The Apocalypse Script Read Free Page B

attack when Ben was fourteen years old and his mother had
killed herself his senior year by driving drunk off a bridge into
river a few miles north of town. There was talk of putting him into
the custody of the State since he had no known surviving family,
but he turned eighteen before a decision could be made and so he
finished school living alone in his deceased parents’ dilapidated
two-bedroom home.
    A week before he graduated he
learned that his mother had been seven months behind in making the
house payments and that the bank was going to foreclose. With no
particular hopes or aspirations and no money, he did what many poor
young men in the area did - he joined the military. It was early in
the first decade of the twenty-first century. The wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan were running full throttle and the military was begging
for volunteers. He had ended up in the Marines for the simple
reason that when he had visited the Armed Forced Recruiting offices
in Boduska’s only strip mall, it was lunchtime, and the only
recruiter who had remained at his post was the Marine
recruiter.
    Prior to going to boot camp he
took the ASVAB and was told he had an aptitude for languages that
was off the charts. In fact, the results were so unbelievable that
the Department of Defense assumed the results were incorrectly
tabulated. The Marines tasked him take the DLAB, or Defense
Language Aptitude Battery examination, and when he did the results
were even more incredible. He’d aced it, which was technically
impossible.
    In subsequent interviews with
befuddled Marine officers Ben explained that he had always had a
knack for languages. He had learned to speak a variety of
languages, albeit at the elementary level, by simply watching
foreign movies with subtitles. This included German, Hindi,
Spanish, French, Chinese, and Italian. The Marines verified this by
interviewing him with native speakers from their own ranks.
Checking his records they saw that the boy had no formal training
on any of the languages he spoke.
    The new Marine was promptly
assigned the MOS of 2671, or Cryptologic Linguist, Middle East, and
was instructed to report the Defense Language Institute in
Monterey, California to attend a forty-seven week long
Pashto-Afghan language class. After that he spent a year in various
cryptology courses around the United States, learning to identify,
use, and break codes used by foreign governments and militaries in
Southwest Asia.
    After almost two years of training
- his enlistment was for six years - he finally touched down at
Kandahar Airfield, usually referred to by its one-syllable
nickname, ‘kaf,’ where he spent five months rotating between combat
duties in Pashtun tribal areas, diplomatic translator assignments
for the State Department, and intelligence analysis missions for
the Department of Defense.
    But a bad thing had happened about
nine months into his tour. He and an Army soldier he had befriended
were tasked to serve as translators for some intelligence officials
that had flown in from the United States to attend a high level
meeting with various tribal leaders in Kabul. The soldier was Eddie
Forbes, a Dari linguist from Brooklyn. The plan was for them to fly
fixed wings to Bagram Airfield from Kandahar and then continue on
to Camp Phoenix, in Kabul, by rotary, but bad weather grounded
flights out of Bagram. It was apparently impossible to reschedule
the meeting for diplomatic reasons, so the U.S. officials had
elected to chance a ground movement.
    The convoy to Kabul consisted of
five up-armored GMC Suburbans operated by a private security
company, with the two officials in the second vehicle, Eddie in the
third, and Ben in the fourth. The use of private security firms for
non-combat related ground movements was standard protocol, freeing
military vehicles and personnel for combat missions. Most of the
private security personnel were highly competent former military
types who had spent a good portion of their careers