Previously—In episode 10, Sepulveda walks with Spillers in the Grass Cutting Area compound only to wake up below the canopy of the enormous ceiba tree. Unable to speak or walk, things quickly take a turn for the bizarre when Garcia shows up. This is the Spaniard killed over 400 years earlier by Santiago’s father (Arasibo, the Taino chieftain). During the melee, Spillers disappears from view and tells Captain Sepulveda he must get up and fight or die at the hands of the Spaniard. There’s a struggle during which Sepulveda is convinced he will die. In what he believes are his last moments, he finds a macana and uses it to get the better of Garcia. When he rises to his feet, the there is only Santiago. The old man, who appears to be able to change his appearance at will, explains that he has brought Sepulveda here despite his physical body remaining in building one—that the two are now entangled in what he describes as shared intent. He ends with a warning—that something ominous is coming. Back at building one, we learn from Spillers and Ramler that JTF Alpha is inbound to Puerto Rico, and will be jumping in in less than 45 minutes.
Part 1: The Deuce-Four
There are many shallow ravines that branch off the Chattahoochee river separating Alabama from Georgia and in early spring when the rains are heavy, the dirt in and around the river beds becomes like clay. On the morning of March 28, 1941 Private Felix Hall’s body was found on the Georgia side, right on Fort Benning. A quarter mile walk from the Army Airborne school’s drop towers and the old confederate sawmill.
Hall was an infantryman with the 24th regiment, an all colored unit known as the Deuce Four—and like all negro soldiers of the day, wasn’t allowed to attend jump school or serve in combat. He and his friends worked at the sawmill, planing lumber under the supervision of a civilian foreman.
One day in February after the midday meal and a series of hushed conversations and squinty eyed glares, the foreman charged at Hall, throwing haymakers and windmills. It was later reported by several witnesses that he simply had had enough of Hall and the others not addressing him as sir every time they spoke to him. It was an affront that deeply bothered the man. I will KILL YOU he screamed, stabbing his finger into the air, slobbering and spitting and stomping at the ground. In a panic, Hall reached over to the wall and grabbed a cant hook, which is a long metal pole with an upturned hook at the end used for the handling of logs. The foreman studied the business end of that hook for a long while before backing off. Don’t lemme see your black ass in here again, he had said.
Hall’s two good friends from the Deuce Four—Willie Smith and Willie Ellison— witnessed the whole thing, but did not say a word and were glad when four o’clock came. At quitting time, the two Willies gathered up their things and left on foot with Hall. After five minutes, Hall, still anxious, broke off from the men, explaining that he wanted to stop at the PX first—the one for colored soldiers—so he could order a hot meal and eat it right at the counter. Awright Poss they said, which is what all his friends called him. See you at the barracks. Then they parted ways. It was February 12, 1941 when that happened. The last time a colored man laid eyes on Felix Hall.
He headed toward the PX, still upset by the argument at the sawmill and carrying the anger in his body—high up in his neck and shoulders as he walked. He thought of how the foreman insisted that every colored man of the Deuce Four call him sir while he just said nigger this and nigger that all day long. A pit began to rise up in his belly, so he walked a while with his head aimed at the ground, kicking at clumps of clover and dandelion from time to time. Later, he thought of his grandmother. He pictured her often in his mind’s eye, her sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, smiling and crinkling up her eyes and asking in her way—is the entire situation really all that bad? No, he thought. Not when he got to thinking about it at length. At least he was learning a trade. At least he wasn’t picking cotton back in Millbrook with all the other colored boys. At Fort Benning, he was making money—enough to send home to gramma and still have a little left over for a glass of beer and a game of pool at Dooky Chase’s every now and then. That was his favorite black and tan club, just on the edge of Columbus. The place had a pool table and they played good music and the girls who went there didn’t mind being asked to dance. Sometimes, if he really liked a girl, he’d offer to walk her home. If she agreed, he’d later add her name to a page in his diary. There was Florence Cotton of McDonough Street, Cordelia Huffman over on Chilton Street, and Miss Ada Mae who he was especially fond of. Hall was careful never to get drunk though because on the way back to the barracks, he’d have to cut through the woods at a narrow crossing of the Chattahoochee, taking care to avoid slippery rocks. And after sundown, there were white men with shotguns and dogs that roamed about in the nooks and crannies of the ravines. Despite all that though, and despite the cracker foreman at the sawmill, when Hall thought of the entire situation — he’d answer in his head: I’m good gramma, you was right. After all, he was getting three squares a day in the Army, and had grown half an inch and gained 15 pounds in the five months since enlisting.
