Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

“Too late?” Saif asked. “For what?”

Chambers ignored him. “Sir,” he said to the commander, “this is what I recommend. I’ll take a small team of guys. Four-man stack, Room Clearing one-oh-one. The staircase spirals up like that. If we move quick, they won’t get an RPG out the window fast enough for a clean shot. The fuckers are iced, and the mosque stands. Win-win.”

“Americans aren’t allowed to enter mosques,” Saif said, pushing his way back into the conversation. His voice was brittle. “My men and I must do this.”

“No offense, big man, but this isn’t training. My soldiers are better. We go, the only blood spilled is terrorist blood.” Chambers didn’t look away from the commander as he spoke to Saif, his eyes pale as slate. “Trust me. I’ve been here before.”

Captain Vrettos began plucking at his eyebrows, trying to think.

I said, “I’m going, too.”

“No way, sir,” First Sergeant said. “Can’t have both members of a platoon’s leadership getting wiped out in one move.”

“I hear you, First Sergeant. But these are my men. I’m going.”

Captain Vrettos groaned and let go of his eyebrow. “Okay, you three all go. Grab a jundi for point. Lieutenant Porter, take a radio, you’re my command and control up there. Molazim Saif, you’re the de facto terp, but with a rifle. Do not kill the mullah. Understood?”

None of us were happy, but we all nodded.

As Chambers stalked off grumbling about having to do this with “two fucking officers,” Saif pulled me behind the adjacent Stryker.

“You must stop this,” he said. “This is a terrible decision. There must be another way.”

I found his voice too authoritative. Dark Irish fury tore through me like cinder.

“Fuck off,” I said. “Orders are orders. We could be dropping a drone bomb. Get your gear on.”

“So that’s how it’s going to be?”

“Yeah.”

“I mistook you, Loo-tenant Porter. I mistook you for someone different.”

“Grab your jundi . We’ll meet at the base of the tower.”

I went to walk away, but turned around to see Saif half grinning at my backside.

“I’ll be there,” he said. The smile he was wearing hadn’t reached his eyes. “But only me. None of my men will go up there for this.”

I rolled my eyes and played him the world’s smallest violin, rubbing my right thumb and forefinger together. Then I found Batule and said he was walking point up the minaret. He started prepping his gear. Hog was there, too, sitting on the back of a lowered ramp with a bored look on his face.

“This is crazy, sir,” he said.

“Sure is,” I said. I’d been avoiding him since the Haitham incident. He’d probably been avoiding me, too. “How you doing?”

Hog looked down at his feet. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think about him a lot.”

“Yeah.” I chewed my bottom lip.

He looked back up, his eyes turning to gin. Before he could tear up, I tapped him on the helmet and said to keep doing a good job. Then I walked away.

We gathered in strained silence. No one in our four-man stack wanted to speak; nor did anyone who was staying behind. The plan was far from tactically sound, but that’d never stopped a military operation. Saif unholstered his pistol, metal glinting in the dusk. Pushing away three or four bad jokes, I cracked my neck, tightened my bootlaces, and crossed myself with great papist flourish. Then I followed Batule, Saif, and Chambers up the yellow stones at a quick trot.

To my ears, our boots on the path sounded like falling trees, each step a fatal alarm for the enemy above that possessed everything — high ground, larger weapons, the fervor of zealotry. As we rounded two, then three loops of the spiral ramp, the sand winds howled. We faced the dead of north on the third rotation, and it struck with an open palm; I had to stagger to my left to catch my balance. Only Chambers remained upright. Saif pushed past Batule, and we kept moving.

With two more rungs of tower to go, the dirty sky burst into patriotic staples of red, white, and purple. A green star cluster followed. Illumination rounds, I realized, meant to distract the insurgents in the tower. It’s Independence Day in Babylon, I thought, turning back to the climb as the lead man tripped over a clear, ankle-high wire spread across the path, landing on his palms and knees.

There was a long, yo-yoing pause during which no one moved. All I could do was bite my lip and tuck my chin before the world exploded into stone. I thought of all the little things that make up life and the ancient howl returned, pushing me into the tower wall. I saw and heard nothing until I did again.

•  •  •

It was the falling debris that brought me back, earth raining back down on earth. I felt my face like a blind man reading braille. One lip, two lips. A nose. The eyes were still there, and they opened and saw dirty sky again, though my lenses had been blown off. I blinked and blinked, pushing away the thousand hammers pounding in my head, and stood up.

Everything was brown ash. As I leaned against the tower wall, trying to remember who and why, a shape came out of the cloud like a monster.

“Sir!” It was talking to me loudly. “Sir!”

“Batule!” I grabbed him by the chest plate and pulled him toward me. His face looked like meatloaf, and his hands were pressed against one of his eyes, his palms lapping up pools of dark blood. Pieces of his uniform on his arms and upper torso had been shredded, but he seemed able to walk. I said to keep his hands pressed against that socket and asked if he could make it down the tower path by himself. He said yes.

“Go,” I said.

“No way, they need help.”

“That’s a fucking order!” I was yelling too loud but wasn’t sure he could hear me, either. “You’re combat ineffective. Go the fuck down!”

He went one way and I went the other, using the curving tower wall as my guide, toward belt lashes of rifle fire.

I floated through steps of exaggerated movement, uncertain where my feet would land, a spaceman sifting through the powder of the moon. Four, five, six steps in, I heard laughter, then the whistles of steady gunfire, then saw the hazy silhouette of a man on one knee firing a rifle up the path. I found my own still on me, dangling from its strap at my hip. I raised it to my shoulder pocket and flipped it to burst, firing into the fangs of the unknown, not bothering to aim, not caring to. A bright lodestar of a tracer lit the way every fifth round. Breathing in the hot cordite of spent rounds, breathing out the cold sulfur of rounds spent, I kept squeezing until the magazine ran dry. When I dropped it and reached into my vest for a replacement, I found Chambers to my left, on one knee, searching the brown cloud, squeezing off rounds one or two at a time.

“Welcome to the party,” he said. He laughed again, low and loud, breathing in the slag around us. “Get some, hajj,” he said. “Come get some. The infidels are at the fucking gate!”

I asked where Saif was, and he nodded to his far side. A body lay there, leaning up, firing a pistol up the path.

“He’s in a bad way,” Chambers said. “Gonna take both of us to get him down.”

“Let’s do it.” I hadn’t heard any counterfire since I’d sent away Batule. “While we can.”

We each grabbed one of Saif’s armpits and lifted, draping his arms around our shoulders. Saif’s head sagged to the side. He mumbled something with glazed eyes and splashes of runny, hot drool. I tried not to look down but realized as we started that there was space where Saif’s legs were supposed to be, two long holes filled with nothing. Something was dripping, like water from a broken tap. I clutched his body closer and kept moving.