It took a lot of rushed planning to prepare the expedition, as well as all the shop spaces on the ship and the many skills of its chiefs, ratings, and officers. They didn’t know what they would face in the interior, how long they would remain, and if indeed they could track the hostages. Just about everything was as uncertain as it had been since the beginning.
Surveying the preparations from the open bridge, Movius spoke his piece to Rensselaer. “It’s my responsibility as your XO to remind you that hostage rescue is notoriously difficult for many reasons, including that the first rule of hostage-taking is to move them around. We’ve already gone way out on a limb. If we fail?”
“We fail. It’s like what Casals said at ninety when he married a woman of twenty: ‘If she dies, she dies.’ No matter how well it goes we’re bound to lose some and maybe all of the hostages. No matter how well we fight we’re bound to lose some of us. But it can be done. Remember when Boko Haram took several hundred schoolgirls and all we managed was a pathetic tweet campaign, ‘Bring back our girls’? What happened? Nothing. But we could have done it.”
“They disappeared deep in the forest.”
“We had a UAV base within range and even if we hadn’t we could have sent a Global Hawk, a Triton, or a U-2, not to mention tasking a satellite. Meanwhile, you set up a base and immediately bring in special operators: twenty, fifty, a hundred, whatever it takes. They’re always ready. It’s what they do.
“The reconnaissance flights fly so high no one below can hear or see them. They scan vast areas optically and with infrared. Hundreds of people moving across the terrain can be picked up optically. In jungle cover, infrared will sense their cooking fires: they’re not carrying MREs or Power Bars, but rice and flour. They have to cook. Even the smoke can be seen. We knew where they started, their maximum speed, how much time had elapsed, and the direction in which they headed. It wouldn’t have been that difficult to track them.
“You find them, watch them, and extrapolate their course. The planes take off. At the right place the advanced teams make a HALO jump and steer to assembly points. They surround the target and use speed, flash-bangs, sniper takedowns. And then the rest of the force in helos goes in to secure the hostages.
“The helos and V-22s come to a landing zone and take everyone home. We could have done it. We chose not to. We could have protected the Vietnamese boat people from the Thai pirates. We chose not to.
“Here”—he gestured toward the land—“we don’t need to parachute in. We’ll have vehicles, and we have a ship as a base. The problem is numbers. I’d like to have two platoons or a company, but we have what we have.”
Five diesel trucks were available for use. Others had either been hit too badly, were in poor shape mechanically, or were gasoline-powered. The village’s gasoline storage tanks had been blown up in the assault, and the diesel tanks punctured. Diesel trucks could run on Athena’s turbine fuel, which would be taken from Athena and carried in plastic jerry cans, of which the village had a seemingly unending supply. Water and fuel would last for a combat radius of three hundred miles and five days out.
Pisecki and Di Loreto supervised cutting the antiaircraft gun from one of the technicals. It and the heavy recoilless rifle were not the kind of weapons they needed, and the guns were spiked so ISIS could never use them again. Replacing them on the technicals were the two miniguns from the bridge wings, and the two grenade launchers. The ammunition and grenades for them, as well as ammunition for infantry weapons, were spread evenly among the trucks, along with food, water, medical supplies, cold-weather gear, and whatever else they thought they might need. They didn’t put all of one thing on any one truck, lest it be hit.
During the skirmish on the cliff top, one of the SEALs had been too badly wounded to go. He wanted to, and had helped clear the village, but had then collapsed. He almost cried when left behind. So they would have one SEAL per truck, plus Rensselaer, who despite his age still counted as a SEAL. The twelve SEAL-trained crew brought the complement up to eighteen. Pisecki—who looked more like a SEAL than Holworthy, in that Holworthy was thin and Pisecki was more or less a cage fighter—made nineteen, and they took the two sailors who manned the grenade launchers as well.
These twenty-one men rode four per truck, with Rensselaer’s truck carrying five, including Holworthy accompanying him in front. Di Loreto was left on the ship, but two of the twelve were mechanics under Pisecki, and they took tools, tires they found in the village, and patching kits improvised from Athena’s stores. One of the SEALs was trained as a corpsman. One of the twelve SEAL-trained crew was the Stalker UAV operator. They jammed a Stalker’s bulky cases into the trucks, sacrificing days of supplies on the theory that the UAV’s twenty-five-mile sacrificial range would save them more than it would make them do without if they could locate their target in such a way that they could cut across the track they were about to follow and thereby reduce the distance traveled, or even arrive at the apparent destination of their prey before it did. Also, although rain was unlikely, high winds might wipe away the hostage convoy’s tracks over certain terrain, leaving Athena’s expeditionary force with no way of following except to observe from the air.
One of the SEALs asked Rensselaer, “Sir, how are we going to take back a hundred and fifty people in five trucks?”
“They have twenty trucks or more. We have fuel enough for ours. We can consolidate what they have left in their tanks. We have siphons. We can jettison supplies. We’ll figure it out.”
“What if they split up?”
“Either we split up as well, or we deal with them in sequence.”
“I see. What if their track disappears?”
“The Stalker. And if we get nothing from it, we go blindly where we guess they might have gone—until we have to turn around. No one says we can’t fail.”
*
Having showered and eaten breakfast on Athena, their uniforms newly washed, the trucks fully loaded, and the air relatively cool, they set out, putting distance between them and the ship just as surely as it moved offshore. They caught a last glance of her as they climbed the south wadi, following the deep and unmistakable tracks of the score or so of trucks they were chasing.
After a few hours of bouncing about and suffering surprising jolts, they were also nauseated by the trucks’ rolling and swaying in the sand in a way much different from the way that Athena moved through the sea. Although everyone fought hard not to show it, they were land sick as well as literally dripping wet in the 110-degree heat. Traveling at about the same speed and in the same direction as the breeze, they had little benefit from it. The floors of the vehicles were slippery with sweat. It stung their eyes and left white salt stains on their uniform shirts. When there was a gust of wind, it lifted sand and dust of various colors that stuck to their clothing, hair, and faces. Within a few hours they were bizarrely colored ochre, gold, and brown, except for the areas shrouded by their driving goggles, which in contrast made them look like they had egg whites for eyes.
Despite constantly spitting out sand and grit, they were parsimonious with their water, and yet careful not to drink too little. For 360 degrees ‘round all they saw was sand; scrub; flat-topped, low trees in clumps here and there; and cloudless sky. They didn’t realize it, for this was known only to Rensselaer, but without authorization they had invaded a country of sorts, even if it was a failed state in which U.S. forces were operating elsewhere. No one except those left on Athena knew they were there, and no one would—or could—bail them out. They had no idea how many men they would have to fight if they found what they were seeking, on what terrain, against which weaponry, in what conditions, or for how long.
Via GPS they did know exactly where they were, but only in terms of coordinates. The map they had was a nautical chart at a scale of 1:250,000, showing merely forty miles inland and that in sparse detail. Beyond the forty-mile strip, they might as well have been on the moon. Their only reassurance came from the belief that they were doing what was right; their only comfort from knowing how well armed and prepared they were; and their only pleasure from being soldiers completely on their own in a place forgotten by the world.
