Princes of War (24 page)

No signs of booby traps. He slammed forward. Crash! Door flew back violently. Moose moved inside the room.

Too big to be a bathroom. Windowless. Dark. The piss smell stronger. And another sick pungent smell. He had the sensation of having emerged inside the entrails of a large beast. He stumbled and stepped further in. Momentum. Stumbled again. He saw something big and cylindrical on the floor.
Long rolls? Rolled up rugs?
Hard to make out anything in the darkness. He took a knee. He breathed big gulps of foul air. Scents of what had to be rotting body fluids drifted into his mouth and nose and clung to his lungs. He gagged violently, twice.

“Fuck. What is it?” Cuebas asked, from behind him, “Anything?” Cuebas froze in the doorway.

“Get your light on!” Moose shouted. He needed light from Cuebas to see what was on the floor.

With his gloved hands Moose probed the floor. A million nerve endings sizzled, every one of them wanting to be the first to find something important. His weapon hung from its sling. Too dark. He needed his night vision goggles, but had left them in the truck because it was daylight outside. He saw nothing yet. One hand balanced him. The other felt around blindly.

“Light!” he yelled to Cuebas.

Then Moose felt something solid. He patted his hand gingerly over it, as if he was checking on a sick child. It was something substantial, with a thin layer over it, baggy, heavy, and hard inside. Bags of rice?

The terrible stench got worse. More like piss than puke, now. The odor hit him like a gas leak and he nearly buckled over, coughing again, several times.

“Ayeee. Jesus Christ!” Cuebas exclaimed. “What a shitty smell!”

Moose knew. By instinct he knew. The singular odor of decaying meat dominated the room.

“Something dead?”

Cuebas had recognized it too.

Cuebas’ flashlight came on, a thin silver beam skipping rapidly over round log-like bags. But not bags. People. Once people. Now bodies. Moose saw them clearly now, and counted three bodies.

Moose stood up. Cuebas came closer. Moose grabbed Cuebas’ light from his hand.

“Call Sergeant Cooke,” Moose said.

He shone the light on each of the bodies, starting at the feet, then up to the heads. Only there were no heads. Feet, legs, torsos, but no heads.

Cuebas hadn’t moved further. He hadn’t called anyone on the radio either when he realized what the stench was. He retched, spitting, coughing, and hurriedly left the room.

“Call Cooke!” Moose called loudly after him.

Moose bent down and leaned over the corpses. The exposed feet confirmed they were human. With the light he could see the feet. Each body wore a white
dishasha
. The bodies gleamed in the dark. Each was spotted brown in places, like fallen leaves on white sheets. As a boy he had raked up autumn leaves onto old white sheets. He shook that crazy memory out of his head. He looked closer at the brown spots. Blood, maybe? The bodies were flat where the necks should be. Definitely no head. He stepped forward so he could look down at the decapitated necks. It made him think of a split cantaloupe. In disbelief, he waved the light around the edges of the room, half thinking the heads might be lying against the wall.

He had never seen a headless man. The folks back home wouldn’t believe it. By now he had seen a couple of dozen dead bodies. Recognizable pieces of bodies, and unrecognizable pieces of bodies. But not headless ones. They had heard about the beheadings going on. He’d seen the snuff videos, even watched them on the web. The insurgents were capturing people and slicing their heads off like so much meat in a butcher shop.

What was this place? An execution center?

Moose stepped out of the room. Cuebas waited at the far end of the corridor, silent, looking down.

The Wolfhounds searched the rest of the warehouse, including a large open bay and two smaller outbuildings looking for more insurgents. Others looked in two adjacent smaller buildings. Security remained tight. After confirming the place was clear, Wynn ordered the men to drag the dead outside. He watched from the side of the room. Cooke stood beside him. When soldiers pulled the bodies across the concrete floor to the outside it sounded like cardboard boxes sliding. The bodies smelt like rotting meat. Wynn followed the last one outside, then walked back to his Humvee to send a report to higher. Outside they didn’t smell as noxious.

