Hunt the Viper Read online

  He winced as Crocker helped him to his feet.

  “I cracked a couple ribs.”

  “Real lucky to be alive.”

  “Hold up,” Akil said. “I need my weapon.”

  His M4A1 was covered with dirt and debris, and the front window of the EOTech scope had shattered. Neither was functional, but Akil took them anyway as he leaned on Crocker and limped eighty feet back to the Flyer. From the equipment locker in back, Akil grabbed an MK-46 machine gun and several belts of 45mm rounds. Cleared the shit from the pockets of his combat vest, and loaded them with grenades.

  “Ready, boss.” The gas-operated weapon weighed more than twenty pounds when loaded.

  “You crazy fuck, you’d better stay here.”

  “Not happening. I’m going back up to the roof to kill those bastards.”

  Crocker pointed to the MK-46. “You sure you want to carry that beast?”

  He heard CT’s urgent voice through his headset.

  “Deadwood. Deadwood, it’s CT. You copy?”

  “Copy.” He felt a moment of relief. “What’s your status?”

  “We’re being outflanked west and south. Taking fire from two directions now. Down to four militiamen, me, and Rip.”

  “Rip okay?”

  “Rip’s a stud!”

  This and yesterday’s encounter at the Cougar crash site were Rip’s first real combat with Black Cell since coming over from SEAL Team Two.

  “Hold fast,” Crocker said into the radio. “I’ll be there in a minute with reinforcements.”

  The latter was a fib, because he had none. Still, he’d try to rustle up a boy or two along the way.

  Davis saw him leaving and shouted, “Where the hell you going?”

  Crocker filled his vest with mags and pointed south. “Same rooftop as before. Then going to help CT. Keep up the good work!”

  Davis fed another belt into the SAW and resumed firing. Crocker wondered how many he had left.

  The roof was a mess of bodies, blood, spent shells, and smoke, mostly from the building next to them, part of which was on fire. Flames flickered out of the second-story windows. Dilshad was one of six locals still alive, but his eyes were completely frozen, indicating a state of shock.

  Crocker lay on his belly beside him, while Akil set up the machine gun and started firing. The racket canceled out everything else.

  He cupped his hands over Dilshad’s ear and shouted, “You hear from the mayor? Mayor Sabri. What’d he say? We need more men!…Dilshad!”

  When Akil took a break and lowered his head behind the concrete lip, he said, “He’s gone, boss. He can’t hear you.”

  “Damn.…”

  Crocker came up with his finger on the trigger, saw a jihadist running toward them with a grenade in his hand. Put three rounds in his chest from sixty feet before the black-bearded man launched the grenade. Fell out of his hand backward and exploded.

  Akil said, “They’re either pulling back or shifting tactics.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Some trucks are moving south. Look!”

  Crocker poked his head above the lip, fired, and saw the silhouettes of three technicals circling.

  “Fuck.”

  He pulled the walkie-talkie from Dilshad’s hand, pushed the activation button, and spoke into it. “Mayor! Mayor Sabri, you hear me? This is Crocker. Copy.”

  All he heard back was frantic screaming in Sorani. A high voice that didn’t match the mayor’s.

  “Is this Mayor Sabri? Is he there? Get Mayor Sabri. Get him now!”

  The line went dead. Crocker tried again. “You okay here?” he shouted to Akil. “I’m gonna help CT and Rip.”

  Akil nodded without taking his eye from the Trijicon sight.

  He ran southeast through the narrow streets and saw the light of dawn illuminating the cloudy sky. Slipping as he turned a corner, he realized for the first time that it had started raining.

  He wanted to assume Mayor Sabri had stationed some of the militiamen at the south and west sides of town. But when he stopped in the doorway of a house and tried to reach him via walkie-talkie again, he got no response.

  So he pocketed it and moved forward. The distinctive rip of the SAW echoed close and to his right. He slid across a slick concrete slab under the portico of a building on the corner and saw a sudden flash of light and the profile of a Toyota truck. The explosion threw him off his feet and onto his back. Momentarily stunned, he lifted himself out of the mud, and through the flames and smoke saw Rip on the ground, grappling with a jihadist.