When Felix Hall didn’t show up for reveille the next morning, the two Willies shook their heads and muttered what everyone at the Deuce Four worried about. Block W was a cluster of thirty or so sagging tin roof hillbilly houses situated in a mosquito-infested field. There was no way you could reach the PX from the sawmill without walking right through it. Some of the white NCO’s quartered there, but it was also where the foreman lived.
After a month of not hearing any news of Hall, an official battalion Army register marked him a deserter. No one in the white chain of command thought to ask a single question that might explain the sudden absence. Until six weeks later, a white solider from the 20th Engineer Regiment, noticed a quarter inch rope angling down from a sapling. When the soldier grabbed the rope, he could feel it was tight in his hand, so he followed it to the mouth of a nearby shallow ravine. On the other end of that rope was a dead black man, his face pressed into a wall of clay, maggots coming out of his eyes and nose. The man’s hands were tied behind his back, his legs bound tightly together at the knees and ankles with baling wire—the kind commonly found in tool sheds and sawmills. A few inches below his feet, there was a small pile of loose reddish brown soil. It was a curious mess resembling the dirt you might see a dog produce with his front paws when digging up a bone. The dirt, coupled with the odd concavity of the ravine wall down low by the dead man’s feet, seemed to be telling a story—as though during the man’s last moments, he used the tips of his shoes to frantically kick at that ravine wall, trying to scoop as much material out of it as he could, to build a mound. An earthen platform solid and high enough to stand atop, to lessen the pressure from the noose coiled around his neck—so he could gulp in just a few more mouthfuls of air. But in early Spring when the rains are heavy, the soil of the Chattahoochee is like clay. And no amount of kicking and scooping could have made the entire situation alright for a man strung up in such a manner.
Hours after the engineer regiment discovered Hall, the white Army investigators arrived and documented what they saw. They jotted down the time and location, took photos, noted the position of the body in relation to the ravine’s edge, observed how the feet were bound together with baling wire, noted that the dead man’s hands were tied behind his back, and then they declared it a suicide. After some debate, they changed their minds, and wrote down SEX CRIME in all caps. The white military physician who later examined Hall’s body politely demurred in a heavy New England accent and ruled it a homicide on the official death certificate—a fact which later proved inconvenient for the FBI.
Part 2: The Triple Nickel
Nine and a half years after Felix Hall’s murder, the sawmill is gone. A new center of gravity is forming inside Fort Benning—a sort of bubble within a bubble within a bubble. Not far from the two hundred and fifty foot drop towers that overlook Airborne headquarters, there’s an unmarked two story wooden barracks. A jeep has just pulled up and the sergeant at the CQ desk has just received a phone call announcing the purpose of the jeep. The sergeant stands up from his desk while cradling the phone to look outside. He nods and confirms the driver has arrived, then hangs up the phone. Moments later, there’s the sound of footsteps moving at a range walk clip along pine wood floorboards, followed by a short silence, then three fast raps of tight-fisted knuckles against a solid wooden door. There’s a pause, then three more raps and a much longer pause. A low growl comes from the other side, then a bark—What! The man who just banged on the door stares at his hand and shoves it down by his side and clears his throat. “CQ sir. Orders just came in from S3. There’s a chalk headed out now.”
From inside the room, a man lying belly down on a cot commands his hand to go left, to where a duffel bag ought to be. A stack of coins slide down the side and a nickel rolls across the floor inside one the tiny channel of the floorboard seams. The metal joints of the cot groan and flex and the man mutters curses at the door in a low voice saying goddamn bastard and godammit and fuck. The man in the hallway frowns, rearranges his feet and settles into parade rest with his hands clasped behind his back. “Captain Hardesty,” he says. “There’s a jeep downstairs waiting. The driver is with the uh—he’s with JTF Alpha sir.”
Hardesty sits up on the cot and plants his feet on the ground. He flexes his eyebrows, straining to lift his eyelids as though they were held in place by tent stakes. When they’re sufficiently open, he then snaps his neck left and stares at the window for signs of rain. It’s still too dark to tell for sure he thinks. So he groans and draws in a deep breath, then sags into the cot a little.