*
The going was slow because sometimes they crossed deep sand into which the tracks they followed seemed to disappear, but then after careful observation they would pick them up again. In midafternoon they came to a crossroads. They stopped, gave the trucks a rest, drank some water, and gathered around the spot where two rather well worn roads intersected at right angles.
“How do we know that they didn’t go left or right?” a sailor asked.
“You tell me,” Holworthy said.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Because there are no curved tracks. A truck can’t make a perfect ninety unless it’s on a turntable. They went straight. But they stopped.”
“How do we know that?”
“Look at that shit over there.”
The sailor looked toward the horizon, where Holworthy had pointed. “Sir?”
“Look lower.”
“What is that?”
“That, sailor, is exactly what I said it was.”
“Shit?”
“Right. And because you win first prize, you get to go over there, count it, and tell me how dry it is.”
“How dry it is? How will I know?”
“Figure it out,” Holworthy said. “Observe, orient, decide, act.”
“Sir, with all due respect, is counting shit relevant to my rating?”
“With all due respect, if you don’t do it, it will be relevant to your rating for the rest of your enlistment.”
As the sailor left, he said, “Join the Navy, see the world, and count Somali turds.” But when he returned they knew by his unorthodox report that the convoy had passed less than a day before. In other words, Athena-force was going faster and catching up. Five or ten more miles in, they saw why. All along the track they had observed small, rusty petrol cans of the size that in the U.S. would hold paint thinner. Even in these vast distances the habit of gas by the liter hadn’t been broken. Some had been discarded long ago, some of the new ones perhaps by the hostage convoy. But there were also freshly oil-soaked patches and oil-covered, discarded engine parts, showing that at least two ISIS trucks had had mechanical trouble. As they were not left behind, they had been repaired, which obviously had taken time. The afflicted vehicles had no doubt also slowed the convoy even before they broke down, and perhaps they were slowing it still.
One thing they were able to conclude was that the hostages were no longer being executed every hour. Had that been so, they would already have come upon a dozen bodies. This was encouraging, until at around six they saw ahead what they thought was a rock pile or a low tree. Heading west-southwest, they had the sun in their eyes. But as they came very close they realized that they had come upon a dozen bodies on the side of the track, some piled, most headless. No effort had been made to spare women or children.
This was devastating, and it only amplified what they had learned Ras Hagar when the whaleboat went to retrieve the RHIB, and the sailors had seen a raft bobbing a mile out. They took the RHIB and brought Martin, Petra, and Sophie aboard. The debriefing had been particularly difficult, and in Athena’s sick bay there was nothing other than antibiotics with which to deal with Sophie’s rape. Neither could they could test for sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy. She would have to wait. But, still, she was in a far better position than the rest of the passengers and crew of l’Étoile. Martin, Petra, and Sophie were treated as if they were a family, and, indeed, Sophie clung to Petra like a small child.
When Rensselaer saw that two of the bodies in the pile were those of adolescent girls, he was as puzzled as he was horrified, for he assumed that they would have been kept for other purposes. Perhaps they had tried to escape. It was impossible to tell, and there was no use speculating. Nor was there time to bury the bodies, which were left behind. Without the right tools for such hard ground, it would have taken too long even for twenty men.
*
They moved along steadily, following the track of their prey. It was easier for them, in that the captors had had to find a path amid the rocks, bushes, and scrub, and all the pursuers had to do was hold to it. Now and then, Rensselaer or Holworthy would call a stop to examine things that had been discarded: food wrappers, cigarette boxes. The cellophane wrappings of German cookies told him that they were not tracking the wrong vehicles.
If not as difficult a drive as that of the terrorists, it was hard to bear in the great heat and glaring sun. Slowly moving, winding about umbrella-shaped trees and clumps of bushes that all seemed the same, put Rensselaer and the driver who had relieved Holworthy (who was trying to sleep in back) in a semi-hypnotic state. To break it, he asked the sailor, whom he hardly knew, where he was from.
“Katy, Texas, sir.”
“That’s right. I remember from your record. It’s a very nice name. I’ve always loved it. It’s feminine, cheerful, and strong. The kind of woman in whom you know you’ll never lose interest.”
“We like it, too, but it’s not named after a woman but the initials of the railroad or something.”
“Still, every time you say it. . . .”
“You get used to it. Other people like it a lot, too. It’s different from what they think—although I let’em think what they want. It’s not a little town in the middle of rangeland, with cowboys and cattle.”
“No?”
“No. It’s kind of like a suburb of Houston. One side of it is still farmland, but the other has a billion houses, malls, you know.”
“So, you don’t have a horse and a lever-action Henry?”
“No, sir. Never been on a horse, and I’ve got a Winchester Seventy. We’ve got a water park, you know. That’s fun. It was the old carrier docked in Corpus Christi that got me interested in the Navy. Because it’s in the middle of the country, people think Texas is just a lotta land, but we have a big seacoast. I wanted to be on the water.” He looked out at the desert ahead. “Ha!”
*
Whether the natural effect of the chase, their eyes growing more expert in following the track, the driving that became a rhythmic process of avoiding obstacles, or their adaptation to the unrelieved terrain, they moved faster and faster until they were racing, until their speed itself built in them a greater and greater desire to catch ISIS, at whom their anger mounted as if with the heat. Now all they wanted was to close with and fight Hadawi and his little army.
Desert dotted with flat-top trees and scrub eventually gave way to reddish and black sand; ridges impassable to vehicles other than through geologically ancient channels worn in the rock; and featureless flats along which they sped, their eyes fixed on a horizon wavy with heat. Increased speed gave away the gradual ascent of which they had been oblivious when moving more slowly. Now they could feel it, and before the pursuit was over they would rise more than three thousand feet above the sea level to which they were accustomed. There, unlike on the ocean, the air was dry, slightly cooler in the day, and truly cold at night.
Now that they were moving faster, so as not to choke on the thick clouds of dust raised by vehicles in line, they spread out in a shallow V, like a cavalry charge. There was something really magical about forging ahead so aggressively, and though no one brought it up they wondered if their resolution would falter if they were just to stop. Now, however, because of their strange, velocity-induced confidence, they had no fear whatsoever.
But at the opening of a huge defile of black cliffs through which wound a sandy roadway in some places only twenty feet wide, they halted. It was a perfect place for an ambush, and if Hadawi had any sense at all he wouldn’t have ruled out being followed. So Rensselaer had his force pull back far enough from the cliffs to be out of RPG and machine-gun ranges, and there, waiting until dark, they slept in the heat, or tried to, leaving only one sentry to keep an eye on what was ahead.
At dusk, they roused themselves, ate, and drank. Then they drove closer, and sent two patrols of five men apiece up onto the plateau, one on each side of the cut. By the time the patrols found themselves on top of the escarpment, the stars had come out and the wind had come up. They had to move cautiously, as the ground was riven with cuts and folds where an enemy could hide. The patrols picked their ways across the rock for half a mile, rising and falling almost as if on petrified waves, and they found nothing.
