“You okay, boss?”
“Couldn’t be better, dude.” He gave his teammate an upturned thumb, then swiveled, squatted, and put his M4 in low ready. Gave himself a burst of IR light, saw nothing but air, and duckwalked forward.
0426. Charlie was having trouble breathing. He hadn’t gone two hundred feet, yet his lats felt as if they’d been napalmed. His fifty-two-year-old back screamed Yo, geezer, give me a fricking rocking chair and a screen porch. Yeah, well, he thought, Rangers lead the way.
Lead the way even when you knew it could get you hurt. The way he’d felt jumping at five hundred feet over Grenada. The way he’d felt in Mogadishu. The way he felt now. This is what he did.
A hundred feet ahead, the tunnel veered left-west. It looked to be about a forty-five-degree turn. Charlie edged closer to the left wall so as to give himself cover. That’s where I’d set the ambush if I was them.
He halted. Brought out the do-rag and Treo, covered his face and head, and fired it up, only to confirm there was no reception down here. That was another bad-news element of twenty-first-century netcentric warfare: It is signals dependent. Block the signal, you defeat the system.
He stowed the PDA. Pressed the transmit button on the radio twice.
Immediately Jose’s voice came back at him: “Boss?”
Charlie hit the transmit switch twice again, telling Jose he was okay. At least the radios were working.
0429. He figured he was about three-quarters to the first villa west of Tariq’s safe house. Thing was, he wasn’t sure what he’d do when he got there.
He was missing something here. They had to know he’d find the tunnel. Had to know he’d come after them. Had to know he wasn’t without resources. In-he checked his watch-four and a half minutes the Apaches with all their firepower would be on-site to rip these scumbags new assholes.
0431. Muscles burning, he eased into the curve, moving inch by inch, his NVGs scanning floor, walls, ceiling.
Nothing.
But something deep inside Charlie still made him bring the M4 up. His right thumb eased the safety downward. He was surprised by the loudness of the metallic click as it snapped into the fire position.
Scan and breathe. Eyes open, he kept a sight picture through the NVG-capable Aimpoint.
He moved forward soundlessly, his boots heel-toe, heel-toe on the packed earth, trigger finger indexed, touching the side of the M4’s magazine well.
He paused to control himself. Took a deep breath.
Okay. What was the main thing here?
That’s the key, Charlie thought. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
And then, as he cleared the bend, Charlie saw something thirty feet ahead that could be the main thing.
A teenage kid. Facing Charlie. Propped up against a wooden crate, kind of sitting on his hands. The kid wasn’t wearing a shirt but sported a pair of the baggy pajama bottoms that young Iraqi boys wore before they transitioned to blue jeans.
The left leg of the kid’s pj’s was cut off above the knee, revealing an ugly, raw stump.
One of the main things about this could-be main thing was that the kid wore an American helmet and stared back at Charlie through its NVGs. On the front of the helmet cover, Charlie read the name maupin.
As unfatherly as it might have been, Charlie’s first instinct was to shoot the kid preemptively. Then he thought better of it. But he kept the Aimpoint’s dot on the kid’s bare chest.
He advanced, the kid staring at him.
From ten feet away, Charlie asked in Arabic, “What’s your name, boy?”
“Rachid.”
Charlie nodded. “Where’d you get the helmet, Rachid?”
The kid’s voice was so subdued he might have been on painkillers. “From my father.”
Always ask a question to which you know the answer. Charlie gave it five seconds. “Who’s your father, Rachid?”
“My father is Tariq.”
That was when Charlie realized what the real main thing was. That the real main thing was Charlie. Charlie, who’d put one big fricking dent in AQI’s operations.
“Show me your hands, Rachid.”
Shrugging, the kid brought them out. Each adolescent hand held a single alligator clip attached to a pair of wires. The wires ran under the boy to the crate. Two short pieces of wood dowel separated the tips.
As Charlie watched, the kid squeezed the clips. The dowels tumbled in slo-mo onto the tunnel floor.
I should have shot him, Charlie thought. I should have killed him even though he’s someone’s son, because the fathers here are fricking nuts.
Rachid looked at Charlie with the same sort of blank stare Charlie had seen on khat-eaters in Somalia.
“My father says to tell you Happy Father’s Day.”
In the heartbeat between the time Rachid released the clips and the tunnel disintegrated in a violent orange fireball, Charlie thought he saw the kid smile.
CASEY AT THE BAT by Stephen Hunter
“No, no,” said Basil St. Florian. “Bren guns. We need the Bren guns. It is simply undoable without Bren guns. Surely you understand.”
Roger understood but he was nevertheless unwilling.
“Our wealth is in our Bren guns. Without Bren guns, we are nothing. Pah, we are dust, we are cat shit, do you see? Nothing. NOTHING!”
Of course he said “Rien,” for the language was French as was the setting, the cellar of a farmhouse outside the rural burg of Nantilles, département Limousin, two hundred miles south and east of Paris. The year was 1944, and the date was June 7. Basil had just dropped in the night before, with his American chum.
“Do you not see,” Basil explained, “that the point in giving you Brens was to wage war upon the Germans, not to make you powerful politically in the postwar, after we have pushed Jerry out? Communists, Gaullists, we do not care, it does not matter, or matter now. What matters now is that you have to help us push Jerry out. That was the point of the Bren guns. We gave them to you for that reason, explicitly, and no other. You have had them eighteen months, and you have never used them once. The war will be over, we will push Jerry out, the Gaullists will take over, and we will demand our Brens back, and if we don’t get them, we will send Irishmen to get them. You do not want Irishmen interested in you. No good can come of it. It’s my advice to use the Brens, help us push Jerry, become glorious heroes, happily give up the Brens, then defeat the Gaullists in fair, free elections.”
“I will not give you Bren guns,” said Roger, “and that is final. Long live Comintern. Long live the Internationale. Long live the great Stalin, the bear, the man of steel. If you were in Spain, you would understand this principle. If you-”
Basil turned to Leets.
“Make him see about the Brens. Dear Roger, listen to the American lieutenant here. Do you think the Americans would have sent a fellow so far as they’ve sent this one just to tell you lies? I understand that you might not trust a pompous British foof like me, but this fellow is an actual son of the earth. His pater was a farmer. He raises wheat and cows and fights red Indians, as in the movies. He is tall, silent, magnificent. He is a walking myth. Listen to him.”
He turned to his chum Leets and then realized he had, once again, forgotten Leets’s name. It was nothing personal, he just was so busy being magnificent and British and all that, so he couldn’t be troubled by small details, such as Yank names.
“I say, Lieutenant, I seem to have forgotten the name. What was the name again?” He thought it was remarkable that the name kept slipping away on him. They had trained together at Milton Hall on the river Jedburgh in Scotland for this little picnic for six or so weeks, but the name kept slipping away, and whenever it did, it took Basil wholly out of where he was and turned his attention to the mystery of the disappearing name.