Cuebas stared at the four bodies laying side by side outside. Three were decapitated, dressed in soiled white
dishdashas
like grotesque morgue creatures. One still oozed blood from the neck stump. The fourth, the one Moose killed, wore black pants and shirt. In the daylight things became clear. The imaginary dead leaves on white sheets were dried blood spots soaked into clothing. Small holes punctuated many of the dried blood spots, as if someone had stabbed the bodies multiple times with an ice pick. Some of the Wolfhounds standing next to the bodies wore bandanas around their faces to filter the stench. Cuebas didn’t have his bandana with him, but kept holding his hand over his nose and mouth. Flies swarmed. The exposed hands and feet on the headless corpses were purplish, nearly black. The underside of the feet retained a brownish tint. All three bodies were engorged, unreal, like inflatable headless manikins. The heaviest corpse had his wrists broken, splintered bones like snapped pencils protruding from the surface of his lower forearms. The liquids of death had mostly dried, the sweet heavy redness of fresh blood long gone. Two headless men had been dead for several days. The other looked recent.

“Looks like they broke his hands by pushing them forward over his forearm. Must have held pretty tight. Hurt like hell, I bet,” said Lee, softly, as if he had to say it to believe it.

Cuebas tried to imagine the man’s extreme pain.

“Snapped ʼem in half like it ain’t nothing,” Moose injected.

“Jeez,” someone said, sighing in disgust.

“Like big infected bee stings on his feet,” Pauls conjectured through his bandana. “Whatever it was left ugly welts.”

Two of the dead men had the odd marks on their feet.

Lee pulled up the
dishdasha
of the biggest man to above his waist, exposing his lower body. Cuebas looked down at it. Flies scattered. The man’s penis had shriveled into what looked like a fat brown slug. More dried blister welts on his legs. Streaks of dried blood ran out of some of the welts. Lee leaned forward and looked closer. “Fuck! Must be eight or ten of these per leg,” Lee said.

Cooke walked up and looked.

“Private Halloween party here dudes?” he asked insouciantly, as if nothing would surprise him.

The others said nothing, staring at the bodies.

“You shoot this dude?” Cooke asked Moose, pointing at the recently dead body, blood still pooling around its sternum.

“Yes.”

“Good shooting.”

“It’s what he needed.”

“Tell the LT he’s going to want to see this,” Cooke commented, motioning to Pauls to walk over to Wynn.

Lee still bent over the headless bodies. Cuebas took a knee and looked closer too, simultaneously fascinated and repulsed. Lee probed the welts on the exposed legs of the big man with his gloved hands, tenderly, clinically.

“We’re going to do another fucking thorough search of this place,” said Cooke.

“No power on it,” said Moose.

“Bring us one of those spot lights,” Cooke shouted back to no one in particular in his vehicle. “And I wanta yank the fucking doors off this place and take a better look inside.”

Moose had shot the insurgent in what had probably once been front offices. At the end of this room double doors exited into a parking area. These doors were locked with a chain. Cooke intended to pull these doors off using a Humvee.

Wynn reassured himself that the platoon had good security of the surrounding area and then gave the TOC an update on the platoon’s status, telling them about the four bodies. He left his truck again, taking his portable radio with him, and walked back over to where the dismounted men stood.

Five Wolfhounds stood over the bodies now. Wynn could see Lee on his knees, leaning over one body. Wynn contemplated what to do next, trying to stay ahead of things, remembering the principles of site exploitation. Collect what we can that tells us what’s important about this place. Learn what we can about the bodies. This meant search, collect evidence, take pictures. The closest house showing signs of occupation was 50 or 60 meters away. Wynn had already ordered D22 and Cengo to go to those nearby houses and ask if anyone knew anything about what had been happening at this place, and if anyone could identify who had been coming in and out.

After talking to the dismounted men for several minutes, Wynn stared at the dead insurgent. Surely this man hadn’t been alone. Somebody else had recently been here. They’d seen that red car drive off as they came up. He’d decided not to stop it. Didn’t want to split his force. Probably should have stopped the car, but of course he didn’t know then what he knew now.

Something was strange about this deal. They hadn’t been fired on. The insurgent killed hadn’t fired a shot, though he did have a weapon. The way the man’s open eyes were glazed and bright, Wynn wondered whether he’d been drugged. Drugging was not uncommon with insurgents getting ready to fight or blow themselves up.

