CHAPTER ONE
November 2008
Fort Dix, New Jersey
I’m lost.
Again.
Jameel Mason squinted through the heavy, swirling snow and raised a gloved hand to move a low branch out of his vision. His digitized green Army combat uniform stood out like a sore thumb against the snow-covered ground. In a real situation, an enemy with half a brain and one good eye would have seen the four cadets moving forward a thousand meters out and put them out of their misery with coordinated indirect fire. Training, however, meant that the opposing force of experienced senior cadets usually did their best to slack off, play blind and deaf, and let the underclassmen cadets get close before opening fire. At least they were using blank 5.56mm ammunition instead of yelling “bang bang bang” like they had to do around campus back in Pittsburgh. While the blanks weren’t bad, they weren’t exactly realistic either. None of it was. In reality, the near blizzard would make both sides hunker down and wait for better weather instead of patrolling around on foot. Mason pushed the thought away and focused. The “suspected enemy bunker” should be a hundred meters downhill from his chosen reconnaissance position. Another ten minutes and they would be done with the final training lane and on their way to a warm bus ride home instead of traipsing around in four inches of fresh snow.
In a year and a half, he’d enter law school and leave the infantry crap to the rest of the Army. Since middle school, he’d wanted to be a judge advocate general’s corps officer, like his mother. His Law School Admission Test scores got the attention of Yale, but Mason was holding out for Harvard. He’d take the test again in six weeks with his eyes on a perfect score, better than his mother and father and certainly enough to get Harvard’s attention.
Mason shook off the thoughts and got his mind on the squad exercise at hand. Cadets learned and practiced small unit leadership by leading a composite group of nine. Besides the leader, the remaining cadets formed two fire teams, alpha and bravo for a standard infantry squad patrol. All of the cadets in his squad were underclassmen. The juniors held the three leadership positions: squad leader and team leaders. The freshmen and sophomore cadets assumed duties as compass man, paceman, radio telephone operator (RTO), and security. Learning to control the smallest fighting force in the Army order of battle was the perfect place for future leaders to start. At the squad level, success and failure were possible. One happened more often than the other.
Displacing a tree branch in front of him shook fresh fallen snow down his arm. In the craterlike depression below was nothing. He strained to hear against the muffled impacts of the snow. All around him, the forest was quiet. To his left, one of the sophomore cadets whispered.
“Nothing there.”
Footsteps crunched the snow behind them. Mason saw a tan, rough-sided boot in the corner of his vision. A slightly louder voice said, “Mason? What’s going on?”
Their evaluator for the lane, Cadet Porter, was also the cadet battalion commander and a graduating senior. Already selected for a regular Army commission in the infantry, he’d successfully pushed every one of Mason’s buttons for months. Having a reputation as the wannabe lawyer who didn’t want to serve in the field only made it worse for Mason. “I’m reconning the objective, sir.”
Mason stared down into the depression again. The snow blotted out the brown bed of leaves in all directions. An hour before, there had been nothing. The OPFOR should have been easy to see. Was it Myers down there hiding as usual? Or Compton asleep against a tree and not playing fair again?
“Are you sure this is the objective?”
Mason nodded. “Stratton, take Martinez and move over there. Twenty meters that way. Behind that tree. See if you can get eyes on the OPFOR.”
“Yeah.” Stratton smiled. He turned away from Mason and crawled two meters to Martinez and gestured toward the position. Mason alternately watched them crawl and turned back to the objective. Most of the time, the seniors playing the enemy would show themselves or do something very unrealistic to help the cadets learn. Into the spring, they’d get sneaky and difficult. In a snowstorm, they’d want to go home as badly as Mason did.
Stratton and Martinez reached their position. Mason stared as Stratton broke into a smile and laughed. The smaller, blond junior turned toward Mason and shook his head.
“Damn it,” Mason whispered. He motioned Stratton to return. They would try the other way. Maybe then they could—
“Are you sure this is the objective, Mason?”
Annoyed, Mason rolled to face Porter. “Yes. That’s the depression right there. The OPFOR is hiding and—”
Porter raised his voice. “ENDEX, everyone. Back to your assembly area.”
The end-of-exercise call resulted in everyone but Mason jumping to their feet and brushing off the rapidly accumulating snow. Mason rolled to one side and met Porter’s eyes. “Why now? The weather?”
