Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“Fuck you, Momo,” Nick said as he watched the man dig hard to get away, calculating the drift of his bullet, the light wind that came from the west, and took a two-ball lead with his Mil-Dot range-finder reticle on the soon-to-be-dead jihadi.

Costa took a breath, let it slide out, and held it as he relaxed into the big gun while oozing on trigger squeeze.

Boom! The mark 82 belched, blowing a dust cloud from the exhaust that came from both sides of the triangular compensator at the Barrett’s muzzle.

Again, less than a second passed while the bullet arced two thousand yards and splashed home, leaving the running man scattered in pieces across the sand.

“Nice shooting, Mob Squad,” Colonel Snow said on the intercom, seeing his MARSOC operators claim two clean kills with two shots. “What was that, two grand?”

“Twenty-one hundred,” Iceman said.

“Short of a record, but awesome,” Elmore said.

“It’s just business,” Iceman came back.

Momo added, “Nothing personal.”

Jack Valentine kept his foot pushed to the floor on Yasir’s piece-of-shit worn-out bucket of bolts. Giti, Miriam, and Amira sang in harmony. “I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses. And the voice I hear falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.”

The happy gunny joined the refrain as the old truck’s wheels churned dust. “And He walks with me, and He talks with me. And He tells me I am His own. And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.”

The three teenage girls sang every old hymn that Jack had ever remembered from those long-ago times, sitting with his mother and father at Coronado Baptist Church in El Paso.

The old truck rattled, and the girls and Jack bounced on the springs that stabbed them in the ass. Each time they hit bottom, all of them laughed. Successful escape, moving toward friendly lines at a good pace, no matter the pain or misery, it all seemed good.

“Where will we live?” Giti asked, looking across Miriam and Amira at the cheery Marine.

“What do you mean, where will we live?” he asked, his mind focused on keeping his northeast heading. Crossing the desert, like driving a boat on open water, he had to make sure he didn’t drift off course.

“In America?” she said.

Jack pondered and took a breath. He didn’t know. He had never gotten beyond the idea of making sure the three sweet Christian girls, who had lived as slaves the past year and risked their lives to help him escape, got a green card and a life in the United States of America. It was the least a grateful nation should do for three such heroes.

“Geez,” he puzzled. “I never thought about it.”

Amira began to cry.

“We have no one there, and we have no one here,” Giti explained. “What will America do with us? What will we do!”

Jack thought about it, and all kinds of horror pictures flashed in his mind. State Department turns them over to the Iraqi government, run by hard-thinking Shiites. Bureaucrats take charge of the three young Christian girls’ futures, one of them about three months pregnant. A total nonstarter.

“I’ll call my mom and dad,” Jack said. “Judge Darius Archer, he’s old now, retired, but he knows people. My girlfriend, Liberty, is an FBI agent. Her dad’s a big-time lawyer. They’ll help. So will our church, Coronado Baptist.”

He looked at the girls, the three staring up big-eyed at their hero, and not having a clue.

“You’ll come home with me,” Jack said. “Live with my family. We have people who can get you in school, give you a good life. I promise. You’ll have a great place to live, with the best people you ever met.”

Giti smiled at her sisters. “See? Jesus has answered our prayers all this time. He brought Jack to us, to take us to America, and our Lord gives us a wonderful life!”

They began singing again, “Oh, how I love Jesus…”

Jack drove on, not having a notion where to start. But he swore to God while the girls sang that he would make sure that the three sisters in Christ got to El Paso. It would be over his dead body if they didn’t. And he knew that Elmore Snow would make sure they got to El Paso, too.

A half mile ahead, Jack saw a rise in the land, and he slowed the truck. Sometimes, crossing the desert, the earth can open up. A deep drop-off appeared, not on a map, caused by a subterranean cavern, which had once held water but ran empty, collapsing on itself. It opened a sinkhole or a rift if it was an underground river that had died.

As he crept forward, he saw the ravine, sheer sides twenty feet deep. He stopped the truck and looked up and down the land rip. In the bottom he saw a dusty, well-used road, cut by jihadi homemade Hummers no doubt.

“If they got the trucks down there, they got to have a road out,” the gunny told the girls, who also stretched their legs, looking at the great break in the landscape.

Jack rubbed his back against the cab, scratching the scabs and scrapes that now itched. He thought about his kit unharmed, but his clothing shredded off, and he called to Giti, who stood with her hand shading her eyes, looking up and down the ravine, searching for a way across.

“Say,” Jack said. “How’d my uniform and my back get cut to pieces but my gear not have a scratch? You know anything about it?”

“The men dragged you behind a truck,” Amira answered. “You don’t remember?”

“No,” Jack said.

“How could you not know something so terrible?” the girl said, surprised.

“Because I was knocked unconscious?” Jack said.

Giti smiled, then told Jack, “Yasir said that some of the men found you where the jets had bombed.

“They took your equipment, put it in their truck, and tied you to the bumper. Yasir said he found them dragging you. He stopped them so they would not kill you, and told them Abu Omar wanted you alive. Then he took you home.”

“Right. He saved my life so they could cut off my head on YouTube,” Jack said, taking his little binoculars out of his operator’s vest and searching north, up the rift.

“Well, at least Yasir saved you from death at that time, or you would not be alive later, so you can escape and live,” Giti said. “He is not a bad man.”

Jack smirked at her and kept searching.

“This sinkhole looks like it shallows enough, way up ahead, so we can drive across,” Jack said. “Couple of feet drop on this side, but a decent-looking slope the rest of the way down and all the way up the other side. Looks like we can angle up, as long as we don’t roll over.”

“We will get out and watch at that point,” Miriam said.

“Yeah,” Jack said, getting in the truck. “Let’s roll.”

When the three girls got inside and shut the door, Jack ground the gears and got the old jalopy moving.

“We’ll do well if this collection of crap holds up much longer,” he said. “Clutch is shot and the gearbox totally worn-out. I don’t know what’s holding the engine together.”

“Yasir drives it to Haditha all the time,” Giti said. “He seems to have no trouble.”

“I hope you’re right,” Jack said, running north, along the side of the land cut.

He looked at Giti. “Why do you suppose Omar lied to me about my stuff? He told me that it got blown to bits. One gun broken in three pieces and the barrel bent on the other?”

“He tells lies at a whim,” Miriam said. “Why does a viper bite? He could so easily lie hidden, unseen, and do nothing. But he jumps from the grass and bites us.”

“Omar has no soul,” Amira added. “He gave it to Satan.”

“That is the kind of man that Omar is. A son of perdition,” Giti said. “The devil lives within him.”