The Gathering Dead (15 page)

“Come on, Zoe, let’s get some more pie.”

Zoe nodded and allowed herself to be led away, then suddenly turned back to McDaniels. “Bye,” she said.

“Bye, Zoe. See you later. Save some pie for me, okay?”

She sniffed haughtily. “
Maybe.
”

McDaniels chuckled as the two girls disappeared into the dark cafeteria and looked over at Earl. Obviously, Earl got what he wanted from his girls’ smiles. McDaniels hadn’t figured Earl had much going for him. Obviously, he was wrong.

“Beautiful girls,” he said. “Really top notch, Earl. You should be proud.”

“I am, I am. I wanted them to meet you, you know, before anything else happen. I wanted them to see a black man who’s
successful
, you know what I mean? Not one a them bond traders or somebody like that, but a man who will put it all on the line for people he don’t even
know
and not even blink an eye.”

“Well... thanks, Earl.”

“We comin’ with you guys, right?”

“What?” The question surprised McDaniels.

“I said, we comin’ with you guys, right?”

“Of course you’re coming with us. We’re all getting out of here.”

Earl shrugged and looked past McDaniels, out the window behind him. “I just gotta be sure. I can’t have my kids here. If somethin’ happens and we all can’t go, I’ll stay behind, and you take my kids, okay?”

“Earl, the V-22 can lift like ten tons or something like that. Don’t worry, we’re all going.”

Earl nodded slowly, then stepped toward the window. He pointed toward it. “Can this thing fly in the rain?”

McDaniels suddenly became aware of rain being flung against the window. He turned and saw small droplets smash against the pane of glass as they were driven into it by the wind. He heard the wind whine slightly as it wrapped around the building. Below, the street
—
and the deadheads that prowled it
—
were becoming wet. The zombies didn’t seem to pay any attention to the rain or the wind.

“It can fly in rain just fine, Earl,” McDaniels assured him. He put what he hoped was a comforting hand on the smaller man’s bony shoulder and squeezed. “After all, if it couldn’t take a little rain and wind, then the Marines probably wouldn’t be flying it, right?”

“I guess. I’m just thinking about your helicopter crashin’, that’s all.”

“We crashed because a
—
a window diver landed in the Black Hawk’s main rotor. The V-22 isn’t going to have that problem, it’s going to hover over the building and hoist us up with its winch, one at a time, until we’re all aboard.”

Earl frowned. “That sounds kinda dangerous. And in this rain ‘n wind? It can do that?”

“Well, it certainly beats the alternative, doesn’t it?”

Earl chewed on that one for a while, then turned back to McDaniels. “My kids. Please save my kids.”

Please take my daughter!

“We will,” McDaniels promised him. “Now, let me ask a favor of you, all right?”

“Sure. Name it. Anything.”

“Let me have one of those smokes. I’m going to step out into the stairwell and have one, if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Earl smiled and handed over a cigarette and his butane lighter. “You ain’t worried about any of those things comin’ up from down below? Like Mister Walsford did?”

McDaniels patted his M4 carbine. “If they do, I have this. And they tend to move pretty slow, and we should have plenty of warning.”

“Then I’ll go with you. I ain’t had no cigarette in almost half a day!” Earl said with a smile so bright that it bordered on being positively radiant.

“We should kill the kid,” Sergeant Racine said for the fourth time.

McDaniels looked at the young sheepherder sitting nearby. His eyes were full of fear, and his face was still bereft of even the most nascent whiskers. McDaniels figured he was maybe eleven, possibly twelve; he looked much older because the Pashtun lived hard lives in the mountainscapes of Afghanistan, where the terrain was so hostile and forbidding that humans seemed to age a year to the month. The boy looked from Racine to McDaniels almost pleadingly, as if he understood what the reedy Special Forces soldier had said. McDaniels knew that was impossible; the boy didn’t know a lick of English, and the valley in which he lived hadn’t seen a foreigner since the Soviets had pulled out decades ago. Hell, he probably hadn’t seen much of the tribe that lived in the next valley over, as the tall, craggy peaks that separated the geological depressions were so high that the locals called them the spine of the world. The boy’s sheep bleated forlornly, looking up at the Special Forces Operational Detachment (Alpha) that surrounded them and their herder, weapons always close at hand, their eyes both hard and soft. McDaniels wondered if the boy knew exactly how much his presence had upset them. His arrival was almost as disturbing as Racine’s apparent willingness to sentence a young boy to death merely for walking into their hide site, a place he had come to for years.