Porter squatted down. “You’re nowhere near the objective, Mason.”
“That’s it down there,” he said and jerked his chin toward the depression.
“No, it’s not. You are a hundred meters off. Your azimuth out of the patrol base was supposed to be what?”
Mason replied, “Zero four five. Due northeast.”
“You were fine for about fifty meters,” Porter said. “Then you ducked around a bunch of low brush and started off at zero six five. That’s enough to get you off course on a four-hundred-meter lane.”
Mason looked down. The compass had been Murphy’s responsibility. A goofy kid from Missouri who never took anything seriously. No wonder they were off course. He stared at his own wrist compass, purchased by his mother so he’d always have a backup. The hands were frozen at due northeast, forty-five degrees. He’d never bothered to check himself or Murphy’s navigation. He failed the situation training lane for the fourth time in five weeks. Two weeks earlier, back at the University of Pittsburgh, he’d failed his third straight lane before barely passing a standard ambush.
Porter continued. “Your plan was solid this time. Everyone understood the mission and their role, unlike last time. But, your navigation skills suck. You need work, Mason, or you’re not going to pass LDAC.”
The Leader Development and Assessment served as the capstone event for Army officers commissioning through the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs across the country. Cadets between their junior and senior years converged on Fort Lewis, Washington, for six weeks of constant observation and machinated leadership experiences. Leadership, though, took a backseat to technical and tactical proficiency. With variables like peer assessments thrown into the mix, LDAC took on some vestiges of a popularity contest. Being good with a map, compass, and rifle weren’t enough. Having all the requisite soldier skills and not being able to lead, or follow, would catch the glare of the instructors. That meant low scores in the overall order of merit list. With every LDAC graduate numbered from 1-n based on their performance in school and the six-week course, slots in the active army were hard to come by. Being accepted to Harvard was no guarantee that Mason would gain a coveted JAG position. His future depended on passing the summer tactical course with flying colors. With seven months to go, the mountain in front of him appeared unclimbable.
There wasn’t time to practice all of the things that Porter and the Army cadre wanted and maintain a high grade point average and job at the university recreation center. Something had to give.
“Mason?” Porter’s inflection changed and snapped his thoughts like a twig.
“What?”
“Get up out of the snow.” The senior extended a hand. “You’re gonna be fine. Just keep working.”
Mason wanted to say something, but the look on Porter’s face was something he’d not seen in two years with the ROTC battalion. The senior put a hand on his shoulder and smiled.
“We’ve all fucked up a few lanes, okay?”
Mason returned the smile genuinely. “Thanks, Porter.”
Like all cadets, they used only last names. Technically, Porter was a cadet lieutenant colonel and Mason was a cadet staff sergeant. Protocol in “CadetLand” meant he should have said “sir,” but Porter would have shrugged it off. They were cadets, after all. There would be a time and a place for actual rank and real responsibility.
“Get your squad and head to the road. We’ll debrief on the way to the bus.”
The snow fell harder as Mason and his small team of four met the other five members of the squad. The bravo team leader, Ashley Higgs, was the only one to meet his eyes. The pretty, shy blonde frowned at him, disappointment all over her face. Not only had he let himself down, but her and the others.
“Everybody ready?” Mason asked.
“All up. Kennedy is using the B&W.” The “bushes and woods” were the equivalent of a field latrine in Higgs’ midwestern parlance. It brought a smile to Mason’s face as always.
“Again? The kid’s got a small bladder.”
Higgs giggled. “Tiny tank.”
Mason smiled and reached down for his rucksack. The large, digital-patterned rucksack weighed roughly thirty pounds with a standard load for cadets on a weekend training exercise. A uniform change, extra set of boots, underwear, physical training clothes and shoes (for wear in the barracks), extended cold weather modular sleep system, and personal hygiene items filled the space quite nicely. As he slipped his shoulders into the straps and pulled the rucksack on, the sky flashed and a tremendous sound came down on them. The ground came up at once and threw them all down.
Mason closed his eyes and covered his head. Did Porter throw an artillery simulator? He looked up and saw Porter stumble to his feet, looking skyward.
“Is everybody all right?” Higgs looked at the collected cadets, her eyes wide and frightened. “What was that?”
