Knife (9780698185623) (10 page)

The team formed a static line a few meters apart. Barnes at the head, Shaw and Cooke beside him. Massey faced the rear, directly behind Barnes, and watched their six. Dalonna and Hagan turned away from the compound to watch their flanks. Their watches hadn't hit ten minutes yet.

Barnes kept his eye to the scope, shooting hand on the grip and finger inside the trigger guard. He picked loose bits of tobacco from his teeth and rubbed his fingers on his pants. It looked like he was picking at, and eating, small shreds of dried grass from in front of him. Barnes was mumbling quietly to himself and Shaw could see waves of red hair flowing out of his helmet. Hagan wiped the dirt and earth from his tongue and Dalonna brought his sight to his eye and then relaxed. The wind had blown dried earth into the air and it looked like dust kicked up by someone running, but there wasn't anyone around. Cooke rocked back and forth on his knee and took out his chew, buried it, and put another in. He tested the seal on his suppressor and sent a stream of tobacco forward. A few stray clouds passed quickly in front of the moon and then carried on down the sky. The night was beautiful, temperate and with a light breeze. Shaw thought of Florida nights during training hops.

Shaw watched the guard bouncing his foot and wondered if he would feel the air splitting before the point of Barnes's rounds found him. Then the guard leaned forward and started picking at his feet. Shaw could almost see the bones of the guard's back shifting underneath his shirt. He was so skinny. Then he righted himself and threw something to his side.

“Yeah,” Barnes whispered. “Throw that shit away. Clean space, clean life. Good boy.”

Shaw checked his watch. Thirteen minutes. His head and hands throbbed and the ground seemed to pulse up and down. He tried to breathe slowly, tightening his hands on his rifle and running his tongue across his teeth. If there were any kids inside he hoped they'd locked themselves in a bathroom.

“Show's on, boys,” Barnes whispered.

Shaw checked his watch. Fourteen minutes and running. He keyed the comms once and a short static went out. Three others echoed in return. Then it seemed like the wind stopped and everything got real quiet. Peaceful. His head felt heavy, like he could lie down and sleep for hours. He counted individual blades of grass and could see the circular treads in Barnes's boots.

Then the guard put both of his feet on the ground as if he were going to stand.

And he did.

The guard turned to walk inside and Barnes released a breath. Shaw felt air kick back on his face and tremors rippled through his chest and arms. The round tore through the guard's back and he crumpled behind the chair, legs splayed at impossible angles.

Shaw and his team were up and running before the shot finished its echo. They entered the light of the lampposts, running over soft dirt that crumbled at their feet, and Barnes came over the comms as their legs pumped to the doorway. “South guard down.”

Then Bear. “East guard down.”

Shaw ran straight to the opening, his sight fixed on the doorway just a few steps from the dead guard's feet. He put two rounds in the body lying in the dirt,
pop, pop,
and pressed against the wall to the right of the door as the team stacked behind him. Blood was splattered all over the wall and he could see there wasn't a door but an open entryway leading inside the dwelling. The hem of a shag carpet stuck out from inside in the moonlight.

“Bang it,” Shaw whispered.

Hagan came to the other side of the door from the last spot in the stack, banger in hand. Then Cooke squeezed Shaw's shoulder twice. Shaw nodded at Hagan and Hagan threw the banger into the entryway.

Shaw charged through the doorway and the banger lit up the room, flashing and bursting loud.
Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
The smell of metal, spices, and stale sweat hit harsh and hot. Like a bag over the head. Cooke peeled off Shaw and a high scream pierced the air. Shaw hugged the wall, moving quickly along the perimeter of the room, kicking aside boxes until he felt carpet give way to concrete and a landing of stairs. The layout was open. There were two doorways and a staircase in three corners of the room. Flashes and a banger from another breach point had already popped in the room off to the left when Shaw entered the door. There'd already been shots. Hagan and Dalonna entered the room to the right and Cooke and Shaw climbed the staircase on the left. They curled right toward the only doorway on the second level.

