Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

The big brindle Belgian Malinois with the mostly black face, flashing his titanium smile, came bounding out of the Hummer. He gave two good barks at the old man pulling the dog to the barn and shot the gap to the house.

Before Sergeant Padilla could catch up, Rattler began barking and digging on the floorboards of the kitchen.

Cotton Martin with Cochise Quinlan at his side, backed up by Ironhead Heyward and Jewfro Clingman, guns drawn and cocked, stacked outside the doors and filtered into the house with Sergeant Padilla.

An old woman and little girl came running out the door when the dog ran inside. They ran screaming to the old man, who had finally gotten his dog shut away, and they clung to him for dear life.

“They know their shit has hit the fan,” Barkley told the colonel.

“Yeah, but they don’t have Jack here. I hate to waste precious time,” Colonel Snow said.

“They got guns and ammo, and heaven knows what else hidden under their floors,” Barkley said. “Could have a whole battalion of Hajis down in the caverns. Some of these places have quite a setup underground.”

“Colonel,” Staff Sergeant Martin shouted at the door. “You’re going to want to see this.”

Elmore gave a hand sign to Bobby Durant. “Snake, you take charge of those three civilians. Bronco and Jaws, go with him. Mob Squad, you four with Biggs and Hot Sauce, grab some of Barkley’s boys and clear those barns. Check under floorboards. Could have Hajis lying in there with guns.”

Then he and Alvin Barkley headed into the house. Just as they got to the door, Elmore looked back at his men. “And be careful of that dog!”

Sal the Pizza Man had just cracked the barn door and got met with snarling. He took a step back, pulled his pistol, but the old man came running, pleading in Arabic.

“No, no!” he cried, and stepped inside the door. In a few seconds, he came out with the dog on a rope.

Elmore smiled. “Glad it went that way. A good herd dog like that probably cost the old Bedouin a passel of goats.”

“I’d a shot the dog,” Alvin said, stepping inside the house with the lieutenant colonel.

“We need to win the support of the people,” Elmore said. “We don’t win much, making them our enemy by killing the man’s dog. Around these parts, he’d probably rather you killed his wife.”

“I know.” Barkley smiled. “And he loves his wife.”

“You can’t have justice without righteousness,” Elmore said. “And you can’t have mercy without love.”

Barkley nodded. “Another wise saying from the colonel?”

“A wise saying from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.” Elmore smiled.

In the kitchen, Rattler clawed hard on the floorboards, leaving deep marks in the wood. Then Cotton opened a side door that looked like the entrance to a pantry but hid the passage to a world of underground chambers. The working dog bounded down the stairs, Sergeant Padilla hot on his tail, and began barking and snarling amidst a chorus of terrified human screams.

Colonel Snow and First Sergeant Barkley stepped into the kitchen with their guns in their hands, and found Staff Sergeant Martin waiting at the open door at the top of a stone-lined stairway. Below, Rattler barked and snarled while four men wailed loudly for mercy.

At the bottom of the stairs, Jorge Padilla held Rattler on a short lead. The black-faced shepherd with titanium teeth wanted nothing more than to finish chewing arms off four Hajis, now on their knees, bloody wrists zip-tied, Jewfro and Ironhead holding rifles on them.

Barkley called outside on his radio. “I need two fire teams in here to take charge of four prisoners, an interrogator-translator, and a corpsman.”

Cotton Martin motioned for Elmore as he pushed open a door. “Come in here, sir. Take a look.”

It opened into a long chamber filled with double-stack metal bunks, made up military style with US Army blankets tucked tight on the mattresses. Along the wall, a rack of fifty rifles. At the end of the barracks, a raft of Russian B-40 launchers and boxes stacked full of rocket-propelled grenades piled next to a hundred wooden boxes of Russian ammunition. Stenciled on the gun racks and ammo cases, the crest of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard.

“How many of these places do you think are out here?” Elmore said. “It’s like they’re getting ready for newly arriving troops.”

“Exactly,” Martin said.

“Fuck!” Alvin Barkley said, walking into the long squad bay. “What is this? Marine Barracks al-Sunnah?”

“Mind-boggling, isn’t it,” Elmore said. “We need to go upstairs and have a heart-to-heart talk with the proprietor of this establishment.”

An interrogator-translator squatted by the four prisoners, while a Navy Medical corpsman bound up their dog bites. The translator spoke to them in Farsi.

“These guys are Hezbollah, volunteers from southern Lebanon,” the ITT Marine gunnery sergeant said. “They call themselves Sons of the Ummah. A radical Islamic community linked to all Muslim schools and sects worldwide, regardless of whether they be Shiite, Sunni, Khawarji, Sufis, Baha’is, Ahmadiyyas, Druze, Alevis, ’Alwis, or any other of a couple dozen more sects you might name. It’s the old enemy-of-my-enemy thing going on with these guys.”

“Palestinians?” Elmore said.

“Yes, sir. Just like Zarqawi,” the Marine translator said. “Your basic Beirut bomber type, motivated by the sainted teachings of such ilk as Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden. These four arrived here from Syria this morning, hell-bent on martyrdom.”

“If they came here to die, why didn’t they try just now?” Snow asked the translator.

“One look at that monster with metal teeth, him shredding their filthy hides.” The Marine laughed. “All of a sudden, jihadi martyrdom didn’t seem quite so appealing. They thought the devil had hold of them.”

Sergeant Padilla had Rattler sitting at attention, watching the four prisoners. A slight, hardly noticeable slack off the lead and he went to snarling and barking at the men. Padilla laughed as the men wailed in fear.

“See what I mean, sir?” the translator said, as the dog handler took back his short lead and Rattler silenced, but still happy and smiling. Rattler thought of his Kong reward time with Jorge. He knew what he had earned.

“Good boy, Rattler,” Padilla said, and patted the dog.

Outside, another translator from the four-man ITT crew had gone to work on the old man and his wife, quizzing them, as the Marines led the four Palestinian prisoners out of the house. They had zip-tied the Bedouin’s hands behind his back and now put plastic handcuffs on his wife and even on the little eight-year-old granddaughter.

Seeing the zip ties going on the little girl, crying and afraid, the old Bedouin again broke into a jabbering tirade of pleas a hundred miles an hour.

Elmore came out and saw what was happening and wanted to stop it. He could not accept handcuffing the child, nor the old woman.

“It’s a bluff, sir,” First Sergeant Barkley said, taking the colonel by the arm before he could stop the show.

“The child doesn’t know it,” Snow said, seeing the terrified little girl.

“Sir, give these guys a chance,” Barkley said.

Elmore bit his tongue, hating every second of what he saw, and listened to the old man spilling his guts.

The lieutenant in charge of the Interrogator Translator Team came to the colonel. “Abu Omar was here with a hundred men about two hours ago. A dozen guys based here went with him to al-Rawa for a meeting. The old man said he thought it was Zarqawi.”

“Get on the horn to Captain Crenshaw, First Sergeant,” Elmore said.

“Way ahead of you, sir,” Barkley answered, talking on the command-channel radio. “Forces are deploying to Rawa as we speak.”