Combat Ops

SIXTEEN

I thought I knew everything about Master Sergeant Joe Ramirez. His parents had emigrated from Mexico and had held fast to the old ways. They’d raised him in North Hollywood, California, and had kept him on the straight and narrow path. He was a devout Catholic, an altar boy, a Boy Scout.

In his teenaged years he’d become a computer hacker and had almost gotten busted for identity theft, but he’d been taken under the wing of a detective who’d persuaded him to join the Army. His older brother Enrique had enlisted, and I’d met him — nice guy, quiet demeanor, and a good soldier, as reported by many of his superiors. Ramirez followed in his footsteps.

It wasn’t long before he was tapped for Special Forces, and he now had more experience in Afghanistan than any of us. Two tours as an Army Ranger plus some shorter ops. Old man Gordon had handpicked the kid himself to become a member of the Ghosts, and Ramirez had done a great job when I’d taken him to Waziristan and, later on, into China. He was one of the most levelheaded guys I’d ever served with and the last person on earth I’d thought capable of murder. He was the epitome of an outstanding soldier.

And he’d become my good friend.

“Joey.” I gasped.

“I’ll get him out of here,” he said. “Just have them cover me. I can see the Hummer down there!”

Before I could do anything, he scooped up Hendrickson’s body and started shakily down the mountain. Nolan came running up and cried, “Wait!” He was already sloughing off his medic’s pack.

“Too late,” I said. Then I raised my voice. “Everybody, fall back! Fall back! Let’s go!”

We started a serpentine descent, following the ridge lines and those areas where the outcroppings provided some slight cover from the Taliban behind us.

Treehorn and Brown covered our withdrawal, retreating only when they spotted a guy shouldering an RPG. They vacated their position only seconds before the rocket struck, heaving fiery flashes and pulverized rock.

At the foot of the hills we were met with a curious sight: About a half dozen Afghan National Army troops had driven up in a truck, and beside them was Bronco. He waved me over and cried, “Let’s go, Joe!”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“We’re the cavalry. We’ll cover you.”

“How’d you know we were out here?”

He rolled his eyes, then climbed back into the truck as the Army troops dropped to the ditches and began firing on the advancing Taliban.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“I like it when people owe me,” he said.

The rest of my guys came darting over and, using Bronco’s truck for cover, returned a few more salvos before breaking off to make one last run for the Hummer.

Two more vehicles pulled up, a big Bradley and another Hummer, and rifle squads bolted out: the security team from the construction site.

I talked to the sergeant there, handed over the fight, and jogged back to the Hummer. The earlier wounds in my leg began throbbing again.

Harruck confronted me before I could climb out of the Hummer.

I barely heard what he was barking about. I just spoke over him: “Warris was cut off from us during a cave-in and he’s missing. He might’ve been captured by the Taliban.”

“Say again?”

I did. His jaw fell open, then: “Well, isn’t that goddamned convenient for you!”

“My mission is to capture Zahed. I can and will do that without interference. Our mission tonight was completely within my rights.”

“I sent him up there to relieve you of command.”

“I know. But we got attacked.” Not exactly a lie. Not the full truth, either. “His driver was also killed on the way out of there.”

“And what did you gain?”

I looked back to the Hummer, and Nolan got out, carrying one of the HERF guns.

“This is how they’ve been knocking out our Cross-Coms. Also, I’ll be sending you a rough map of the tunnel complex they’ve got up there. We need a team to blow it up, otherwise they’ll plan their offensive against your school and police station.”

He studied the HERF gun, then faced me. “Are you really trying to help me?”

“Simon, I understand where you’re coming from. I don’t have to like it. With the all crap going down in Helmand, I bet Gordon can’t spare another guy to come out to relieve me. If they got Warris, you need to let me work on that, work on taking out Zahed.”

“And we’re back to square one, with you stirring up the nest and me crying foul.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. I’ll be filing my report. You can read it. You can suggest I’m relieved of command all you want. But I’ll fight you all the way. Keating knows I get results. Hard to argue with that.”

I turned around and walked back toward the truck before he could reply.

At the comm center, Colonel Gordon told me that they’d received a good signal from Warris’s GFTC. Every Ghost operator had a Green Force Tracker Chip embedded beneath his arm. The GFTCs were part of the Identification, Friend or Foe (IFF) system so we knew who was who on the battlefield. Warris was being moved, but the colonel said that Warris’s chip suddenly went dead. Either they’d taken him to a deep cave where the signal was blocked, or they’d cut the chip out of his arm and found a way to deactivate it. If they knew about our Cross-Coms, they might’ve known about our chips…

Back in our billet, I collapsed onto my rack and just lay there a moment, staring at the curved metal ceiling. The guys were removing gear, groaning about aches and pains, and recounting moments from the battle. I glanced over at Ramirez, who was sitting on his bunk, shirtless, with his face buried in his palms.

