Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

Thus when Jack Valentine began calling Corporal Heyward Ironhead, the young man who lived and breathed Cowboys blue had mixed emotions about it. Sharing the same name with the hard-hitting NFL running back who gained righteous fame on the New Orleans Saints and Atlanta Falcons, long-standing rivals of Dallas, rubbed against his grain more than just a tad bit. He didn’t like it at all. But that hardly mattered to Jack. Ironhead was Ironhead, and that was that.

The other four Marines who jammed in tight with Sage and Ironhead, surrounding Gunny V, Bronco, and Jaws, Jack had lovingly named the Mob Squad. He also called them by a few other creative names like “Mario Brothers” and “Donkey Kong.” But “Mob Squad” seemed most popular.

Sergeant Carlo “The Iceman” Savoca, a six-foot-tall, good-looking Marine, born and raised on Staten Island, headed up the Mob Squad. His father and grandfather, and as far back as he knew, men of his family for many generations carved Italian marble and granite for a living. They didn’t just make grave memorials but architectural works of art and fine sculptures. People called Sergeant Savoca the Iceman because nothing ever rattled him. On the trigger, he was all business.

Also a native of New York City, Corporal Salvador “Sal the Pizza Man” Principato called the borough of Queens his home. His dad was a cop, a lieutenant on the Big Apple’s SWAT team. Sal’s father had survived the falling towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, among the last policemen to clear the street before everything came crushing down. Now, five years later and counting, Lieutenant Salvador Principato Senior fought the early stages of lung cancer and mandatory retirement.

Sal Principato had openly wept with his father as the families said good-bye to their Marines as MARSOC Detachment, Iraq, boarded their flight at Cherry Point. Both Marine and New York policeman wore their uniforms proudly that day.

Corporal Nicholas “Nick the Nose” Falzone, the third of the four-man Mob Squad, lived at the opposite end of the Verrazano Bridge from Sergeant Savoca, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. His mother and father owned a popular restaurant on Fourth Avenue just past Marine Avenue, toward Ninety-ninth Street.

For Nick Falzone, a nickname like Nick the Nose didn’t bother him. But he warned everyone, including Gunny Jack and Colonel Snow, and especially Captain Burkehart, who always loved using nicknames, to nix it on the Nick the Nose anytime anyone from his family was around. They wouldn’t understand the affection that went with it and would feel insulted by it. Nick’s father, Anthony, carried a nickname of “Big Tony” from childhood. Little Tony Falzone was a kid up the block that grew up with his dad, also from a Sicilian family, but no relation. While Big Tony Falzone had never even gotten a parking ticket, and took pride in building and owning his own business the hard way, Little Tony Falzone had gone with the mob, robbed an airline with three other Bay Ridge boys, and now was spending the rest of his life in Attica.

Last but not least, Corporal Marcello Costa came to the team already named Momo. His mother in Hoboken, New Jersey, heard Frank Sinatra call one of his buddies Momo, so she decided her son, Marcello, should be Momo, too.

Jack Valentine loved the Mob Squad. He hadn’t put them together, they chose each other. Sergeant Savoca had suggested it early in their training, even while paring down the detachment to eighteen operators plus Jack, the captain, and the colonel, two armorers, and the one supply and administrative clerk they called Smedley.

“Make a hole. Let me in where I can hear the radio,” Staff Sergeant Dennis J. Drzewiecki, chief detachment armorer said, pushing from the rear. He and his armory partner, Sergeant Andre Romyantsev, whom Jack Valentine called Rasputin the Devil, mostly because he and everyone else on the team had trouble getting Romyantsev off their tongues, had followed the crowd to the operations hooch when they heard that some of their brothers had hit trouble.

Jack had shortened Staff Sergeant Drzewiecki’s name to simply Sergeant D, for the same reason Romyantsev became Rasputin.

“Gunny,” the staff sergeant added. “Captain Burkehart told me to tell you that he’s headed up to MAF operations to catch a ride with the assessment team. They’re heading out to the ambush site right behind the reaction force.”

“With you and Rasputin here, who’s minding the store? Smedley? Again?” Jack asked.

Drzewiecki nodded. “Yup. Corporal Butler has the con.”

“You know, he ain’t the sharpest tack in the pile,” Jack said, and looked around at his men and saw the smiles. They, too, knew that Ralph Butler, whom they nicknamed Smedley, had real issues with Marine Corps common sense and skills beyond keeping documents filed, making correct entries in service records, which Captain Burkehart supervised closely, and maintaining inventory of detachment supplies.

Sergeant D cleared his throat, as if he had more to say, but then simply added, “I keep an eye on him. He’s trained to pee on the paper, Gunny, and we don’t let him out of the yard.”

As he came to know the staff sergeant, Jack had come to highly regard the man. A deep well, and nobody’s fool. The best gun maker in the Marine Corps, with Rasputin the Devil a close second.

Dennis Drzewiecki grew up in Whiskey Run, Pennsylvania. People who didn’t know better assumed him a backwoods coal thumper, as the name Whiskey Run might imply. And Drzewiecki let them believe it. For Jack, Whiskey Run fit right in with Crazy Woman Creek and seemed totally out of place as a neighborhood on the west side of Pittsburgh. Jack also learned with more than a decade and a half in the Marine Corps that a man’s hometown didn’t make him smart. Elmore Snow from Crazy Woman Creek stood testament to that fact. And poor dead Rowdy Yates, too.

Jack felt bad as he thought of Rowdy, listening to the intercom chatter with Billy-C and his brothers fighting on. They would mourn their fallen Spartan later.

Looking around at his Marines, Jack knew one thing as certain as death and taxes — his warriors, even Smedley Butler manning the phone in the headquarters office, had bonded as a family. A few months ago, he had his doubts, especially with someone as far off the normal track as Andre Romyantsev. Rasputin the Devil was an outstanding armorer, smart hunter and outdoorsman, and outstanding rifle shot. A little reconnaissance and sniper training, and Rasputin could do double duty, but beyond that, he was really a different sort of animal.

Jack thought Rowdy Yates was unique, but not nearly as special as Rasputin the Devil.

Sergeant Romyantsev was born in the Yukon Territory when his parents tried life off the grid, before it became fashionable among antisocial political zealots of the new age. Although his Canadian birth certificate lists Whitehorse, the territorial capital, as his birthplace, Andre took his first breath in the family cabin on a trail nearer to Dawson City, in the Klondike.

When Andre turned fourteen, his parents repatriated to the United States and opened their own gun store and repair shop in Anchorage. They had not set foot on native soil since his father, Grigory Romyantsev, burned his draft card in 1972. His mother, Tapeesa Ipalook, was only thirteen when the two of them dropped out of sight and ventured to the Yukon from Palmer, Alaska, their hometown.

Tough as a boot and virtually bulletproof, Andre never caught cold, never had a runny nose, and seemed impervious to weather. He had his mother’s Iñupiaq color and black hair, and her beautiful pixie eyes and smile, but his father’s tall Russian build.

When a Marine came to his father’s shop, ordering a big-bore rifle for hunting brown bear and Alaskan moose, the idea of seeing the rest of the world appealed to the tall, tan-skinned young man. Andre found a recruiter and signed up when he turned eighteen. Then he told his parents.