Leading the western patrol, Holworthy radioed back that it was okay to come through. They would stay on the heights until the convoy cleared the defile on the north side, in case the enemy had taken position below, where even with night vision the men up top could not see clearly. In that case, both combatants would be deadlocked in the narrow space until the two patrols would arrive above to catch the enemy in a triple crossfire.
But the defile was empty and the scouts descended the face of the escarpment. Once they had rejoined the convoy, it set off again, slowly, but not that slowly, as the tire tracks they followed were sharply illuminated and cast in shadow by the trucks’ low beams.
*
They halted the next morning because they felt that the enemy was near, and after carefully calculating times, speeds, and distances, they guessed that it had to be so. They secured their position behind a natural barrier of boulders and trees, and put together and then launched the Stalker. At first they flew it to the rear, where it spiraled and spiraled into the clear sky until it reached its maximum altitude of twelve thousand feet. The operator announced this to Rensselaer. “We’re at the max, sir.”
“Can you push it higher?”
“Not really. It strains, makes more noise, and uses more fuel beyond that altitude.”
“Is that maximum altitude with a full load of fuel and standard payload?”
“It is.”
“In the climb, we’ve reduced fuel weight, right?”
“Right.”
“We have only the imaging payload.”
“That’s correct.”
“And we’ve got desert thermals of upwelling air, right?”
“Yeah, we do.”
“Keep spiraling, go higher.”
“Aye sir.”
The Stalker climbed to fifteen thousand feet, where it was impossible to see from the ground, and, depending upon updrafts and downdrafts—in the morning it was riding on updrafts—impossible to hear.
Rensselaer, Holworthy, and the operator concentrated upon the display. The camera panned around, covering from its altitude a much larger space than necessary, so the magnification was increased to narrow the area of investigation, enabling them to distinguish features on the ground with far better resolution. Ten minutes passed.
“There,” the operator said. He zoomed-in at a mass north and ahead of the Stalker. They could see clearly that it was a collection of low buildings and a fortress of some sort (almost undoubtedly a relic of the long Italian dominion) on a rise overlooking the desert around it.
“How many trucks do we count?” Rensselaer asked.
They all counted, and although Holworthy said twenty-seven, the operator and Rensselaer saw twenty-six. “Close enough,” Rensselaer declared. “Save as many images as you can. Don’t move the Stalker too close. And note the coordinates.”
“They’re stamped on the images, sir.”
“Right.”
When they had saved in the operator’s laptop the detailed and comprehensive pictures of the objective, they brought the Stalker back first in a long, power-assisted glide, and then, with the engine out of fuel, in a silent descent from ten thousand feet. Before it bumped to a landing, they had their intelligence. The fortress was seventeen miles ahead. Four technicals were arrayed to cover the four quarters of approach. No trenching. Two heavy machine guns were mounted on the parapet of the fortress’s decaying tower. The two largest buildings had two guards stationed in front of each one. The other structures had none, and armed men moved freely about. No pickets were outside the area or on the track that led to it. And no civilians appeared in any image.
Rensselaer and Holworthy looked at one another. “It’s gonna be a problem,” Holworthy said. “It wouldn’t be easy even if there were no hostages, even if our whole complement were SEALs or Delta.”
Rensselaer nodded. “True, but I’d be willing to bet—we have no choice but to bet—that no guards are permanently stationed inside those two buildings. That means, if we can take out the four in front, we’ve got the hostages behind cover, and then we can hit everyone else hard.”
“I worry about the technicals, and the guns in the tower,” Holworthy told him.
“That you deal with in the same way you fight someone who’s coming after you with a stick. You get close in. It’ll take covert movement and good timing.”
“No kidding,” Holworthy said, more apprehensively than when, charging across the desert, he had been high on forward motion, the steady pace, and the light flooding into his eyes.
Rensselaer replied, “We’ve got until nightfall to get it locked down.”
*
First they studied the aerial shots of the village, and, with no printouts possible, converted them to a schematic map drawn on a 2x2 square of canvas tarpaulin. Using elevation readings from the imagery, they lined-in ten-foot contours that showed the settlement rising only twenty feet or so above the plain after a climb of little less than a mile on an almost negligible slope of half a degree. Nonetheless, the fortress tower’s height of approximately thirty feet would give sentries posted there unobstructed views across the desert. The fortress was the easternmost building. To its west were the two large structures—one perhaps a mosque, the other indeterminate—in which the hostages seemed to be held. Separating fourteen smaller houses from the larger structures, the desert track ran between them before looping around to join the main route westward. A technical was stationed east of the fortress, one just south of the village along the road, one north along the loop, and one west on the road as it led out. The photograph showed no one manning the large guns in the truck beds, as the gunners and drivers had undoubtedly taken refuge in the cabs’ shade. Trucks purely for transport were scattered everywhere, offering so much cover that the tiny village mimicked a dense urban environment.
Rensselaer, Holworthy, and Pisecki—the three in command—and O’Connor and the three noncom SEALs, gathered around the map, which was held with stones against a strong afternoon wind blessedly not strong enough to blow sand. Little is as troublesome as sand in the eyes, throat, ears, nostrils, gun barrels, machinery, engines, food, and everywhere else.
They had drafted two copies of the map so they could draw on the first to make the plan of assault and move to the fresh sheet as it was refined, changing or abandoning lines, arrows, and time notations as necessary. One of the SEAL noncoms protested. “This map,” he said, “differs from the other one. The fortress is too far to the right.”
They looked at him in disbelief until Pisecki broke the news. “You’re right. Ya see, we don’t have a copy machine. I would’ve taken it to Kinko’s, but the nearest one is seven thousand miles away. It’s probably right next to a Starbucks. Would you like me to bring you a triple mocha, nonfat, iced latte, or an iced grande with nutmeg shavings and chocolate shit?”
The noncom SEAL replied, “Oh.”
Then they got back to business. In the last iteration, the complicated and demanding assault plan was fixed, calling not merely for performance but luck. The SEALs’ ear-budded communication equipment had been destroyed as it, like the sat-phones, had been trickle charging in COMMS. The only way to know which phase to activate in the assault would be by precisely following the clock, which meant that each task, such as taking out the technicals, the sentries, and the machine guns in the tower, had to be successfully completed within the time allotted, something that demanded a perfection of timing that seldom was achieved.
Much more likely was that, as Holworthy put it, when gunfire awakened the enemy force after a stealth takedown had failed, everything would get totally fucked-up. After all, the SEALs, the only ones trained to kill stealthily, and none of them necessarily a master of the technique, had to eliminate eight men manning the technicals, who would no doubt be inside their truck cabs even if, as hoped, they were asleep; four sentries guarding the two hostage cantonments; and the machine-gunners on the tower. Almost certainly, they would not succeed in doing so silently, in which case they would have to fight fifty men or more, and the plan would be useless save for fallback general orders tailored to broad contingencies.
