Quest for Honor (6 page)

Jim sat in the car now, sweating and crying and pounding the steering wheel. He cursed himself for coming back here, but at the same time he knew it had to be done, this one time, and it would be over. He fought to get his emotions under control, and his Systema training came back to him now, saved him, brought his breathing back down and cleared his mind. If he’d only had that back then, he might’ve been able to move faster,
more efficiently, to save Suzy, but he hadn’t started that training until ’06, a year too late to help her.

He wasn’t aware that another twenty minutes had gone by. He stared at the front door of the church, where the man with the gun had gone inside that day. A psycho, they said later, privately, some yahoo whose girlfriend had broken up with him a week before. She attended that church but hadn’t even been there that day. He didn’t know that, but he went there looking for her and he was going to take her out and a lot of other people, too. The cops found two full magazines in his pants pockets. But Jim had been there to stop him. He saved maybe dozens of people that day. Only one died, because he wasn’t fast enough, well-trained enough, strong enough. He’d failed.

The memories flooded back over him again. His wife, her face pale and eyes wide with pain and confusion, looking up at him one last time as he held her close, feeling the life drift out of her, watching the red stain grow on the front of her new white blouse. The screaming and wailing of the other churchgoers, with the pastor kneeling down beside Suzy and blessing her with a trembling hand. The phone call he had to make to his daughter, back home on summer break from college, and hearing her hysterical sobbing on the other end of the line. And later that night, sitting out on Edie’s front porch, gazing up at the stars, seeing a meteor blaze briefly across the sky, and wondering if it might be Suzy’s immortal soul, going wherever souls go, without him. He wanted to beseech God to take him too, so he could be with her in eternity. He wanted to curse God for not taking him instead. But he did neither. He simply sat there for the longest time, staring at the sky, feeling a hole open deep within the pit of his own soul, a dark abyss that had never closed.

The church bell rang. Jim started the car and drove away, heading east, to Cedar Lake, and his empty house.

CHAPTER SIX

Somalia

“
Y
ou will do
exactly as I say, and you will tell no one. Is that clear?” Yusuf gave the boy his hardest stare, the one that had cowed even hard-core Arab fighters in the past.

“Y-yes, sir,” the boy stammered. Only sixteen, and he looked four years younger. Yusuf wondered again if this youth was the right choice for the mission. But he had precious few options. The boy’s very youth would be to the Ugandan’s advantage in this case; he had not been part of the group of fighters for very long, had not had time to come under Amir’s spell, and as a Somali he was looked down upon by most of the other fighters, only a few of whom were Somali.

“Tell me again what you will do.”

The boy reached into the pocket of his robe and pulled out a piece of white chalk. “I will go to Mogadishu, to the Hotel Shamo. After nightfall I will use the chalk to make a mark on a telephone pole.” The boy hesitated, trying to remember.

Yusuf forced himself to be patient, but he didn’t have much time. The mosque would be calling the men to prayers in just a few minutes, and Amir would be making sure there were no stragglers. “What telephone pole, Ayan?”

“The one near the entrance to the hotel…?” The boy looked up at Yusuf hopefully.

Yusuf nodded and smiled. “That is correct. And what mark will you make?”

“The mark of the infidel cross, with a circle around it.”

“Show me, in the dust there.” He pointed at a film of grit on the wall.

The boy reached up and traced the sign, then looked hopefully at him again. “Very good,” Yusuf said, and he rubbed the mark out of existence with the flat of his hand. “And what is your task after that?”

“I will go to the home of Aziza, on the Jidka Walaalaha, and ask for shelter during my stay. I am to tell her Sudika sent me. She will give me a note. At dusk, I am to go back to the hotel. In the telephone booth across the street, I will use a screwdriver to open the base of the telephone. I will place the note inside and replace the cover.”

“Very good indeed. And finally?”

“Two nights later I am to go back to the hotel. I am to go to the telephone booth and open up the telephone again. Inside there will be a folded paper. I am to bring it to you.”

“Yes, and remember to put the telephone back together before you leave.”

“I will,
hogaamiye,
” the boy said, addressing Yusuf as “Chief”, as the Somalis liked to do. The other fighters always used the more formal Arabic,
Ra-iss.
“And I am to show the paper to no one else. If anyone asks me, I am to eat the paper.”