“Captain?”
Half an hour later, Hardesty is in an open-top jeep, driving along a pitch colored asphalt road that snakes along the edge of the Chattahoochee river. It’s one of the new roads, freshly striped by the corps of Engineers. The predawn air is cool against his face—like bluish-lavender vapor holding everything in picture frame stillness—grass, trees, hills, stars—everything but the jeep, which whizzes by gleaming white lines and chain link fencing and telephone poles. Aside from the whining engine and changing of gears around bends in the road, there is only the soft din of chirping crickets and katydids and palmetto bugs. He and the driver are like tiny white pinballs, hurtling along unseen meridians atop a jet black surface resembling pulverized and compacted graham crackers. He pictures biting into a dark chocolate s’more—actually sees it happening somewhere a few inches in front of his face in a tangle of images all tumbling and twirling and collapsing in on themselves—the jeep, the road, the cookie, and a pair of disembodied incisors—all falling into a gigantic spiraling maw. Hardesty stiffens his back and squeezes both knees, suddenly aware that he’s drifted into a waking dream. He brings a hand up to his mouth to check for drool and after a perfunctory pat, yawns and steals a look left to gauge the driver, who has not spoken a word. The man is a boxy staff sergeant with chubby eyes and a deep chin dimple. Barrel chested too, with a face that looks like it was hastily sculpted out of half-cooked meatballs with a ball peen hammer. This observation forces Hardesty to knit his brow and reconsider the chin dimple—part crater, part groove, part orifice, it’s nestled right at the juncture of two fleshy orbs of the man’s meatball face. Suddenly, the word meatus flashes like a marquis. It’s one of the few words he remembers from high school anatomy—the medical term for the opening at the end of a man’s penis. He grins and starts to look away, but just before he does, he catches another detail. Down at the sergeant’s chest, where his name tape should have been, there is only a black rectangle. Odd, he thinks.
After a few more turns, the jeep makes a sharp right into an airstrip behind a concrete berm. The tires immediately hum at a higher pitch the moment they transition from the soft asphalt road to the harder light-grey surface of the airstrip.
A quarter mile in the distance, warm incandescent light spills out of an open-bay hangar. Hardesty has seen hundreds of jets and airstrips, but today, on this morning, he feels something different. He looks at the hangar, then at the driver, then back toward the black asphalt road from where they came and suddenly feels exactly like a human pinball. He looks at the hangar again with fresh eyes, notices the contrast between it and the now violet colored air, along with the strange stillness imbues it with a patina of unreality. It is a thing sitting oddly apart from every other thing. Like a blown up diorama.
Inside the hangar, there’s a silver C-123 with its rear troop lift down and three men shuffling up the ramp, lightly geared. Hardesty turns to the driver as they slow to fifteen miles an hour. “Where’s everyone else?”
The sergeant stares ahead and speaks with the detached coolness of slowly tapering stalactites. “Three man chalk is SOP.”
Hardesty’s eyes go back down to the black name tape, and wonders if that too, is SOP. As they approach, he looks up and down the plane and moves his eyes from the propeller blades back to the sergeant, who explains they’ll need to be wheels up by oh three hundred—on the dot.
“Yeah, that won’t be a problem.” Hardesty says. He pauses a moment, still curious about the name tape and asks if anyone else will be joining the chalk.
The sergeant smiles. “Just me. I’m the jump master.” After a pause, he adds “And the rigger.”
Hardesty arches his feet and bangs the toes of his boots together, trying not to smile. Whoopdie-fuckin’-doo he thinks to himself. Meatball can tie knots. “Great,” he says. “You mind telling me where we’re headed?”
The sergeant cocks his chin toward the nose of the plane. “Details are in a packet up in the cockpit sir.”
Hardesty smirks, “Cockpit. Copy that.” Now exiting the jeep, his eyes dart past the sergeant, toward the three men walking along the ramp into the back of the C-123. Trying not to stare as he enters the airplane, but not doing a good job of it, he realizes there isn’t a single A-5 container in sight—just three men and a meatball. He mumbles a few goddammits then fishes out a pack of Pall Malls from his right trouser pocket.
