When Totems Fall (40 page)

The best of the outcomes playing wildly in Zeb's fertile mind amounted to a nuclear stalemate, a situation in which America regained absolute fire and guidance authority over its five-hundred-fifty deployed assets. In this version of the storyline there was no holocaust. Cooler heads would prevail. Some kind of diplomatic solution would arise; some gesture offered to allow both sides to back away with pride intact. This was the best of all possibilities. Tragically, the data stream was indicating another outcome altogether. The parade of ones and zeroes Zeb was watching and interacting with was beautiful. He had no idea anyone on the current world stage was coding with such complexity and power. What he observed before him had previously been considered as theory, nothing more. Now, clearly, it was very possible. And incredibly dangerous.

It was also, as Zeb was now learning, very flawed.

Zeb couldn't yet allow his concerns to be known in the room. He needed more time to spin out the possibilities before making a statement to his partners. What he did know was this: upon cracking open the digital chains holding America hostage, any access regained would be of the limited kind, something less than absolute control. Beijing would retain lock-down capability over an unknown percentage of the U.S. arsenal but was no longer able to direct these weapons for their own purposes. China could stop the U.S. from firing some of her nukes. That was all. A full lockout or full capabilities. In these two cases the likelihood of hostilities diminished greatly; the latter equation being what Cold War planners referred to as Mutually Assured Destruction. The current situation—some vague middle-ground—was the place where warring became virtually guaranteed.

No, this was not the best of all worlds.

It might, in fact, be the worst.

First Strike.

It's come to this,
Dalton thought to himself.

God, no.

How did this happen?

The gravity of the moment struck him, forcing breath from his lungs as he gasped, swallowing hard at the thoughts he now faced. In an instant the mission had changed and drastically so. He knew it, felt it; responsibilities he couldn't begin to handle and an emotionally exhausting accountability, shaking him deeply. So, he did what engineers do. He reviewed the data again.

Chinese deployment: roughly one-hundred-eighty nuclear assets.

Best estimate of forty-two percent retrieval rate on our side.

What... two-hundred-twenty-eight... no, maybe two-hundred thirty warheads.

He lifted his head, staring forward with the realization.

It was a crap shoot.

A total and complete crap shoot.

Sure, we "win", but only because we have a few more bombs and a little better range. Nobody can drop these things out of the sky, so it's only a matter of time before everybody gets their throats cut wide open as the last few hundred years of human civilization bleeds out on uber-radiated ground.

The unfolding drama of launch scenarios played out furiously in his mind's eye. Flight time, detonation, casualty numbers, environmental and worldwide economic impact. Reactions of nuclear partners on each side. Every American launch countered by a devastating return volley from Beijing. Of all the visions he had been called upon to foresee in his military career, none carried the weight that this one did. It was an apocalyptic nightmare, unleashed in his head and gaining speed and ferocity with every new second. If there was one time in his life Zeb wished he had a normal brain, this would be it.

FIFTY THREE

A single, electronic beep woke Zeb from his vivid visualizations and their deeply disconcerting outcomes.

C:>inserttext>Do You Fear God?

C:>|......

The aggravating question begged
for a response. Any efforts made toward answering it gave him only more pause. Facing death—there was nothing new about this to him, but the weight of so many others' fates? This was something wholly different. Far too substantial to carry on his own. As the cursor blinked on screen, the burden only increased exponentially.

From his position a few feet away Loch surmised a moral confusion growing in Zeb. He didn't like it. Not at all.

"
Hey.
What are you doing, Dalton? Keep your head doon. Do your job."

Loch's inquiry and the sense of command it carried snapped Zeb back to attentiveness.

Typing:
Repeat last transmission, please.

Beep.

C:>inserttext>Do You Fear God?

C:>|......

Zeb, surprised by the repeated—and to his mind nonsensical—line, paused again before proceeding. His inaction sent an undesired signal, bringing a swift, practiced movement in response.

Loch drew his sidearm, aimed squarely at Zeb's head.

The HK15 was chambered, cocked, and ready. The sergeant flipped the safety off, the subtle click signaling that events in the room were moving well past the point of no return.

Sanchez' reaction, five feet behind Zeb and to his right, came equally as swift.

Her pistol was brandished now as well, trained immovably on the Scotsman's face, a harrowing red dot staining the place between his eyes where a small but lethal hole would open, were she to proceed. Without flinching she commanded a reason for his sudden, unexplained actions.

"What the hell are you doing, Loch? Loch, dammit, answer me!"

"Shut uuup! Shut uuup! Put your gun down, noooow! Or I splatter him all aboot this lovely place."

Loch seethed, speaking through clenched teeth. His tone, though quiet, shouted that he despised the man's very presence.

"I knew you wouldn't haaave what it takes. It's all one big, recurring theme for you, isn't it?!"

"Fifteen men," Loch shook, spitting venom with his words. "Your weakness. Your softness killed fifteen good men. Soldiers. Warriors, far better than you ever will be...
Lieutenant.
"

Sanchez tried to grasp what was happening, to garner some basic reconciliation of the conflict taking place only a few feet away.

"Zeb, what on earth is he talking about? Give me one good reason to not blow this psycho-soldier away, right now. Just one. C'mon."

Dalton uttered one word.

"Fallujah."

"Thaat's right," Loch said, disdain dripping from every syllable. "Or didn't your new friend let you in on the tragic tale?"