The initial plan, studied, recited, and repeated for hours by everyone across all ranks, would have been of great benefit to Hadawi had he labored to imagine himself in Rensselaer’s position and map out what Rensselaer might do. But Hadawi was more a political than a tactical commander, and he operated less according to foresight and calculation than by drawing upon emotion, commitment, daring, and faith that everything was so much in the hands of God that his impulses of the moment would carry him through. He and those like him truly believed—at the very root of their being—that too much thinking and planning demonstrated a lack of faith. For them, a signal virtue was the ability to jump into the darkness, trusting in Allah. Impetuousness was therefore a sign of holiness, and it revealed to others and themselves the absolute reliance upon the divine to which saints and martyrs are commanded. Thus, other than posting the technicals, the four sentries, and the machine-gunners in the tower, he had given no orders and made neither plans nor preparations to counter an assault.
Although Rensselaer could not know this, and certainly would not rely on it, at a gut level he sensed it, and thought it might be a salient factor of battle that would allow him to confound the odds. One way or another, he had no choice and was compelled to try. To stretch the point, it may be said that he and Hadawi were somewhat the same in that he was relying upon God to have caused Hadawi to rely upon God even more so. And such a thing was not unusual in war, for prior to battle the outcome is known and decided only in heaven. Some may scoff at this, but no doubt only because they have neither waited for a battle’s beginning nor survived its end.
As Athena-force discussed and assimilated their plan, in the village three men, one of whom was some sort of commander, walked past the guards and entered the easternmost hostage building. In the dim light, they shone flashlights at the women, who had been moved against the east wall. The women raised their hands to shield their eyes from the light, partially covering their faces. It didn’t matter. The commander picked out three of them by moving the beam of his light up and down their bodies.
As they were being taken out, two men—a husband, and a boyfriend—lunged from where the men had been herded, and were shot. When they fell, they were dispatched with shots to the head.
Numb with terror, the three women were walked across the compound. It was very cold. Among them was one of the French schoolgirls. She hadn’t had time to put on her shoes and was struck by how cold the sand was beneath her bare feet.
*
Although the attack would commence at 0400, Athena-force spent the evening positioning, checking their weapons, going over the timing, and then trying to get some sleep. At 0130 they synchronized watches, after which Rensselaer briefly addressed them.
“This may be the most difficult and perhaps for some the last thing you will ever do. You’re doing it for others, for principle, for decency, and, in essence, out of love. Our actions and imperfections will always be with us. It’s impossible to kill a man, no matter how evil he may be, without a perpetual debit to one’s own conscience and a trespass against God. Anyone who tells you otherwise is blind to himself and the world. But we take on such a burden so that those at home need never bear it, nor even understand that for the sake of the innocent we protect, we accept the stain.
“If you have doubts, think of what they did on l’Étoile. Whether or not we’re remembered with respect or at all, whether in the next hours you live or die, know this: even if known but to God, to do what is right will be permanently engraved on the walls of time. I’m at a loss to explain it, but I think that today of all days, up in this high desert, we bear witness to the tens of thousands of American sailors forever at the bottom of the sea. May they smile upon us. Good luck, carry out your orders, have no fear, and fight like hell.”
*
At first the problem had seemed insoluble. The two trucks that Pisecki and his men had fitted with miniguns and grenade launchers had to enter the compound immediately after the sentries and the technicals had been neutralized. Then, in coordination with the assault, they would drive between the cluster of houses where the troops were bedded and the larger buildings where the hostages were kept, delivering a fierce broadside from the east, while Athena’s naval infantry (as Rensselaer called them rather than Marines, which seemed less exact) enfiladed from north and south.
If, however, Athena’s weapons trucks would be brought close enough to open fire when needed, the sound of their approach risked alerting Hadawi before actions dependent upon stealth had begun. If they were not close enough, it would take minutes to arrive, during which time the alerted enemy could form into defensive positions even were these slap-dash and unplanned. Although ideally the sentries and the technicals would be eliminated in silence, if this proved impossible the plan of attack switched to accommodate early discovery, in which case as well the gun trucks would have to be close.
With camouflage netting, no moon, and great care, the trucks might remain unnoticed stationed only a quarter mile south. Through pitch darkness and over churned sand at maximum speed of forty mph it would take approximately twenty-five seconds to reach the village. Assuming the trucks could remain undetected at such a distance, this was workable. But how could they get so close without being heard?
The three purely transport trucks stayed five miles from target. Then, one at a time, the gun trucks moved up at idling speed in first gear so they wouldn’t stall out and traction was assured. When they had reached the two-mile distance from target, they went ahead in the same fashion after Rensselaer had gone to the quarter-mile point to monitor the wind.
Cold, dense, night air flowed toward the coast, in this case crossing the village from about 350° North to 170° South. But sometimes, as if catching its breath, it ceased. So Rensselaer sat on the ground, starlight giving away the black contours of the buildings only a little north of him, and waited for a gust in the right direction. Then he would stand to make sure that he was not in thrall to some odd cross-current on the ground. Then it was back down, so as not to give himself away by blocking the stars on the horizon, and, with a simple “Go,” on his hand-held, he would signal the movement of one gun truck at a time in first and with half a dozen men pushing it so if it hit uneven ground it wouldn’t have to strain and make a louder sound.
In this way, when there was wind to carry south the little noise they made, the gun trucks were brought up close. Chillingly, the engines of both trucks shut down with a backfire that made everyone cringe. But the trucks were not detected, and were positioned facing the target, ten yards apart so as not to combine their masses and block the starlight, the only way anything could be seen on such a dark night.
Before they had set out—in fact, many times that day—the three commanders had said to the men, “For God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t turn on the lights or honk the goddamned horns.” And they had prayed that when the engines shut down there would be no backfire, as, in fact, there was.
Waiting for the rest of the assault force to catch up, Rensselaer whispered to Holworthy, “Apparently Hadawi doesn’t have a searchlight. There’s no way something on these trucks wouldn’t glint.”
“Maybe he does.”
“He hasn’t used it.”
“Maybe that’s the point, and he’s smarter than we think, and he’ll turn it on intermittently and not according to a schedule.”
Rensselaer was worried. In daylight during the first of several inspections he had required that all wristwatches, wedding rings, other jewelry, and anything that might glint be moved to pockets and wrapped so as not to clink. They would have enough trouble keeping their weapons and ordnance silent. “What the hell, sir,” a sailor had protested. “I swore to my wife not to take off my ring. If I take mine off that means she can take hers off, and who knows what she’ll do, sir.”
“She won’t know.”
“Yes she will, sir. You don’t know her.”
“Still,” Rensselaer told him, “wouldn’t you prefer that your wife screw every acrobat in the circus than that you come home dead?”
“No sir.”
“But I would.”
“Sir, you aren’t married.”
“I’m talking about your wife. Your wedding ring could get us all killed. Besides, they closed down the circus, so don’t sweat it.”
“Yeah,” said someone. “And that means that all those acrobats have nothing to do, and you know how dangerous that can be.”