For most of the flight, Hardesty steadily burns through cigarettes, stewing in silence, thinking. Unable to let go of the black rectangle at the sergeant’s breast pocket, he’s absorbed by thoughts of possible names. Like Dickie Lips or Manhole Balz. Five minutes earlier, there was Headley Woodcock. At the moment, he favors Manhole Balz, but is convinced he can do better by the time they reach the jump zone.
Part of him is embarrassed by these compulsive thought experiments. Ever since he was a kid, he’d look at things normal people look at all the time only he’d get fixated on a single irritating detail or flaw, then spend the rest of the day running it up and down a flagpole in his head. In the fifth grade, he became convinced that the mole on the new principal’s nose looked exactly like a half-baked chocolate chip. Things were fine at first. But then the cookie recipes starting showing up on the backs of his textbooks. And then there were drawings with captions, followed by short short stories. A girl he was sweet on who sat next to him in social studies eventually ratted him out. The principal gave him ten switches at school and later that evening, his stepfather beat him across the tops of his hands with a section of rubber hose. After that, Hardesty learned to stuff that part of him deep down where nobody could see it. In a hole.
Nowadays, instead of chocolate moles on the noses of principles, there are chin dimples on staff sergeants with blank name tapes and bizarre-sounding SOPs, all of which gets jammed down into that hole. Sometimes though, the hole is at capacity and things come out. The Army is good at discovering holes in men. They absolutely love it, and staff entire buildings filled with people who do nothing but cook up ways of spotting statistical anomalies and outliers and beginnings of oddball traits that might one day pop out of a soldier—out of some little hole the man has secretly kept squirreled away inside himself. Hardesty sometimes thinks that his particular hole is maybe what got him mixed up with the JTF Alpha people.
By 0900, the western tip of Puerto Rico is within view. He lights up another Pall Mall and is about to check his altitude and speed when he lets out a snort and bangs his knee with a balled up fist. The moment this happens, the barrel-chested sergeant cranes his neck from his seat, glares into the cockpit, and picks at his chin dimple. The smile evaporates from Hardesty’s face as he turns to his right and peers out the cockpit window. He feels the man’s gaze along his neck and commands his entire body to take on icy stoic qualities. He becomes expressionless, empty, serene—like one of those Japanese stone gardens—the kind with about a million pebbles looking like some insane person had just combed the fuck out of it with a toy rake. He is the limestone blocks of the Sphinx and the columns of the Acropolis and the great Luxor Obelisk all rolled into one—a stone cold human cypher capable of flying airplanes and studying cloud formations. He becomes that. When the chin-dimpled sergeant turns back around to again stare at the chalk, Hardesty lets his chest sag a bit. He turns his head away from the sergeant, then smiles and mouths his most promising name yet.
At 0945, sergeant Dick Pole stands up to open the paratroop door. Through the now open exit, the combined roar of air and Pratt & Whitney engines fills the metal tube of the airplane. Hardesty instinctively reaches up to tap the arms of his aviator sunglasses to make sure they don’t fly off his head, then twists his neck far to the right to get a view of the chalk. Moving from left to right, he stops as soon as he reaches the man sitting at the rear. He has the the build of a brawler, and stares forward quietly while tapping his boot up and down. Unlike Dick Pole, the brawler has a name tape—Dawkins. Hardesty’s brain immediately goes to work, trying to figure out the rationale behind the incongruence of name tape SOP when suddenly, the toe tapping stops. And then the man’s face begins to rotate up and to the right toward. It’s a slow swiveling, not unlike that made by five inch anti-aircraft guns on battleships. When the two men meet eyes, Hardesty tells his face to become the Sphinx, only this time it doesn’t work. So he stares at him a while. Dawkins has pale dry freckled skin and small slits for eyes, set back deep in his skull. His cheeks are stony outcroppings that look like they could chip concrete. He winks at Hardesty and as he does, thick veins along his neck pulse and shift, as though the insides of this man were nothing more than a tenuous confederacy of fluid-bearing cords and springs, on the verge of bursting free of whatever forces held them in place. Hardesty wants to look away now, but thinks that doing so prematurely might send the wrong message. Dawkins grins with a slightly open mouth which causes his eye slits to narrow down to piggy bank slots. Hardesty responds with a sheepish grin, blinks two or three times from behind his aviators, then turns to face the control stick.
Dawkins shoots a glance to his right over to Delaloza, who has his eyes closed and his chin tucked in.