  The latter seemed to have the advantage.

  Fucking hell!

  Crocker wanted to shout out the lessons he’d learned from his close quarters defense training. Seeing the flash of a knife in the jihadist’s hand, he lifted his HK416 and tore a red ribbon across his chest.

  “Rip!”

  Rip pushed the big man off him and struggled to his feet.

  “Boss? Shit.…” Gasping for breath.

  “Over here.”

  The tall man limped over, blood smeared across his face and neck, his eyes wide.

  “Where are the militiamen?” Crocker asked.

  “All dead.”

  He pulled Rip close, and craned his head around the concrete column. Saw CT with his back to him on the SAW. Bodies strewn haphazardly around the Flyer. The technical burning to their right and the sound of more Daesh fighters shouting behind it.

  “We’re fucked.…They’re coming…from all sides.…” Rip warned as he tried to catch his breath.

  Crocker saw that CT’s back was exposed. Soon as the smoke cleared, the jihadists would see the SEALs were trapped.

  He pushed Rip toward the Flyer. “Start it up, and get it the fuck out of here!” he barked.

  “And go where?”

  “Make a loop and flank the fuckers to our right.”

  “What about the ones coming from the field?” Rip shouted, his eyes bulging out of his head.

  Crocker couldn’t see them and, therefore, couldn’t calculate how close they were. “Do it. Go!”

  The situation wasn’t good. Rounds were coming hot and heavy from two directions. He made his body small. Clenched behind the column. Heard more shouts of “Allahu akbar!” from the jihadists sensing victory.

  Past the burning technical, Crocker saw the outlines of six to eight of them surging forward. The Flyer engine growled behind him. It was his job to provide cover. Without the Flyer and its SAW they were certainly fucked.

  Someone was shouting through his earbuds. “Boss! Boss! Copy!”

  “I can’t now…”

  “Boss, we’re trapped!”

  On his belly behind a column of what seemed to be the town’s only three-story building, Crocker said a quick prayer to God to look after his friends and family, especially his daughter, Jenny. A colleague whose heart stopped beating for two whole minutes once told him that he felt himself being pulled down a tunnel to a bright white light while seeing scenes from his life.

  Crocker readied the 416 and waited. The jihadists seemed to move in slow motion past the burning truck. He held his fire until he was able to take out as many of them as possible with one continuous stream of bullets. He’d get one chance before they turned on him and took him down.

  It’s been a good life…

  Thunder pealed overhead as he pulled the trigger. Jihadists screamed, twisted, and fell to the ground. Two, three, five of them. A split second later, a tremendous explosion rocked the field to his left and lifted him into the air.

  His chest hit the concrete under the portico, knocking the wind out of his lungs and snapping his teeth together. Lost consciousness for a moment.

  A deafening explosion pulled him out of it. Then another and another.

  By the time he could think clearly enough to level the 416, he saw the jihadists had turned and were running toward the technicals, which were backing away. A deafening roar ripped his eardrums, and then a huge metal object screa
med overhead.

  Looking up he saw a single red star on the wing of a Russian Su-34M jet fighter as it slipped behind some low clouds. The continuous blast of its 30mm cannons rendered him temporarily deaf.

  Fucking Russians.…

  Chapter Six

  The unexamined life is not worth living.

  —Socrates

  As pleased as Crocker was that the ISIS insurgents had retreated, he was pissed that it was a Russian aircraft that had come to their rescue and not an American one. It might seem like a strange quibble, and maybe he wasn’t thinking straight, but that’s what stuck in his head. In his half-conscious state, he pictured Russian President Putin leaning back in a red leather chair with a self-satisfied look on his face.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

  “Who?”

  He slowly focused on CT looking down at him.

  Crocker saw his big white teeth and the light around him.

  “We still alive?”

