They didn’t have to follow the trail of tire tracks very far. About two kilometers from where the shooting started, they found an abandoned Isuzu pickup truck. Black smoke was wafting up from around the edges of its still closed hood. Those who are mechanically minded and familiar with automobiles would know this is almost the natural state of repose for most Isuzu products. Even so, the men were careful as they exited their vehicle.
Terrorists of any stripe whether they be ISIS, Al Qaeda, Antifa, Scientologists and possibly Amway, are no strangers to booby traps. This lifeless husk of a vehicle could have any number of deadly party favors hidden inside of it or buried in the sand around it.
The three sets of footprints in the sand, moving north, indicated a hurried scramble to get away as fast as possible. The wide spacing of their strides told any competent hunter that their quarry was running, and Kace was a competent hunter. Growing up in rural South Carolina, if a kid didn’t learn to hunt he may as well have just given up and taken Junior Manners Cotillion. These were classes where women who acted like characters from Gone with the Wind taught children that noisy, bodily emissions were not acceptable as a formal greeting. Considering how many girls took that class, and how he was currently using his hunting skills, he sometimes wondered if he had made the right decision.
The tracks told a story of three men in a big hurry. It was possible that in their rush to put distance between themselves and the Marines they may not have had time to set any traps. That was a comforting thought with some evidence to back it up but unfortunately it is exactly that sort of thinking that can cost a solider a limb.
Kace had Rix call back to base. They would leave the truck to the Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) guys. Checking the Isuzu for bombs was is exactly what those adrenaline freaks considered fun. To them working with bombs was like a rollercoaster that lets you bring fireworks.
“Okay,” Rix said as he began to relay their instructions to Kace, “We are to stay with the pickup to, and I quote, ‘maintain the integrity of a potential source of intelligence.’ Man, at what point after you get your captains bars to stop talking like a person and start talking like a computer? Probably about the same time they insert the pole up your…”
Kace shot him a look. It wasn’t that he disagreed with anything that Rix was saying, he just believes that as commander of the fireteam it is inappropriate for him to encourage criticism of officers higher up on the food chain. The inappropriateness of it all would have been compounded if he started laughing. This was always a lurking possibility once Rix really got rolling on the topic of officers. Somewhere in this guy’s future was either a court-martial for insubordination or an HBO comedy special. Maybe both.
“So, what’re we going to do Corporal sir,” Tuco slung his M249 machine gun behind his shoulders and held it like a yoke. “Are we gonna maintain the integrity of that valuable, made in Japan source of intelligence or are we gonna chase down the real sources of intelligence before they completely disappear. Either way I still make my twelve dollars an hour.”
Kace knew Tuco was right. He knew this because he was actually mulling over the same question in his own head. Tucojust gave voice to it. The truck was a useless, possibly booby trapped husk that had no real value from an intelligence standpoint. The intelligence sources that could provide real information were presumably sprinting across the desert as fast as they could to get away from the fireteam.
It hadn’t escaped Kace’s notice that in the back bed of the pickup was a makeshift, empty, stand that recently had a fairly large gun mounted to it. Judging from the shells he found in the sand, it was a weapon of fifty-caliber, automatic variety. To Kace, this meant there was a possibility that the enemy hadn’t run away, but was hiding somewhere in the dark…waiting for the four of them to bumble into their line of fire.
Kace lowered his goggles and scanned the horizon. The newest night vision technically included a binocular function as well as picture in picture mode. This was a handy feature that allowed the wearer to see two different directions at once. The only thing that would have been better was if the engineers added and X-Ray function (like he used to see advertised in old comic books) and NetFlix access. And while he couldn’t watch The Babysitter on his goggles, he did have a pretty clear view of the enemy’s footprints as they stretched far off into the distance.
Kace ordered his team to stay behind with the vehicles while he followed the tracks. He knew this wasn’t his job. Rix, a rifleman, was the teams designated scout, but they had all been commanded to stay with the Isuzu. Following the enemy into the desert could be interpreted as disobeying a direct order. He couldn’t ask any of his men to do that. If anyone was going to wind up in the stockade eating stuff even MSG couldnt fix, it would be him.
The night vision binoculars allowed him to see the tracks far ahead of him. All three sets of footprints continued their northward trek. The strides indicated that at no point did they stop running, which was tough work in the sand. It was difficult not to admire their cardio health.
He followed the tracks for another kilometer and saw that they led into the ruins of an old city. He took cover at the top of a low dune to assess the situation. One of the things that fascinated Kace the most during Seminary was the historical aspect of the things he learned about the lands mentioned in the Bible. So he knew these ruins weren’t just any city, these were the ruins of Babylon. This was the home of Nebuchadnezzar II, the conqueror of Judah (along with much of the civilized world) and the Caesar of his time.
“Shit,” Kace said, happy that there was nobody around to hear him disgracing the three generations of pastors in his family. It was Babylon. It was fascinating. It was also a perfect place to be ambushed. Looking down from atop his dune, he saw that the tracks stopped before they entered the city. From there they had been deliberately erased.
