Craig Dilouie: Tooth And Nail

Concertina wire is lined with two-inch-long razors set four inches apart. The man shreds himself until he falls to the ground, his legs soaked with blood and bleeding out from a severed femoral artery in his thigh.

The other man jumps to his feet, runs, leaps over the wire—

Several carbines crack and pop at once and the man twitches in mid air, lands on the ground in a heap. Instantly, a widening pool of blood begins to form under him.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!”

Mooney lowers his carbine. The sharp tang of cordite hangs in the air.

“Did you see that?” McGraw says to nobody in particular. “What was that?”

Bowman is shouting, running towards them from the other checkpoint, demanding to know why weapons are being fired.

The woman is still alive, lying on the ground and in the throes of some sort of convulsions. The two assailants lie still in their own blood, obviously dead.

“Ma’am, it’s all right now,” McGraw says, holding the Beretta behind his back and extending his other hand across the wire. “Come to me. We’ll take care of you.”

The woman stares at him in terror, panting as she pulls herself unsteadily onto her feet.

He lowers his mask. “Look at me. Miss. You’re going to be okay.”

She begins twitching and blinking rapidly.

“No, don’t—”

But she has already turned and started running. By the time the squad can make an opening in the wire enough for McGraw to give chase, she is gone.

Chapter 2

Beginning to wonder if we actually did leave Iraq

The night is alive with police sirens and car horns and shouting and gunfire. The warm, muggy air smells like smoke. The streetlights dim and occasionally flare up as the city juggles its power problems. Down First Avenue, past the roadblock, the traffic lights are all blinking red and the traffic is snarled and honking with fury as thousands continue their flight from Manhattan in anything that can get a little gasoline in it.

Everybody thinks things are better somewhere else.

The boys of Second Platoon’s Third Squad pace the wire nervously, wired on black coffee. A police helicopter roars overhead, its powerful spotlight exploring the area briefly and ruining their night vision before moving on.

“I can’t believe this,” Corporal Hicks mutters to himself, squinting down First Avenue and listening to the deep thuds of heavy machine-gun fire. “Are those tracers?”

“No, I’m just happy to see you,” McLeod says, strolling up with his SAW. “Sounds like a fiddy-cal. So what?”

“Because this is New York, not Baghdad, shit-for-brains. What is somebody down there doing firing an MG in the middle of New York?” Then, as an afterthought: “Beat your face, McLeod. Give me twenty.”

“Are you serious? We’re in the middle of a war zone here.”

“You want thirty?”

While McLeod counts off his pushups, Hicks raises his carbine’s telescopic close combat optic to his eye. A red dot is centered in the optic for easy targeting. The tracers form a stream of light over the hoods of cars crawling in bumper-to-bumper traffic and the heads of people running through the cars.

Hicks can’t see through buildings, though, so he can’t tell who is laying down this steel rain and who is getting rained on. Just a few hundred meters away, and yet even this close he feels isolated and can barely tell what is going on. He wonders where all those big bullets are ending up. A fifty-cal round can travel four miles. It can blow through vehicles and, at close range, concrete walls.

Now imagine what it can do to a human being.

“Six. . . . Seven. . . .”

The firing stops. It lasted only a few seconds. Somebody screwed up big time, probably some green recruit in a Humvee who got spooked. Hopefully, nobody got killed.

Rather you than me, he thinks.

Hicks is about to lower his weapon when he notices two people at the periphery of his scope image and focuses on them. One is a middle-aged man wearing boxers. The other is a teenaged girl dressed in a long T-shirt that comes down to her knees. They’re staring vacantly and doing that strange, jittery neck roll that people with the Mad Dog strain of Lyssa often do and that always gives Hicks the creeps. Their hands are clenched into fists in front of their chests. They look in his direction, open their mouths, and bolt away in the direction of where the MG fire had come from.

He mutters, “And what are all these Mad Dogs doing running around without a leash?”

The last thing we need, he tells himself, is another bunch throwing themselves at our perimeter and getting themselves shot. Getting caught in that kind of fire incident will follow you around for life.

The MG starts thudding again.

“I’m beginning to wonder if we actually did leave Iraq,” McLeod says, then resumes counting.

Things will be just fine, sir, if we keep right on moving

The armored Humvees, butterbar Todd Bowman commanding, race up Haifa Street through dense smells of burning trash and gasoline fumes. The boys in the lead vehicle bob their heads in time to Dope’s “Die Motherfucker Die” played loud enough to be heard in the mosques. A year ago, the government of Iraq tottered on the edge of collapse and the U.S. Army reentered the cities in force to prop it up, unleashing a new generation of martyrs, foot soldiers and mad bombers in a war that has no end.

The street karma is constantly shifting, but Bowman, brand new to the country and command, is not prepared for how much hate he has to eat here on a daily basis. The walls of the high-rise apartment buildings, pockmarked with bullet holes from years of strife, radiate it. The very streets cry infidel. The very bricks want him dead.

“Contact, right!”

The RPG zips across the front of his Humvee and strikes a parked minivan, which explodes and rockets a spinning blur of metal against his windshield, where it bounces with a heart-stopping smash and leaves a spider web of cracks. Kemper, driving the rig, whistles through his teeth but otherwise barely even flinches at the impact.

They did not prepare Bowman for this in ROTC.

The air hums and snaps with small arms fire while the fifty-cals on the Humvees chew up the walls of nearby buildings. Tracers flicker and zip through the air. The top of a palm tree explodes, scattering burning leaves and blistering their windshield with pieces of shrapnel.

Bowman, wide-eyed and shouting himself hoarse, forces himself to calm down. His men are counting on him to lead them, and he doesn’t want to let them down on his first mission. They need to stop and start directing aimed fire at the insurgent positions. In an ambush, if you can’t withdraw, you assault.

He starts to key his handset, but Kemper turns, winking, and tells him that things will be just fine, sir, if we keep right on moving.

The cops aren’t answering the phone

Bowman’s eyes flutter open and he looks around the facility manager’s office with a flash of panic. Had he been dreaming? For a moment, he’d thought. . . . Then he’d heard a noise. A knock? He listens to the hum of machinery in the hospital basement.

Somebody is muttering outside his door.

“Come in,” he says.

Kemper enters the room, dimly lighted by a single desk lamp, followed by the squad leaders. Bowman is expecting them. He requested a squad leader meeting. The room’s smells of sweat, stale coffee and lived-in gear grows stronger.

“Pull up a chair, gentlemen,” says the LT, rubbing his eyes. “Yeah, Pete, just push that aside. Ah, coffee’s not fresh but it is hot if you want some.”