Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“The man’s got a mouth,” Ironhead told Bobby the Snake, “but he backs up his trash.”

“That he does,” Snake agreed.

They both wondered about the undrafted free-agent backup quarterback, Tony Romo, whom the team picked up three seasons ago from Eastern Illinois University, and all they had done with him so far was sit his young ass on the bench.

“Six-two and two-thirty, he’s got the body to be a great quarterback,” Bobby Durant said. “I seen him in the preseason last year, and I like how he can scramble. Dude’s got an arm, too.”

“But where the hell is Eastern Illinois University?” Craig Heyward sang back. “Totally unheard-of nondrafted dude, how did he not get anybody’s attention if he’s any good? I didn’t even know Eastern Illinois University existed, much less had a football team.”

“Guy’s like Tony Romo come out of nowhere and become great,” Snake said. “Don’t judge him until there’s something to judge.”

“You got to figure that if Bill Parcells has kept Tony Romo around this season, he sees something worth having,” Cotton Martin broke into the conversation. He, too, liked the Dallas Cowboys, and the Denver Broncos. A two-hat man. His American Football Conference team, the Broncos, and his National Conference team, the Cowboys.

“Fuckin’ A, dude,” Ironhead said, a total Cowboy hard-core devotee. “Coach Parcells is the best since Tom Landry, and nobody will ever be as great as Tom Landry.”

All three Marines nodded reverently at the mention of the late Coach Landry’s name. It was like speaking of Jesus.

“Now, if we could just find a way to fire Jerry Jones.” Cotton laughed. Ironhead and Snake laughed, too, and nodded yes. Nobody liked the Dallas Cowboys owner. The man who had unceremoniously fired Tom Landry.

“God bless Tom Landry,” Snake said.

“May he rest in peace,” Ironhead added.

Then the three Marines got quiet and looked out of the blockhouse atop the high, hard wall, again searching the morning horizons for any sign of Jack Valentine.

With the gunny missing and the enemy alerted to his status thanks to CNN, Staff Sergeant Martin had moved the entire detachment of MARSOC Marines, including the armorers, to the lake area north of Haditha. Every man mattered now.

With one-five calling off the sweep operation, more or less falling back to Fort Apache and hunting renegades in the daylight on patrols that took no real-estate ownership but just hunted bad guys, he saw no further advantage in deploying the special operators among the battalion. Colonel Roberts agreed, and even sent two additional rifle platoons to Haditha Dam with Martin and the boys as reinforcements to support Company D overwatching the top end of AO Denver.

Martin planned to run multiple long-range patrols out to the west day and night, searching for Gunny Valentine. Captain Charlie Crenshaw, Delta Company, Fifth Marines commander, at Alvin Barkley’s behest, assigned the first sergeant and fifty Marines to support the MARSOC detachment’s efforts to find their missing man.

Speedy Espinoza had at first decided to send Hacksaw, Kermit, and Habu back to Baghdad, since the purpose for their augmenting his CIA staff had all but disappeared in Hit. Because they remained under contract with the CIA, he thought that Chris Gray might put the oddballs to work at their Camp Liberty complex, where their other assortment of off-center characters stayed away from the stiff collars that worked at the Baghdad embassy offices.

However, Walter Gillespie had different ideas. He had gone to Black Bart Roberts and given the man a good master-sergeant-to-lieutenant-colonel talking-to. Since his FBI cover was no longer viable with the Malone-Leyva intelligence mission, he had already called Jason Kendrick in DC and gotten his release from undercover duty, except as far as backup for Liberty Cruz and her team was concerned. Kendrick told Hacksaw that simply as Marines, he needed to uphold that side of the deal. No argument from Hacksaw but total agreement.

So when Hacksaw approached Speedy Espinoza with the idea of going up to Haditha Dam and pitching in on the search for his buddy, Jack Valentine, the CIA agent not only agreed but packed his trash, too. When he called Chris Gray to let him know the plan, Speedy learned that Elmore Snow and Staff Sergeant Billy Claybaugh had already departed for Haditha Dam and would welcome the crew there with open arms.

“Shit,” Gillespie crowed. “Old Hammer will feel plumb left out of such a grand reunion of great Marines. Why, with our talent manning the ramparts, we’ll have young Master Valentine home in no time.”

“We may have to sleep in the ditch,” Speedy said. “I talked to Captain Crenshaw, said we were coming, and he told me we’d better bring cots. He’s fresh out, as well as a place to park them.”

“Me, Kermit Alexander, and Cory Webster slept most of our Marine Corps careers down some hole filled with shit anyway,” Hacksaw said, smiling with his impressive gold grill at the former Marine major and Prowler pilot turned CIA spook.

“Just saying, accommodations might be sparse.” Espinoza shrugged. It didn’t bother him much, either. He’d endured much worse, too. But it didn’t make him like it any better.

“I don’t plan on laying boots up in the barracks no ways,” Gillespie said. “We’re up there huntin’ our boy Jack Valentine. Number one priority, Bubba. Get him out alive.”

Morning sun and gentle breezes lifted Giti Sadiq’s spirits as she finished hanging blankets on the clotheslines that stood between the back of the house on the Anbar desert where Abu Omar made his headquarters and the adjacent barns where they kept an ample supply of chickens and goats for milk, eggs, and meat. Today, all the men had gone hunting this Ghost of Anbar right after breakfast, led by the old graybeard himself. Now she sang freedom songs from her heart, loud and happy.

A few steps away, Miriam and Amira had already shucked off their clothes and thrown them in the wash pot filled with soapy water that heated over a hot hardwood fire they had built in the backyard right after breakfast. They chased each other in the sunshine and open world, naked, laughing like children at play. Washday baths. No men. A blessing from God.

Sabeen, the Shia girl from Syria, wrapped her shawl around herself as she took off her clothes and put them in the great black boiling cauldron. Chubby all of her life, ashamed of her fat, she hid her nakedness. The rolls on her belly, her large breasts, the fat around her buttocks, thighs, and ankles made her feel ugly, undesirable. Outcast.

The last blanket draped over the rope line carried out a twofold purpose: airing out the bedding of the al-Sunnah gunmen who lived at the ancient desert water stop with their general, and giving the girls a sense of privacy, should their watchdog, Yasir al-Bayati, return unannounced from his so-called hunting.

He had claimed to see a fabled white oryx, a rare and endangered animal, legendary in folklore, that once thrived across the Arabian deserts and Persia, and at one point not long ago had been declared extinct by world wildlife conservationists. No one had yet sighted the Arabian oryx in Iraq since their return from extinction to the endangered list, but some people now said that they had seen them in Jordan.

“Boosolah do not know borders. So why can’t they be here in Iraq, too?” Yasir had argued with the other men who teased him and said they had seen unicorns grazing in the desert, too. They scoffed at his tale of seeing the big buck with a harem of three doe. Yet the old goatherd stubbornly insisted that the animal had magnificent ebony horns that curved over his shoulders like great black scimitars, a full meter long.