“Enough,” Rensselaer said. “I’m sorry I brought it up. No one should worry about unemployed acrobats. You all know what you have to do.”
As they waited near the gun trucks and focused on the village for signs of movement, the rest of the force approached as quietly as they could, separated, like the trucks, so as not to block too wide a field of stars.
*
One man stayed with the transports, sitting in a truck carrying mainly ammunition and medical supplies. With the onset of firing, which would be audible even farther south than he was, he would race to a predetermined point and await orders. With his truck partially or fully unloaded, if he and two others were no longer needed for fighting they would go back to fetch the other trucks.
Fully assembled, they were twenty-one, as follows: a driver, a gunner, and a grenadier in each gun truck; six SEALs, including Rensselaer and Holworthy, and the rest of the “naval infantry.” At 0200, those not manning the trucks moved out.
Five naval infantry looped very wide and east around the fortress so as to be able to approach and take position from the north. Five approached from directly south. The SEALs divided up into two teams to take out the technicals. Rensselaer would eliminate the east technical and then position himself with the Barrett east of the tower to kill the tower machine-gunners when they popped up, as undoubtedly they would. For his shots to clear the parapet the trajectory had to originate from a relatively far distance, but with the Barrett’s night-vision scope he had a very good chance of a hit at an even greater distance than required.
SEAL team north would hit the north technical as SEAL team south hit the south technical. At this point, if firing broke out, both teams would rush to the hostage impoundments and shoot the sentries from wherever they had good probabilities of hits. The goal was to prevent the sentries from entering the buildings to execute the prisoners. In thinking about this, Rensselaer had banked that, first, Hadawi had not necessarily issued such an order; second, that it might not be the sentries’ natural reaction; and, third, their first impulse would be to hold their ground and defend their posts.
If, as intended, the north and south technicals fell without a sound, the SEAL teams would make their way as slowly and stealthily as they could to the hostage impoundments, where they would kill the guards. With the very first report, the minigun-and-grenade trucks would rush north, with grenades hurled into the village on the go. As Hadawi’s troops exited their sleeping quarters they would be faced with grenades falling like hail, the crossfire of ten automatic weapons, torrents of bullets from the miniguns, and whatever the SEALs at the entrances of the impoundments might contribute. Left out at the beginning would be the west technical, which, to get into a firing position, would have to loop north or south, during which time it would come under fire from night-vision-equipped troops invisible to it in the dark.
Working precisely by the clock, the attack elements set out at different times so as to arrive at their various positions simultaneously. All of them had to cover the last quarter mile or so, more than 1,200 feet, crawling slowly across hardscrabble, thorns, and rocks. Their heads had to be down, and they had to be almost absolutely silent even as the two-inch thorns stabbed them all over, including in the testicles, as if, they thought, deliberately. After almost two hours of this in some cases, they then had to go into battle.
No one, least of all Rensselaer, expected that the attack would conform perfectly either to the main plan or the alternatives nested within it. Attacks of more than embarrassing simplicity seldom if ever do, and this one would be no different.
*
Though they set out last, the five infantry south of the village arrived before any others, at 0345. Spread out so as to be less visible, they were still close enough to communicate. On the left wing, to the west, one of the sailors, Monroe (which he pronounced Mon-roe), an engineman from Los Angeles, was initially shocked and alarmed by something moving toward him from his right. Beginning to slew his M4, he realized that it was Gunner’s Mate Lester Minorkis, who had actually crossed over the man immediately to Monroe’s right, forcing him to shift to Minorkis’s previous position.
“What’s going on?” Monroe whispered, alarmed.
“I wanted to finish our conversation.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Monroe asked in as disturbed a whisper as one could make.
“They can’t hear us if we whisper.”
“Shhh!”
“They can’t. The wind’s coming from the village at least at five miles per hour. There’s no way.”
“Finish it after.”
“One or both of us might be dead.”
“You’re crazy. Go back.”
“No. They can’t hear us, and we’ve got more than ten minutes.”
“Oh God,” Monroe said. “What?”
“When we were making our own pancakes. . . .”
“What?!”
“On the ship.”
“That was. . . .”
“I know, a long time ago.”
Monroe was stunned into silence. On the one hand he wanted to kill Minorkis, but, on the other, he really wanted to know what in their current situation Minorkis could possibly want to bring up about when they were making their own pancakes, which was before they passed Gibraltar.
Minorkis continued, quietly even for a whisper. He was right: the wind was such that no one even twenty feet ahead of them could have heard. “I wanted to tell you that I used to cook short-order.”
“You did tell me.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t finish. My parents have a Greek diner. They’re Greek.”
“I figured that.”
“From the time I was five, I worked in it. Before the Navy, I was super expert at short-order.”
Doubting his sanity, and thinking that perhaps he was in a dream, Monroe asked nonetheless, “Then why didn’t you become a Navy cook?”
“I wanted to do something else. What I was about to tell you, and I couldn’t because then we had the drill for general quarters, and then I forgot, but now I remember, is that short-order is like just what we’re about to do now—infantry fighting.”
“I draw a blank.”
“For one, the pressure never ceases. If you cook badly, or the eggs aren’t done as requested, or the orders are late, or confused, the restaurant goes down. As you’re struggling with an order, five more come in. If you run out of something and you have to get it, everything goes to hell, and things may burn or get cold. If you drop something on the floor and you’re honest, you have to start over. You’re going so fast that if, for example, you’re buttering toast and you get butter on the plate, you have to get a paper towel and clean it off. In that time, something may boil over. Then you’re really screwed. You have to handle your tools like your rifle: know how much ammo is left in the magazine, quick tactical reloads, good aim, rapid target engagement. People are yelling at you—‘Where’s my order?’ ‘The customer wants more fries,’ ‘Where’s the pickle,’ ‘Not enough.’ People bump into you. You don’t have a second to yourself. You have to go with the speed and the rhythm or you’re finished.
“You see? Just like combat. Short-order. Get lost in the rhythm. Surrender to speed. Think of nothing else.”
“Okay, Minorkis,” Monroe said. “I got it.”
Minorkis pulled his watch from his pocket. “Have to get back. Five minutes.”
“Minorkis.”
“Yeah?”
“No sane person could be your friend.”
“I know.”
*
The south technical had to be taken out lest it destroy Athena-force’s gun trucks with its Russian double-barreled antiaircraft gun—the kind with cones at the barrel tips, as on the pom-pom guns of the Second World War, to contain flashback that would make aiming difficult. As Holworthy’s south SEAL team crawled toward it, the cab lit up and the passenger door opened.
The SEALs stopped dead and pressed their bodies into ground literally covered with flint, which was hardly accommodating, although more so than the thorns, some of which were still embedded agonizingly in their flesh. Fearing that the whole operation would be forced to start before the appointed time, Holworthy and his partner watched the man who got out walk around the back of the truck. They could barely see him, but they didn’t want to use their night scopes because to do so they would’ve had to raise their rifles, which might have made noise.