Yusuf nodded, patting the boy on the shoulder. “You will do well, Ayan. You will leave after morning prayers tomorrow, on the bus.” The rattletrap Italian-built bus carried men from the village to Mogadishu, fifty miles away. Yusuf gave the boy a fifty-shilling note and a few coins, enough to pay for the bus and bribe anybody who tried a shakedown on the way. “Please give my blessings to Aziza and tell her I will visit her soon.”

“Yes,
hogaamiye,”
the boy said. “I will not fail you.”

Yusuf looked out his window to see men walking toward the mosque. The call to prayers would come very soon. “Very well. Go now. I will see you in three days.” The boy bowed and walked swiftly out of the room. Yusuf took a deep breath, smoothed down the front of his robe, and looked out the window once more.

There was Amir with two of his trusted sergeants in the company of a pair of foreign fighters, one a Jordanian, the other a Chechen. Yusuf suspected their loyalty was more to his lieutenant than to him. He would not care to have Ayan taken by them and questioned. An even worse fate would be for the boy to be taken by the Iranian, Heydar. Yusuf did not see him now, but he was around. Technically, he was an “adviser”, provided by the Sheikh himself through the courtesy of their allies in Tehran. Heydar had spent much time in Lebanon and Syria, working with Hezbollah, and with Hamas in Gaza. Yusuf suspected that he was an officer in the much-feared Iranian Quds Force. It was said he had personally killed six Israeli soldiers and had led the raid in Karbala, Iraq, in 2007 that resulted in the capture and execution of four American soldiers.

Yusuf thought the Karbala story was credible, but doubted the one about the Israelis. He had known a few IDF soldiers and they were not men who were easily killed. Heydar was a physically powerful man, a world-class martial artist who had competed in taekwondo at the Olympics in Sydney, but that was one thing. Being strong enough to kill six Israelis in hand-to-hand combat was quite another. Still, Heydar was not a man to be trifled with, and if the truth were to be known, Yusuf was a little bit afraid of him. He had pointedly declined Heydar’s invitation to train in the makeshift gymnasium the Iranian was using to instruct some of the fighters in taekwondo and some rather exotic martial arts weapons.

It was most unfortunate, but now Yusuf knew that he could trust no one, not even Amir. Well, that was not quite true, he corrected himself. He had to place his trust, at least for the next forty-eight hours, in a pair of Somali teenagers and an Ethiopian woman. The first boy, a cousin of Ayan’s, had been sent to Mogadishu the day before with a coded message for Aziza, whom Yusuf knew to be an agent of NISS, the Ethiopian intelligence service. She would make sure Ayan got the message to the CIA dead drop. If the boy came back with the response Yusuf hoped to see, perhaps he might be able to put his trust in a certain man he had not seen in almost thirty years. It was almost too much to hope for, but then he remembered the screams of those Afghan children. How many more children would die if he failed?

The Chechen was joined by one of his countrymen, a hulk of a man who looked more like an ethnic Russian. He was a new arrival at the camp, and Yusuf had not yet had a chance to interview him. The man turned his head and Yusuf saw a glimpse of his face. For a moment, Yusuf thought it was the man from—

No, that could not possibly be. That man was an American, and it was long ago, but Yusuf had never forgotten him. It was at the campus night club, one night shortly after Yusuf’s arrival at the college in America. Yusuf knew nobody, the fall term had just begun, and he thought there might be other foreign students at this place. As he stood there, minding his own business, he was bumped by a large white man, and Yusuf’s Coke spilled from the plastic cup onto the shirt of the man. He towered over Yusuf and glared down at him, then started yelling. Yusuf’s English in those days was far from fluent, but he did recognize one word,
nigger.
The man was very angry, probably drunk, and Yusuf suddenly was in fear for his life. He looked around, but nobody wanted to intervene, to challenge the bully. Yusuf was wearing a cap, a brimless
kufi
that was his favorite cap from Uganda, and the man arrogantly plucked it off Yusuf’s head and tossed it on the floor.

