The Soldier's Snitch

Prologue

CALLEN

“YOU NEED TO go. Leave me,” I tell the old man for the third time. And for the third time he pretends he can’t understand my English.

Belai, a village elder, sits still on the ground beside the bed, not going anywhere, his riverbed face turned toward me trying to mask his pity.

Behind him, his wife, Nuria, wraps flatbread in a cloth with hands that don’t shake.

Their boy, Sameen, sits against the far wall with his knees drawn up and his eyes huge, holding the tin cup he’s brought me water in for six days like it’s the most important appointment the world could have given him: my personal water boy.

A good family. Kind hearts. An entire misunderstood culture buried here deep in the village of Teret, in the Republic of Kesara of the East African region.

Their people are being punished for crimes that were never committed.

An entire century of lineage handed over to men with guns in their hands and hate in their hearts.

By nightfall, Teret will be conquered. The people who can’t outrun the guns, slain.

My eyes are burning. Sweat or tears, I can’t tell anymore. They’ve been running into the cuts on my face for so long that the sting has become expected. Comforting even. Feeling pain means I’m still alive.

I blink and the lamp smears into a long gold streak and then resolves again into a flame the size of a thumbnail sitting in a dish of oil on the dirt floor, throwing more shadow than light.

The shadows are the only thing in this hut with any energy left.

They climb the mud walls and pool in the thatch, leaning over me like they’re waiting for the part where I stop talking for good.

My condition isn’t improving. Six days of recovery has felt more like prolonging the inevitable.

My leg is worse and the hole in my side is much worse, but the pain has stopped being a stranger.

It’s a roommate. A companion at this point.

I know its habits—how it flares when I breathe too deep, my cracked ribs wailing in protest. Or the way the pain goes quiet…

sly right before the fever-tide rolls back in, the room spinning as I dip in and out of consciousness, my throbbing bullet wound the steady cadence of sanity I try to grasp onto.

We’ve made our arrangements, the pain and I. I let it have my body. It lets me keep, for now, the few thoughts I’ve got left worth keeping.

Melissa…the smell of her long, dark hair—coconut. Her lotion, vanilla. Her perfume, rich with citrus and strawberries. These are the random thoughts swimming through as I lie on my deathbed. My beautiful wife, who hates to cook, always smells like food.

A different smell snaps me back to reality.

It’s pungent, redolent of vinegar and sugar in the hut.

Sharp, sour, yet sickeningly sweet, cutting under the woodsmoke and the wound-rot and the green bitter paste Nuria packs into my side twice a day.

I don’t know where the vinegar’s coming from.

It’s not Nuria’s homemade remedy. I’ve been trying to make sense of it for two days, in the lucid stretches, and I can’t.

Somehow that small unsolved thing bothers me more than the dying does.

A man deserves to know what he’s smelling at the end.

I keep meaning to ask if Nuria and Belai, my saviors, my merciful caretakers, smell it too.

But I’m afraid of the answer because I already know it.

It’s in my head. The infection is too deep.

I’m too far gone. The fever-craze has me smelling things. Next, I’ll be seeing things.

I’m starving. I haven’t eaten anything since the crash.

Yet when Nuria holds the flatbread near my mouth, it turns my stomach so hard I have to look away, because my broken body has decided food is the enemy now.

My body is at war with itself and losing on both sides.

Starving and sick at the thought of bread.

That’s sepsis. I’ve got enough field medicine to read my own chart, and the chart says I don’t have weeks. Maybe not even days…

Because the gunshots are whispers in the wind.

And the breeze is headed our way.

“Belai,” I wheeze out. His name costs me air I don’t have. “Listen to me. You have to go. You hear that—”

“I hear it.”

Out past the cloth that hangs over the doorway and beyond the persistently barking dog, somewhere down the valley, the sound is vibrant: the popcorn coughs of rifle fire.

Not close yet. But much closer than yesterday.

Those same men burned the village two ridges east the night before last; I watched the glow through a gap in the thatch.

Belai watched me watch it and neither of us said the obvious thing: the glow was coming this way and the pace was picking up.