  He closed his eyes for several minutes and woke up in the passenger seat of Truck One. Sunlight reflected off the sides of buildings. He heard people groaning behind him. Turning, he saw the bodies of four wounded townspeople in back.

  “Where are we going?” he asked Davis, who was at the wheel.

  “Once we drop these folks off at the hospital, we’re going back for more.”

  “You remember where it is?”

  “The hospital?”

  “Yeah, the clinic. You okay?”

  “Yup.”

  He slowly got his bearings. “The hospital…it’s off to the left when we reach the plaza. I’ll know the street when I see it.”

  “Cool.”

  “Where are Akil, CT, and Rip?”

  “They stayed behind with Truck Two to guard the northeast perimeter. Akil’s still on the roof. I think he wants to marry the 46. Refuses to come down.”

  He was trying to clear his head as they pressed on, the Flyer engine purring, the rest of the town quiet as though it was still asleep.

  Closing his eyes, he imagined the first time he saw Cyndi poolside at the Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, her toned dancer body, sweet smile, and how she put him at ease. He promised to thank her for that again next time he saw her.

  “Boss?…Boss?”

  He jolted awake. “Yeah.”

  “We’re in the plaza.”

  Davis, to his left in the driver’s seat, appeared ten years older. Deep lines creased his cheeks. His skin hung gray and lifeless over his cheekbones. There were dark circles under his eyes.

  The month, date, and year were a complete muddle. Townspeople were clearing debris and assembling in clusters to exchange reports about the deaths and damage.

  “Boss, can you hear me?”

  “Yeah. Why do you keep asking?”

  “We’re here. We’re in the plaza.”

  “I know.” With the sunlight in his face, he wondered how Mayor Sabri and the rest of the militiamen had fared. The town was eerily silent. The fighting had stopped.

  “Where’s the hospital?” Davis asked.

  He pointed. “Down there. Hang a left. Look for a blue cross.”

  Sheikh al-Sufi was disappointed when he heard that Qabusiye hadn’t fallen, but he wasn’t surprised, or particularly upset. Fate was fate, and didn’t care what you wanted.

  He sat in the courtyard of the mosque watching two doves feast on ants on the bark of an olive tree. Miraculously, the ancient tree and the birds were still alive. Most of the other life in this part of Raqqa had been destroyed in one way or another.

  What remained were collapsed homes and wrecked buildings bristling with twisted rebar. Most of the trees shot up, shorn of upper branches, bark shredded.

  As he shoveled goat milk yogurt into his mouth, he thought that there was no point dressing down or punishing Mohammad Balul. Yogurt was one of the few things he could eat, because it didn’t require chewing, and chewing was painful because of the ulcers on his gums.

  His aches and pains were too numerous to name, but they started with his gums, bad knees, and sore back.

  Despite pains and disappointments, God’s will remained irrefutable and would determine the future. He knew that. Experience had taught him that the goal of the infidel was to sow chaos in the righteous and corrupt their souls. The infidels’ many tools included pornography, licentiousness, self-indulgence, idolatry, materialism, and liberalism.

  All of this blasphemy advanced by the United States, Israel, and secular leaders in Europe and the Middle East was aimed at making men weak and luring them further away from God.

  He’d experienced this spiritual dissolution firsthand as a junior officer in the Iraqi Army commanded by Saddam Hussein, when he spent six months training with U.S. Rangers at Fort Bragg. Many of the men he met were friendly and kept their bodies strong. But al-Sufi had observed that their minds and souls were in decay.

  For one thing, they allowed women to rule their lives—women who rejected the modesty of hijab, and instead desired to show and adorn their bodies and brag about their accomplishments. The principle of hijab required modesty and humility in men, too.

  In the U.S., instead of studying God’s laws, men busied themselves with frivolous things and lavished time on stupid objects like cars. They turned themselves into children, spent no time in contemplation, and mistook niceness and moral ambiguity as virtues.