“Thundersnow!” Porter yelled. “Let’s get going, people! Get your rucks on!”
Mason turned to the collected group and opened his mouth to yell for Kennedy to hurry up. Instead, there was a bloodcurdling scream and then silence. “Kennedy?”
Higgs yelled as well, with no response.
“It stopped snowing,” the other junior in the squad, Mark Stratton, said with a laugh. “How about that!”
“Kennedy!” Mason yelled again. He turned toward Stratton. “Get him back here.”
“He’s not my problem,” Stratton said. “You want him, you go get him.”
Mason spun on his heels. “Kennedy is your soldier right now, Stratton, and I’m still in charge of this mission. Get Kennedy and get ready to move.”
“Whatever,” Stratton said, but he moved toward the wood line Higgs indicated. He looked over his shoulder to glare, and Mason knew why. They hadn’t liked each other as freshmen. Mason won the Superior Cadet award their freshman year, and Stratton took the award their sophomore year. A coveted opportunity to attend the Army’s basic parachutist course at Fort Benning the previous summer came down to their physical fitness test scores, with Stratton winning out. Given the chance, he loved calling the other cadets “legs,” the airborne derogatory term for those unqualified to jump from a perfectly good airplane. Which meant Mason and ninety-five percent of the rest of the cadets in the battalion.
“Medic!” Cadet Martinez, Kennedy’s battle buddy, screamed. “Higgs! Get over here!”
The young woman dropped her rucksack, opened it, and removed a Combat Life Saver bag. The squad carried two of them, and Higgs always managed to grab one. Mason teased her about always wanting the lighter-weight bags versus the tactical radios, until he’d learned she was an emergency medical technician when she’d sewn up a fellow cadet the previous year. Mason watched her jog toward Martinez. The freshman’s face was pale as the snow on the ground around them.
“Hurry!”
The blizzard had stopped. Stratton had said something, but it hadn’t registered until that moment. Not even a trace of snow fell from the sky. The solid ceiling of gray clouds appeared broken amidst a cool yellow western sky. His stomach twisted on itself. Something else had gone wrong. He jogged after Higgs. Behind the frozen remains of a thicket, they found Kennedy lying facedown in the snow. The tall kid’s pants were down around his ankles, and he lay motionless. Higgs gasped at the amount of blood on the snow. It made no sense.
“What the hell—” Mason said. A loud crack sounded to the right. For a split second, he could hear a whistling sound before the bark of a nearby tree exploded. The group all dove into the snow. Mason looked into Kennedy’s motionless blue eyes. Voices screamed from the clearing in an unintelligible language. Mason shifted to his elbows and looked low over Kennedy’s helmet. In the clearing to the north, three men in green jackets and funny plumed hats sprinted away.
One of them had Kennedy’s rucksack. Another had his M16A2 rifle.
Porter’s voice spurred them to action. “Hey! Stop right now!”
The three men looked over the shoulders and kept running. After a moment, one of them slowed and spun. He knelt in the snow and aimed a long rifle back toward the cadets.
“Take cover!” Mason yelled and flung himself into the snow. The rifle cracked and a shot whistled low above their heads. Mason waited for another shot, but it did not come.
“Come on!” Porter yelled and got to his feet. Mason looked up to see the senior tearing through the snow toward the retreating men. Stratton and Murphy followed. The Warrior Ethos, the model for behavior in combat, said to never leave a fallen comrade.
“Help me flip him over,” Higgs directed. When he didn’t respond, she yelled. “Mason! Help me flip him over!”
Grabbing the freshman’s shoulders, Mason did as he was told. The boy’s eyes stared unseeing into the distance. Blood covered his abdomen and soaked through the thin combat uniform shirt and trousers. Higgs touched Kennedy’s neck for a long minute.
“No pulse. He’s not breathing.” She pulled up the shirt and grimaced. “Gunshot wound left lower abdomen. Puncture wound at the solar plexus.” She touched Kennedy’s soaked trousers and announced, “Another one at the femoral artery.”
“What happened?” Mason looked up at the receding cadets in chase. Higgs worked quickly and cut away Kennedy’s pants leg. The amount of blood turned Mason’s stomach to the point he had to turn away before his lunch made a second appearance. “Do we need to start CPR?”