An overweight man in a white tank top and with a black mop of hair came into the frame of the door, groggy and holding an AK-47 loosely in his hand by the wooden stock. Like it was a stage prop. He looked dizzy with his eyes half closed and ran his thick pink tongue over the ends of his mustache. Shaw sent two rounds through his chest and the rounds punched through the loose white shirt and coughed out the back. The man wheezed and snorted blood from his nose and then collapsed over a bedside table before falling to the carpet. He bobbed and trembled slightly, like a fish out of water for a moment. Then he lay still.

Cooke and Shaw stepped over him and entered the room. The blood blooming from the body had saturated the carpet and painted the ground a deep red. Shaw kicked the AK away from the body and Cooke started opening drawers, moving boxes, and leafing through papers. Shaw looked at the man. His eyes were partially open and they twitched toward Shaw and then away toward the door. Shaw ran his hands along the man's arms and legs and didn't find anything in the pockets, but the man had wet himself, so Shaw's gloves were wet. They shined as if rubbed with a gloss. The piss was warm on his hands. The dead man's skin looked sickly in the bright light of Shaw's tac light. The curly dark hairs of the dead man's belly stood out sharply on the pale flab of his stomach.

Shaw keyed the comms. “Upper level secure. One EKIA. Probable Tango1.”

“Got a thumb drive,” Cooke said, holding it over his shoulder. He put it in a baggie and kept shuffling through a drawer. “IDs and a checkbook. Lists, too.”

Hagan came over the comms from below. “Lower level secure. We've got a live one down here.”

Mike came over the comms right after Hagan. “Three additional EKIAs confirmed in North sector, lower level.”

Shaw radioed in
Objective secure
and the CO came back over the comms, told them they had ten minutes for SSE. “Exfil at South ORP in twenty mikes,” the CO said.

Cooke and Shaw began searching and toeing the walls of the room. They checked the paneling along the wooden floor and the sections of drywall for hidden compartments. There were more ID cards in a cigar box under the bed, along with handkerchiefs and a rifle-cleaning kit and two full mags of 7.62. Dust piles clung to the corners of the room and it looked like someone had kept the place clean but didn't plan on needing to for long. A pair of black tennis shoes sat neatly under the bed and a teal windbreaker hung on a nail in the wall. Shaw opened the drawer of the bedside table and found a copper slimline cigarette holder and a few pictures sitting in a white envelope. He smelled the holder. It had a sweet, peppery odor, and Shaw wondered when the dead man had smoked it last. He looked at the pictures before throwing them in Cooke's bag. There was a picture of the man on the floor holding a weapon. A picture of the man on the floor smiling. A picture of the man on the floor not smiling. A picture of the man on the floor looking serious with other men looking serious and cradling rifles across their shoulders like yokes. Shaw took a large black bag out of one of his cargo pockets and grabbed the shoes, windbreaker, and cleaning kit, and put them all inside the bag.

“All right,” Cooke said. “I'm good. Let's go see what Hagan's got alive down there?”

Shaw nodded. They looked around the room one last time and left. A team member came up the stairs to take pictures and fingerprints of Tango1 as they walked down the stairs. Command wouldn't want them lugging six bodies back to the FOB if they didn't need to, so prints and photos were enough.

The lower level was mostly bare except for boxes full of automobile parts. Cooke and Shaw joined the follow-on teams rifling through the things scattered all over the floor of the room they had first breached. Wires were splayed randomly among dirt and oil-streaked carburetors and gearshifts on the floor. Boxes of Winston cigarettes and discarded clothes were set on the carpets, and prayer rugs were rolled neatly in the corners of the room. The northern room, the one Mike and his team had cleared, held a large table in the middle with cardboard boxes set on top. The boxes held metal ball bearings, nuts, bolts, screws, and washers, along with other small, lethal bits that would rip and tear and cut. Maim. Shaw grabbed a handful of the small metal pieces. They drained from his gloved hands like steel confetti. Large jars of industrial glue lay around the boxes, and paintbrushes were lined up in a cup. The walls and floors were white and the room reeked of machinery, bleach, and the dead men's dinner. There was a small stove with hardened rice in a saucepan and a jar of curry sitting broken on the floor.