  They worshipped Jesus without understanding his true story as explained by the Messenger Mohammad. Jesus wasn’t the son of God, nor had he been crucified. Instead he had been summoned by God to rid the world of disbelievers. In this he had been only partially successful. Nor was it true that those who followed the word of Jesus, whether Jewish or Christian, would receive recompense from God.

  The truth was that Jesus’s teachings, and the Bible they were based on, had been tampered with by other men. The Quran, on the other hand, were the words revealed by God through the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammad. Words that were memorized by Mohammad, dictated to his companions, written down by scribes, and cross-checked by Mohammad. Not one word of its 114 chapters, or suras, had been altered over the centuries.

  To the sheikh’s mind, it was the literal word of God.

  The SEALs hadn’t expected this. They were grateful to have caught a few hours’ sleep in shifts. But Mayor Sabri had insisted.

  So here they were now standing at attention in the town hall and shaking the hands of the long line of people who had come to thank them for saving their town. Crocker reminded himself that a number of them had lost homes and loved ones. Others bore signs of physical injuries, like Mayor Sabri, who carried his injured arm in a sling around his shoulder.

  Their generosity moved him.

  “God…bless you, America,” a young man said in broken English, squeezing Crocker’s hand.

  “God bless you, too, and your family.”

  Crocker didn’t know these people and they didn’t know him. The conflict had drawn them together, overcoming differences in culture, history, and language. In the end, they wanted the same things people back home in Virginia did—peace, freedom, and a good life for themselves and their families.

  He was reminded of the intimacy that comes from facing extreme danger together. How many times had Crocker attended to a wounded enemy soldier after battle? How many had he saved? And how many had thanked him afterward?

  Nobody ever talked about that three years ago when he helped treat the son of an ISIS commander in Syria, who had been shot in the neck and jaw. The ISIS leader—a ferocious fighter and avowed enemy—had not only embraced Crocker for helping his son, but had also given him a gift.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Davis, to his right, remarked.

  “Sure is.”

  An old farmer and his wife handed Akil, who stood first in line, a platter of dates covered with plastic and tied with a red ribbon. Proximity with death made you appreciate the preciousness of life and the things shared in common.

  To his le
ft, he recognized a short woman with a long nose and a dark blue scarf tied over her head. Her son or grandson had been buried in the rubble with Akil. Hours earlier he had watched her dig furiously, then wail in agony when she found the boy’s dead body. Now she held up her bruised hands to Crocker and compared them to his. Then she reached around his waist and hugged him.

  “Sipas, ji were,” she muttered, fighting back tears.

  “I’m very sorry about your boy,” he said back in English, looking into her flinty blue eyes and struggling to contain his own emotion. “I hope he’s in a better place.”

  “Good…man,” she replied, kissing his cheek.

  He wanted to think so. Even though he had screwed up two marriages, and killed numerous men in battle, he had done some good, too.

  The night sky was so clear that it seemed freshly cleansed, and showed off many stars. Crocker had just gotten off the phone with Colonel Rastan, who apologized for not sending relief and explained that his men hadn’t been able to get past Mosul because of the fighting near Highway 47. He would be sending a platoon to relieve them in the morning, he promised.

  All Crocker could say was, “Thank you, Colonel.”

  There were weapons to clean and reload, reports to make to the TOC in Erbil, and other chores to attend to. It was almost midnight before he and Akil gathered around Rip’s DVD player in the room behind the town hall to watch the movie Pineapple Express.

  The action on the screen was silly and outrageous—a perfect antidote to the seriousness of the day. Crocker found himself laughing at an exchange between James Franco and Danny McBride’s characters, when Rip got up abruptly and left the room.

  One of Crocker’s duties as team leader was to monitor the mental health of his men. He found Rip sitting on the front steps with his head in his hands. A Kurdish love song drifted from an open window across the street.

  “You still worried about your dad?” A week ago, while they were in Erbil, training some of Colonel Rastan’s troops, Rip had learned that his father—a Vietnam vet who suffered from Alzheimer’s—had gone missing from their farm in Indiana.