Fade to Black - Proof (24 page)

Chapter

28

Jack leaned back against the
dirty and deserted building, knees up against his chest, as he poured warm
water from his canteen onto his face. Brown rivulets of mud trickled down his
neck and into his blouse, feeling nothing but good. The wall behind him tipped
his Kevlar helmet down into his eyes, and he tipped it back with the open mouth
of his canteen. His rifle was slung awkwardly in this position, the butt up
above his chin, and he cocked it over to one side with some annoyance.

They were
exhausted. All of them. They were also scared, but Jack suspected that his fear
was somehow different. His men, his friends, were frightened by the unknown.
Meanwhile, he was terrified by his certainty of what would happen if his plan
to change their fate failed. It was down to the wire now. They were waiting
here for First Squad, and once they joined up, Jack’s script called for them to
split in two and go down opposite sides of the block in which they now sat
squarely in the middle. He had no idea what awaited First Squad, but he knew goddamn
well what would happen to Casey and his young team of Marines. Unless he
succeeded, they would be cut to ribbons, he and some of his boys would die, and
Jack would never again see his wife and daughter. He knew that there would be
no goodbye if he failed. Jack closed his eyes and breathed deeply of the scent
of Pam’s perfume, mingled with the sweet baby smell of Claire, a smell every
parent knew and loved. He knew it wasn’t memory. A part of him was still lying
in their bed, arms wrapped around his girls, waiting to see what would happen.
And if he failed? Would he just simply evaporate from that family embrace as if
he had never been there at all? Jack shuddered and opened his eyes. Focus on
the plan.

Take the
offensive, he reminded himself for the thousandth time in the last few hours.
Pick the windows you remember, fire as a team to drive the bad guys down to the
floor and then haul ass across the street to the corner that he hoped would be
safe. His doorway home, he prayed to God. A part of him felt that there should
somehow be a much more intricate plan, a more dramatic change to the events
that haunted him, but the other part of his mind, and maybe his heart,
reassured him that all he really needed was a tiny little change that could
domino to a totally different outcome.

Just like
McIver’s eye.

Jack looked
around him at the young men that he felt he loved from somewhere. He was
energized by the strong sense that he was supposed to be here—that he was
somehow called to make this change. It wasn’t just his life he would be saving,
after all. The feeling was as real as anything else (and much more real than so
fucking much) and he was empowered by the sense of purpose it brought. Jack
looked over at Simmons, squatted down, back against the wall. His eyes weren’t
closed. They were open and wide with uncertainty and fear. Jack patted him paternally
on the knee.

“Hang in there,
bud,” he said, holding the young boy’s gaze and smiling.
We’re going to be
fine,
he hoped his smile said. Simmons shifted uncomfortably and looked
down, wanting so much to look like a man and not a boy.

“Hoorah,
Sar’n,” he said, but his voice cracked. He cleared his throat harshly in
annoyance or embarrassment, or more likely a little of both. He turned and held
his platoon sergeant’s gaze again. “Good to go,” he reassured Casey.

And Jack
believed him.

A flurry of
activity brought Jack’s eyes up and his hand from his young Marine’s knee. First
Squad.

“Yo, man,”
said the wiry and short man in the lead. Chad O’Brian. A good friend, Jack remembered
from somewhere. A little guy with an Irish name, an Italian face, and a very
Chicago accent. “S’ happenin’?”

“Glorious day
in the Corps,” Jack answered from the script, an old and familiar joke. O’Brian
laughed through his nose.

“Fuckin’-a-right,”
Chad answered, dropping down beside Jack. He spit a puddle of thick brown
Skoal-spit on the ground between them, and then looked up at the boys in a
group around them. “Fitz, Connelly…perimeter,” he said, and two of his men
fanned out in the street. They dropped to one knee and pulled up their rifles,
scanning the darkening and quiet street. Chad grabbed Jack’s canteen and took a
deep swig of the piss-warm water.

