When A Warrior Comes Home Read online

“Give me time to wrap up the paperwork and shower, then come to Butch’s trailer.”

  “Need For Speed, again?”

  “Yeah, but you’re playing left-handed.”

  When Brian mimicked a shocked face, a lock of black hair shook loose from his fringe. The civilian had the worst haircut on base, but Mike liked the man. Lanky, and so thin he disappeared when turned sideways, Brian was a deep thinker. All brains and no balls, Butch said. But for six months, this VCOM project had kept Mike away from the front line and left no time for boredom—better fare than most.

  He slapped Brian on the back and triggered a coughing bout. “See you at six thirty. Beers are on me.”

 

  At six fifteen, Brian strode between two rows of box-trailers. Staff Sergeant Paul (Butch) Cassidy’s accommodations sat five trailers over. The night air chilled him enough to generate a shiver. This wasn’t the humid, clinging cold of a North Carolina winter, but the twenty-degree temperature drop that happened minutes after sunset left him wishing he’d worn a jacket.

  Identical to hundreds of others, Butch’s thirty-foot-by-twelve box had a bunk at each end and a TV in the center. When Brian opened the door, his nose wrinkled at the heady aroma of body odor and stale pizza. “Stinks like a locker room in here.”

  Mike, lounging on Butch’s bed with a headset on, glanced up from the laptop resting on his knee. He held up one finger and waved Brian in.

  Butch, and Yaz—his roommate, Staff Sergeant Mark Yazinski—sat on canvas chairs at a small table, each nursing a beer. Yaz sprang to his feet. “Finally! Ready to get served, Nerdman?”

  Butch’s soft rumbling laugh filled the room. Six foot six or seven, he was a bear of a man with a blond buzz-cut. His melon-sized right biceps sported a blue scroll with “Rosa” tattooed inside. On his right wrist, a heart enclosed the name of his only son, Noe. Butch stood, and the room grew smaller. In a deep bass southern drawl he said, “Now, Yaz, don’t go callin’ Brian names or he might take off the blindfold while he whoops your ass.”

  Brian laughed. “You guys go ahead. I’ll play the winner. I need a beer.”

  Butch slapped Brian’s shoulder hard enough to jostle him a step backward. “Good idea, maybe the liquor’ll slow you down. C’mon, Yaz, prepare to be humbled.”

  The men dragged their chairs in front of the TV and a virtual racetrack filled the screen. In seconds, their heads were bobbing and weaving.

  Brian peeked at Mike’s laptop—he was on Skype with his wife, Sarah, and their two boys back home in North Carolina.

  “I miss you too, Christopher,” Mike said to the monitor, in a voice far gentler than the one he used in camp. “I’ll be there in a couple weeks.” As he listened to his son’s response, Mike’s face lit with a soft smile. He nodded. “Yes before Santa arrives.” Mike laughed aloud at whatever was said next. Brian, feeling like an intruder, made for the fridge and snagged a Budweiser. Without the camaraderie of these men, his six-month project in this desert in the middle of nowhere would have seemed longer and been lonelier.

  But their Iraq was worlds apart from his.

  Four weeks into this deployment, these warriors had seen action together when series of IEDs had demolished the second vehicle in Mike’s convoy. Butch and Yaz and Mike had spent two hours combing the wreckage and collecting the remains of five soldiers. They brought the body parts back to base. They knew the men from Fort Black. They knew their wives. They knew their families. Families who were waiting for those men to come home.

  He had heard of the incident, but not from Mike or the guys. When he’d asked, Butch simply said, “We ain’t never going to talk about that.” Then a screaming silence filled the trailer and made Brian squirm.

  He popped the cap, took a long pull on the beer, and wandered to the door. A family portrait hung on the wall to the right of the door jamb. Butch touched a finger-kiss to it each time he passed. In the photo, the big man, dressed in a green hospital gown, towered over his wife. Leaning against her husband, Rosa’s dark hair draped her shoulders and spilled over the front of a pale-blue nightgown. Her even, white teeth sparkled amidst tanned Hispanic features. Head tilted, her chocolate eyes, brimming with a mother’s love, gazed at baby Noe.

  A perfect family.

