Chapter 4
Everyone was looking at me. Hayes. Miller. Three operators whose faces I had known for two years. The intelligence officer who had been on the radio when the first call came in. They were all looking at me, because they had been in the briefing room two nights ago, and they remembered what Cutler had hit me for saying, and they were waiting to see what I was going to do with the fact that I had been right.
My jaw still ached where his fist had landed.
I put on my headset.
"Send me the grid," I said. "I'm bringing them out."
I did not look at anyone when I said it. I was already running the terrain in my head — the wadi geometry, the elevation of the ridgelines, the egress angles that would be available if air support could suppress the eastern ridge long enough to create a window. There were three options. One of them had a reasonable probability of working. The other two were worse.
I started with the one that worked.
The exfil took forty-one minutes from the moment I took the radio. We coordinated the air support on a suppression pattern I built in real time, used two vehicles from a secondary patrol unit to create a distraction approach from the north that drew fire off the main exfil corridor for ninety seconds, and ran the surviving vehicles out through the exit point while the eastern ridge was occupied with the decoy. Four men were wounded. None were killed after the initial RPG. Everyone who could move came out.
Cutler came out last, in the third vehicle.
He did not speak on the radio after the exfil was complete. There was a long stretch of nothing — the static of a channel that is open but not being used — and then his voice came through once, saying that the convoy was clear of the wadi, and then nothing else.
May you like
I handed the radio back to the operator beside me and pulled off my headset.
The investigation opened the following week. Not the quiet internal review that Rogers had substituted for accountability after the punch — a formal investigation, initiated through a channel that did not run through Camp Lemonnier's chain of command and therefore did not run through anyone who had received phone calls from two-star admirals in other time zones. The formal investigation was requested by three separate field operators who had been in the briefing room and had filed contemporaneous written accounts within hours of the punch, a procedure I had told Hayes and Miller about before telling them to stand down two nights earlier, because documentation made in the immediate aftermath of an incident is significantly harder to characterize as misremembering.