A match flared as the man, who had moved to the truck’s south side to get out of the wind, lit a cigarette. Thereafter, the little red-orange beacon of the cigarette, moving in an arc, hesitating in his mouth as he drew in a puff, riding back down in his hand, announced his position.
“Get back in the fucking truck,” Holworthy said to himself under his breath. But no, the man came forward, until he was ten feet in front of them. He was smoking and looking out toward the horizon.
Holworthy whispered to the other SEAL, “Get the one in the truck,” and started to raise himself. But the cigarette came down in an arc once again, and, still staring out at a horizon beautifully littered with very bright stars that seemed to ride just above the ground or even to touch it, their target began to sing quietly in the Arabic scale of the maqam, repeating with considerable variation and changes in tone the phrase, “Yappa, yappa, yappa,” or “Yabba, yabba, yabba,” or somewhere in between the P and the B, skillfully, sadly, and, to Holworthy, no stranger to the Middle East, familiarly.
“Go,” Holworthy whispered as he himself rose and bounded toward the singer, who became aware of him not even a second before Holworthy’s left hand covered his mouth, and the knife in Holworthy’s right sliced his neck, severing the carotid arteries. There was some noise, but no clattering to the ground, as Holworthy lowered his victim slowly in the few seconds before death. And the wind was up, blowing south, taking sound with it.
This afforded Holworthy’s partner the opportunity to approach the driver, who was still in the truck and who had heard nothing to alert him, as if the SEAL about to knife him was the one who had gone to smoke. It was so dark even with the fantastic starlight of the desert that the American was just a form. He casually knocked on the window, and then opened the driver’s door from the outside. Thinking that his gunner wanted to tell him something, the driver was in no way alarmed.
With great and shocking force, he was pulled out of the cab and dispatched exactly as Holworthy had dispatched the gunner. The only sound was the driver hitting the ground and air escaping his lungs as he did. Even before he was dead, Holworthy had arrived. They closed the driver door quietly so it wouldn’t bang in the wind, and moved toward the hostage impoundments, no longer crawling but walking fast and quietly, with three minutes left until 0400.
*
North SEAL team was late in approaching the north technical because the east technical had moved to where the road to the village turned west. North and east technicals were now separated by a few yards, and the four men manning them were gathered around a little fire in the stretch between, talking while fussing about a pot on the embers. Anyone standing watch at four in the morning on a cold night, whether on a ship or in the desert, is driven as if by an irresistible force to drink something hot. Chocolate, too, has been for more than a century a staple for sentries.
In their arduous training and continuous exercises and operations, SEALs become almost telepathic. North team said not a word, and yet each of the two understood the problem exactly. There were too many enemy to go quietly, especially as two of them had slung weapons and were standing. Grouped around the fire, they may not have been alert, but their placement meant they had a view in every direction.
Were they to be eliminated, it could be only by gunfire, and there was no way to tell what effect this might have on the rest of the operation. Were they to be ignored, their vehicle-mounted heavy guns might extract an unacceptable toll or lead to defeat. The two sets of guards at the hostage impoundments had to be taken down simultaneously, which was perhaps not possible for only one team. South team would wait for north team. Meanwhile, north team now would have to wait for firing to erupt before hitting the technical crews. That is, nothing would happen, time would drag on, and the chances of discovery would increase.
A civilian might find it hard to believe that the options above would clarify between the two SEALs without a word spoken. That, however, is exactly what happened. And it took just a look for them to decide upon what to do, which was to strike the technicals and run to the impoundments. If they had had adequate COMMS they would have assigned the infantry to the crews and gone to meet south team, but the infantry was too far behind and east of them, there was no way they could reach them, and they were novices.
So north team raised their weapons, and with their night scopes drew their beads on the technical crews. They knew to shoot the two on the left and the two on the right according to their own positions, and were close enough for head shots. “Ready?” one asked.
“Ready.”
“At two seconds.”
Two seconds passed. Two accurate shots rang out simultaneously, striking the leftmost and rightmost man, both of whom were instantly killed. In the second and a half of paralysis before being able to process what had happened, the other two froze in place. The triggers were squeezed, and the second two collapsed. In the short time in which one could see that they were down and probably dead, the SEALs rose and began to run.
They tossed a grenade in the bed of each truck and didn’t look back as six seconds later the explosions sounded behind them. Sprinting, they ran east and curved south to the impoundments. The road was as loose as beach sand, for it had been churned up by ages of traffic, not least camels. At Little Creek or Coronado, the SEALs ran on sand, always on sand, and if anyone had to ask why, this was why. Two men in the midst of many times their number of enemy were sprinting under heavy loads in cold desert air and in the dark, beneath an immense, moonless sky burning with white stars. Even in combat they could not help but to be constantly aware of such an all-enveloping sky.
*
So he might walk rather than crawl, in Rensselaer’s transit to his position east of the tower he had given it a wide berth. It was not because of his rank or his age that he chose not to crawl, but because of his rifle: that is, the Barrett .50-caliber that he carried in addition to his M4. With scope, sling, and chambered magazine it weighed almost thirty-seven pounds. The additional ten-round magazines added almost twelve pounds. Crawling with it, its ammunition, and the M4 all slung across his back—sixty pounds of steel—was not only a nightmare, but the almost five-foot length of the Barrett meant it would knock against the M4 and the ground when it moved from side to side. Which is why Rensselaer went wide, so he could use the Barrett’s carry handle, making less noise walking than by trying to slither across a field of flint. He had expected to take out the east technical, but he saw quite early that it had gone. Still, so as not to alert the enemy, he kept the village at the planned distance.
Being upright in things physical just as in things moral made one more visible and a better target, so he had to keep a lot of distance between himself and the enemy. Though his path was much longer, because he could walk relatively fast his timing allowed for arrival simultaneously with the others. That he was farther out was of little consequence given the ranges for which the Barrett was designed. Dispatching an ISIS terrorist in Afghanistan, its record kill at 2.2 miles was an outlier, but striking a vehicle a mile distant was ordinary and expected. Rensselaer took a position between a quarter and a half mile from the tower.
He set up the rifle, steadying its bipod amid the rocks, deploying the monopod at the butt, laying out the magazines so he could choose the kind of round he would use: ball for personnel and unarmored targets, or high-explosive, incendiary, armor-piercing. Should he be discovered, his M4 was accessible just to the right of the Barrett. He lay in place as comfortably as he could, waiting for 0400.
He didn’t know the name of the little settlement to the west. Perhaps it didn’t have a name, or it once had had a name but after it had been abandoned no one remembered what it had been called. Everything was so similar to so much in the Middle East as he had experienced it. Cold, clear, winter air. A tapestry of stars in a show so bright and sharp that one could see by their light. Hard, cold, rocky ground. A long view over desert to the dark shadows of unlit buildings silent in the still air. Or, seen from a distance, a fortified town or base with a perimeter of electric lights, resting like a diamond necklace upon the dark and rolling landscape.
