The Night Letter

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Hemmerlich usually felt a bit nervous before a mission, like it was an opportunity to finish something left previously incomplete, knowing that more opportunities might not lie in the future. The helo lifted off all lit up and touched down 15 minutes later in a blackout. They were still over a kilometer from their target where there was no landing zone and they humped it the rest of the way. The scouts had placed an infrared beacon at the target so they knew the house they were going to hit. Hemmerlich had the satellite image of the house etched in his memory and when he saw the house he fit the image to it like an overlay so that he knew the entrances and exits even if he couldn't see them.

Although the house was in darkness, the occupants weren't necessarily asleep. They could have been waiting. The engineers went first to clear any traps or IEDs. The team split up to cover any possible exit routes and then executed the infiltration. Hemmerlich was the door kicker. The front room was silent but not quite empty. In the glow of his scope light he could see empty magazines and scattered things that still looked warm from the touch of human hands and the place still had the buzz around it of a room recently and hastily abandoned. The Americans had been spotted before entry and were probably being targeted now in the instant it took Hemmerlich to perceive all this. Beyond the noise of the initial entry, he thought he could hear murmurs like prayer or commands, almost no louder than a whisper but he could hear it.

His second, Latimer, and third, Petras, were already covering the inner door. Hemmerlich rushed it and burst through. He could see the movement of a dim figure, no more than a pile of rags but definitely moving, in the corner. Quicker than thought he swung the barrel of his rifle around but he was too slow. The pile of rags erupted in a fountain of blood and slumped forward on its AK-47, dead from Latimer's bullets.

Hemmerlich scanned the room but there were no more figures, no more movement. Despite his hearing protection, he was deaf for a moment from the proximity of the explosion from Latimer's rifle. He could hear only a high pitch whistle as if his head were a radio trying to tune in a station while in the middle of nowhere. When the sound wave crested and fell and he could hear again, the murmurs had grown to shouts. But where were they coming from? There were no other doors in the room. There was one window but that would be covered from the outside. His eyes swept over the perimeter of the room again and in the shadows of the corner, just behind the recently dead and he made out the frame of a door he had missed on the first pass. It looked like it might have been the door to a cubby hole or a child's room, it was so small.

Rather than kick it with his foot, he forced it with his knee. There was a dirt floor just inside the threshold that immediately churned into a storm of dust from the gunfire on the other side. There were apparently stairs inside so whoever was on the other side was firing downward at them and could not get a straight shot into the room. Fortunately, the bullets sank into the ground and did not ricochet up at Hemmerlich. Latimer and Petras knelt at either side of the door and provided suppressive fire as best they could but the stairs went straight up almost at a right angle. Hemmerlich pulled the door off its hinges and flung it aside. He flipped on his back, raised his rifle over his head and slid to the threshold where he could get a better line of fire. There was a gap on the side of the stairs that provided some cover. He could see a small triangle of sky in the scope light and muzzle flash of his own rifle and two more at the top of the stairs. He felt he wasn't getting clean shots as he had to maintain cover. Suddenly, the triangle of sky was filled with a comet trail of falling linen like a tarp twisting weightless through the air. It looked brilliant white against the black sky. Hemmerlich could just get out of the way before it landed on him. It landed with a surprising amount of force, as if it had acquired mass only upon contact with the earth. It filled the entire doorway as neatly as a cork fills a bottle neck. There were no visible bloodstains on the clothing so Latimer put two more rounds into the man to make sure he was dead then he pulled him out of the way. Everything was very orderly and controlled even this proximate to death. Hemmerlich was about to continue firing but another body fell into the door and he supposed the rest of the team was on the roof now, picking off the militants. After Hemmerlich moved this one out of the way Latimer said the way was clear and they filed up the stairs, each man having to crouch very low to get through the opening.