Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“Know them both,” Jack said, smiling. “Chris and I served together in Force Recon, back in the Gulf War, when I joined your crew. Good men, both of them. I know all about the operation, too, Hacksaw. We’re heading up that way.”

All three old operators laughed, delighted.

“No shit?” Hacksaw said. “I kind of dreaded this one, just to be honest. Like Alosi stuck our pork in the fire this time to end all our troubles. Now, with you boys coming up? Why, it’ll feel like old times. Shit, now I’m happy. I ought to call my boss and let him know how happy I am, just to piss him the fuck off.”

“Got something else for you, Walter.” Jack grinned. “You know that crazy flat-hat, Black Bart Roberts, commands one-five?”

“Fucking Black Bart Roberts? No shit!” Walter Gillespie sang out. “Now he’s a pirate! At least the great-grandson of a pirate, for real. I thought that name E. B. Roberts on the brief sheet I read from Chris Gray looked familiar. Why, shit, Jack! We’re gonna have a hell of a good time.”

“You’re heading that way now?” Jack asked.

“Joining a truck convoy leaving here in an hour,” Hacksaw said, and let out a big sigh. “Wish we could chop up there by air. That road’s dangerous.”

“Tell me about it,” Billy said, leaning on his crutches.

“Yeah, we heard about your bad luck, Claybaugh,” Gillespie said. “We pulled into the opposite end of that ambush about the time they hauled you out to Charlie Med. You’re the poor fucker got shot in the ass. Right?”

“That be me,” Billy said. “Just a graze, though, but it’s got me on a light-duty chit for a week or two.”

“And your boy, the one got killed?” Hacksaw said, a solemn, respectful tone in his voice.

“Lance Corporal Rowdy Yates,” Jack said, shaking his head, and all the snipers looked down at their toes, as if they suddenly joined in a moment of prayer.

“Sorry to hear it,” the grizzled old Marine said. “Losing a brother’s never easy. I still grieve our boy Dirty Harry. Sergeant Leroy Griffin. The Scout-Sniper that Hammer replaced, back when he was a skinny little corporal. Griffin got killed down in South America, back in our cocaine-cowboy-huntin’ days. Never gets easy, Jack. I guess you know it.”

“Yeah, I do,” Valentine agreed. “Elmore’s meeting the widow first thing this morning at Lejeune.”

“Widow, huh?” Walter said, shaking his head.

“Baby on the way, too,” Jack said.

“Fuck. That sucks a big one,” Hacksaw said, taking a deep breath. “Look here. I’m making lots of money. Old man that owns Malone-Leyva loves me. Pays me rich coin. We get off this mission, I want to put fifty grand in a kitty for that girl and her baby. Start a fund. Get all the Marine Corps Scout-Snipers kicking in some jing-wah, too. Old Moose Ferran, out in Colorado Springs with the Scout-Sniper Association, I’ll get him to put something together righteous for her and the kid, God bless ’em.”

“That’s good of you, Hacksaw,” Jack said. “That means a lot to me. It’ll mean a lot to Elmore, too.”

“Old Elmore Snow,” Gillespie said. “Him and Mutt Ambrose used to scare the holy horseshit out of me with some of those goofy missions they’d dream up. Still kicking ass and taking names, then preaching Jesus on Sundays I guess?”

“Fierce as ever, and not shy about sharing the Gospel.” Jack smiled. “And what of Master Gunny Ambrose? I lost track of him when he retired.”

“Mutt?” Hacksaw said. “He’s running a rescue down in San Antonio for homeless kids, runaways from abusive situations. Him and his wife. I saw him just before I flew over here.”

Jack smiled. “Not at all surprising.”

“I hunted him down after he disappeared off the Scout-Sniper community radar. Feared him dead, but he’s doing real good. Real happy down there in south Texas,” Hacksaw added.

“Glad to hear it,” Jack said.

“Mutt Ambrose, one of the best ever. And Elmore Snow? He is the best, Jack. I do love that man,” Hacksaw said.

“We all do, Walter,” Jack said, and every head in the room nodded.

“He made our glory days, well… Glorious.” Gillespie smiled.

“Yes he did, brother. Glorious. And still does,” Jack said.

Road dust and exhaust fumes mixed with burned-oil stench, smoking from the worn-out diesel engine of the Russian-made farm truck. Wafting through the floorboards, it left Giti Sadiq ready to toss her cookies. For the past two hours that she had rumbled southwestward down Iraqi Route 19 from Baiji toward Haditha, she swallowed hard to keep from spewing chunks. And, with each pothole they hit on the battered roadway, her morning nausea only got worse.

Two hours on the road and their destination coming in sight, she felt every bit as green as the faded paint on the cab of the rust-bucket old KamAZ five-ton stake bed in which she rode, overloaded with wooden crates filled with produce for delivery in Haditha. A dusty brown tarp riddled with holes and tied to the sideboards with an eclectic collection of scavenged ropes flapped on top of the tipsy towering load.

Beneath the tarp rode boxes of dates, apricots, and pomegranates, bundles of dried hot red peppers, cotton-cloth sacks of garlic, and big hemp-burlap bushel bags of onions. Lots of fresh sweet and hot peppers, garlic, and onions on this load, whose smell swirling with the truck fumes and goat stink of the graybeard driving, farting at regular intervals, only made Giti feel all the worse.

This pungent load of eye-burning, nose-scorching produce hopefully cloaked the truck’s other load: a four-foot-tall-by-four-foot-wide-by-eight-foot-long plywood shelter installed behind the cab and buried under the boxes and bags of farm-to-market goods. Hidden inside it rode six al-Qaeda jihadists, tucked uncomfortably around a cache of Kalashnikov automatics with extra high-capacity magazines, two Dragunov sniper rifles, four Russian B-40 rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, and several cases of ammunition and rockets for the weapons.

Giti only knew the graybeard driving the truck, Omar Bakr al-Nasser, by the strike of his murderous hands and the unceasing hardness of his third member, stabbed between her thighs as he raped her at will. Members of his growing Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah army, now allied with al-Qaeda Iraq, called him Abu Omar. Father Omar. However, for Giti, he was hardly any sort of father, nor any ilk of kin or husband of even the loosest definition, but her owner.

She served Omar’s will as one of three captive girls taken from the rural Tigris River countryside at Al-Shirqat, a town about halfway between Baiji, to the south, and Mosul, to the north. They belonged to this hateful old dog with stinking bad breath and putrid teeth, who smelled worse than wet goats covered in shit because he never bathed. Always sweaty and foul, and always hard.

Giti feared with nauseating certainty that she had gotten pregnant, and knew that as soon as Abu Omar learned it, he would toss her to his wolves, who would all have a good time defiling her. Then they would kill her. And her child. That’s what he did to another slave he knocked up, just after he took Giti and the two other Christian girls from Al-Shirqat.

While Giti lived for survival’s sake as a Muslim, she secretly prayed to Jesus Christ, her Lord and Savior, and one of the three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, of the one true God of her small Presbyterian life. She prayed to God the Father through His Son, Jesus, for relief. She begged Him for deliverance from her horror. She longed for God’s mercy but got none of it. Her faith lacked strength of conviction, and she felt shame for it. She should have died protesting for Christ. Instead, she had feared death, and put on the Muslim shawl to remain alive. Enslaved and terrified.