Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

A third chamber, much larger than even the front room, sat off the opposite side of the house. Quietly, Jack slipped to that doorway and peeked inside. An exceptionally clean room, it had a wood floor, as opposed to the tile-covered concrete elsewhere in the house. The room had nothing in it except several small rugs rolled up.

“Their little barracks chapel,” he thought. Then he glanced back at the room where the cigarette smoldered with the lamp turned on at the desk. “Where did he go?”

Jack silently eased his way to the door in the center of the house that led into a kitchen, complete with propane range and an electric microwave and refrigerator. And indoor plumbing.

He went to the fridge and opened the door. Inside, jars of condiments and bowls of leftover Iraqi food. Even a jug of cold tea.

Then he looked at the sink and ran his tongue over his cracked, dry lips. Two steps and he hit the faucet handle. Out poured clear, clean, cool water from a deep well. He leaned over and put his mouth on the tap.

It was heaven! He could feel his parched skin absorbing the moisture. A cup sat on the counter next to the sink, and Jack grabbed it and started gulping down the fresh, cool, wonderful-tasting, life-giving liquid.

“Oh God, thank you!” he said, finishing his second cup. Then he drank a third and a fourth. He had never known anything so awesome as a simple drink of water until this day.

He sipped his fifth cup, and looked out the back window as he drank, and noticed the open back door.

“If he ran away, that’s fine with me,” Jack thought, and felt more relaxed. “Obviously, this guy smoking the cigarette saw me run to the front of the house, and he slipped out the back. Good riddance, I say.”

Jack went to the living room, brought his gear to the kitchen, and fished out water bottles. When he had them all filled, he began searching the cabinets and cupboards for food. Then he looked again in the yard behind the house and noticed several four-inch-diameter pipes coming up from the ground. Some had tin hats on them, and some were just open stacks. Just like vents coming off the roof of a house.

Jack looked around the kitchen and saw a side door. He opened it, expecting to see the inside of a broom closet, or hopefully a pantry full of canned goods, but instead he found a stairwell carved deep down into the earth. Each step made of stone, and the walls and ceiling of the passageway that led downward were lined with similar stones, as if in an ancient castle.

He had heard of the camel stops on the caravan routes, many of them thousands of years old. Their deep springwater sources fed from the snows on the tops of the Taurus Mountains of Turkey, far to the north. The same origins of the great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.

As Jack entered the stairwell, he felt the cool stone walls rubbed smooth by countless hands over the millennia, people feeling their ways down the steps to cool chambers and the hidden wells beneath the house.

Down at the bottom of the stairs Jack saw more lights shining, and heard the rumble of a light plant engine.

“That’s where they hide their generator,” Jack said to himself as he slowly and deliberately walked down the passage at the bottom of the stairs, careful to not make a sound. Then he smelled cigarette smoke. “And this is where our mysterious friend is hiding. Or maybe he’s not even aware that I am here. That would be cool.”

Jack pressed his back against the stone wall of the passageway at the bottom of the stairs and peeked into the large underground chamber beneath the house. Along the great room’s walls he saw shelves filled with canned food and US military Meals Ready to Eat. More shelves held boxes and boxes of ammunition, and on the floor he saw steel cases filled with rocket-propelled grenades. Next to them sat racks of rifles and some mortar tubes and B-40 RPG launchers.

Then a door opened at the other end of the cavern, and the loudness of the electric generator filled the room. Out stepped a surprised, middle-aged Iraqi man, wiping his hands on a grease rag.

The fellow never had a chance to speak. Jack put two quick hardballs from his Lippard .45 square in the suddenly dead man’s chest.

“Well, sometimes good shit happens,” Jack said as he went to the food shelves and filled his arms and pockets with American-made douche-bag dinners. He knew what he could expect from them. Not worth risking life and bowels on canned local crap, possibly full of bugs and botulism.

As he was about to leave, his eye caught sight of a box of fragmentation grenades. He smiled, grabbed two, and jogged up the stairs to the kitchen. After tucking his food and water in his backpack, rolling up the drag bag and stuffing it in a side pocket on his pack, slinging his M40A3 sniper rifle on one side, strapping on his backpack, his helmet tied on it, his Vigilance rifle in hand, Gunny Valentine pulled the pins on the grenades, rolled them into the stairwell, and ran like hell out the back door.

Two muffled booms sent dirt rolling out of the house behind Jack. A second later, a more pronounced explosion, from the munitions in the underground chamber detonating, brought down the house. In seconds, it disappeared inside a boiling brown cloud, the ground collapsing beneath.

Jack Valentine smiled as if he had accomplished something genuinely great. He said in a loud voice, “What is it that we do? Oh yeah, that’s right. We fuck shit up!”

The gunny laughed as he took a bearing with his handy compass on the side of his watchband, finding his northeast homebound bearing, and looked on the horizon for a landmark that he could use for steering across the wide, flat desert.

He squinted his eyes, trying to see a plume of dust, and reached in his operator’s vest for his compact binoculars. As he put them to his eyes and focused, he saw what caused the spouting dirt. Three trucks loaded with a dozen al-Qaeda gunmen running straight at him.

“Fuck me to tears!” he said, and ran hard, looking for a place to hide. “I wonder if there was another dude back there? Maybe he had a radio and called for help.”

Jack Valentine had cleared less than a fifty good steps from the smoking house when he heard coursing sounds above him: the shrill cries of jets diving in attack. Heart pounding, he stopped and looked up, when he heard the screams of two large bombs headed his way.

Ahead of Jack a shower of rockets took out the three compact pickup trucks. When they blew skyward, Jack dove for the ground.

Behind the Marine, the whole world exploded.

Jack never saw or thought anything else after that. Not for a long time.

Severe, sharp pain like lightning bolts shooting up his spine brought the Marine gunny around to consciousness. His eyes blinked open, and the first thing that struck him was the terrible smell of urine and old shit, like the bottom of a dirty outhouse on a hot day.

As his senses returned, Jack realized that he lay naked on a dank, stone floor. A man with a gray beard and a black Muslim skullcap sat in a high-backed wooden rocking chair. He held a long, electric cattle prod in his hands and smiled.

“I told Yasir that a good jolt of juice up your rectum would bring you out of that coma,” Abu Omar told the gunny. “He worried that it might kill you.”

Omar laughed, showing his nasty brown teeth.

“No, I told Yasir. The Ghost of Anbar does not die so easily.”

Jack tried to stand, but the chains wrapped tight around his ankles with his wrists padlocked to them kept him on the nasty floor.

“Fuck you!” Jack yelled at the old graybeard, and got another dose of the cattle prod on his naked butt for his trouble. The voltage sent the Marine convulsing across the floor, and Abu Omar laughed out loud.