He also didn’t tell Muldoon that he suspected Brock had put the word out. If First Battalion wouldn’t stay in Boston, Brock would use them while he had them. He’d flush the infected out and send them all into Tenth Mountain’s guns. If true, the man was utterly ruthless. Desperate. Smart. Either way, they weren’t getting out of here without a fight.
“Great.” The sergeant leaned back and put his hands behind his head, revealing massive biceps. Lee knew Muldoon sometimes fired an M240 machine gun with one hand as a party trick at the firing range. “It’s a choice mission. All right. Convince me.”
Lee frowned. “Most real soldiers find a direct order convincing.”
The man laughed. “I’m about as much a real soldier as you are a real colonel. Sir. Times have changed. My boys and I could walk out of here anytime I say so.”
The man was right. There was no use trying to argue otherwise. “Then why don’t you?”
Muldoon leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. His eyes blazed. “Because I am a real soldier. Sir.”
Lee grinned. “That’s what I thought.”
“And we’re coming back. Don’t think we’re a bunch of Dixie cups.”
Dixie cups. Disposable. “I don’t dislike you that much, Sergeant.”
“Tell me something, Colonel. How far would you go for a mission? Where do you draw the line?”
Lee said nothing. The meeting was over. Both had gotten what they wanted. Lee had the best man he could find to screen their withdrawal, and Muldoon had a mission and his pound of flesh.
THIRTY-FIVE.
THE CONVOY OF MILITARY VEHICLES roared down a barren stretch of I-95—Humvees and a couple of five-tons filled with engineers and hastily packed explosives.
Sergeant Andy Muldoon rode in the point vehicle. He listened to the bang of the rig’s iron suspension, the V8 diesel engine’s grind, the hum of the big tires gripping the road. The Humvee was a perfect example of what he liked about Army life: nothing comfortable about it, no frills, everything utilitarian, designed to last and built to survive. There was a kind of Zen in it.
He’d experienced real hardship in Afghanistan: constant fighting, hunger and thirst, scorching heat and numbing cold, days and nights without sleep, scorpions and giant spiders and bugs that ate you alive. The cherries came, and he taught them war. Some got hit; most went home different men than when they’d arrived.
Muldoon couldn’t go home. Civilian life, with its comforts and niceties, kicked his ass, chewed him up, and spit him out. In the real world, he woke up with night terrors and flinched at loud noises. He drank all the time and got into fights. He’d pound some poor guy over nothing. He’d woken up in jail in Vicenza and Rome. His relationships with women tended to be stormy and short. Post-traumatic stress disorder, they called it. After some time home, he always asked to go right back into the shit. The Army psychologists kept an eye on him. But in the field, all his anxieties melted away. He grew stronger. Afghanistan was the devil he knew.
America had been turned into a war zone. Nobody was going home. It sucked for everybody, but he personally didn’t mind it. It somehow felt right. Again, the devil he knew. In the new age, war wasn’t the anomaly; the real world was. War had become the norm. And he wasn’t just surviving. He was thriving. He could puzzle over that for years.
The only problem was serving under Harry Lee.
The Tomcats dropped them into the bush outside a village in Korengal Valley near the Pakistani border. Taliban and foreign fighters crossed over from Pakistan each year to take on the American infidels. Lee had solid intel that a Taliban commander was going to be traveling along a certain route at a certain time. Muldoon’s squad was supposed to do the grab. Lee came along to see if he could get something from the man before they handed him up the ladder for interrogation. Muldoon was happy to get the mission. It was real Special Forces shit.
They lay all night and most of the next day under cover in a gully, waiting for their guy to show up. Instead, boy walked straight through their area of operations; he couldn’t have been older than ten or twelve. The soldiers hunkered down. Lee looked at Muldoon.
The kid had no business here. From the way he kept glancing around, he’d either spotted the Americans or had already known they were there.
The captain drew his finger across his throat. He wanted Muldoon to kill the kid.
Muldoon refused the order.
Thirty minutes later, a heavy machine gun thudded on the ridge above, chewing up the ground around the squad’s position. Another opened up from the west. They were surrounded. The air filled with flying metal. The Taliban threw rocks down at them, hoping the Americans would believe they were grenades and leave cover.