Tides of War (70 page)

Col. Achmed maps out the safest route to the frontier (the one he’ll be chasing us on) and helps key into our GPSes the sequence of junctures—all unmarked desert and mountain tracks that we could never find without his help. Dr. Rajeef rigs mobile hospital beds for Junk and our two wounded engineers; he stocks us up with two dozen vials of morphine, plus sample packs of Demerol and Dilau-did with sterile syringes and a hundred ampules of methylephidrine, which we all need in our exhausted, postadrenalinized state.

We take our leave over cups of black Persian coffee. It’s midnight. Our engines idle beyond the walls in the night. Achmed and his men leave us alone, for our final prep and words for each other.

“Chief.” It’s Chutes, stepping forward before the others. “I’m sorry for what I said back there in Nazirabad …”

“Forget it.”

He apologizes for refusing, at first, to go back after the Fijian, whose name, we have learned, is Manasa Singh. Chris Candelaria seconds this. I thank them both. It takes guts to speak up in front of the others. The act is not without cost to proud men. I appreciate it and I tell them.

The men surround me in the headlight-lit court. Safety lies two hundred miles east, in the dark, across country none of us knows—back valleys and passes peopled by warriors who will know where we are, how many we are, and where we are heading. Every one of us knows this, and every one feels the fear in his bones.

“Because we went back when we didn’t have to,” I say, “we know something about ourselves that we didn’t know before. You know now, Chris, that if you fall, I won’t abandon you. I’ll come back, if it
costs me my life—and so will Q and so will Junk and so will Chutes. And we know the same about you.”

A bottle makes the rounds.

“The contract we signed says nothing about honor. The company doesn’t give a shit. But I do. I fight for money, yeah—but that’s not why I’m here, and it’s not why any of you are here either.”

From inside the compound, Col. Achmed and his sons listen. Two hours from now they’ll be hunting us as if we were animals. But for this moment they know us as men, and we know them.

“What we did today in Nazirabad,” I tell my brothers, “would earn decorations for valor in any army in the world. You know what I’ll give you for it?”

I grab my crotch.

Chris Candelaria laughs.

Chutes follows. The whole crew shakes their heads and rocks back and forth.

You have to lead men sometimes. As unit commander, you have to put words to the bonds of love they feel but may be too embarrassed to speak of—and to the secret aspirations of their hearts, which are invariably selfless and noble. More important, you have to take those actions yourself, first and alone, that they themselves know they should take, but they just haven’t figured it out yet.

Steven Pressfield is author of the international bestseller
Gates of Fire,
an epic novel of the battle of Thermopylae, and
The Legend of Bagger Vance
. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is at work on his next historical novel.