Then another tall white man, this one more slender, stepped forward. “Pick it up and give it back,” the man said to the bully, who responded with an epithet, and the next thing Yusuf knew the bully was on his knees, one arm pinned awkwardly behind him, obviously causing him much pain. With his free hand he picked up the cap and handed it back to Yusuf. Then the bully was back on his feet and the other man, Yusuf’s savior, was walking him to the doorway, giving the arm one more twist as he propelled the drunk out the door. Many people applauded. The slender man walked back to Yusuf. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” Yusuf said, almost stammering, his fear starting to go away. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” the man said, sticking out his hand. “My name’s Jim Hayes.”

Yusuf’s thoughts snapped back to the here and now as the two Chechens walked toward the mosque. Yusuf followed, knowing that his prayers to Allah this evening would be, at least in his heart, quite different than those of the men beside him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Afghanistan

M
ark didn’t normally
go on the supply choppers that made weekly rounds of the forward operating bases, but today he decided to hitch a ride on the run that would end at FOB Langdon, the battalion’s newest and most dangerous forward operating base in the valley. Maybe it was that book he’d been reading,
The Boys of 98
, about the original Rough Riders. The last survivor was Jesse D. Langdon, who died on June 28, 1975, and it was ironic that Mark finished the book just a couple weeks ago, on the thirty-sixth anniversary of the old trooper’s death. Work on the outpost was just about completed then, and the lieutenant he’d put in charge asked him to suggest a name. The other six FOBs in the battalion were all named after Rough Riders, so Mark suggested Langdon to keep the tradition going. It seemed appropriate, as this was likely the last base they’d be building in the valley. The battalion was on the verge of being stretched thin.

Not that there wasn’t plenty to keep him busy back at the main base camp, but the hard work they’d all put in meant he could afford to take the day for this jaunt. Four months now since he’d taken command, and things were shaping up nicely. It had been a struggle, because many of the officers left behind after their commander was sacked weren’t used to working very hard. Mark kicked several asses, rotating a few back to the rear or stateside just to get them out of his hair, and he tapped into his extensive network to find competent men to replace the dead weight. Fortunately, the non-coms got the message and he’d had little or no trouble there. The troops fell into line quickly and morale started to rise. Like most of the soldiers the Army had left in country, these were largely men who’d had one relatively quiet tour of Iraq and were here to get some action before it was all over. Many of them were still lacking the coveted Combat Infantryman’s Badge, and while that was a worthy thing to have, Mark made sure the men knew the way to get it was not to get all cowboy out here on the line and make mistakes. He didn’t want to have somebody back home sewing the CIB on a dress uniform that was headed for a casket.

The howitzers of his artillery detachment were tuning up for the day’s first fire mission when Mark took one last look at the paper littering his desk. He always visited the gunners right after breakfast and then toured the perimeter. On top of his IN box was a flimsy from his overnight staff. The lieutenant at Langdon was reporting fresh intel of a possible enemy attack against the nearby village, about three klicks from the mountainside where Langdon commanded a strategic view of the southern end of the valley. When they’d built the base, someone said it was like they were giving the Tals down in the valley the finger. Was it the lieutenant who’d said that? Something about this guy’s name….He read it again.
Solum.
That rang a bell somehow.

He’d met the lieutenant in question, of course; Mark had made an effort to get to know each of his officers, not to mention as many of the enlisted men as he could. With over seven hundred troops under his command, that was exhausting work, but it enabled him to give his command a more personal touch, and the men got to know their C.O., which was always helpful. What about this guy? Mark took a minute to find the man’s file. Just a one-page entry, as it was for most of his officers. There it was. Kenneth Solum, twenty-six, graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, went through ROTC there, hometown was Rice Lake, Wisconsin. That was it. He remembered the name now, from a story his father had told him and his brother years ago. Could his lieutenant be related….? No, too big of a coincidence, but the geography fit. He made a decision.

In the outer room of what passed for his headquarters, Mark saw Captain Bill Richards, his adjutant. “Bill, isn’t there a chopper going to Langdon this morning?”

“Yes, sir, about a half-hour from now. Langdon’s the last stop on the run.” Richards, a tall, angular Texan with a drawl that confused the locals here but, Mark suspected, charmed the women back home, checked the clock on the wall. “Make it twenty minutes. Going along, sir?”

Richards had an instinct about these things, and that made him a particularly good adjutant. “I think so. Where’s Major Ruiz?”

