GAGE: A Bad Boy Military Romance (13 page)

When I told him that I was leaving the next morning, catching a ride with the weekly supply chopper, the smile disappeared from his face.

“For Baghdad?” he asked after a few seconds of silence.

“No. The other girls are going to Baghdad. I’m going home.”

“What about the press tour?” His eyes were distant, his mind was elsewhere. He stared down the feet and wouldn’t look me in the eyes.

Watching that smile disappear was soul-crushing, and filled my heart with guilt. “It’ll go on without me, I guess. I’ll wait for you, back home.”

“Two years is a long time.” He continued to stare down.

“I don’t care. I’ll wait.”

There was something else bothering him, but he wasn’t saying it. The issue wasn’t the long-distance, and it wasn’t the two years.

I put my hand on his thigh. “What is it?” I asked.

He continued to stare blankly down at his feet.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I didn’t know how to tell Ashley she was at a military outpost filled with ghosts. I didn’t know how to tell her that we were just a bunch of expendable, low-ranked cannon fodder, waiting for the first chance to be killed.

We all knew when we shipped out, there was a good chance we would never go home. Hell, most of the guys stationed at our outpost had no intention of going home. A lot of the guys came out here to die.

“I’ll wait for you, Gage. I will,” Ashley kept saying, not realizing that it didn’t matter one way or the other. “It’s just two years.”

“I might not be alive in two years, Ashley.”

She became silent and her eyes became wet. Her lips parted and she shook her head as if to say no, but she remained silent.

She must have known I was right—it was obvious. She’d met the other men. She’d seen the way the army treated us, like every month was our last. Each night was its own last meal because there was a good chance it was.

The Hajjis were making their way back to our region. There were reports of bombings in nearby towns. The war was finally making its way back to us, after two long years.

“Just go home. Forget about me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Too bad,” I said, my voice loudening into a roar. “We barely know each other. What you’re feeling isn’t love, Ashley, it’s just lust. It’s just a fling. That’s all this was.”

She looked so small, sitting on the edge of my bed with her hands clasped in her lap and her shoulders sunken. Iraq was no place for a fragile thing like her. This was a place for brainless cannon fodder, emotionally-numb Barrel Cleaners, and poor, misguided terrorists.

She stood up and left and I went to bed.

The next morning was strangely quiet and still. Most of the other Joes were away, hanging out in the bunkhouse main area, but saying nothing to one another as they sat and sipped their coffee.

None of the trucks were running, all the engines were dead. Whoever was on watch wasn’t listening to the radio, and there wasn’t any classical music permeating Major Richards’s office walls. Even my footsteps seemed to make no noise as I walked across the compound, towards the outdoor gym.

Midway into my morning routine, Major Richards approached. “Good morning, Corporal,” he said, waving at me. It was almost noon, and the place was still silent. The Playmates were starting to wake up and migrate outside to tan.

“Morning, Major. What time’s the supply chopper coming in this morning?” I asked.

“They’ve already left. You must have slept through it. Don’t blame you—you had one hell of a day, yesterday.”

“They’ve already left, sir?”

“About an hour ago. Miss King’s probably halfway to the Baghdad airport by now.” He hold me that I not only slept through one pickup, but two. A second bird came in for Hastings and Lyon. Apparently, they both needed X-rays after the beatings I dished out.

Major Richards smiled, nodded, and continued towards his office.

My heart sank into my stomach as reality hit: I would never see Ashley again. I thought I’d feel relieved when she was gone—relieved that I could finally forget about her and move on—but there was no relief, just a cold, emptiness that lingered inside my chest.

I continued my set, moving to the chin-up bar.

Some of the Playmates were completely naked, laying out on the sand. Every time I pulled myself up, I could see everything—tits, pussies. The girls knew it, but didn’t care. They smiled and waved. One of the girls blew a kiss and winked.

“I’m all yours if you want me, big boy,” one of the naked girls called out. She spread her legs and bit her lip with a playful giggle. Her friends all laughed as if it was a completely normal, sane thing to do. It made me sick, so I turned around and looked the other direction.