  Someday, he hoped to find his own Rosa. The infant snuggled in her arms was hours old. Butch had deployed four weeks later. In two days, Butch would head home, hoping to see his boy take his first steps and say his first words before the next deployment. Brian hoped so too. No wonder the man was thinking of quitting. Who’d willingly be separated from Rosa and Noe?

  Outside, the missile warning Klaxon started to screamed, drowning the soft sounds of Mike whispering to his family. Counterintuitively, Brian opened the door. Mike waved at him and shouted, “Shut the door, Nerdman. I can’t hear… No, honey, it’s okay, just the siren. I told you; it goes off all the time.”

  Brian stepped out and closed the door behind him. The Klaxon had sounded at two a.m. the day after he had arrived at Camp Liberation. Brian had lain in bed, covers pulled over his head, sweating and trembling like a petrified puppy. Amazing how he’d adapted to this strange life. He stood on the small wooden deck and let the deafening sound course through him. A shiver spilled down his spine and his heart rate spiked—evolutionary flight responses triggered by the ear-piercing noise, but no deep fear remained. As Mike said, this was a regular occurrence.

  The siren was just a warning. If an attack happened, the Phalanx antimissile system protected the camp by spraying thousands of 20 mm rounds into the sky to destroy incoming mortar, artillery, or rockets. The troops called the weapon R2-D2 because its radar detection dome resembled the Star Wars robot. But the Iraqis aim was poor. Phalanx probably wouldn’t even fire.

  The wailing stopped and Brian listened to the ringing in his ears until the echoes faded and the camp’s night sounds resumed. TVs blared from the half-dozen trailers backing onto Butch’s—windowless, gray, and identical on the outside. Inside, though, many of the young men and women had arrived that week fresh from boot camp. At their age, Brian was a newly minted freshman in college. These kids were going to war, moving toward danger. If that had been their first warning siren, they’d be terrified too.

  The Klaxon wound into a scream again. This time, the missile defenses triggered. Hundreds of white tracers lit the sky. Phalanx roared like a ten-ton lawnmower—loud enough to rattle Brian’s teeth. A lead weight dropped into the pit of his stomach. The din wiped out his bravado, and his hand trembled as he spun around and grabbed the doorknob, desperate to escape the tumult.

  A percussive sound wave staggered him backward, scrambled his head, and sucked all air from his lungs. He covered his ears. A fraction of a second later, the trailer door slammed into his arm, flipped him like a plastic toy, and smashed his chest against the deck’s guardrail. He crashed through the wooden pickets, and the world exploded in sound and light and pain.

 

  In Fayetteville, Sarah stared at her husband’s image, frozen on the laptop’s monitor. Mike was wincing, right hand lifted halfway to his head as though fending off a blow. Michael Braeman is offline pulsed in a small dialogue box at the bottom of the screen.

  “Mommy, what’s happening?” Christopher sat beside her on the sofa. Pale-blue eyes, his father’s eyes, stared into hers. Worry creased her son’s brow. “Why did Daddy stop talking?”

  Sarah opened her mouth, forced air into her constricted chest and gripped the sides of the keyboard so her hands wouldn’t shake. Nervous nausea knotted her stomach.

  Daniel, standing behind her, stretched an arm over her shoulder. “What’s that?” He pointed to Mike’s headboard where a white crack had appeared. The dark wood, bowed at the center, appeared ready to snap.

  Sarah managed a breath. “We lost signal, is all. Daniel, why don’t you take Christopher to the kitchen and put a couple Pop Tarts in the toaster while I call your dad back?”

  Christopher bounced to the floor
and ran around the couch. He grabbed his brother’s sleeve and pulled. “I want strawberry. Come on!” He dragged Daniel across the room. Sarah glanced at her older boy, following his kid brother but still facing her. Face drained of color, his eyes locked with hers, full of worry. She shooed him and looked away, tried to conceal her concern, tried to suppress the fear-monster that gripped her chest and shortened her breath.

  Unable to reconnect with Mike, Sarah called Butch’s wife, who lived four blocks away in the same subdivision. Keeping her voice calm, Sarah asked, “Have you heard from Butch?”

  “Not since yesterday.” Rosa’s pitch changed, became nervous. “Why?”

  Army wives existed with a compartment of terror locked inside and primed to be sprung open by an unexpected phone call or a knock on the door. During deployment, she and Rosa inhabited a false reality, forcing themselves never to dwell on where their men were, pretending to be unaware of the dangers they faced.