We both knew the talk was coming.

But all I wanted to do at that moment was sleep. So I draped an arm over my eyes and found myself back in the tunnels, as Warris confronted me with a band of Taliban at his shoulders.

“See, Scott, you never know who’s working for who. I work for the Taliban. And so does Harruck. In fact, the whole Army’s in bed with them, everyone except you. You’re the only idiot who didn’t get the memo.”

I wrote my report in the morning, hating myself with every word I typed. I lied about the time of the attack and about me resisting Warris’s attempts to take my command.

But more important, I lied about Private Thomas Hendrickson’s death. He’d been shot point-blank in the back, but no one would question that. An AK-47 had been used, and seasoned Special Forces operators were vowing that the kid had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hendrickson was a private, a cherry, with barely any experience. That he’d gotten killed would hardly raise a brow. I couldn’t help but do some morbid research on the kid. And what I’d learned just broke my heart.

After a few conversations with the others, I felt certain that no one else had seen Ramirez shoot the kid.

At breakfast, Ramirez avoided me like the plague, and then, afterward, I asked him to join me on a ride up to see the construction site.

Oh, he knew it was coming.

“Maybe we should talk about this elephant in the desert,” he said.

I couldn’t help but snort. “The elephant? You mean the one being ridden by a murderer?”

He slammed the door on the Hummer, and I drove. We left the main gate and headed about halfway down the desert road, and then I pulled off to the side, and we just sat there in the growing heat. I was reminded of the times when my dad was mad at me and would take me out for a drive and a talk. In fact, it dawned on me only then that I was doing the same thing…

After breakfast, I’d put in a call to my sister and brothers and was still waiting to hear back on Dad’s condition. I could only pray for an improvement.

“Scott, before you say anything, can I talk?” Ramirez’s voice was already cracking.

“Go ahead.”

“As soon as you started having problems with Harruck, he came to me and Matt, set up a conference call between us and the battalion commander. Basically, they were trying to recruit us as spies and allies. They were trying to convince us that our mission was going to do more harm than good here.”

I chuckled darkly. “I’m not surprised.”

“You know what we told them to do with that offer…”

“Good.”

“But still, they put a lot pressure on us. I don’t think Matt ever caved in, but I know they’re gunning for you and gunning hard. Not sure if you’ve made an enemy upstairs or what, but I started thinking that maybe this whole mission to get Zahed is just a way for them to get rid of you.”

“Whoa, now you’re getting paranoid.”

“Scott, I don’t think I could do this without you. If you’re gone, I’d just drop out of the Ghosts. I would. I wouldn’t trust anyone else.”

“That’s crazy. But Joey, listen. None of this is justifying what you did — and do you really understand what you did?”

He lowered his head. And my God, he began to cry.

Special Forces operators never say quit. And we certainly do our best NOT to cry.

“He was going to burn us,” he said. “I could tell. I just snapped. And I did it.”

“Did you know anything about him? About how his dad fought in the first Gulf War, about how he’d come from a long line of military guys? Did you know he had a girlfriend who’s pregnant?”

Ramirez shook his head, turning away from me to sink his head deeper into his hands.

“You know, being in Special Forces is one thing. But we were chosen to be in the Ghosts because we don’t just talk about the tenets of being a great soldier, we live by them. We live by the creed. And I quote, ‘I will not fail those with whom I serve. I will not bring shame upon myself or the forces.’”

I guess hearing myself say those words was a little too much to bear. I screamed at the top of my lungs, “JESUS CHRIST, JOEY! JESUS CHRIST! WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know! Please don’t turn me in. I got nothing else. You know that. This is my entire life. Scott, please…”

“I lied in my report. Do you realize the position you’ve put me in? I need to call Gordon and tell him you killed that kid to protect me.”

He backhanded tears from his eyes, then looked at me, trying to catch his breath. “Why do you need to do that?”

“Because I swore an oath. Because you swore an oath.”

“If you go to them, they’ll make me talk. They’ll make me tell everything. You refused to be relieved. That’ll come out. And we’ll both be burned.”

“I know.”

“Then what the hell, Scott?”

“Joey, I just can’t believe any of this…”

“How about I make it easier for you to stay quiet. You can blame it all on me. I’m telling you right now, that if you turn me in, you’ll be hanging from the rope next to me. I’ll make sure of that, not because I want revenge, but because you’re too damned good of a leader for the Ghosts to lose. Don’t you get it, Scott? I killed a guy for you! You can’t just throw your life away now! I killed a guy!”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I really don’t. I thought I had enough going on already. I didn’t expect this. Not from you, Joey. Not from you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Tell that to the kid’s family.”