“Where’s this coming from? The MoHa thing? Because that ain’t real life, Jack. Fieldwork is—”
“I know, I know. I just want to feel like I’m doing something.”
“You are.”
“You know what I mean, Rick. Doing something. I’ve given it a lot of thought. At least let me put it on the table in front of Gerry.”
Bell considered this, then shrugged. “Okay. I’ll set it up.”
Nine thousand fucking miles and still no beer, Sam Driscoll thought, but only for a moment as he reminded himself yet again he could have just as easily made the hop home in a rubber bag. A couple of inches either way, the docs had said, and the splinter would’ve shredded either his brachial, cephalic, or basilic vein, and he might have bled out long before reaching the Chinook. Lost two along the way, though. Barnes and Gomez had taken the full brunt of the RPG. Young and Peterson had caught some minor leg shrapnel but had managed to climb aboard the Chinook on their own. From there it had been a short hop to FOB Kala Gush, where he parted company with the team, save Captain Wilson and his shattered leg, who accompanied him first to Ramstein Air Base, then on to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston. As it turned out, both needed the kind of orthopedic surgery in which Brooke specialized. And Demerol. The nurses here were real good with the pain meds, which had gone a long way to helping him forget that five days earlier he’d had a hunk of Hindu Kush granite sticking out of his shoulder.
The mission had been a bust, at least in terms of their main objective, and Rangers weren’t in the business of failing, their fault or not. Providing the intel had been right and their target had ever been in the cave at all, he’d slipped away, probably less than a day before they’d arrived. Still, Driscoll reminded himself, given the shit storm they came through on the way back to the LZ, it could have been a lot worse. He’d lost two but had come back with thirteen. Barnes and Gomez. Goddamn it.
The door opened, and in rolled Captain Wilson in a wheelchair. “Got a minute for a visitor?”
“You bet. How’s the leg?”
“Still broken.”
Driscoll chuckled at that. “Gonna be that way for a while, sir.”
“No pins or plates, though, so I got that going for me. How about you?”
“Don’t know. Docs are being cagey. Surgery went fine, no vascular damage, which woulda been bad mojo. Joint and bone’s a lot easier to fix, I guess. You hear from the guys?”
“Yeah, they’re good. Sitting on their asses, and rightly so.”
“Young and Peterson?”
“Both fine. Light duty for a few weeks. Listen, Sam, something’s going down.”
“Your face tells me it ain’t a visit from Carrie Underwood.”
“’Fraid not. CID. Two agents back at Battalion.”
“Both of us?”
Wilson nodded. “They’ve pulled our after-actions. Anything I should know about, Sam?”
“No, sir. Got a parking ticket outside the gym last month, but other than that I’ve been a good boy.”
“All kosher in the cave?”
“Standard shit, Major. Just like I wrote it.”
“Well, anyway, they’ll be up this afternoon. Play it straight. Should work out.”
It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes for Driscoll to realize what the CID goons were after: his head. Who and why, he didn’t know, but somebody had pointed the bone at him for what went on in the cave.
“And how many sentries did you encounter?”
“Two.”
“Both killed?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so then you made your way into the cave proper. How many of the occupants were armed?” one of the investigators asked.
“After we policed everything up, we counted—”
“No, we mean upon your entry into the cave. How many of them were armed?”
“Define ‘armed.’”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Sergeant. How many armed men did you encounter when you entered the cave?”
“It’s in my report.”
“Three, correct?”
“That sounds right,” Driscoll replied.
“The rest were asleep.”
“With AKs under the pillows. You guys don’t get it. You’re talking about prisoners, right? It doesn’t work that way, not out in the real world. You get yourself into a firefight inside a cave with just one bad guy, and you end up with dead Rangers.”
“You didn’t attempt to incapacitate the sleeping men?”
Driscoll smiled at that. “I’d say they were thoroughly incapacitated.”
“You shot them in their sleep.”
Driscoll sighed. “Boys, why don’t you just say what you came to say?”
“Have it your way. Sergeant, there’s sufficient evidence in your after-action report alone to charge you with the murder of unarmed combatants.