  “Probably nothing,” Sarah said. “We were on Skype and I lost the connection.”

  “Phew, you had me worried for a minute. Their Internet goes down on a daily basis, sweetie. I think the army scrambles the signals just to make us crap our panties.”

  Sarah laughed. “Yeah, I expect you’re right.”

  “What else?” Rosa asked. “There’s something else.”

  She glanced at the open kitchen door, lowered her voice to a whisper, and cupped her hand over the mouthpiece. She shouldn’t worry her friend over this. But sometimes sharing was all they had. “The Phalanx sirens were blaring.”

  The line stayed quiet.

  “You there, Rosa?”

  “Uh huh. Butch told me those things go off all the time.”

  “Mike says the same. I’m sure he’ll call back soon.”

  “Let me know when he does, okay… and, Sarah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell Mike to say hi to Butch from me.”

  “Will do.”

  Sarah hung up. Before rebooting the laptop, she squinted and leaned closer to the frozen screen image, and tried to convince herself that the look she saw in her husband’s eyes wasn’t fear.

  Chapter 3

  Flat on his face in the dirt, spitting blood and grit, Brian lifted onto all fours. Pain streaked up his spine, whipped up his neck, and speared his temple. He took a breath but cut it short when hot sparks stabbed his ribcage.

  A medic standing next to him screamed into a handheld radio, “Get a fire truck over here!”

  Brian flipped over and followed the man’s gaze.

  Flames and acrid smoke spewed from a gaping hole where the door of Butch’s trailer used to be. A wind gust fanned the fire and blasted searing heat into Brian’s face. He sprang up, slapping sparks from his head. The action radiated pain around his chest and back as though a steel band was being twisted and tightened, crushing him. He bent double and grunted, gagging from the stink of his burned hair.

  He and the medic backed away from the heat, shielding their eyes.

  “You’d better let me check you out,” the medic said.

  Brian yanked at the man’s sleeve, and shouted, “Did they get out?” His voice sounded odd, distorted, as though he were calling from the end of a long tunnel. “Butch, Yaz, and Mike, did they get out?”

  The man stared back, blank eyed, clearly baffled by the question. Yellow flames reflected from his sweat-slickened face. “Who?”

  The Phalanx roared. The Klaxon squealed. Soldiers spilled from their trailers, shouting, swearing, screaming. An officer barked orders at a crew of medics as they checked on dozens of men kneeling or curled fetus-like on the ground. Flashing blue lights signaled more help arriving. Soldiers with gurneys spilled through the T-walls from the access road beyond.

  Four or five trailers had sustained a hit, but Butch’s was on fire. The heat forced everyone back. The stench of burning plastic stung Brian’s throat and stole his breath, forcing him to double over, coughing and choking and clutching his chest.

  He stepped forward, toward his friends, and stubbed his toe on the front door, lying on the ground between him and the trailer. It had saved him, protected him from the full force of the blast. Gritting his teeth against anticipated agony, he bent, grabbed, and lifted. “Gnah!” Brian screamed with the effort but raised the door. Using it as a shield, he stumbled toward the trailer. When he could no longer bear the heat, he pushed the door away from him. With one foot jammed against the bottom, it pivoted, and the top lodged against the trailer’s deck, forming a ramp.

  Flames scorched his face and forced his eyes shut. Bent at the waist, arms clamped across his chest to hold in the pain, he spun away. In an old-man hunch, Brian ran. He bypassed befuddled soldiers sitting, legs splayed, on the sand. He veered around a teenager with blood snaking from both ears who staggered around like a drunk in Jockeys and T-shirt. He swerved and swayed through obstacles, until he turned sharp right and climbed the ramp into his trailer.

  Inside, he fired up the LightCube. Feet and knees vibrating under the desk, he screamed at the machine, “Come on. Come on!” The thirty-second-long boot routine seemed to stretch to minutes before the tablet initiated and hundreds of pinpoint light beams projected from the device’s surface to form the control cube. He slipped on the heads-up display goggles, plunged his hands into the blue glow, and woke the VCOM.

  Brian rolled the machine out the door, and retraced his route. He navigated the wounded and the frantic first responders until he reached Butch’s trailer. The burning roof tiles belched smoke and dripped flaming tar balls that exploded like fireworks when then dropped. He drove the robot up the door ramp and into the burning box.