“I know you ‘aint nappin ‘ole boy.”
Delaloza doesn’t budge. Dawkins leans forward a couple more inches to get a long look at the new guy. A black CO, pulled from one of the colored Airborne battalions now being rolled into a white unit. Dawkins eyes narrow down to cracks. He rocks forward with a bounce. “Hey. Triple nickel. You ready for this?”
The black man does nothing, which causes Dawkins to tap his boots up and down a few times. He waits a bit and adds with a smile, “This ‘aint like puttin’ out forest fires in Ore-GON.”
Hardesty has turned around again, unsure of what to make of this conversation. The new guy just sits there, eyes front, hands folded across his chest, fingers tucked into his armpits. Dawkins waits some more and calls out again, this time using a few of his bread and butter wisecracks. First, he tries goddamn Booker T. Then, hey Tyrone. Then it’s Coonshine?
The new guy turns left and pulls his eyelids open wider for emphasis. The skin of his face is dry like Dawkins’, but so dark black, it seems to emit a powdery purplish sheen. He sits there, not reacting at all, like a supremely comfortable coal colored jinn swaddled in paratrooper’s kit. Dawkins, looking delighted, glares at the man and sits with that forward lean like a tightly wound set of coils. I’m talkin’ to you triple nickel, can’t you hear good?
Hardesty is unable to look away. He notices that even Dick Pole seems to be curious. The powdery black man’s eyes are large and round and blazing white, like a pair of flashlights that render every other thing inside the plane dull and muted. Those eyes, which Hardesty believes could burn holes in men, go level with Dawkins’ slits and linger there awhile. His movements—so agonizingly slow and deliberate, executed with the lowest sense of urgency possible—neutralize Dawkins’ anti-aircraft gun stare with devastating nonchalance. Hardesty wants to know this man’s name, wants to know where he comes from. The black man frees his right hand from his armpit and rests it on his pectoral muscle. Then he taps two fingers up by his left lapel. He sits there slow-tapping his collar, eyeball-to-eyeball with Dawkins, who’s now on the balls of his feet, heels an inch up off the floor. After a few more silent taps and another short pause, the fingers go back to where they were, like tiny swords being sheathed. Delaloza, who’s still pretending to sleep, mutters Jesus Christ, then lets his head droop further down to rest on his chest. A full three-Mississippi goes by before Dawkins clicks his cheek. He’s no longer smiling and his eyes are now hydrothermal vents.
Delaloza’s nose twitches the moment he catches a whiff of the cortisol. It is a dingy sourness like alcoholic’s urine mixed with mineral spirits and it’s rushing out of Dawkins. Only three men on the airplane can smell it.
Half a minute goes by where there’s only the sound of airplane engines vibrating through metal. Dawkins, who’s still leaning forward, speaks again. There is a vein running up the middle of his forehead now. “Listen up Chaulette. Those fuckin’ eagles on your collar don’t add up to jack shit.”
As soon as Hardesty hears Dawkins hiss out these words, he realizes Chaulette is a full bird colonel.
A small tremor moves along Dawkins’ forehead vein. “Don’t you forget who’s in charge,” he says. “I fuckin’ own you. When we unass this bird, if you forget that once, I swear… I will rip out your fuckin’ eyeballs and skull fuck you. Is that clear?”
Chaulette, whose hands are still folded up into his armpits smiles and lifts his eyebrows slightly as he chirps back cheerfully: copy that… CORPORAL! This makes Delaloza chuckle. Dawkins opens his mouth, about to speak, but is interrupted by Dick Pole who’s standing now with one hand up in the air, flashing all five fingers out. Hardesty catalogs this oddity at once. Airborne jump masters normally give a twenty-minute warning, followed by another one ten minutes later. Dick Pole’s voice suddenly fills the tube of the plane.
“STAND UP!”
Like puppets on wires, the men all rise up to their feet in unison, and stare ahead at the jump lights.
“HOOK UP!”
Each man attaches his static line snap hook to the steel anchor cable running down the middle of the the aircraft at eye-level.
“EQUIPMENT CHECK!”
In unison, the men begin patting down their arms, chests, and legs. Each member of the chalk has only a T-10 main parachute, one reserve chute, and a Griswold weapons bag. Originally designed to hold a disassembled M-1 Garand rifle, JTF Alpha chalks modified their Griswold bags to hold a fully assembled M-1 Thompson submachine gun.
