The Profession Read Free Page B

hopping on one leg and hanging on to one of the security men. We plunge back to safety just as full darkness falls.
    Chris’s two Kodiaks, which we had held in reserve two blocks back, have come forward now, ready to take us out. They’re revving in the alley, thirty feet north, in the safe zone shielded by an adjacent building. Enemy 5.56 and 7.62 fire is ripping into the wall above us. Now the rocket rounds start flying; our Lada Nevas and 7-ton truck have to pull back. Someone is helping Junk into the first vehicle. I hear one of Chris’s DSF men shouting in a German accent, “Who? Who’s missing?” For a moment I think they mean Junk. I look over. Junk is okay. Then I realize they’re talking about someoneelse. I turn back toward the compound. On the ground beside the air-conditioning units crawls one of our Fijians.
    Sonofabitch! The man is in the dirt, clawing his way toward cover. Furious fire rakes the ground around him. I see him scramble face-first into a cooking ditch, just as a full burst from an AK takes him square between the shoulder blades. Both elbows fly rearward, then flop; his neck snaps; he crashes face-first into the dirt. He stops moving. “Brake!” I’m shouting to Chutes. “Q! Chris!”
    “Go! Get out!” Chris Candelaria is calling, waving the vehicles to pull back. He has packed Junk’s wound and stripped his own tourniquet, worn lanyard-style around his neck; he’s cinching it around Junk’s thigh as he and the German DSF man help him toward the first Lada Neva.
    “We’re going back!” I shout.
    “What?”
    “The Fijian. We’re not leaving him!”
    A shoulder-fired rocket whistles overhead and blows the hell out of a house across Espresso Street. What little hearing I have left is now gone.
    “We’re not leaving without him.”
    It’s my secret me who’s talking. He has made the decision.
    “What the fuck are you talking about?” This is Chutes, my tightest mate and most trusted brother. He sticks his jaw six inches from mine.
    “We’re going back,” I tell him.
    Junk curses. “He’s not our guy, chief! We don’t even know who the fuck he is!”
    “He’s dead!” says Chutes. “There’s two more 155s in there, waiting to blow!”
    Other faces stare at me.
    “Leave the body,” cries the Fijian team leader. “The man would say so himself if he could!”
    I tell the Fijians he’s not theirs, he’s ours.
    Chris Candelaria’s two Kodiaks are hauling ass now; they know they’re targets. Iranian rocket gunners are trying to blow down the building that protects our flank. As their rounds scream in, blocks of concrete the size of bowling balls sail a hundred feet into the air and fall back, crashing all around us. We scramble into the slit trench of sewage. Guys are trying to crawl up inside their helmets. I’m peering around the corner, back into the compound.
    Chutes clutches my sleeve. “Bro, listen to me. We got the engineers, we got the report … that’s what we came here for.” He points past the gate to the compound, to the fresh enemy streaming in along the rooflines. “We go back in there, somebody’s gonna die.”
    There’s no fear in Chutes’s voice. He’s just stating the truth.
    I meet his eyes.
    “Fuck you,” he says, jamming fresh magazines into his belly rig. “You hear me, bro? Fuck you!”
    Back we go. Chris Candelaria comes with us. We can hear the enemy hooting with anticipation. In the interval they have brought up a Russian PKM, which fires Eastern Bloc 7.62 rounds with a nutsack-shriveling
rat-a-tat
sound, and these are tearing the hell out of the open space we have to cross. The foe has got his second wind now. He is going after our Lada Nevas and the 7-ton truck, which have stayed behind to cover us. Rockets are zinging across the compound like Roman candles.
    We grab the dead Fijian and haul him facedown from the dirt behind the blown-down cookhouse. The IEDs never blow. Chutes curses me all the way back to the gate, curses