He didn’t have to wonder why this was the place where the terrorists decided to start hiding their tracks. The situation had the foul, acrid scent of a setup. Looking at the situation objectively, it now feels like the enemy was trying to lure them here. That would explain why the original volley of gunfire went over their heads and why the enemy ran away without a fight, leaving an absurdly easy trail to follow. For all Kace knew there were a hundred Jihadists hiding in the city.
It wasn’t likely they would go to this trouble if all they wanted was the killing of four American troops. This was probably an attempt to take one, or all of them prisoner. Muslim extremist groups valued prisoners. They could either ransom them off or kill them in gross, quasi-religious ways that would get millions of YouTube hits. That made for excellent propaganda and recruiting material. Whichever it was, the things that would happen to them while in the care of a rampaging hoard of infidel hating Islamofascists would probably look a lot like a Rob Zombie movie.
Kace turned away and was going to head back to his team when he was suddenly staring into a hideously distorted, hairy face. It looked like the unholy product of taboo interspecies nookie between Sarah Jessica Parker and a Sasquatch. The creatures long, shaggy face took up his entire field of vision. Its huge watery eyes glowed green in the technologically enhanced light that the night vision goggles provided.
Kace fell backwards, reaching for his rifle and flipping the night vision specs up. About ten feet away was a camel obliviously chewing its cud. Its puzzled Bedouin owner stood next to it. Kace breathed a sigh of relief. He had left his goggles in binocular mode. Until that moment he never thought about how ugly a camel really was. They were by no means going to win some sort of Animal Planet beauty contest, but seeing the animal in the 7 X 50 magnification from his enhanced eyewear made it look like something the guys from Ancient Aliens would have blamed on Martians.
His M4 rifle and its barrel mounted M203 grenade launcher were still pointed toward the camel. Kace felt a strong urge to launch a grenade at that moment. This impulse was probably fairly common among kids who grew up on Beavis and Butthead reruns. He could see it in his head, “Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike….Boom!” Worst Geico commercial ever. Instead he just lowered his gun before it went off. Accidently of course.
The look on the Bedouin’s face was one of confusion about Kace’s reaction to something as common as his camel. Kace’sface betrayed how befuddled he was about about how a desert person and a thirteen-hundred-pound advocate for hump day could have so easily gotten behind him. Once they both got over being mutually baffled, the Bedouin spoke in slow, slightly broken English.
“Don’t shoot my camel,” he said.
“I’m…not,” Kace responded as the statement took him completely by surprise. The guy must have been psychic. “I mean…I wouldn’t even think to…it didn’t cross my…I’m just not going to, okay?”
The Bedouin’s eyes moved down to the weapon pointed at his pet. Kace didn’t realize until that moment that his finger was inside the trigger guard and few ounces of pressure away from seeing what an inside out camel looks like. He immediately let go of the trigger and pointed the barrel anywhere that didn’t include a temptingly flammable ungulate. This seemed to satisfy the man as he and his camel began to amble their way back into the desert. He then stopped.
“Your men are almost here.” This wasn’t spoken by the Bedouin as a question, or a supposition. Instead was announced as a clear and unambiguous fact. Before Kace could respond and ask him how he knew that, the man continued. “The ones you are chasing. The bad men. Don’t follow them into the city. The city is cursed. Let the city punish them.”
He then walked off with his camel and disappeared into the darkness.
Kace flipped his goggles down and activated its binocular mode again. In the distance he saw a dust cloud coming his way. The vehicle that was making it looked like a Marine JLTV, so those were his guys. The Bedouin was right.
“Son of a…,” he muttered to himself, “how did he know?”
He turned his binoculars in the direction that the Bedouin and his unexploded camel had left. There was nobody in sight. He turned in a full circle, still nothing. There was no way they had made it out of range of his goggles. It’s not like they were sprinting away. Watching them saunter off was like watching old people eat. Kace activated the thermal function. There was no heat signature anywhere in his field of vision. It was as if they just melted into the sand and the darkness. He flipped the goggles up and looked at the ground where they had been standing. No imprints from the Bedouins boots or two toed imprints from the camel. This was insane.
Refusing to believe what his eyes were telling him. He flipped his goggles back down and made one final search for heat signatures. This time he found one. Kace was staring at the ruins of ancient Babylon and just inside the stone that marked the cities border was a body lying in the sand. Through his goggles he could see the warmth from the body slowly waning. This man was not there when Kace first arrived.
The JLTV parked several yards behind Kace. He could barely hear his men as they took positions behind him. In truth, the only one he actually heard was Auroch. As the assistant automatic rifleman, Auroch not only carried his own load, but also carried extra ammo for Tuco. Asking for absolute stealth out of someone that size, carrying the most baggage was like asking a WalMart to move quietly. To his credit, all he heard was the soft sound of the man’s boots in the sand. No jangling of bullets, no heavy breathing. Kace knew cats that walked louder than Auroch.
Nobody spoke. Kace just pointed down to where the man, presumably an enemy, was face down in the sand. Rix took the cue from his boss and silently made his way down the dune and to the place where the rapidly cooling body was.