“Bag any
rags?” he asked without looking at Jack.

“Five to
nothing, good guys are up,” Jack answered, referring to the five dead
insurgents from the roof. O’Brian smiled.

“Strong work, dude,”
he said. “We’re dry…or I think anyway. Returned some fire from the rooftops,
but nothing confirmed.”

Jack nodded.
Then he waited. Chad had another line yet.

“Wanna clear
this block together?” he asked.

“Sure,” Jack
read back from his playbook. “How’s about you guys come around the far corner
and we’ll take this one. Meet you in the middle?”

“Sounds
right,” his friend from Pendleton answered. Chad was single and lived in the
barracks, but Jack had a vivid memory flash of him and his girlfriend Kim
laughing and drinking beer in their living room back home. Kim loved Claire to
death, and Chad was always worried about how much she loved playing Mom to her with
Pam. “We’ll clear the street from the corners and then work into the middle.
You guys take the far side and we’ll clear our side of the block.”

“Roger that,”
Jack answered on cue. He felt his throat tighten and his heart pounded in his
chest. This was it.

Time to go
home.

Jack closed
his eyes tightly and for a moment he was in bed, arms around his girls. God,
please don’t let it be just a fantasy.

Jack pushed
himself up on weak and exhausted legs. The sun was down below the low‐rise
brown buildings to his right and the sky was turning orange. The déjà vu was
intense and nauseating. He slapped Chad on the back of the helmet and watched
as he and his men hustled down the block to the far corner. He gathered his
friends around him to set the plan. In his tortured mind he found himself
wondering how it would work. If he reached the far side of the street intact,
would he just disappear in a cyclone of sand and wake up in bed with his girls,
the nightmare forever over? Would he just be Casey again and have to finish his
tour and then come home to them? And what if he failed—if he was cut down by an
insurgent bullet? 

He jerked his
head violently, clearing his mind of the thought. He would simply not let that
happen.

Jack and his
friends huddled up like a high‐school football team, planning the last, game‐ending
play.

“I want to get
to the far side of the street first,” he began. “We’ll lay down some
suppressive fire across the street and then cross, one at a time, with the rest
of the team sustaining covering fire.”

Bennet frowned
and held Jack’s eyes.

“What the
hell, Sar’n?” he asked. “I thought we were supposed to maintain fire
discipline. You want us to fire blindly into the buildings across the road? At
what?”

Jack paused.
He expected this question, but was still unsure of his answer.

“Look, guys,”
he said solemnly. “I can’t explain it, but I have a really bad feeling about
this. I think we’re going to draw heavy fire from the far side of the street.”
He looked at the tired and now worried faces around him in his school circle.
“Actually, I know we are,” he finished. His proclamation was met with an
awkward silence. The young Marines exchanged confused glances and then looked
back at their platoon sergeant. Simmons shrugged. Jack wiped the dirty brown
sweat from his face.

“Look, we’ll
form up at the corner, I’ll fire first and then, well…” he paused. “Just engage
whatever you see, OK?”

“Sure, Casey,”
Bennet said a little uncomfortably. “Whatever you think.”

The others
were quiet, but nodded their heads. Second Squad checked their weapons and ammo
and moved together as a group to the corner. Jack led his team the short
distance around the block and stopped at the next corner. Inches away was the
kill zone set up by the bad guys hiding across the street. To his right was a
low wall, the remains of a building long since gone. Jack shuddered at the
images that flooded his mind at the sight—Kindrich with half his head blown
off, the rest of them piling over that wall for cover, the RPG disintegrating
and burying Bennet’s bleeding body in rubble, his head striking the far corner
of the shitty little wall as a bullet knocked him backwards, leaving a smoking
hole in his flak vest…Jack squeezed his eyes shut for a moment to press the
pictures out of his head and then peered around the corner, scanning
desperately for movement in the doorways and windows on the far side of the
street and along the low rooftops.

