Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“And Jack! What about Jack?” Liberty wailed, her voice straining with fear.

“Their last communication with him, he was fine,” Gray said. “He’s on his own, however. Out in the badlands.”

Liberty groaned on the phone, unable to speak.

“Look, Liberty,” Gray offered, “Colonel Roberts has pulled out all stops to find him and get him out. He’s an old friend of Jack and Colonel Snow. So, it’s more than just a Marine MIA. Which is bad enough. It’s also very personal for him.”

“How did it happen?” Liberty choked out in a broken voice.

“Jack being Jack, sacrificed himself to give his Marines a chance to escape,” Chris told her. “They got entrapped. The enemy knew where the Marines were operating and set up an elaborate ambush. Somehow, the gunny and his men avoided getting caught in the middle. Jack set up a base of fire with his machine gun, kept the bad guys busy while his boys ran out the back door.”

“Oh! That’s Jack Valentine alright!” Liberty said, a surge of anger in her voice. “He thinks he’s bulletproof!”

“Well, there’s a little more bad news,” Gray added.

“Why not! If I don’t have enough bad news, just pile it on,” Liberty let out, her voice cracking, and now she broke into full-fledged tears. “When Jack gets in the shit, it’s not just bad, it is always really terrible. There’s no half stepping with Gunnery Sergeant Valentine.”

“The enemy has mobilized a major force on the desert,” Gray went on. “Large numbers pouring in from Syria and the north. Looks like a major offensive by Zarqawi and several insurgent affiliate groups. My opinion? They got that operation plan, and formed a counterplan of their own.

“Colonel Roberts has shifted everything to a counteroffensive posture. All positions and camps on high alert. I’m afraid they’ve got their hands full. Finding Jack in the midst of this? Well, it doesn’t look good. I’m sorry.”

“Oh no!” Liberty moaned, crying hard. “Oh my God!”

“Liberty, listen to me,” Chris Gray said. “It is very, very important that this conversation remains between you and me. Jack’s life depends on secrecy. Al-Qaeda may not even know that we have someone missing. However, if they realize that Jack Valentine is lost in their desert, they’ll pull out all stops to find him. He would be a prize.”

Liberty could say nothing more. She just cried.

Jack walked all night. Judging from his normal pace, about three and a half miles in an hour, given his rest stops, he estimated that he traveled twenty miles. He angled slightly southwest from the wadi, and crossed the T1 roadway sometime after midnight. He decided to go parallel to it as a means of keeping his direction from veering too far right or left. He chose walking on the south side of the highway because of increasing cross-country traffic he heard north.

All he had to steer by was his little bubble compass on the side of his watchband. It worked well for establishing directions, but serious navigation across open wastelands for long stretches, trying to follow an azimuth, required something with more guts. With his radio and GPS position locator sat link dead, he wished that he had gone ahead and stuck his old trusty Silva Ranger in his vest pocket.

He always carried the timeworn compass, just in case. Only this trip, Billy Claybaugh had called him OCD for always packing it and never needing it. So to show the staff sergeant he wasn’t OCD, and didn’t need a security blanket, nor would he need to suck his thumb without it, Jack dropped the Silva compass in the flat middle drawer of his desk.

“I guess I showed Billy.” Jack had laughed to himself.

The reason he veered south, rather than remain on the closer, north side of the T1 road, was that all night long he kept hearing trucks and cars with bad mufflers driving fast across the wastelands to his north, coming from the west and heading east. The elevated highway gave him a slight buffer as well as a known landmark to use for orientation.

Half a day more walking west, and Jack planned to arc northward, before he drew too close to the city of al-Qa’im, which lay just off the Syrian border. Another ten miles from where he called it a night and stopped to rest through the next day. He would make his turn well before T1 made its bend north and intersected MSR Bronze, Iraqi Highway 12, outside the town of al-Obaidy, a farming community on the south banks of the Euphrates River, just east of al-Qa’im. A busy place for al-Qaeda.

Jack decided that when he reached the point that he could see MSR Bronze on the horizon, he would turn his course eastward. Remaining well in the wild lands, he’d move parallel to that highway at a distance, as it took him homeward, bending toward the south and Haditha.

Once he got close enough to Haditha Dam, he’d turn on his MARSOC short-range intercom and start calling. One or all of his four-man Mob Squad, Iceman, Sal the Pizza Man, Nick the Nose, and Momo, standing duty with Alvin Barkley and his Marines, would surely have their ears on, listening. Undoubtedly, they would also have the S2 and S3 cued up on the channel. He absolutely didn’t want to approach their base unannounced.

In a matter of days, Jack could grow a healthy dark beard. With his tanned complexion, inherited from his Latina mother, he knew he would look way too much like an Arab. On the run, he considered, that might be a good thing. But hiking toward the forward operating base at Haditha Dam, the look could get him killed.

As Gunny Valentine tucked himself into a cozy hide that he dug with Sergeant Quinlan’s entrenching tool among a bunch of rocks and a crop of two-foot-tall Alhagi camelthorn bushes, just before sunrise, he heard the coursing sound of diving jets followed by the rolling thunder of their bomb loads delivered on targets far to his east. He wished badly that he had some way to talk to those guys. He’d direct them on the trucks and cars rumbling all night to his north.

A n hour before morning Colors, an over-capacity number of military officers and ranking enlisted Marines stuffed the briefing room at Al Asad Air Base. Cesare Alosi had caught a ride on the Osprey out of Baghdad carrying the headquarters contingent of so-called security experts and intelligence analysts and other big thinkers.

First seat he grabbed belonged to the Marine Expeditionary Force chief of staff, at the end of the conference table, just to the right of the commanding general. To his right, the regimental landing-team commander had his seat. The battalion sergeant major caught the blundering civilian before the bosses entered the room. He promptly hustled Alosi out of the colonel’s chair and pointed at the seats along the wall, in the rear.

“I need to be at the table,” Cesare argued.

“I need to see documentation of your top secret security clearance,” the sergeant major answered.

“Do you know who I am?” the Malone-Leyva boss huffed. “I have the same rank and privileges as an oh-six colonel!”

“I need to see that clearance, or you’re not staying in here at all,” the sergeant major responded, and tagged at the end, “sir.”

Alosi reached in his breast pocket and took out his passport. Folded inside, he kept a copy of his clearance document. He wagged it under the Marine’s nose.

The sergeant major took it, checked his name, and looked at a list of invited guests on a clipboard, found Alosi’s name, checked it, then handed him back his clearance.

“Nothing that anyone says or anything that you see goes outside this room,” the sergeant major told Cesare. “Your seat is back there, not at this table. According to the list, you’re only a guest, here in purely a consulting capacity. If someone asks you a question, you answer it. Otherwise, you remain silent. Do you understand? Sir.”