It was so beautiful, for being fundamental, harsh, and unforgiving, that he had almost forgotten where he was, until north team’s gunfire rang out early. Awakened by this, for some reason, perhaps the vagaries and delusions of the night, the machine-gunners in the tower thought the assault was coming from the east. The one facing west moved his weapon to join his mate on the eastern-facing parapet, and there, without any kind of aiming, the two guns began to fire into the darkness, hose-like, as if they were watering a patch of garden or painting a wall. The idea seemed to be to do the job by making a lot of noise and covering a lot of area. This, Rensselaer had concluded long ago in his reflections about why such people didn’t bother to aim, was an extension of the battle cry intended to terrify and demoralize opponents, despite the modern consequence of excessive expenditure of ammunition.
It was always possible to be killed by accident, and the sounds of thousands of slugs smashing into rocks and dirt was all around him. But he calmly put the cross hairs on the parapet wall at the level where he judged the left machine-gunner’s center of mass would be. In this, Rensselaer was half blind, but only half so. The guess could not have been off by that much.
When a .50-caliber round exits the Barrett, it does so like a shell leaving an artillery piece. No one ever gets fully used to it. As hundreds of rounds are pushed through them, the twin fifties fixed on ships or vehicles make much more noise, but they’re mounted on steel that transfers their force to the mass of the deck or vehicle bed. With the rifle, the force is transferred to the man and his sore shoulder, and each shot feels like the salvo of sixteen-inch guns. He engaged the trigger. The Barrett jerked back like one of the guns of the Missouri, and its projectile, meant to pierce steel armor and brick walls, went through the mud parapet and struck the machine-gunner, who was toppled backward—not with the absurd, acrobatic body toss of the movies, but with a force equal to the force of the Barrett’s recoil minus the power the projectile had expended in piercing the mud-brick parapet. It was enough to push him over, with his heels as hinge.
The other gunner paused in firing, trying to assimilate what had just happened. He stared at the hole in the parapet, wondering if it had already been there. But he failed to do what he should have done: move off-center from his gun and out of sight. In the instant as he wondered, another round exited with an immense shock from the Barrett, supersonic even when it hit the wall. Striking the second gunner on his right side, it twirled him around, and as he banged into the north wall, he died.
Immediately after the shot, Rensselaer had begun to gather his equipment. He stood, grasped the Barrett’s carry handle, and started running toward the tower. As he ran, he heard cascades of gunfire sounding to his left, to his right, and ahead. With firing all around, when Rensselaer reached the door of the tower he threw in a grenade. In the dusty aftermath of its explosion, he entered and, as if expecting to find an infantry squad within, tensely climbed the stairs to the roof. No one opposed him, and the two sentries on the roof were dead. In a dreadful but necessary act, he shot each one to make sure—how horrible to fire into the corpses of men he had killed—and then he set up the Barrett on the tower’s west-facing parapet.
*
Upon hearing the premature fusillade, south SEAL team had dropped prone and fired at the guards in front of the impoundments. The four guards were stock-still, looking northwest toward the sound of north team’s volley. The SEALs took aim and shot them. Taking the right, Holworthy dropped one and hit the other one multiple times as he started to seek shelter inside the south building. But he got in, and he had his weapon, which was what they had most feared.
The other SEAL hit the two guards at the north impoundment and put them down without ambiguity. Then he and Holworthy ran forward. “Secure it,” Holworthy ordered, gesturing toward the north impoundment. He himself reached the south one and charged in the door. He almost shot a Filipino steward who had taken the wounded guard’s gun from him and, not knowing how to fire it, had beaten him over the head.
The steward dropped the gun and raised his hands. “He’s dead, sir. I hit him, sir.” Indeed he was. Holworthy checked, and then glanced around. A candle burned in a holder on the shelf on the back wall. It was the only light, and all he could see were the faces of people in the first row of hostages. They were dirty, and the stench was hard to bear. Holworthy didn’t know it, but two half oil drums were in the corner, a jury-rigged latrine. It seemed as if a thousand questions were asked of him at once. He didn’t understand a single one.
“United States Navy,” he said loudly. “Move to the sides!” He gestured with his arms. “Move to the sides!” Then, a few feet in from the door, his heels nearly touching those of the dead guard, he lay on the floor, opened his bipod, took a spare magazine from its pouch and placed it to the left of his rifle, a grenade to the right, and, assuming that the other impoundment was now similarly protected, waited for whatever might come.
What worried him most was an RPG fired from directly in front. He would try to shoot the grenadier before he took aim, but it would be extremely difficult to make out anyone in the dark. Which was better, to scan a narrow field with the rifle’s night scope, or take in the whole field at once, trying to detect a disturbance in the darkness? He chose the latter.
*
Just as north SEAL team’s premature fire had set Rensselaer into action, the two infantry squads followed suit. South infantry advanced at a run, tossing a grenade into the south technical to make sure it was neutralized, and dropping to the ground a few hundred feet beyond to cover the south flank of the village. North infantry took responsibility for the north flank in the same fashion. By the time they had taken position, Athena’s gun trucks had arrived on the road between the village and the impoundments.
Holworthy was frustrated because the gun trucks hadn’t stationed themselves, as they were supposed to have, to block and protect the doors of the impoundments. Only he, Rensselaer, and Pisecki had radios, no one on the trucks. The drivers by this time were underneath, their rifles pointed toward the village, whence came scores of men, running in crowds and firing wildly.
The order had been, except for miniguns and grenade launchers, and unless faced with a tight cluster of enemy, to use scopes, single shots or, at most, bursts of three, and the order was followed. As ISIS soldiers rushed out of the houses, often firing uselessly without acquiring targets, they were shot individually by the ten infantry, the four SEALs, the two drivers, and Rensselaer on the tower. As soon as groups of men were visible as they altered the texture of the darkness, the miniguns raked the village, and the grenade launchers blasted it with the effect of artillery.
In a very short time, almost two hundred grenades exploded amid the huts. It sounded like the end of the world. Many of the walls shattered. Some came down, and when two or three grenades would find their ways inside through the gaps or a doorway, a hut seemed to explode outward.
The slaughter was a punishment for what ISIS had done on the decks and in the cabins of l’Étoile Océanique, at the execution site in the desert, and in truth all over the world. Hadawi hadn’t suspected that from a small, battered ship such a force could follow him so deep in, that it would dare to do so without air support, that it would find him, and that it could marshal such murderous fire. After all, he had had half a hundred men, give or take, four technicals with heavy guns, and two heavy machine guns, all on the high ground in open desert.
Scanning the darkness quickly became impossible for Holworthy when the assault opened and thousands of muzzle flashes blinded him to any subtleties of shading. Nor would scanning through the scope be of any avail, as the continual flashes washed it out most of the time. Now he could cover only the spaces 50–100 yards directly in front of him, at most, and even those only partially.
At the battle’s midpoint, one of Hadawi’s men managed to take position next to a hut, aim his RPG at the open door of the south impoundment, and fire. As soon as the plume of his rocket bloomed, Holworthy shot him dead, and in an instant prepared to die himself, with only seconds to feel his despair that so many civilians would be killed along with him. As the rocket approached, he held his breath and his heart seemed not to beat. He hadn’t time to warn of the RPG, and there was no place for anyone to go anyway.