 Nothing.

He closed his
eyes again and this time he searched for images of muzzle flashes from his nightmare
at the wall and tried to pick the locations from this slightly different
perspective. There was a large hole in the wall of the center building, a blown
out and glassless window. In his mind’s eye he saw double muzzle flashes from
there, twin AK-47s firing rounds at him as he had moved out from the corner of
the wall in his nightmare. That was where the shots that had pounded him in the
chest, knocking him from his feet and into the dirt, had come from. He was sure
of it. He saw only darkness in the fading orange glow of dusk. No movement at
all…but they were there. He knew his executioners, at least some of them, were
huddled there. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, forced away the sweat and tears
that burned his vision. Then he checked the safety off on his rifle and raised
it to his shoulder. He flicked the safety past single shot to three-shot burst
and aimed into the darkness of the hole in the building.

I love you,
Pam.

I know, baby…
Her voice was
music in his mind.

He squeezed.

Three rounds
burped out of his  rifle, one of them a red tracer, and he watched as the
tracer clearly marked his shot, the rounds disappearing into the dark hole in
the building. Jack squeezed a second burst and this time he pulled a little wide,
his round tearing chunks of brown wall away in cloud of dust. Then he stared
down the sights of his rifle, waiting for movement. For a brief moment he
started to think maybe he had been wrong, and then he heard a shrill voice
hollering in Arabic and—

Jack and his
friends saw the flashes a split second before they heard the twin cracks of the
rifles, bluish-white light exploding from the darkness of the room in which the
Hadjis were hidden. Jack dropped his head down and pulled it back slightly, but
the shots were wild. One hit the dirt ten yards in front of him in the street,
the other he never saw. He heard the flurry of movement as his men raised their
weapons, drawing in on the building with the hole in it.

“Suppressive
fire!” Jack hollered as he sent another three‐round burst into the building. It
was followed immediately by a high‐pitched scream from the dark recesses of the
hole in the wall, which was drowned out almost immediately by the ear‐shattering
bursts from the M16s all around him. “McIver, Ballard, Simmons…one at a time
when I tell you.” He heard the men moving out sideways from the wall. “Straight
to the far corner.” He let his gaze stray over to the low wall where he had
died once already. “And stay away from that fucking wall to your right,” he
added as an afterthought. Jack knew he had already changed things, maybe even
enough, but his eyes scanned the rooftops and windows. He knew from the
nightmare that there were a shitload more bad guys out there. Anything could
happen yet. There was another wild shot from the dark room and then nothing.
Jack fired at it again anyway then hollered over his shoulder “Go…go…covering
fire!”

One part of
Jack’s mind became vaguely aware that the horribly intense and disorienting déjà
vu was gone.

The times they
are a changin’.

From the
corner of his eye Jack saw McIver, tall and lanky and looking awkward hunched
over as he was, start his sprint to the corner. His weapon was up and aimed,
jerking back and forth as he scanned for targets, legs pounding in the sand and
kicking up a little trail of dust. Like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoon, Jack
thought for some reason. The thought made him chuckle.

McIver was
halfway across the street when Jack sensed movement farther down the street and
above them. He raised his rifle and scanned the rooftops through the sight like
he had trained over and over at home in California… There!

Jack squeezed
the trigger as the heavily bearded man came into view over his sight. The man raised
an AK-47 to his shoulder, and Jack thought he hollered something, but the words
were cut off as three red puffs popped up off his chest nearly simultaneously
as Jack’s bullets found their mark. The insurgent’s arms flew up and his rifle
flipped through the air. His face turned upwards as he fell behind the low wall
along the edge of the roof and then disappeared from view. Jack continued his
scan, looking for other targets. He heard more shots from his men, but didn’t
bother to search for the targets they had engaged. His own scan focused on the
search for the assholes that would try and kill him and his friends, while his
peripheral vision followed McIver’s progress. It was only a few seconds, but it
felt like forever.