He inched his fingers into an indentation in the edge of steel, and instead of pushing, he pulled at it with all his might. And miracle of miracles, it shifted slightly. He pulled again, and it shifted more — he gasped to feel the pressure on his legs and would have cried out if his mouth hadn’t been pushed into the dirt and if he hadn’t now been able to engage both of his shoulders with the metal, so that when he heaved up against it, the pressure eased slightly, allowing him to maneuver in a way that gave him even better leverage. Then he adjusted the left side of his body, and again he could shift his legs a fraction of an inch. By working within the narrow range of available motion and space, he positioned his hands more solidly underneath him. With a mighty heave, he pushed upward and then from side to side. The metal rocked and shifted until finally he was free to shimmy backward into a deeper part of the ditch.
He sank exhausted into the dirt, depleted and disoriented and slightly afraid, but then he remembered something else that was tucked into the bottom of his kit, and the fear was replaced with jubilation. He rolled onto his side and carefully extracted a tiny foil-wrapped package containing two pills Joe Kelly had given to him after the black power salute. “For when you want to really escape,” Kelly had said. And then Kelly had winked at him and slipped him the pills.
Pig Eye unwrapped the package and studied its contents — one bullet-shaped capsule and one baby blue disk. He tried to decide which one to take. Then he put both of them onto the sandpaper of his tongue and wished he had a drink of water before pulling himself up just high enough to peer into the front of the destroyed truck, where Danny was slumped against his seat belt. “Hey, man, you okay?” Pig Eye whispered. He could tell Danny was breathing, but his eyes remained shut, so Pig Eye slid his knife from its sheath and cut the strap of the binoculars that were still hanging around Danny’s neck. As he was searching for his weapon, which had been stowed behind his seat, a spray of bullets pinged metal, and he dropped down behind the heavy shield of the truck door that had almost killed him. Using the wire cutters and spool of wire from his kit, he looped some lengths of wire around his arms and legs and neck and then tucked bunches of weeds and grasses into the loops before raising his head out of the weedy ditch that bordered the east side of the road in order to assess the situation.
4.4 Danny Joiner
Danny forced himself to open his eyes. He remembered going over the equipment list. He remembered Kelly going on about the water and Tishman about the time, everybody focused on the one or two details they could actually control — or not focused, just shuffling through the motions, their thoughts on how they weren’t going home after all or on the endless stretch of weeks that lay ahead. But something else tapped at the door of his consciousness. Something he should be noticing but couldn’t quite grasp. He could see that the front of the truck was tilting strangely, and he understood from a stray flap of canvas that the top had ripped loose despite the double- and triple-checked fastenings — triple-checked because that’s the way Danny did things.
Gravity pulled his body against the seat belt, and his legs were angled toward the steering wheel as if the truck had been reconfigured. He could taste the dust and smell the acrid odor of explosives, which is when he realized that the top-heavy cargo truck had rolled and that the thing he should be noticing was the silence, the complete absence of sound except for a muffled ringing in his ears. And he understood that Pig Eye wasn’t slumped on the seat beside him and that his helmet had come off and that he had hit his head and that his weapon was wedged between the gearshift and his knee.
IEDs were deadly, but they weren’t precise. Shouldn’t the men from the other trucks be scrambling around and shouting? Shouldn’t they be calling out for survivors and coming to find out how he was? His instinct was to assess the situation without moving — the condition of his body, the position of the enemy, the status of the other men — but he couldn’t get his thoughts together because of the ringing and the thick, mashed ache in his head. He remembered climbing into the truck beside Pig Eye, who wasn’t slumped beside him, who wasn’t anywhere that he could see. He remembered reaching over to beep the horn of the truck as the convoy rolled out that morning. He remembered checking the straps on the canvas that covered the cargo, and he remembered helping Kelly stow the extra cases of water even though Tishman kept chasing at his heels like a terrier and saying, “Hurry up. We should have left when it was dark.”
He remembered Kelly asking for the updated strip maps, and even though checking the vehicles had been Tishman’s job, Danny had double-checked everything himself. Then Harraday and Rinaldi and Finch had climbed into their turrets — most of the vehicles had crew-served guns, but not the long cargo truck — and Danny had climbed in beside Pig Eye and tooted the horn just as they pulled into line behind Hernandez and Harraday and Betts and in front of Tishman and Kelly and Finch, who were bringing up the rear. He remembered tooting the horn, but he didn’t remember anything after that.
It was too quiet. Could he have gone deaf? He wanted to test his hearing by saying something, but he thought he should wait until he knew exactly what was what. Meanwhile, the silence pressed in on him, but little by little, his vision cleared. He remembered checking the cargo straps and reaching over to beep the horn. But where was Pig Eye? Not on the seat next to him. And where were the men in the two vehicles in front of him and the one that had been behind? As he struggled to free himself from his seat belt, a volley of gunfire broke through the silence and he hoped it was Rinaldi or Finch or Harraday, giving the bastards hell.
4.5 Pig Eye
Pig Eye crab-walked backward, trying to see around the carcass of the truck. Because it was too risky to raise his head very high, his eyes had to burn through a jumble of brush and spiky grass in order to assess the status of the convoy: the blackened husk of the lead vehicle, the second Humvee swerved into the ditch, his own rolled truck, and the rear vehicle, which had been hit but not destroyed. It made sense now. There had been a series of explosions, explosions that must have come from IEDs wired in a daisy chain. It was an increasingly common tactic. A purposely ill-concealed decoy bomb would stop a convoy, putting the line of vehicles in position for a buried chain of smaller bombs that were then detonated by trigger men — men who were probably still hunkered down somewhere not too far away, ready to take potshots at anything that moved. From the sound of sporadic gunfire, Pig Eye guessed the hide position was a low wall that formed part of an animal enclosure about one hundred meters off the road.