Captured(2)

I feel the Humvee tilt and hear the engine groan as we hit an incline.

“Look sharp, f*ckers,” Lewis barks. “This here is ambush country.”

I thumb off the safety. My heart hammers. My stomach is a chasm with a river of adrenaline roaring at the bottom. Barrett is leaning back away from the window, hunched down to get a line of sight on the ridge rising around us on either side like the serrated edge of a rusty knife. I assume the same lookout posture, my finger resting outside the trigger guard.

Here in the foothills we’re surrounded by naked rock, which is absorbing the sunlight and reflecting it back as baking heat. Higher up there’ll be vegetation, but down here, it’s just rock, bare stone thrusting up out of the hard-packed dirt. The ridges climb and fold into each other, shove together and knife apart, providing a myriad of little nooks and crannies, caves and caverns, places where a man with an RPG can lie down and be invisible from our vantage point. Which is exactly what I was told to expect. It’s what the lieutenant expected when he got the orders to send us up to visit a couple of villages on the other side of these hills. He bitched up the chain about the mission, but the f*ckin’ brass knew damn well they were sending us through an area known for ambushes. They sent us anyway, and denied our requests for backup, air support, or any heavy armor. In and out, they said. Just check out the reports of enemy activity in the area and come on back.

Right.

The roiling of nerves turns to cold sweat despite the heat inside the vehicle. My chest is throbbing, my hands shaking.

“Lewis?” I say.

“What?” he barks. Lewis always barks. It’s his natural state: aggravated, sullen, petulant.

“I got a bad feeling about this.”

“Yeah, me, too,” McConnell says, smirking at me.

“Can you pencil-necked dweebs quit quoting Star Wars for one goddamn second? I think I’ve got contact.” Barrett’s low, gravelly voice cuts through our chatter.

“Where?” I say.

He points out the window, high above our location. “Two o’clock. Way up there. It was just a flash of movement, but I know I saw something.”

Lewis keys his mic. “Possible contact. Two o’clock high.”

A voice comes back in our ears, Addison in the vehicle immediately ahead of us. “Roger that. I saw it, too.”

I count the next sixty seconds individually—they pass like molasses in January. We drive past a low scrub bush on the edge of the road, a puff of wind-borne dust skirls, tires crunch, McConnell charges his M4, Lewis mutters “f*ck” under his breath.

“CONTACT!” The scream comes over the radio, shrill, panicked. “GO! GO-GO-GO! He’s about to fire—”

Whooooosh…BOOM!

RPG. Shitshitf*ck. I hate that goddamn sound.

I feel the shockwaves of the RPG detonation in the ground beneath me, and—CRUMP—our entire Humvee is rocked by a second explosion, an IED.

My ears ring.

Hackhackhackhackhack—an AK-47, high. Two of them. Three. Fourfivesix separate reports.

Heat, someone screaming. Crackcrackcrack…crackcrackcrack—an M4 carbine from ahead and to my left. I smell smoke, and the horrible, unmistakable scent of charred flesh.

I throw myself out the door, land on my knees, and crouch behind the open door. Barrett slithers out of my door and hunkers down beside me as bullets thunk and plink and pitpitpit into the metal of the Humvee and the glass and the dirt. Ahead, a plume of gray-black smoke rises angrily, lit by flames. The first truck in the convoy hit an IED, and the last in line was blasted by an RPG, trapping the convoy in place.

Absurdly, I hear myself singing Tim McGraw under my breath, “corn poppin’ up in rows….”

“Shut the f*ck up, West,” Barrett snaps at me. “I hate that f*ckin’ song.”

“Me, too.”

“Then why are you singing it?”

“It’s stuck in my head, okay? I can’t help it.”

Lewis is beside us. “Cut the chatter, you two.” He points ahead of us where Abraham, Nielsen, Martinez, and Okuzawa of Echo Company are crouched behind their as-yet undamaged truck. “We gotta get a line of fire up on that ridge. Get over to Echo and lay down some covering fire so Nielsen can get his SAW planted.”

“Sir.” I peek up through the window, see a flash of muzzle flash, wait for the firing to die down, then scurry forward to the edge of the truck.

I peer around the Humvee. Barrett is behind me, then McConnell, then Lewis. I’m always point, Lewis always last. I count…one—two—three…and then swing around the hood and bring my rifle to my shoulder. It jerks, and I barely hear the crackcrackcrack as I fire at where I saw the flash. The other three in my squad roll past me, Lewis hanging around the ass-end of Echo’s Humvee and laying down fire. Abraham is firing over the hood, and Nielsen is unfolding the legs of his bipod, slamming down on the hood and drawing aim on the ridge where the contact seems to be heaviest. Bullets walk up the dirt toward Nielsen and hit the truck, and then he rolls around and drops to a crouch beside Abraham. I send half a dozen rounds flying, and then I hear a grunt, and watch as the muzzle flash stops abruptly.

“West, Barrett.” Lewis points at each of us, and then at the burning wreckage ahead. “See if anyone’s alive in there. Nielsen, cover them.”