“Already out with the battery, sir, prepping the fire mission.” Ruiz was Mark’s 2IC, second-in-command, and a damn good one he was turning out to be. This morning Mark’s battery of four 155mm guns was getting ready to fire in support of FOB O’Neill, which had taken three mortar rounds from the nearby mountainside about twenty minutes ago, an annoying interruption of morning chow. This wouldn’t be their last mission of the day, probably; in the hundred and twenty-five days Mark had been in command, his battery averaged nearly four per day, firing over fifteen hundred rounds. The loud crack of the big guns was a common sound around the base, and the farmers and villagers down below hardly paid attention anymore. Mark had seen them more than once, going about their daily business just as they had been doing for generations, ignoring the one-sided duels between the heavy weapons of the Americans and the lighter, less-accurate mortars of the insurgents. Even when the stray mortar round landed in their fields, the Afghans rarely complained. What good would it do? It was how life was in Afghanistan. He’d asked a village chief about it once. “Before you Americans,” the chief said wearily, “it was the Russians. Before them, the British. Before them, someone else. After you leave, someone else will come. It will never stop.”

“We’ll see about that,” Mark had said, and his Afghan National Army interpreter had struggled with that one, finally coming up with something that sounded like the Pashto version of “
Inshallah,”
the Will of God.

It would be a short hop to Langdon, but not necessarily a safe one, so Mark was glad to see the Blackhawk helo was fully armed and manned. In a real hot zone he’d have an escort of one or two Apaches, but this would do for now. The warrant officer pilot snapped off a salute when Mark approached. “Need a ride somewhere, Colonel?”

“You can drop me off at Langdon, Mr. Witz.”

“Roger that, sir. Step inside and the flight attendant will show you to your first-class seat. Keep your tray in the upright position until we reach our cruising altitude, and have a safe flight.”

Mark was helped aboard through the port side door by the gunner and strapped himself in to the only empty seat. Mark could remember a time when sacks of mail would fill supply choppers, but now there was only one small sack that looked like it had some packages. Most of the troops relied on email, which they could access when they rotated back to Roosevelt. Along with the mail, the bird would carry other, more vital supplies to the twenty men at Langdon: food, bottled water, spare parts, and some ammo crates. Mark would be the only soldier getting off at the last FOB.

The crewmen were finishing up the loading when Mark suddenly remembered when he’d first heard the name Solum. He hadn’t thought about it since leaving his office, but that’s how it worked sometimes. This particular memory was nearly forty years old, but now it came back to him with near-perfect clarity. He remembered his father speaking the name….

“You okay, sir?”

Mark blinked away the tears that were about to come, seeing the door gunner looking at him through his shaded visor. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

He remembered the day: Memorial Day, 1972. Sunny and warm, and his dad, Ed Hayes, had taken him and Jim to the veterans cemetery near County Stadium in Milwaukee. Dad was quiet on the drive from their house in the suburb of St. Francis, and that was unusual for him. He always had the radio on, always a ballgame or a country station, and he would sing along, although not too well. Ed Hayes was a carpenter, not a singer. He was a baseball fan, too, and had taken his boys to the ballpark a few times to see the Brewers. But the team was out of town that day, so Mark was puzzled when they drove past the stadium with its vast empty parking lot. In a few minutes they parked along a side street and walked a block to the first cemetery Mark had visited since his grandfather’s death, four years earlier.

He remembered the lush green grass, and all the crosses, hundreds of them, all over the rolling hills. Mark was only seven at the time. Jim was eleven, old enough to remember Grandpa Hayes’s funeral. “They bury dead people here,” Jim said to him, “like they did Grandpa.”

There were a lot of people there that day, and Jim said it was because it was a special day, they’d talked about it in school on Friday. All these crosses were for guys who died in wars, he said. Vietnam for sure, and there were big ones a long time ago.

“Dad was in one,” he said. Jim was whispering, because Dad was walking ahead of them, slowly but purposefully, and this seemed like a place to be quiet, even though Mark heard birds singing like they always did on sunny days.

“He was? Was it Vietnam?” Mark wasn’t really sure where Vietnam was, but there were people on TV who talked about it all the time and usually they were yelling.

“No, the one before that. Korea. I saw his medal.”

“Yeah? Where is it?”

“In his foot locker, down in the basement.” Mark didn’t know how that could’ve happened, because there was a big padlock on it, but Jim must’ve found the key. He was pretty smart.