__________________________________

The City of Mosques
was not a peaceful place. American and Coalition forces arrived in strength in the Spring of 2003 only to find that moderate Iraqi civic and religious leaders had already abandoned it en masse. Much of the general populace followed suit, leaving a power vacuum into which the insurgency quickly coalesced and organized. Most of what remained at this point were hardened, militarized masses and few friendly factions with which to collaborate. Not much to do in the way of winning hearts and minds. Mainly enemies to engage and destroy. This ethos of armed resistance and constant chaos was made only more dangerous with the final official actions of their former leader, Saddam Hussein. Upon releasing every last criminal and degenerate from Abu Ghraib Prison—just thirty minutes east of town—his "pardons" flooded the area with an even more violent substrata. The sum of these factors added up to a hostile, unstable setting in which the U.S. Military was expected to establish order as well as win the goodwill of the people. Six weeks in the whole thing exploded.

The crowd of nearly two hundred Iraqis
stood outside the gates of the local secondary school, demanding it to be opened and courses reconvened. At first a concerned neighborhood response born out of fears that temporary military occupation of the grounds might become the new normal, the protest had transformed from there into a tragic hailstorm of screams, bullets, and death. American personnel from the 82nd Airborne, stationed on the rooftop, had opened fire. Seventeen dead. Another seventy mortally wounded. Naturally, each side claimed they were fired upon first.

Two days later—April 30, another group returned to protest the heartbreaking event, to make their voices heard. Gunfire erupted again and two more Iraqi lives were lost. From there Fallujah devolved into a tempest, one that would remain just under the boiling point for the next eleven months. As with water in a pot, the constant heat and agitation ultimately produced an expansive, volatile reaction.

__________________________________

"Only a few weeks later,"
Zeb said. "We went in. After the Blackwater incident."

Dalton, trying his best to tell the story, desperately wanted to avoid re-living the nightmare personally.

"Operation Vigilant Resolve," Sanchez noted.

He paused, nodding his head.

"The guys were just protecting a food delivery," Zeb went on. "The insurgents trapped their vehicle and pulled them out. One by one they shot 'em and then burned them, right there on the road. That wasn't enough. Afterward, they dragged their charred bodies through the streets and then strung them up on the spans of a bridge across the Euphrates."

"Blackwater Bridge," Sanchez breathed, remembering the grisly tale, passed among the majority of the occupying force at one time or another.

"Yeah," Zeb confirmed. "That would be the one."

Zeb didn't move, his gaze unaltered. In his mind, in his emotions, he was back in that hot zone, the hell he had run from for the better part of a decade. His voice lowered.

"Officially I was Army Signal Corps. In reality I operated as a special strategic asset, embedded with whoever needed my odd skill sets the most. The truth is, I never even attended OCS. My rank was all a part of the deal and for the most part kept under wraps."

The revelation that Zeb wasn't really an officer, much less even a lowly lieutenant, wasn't news to Loch. He'd been brought into the know back at Clark. Yet it only underscored his dismissal of this man's place in
his
Army. With trigger finger still in place the barrel of his pistol was leveled, ready, only a few feet away from Zeb's head.

Dalton continued, committed to getting it all out now.

"That day—April 6, 2004—I was assigned with a patrol from 1st Marines. They showed us pictures from the bridge... all part of our op prep. A solid week of hot intel told us this local Al Qaeda commander ran the show in the Hai al Askiri District. As a direct report to al-Zarqawi we knew that if we took him out, we'd climb right up their org chart in no time."

"But that's not how it went doooon, now did it,
LT
?"

"No, it wasn't," Zeb admitted. "My job was to get us through the labyrinth of side streets and rooftops, the hidden corridors of the district. I must have reviewed every square inch of the place a thousand times. Satellite and ground imagery. Maps, utilities, schematics. I had it all down cold. When a piece of data: people appearing around a corner, snipers overhead, wind change, anything adjusted, I could tell where it might lead next and then what to alter in our operational approach."

Zeb broke, his head dropping an inch or so, his voice weakened and hollowing now with every word.

"It wasn't enough."

One more, deeper breath.

"The gates to the courtyard flew open," he whispered. "It was dusty, like every other space in the city. Wind, sand. Another private wasteland with a fence around it. We were on target, on clock. The plan was to be exposed to the roof line for about seven seconds, that was all."

Another slight pause. Zeb was visibly choked up, so shaken by the haunting, unforgiving images.

"Couldn't have been more than seven, maybe eight years old...

... came out of a dark corner of the house. So fast. Though way too much weapon for his little body, he leveled the AK47 right at my chest. I froze. I had visualized this scenario more than enough times to know what to do. I just couldn't get myself to pull the trigger."

In great pain, Dalton kept going.

"... neither could Strickland.

He stepped in front of me, shoved me through the open window a foot or so to my right. The squad's attention moved for the slightest, briefest second. By the time I'd rolled over twice and come to a stop in the empty room against a rickety chair, it was over. In the instant of my hesitation and the courage of a young marine, the courtyard had become a shooting gallery from above. Everybody. All of them gone. That quick."

"I waited in the shadows," he heaved, words thick with regret. "Their bodies just lay there, empty of life, absent the spark of their personalities, their stories, their... lives."

Dalton wiped his eyes as his voiced trembled.

"Either the enemy didn't know how many we were or they didn't care. Two hours later I had made my way back out, to our outpost, alone."

"Oh my Lord, Zeb," Sanchez broke in. "I had no idea."