Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“Animals, like horses, have fewer cones and more rods in their eyes. They see better at night than purely day animals. Nocturnal creatures, like owls and cats, have nearly all rod vision and can see at night as if it were daytime.

“Your rods surround the outer area of the eye while cones fill the center area. So to see something in the dark, look slightly away from it.”

Jack laughed, his thirst pronounced but heart uplifted. “Definitely a house there, just over the horizon.”

He checked his little bubble compass, determined that the lights glowed just northeast of his location.

“I may even see Haditha when I reach this farm,” Jack said to himself as he trudged toward the brightness.

Every tenth step that he took, he sidestepped to his left one step.

“Right leg stronger than the left leg,” he reminded himself. “Compensate for the tendency to drift the direction of my dominant leg.”

Little things from the introduction to land navigation course that he had taught his Scout-Snipers perked to the front of his consciousness as he pressed onward, checking his compass and keeping his bearing on the bright spot.

“Funny how life can suddenly depend on something so trivial as a dime-store compass,” he said as he followed the little trinket that he put on the side of his watchband. He had bought it more for looks than function; however, now he appreciated how well it really worked.

With each step, the brightness that he had hardly noticed became brighter so that he could see it when he looked directly at it. He thought how easily he could have passed up noticing it, and would have continued walking in a circle to the south and, without a question, died.

“With the jackals and cats and rats out here, they might never have found my body,” Jack said as he trudged. “Elmore must have prayed for me. Definitely my mom. She’s got a hotline to God.”

An hour later, with the brightness getting more pronounced, Jack finally saw the house lights glowing.

“Thank you, God!” he said, and meant it.

He looked at the farmhouse and outbuildings with his sixty-power spotting scope. Three trucks sat outside, and two men with rifles walked guard duty while their brothers slept inside.

Jack prayed as he looked through his scope. “So far, so good, God. Your hand brought me this far, so I’ll just have to trust You the rest of the way.”

When he checked his watch, he realized he had less than an hour before sunrise. To the right of the house, he looked at the sky. Rather than black, it now shone gray, and the stars faded.

He looked for a place to hide. Very little offered relief to the flat landscape. Little patches of Alhagi and weeds that grow with them seemed his best option. Then way ahead, perhaps even too close to the farm, about a half mile from it, he noticed the hump. Rocks covered with windblown dirt. Alhagi growing around it. Perfect.

Twenty minutes later, Jack began digging in, building a hide for the day. He checked his range. Eight hundred seventy-two meters. That would work.

“I’ll keep watch from here,” he told himself. “When the bastards leave to go blow up some shit, I’ll slip in and steal some food and fill my bottles with water. Haditha Dam can’t be far from here if I just keep pressing northeast.”

All around the outside of the house where Abu Omar Bakr al-Nasser made his headquarters, gunmen squatted, eating breakfast and drinking tea. Inside, the girls hurried getting food to all the men who still waited for their morning meals.

“Why do you just sit here and stuff your faces? We must find this devil before he escapes us!” Abu Omar bellowed, storming through the house and outside in the hard-baked dirt dooryard. Surrounding them, a fleet of rusted and filthy Toyota and Nissan compact pickup trucks waited with pipe racks on the beds, some bristling with machine guns, with belts of ammo draped from them.

Yasir al-Bayati, Abu Omar’s aide-de-camp and general gofer, hurried behind the Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah chieftain, carrying the old graybeard’s satchel and rifle.

“They will be finished soon enough, master. Many have not yet eaten,” Yasir reminded him, both men speaking the native Arabic of their Sunni faith. “We will get that dog today, without fail. It is God’s will!”

The graybeard looked back at his most trusted servant and cracked a hint of a smile. “I know that. But they must fear my impatience or we waste our entire day here. We must scour the land for this filth, Valentine. What a prize he will be! Removing his head while the world watches us will bring our jihad great fame. It will put fear in the hearts of all who oppose us.”

“Oh yes, master!” Yasir said, bowing and scraping. “God’s will be done! God is great! God is great!”

Today, Omar wore his Russian Makarov nine-millimeter pistol in a leather shoulder holster, not that he knew how to use the gun much less hit anything with it, unless he put the muzzle against some poor bastard’s head. But he thought he looked powerful wearing it, along with the Moorish-style sword with a ten-inch-long brass-leather-and-ivory-decorated handle, and a gleaming eighteen-inch-long curved chrome blade hanging on his belt. A gift for his birthday two weeks ago, he fancied cutting off Jack Valentine’s head with it.

“The wadi to the south, I say,” Omar fumed, looking across the broad lands twenty miles west of Haditha, where he had made his headquarters these past weeks. “We keep looking to the north and the west, and this Ash’abah al-Anbar , that the men so fearfully call him, slips ever closer to his rescue. He still waits in the south, I tell you, near where we last saw him and his Marines.”

“Oh, you’re right, master,” Yasir said, watching the men finish their food. “No one can survive these lands long on their own, not without knowing the ways of them. Surely not some American. He will sit where he is and wait to be found. Just as you say.”

“That is right, Yasir,” Abu Omar said, and glared at his men. “Someone is helping him, or we would have found him by now. We must go house to house, everywhere he could have gone. As long as we see the Americans still searching, we know he is among us. Somewhere.”

“We will find him!” Yasir said. “It is God’s will. I know it is God’s will.”

“Perhaps.” Omar nodded, looking west to the open desert. “Certainly, Allah wants nothing to do with this son of a pig.”

Suddenly, the old graybeard heard the rushing sounds of screaming jets overhead, and both men ducked for cover inside the doorway. Seconds later, the earth shook with bombs striking targets.

“As we increase numbers, hiding from the American planes grows most difficult,” Yasir said.

“Let them bomb!” Omar said, defiance raising his voice. “Our numbers will increase nonetheless, and we will not fail in our jihad! Yasir, that truly is God’s will! Allahu Akbar! ”

“Allahu Akbar!” Yasir echoed.

Cotton Martin finished his breakfast early and took a seat in the blockhouse atop the hard, high wall that surrounded the camp at Haditha Dam, where Delta Company, First Battalion, Fifth Marines held the ground. Craig Ironhead Heyward and Bobby the Snake Durant sat with him.

Heyward from Dallas and Snake from Lawton, Oklahoma, both men loved the NFL Cowboys. They talked up the greatness of Coach Bill Parcells but missed Jimmy Johnson, and proffered how former New England Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe was yet another waste of time in a long list of wastes since Troy Aikman left the team, although last season the pokes managed nine wins above seven losses. Both Marines liked the Cowboys’ new acquisition, controversial tight end, Terrell Owens.