Two slight men with dark hair and clean faces lay on the floor around the table. They looked asleep, as if pleasantly dreaming. Blood formed in small ponds around the bodies from the holes in their chests. A fatter, bearded man lay slumped over the table. His beard was graying around the jaw and neck, and his mouth was open and seemed frozen in mid-sentence. Mike and Ohio had breached the room, killed the men, and were running their hands along the dead men's arms and legs. They had two rifles and a pistol gathered into a corner of the room. The cardboard boxes on the table were wet and soggy from the runoff of the fat man. The room was spotless without the bodies and the blood. There were large Ziploc bags of white powder strewn about, and Cooke held one up.

“TATP?”

“Probably,” Shaw said. He shrugged. “Or cocaine.”

Cooke laughed.

“Hey,” Hagan said. He was standing behind them in the doorway. He motioned with his head to the other room. “Come here.”

Shaw and Cooke walked around to the other room while Mike and Ohio took stock of the items on the table and gathered them into large black bags. In the next room, Slausen and Massey were kneeling on the floor, placing bandages on a trembling body lying in the fetal position on the floor. Dalonna nodded to them as they stood in the doorway, then he just shook his head. Hagan whispered something Shaw couldn't hear. It looked like Slausen and Massey were having a hard time keeping the body on the ground, so Shaw leaned forward to help. His hands hit cold, trembling flesh. Wild eyes darted up toward him from a mass of tangled black hair on the floor. It was a boy, stripped of all his clothing except for a white pair of briefs with a dark mass smeared on the bottom.

Massey wore latex gloves and ran his hands over the boy's face and hair. His fingertips came away bloody and streaked with black residue. The boy was thin and slight. Fragile. He had a metal clamp around his neck chained to a concrete block in the center of the room that kept his head close to the floor. His knuckles were bruised and bloodied, and swelling had set in so thick it was impossible to tell where the bones separated from flesh. His coal-black eyes darted about the room and his body tensed and flexed. He looked like a trapped animal and the medics were doing their best to soothe him like an old scared horse trapped in a stall. Massey and Slausen were light with their movements, gentle. Small, flaky white bits of something that looked like oatmeal or vomit, maybe both, peppered the boy's hair. There was a small puddle of dark, grainy fluid on the floor where he sat. A harsh smell grew stronger the longer Shaw stood in the room. He realized the boy had shit himself.

“Donna, cut him,” Shaw said.

Dalonna nodded and Hagan gestured to his pack. Dalonna grabbed bolt cutters from Hagan's pack and opened the pincers, setting the chain between the teeth. He squeezed and the chain fell loudly to the ground. The boy's eyes grew wide and he stared at the chains and lock on the floor. He tried to stand up, but Slausen held him down. A small bubble of spit formed on the boy's lips.

“I don't think I can cut the thing around his neck,” Dalonna said.

“Don't worry about it,” Massey said. “They'll take care of him at the FOB.”

Massey had the boy's mouth open and ran his fingers inside it, tracing the jawline and looking for broken teeth. His fingers came away bloody. Shaw wondered what the boy's breath smelled like.

“He's missing some teeth,” Massey said. The boy's eyes were darting around the room, but Massey kept his head still. Slausen rubbed the boy's back with his big gloved hand. “Anybody got a blanket?”

Hagan nodded. “I've got an extra top in my pack.”

He gestured to Dalonna again, and Dalonna brought out the top and gave it to Massey. Massey took the top in his hands, looked at the boy, and mimicked putting the top on. The boy took the top in his hands, rolled it into a tight ball, and held it tight against his bare belly. He started rubbing it back and forth, hard. Massey shrugged and Slausen just kept rubbing the boy's back.

“All right,” Shaw said. “Let's go. Bring him on the bird.”

•   •   •

T
hey took what they needed from the compound. The tech devices, papers, checkbook, IDs, and the three phones, along with other stuff they weren't sure about but figured might've had some value. Shaw held the black bag over his shoulder while they walked to the exfil. He'd put the slimline cigarette holder in one of Tango1's shoes, thinking Intel could run it for DNA and maybe get traces of other HVTs. They gathered the car parts, the electrical wiring, and the bags of white powder into a big pile a hundred meters west of the compound and dumped the cups of glue and bags of metal pieces on top of the pile. Then they set a charge to detonate and blew it while they waited for the birds. There was a bright flash of orange and white and a loud crack that made the wind shift and the ground tremble beneath them. The boy nearly fell over, but Hagan steadied him. Then everything was black again and thick smoke clouded over their heads.