The Eternal War

The desert at three in the morning is not quiet. It breathes. Wind off the plateau moved through the dry grass in slow waves and somewhere a kilometer back a dog had been barking for twenty minutes at nothing, or at them, and Reyes had been listening to it the whole way in.

It was cold. Not the cold of winter in the States but the dry cold of the Syrian plateau at altitude, the kind that got into the joints and stayed there and made every piece of gear feel like it weighed slightly more than it should. Reyes had been moving for forty minutes and the cold was still in his fingers despite the gloves. He noted this the way he noted everything on an approach, let it sit, kept moving.

Eight men. Single file. Moving across broken ground in the dark with their night vision rigs down, the world gone green and flat and full of shadows that weren’t shadows. Nine, counting the woman fifty meters off their left flank moving parallel through the scrub.

Staff Sergeant Danny Kowalski was on point. He’d been on point for six years across three countries and he moved like water finding its way downhill, patient and without noise. Behind him came the rest of the team in a loose column, spaced wide enough that one grenade couldn’t take more than two of them. Reyes was fifth in line. He kept his eyes on the man ahead of him and let his feet find the ground.

Captain Glenda Marsh kept her own pace fifty meters out. Military intelligence, attached through the CST program, three deployments and enough of these operations to know exactly where to be and when to stop moving.

Her job tonight was observation and documentation, positioned on the north side with eyes on the full target and a Predator feed running on her tablet. She’d go in after the compound was cleared for sensitive site exploitation.

She was good at her job and she stayed out of the way and Reyes had stopped noticing she was there the same way he stopped noticing Garza was there, which was the highest compliment he gave anyone on an operation.

The compound was a quarter mile out.

They’d been watching it for nine days. The Predator feeds showed twelve fighters cycling in and out, a rotating guard on the roof, a generator that kicked on at sunset and off at midnight. And a man they’d been trying to find for four months, sitting in a plastic chair in the inner courtyard, smoking cigarettes and talking on a phone he’d already swapped three times.

The compound sat inside a low mud-brick wall maybe eight feet tall, a main building of two stories and a smaller outbuilding at the back, the whole thing the color of the ground it sat on. A wooden gate on the east side faced the dirt track that ran out to the highway. The roof of the main building had two sandbag positions and the Predator had counted heads at both on every pass.

Kowalski raised his fist. The column stopped.

Reyes moved up. Kowalski held up two fingers and pointed at the base of the wall, southeast and southwest corners. Two sentries outside. The Predator feed on the JTAC’s tablet confirmed it. Both men had been there for an hour, both stationary, both probably cold and bored and thinking about something else.

Reyes looked at Kowalski. Kowalski looked back. They’d done this enough times that the conversation happened without words.

They split. Two pairs going wide around each side of the compound, moving slow and low through the scrub. The sentries died without knowing it was coming and without making much noise. Reyes checked his watch. Forty seconds behind schedule, which was practically on time.

The gate had a wire along the bottom of the frame, thin and running to something inside the wall. Sergeant First Class Torres had been dealing with exactly this kind of problem for a long time. He cleared it in ninety seconds without ceremony.

They went through.

The courtyard between the gate and the main building was thirty feet across. One bare bulb on a wire over the main door. Two fighters sat against the far wall sharing a cigarette, rifles across their knees. They came up fast when the gate opened and they didn’t come up fast enough.

Then the building.

Another wire on the door. Torres cleared it. Reyes and Kowalski went through first and the building opened up into a main room with four men who had their weapons up. The next twelve seconds were loud and ugly and at the end of them Reyes had a round through the meat of his left arm and all four men were on the floor. He registered the arm and kept moving.

The upper floor took three minutes. They cleared four rooms, found the man from the plastic chair asleep in the third room, which surprised everyone, and dealt with the last two fighters in the fourth room. Sergeant Holt started pulling everything electronic into a bag, every phone, every laptop, every drive, because a laptop was worth more than the twelve men they’d just killed.

Reyes heard Torres shout from downstairs. Not a warning shout. Something else, a sound he’d heard once before, in a basement in Mosul, and that time it turned out to be a room full of children.

He went down fast.

Torres was standing in the doorway to the back of the building, looking into the inner courtyard. Kowalski was beside him. Neither of them was moving.

Reyes pushed through.

Two ISIS fighters stood in the inner courtyard, alive, weapons up, not looking at Reyes or Torres or any of them. One was young and thin. The other was older, thickset, with a long dark beard and a face that had been broken and reset more than once. He stood with the loose patience of a man who had spent years in real war and he was looking at the ground, not at the Americans who had just cleared his compound.