McDaniels looked at Master Sergeant David Gartrell, his team senior NCO. He knew Gartrell was a man of quiet religion, and he felt he could count on him to back him up when he pushed Racine back into line. He was surprised to see Gartrell’s eyes were flat and expressionless, and that caused McDaniels some worry.

My God, is Gartrell actually going to suggest we kill a kid?
he wondered to himself.

Gartrell stirred uneasily on the rock he sat on, glancing up at the peaks overhead, then down at the small village that lay almost two miles away. There was no real activity there, though the intel guys had said it was an al Qaeda rally point. There were Taliban there, that was for sure. But the Taliban weren’t what they were after. It was the followers of Osama bin Laden that ODA PHANTOM hunted. Taliban were just poseurs, pretenders when it came to combat. To the Taliban, warfare was a thing of ritual, something that started when the sun rose and ended when the sun set. If it had been any other way, then they would have ousted the Northern Alliance years ago. But at their core, the Taliban were no more than children playing with guns. They said they lived and died for Allah, but the reality was they led their lives in as much fear of dying as anyone.

Gartrell rose to his feet and dusted off the seat of his battle dress utilities. He looked at McDaniels with those strangely hooded eyes, like a poker player trying to determine just what he was up against in the final hand of a high stakes game.

“We kill the kid, we buy ourselves some time,” he said. “Of course, we’d have to kill the kid’s goats too. We can’t have them ranging around. But if we do that, we’ll have to dispose of the bodies and hope we can hide ‘em well enough that the rest of the villagers don’t find them.”

“This kid already found our hide site,” said Abood. He was one of the only troopers in the entire branch who spoke and understood Pashto, Dari, and Arabic. A small man with narrow shoulders and an expression that made him seem to be in a constant state of disapproval, he had been against the notion of harming the boy from the start. He kept his eyes riveted on Racine as he spoke. “We kill this kid, we lose any traction we might be able to develop with the villagers down there. I guarantee you, Captain, they don’t want anything to do with al Qaeda. They probably hate them as much as they dislike the stinking Talibs.” Abood’s gaze came to rest on McDaniels, conferring the entire weight of the situation onto his shoulders. McDaniels sighed and rubbed his face. He understood now why there were so few African Americans in Army Special Forces. No one wanted to deal with this shit. Shooting Afghans wasn’t a problem for McDaniels; they were giving al Qaeda their cover, and for that, a lot of them would pay. But double-tapping a kid just for leading a flock of mangy goats past their hide site? That seemed a little harsh.

“So, Master Sergeant.” McDaniels locked his gaze with Gartrell’s. “You think killing this boy is the right thing to do?”

Gartrell’s expression didn’t change. “We have a mission to preserve, sir.”

“That’s not an answer, Gartrell.” The team had been debating what to do for twenty minutes now. McDaniels knew that calling out his senior NCO was akin to inviting disaster. The two men were supposed to be totally in synch, the glue that held PHANTOM together, the father and the mother who always put on their best faces for the kids. But even among Green Berets, the prospect of intentionally killing defenseless children rarely came up.

For his part, Gartrell finally looked away, turning to gaze back at the village. “No one wants to kill a boy, sir. But I have to wonder if in the context of the big picture, it might be the lesser sin.”

“That’s a load of bullshit,” Abood said.

“Sounds like common sense talking to me,” Racine said. He pulled his M9 pistol and made a show of decocking it, his eyes on the goat herder. The boy began to shake, and he hugged his knees against him. He looked from man to man, searching for some clue as to what was going to happen.

“You’re a fucking hypocrite.” Abood stood and squared off with Racine, who fairly towered over him even though Abood stood on slightly higher ground. “You run off to the chapel every fucking Sunday, praying to God that he’ll save your soul, and here you are getting ready to plug some kid who has to play with goats instead of a fucking X-Box.”