After thinking another minute about the situation, Wynn said to Cooke, “Let’s check it out closely. Leave nothing unopened. Take pictures of everything.” He paused. “Be careful looking around in there.”

Wynn walked back over to his vehicle and called in another report to the HQ.

A clanging sound signaled that D24 had pulled the doors off the place using their tow rope. This brought daylight inside the bigger room.

Moose, Tyson, and Sims went inside to search more. Most of the rest of the platoon maintained security.

“I’ll hold the light,” Moose said. He again smelled the filth in the room, rancid, abnormal. Now he could better see the large table in the middle room. The table had a thick wood top with multiple drawers underneath, like an oversized wood carpenter’s table. He looked around. He again saw the two-drawer cabinet he seen earlier against the wall. Symmetrical holes in the wall suggested shelves had once been mounted. Nothing on the floor but filth.

If this place had been an old agriculture storage operation you couldn’t tell that now. Surely it had been stripped by looters, like everything else. He held the spotlight over the large table while Sims looked in the drawers. Three opened easily. Stacks of papers inside. Another was locked.

“Get the crowbar,” Sims called to Tyson, who stood by the door. Tyson in turn shouted to Kale, who still sat in D23.

Cooke walked into the room, coming up to where Moose and Sims were. He kicked something on the floor, then bent down and picked up a long thin strip of something flexible.

“Why are fucking belts on the floor?”

Cooke held a leather belt up.

“Several of them here.” He bent down and picked up another belt. He saw two more on the floor, coiled like sleeping snakes, but did not pick them up. Moose watched him.

Cooke held the belts horizontal up in the air, and slowly slid his hands outward in opposite directions, all the way from the buckle to the end tip. Moose turned his light on the belt.

“Hey, I’m still prying at this drawer. Need the light,” Sims complained.

Tyson had entered with a crowbar, and moved to help Sims pry open the locked drawer.

“Something strange about these belts,” Cooke said. “Rough-finished, as if painted with something.”

“Hold on. Sarge is looking at something,” Moose to Sims.

Cooke ignored them, and walked closer to the now open door to look at the belts in the sunlight.

“Weird,” mumbled Cooke, curious. “That’s dried blood on this belt,” he said, coming back into the room.

Lee walked into the room, a disgusted look on his face. He’d finished examining the bodies outside.

“Sergeant Cooke, those headless guys all got puncture wounds. Multiple puncture wounds. All over their fucking bodies. It’s wild. I don’t know what did it. Punctures all the same size. Especially on their feet and legs.”

Cooke glanced at him, questions in his stare. He said nothing. Cooke walked outside again with one of the belts, scrutinizing the stains on it.

“Definitely blood.” Cooke was fascinated and couldn’t understand what had happened.

A smaller clinging sound, like a stuck toaster releasing. Tyson had opened the drawer. He reached in and pulled out a bulky item wrapped in loose fabric. He laid the heavy package on the table, and unwrapped it. Inside was an electric drill.

“An electric drill?” Tyson questioned, perplexed, surprised to see that kind of equipment. The others heard him.

Cooke heard too, and walked back inside. The four men all stared at the table. They looked at the drill, then at each other. Tyson fingered the drill cautiously, as if checking if it was alive. Nobody spoke or moved.

Moose put the light on the table top. The sudden illumination got everyone’s attention. The surface of the table looked as if someone had finger painted dark colors on it. The drill lay on the table.

“Jeezzzz,” expelled Lee. He cleared his throat by coughing. “Is there a bit in it?”

They were all thinking the same thing.

Cooke put the belt he held on the table. He reached for the drill, pulling it towards him. Moose shone the light. The drill chuck held a bit.

Cooke looked back at the surface of the table. “Blood,” he mumbled.

“I bet they drilled those fucking bastards,” said Lee.

“Fucking A,” Moose agreed.

“Shitttt,” said Tyson.

For several seconds, nothing else was said. They all imagined it. The contemplation of brutality iced over the room.

“Lemme look at those bodies again,” Cooke said. He went outside, followed by the others. He knelt beside one of the bodies. Lee had carried the electric drill outside. Cooke snatched the drill from Lee’s hands, held it up above the corpse, looked at the drill, at the bit, then back at the corpse, several times, and then handed the drill back to Lee.