Dad stopped, looked closely at the row of headstones to their left, and started down the row, the boys following. They passed some people. There was a woman about the age of Mark’s second-grade teacher back at Willow Glen School, and she was kneeling in front of one of the crosses, crying. A little boy stood next to her. Farther down, there was an old gray-haired woman leaning on a cane, with a long-haired young man wearing a grubby jacket with that one sign on it, like a rocket in a circle, standing next to her. She was putting some flowers down near a cross, and the long-haired guy was looking away, up at the clouds, but Mark thought he saw his chin trembling.

Dad finally stopped before one of the crosses, and after a few seconds he got down on one knee and touched it. Mark saw his father’s shoulders start to shake. He peered past him to see the words on the front of the cross:

MICHAEL T SOLUM

PVT CO C 1
st
BN 1
ST
CAV

5 JULY 1931 – 1 NOV 1950

The boys stood silently behind their father. After a couple minutes, he stood up, took a deep breath, and said, “Come on, boys. There’s a bench over here.”

Around the perimeter of the graves were several stone benches, and Dad found the nearest one and sat down. Jim sat on his left, Mark on his right. After a moment of staring back at the grave they’d visited, Dad began to talk. Nearly forty years had gone by, but Mark could remember almost every word.

I was in the Army, First Battalion, Eighth Regiment, First Cavalry Division. We’d fought our way up from Pusan, over the
thirty-eighth parallel, into North Korea, and it was late October 1950 and we were in Pyongyang and thought for sure we’d be home for Christmas. Didn’t even have winter uniforms yet and it was cold as a bitch up there.

I was there when MacArthur flew in. Nobody knew where Kim Il Sung was. He was the North Korean dictator. “Where’s Kim Buck Tooth?” MacArthur says, and everybody laughs. Then he flies back to Tokyo that night. You know, he never spent even one night in Korea with us, always flew in, flew out, same day.

The ROKs, the South Koreans, they couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag in those days, but we’d sent them up ahead, toward the Yalu, chasing the rest of the North Koreans, and the word came down about maybe some trouble up there, so we saddled up and headed north.

We got up to this place called Unsan and we dug in, and the word was that some Chinese had come over the river, but all the officers told us the Chinese would never come across the border, so we thought it was just bullshit, but then by God I saw a patrol bringing in a couple guys in these heavy, baggy uniforms and they didn’t look like any North Koreans I’d seen.

It was the first of November, about ten at night, we’re about four hundred meters from the town and trying to stay warm and then we hear these weird sounds, almost like music, but no music I’d ever heard, and it was damn scary, and later we found out it was the Chinese with their bugles, that’s how they signaled on the battlefield, and here they came, goddamn waves of them.

I’m in a foxhole with Mike Solum, kid from near my home town up north. Had a new bride back home, a baby on the way. We’d gone through boot camp together, and there we were, a couple of Wisconsin kids way the hell up at the goddamn ends of the earth in North Korea, best buddies, and the lieutenant yells for us to fall back. Mikey’s banging away with his Tommy gun, and then it jams and here comes a Chink right after him with a bayonet, and I shot the guy point-blank with my carbine, blew his face right off.

We get back to the rear and nobody knows what the hell’s going on, there’s no armor, no air support, Chinese everywhere and those damn bugles, and the lieutenant tries to rally us, but then he took a round in the throat, and he was gone, and it was every man for himself, so we headed down this gully near the road with about a half-dozen guys, trying to make it out of there.

Mikey, he’d taken a round in the leg, and I was helping him walk, but he’s losing a lot of blood, and it sounds like the Chinese are getting closer, but if we can get back to this one road that’s where we knew there was some armor and we could hear some artillery opening up, so we had maybe a mile or two to go, and Mikey tells me that he’s almost gone, I gotta leave him there and get out. And I said no, I’m not leavin’ you here. But he’s bleedin’ out, and he says for me to tell his wife back home, Julie, that…that he loves her very much. And then he dies right there in my arms. Another guy tells me to get movin’, the Chinese are coming, and so I lay Mikey down and take his dog tags, and I make it outta there, and about a hundred meters out we’re on a bit of a rise and I look back to Mikey, and in the moonlight I see the Chinese around him, using their bayonets on him, over and over.