They whined and made some comments about me being a homo but I could have cared less.

As soon as the Joes realized there was pussy on display, they were all out on the gym, taking turns on the chin-up bar, not bothering to hide their diseased hard-ons.

I was nothing like the other guys. All they cared about was fucking. As long as there was some cunt to make them come, they were happy—happy being ignorant to everything else in the world, because everything else scared them. They were terrified of their hometowns and their families. They would all sooner die than have to get real jobs, or interact with real people who thought of more than just pussy.

They were scared of love—they wanted nothing to do with it.

Combat Outpost IQ-UA-14 was specifically designed to keep them happy before they were slaughtered, like the cattle farm that leases land from the slaughterhouse. BCs weren’t kept around for more than five days so men wouldn’t develop feelings. The base remained woman-free for twenty-five days so the men could get over whatever feelings they managed to muster up in the previous five. And they kept the BCs coming, month by month, so their minds wouldn’t wander and stumble onto something that mattered even a little bit, to make them reconsider their lives.

I signed up to be cannon-fodder because I didn’t know what I wanted, but that had changed. I wanted Ashley. I didn’t want to be part of some prostitute-a-month club. I didn’t want to die in the name of American oil and free fucks.

I just wanted to be with Ashley.

But that was never going to happen because, that day that the girls were laying naked in the sun and the men were drooling all over the chin-up bar, we got our first call of duty.

We were being sent into battle.

The Hajjis shot down a friendly chopper. It managed to land safely, fifty miles from our outpost, but the Hajjis were moving in to take hostages. Our mission was to intercept and hold the Hajjis off while a rescue chopper came in for the survivors. For us, it was practically suicide. Once the rescue picked up the hostages, we were on our own, behind enemy lines, with zero combat experience, zero backup, and zero intel. As far as we knew, we were going into a region covered in IEDs and crawling with Ali Baba.

Major Richards pulled me aside and told me I didn’t have to go, that I was still visibly shaken from the false-attack in Shamiya. I would have accepted the offer too, to stay back, had he not added that the downed bird was the supply chopper that had left hours earlier, with Ashley onboard.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

We weren’t even an hour from the outpost when a loud bang shook our helicopter. The pilot handled it well, flipping a few switches, and keeping his calm.

The co-pilot wasn’t so calm. “What the fuck was that?”

“I don’t know. I think we blew an engine. What’s the pressure reading on the rear rotor?”

“I—I dunno, it looks fine. Wait. The gas gage is reading empty.”

“I think there’s a leak. The throttle isn’t being fully responsive.”

The smell of burning and smoke filtered into my nostrils and I started to panic, but I kept quiet in the back of the cockpit. Before the rattle, the ride was smooth and the only noise was a loud, consistent humming. Now, the helicopter was going through turbulence, hiccupping sporadically, making a grinding put-put-put sound.

“I’m going to bring it down,” the pilot said, pushing down a lever, tilting the helicopter towards the ground.

It took me a good minute to build up the courage to speak. “Is everything alright?”

“Everything’s fine, Miss King,” the pilot said without looking back at me. “Just a mechanical glitch—that’s all.” The co-pilot’s face was white and his hands were trembling. If it was just a mechanical glitch, it was a serious one. The cockpit began to fill with smoke, making it difficult to breathe.

We hit the ground with a heavy thump. The two pilots got out of the helicopter, leaving me alone. “Just wait right there, Miss King.”

Not even seconds after they stepped onto the sand, I heard, “Jesus fucking Christ, what the hell happened?”

We were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but dirt and sandy hills as far as the eye could see, in any direction.

“This thing is fucked. We need to call in an EVAC.”

“The casing’s burnt—and look at the metal—this wasn’t no engine blowing up. This was hit from the outside.”

“From the outside? What, like an RPG? We were hit by an RPG?”

“Just call it in. Quick,” I could hear the main pilot say in a surprisingly calm tone. I didn’t know much about war, guns, or aviation, but I knew that RPG stood for Rocket Propelled Grenade, and I knew that that’s what terrorists used to shoot down planes and helicopters.

