Knife (9780698185623) Read Free Page A

knife, or hands, he wouldn’t have to worry about it catching on the bleeder and getting all snagged up. Snags lose time. Lose time, lose lives. Bleeder kits were for the wearer and no one else. Nothing selfish about it, just business. If a guy got hit, whoever came to his aid would be able to locate the wounded man’s bleeder and not have to use his own to patch, clog, or wrap him back up. If a responder used his own to help a buddy and then got shot himself, the next person on the scene would lose time trying to find stuff to clog him up with. Again—lose time, lose lives. Shaw made sure his bleeder was packed tight with anything and everything getting shot or blown apart might necessitate. He packed reams of gauze, stacks of wrap bandages and cotton compresses, a few tourniquets, scissors, tape, and a hollow metal cylinder with plastic wrap for sucking chest wounds. He kept a pack of Skittles or two in there as well, plus a few tampons to plug bullet holes the size of a fingertip. Above the mag pouches he had a pouch for signal tape and others for frags and bangers. Flex-cuffs and ChemLights bridged the space between his radio and bleeder, and the rear of his kit had a water reservoir and eight other pouches for bangers, frags, and other things that smoke, bang, or flash. Front and back ballistic plates weighed about seven pounds each and three-pound plates the size of index cards protected his vitals from the side. All loaded up for a house call, the men’s kits weighed anywhere from twenty to forty pounds. Shaw carried 5.56 in mags, not drums, so his kit weighed in at twenty-seven pounds all topped off. Carrying rucks on longer missions or in remote areas and they’re humping another thirty to one hundred pounds. The teams slept and ran in their kits, climbed ropes, shot thousands of rounds, ate, and shat in their kits. They didn’t fuck in their kits, but Shaw wouldn’t have been surprised if some guys had tried. Hagan was a likely suspect.
    Everything was in its place, so he strapped the kit to his ruck and laid it outside his locker.
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    T he men grabbed seats in the briefing room wherever they could. In chairs. On or under tabletops. Sprawled out on the floor. Elements of two squadrons were relieving the one that had just lost nearly half its strength after the Chinook and Black Hawk went down. Multiple terrorist cells had claimed the kills and the government was still investigating. The party that fired the RPGs wouldn’t take credit for it, though. Their founder forbade it.
    The BO stood at the front of the room. He opened the file folder he held in his hands and started reading. “Those of you with families won’t head home to them tonight,” he said. “Those with hot dates should consider them iced, and if you were trying to get out of one, you’ve got an excuse.”
    Most of the family men’s hands found their pockets and their fingers started fluttering. The unmarried and childless laughed. The BO spoke slow and calm, a smile curling on the edges of his lips. He looked pleased with himself and continued the speech, telling the men they would be relief for the sister squadron that had lost the fourteen men. Instead of visiting the familiar pussy they were used to, they’d hop on a plane for twenty-three hours and land in the country that’d been on the news lately for its recent surge in suicide bombings, executions, and kidnappings. He told them Intel had noticed a splintering of leadership among multiple terrorist cells and organizations. High-value targets from al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, the Taliban, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were leaving their organizations and joining under a new veil called al-Ayeelaa: the Family. Al-Ayeelaa primarily stressed bombings and avoided gunfights with coalition forces, and as a result, they were staying alive longer and causing