The Watch (6 page)

I say: No point telling you to keep a look out, but still …

He cracks a smile and shoves a wad of chew into his mouth. He’s a veteran of Iraq, a man of few words, capable, efficient. I’m not worried about leaving him in the tower by himself.

Back on the ground, I run with Whalen past the brick-and-mortar command post, then follow the Hescos back toward the ECP. We slow down by the shelter of the mortar pit where Manny Ramirez and Pratt have secured the gun with canvas. Pratt has his M-4 tucked
inside his poncho liner, while Ramirez stands some distance away, pissing into one of the PVC tubes jammed into the ground for that purpose. He’s bending over with his back to the storm, but the wind arcs his urine way past where he’s aiming it. He buttons up his fly with a grin as we approach. Whoo! he says. Whoo …

Whalen coughs and spits out a mouthful of sand. Motherfucker, he says to no one in particular; then he repeats himself for emphasis.

This is
fun
, First Sarn’t! Ramirez shouts. He prances around Whalen with an exaggerated mince.

Pratt doesn’t say anything. His dark leathery skin looks gray; his eyes are bloodshot and streaming.

You okay, Pratt? I ask.

M’fine, Suh, he says. This ain’t nuthin’. I worked through worse storms in the fishin’ fleet.

Snowstorms?

Yeah.

I try to see the analogy, then give up.

Ramirez shouts: You expecting an attack tonight, Sir? I’m sorta goin’ crazy doin’ nuthin’. I haven’t fired a shot in days, I swear to God.

Whalen says: You got gunner’s tourette, Ramirez.

No shit, First Sarn’t, Ramirez says. Whatever that means. He asks me again: So …?

I say: Maybe. Maybe they’ll come for us tonight. I got a feeling.

You gotta respect those feelings, Sir, you know what I’m saying?

Pratt says: Be perfect weather for it—if it happens.

Ramirez laughs happily and slaps his thighs. Finally! he exults. Time to kill some badass motherfuckers. I’m stoked!

A gust of wind whips away his bandana and he spends the next few moments cursing wretchedly while trying to tie it around his face again.

Fuckin’ sand in my eye! he yells.

You’re an open target, Ramirez, Whalen says calmly, stating fact.

Like hell I am. Aah! Fuck this.

It might help if you put on your wraparounds, I suggest, stating the obvious.

Can’t see when I have them on, Sir. No peripheral vision.

Jes’ put ’em on, Ram, Pratt says.

Pratt’s an Athabascan fisherman from north of Fairbanks, and functionally illiterate. He’s also the most lethal fighter in the platoon. Rumor goes, before he joined the army, he once waded into a dockyard scrim and disemboweled three men as casually as if he were in some barroom brawl. He always carries an ice pick tucked in his belt and rarely speaks; when he does, you have to lean close to catch what he’s saying. In contrast, Ramirez rarely shuts up. By his own admission, he used to be a drug runner along the Arizona-Mexico border. Strictly part-time, he’s quick to qualify. Strictly part-time, Sir. The rest of the time I worked the night shift at the local 7-Eleven. A bored restlessness is his signature style; he’s a deadly shot, a crack poker player, and he seldom sleeps. Together, Pratt and Ramirez make an unpredictable team, and the other men give them a wide berth.

The base is shaped like an oblong, and Whalen and I circle around the entire perimeter one more time, past the sandbagged mortar pits, the burn-shitters, the plywood B-huts, stopping to check each guard position until we return to where we began. And all the while, the banshee wind scourges the base. I glance back at the plastic shitter screens billowing crazily in the storm.

What do you think? I ask Whalen again as we take shelter behind the medical tent.

I don’t like it.

Me neither.

We’re completely blinded, he says. They can take us out any way they please.

How? If we can’t see anything, neither can they.

They could surround us and we wouldn’t even know it, he says tersely. It’s my nightmare scenario. Three-hundred-sixty-degree catastrafuck.

Whalen’s thirty-seven, a career soldier and another veteran of Iraq, like Espinosa, and I listen to everything he has to say because he’s always sound. All the same, I rib him now.

You’ve been watching too many movies, First Sarn’t.

He laughs. You asked.

I say: At the same time, I don’t know what else we can do in this situation but wait it out. I’m clean out of ideas.

It’s all that college learning, Lieutenant, Suh, he says mockingly.

You’re prob’ly right, I tell him, thinking for a moment. Then I make up my mind: Wake up Grohl and Spitz and send them out to replace the ANA. I’m pulling the Afghans back. They’re useless in a situation like this.