“No. He’s dead, Mason. He bled out.” Higgs wiped her right eye with the back of her bloody hands. “What do you want me to do?”
“Bled out? From what?” Mason shook his head. “Get him up so we can get out of here.”
Higgs held up her hands. “He’s dead, Mason. Didn’t you hear me? Those assholes”—she gestured toward the fleeing men in the funny white costumes—“stabbed him twice and took his gear.”
He could hear Stratton and Porter screaming. One of them fired six or seven shots of blank ammunition. They were out of the training range. The whole mission had gone into the toilet. Kennedy was dead, the cadets were running around without any leadership, and the rifle was missing. Focus, he told himself. Pick one thing and deal with it.
“Higgs, get the cadre on the radio. Call in the emergency.” Mason licked his lips and looked at the collected cadets. “Koch, you come with me. The rest of you stay here until the cadre come.”
“There’s nothing but static.” Higgs shrugged.
“Keep trying. Call them on a cell phone if you have to.” As the directions came out, Mason calmed and focused. “Koch and I are going after Stratton and the others to get the rifle. Stay here and maintain positive accountability. If anything else happens, call me on the radio. Same will happen for me. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
Mason shrugged out of his rucksack and let it fall to the snow. He heard Higgs calling into the radio, “Charlie Two Four, this is X-ray Two One, November November November. I say again, November November November. We have an emergency situation.”
There was no immediate response. Go! Get the rest of them before this whole thing gets worse! “The rest of you stay here and don’t move. Let’s go, Koch.”
The big kid from Indiana got to his feet and started toward the clearing and Mason followed. In the flattened winter grass, they began to run.
“What the fuck is going on?” Koch asked.
Mason shook his head. “Don’t know. Let’s just get that rifle back before this gets any worse.”
“Roger that.”
Koch wasn’t much of a runner and Mason began to pull away from him. After a hundred meters, the snow faded abruptly into a light powder on the ground. Mason accelerated like a gazelle and began to close the gap on Porter and the others. Another crack echoed through the valley. For the first time, Mason wondered if they were some kind of terrorists. Who else would trespass on a military reservation with live ammunition? Mason closed on the tree line and found Porter and the three other cadets lying behind trees for cover.
A two-story wood-sided cabin sat inside the trees, off-center in a circular clearing. The front steps did not have a porch, just a weathered brown door. Small windows adorned each side roughly a meter from each corner. A longer, thinner building abutted the taller main house. Two horses grazed in a wooden-fenced paddock. Wood smoke trailed out of the central rock chimney with the smell of bread cooking.
Stratton glanced over his shoulder at Mason. “They went inside.”
“What is this place? A movie set?” Mason looked toward Porter. The senior ripped open a foil packet and removed a field dressing. Murphy’s right arm was a bloody mess. “He okay?”
“They’re shooting at us and Murphy’s hit. What the hell do you think, Mason?” Porter asked. “You call the cadre?”
Mason nodded. “We did. Nothing but static.”
Porter ripped open the Velcro pocket on his left sleeve and removed a smartphone. He stared at it for a moment. “That’s odd.”
“What?” Mason asked.
“No service.”
Voices drifted on the wind. A scream rang out from inside the cabin. A woman’s scream. Porter tied the dressing on Murphy’s arm. “You with me?”
Mason blinked. “What are you talking about? We don’t have any ammunition.”
“Five versus three and they’re using muskets. Single-shot. We can get in there and stop them before someone else gets hurt.”
“Muskets?” Mason shook his head. “We need to wait for the cadre. They stole a rifle. That’s government property.”
Porter nodded, chewing on his bottom lip. He looked at Mason for a long moment. “What if the cadre isn’t coming, Mason? It’s up to us to get that rifle back.”
“What do you mean?” Mason blinked. None of it made any sense. The weather change. Less snowfall on the ground. Three men who obviously killed Kennedy and ran into the woods and were holed up in a shack.
“I’ll explain later.” Porter looked up at Stratton huddled behind a tree fifteen meters closer to the door.
“Let’s go,” Stratton whispered. “We can take them!”
Porter licked his lips and looked at Mason. “You ready?”