Racine’s face clouded with anger. “These fucking sand niggers nuked the Trade Center and the Pentagon, Abood. Maybe you ought to remember whose side you’re on, huh? Maybe develop a little bit of warrior ethic, now that you’re out here with the rest of us steely-eyed killers doing God’s work?”

“Sergeant Racine.” McDaniels kept his voice low and level as he spoke, his hands clutching his M4 like some sort of weird crutch. “Put your weapon away. Now.”

Racine looked shocked. “You’re kidding right, sir?”

“Do I look like I’m fucking kidding, Racine? Holster your sidearm or I’m going to land on you with both boots.” McDaniels fixed Racine with his patented ‘I’m going to fuck you up’ stare. Racine seemed to consider debating the issue further, then slowly holstered his pistol. McDaniels pointed at the village.

“Eyes on that village, Racine. They could start looking for the boy at any moment. Make yourself useful and keep an eye out.”

Racine unslung his sniper rifle and nodded as the cool professionalism of a Special Forces soldier returned to him. “Hooah,” he said simply, then turned away from them and walked toward the line of rocks that would serve as his primary sniping position. He did not spare the boy a second glance.

McDaniels looked at Abood. “Tell him to go home, Abood. Tell him we’re his friends, and we’re not going to hurt him or his family. He needs to stay quiet about us, for the safety of everyone. But he’s free to go. With his goats,” McDaniels added with a smile.

Abood nodded gratefully. He knelt beside the boy and spoke to him in soft tones, his arm around the boy’s narrow shoulders. The boy listened with rapt attention, then nodded a few times. Abood helped him to his feet, and the men watched as he gathered up his goats and shooed them down the rocky hillock. The boy looked at McDaniels with a cautious expression for a long moment, and McDaniels nodded to him, trying to give the impression they were all friends here. The kid didn’t buy it, and McDaniels saw that plainly.

Gartrell stepped up beside McDaniels, and together they watched the boy and his goats move down the hill.

“I didn’t sign on to kill kids,” McDaniels said.

“Neither did I, sir.”

“Then maybe next time you’ll back me up when it comes to making some hard decisions, Gartrell. You’re a soldier in the United States Army, and you wear the patch of Third Special Forces.”

“All true. But I represent the men, Captain. I’m the guy who’s supposed to keep them alive.” He pointed at the kid as he urged his goats toward the village. “That kid’s going to get us killed, but it would happen either way. You did what you had to do, and in accordance with the ROE. But the truth is, letting that kid go has just made our lives a lot shorter.”

“We’ll see,” McDaniels said.

The Taliban attacked four hours later. PHANTOM lost five soldiers, and the Air Force had to be called in to decimate the village.

###

“Major? Major, wake up.”

McDaniels snapped awake instantly, his hands going for his rifle. He found Gartrell had anticipated him, and held the weapon against McDaniels’ body with his free hand.

“Sorry for the wakeup call,” Gartrell said. “I tried to wake you by voice alone, but you weren’t having none of that. Had to shake you out of it. Sorry.”

McDaniels coughed. He still tasted nicotine in his nostrils, disgusting and bewitching at the same time. He looked into Gartrell’s face, and saw the older NCO looked like hell. McDaniels was embarrassed he’d fallen asleep while Gartrell and the other troops had remained awake and on duty.

“No problem, first sergeant. What’s up?”

“Thunder Three’s less than thirty minutes out. We might want to start getting organized.”

McDaniels cleared his throat and rose from the booth he had been sitting—sleeping!—in. His coffee cup was still on the table, and he picked it up. He needed a refill. “Let’s have everyone take a second and do weapons maintenance if they can. If they need light, they can head for the latrines and take care of it there. Someone will have to take care of Jimenez’s weapons, I don’t want him trying to do that in his condition, but he does need to be able to shoot his weapon if circumstances warrant.”

“Understood, sir. I’ll see to it personally. You given much thought to the order of egress?”

McDaniels nodded. “Jimenez first, he’s injured. Once he’s on the Osprey, then the Safires, and then the rest of the troops. I’ll go last, of course.”

Gartrell frowned. “That would be my position, sir. You being an officer and all.”