All right. I’m also going to wake the Cap’n.

No. Let him be.

He hesitates. As First Sergeant, he answers directly to Evan Connolly, Alpha Company’s Captain, but we both know that Connolly’s not the best leader in a crisis, so Whalen’s had very good reason to seek me out first, and I’ve the same good reason to avoid waking Connolly.

Whalen continues to look worried. I’ll wake Lieutenant Ellison, then, he says.

Nope. Let him sleep as well. He had the last watch.

Lieutenant Frobenius, he says: I don’t know about this.

C’mon, First Sarn’t. We can handle this.

Whalen leaves, and I make my way back to the ANA position. As I pass Folsom and Mitchell, I peer out at the swirling murk. I can’t see the concertina wire at all, and when I turn my head and run my eyes down the Hescos, I can hardly make out the guard tower. There’s something wrong. I can sense it.

I hear a whimper behind me and turn around. Shorty, the platoon’s adopted year-old pup, nuzzles my leg, his tail between his legs. Shorty’s a misnomer: he’s already massive, a cross between a mastiff and some kind of Afghan hound. I can’t imagine how big he’s going
to be full-grown. I bend down and pat him. His bushy coat is matted with sand and dust. He whimpers again, then growls, showing his fangs. He’s pointing at the wire perimeter, tail held ramrod straight behind him hound-dog fashion. I feel the hairs on the back of my neck prick up. He growls again and begins to bark nonstop. There’s something going on out there all right.

Whalen rejoins me. He’s panting. I can’t believe how quickly he’s made it back. Grohl and Spitz are on their way, and Sergeant Tanner’s at the ECP, he says rapidly. I glimpse the whites of his eyes flash behind his bandana. I can tell he’s worried. We begin running toward the ANA position. The dog paces alongside, then darts out ahead of us into the maw of the storm. We hear him barking wildly.

The ANA turn and watch us approach. They don’t move until we’re standing right before them. See anything? Whalen says jerkily, pantomiming the question as he gestures toward the perimeter. Fazal Ahmed removes his face cloth. He looks disgusted. His two companions do the same and stand by with surly expressions. None of them answers Whalen.

A wave of irritation invades me, and I seize Fazal Ahmed’s arm and draw him to me so roughly that the others begin to protest. Fazal Ahmed resists, his eyes filling with rage and pain. He continues to remain stubbornly silent, and suddenly he jerks and falls against my shoulder. I hear one of the others shout as I attempt to prop him back up—then let go of him abruptly. His helmet slaps off his head with a neat hole drilled through the back. Bits and pieces of brain slop down the collar of his tunic. The other two ANA swivel in tandem and gawk in the direction of the wire. Initially all I see in the brown darkness is a single muzzle flash. Then a fan of red tracers begins arcing through the haze. Grohl and Spitz come running up just as a turbaned silhouette darts through an inexplicable gap in the wire. Whalen hollers: TAKE COVER! WE’RE BEING BREACHED! He dives behind the sandbag walls that surround the ANA’s position. Something shrieks over our heads and detonates against a B-hut: it’s
an 88 mm round. The two remaining ANA are still standing in plain view as if frozen. Then the enemy opens up from about fifty meters away. I hear AK-47 rounds and rocket-propelled grenades. The ANA finally hit the ground and begin crawling toward their machine gun, but Grohl and Spitz beat them to it. We begin returning fire while enemy bullets rake up the Hescos all around us. There are others taking up position beside me. Most of them are in gym shorts and flip-flops: they must have come pelting out from their cots. Someone detonates the Claymores, and they engulf the man in the turban. As he disappears in an explosion of dust and smoke, Pfc. Jackson begins firing meaty M-203 rounds: good man; it’s the perfect antidote for an attack under these conditions. From the guard tower, Espinosa goes cyclic with an Mk-19 belt-fed automatic launcher grenade—firing without stopping. Almost immediately I hear the retaliatory crump of a rocket-propelled grenade, and the guard tower buckles and disappears in a black pall. That RPG came from a different direction from the ones up front pinning us down. We’ve been taking fire from the north and the west and now someone else begins firing RPG rounds from the east. I replay Whalen’s nightmare scenario in my head: we’re surrounded. And we can’t retaliate effectively. We’re all firing blind.