As he waited to die, the grenade flew over him. He felt the heat and smelled the rocket exhaust. Then it hit the back wall. But because it was designed to make a hole in armor and explode after it penetrated, it went through the wall and exploded on the other side. In the enclosed space of an armored vehicle, the blast pressure would have nowhere to dissipate. But, beyond the wall, the charge burst in open air. So although fragments of RPG casing were embedded in the dried mud wall, nothing penetrated, and the overpressure was insufficient to knock the wall down. No one inside was even slightly hurt.
Just after that, as Rensselaer, high in the tower, was hitting one house after another with armor-piercing rounds, he saw through his scope the interior of a truck light up as its doors were opened. North team hadn’t had time to destroy the west technical, and before north infantry could do so the enemy had gotten to it. Changing his focus and scope power, he saw two men get in. At first he thought the technical would move to the battle, but no gunner was visible in the truck bed, which held a large, single-barreled antiaircraft gun. And when the truck started to move, it went west. Guessing that Hadawi was in flight, Rensselaer adjusted his scope, loaded a high-explosive incendiary round, and trained the Barrett on the road west.
It was here that a shot could fly unblocked by the houses. As the truck reached a few feet to the rear of this point, he fired. But he had been unable to calculate properly the truck’s speed, and he didn’t know if Hadawi was in it. Because the distance involved made a flat trajectory impossible, the bullet would have to travel ballistically. With a flat trajectory, all he would’ve had to worry about was windage: i.e., the X axis. Ballistically, the Y axis came into play, and he had to calculate for distance. With the target traveling at an unknown, variable speed, only luck would allow this, and although he fired five rounds as the truck receded west, that luck was not to be his. After his last shot, he was stunned by silence, for it was the last shot of the engagement. Except for the moaning of the wounded and the steady rush of the wind, the desert night was once again quiet.
Now they would try to save lives rather than take them.
*
The aftermath was by far the worst part of the battle—the wounded and the dead; and the smell of burnt flesh, gunpowder, and spilled intestinal contents. At best, the odor would be partially carried away in the wind. On the sea it was different. The enemy would disappear under the swell, all his disarray and sadness buried in hushed ceremony. The casualties among one’s own men were difficult enough to bear, but even then, burial at sea had the same finality, quickness, and decency as when the enemy ship gently vanished, leaving only silence and a puzzled conscience. The sea washed over everything, consumed everything, absorbed everything, equalized everything. Imperturbable, it quieted with ease the occasional violence upon its surface, and as if by magic reconciled the heart to the prospect of eternal sleep. But not the land, where bodies would lie and rot until they were buried not in deep, mysterious waters, but in graves so relatively shallow as to make impossible the comfort of forgetfulness.
Rensselaer now divided his men according to two equally important tasks. Half would look after the hostages and the wounded, the other half would clear the village to make sure no threat remained. He made it clear to the mopping-up operation that there would be no executions. They could fire only at remaining hostiles in or about to take action. Only one of the enemy resisted, and he was dispatched after he shot from beneath a truck. The total of half a dozen reports made everyone within earshot cock his head to listen, but then it was over. Three of the enemy gave up, fearfully.
No hostages had been harmed during the assault, although almost a score of them, mainly older people, were sick. They had gone without their medications, suffered nightly hypothermia, and been ill-nourished and under stress. A few had high fevers and were delirious. Flu and diarrhea were endemic, and even the young people were coughing and weak. The Filipino crew, young for the most part, tougher, their immune systems tutored on every inhabited continent, were in the best shape, and they were superb in caring for the sick. Foreseeing this state of affairs, Rensselaer had brought from Athena as much in the way of medical supplies as he could. The corpsman became a central figure, first in treating the combatants.
Both Monroe and Minorkis had been killed. No one had seen it happen, but after they failed to report, they were found facing the village and shot in the backs of their heads. In the dark, someone had circled around south infantry and caught them unaware. Two sailors were wounded, both from rifle fire, one seriously though not critically, the other superficially, shot through the calf—entry and exit—and unable to move more than a few feet.
They would wrap Monroe and Minorkis in sleeping bags and take them back, hoping that the trip would be short and that the large French ships, with morgues, had arrived. The corpsman and others turned to the hostages next, mainly distributing antibiotics, fluids, anti-inflammatories, analgesics, food, and instruction to the stewards.
It was tempting not to attend to the ISIS wounded, but reluctance vanished as their cries became more and more pitiful. The corpsman and volunteer assistants, including some stewards, did what they could with sutures, blood-stop, and morphine. When Athena’s crew and the hostages were ready to move out, the three ISIS prisoners who hadn’t been wounded would be uncuffed and left with medical supplies for their comrades.
“We can’t save them, take them, or execute them,” Rensselaer told Holworthy and Pisecki. If the prisoners and some of the wounded live, God knows what atrocities they’ll commit in the future, but we can’t just kill them. That’s the way it is.”
“Yes we can, and you know it, but at least we can take one for interrogation,” Holworthy said.
“We’d have to feed him and guard him, and we don’t have the time or facilities to break him down. He won’t be any more sleep-deprived than we are.”
“I could break him down,” Holworthy volunteered.
“Not when you’re under my command, not in the way I think you mean.”
“They kill us, we kill them, but we can’t get tough with them?”
“Not unless the threat is imminent.”
“The law?” Holworthy asked.
“The law. Sometimes, however, it’s necessary to be civilly disobedient, so to speak. Don’t quote me. But only then. Clear?”
“Clear.”
Athena’s crew, their weapons still with them, had nonetheless become once again more like sailors than infantrymen as they rushed around accomplishing various tasks. First, they assembled the fleet of trucks necessary to convey them, their stores, the hostages, the wounded, and the dead back to Athena and, they hoped, the French squadron. They lined up sixteen serviceable trucks and distributed all the fuel they could siphon and gather. Ten fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel had survived in a dump west of the village, and by siphoning and spreading out the supplies they themselves had brought, every truck had a full tank, and then there were the ten drums.
With preparations completed as the sun rose, they crowded everyone into the trucks, checked the village once again, and set out. The sailors marveled at how quiet the hostages were, and felt love and pity for the French lycéennes, who now moved like their elders.
The minigun-and-grenade trucks were last. Before they rolled out, the SEALs on them uncuffed the three unwounded ISIS captives and set them free to attend to their wounded and dying. The captives were bitter and contemptuous to the end. None could speak English, but they were able to make clear that they thought the Americans were weak for not killing them and their wounded. Their faces showed it, and the look in their eyes said that they would come after the Americans—all Americans—and would be stopped by nothing but death.
They were tied to each other as well as cuffed. “Unhook’em,” Holworthy said. Under the SEALs’ guns, they were freed. The SEALs mounted the truck, and as it rolled away their former captives spit toward them. O’Connor raised his rifle, then thought better of it.