Stratton jumped to his feet. “Come on!” he hissed at them and ran at a crouch to the side of the cabin. Koch, Porter, Murphy, and Mason lined up against the wall behind him to stack against the door. The stack was a standard formation to clear a room. The point man would kick down the door and the rest would follow him into the room, each with a given sector of fire. The idea was to get inside the room quickly, identify the enemies, and bring them down. As a group, they’d practiced room clearing exactly once.
Stratton held up his rifle and flipped the safety off. He rotated the switch past the semiautomatic setting to full automatic. Everyone else did the same. Without a grenade or any actual weapons to use, they’d have to use their blank ammunition to startle the men. Finger to his lips, Stratton motioned them to creep along the wall toward the cabin’s front door.
Mason lined up as the last man, behind Murphy. “Your arm okay?”
“Yeah,” Murphy said. “Hurts but I’ll make it.”
Another scream came from inside followed by more incoherent language. “Is that German?” Mason whispered to Murphy, who nodded.
“Sounds like it.”
Stratton looked back at them. “Shut the fuck up, you two. Something’s wrong in there. Let’s go.”
Porter moved first, telling Stratton with hand gestures that he would lead the assault. With the accomplished senior leading, Mason felt a bit better. Porter would know just what to do, like always. There were three armed men inside versus five unarmed cadets.
They shuffled toward the door as quietly as they could. Stratton stepped out and kicked the middle of the door near its jamb. Wood flew in all directions as the flimsy door slammed inward. In one move, Koch ran inside firing his weapon on full automatic. Not that the blank ammunition would do anything other than maybe scare the attackers or stun them to inaction. Five against three was pretty good odds.
Porter went left, Murphy went right, and Mason looked high and checked the corners. Stratton came through last and froze in the middle of the room. All of them squeezed off multiple shots, filling the tight room with noise and a small amount of blue smoke. Three men in strange white clothing and green felt jackets stood in the cabin. Two were armed and one lay astride a pretty blonde girl on the kitchen table. His intentions were immediately clear. One of his hands covered her mouth while the other stopped trying to open his belt. Another man lay on the floor bleeding from a head wound. He moaned but did not move.
The girl locked eyes with Mason for a moment and then Porter. She closed her eyes and bit down on the hand across her mouth. The fat man howled and brought his other hand up and slapped the girl viciously.
“Hey!” Porter screamed and gestured with the barrel of his rifle. “Put down your weapons and get down on the floor!”
As if time slowed down, Mason saw it was all wrong. These people, whoever they were, did not dress or live as modern people did. The cabin looked like something he’d seen as a boy on a family vacation in the south. A working colonial farm with old women dressed much like the pretty young woman thrashing at the fat man attempting to rape her. Cooking utensils mixed with tools on the hearth, making the fireplace a combination workbench and kitchen. A heavy cast-iron pot hung above the smoldering logs. Some type of stew simmered by the smell. The fat man barked an order in German, snapping Mason’s thoughts.
“Tote sie alle!” he roared and pushed himself away from the girl with a grunt and his penis flopping absurdly in his hand.
The two others looked at each other for a moment. The one with a hawk’s face held his rifle at the waist and spun toward the cadets. The glint of a bayonet caught Mason’s eye. Blood covered the slim metal blade. Mason wondered if the rifle could fire with the bayonet attached.
“Put it down on the ground,” Porter ordered. He took a step toward the two men. “Now!”
The man sneered and pulled the trigger. Mason blinked at the intensity of the burst. Sulfurous smoke filled the cabin, its stench overwhelming the breathable air. Coughing and sputtering, Mason waved at the smoke with one hand in a desperate attempt to see something, anything.
Can’t see! What the hell?
The smoke swirled and cleared as the chimney did its work and pulled the remnants up and away from the cabin. The two men shouted at each other, but the ringing in his ears muffled everything. Something moved on the floor and Mason recognized the brown rough-out boots of his friends. He knelt toward them and moved up the legs. Eyes looking up into the smoke, Mason felt something slick and moist on his hands and looked down for the briefest of moments.
Porter lay crumpled on the ground, a black-and-red stain spreading across his abdomen. Eyes wide, he looked up at Mason and raised a bloodied hand. Blood trickled from both sides of his mouth as he struggled toward Mason. “Take charge,” Porter whispered. “Mason. Take . . . charge.”