The enemy isn’t just conquering. They’re celebrating as the peaceful villages surrounding us burn like wrongly accused witches at the stake.

And here I am helpless to defend anyone, still clutching my brothers’ dog tags.

I’ve been holding them for six days. My fingers cramped around them so tight they’ve morphed into a claw. I’ve had to use the other hand to pry them open and then they just close again, like the grip is the last order my body’s still willing to follow.

Four sets. Taylor. Ferro. Cordova. Gray.

Four men I knew the way you only know men you’ve been buried in the same dirt and boredom and terror with, men whose kids I’ve held, whose bad coffee I’ve drunk at three in the morning, whose worst stories I know and have promised never to repeat.

Four sets of tags, and I went back across that burning hillside on a dislocated shoulder and a leg that didn’t work to collect them, crawling, because I was not going to leave my brothers nameless in the dirt of a place the maps say we were never standing in.

Four. Not five.

I couldn’t reach Lex. He went down on the far side of the wreck, past where the fuel had caught, and the heat coming off it was a wall.

I got close enough to see his hand but not close enough to take what I came for, and then the men started down the slope and I had to choose between Lex’s tags and my own breathing. I chose breathing.

I’ve been choking on that choice for six days. Five of my SEAL brothers are dead and I could only bring four tags back.

I failed.

The crash comes back to me in pieces. It won’t come in order.

It comes when the tide goes out, in flashes that don’t connect—the bird yawing hard right when there was no reason to yaw, the rotor note climbing into a scream I’d never heard a healthy aircraft make, the white flash, the door that was suddenly not a door, the ground.

And under all of it, every time, the same thought surfacing like something dead coming up out of a lake: it didn’t malfunction.

I keep landing there and I keep flinching off it, because it’s not a thought a man like me is allowed to have.

But it didn’t feel like a machine failing.

It felt deliberate. Aimed. And the thing my fever keeps serving up, the detail I can’t stop chewing: the pilot.

A warrant officer I’d never flown with, Wiles, brought in last-minute, and when I climbed aboard and clasped his hand he looked at me, held my eyes a half second too long, with an expression that’s haunted me since the helicopter went down.

Remorse…that’s what that face looked like.

He was remorseful before the crash. Like he was sorry for a sin he hadn’t committed yet, but already knew he was going to.

I didn’t think anything of it then. You don’t have the luxury to think as a Navy SEAL.

You trust. You trust the man in the seat.

You trust the chain of command. You trust the orders that put you both in the air or under the water.

That’s the job, that’s the whole architecture of the job.

Morality is held in the hand of someone far higher up the chain, someone who dons more stars than you.

You trust that they’ve weighed the situation and outcome and deem the mission necessary.

This is the way of it.

But I’m not as sure about the architecture as I was a week ago.

I can’t run. I can’t even stand. But this family that took me in mere breaths from death, and have blessed me with one more week of reflection, have working legs. It’s time for them to run.

“You take Nuria and Sameen, and you take that—” I tip my chin at the bundle by the door, the cloth-wrapped stack of pages Belai’s been adding to every night by this same lamp, his small hand moving across them in a language I can’t read, while the world he’s writing about burns down around us.

“You carry that out of here. And the black box from the helicopter. One day, tell this story. For me and my brothers. Tell them something went wrong. Something evil happened.”

He gestures toward me to stand, as if I can.

I shake my head. “No, not me. A dead man’s just weight, Belai.

You’ve got a family and you’ve got a hundred years of your people in those pages and no room in your arms for the fool who fell out of the sky and brought it down on your heads.

Leave me. Let me do one more thing right before I’m done. ”

For a moment, I foolishly think it’s landed. But this man is more stubborn than me. He bows his head. His lips move, and I understand he isn’t answering me, he’s praying, in the language I can’t understand.

Then he reaches out and takes my face in both his hands tenderly, the way you’d hold a son. Such strength and compassion in a single touch, bringing me back twenty years ago to when I was a boy and my father held my attention this way. Belai says: “No.”

That’s all. No. And his hands don’t let go.

I’m still collecting the breath to fight him on it when the dog outside stops barking.