  The VCOM’s cameras projected the scene inside. Jagged holes, basketball-sized, peppered the walls. The center rear panels had blown in; shredded, they littered the floor. To his right, a three-foot-long spear of blue flame roared from a propane gas heater like a huge blowtorch. Flames swamped the carpet and wrapped the walls. Clothes spilled from an upturned dresser burned and glowed tinder red.

  The smoke was densest ahead and right, so he turned left. Mike was at the far end trapped beneath the bed he’d been lying on when Brian last saw him. Mike’s arm was straight out, pointing toward the middle of the trailer, near the busted paneling. He was shouting. Brian couldn’t understand, but he rotated the robot and followed Mike’s finger. Rolling forward, he spotted Butch’s head poking out from under a tangle of chairs. A series of black tar balls peppered his scalp—remnants of the big man’s blond buzz cut. A splintered two-by-four burned against his bare, outstretched arm, singeing the Rosa tattoo.

  No time to consider the soldier’s injuries. Left here, Butch would die, and Brian didn’t know how long the prototype’s hardware could survive the heat. He bent the torso, grabbed Butch’s wrist, and reversed, dragging the sergeant down the makeshift ramp and twenty feet across the sand before dropping him and rushing back to the fire.

  As he reentered the trailer, to Brian’s right, a ten-foot section of roof caved in, showering sparks and debris. Greedy for oxygen, flames licked the wall, straining toward the new hole. Smoke blinded him, or maybe the lenses were failing. The prototype VCOM wasn’t constructed to withstand combat conditions. He rolled away from the fire, toward Mike’s bed. Three feet from the upturned mattress, the master sergeant came into focus. Both hands clamped his left leg. A jagged metal spike protruding from his calf pinned him to the floor. The digital readout on Brian’s heads-up display ticked off the seconds.

  Hurry!

  Mike, face blackened and contorted, pointed toward the far wall where the propane gas blazed, and screamed, “Get Yaz out!” Brian rotated the cameras one-eighty. Butch’s fifty-inch flat-screen TV had blown full across the room and lay at an angle against the upturned heater. Next to it, Yaz’s red-checkered bandanna peeked out from under the toppled television. Brian rolled toward it.

  He clamped the VCOM’s crude grasping hand on the corner of the TV screen, and pulled. The heat-softened f
rame stretched like chewing gum. Flaming, molten plastic splashed the floor, splattering Yaz’s chest. Brian moved in again, hooked the TV’s metal mounting bracket, and dragged the set off the soldier’s back.

  Yaz’s legs, enveloped in a roaring cone of propane flame, resembled two blackened Sunday roasts. Fat bubbled and oozed from cratered skin. Brian recoiled and sent the VCOM into a spin. “Get a grip. Get a grip!” Jaw clamped, he ground his teeth, forced air into his lungs, and regained control of the machine. When he grasped Yaz’s left arm, the image swam, distorted, and then the feed from the right camera failed. He turned the robot toward the doorway and dragged the soldier outside.

  A brace of medics were attending to Butch. They sprang back from the robot as Brian dropped Yaz, circled them, and returned to the trailer. He moved to the bed and grasped Mike’s arm, yanking it away from his injured leg. A piercing scream sounded in his headset. Mike’s agony swamped Brian’s ears and sent shudders through his stomach. Body rigid, face twisted, tense and tight, knees shaking, he focused on maintaining steady hands. The LightCube was sensitive to the slightest movement. And this was no demonstration, no dry run. When he swiveled the cameras toward the door, his video feed flickered.

  Then went blank.

  Blinded, fingers poised, Brian froze—an orchestra conductor who’d lost his place in the music. Sweat dripped from his chin, but he dared not move a muscle. If he lost orientation, he might drive the robot into a wall.

  Focus.

  He closed his eyes, forced a slow breath, in, then out. Visualizing the floor plan, he pictured the last image he’d received. His fingers edged through the blue light. Drawing on years of experience with the controller, he judged an eight-foot straight-ahead maneuver, stopped, and then executed a standing turn. Please be right. After rolling thirty feet, he gave the command to open the claw. If he’d missed the door, the robot and Mike would still be inside the inferno. With no way out.

  Brian put the robot in standby, jumped from his chair, and flew out the door.