Shorty zips past, heading for the B-huts. GET AWAY, DOG! someone shouts. The dog’s howling like crazy but the sound merges with the storm. Tracers light up the darkness. The enemy’s aim is so precise, they have us pinned down. They must have started moving into position as soon as the storm began. Ahead of me, Grohl and Spitz are working away methodically with the .50, spitting rounds. I can hear them swearing. The two ANA flank them, firing away with M-4s until one of the guns jams. The man spits into the breech of the gun, trying to clear it, but it’s no use. He throws it away, loses his nerve, and sprints past me for the brick-and-mortars. He doesn’t make it. I take over his position, firing short bursts. Whalen pulls me down behind the Hescos. You wanna die young? he snarls. His face is red
with exertion; his bandana’s fallen off. The other ANA starts, then slumps to his knees. I grab him by the vest and pull him down. The ground is littered with empty shells. Things are happening too fast.

The air clears momentarily, and I glimpse Connolly to my left standing behind Mitchell and Folsom, screaming grid coordinates into his radio. I shout to him and race over through incoming rounds.

He stands up, fires a round, ducks down.

We’re in a fucking shooting gallery! he screams. And I can’t even call in the birds!

No shit, Sir, I yell back. They’d wipe out in this storm.

Where’d they come from?

They must have used the ratlines down the mountains.

Figures. Okay, I’m going to circle round to the back. See how things are with Ellison.

He flicks a glance at me. You should’ve woken me the moment you suspected a fucking TIC situation, Lieutenant. We’ll talk later.

A mortar shell thuds into the Hescos just as he takes off. He stumbles, catches himself, and runs on. White phosphorus residue from the shell washes over the ground. I watch him disappear from sight, then take up position beside Mitchell and Folsom. I’m seething from his rebuke, partly because he’s right. I should’ve had Whalen wake him.

I glimpse a dark silhouette dart past the wire. Mitchell screams at the same time: THEY’RE PAST THE WIRE!

Folsom starts cursing. Their M-240’s jammed up. The barrel’s smoking.

Come on, come on … he says urgently. Frickin’ come on …

He manages to get the gun working again.

I aim and empty my M-4. The silhouette staggers back and falls against the wire. I realize I’ve run through all my ammunition save one magazine.

I hear the distinctive snap of a bullet inches away.

Folsom jerks back, then turns almost lazily and crumples into my arms. There’s a hole where his nose used to be. Blood spews out. I try
to hold him up, but his head lolls to one side and his eyes slide back in their sockets. He’s gone. A gust of sand sweeps over us.

I lay him down and slide in next to Mitchell, feeding him the belt. His hands are raw, sweaty. He stares at Folsom.

Keep going, I tell him. Just keep going.

He steadies the M-240, stolid, workmanlike. For a cherry, he’s holding up all right. He glances at me and shouts: This is
nuts!

I can feel my adrenaline pumping. Don’t think about it, I yell, then begin to cough. There’s sand between my scarf and my mouth. A thick coating of dust sheathes my face. I’m having difficulty breathing. I clear my throat and spit. I’m slathered in Folsom’s blood.

Two more ghostly apparitions cross the wire. The M-240 stutters, then jams again. Mitchell struggles with the breech of the gun. It’s coated with sand and grit. I snatch up my M-4 and aim at the enemy. Before I can fire, one falls, claimed by a Claymore, but the other seems to float right through the sandstorm while coolly firing an AK-47 with one hand. A jagged line of bullets rips up the Hescos. Dirt smacks me in the face. Then Mitchell clutches his elbow and yanks back from the M-240. He’s hit. Another bullet slams into his chest but his body armor saves him. Even so, he spins around. Blood belches down his arm. He squats on the ground in a stupefied daze. I’m about to yell at him to fall back when our senior medic, Doc Taylor, comes loping up. I empty my last magazine to give him cover, then catch the 9 mil that Doc throws at me. I’ve lost sight of the other militant, but a fire team sets up beside us and starts blazing away with an LMG. All around, every man in the company is emptying magazines into the darkness. The noise is deafening, the crack of guns somehow amplified by the howl of the storm. Red tracer ribbons stream back and forth, forming an illuminated web overhead. Incoming bullets spark off surfaces. We’re taking heavy fire, and it’s concentrated, accurate. And it’s coming from all directions.

Doc’s wrapping a tourniquet around Mitchell’s arm, but the sand’s making things tricky. Mitchell’s in agony: I catch a glimpse
of white bone piercing through a tattoo spelling HEATHEN. Doc packs the bloody wound cavity with Kerlix, then straps a bandage around it and slides an IV into the other arm. It’s a miracle he hasn’t been hit yet.