“SOUND OFF FOR EQUIPMENT CHECK!”
Dawkins initiates the final sequence from the rear of the stick, and is followed by the others in rapid succession. Three OK! Two OK! All OK!
At sixteen hundred feet, they’re more than a thousand feet above what airborne SOP stipulates for combat static line jumps. Dawkins wanted the extra altitude so the team would have time to scan the drop zone and orient themselves to all the principal targets listed in the op order. Chaulette, whose fingers are already gripping the outside of the C-123 is like a black marble chambered in a gun barrel. A minute later, when the red jump light goes green he shoots out. Delaloza is right behind him. When Dawkins approaches the door, he slows and locks eyes with Dick Pole. Both men glance toward the cockpit. They exchange nods and Dawkins steps off the platform, yanked out into the sky, sixteen hundred feet above the Grass Cutting Area. Four seconds later, his chute is open. Almost immediately, he catches a small green mote ten kilometers out. He squints. It’s a jeep moving at thirty miles an hour along a dirt road. There are four Air Force SP’s, each provisioned with a pistol and an M-4 rifle.
The first order of business will be to rally with Chaulette and deal with the jeep problem—which was anticipated.
Second order of business will be the FM transmitter. Dawkins turns the parachute a hundred and eighty degrees to get a better view. He does a double-take as soon as he sees the tree. The op order said ninety to a hundred feet, but it looks more like a hundred and fifty. Even so, this should pose no problem for Delaloza. He’ll ascend the trunk, move up into the crown with his tools, open up the panel and set the relay switches to the new JTF Alpha frequencies. The compound will have no way of speaking to Ramey. No way of calling for help.
Third order of business—the inside defenses of the Grass Cutting compound. Dawkins can see it clearly. It can’t be more than a quarter mile from the FM transmitter. His eyes follow the path of the perimeter fencing and concertina until he reaches the single gated entry point. There’s one guard. Behind that man are three machine gun nests. Dawkins focuses on the machine gun nests until he can make out each of the pairs of men—their appearance, the condition of their gear, how many belts of ammunition they have. Bending his head like a parabolic dish, he tunes out the wind and the flapping of silk to listen to two separate conversations over three miles away—one about baseball, the other about something he can’t discern because the men are speaking entirely in Spanish. There’s a single word though, that comes up over and over again. It’s as clear as day to him—morecheeba. Dawkins files it away for later, and moves his eyes toward the two main concrete buildings with block lettering stenciled along the sides.
Fourth order of business—the target. A prisoner by the name of Santiago. Should be in building one, but might be in building two. Spillers and Ramler can confirm, as they have already established contact with the CO—a Porto Rican with a small staff of enlisted men—paper shufflers, nothing to worry about.
With a few hundred feet in between him and the ground, plenty high enough to still see the ocean, he starts to wonder if the op order might be incomplete. If it was right, and if Spillers made the call for a fast helicopter extraction, today would be a wrap. The whole thing could be as straightforwardly simple as it seemed to be on paper—parachute in, kill some beaners, bust an old man out of jail, push him into an airplane, fly home.
He follows the jeep with his eyes for a while, then shakes his head. Certain things about the op order don’t make sense. The old man. Why do any of this for a farmer? What’s there to gain? And why in the exact fuck is Chaulette even here, let alone in JTF Alpha? That one made no sense at all to Dawkins. He looks up at his parachute, then down at the tips of his boots and out toward the horizon at the waters of the Carribean sea. The distance is ten miles—too far for him to hear, but he can see the waves breaking—the soft soapy surf lapping at the craggy black rocks along the jetty that sticks out. Looking up again, he smiles and thinks—one day, he won’t need the parachute.
When his feet touch the ground, he doesn’t bother to bend his knees, doesn’t tuck and roll or brace himself for impact—just goes from a twenty mile an hour drop to a shuffle step to a walk. Within seconds, the parachute is off—discarded like a silky carapace, sliding over on itself as the wind catches it. Dawkins works at the buttons to unfasten the Griswold bag from his left side and sees Chaulette up ahead two hundred meters.