The co-pilot was in a frenzy now, his hands shaking while he pulled down the radio from above the cockpit door. He was a younger guy, younger-looking than all of the recruits stationed at Gage’s outpost. He had a few blonde wispy hairs over his lip, and acne all over his forehead. “Come in, uh, Outpost, uh, IC… Any nearby outpost, come in…”

By the time he got a response, he was a stuttering, incoherent mess. “H—Hello. W—W—We need an EVAC, at, um, location—We were hit by an RPG, and, uh…”

The main pilot came and took the radio away from him. “Help Miss King down from the bird,” he said to the co-pilot, before addressing the radio.

Once he was finished calling in our coordinates, the pilot went into the back of the helicopter and emerged with an assault rifle. He handed it to the co-pilot. “We’ve only got the one, so make it count.”

We moved away from the helicopter because, according to the pilot, “it’s an easy target, and it’s full of combustible gas. We aren’t far from where they fired the RPG.” The threat was suddenly real.

We’d been shot down and now there were bad guys coming for us.

I wanted Gage there with me. Gage would have taken control of the situation. He would have taken that rifle without fear, and he would have protected me. He wouldn’t let them take me.

The co-pilot could barely hold the weapon, with his sweaty, shaking hands.

“The EVAC’s about two hours away,” said the pilot as we took cover behind a small hill. The co-pilot crawled up to the top of the hill and planted his gun down, using the scope to scan the horizon. As far as I could tell, we were alone—just miles and miles and miles of sand and dirt and the occasional dry-looking shrub.

About fifteen minutes into our wait, the co-pilot said, “I think I see something. There’s something moving over there.”

My heart started racing, but I remained down on the ground, at the bottom of the hill. The pilot crawled up to the rifle and checked the scope. “I don’t see anything.”

“I swear, there was a guy there.” His voice was still shaken. I tried to convince myself that he was just seeing things, maybe a small bush rattling in the breeze.

“Just calm down,” the pilot said. “Our boys should have left the outpost by now. They’ll be here soon.” The rescue chopper was coming in from Baghdad, which would take a few hours, but the troops from Gage’s outpost were coming in to cut off our attackers—whoever shot the RPG.

I wondered if Gage was coming, if I’d see him before we were picked up.

After an hour of tense silence, we finally heard something—a hum. The co-pilot located the noise with his rifle. “It’s our guys,” he said with a flare of excitement. His voice was still shaken, and probably would be for days to come.

Far in the distance, a line of Humvees approached, creating a plume of dust in their wake. The pilot used his walkie-talkie to let the soldiers know where we were.

The walkie crackled and one of the soldiers responded. “Roger that, we’ve got eyes on you. We’re going to get in position and make sure you get out of here safely. Just hang in there.”

The trucks came to a stop about fifty feet from the helicopter and the men stepped out. It was impossible to distinguish any man from the other; from where we were, they all looked like small dots on a vast sea of tan. Some of them took cover behind the surrounding hills, others stayed near the chopper and took cover behind propped-up ballistic shields. The pilot’s walkie became vibrant with activity as the soldiers relayed messages back and forth to one another.

“Looks like we’ve got activity about five klicks to the east. Could be Hajji, could be OIF. Over.”

“Get an ID on them, ASAP. Over.”

“S-2 says we’ve got action eight klicks north. No positive ID yet. Over.”

“No positive ID? There ain’t no POGs out here. They come any closer, I say we open fire.”

“No one shoots ‘till we have IDs.”

My heart was racing. As all the soldiers settled into their place, they became invisible, blending in seamlessly with the sandy terrain. If they could blend in seamlessly, then I knew the bad guys could too.

“I don’t see shit to the east, Corp. There’s nothing there.”

“They’re there. They’ve got eyes on us. Keep your guns on your AOR.” It was Gage’s voice—calm, confident, and in control. An inexplicable relief washed over me. “Miller, what’s the frequency of the OIF channel?”

The radio was never silent for more than a couple of seconds. But my eyes told a different story. If I hadn’t seen the soldiers pull up and move into position, I would have thought we were alone. I could only see a silent, barren wasteland.