Kace, Tuco and Auroch all had their weapons out and ready to cover Rix if there was trouble. There was every chance the man dying (or dead) in the sand was bait. All three of them had their goggles in place looking for movement, heat signatures, or anything that would suggest this was a trap. All was calm and thanks to night vision technology, all was bright.
They watched as Rix got to the body in the sand. He quickly checked the area around him, looking behind a ruined wall from over two and a half millenniums ago and scanning in every way he could for enemy movement. The group watched as he knelt down and turned the body over. Rix recoiled in what looked like surprise and he began to wave them down.
The three men spread out and cautiously moved down the dune toward their comrade. Tuco and Auroch hung back and took firing positions on the flanks that allowed them to see an impending ambush and provide cover fire, if needed. Kacemoved on to where Rix knelt with the body. The dead man had been turned over, on to his back by Rix. Wet sand clung to the corpses’ black clothing. Wide, milky, but somehow terrified eyes stared out from what looked like a black ski mask.
Kace removed the mask. Like all the man’s clothing, it was soaked. He felt the sand where the corpse was originally before Rix rolled it on to its back. The sand was bone dry. He looked back to the now exposed face and saw that it was distorted into a contorted veneer of absolute horror. It wasn’t just that it he had the familiar pallor of death. Or that blue veins visibly crisscrossed just beneath the surface of skin that somehow seemed both damp and sticky. It was the story his final expression told. Whatever it was that became the last things those eyes saw, Kace wanted nothing to do with it.
Instead of thinking about that, he decided to focus on the story that the rest of the body was telling. It was bloated, sallow and wet. A milky film covered his eyes. Back home in South Carolina, Kace’s after school job was at a funeral home. He was by no means a forensic expert but in those high school years he had seen enough bodies to recognize obvious causes of death. Spring breakers who disappeared in April would sometimes be pulled out of the Pee Dee river days later looking a lot like this guy. Kace pushed down on the corpses’ diaphragm. Brackish water and phlegm bubbled up from out of the mouth.
Kace sat back in the sand and looked at Rix. “He DROWNED!” The words were mouthed to Rix to avoid making any unnecessary noise. Even silent, the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence was self-evident. The closest significant source of water was the Euphrates river, and that was about twenty miles away from where they sat. The Euphrates was also a fresh water river. The scent of what spilled out of this poor SOB’s mouth had the overtones of salt water. Iraq was nearly a completely landlocked nation. It accesses the Persian Gulf in one tiny spot at its extreme southern end. That was over three hundred miles away. Add to that the fact that his body was cooling, but not yet completely cold. He died very recently. Despite this, the condition on the body was one that had spent at least a couple days under water. This was all impossible and unbelievable, but here it was. The inexplicable lying on the ground next to him forcing Kace to mouth words in all caps.
“You have got to be shitting me!” Rix whispered the words instead of just mouthing them. “How in the Elvis forsaken desert does some asshole drown to death. It doesn’t make sense.”
Kace couldn’t answer how, or why, or come up with an explanation that logically ends with a drowned man somehow appearing in a desert that not even Elvis apparently wanted. Rix was from Memphis, and often invoked the name of Elvis in places where most people would put God.
Kace grabbed the AK-47 that was on the ground next to the corpse. The edges of the metal were already showing signs of corrosion from the salt water. He turned it over. Water came out of the barrel and spilled into Kace’s hand. He put his hand to his mouth and tasted it.
“Salt!”, he mouthed back to Rix.
Putting the gun down, Kace got on his knees and pushed down on the man’s diaphragm again. As before, water came up and out through the mouth. He looked at Rix, satisfied that he had proven his point. He pushed down one more time. Not only did water bubble up from his mouth and spill out at the corners, but this time the corpse blinked.
In a moment Kace saw those brown, milky eyes focus and in a shot the drowned man sat up, vomiting salt water and bile.
“Almawt! Aihtidar!”, he screamed while looking around frantically. His eyes then rolled backwards into his head and he collapsed back on to the ground.
“What the fuck! Man, what the fuck!!!” Rix yelled while scooting on his butt away from the corpse as fast as he could. Were his helmet not on his hair may have transitioned from bright red to ignited.
Before Kace could worry about a screaming corpse giving away their position (a topic nobody ever covered during basic training), the squeals and cries of tortured men began to echo all around them. The victims were nowhere to be seen but the sounds seemed to be coming from inside the ruined city itself.
“Don’t follow them into the city. The city is cursed. Let the city punish them.” Kace heard these words in his ear as clearly as if the Bedouin was standing next to him. Even though every instinct inside him said the right thing to do here was to walk away in blissful ignorance and end the night in his rack with a bag of Cheetos, he just couldn’t.
Kace stood up, motioned for Tuco and Auroch to take up their positions in a wedge formation. “We’re going in,” he said as he took his place at the right flank.
“Elvis be with us,” Rix stated, almost prayerfully. He checked his clip and assumed the point position.
The fireteam cautiously entered the ruins.