He’s looking straight at Dawkins, signaling in the direction of the Air Force jeep with 4 fingers. Dawkins slings his rifle across his body, barrel down, and replies with a hand sign. In less than two minutes, they cover a distance of 3 kilometers, moving just behind a line of trees along the road. When the jeep goes by them, Chaulette counts to three and accelerates on foot to catch up to the vehicle. As he does, Dawkins scales a nearby tree to provide overwatch. Before he’s even unslung his rifle, Chaulette’s hands are gripping the jeep’s rear fender. The driver looks backward, clutching at the steering wheel.
Dawkins whispers from treetop level. “Go on boy, do the thing.”
All four men in the jeep have their eyes glued to the powdery dry black man running behind them at thirty five miles an hour. One man seated in the rear has the presence of mind to reach for his pistol, but it’s too late.
JTF Alpha SOP clearly stipulates what will happen when just such an eventuality presents itself—a single unobserved open-top vehicle with 6 or fewer armed combatants, where the Alpha team still possesses the element of surprise. According to SOP, the JTF Alpha operator must effectuate two things. First, the vehicle, along with any mounted guns or installed communications must be rendered inoperable. Second, all vehicle occupants must sustain injuries resulting in death, which if subjected to forensic analysis, would suggest driver error or mechanical malfunction.
Chaulette, still gripping the rear fender, takes a bounding leap off his left foot, and hurls the jeep upward, as though under-handing a sandbag. The force of the throw sends the jeep and the men sailing into the air twenty feet. The two in the rear are immediately launched further upward like a set of bowling pins, reaching an altitude of forty feet minimum, before crashing to the ground. They die instantly. The two in the front are able to remain in place as the jeep flips one and a half times end over end, like a coin. It lands right side up, and slow-rolls into a thicket of sugarcane.
When Chaulette walks up to the passenger side, he sees the man’s head slumped forward, sagging flacidly. His helmet is no longer on his head. The man taps the dashboard and starts to say something. Chaulette grabs him by the crown of his head and yanks down, instantly severing his spine.
“Damn, I heard that boy!”
Dawkins is walking briskly over to the other side of the jeep with a huge grin. “You do good work triple nickel.” He grabs the driver by the armpits, dumps him out on the ground, then gets down on his hands and knees, patting at the grass and dirt, as though looking for something. The driver, whose ribs are shattered, lies there helplessly. He can’t speak, can’t move his arms, and succeeds only in making a sort of high pitched groaning noise while rubbing his feet together. As Dawkins goes about his business on all fours, he looks over to the Airman once in a while, repeating himself, “Sorry, I didn’t hear that chief.”
Chaulette walks up softly, like a cat, then leans against the rear driver’s side of the jeep. He studies Dawkins for a bit and asks him, “You think Delaloza’s done with the coms?”
“Probly.” he says, barely aware of the other man. “Hell, I don’t know. I trust him.”
“You need a hand?”
“Nah, I just need this to be right.”
A minute later, his hands stop beating at the ground. Gently, he positions the Airman’s head on top of that spot. Chaulette leans in for a closer look. It’s a partially submerged stone, about the size of a steering wheel—four, maybe five feet away from where the jeep’s front left tire is. Dawkins gets behind the jeep and rolls it forward just shy of the spot. The Airman’s breathing quickens as he seems to have worked out some version of what will come next. Dawkins stands over the man, looks into his face and grabs the front wheel well of the jeep with two hands. He hoists it up like a piece of furniture so the tire dangles just a few inches over the man’s face, and gently lowers it on to his nose.
He counts to ten, gradually modulating the pressure the jeep exerts on the man’s face as his feet flop up and down like the tiny treble hammers of a piano. Finally, he pulls the jeep away and sits down next to the Airman. “Tell me. What’s morcheeba.”
Chaulette’s eyebrows go up. The airman’s entire face is blackened from tire rubber. His nose and upper mouth look like broken fragments of a lobster dinner and there’s coagulated blood streaming out of his eyes and mouth. He seems to be trying to move his eyes, but the whites are fixed in place, having been partially crushed.
Chaulette walks over. “We need to be at the ammunition depot.”
Dawkins nods and stands up. Slapping at some dust on the seat of his pants, he stands astride the man’s head and grips at the wheel well once more. He hoists it up high again and looks down at the ruins of the man’s face one last time.
“Sorry chief. Driver error. Fuckin’ SOP. I honestly don’t know who writes that shit.”
