The Traiteur's Ring Read Free Page B

quietly around their hide on watch, Ben sat basically alone. He adjusted the earpiece from his headset so he wouldn’t miss any calls from the guys on watch, and then settled back himself. He knew he couldn’t possibly sleep, but perhaps if he could get his mind to stop flying between the past and his bizarre feelings from the village, he could at least get a little rest before they hit the camp.
    Ben closed his eyes and instead of fighting the memories chasing him, he just let them float around his mind. He drifted to happier thoughts of his grandmother and his early life in the boonies of Louisiana. They were mostly happy times, and, except for the few troubling memories he had convinced himself were merely bad dreams, his thoughts of Gammy were all good. He loved her very much and believed he chose his specialty training as a combat medic almost as a tribute to her memory.
    She would be happy to know I’m now a Traiteur of sorts myself.
    And more at times.
    Ben didn’t remember falling asleep but he woke up to a gentle nudge and Reed’s hushed whisper.
    “Gotta head out, bro.”
    He felt on the ground beside him for his helmet and put it on his head, then reached without fumbling to the point on his kit where he knew his NVG’s would be. He snapped them into place on his helmet, swung the binocular-like eyepieces to his eyes, and turned the device on. Instantly the thick, ink-like blackness came alive with trees and his fellow Frogmen, all in eerie green and grey.
    Ben got to his feet and re-slung his rifle into a combat position across his chest. He pulled the slide back half an inch and checked to see a chambered round, shoved the MRE remnants into a cargo pocket, and followed Reed to where Chris, Auger, and Lash waited. His footsteps were loud and metallic, magnified by the volume enhancement of his head set. He heard Chris’s voice in both his head set and his other ear.
    “Set?”
    The four other SEALs nodded, and they moved out into the jungle in single file, Chris in the lead and Auger in trail. It took only moments before the distracting feelings disappeared, and he settled into the familiar mindset of a combat operation. His mind ran through scenarios of the encounter to come. He checked off his plans for each of them, all the time scanning the grey-green jungle around them through his NVGs as they moved nearly silently towards their objective.
    They made it to the rally point in just over half an hour. Chris used hand signals to move the other four SEALs out toward their positions as they had briefed at the rest area. They would remain silent until Lash called back with his survey and Chris gave the go. Then they would hit the camp under the cover of confusion provided by concussion grenades from four corners.
    Ben turned left after Auger and moved low and silent along the periphery of the camp. He couldn’t see the Al Qaeda fighters yet, but he could hear them as he circled around behind Auger. When he had paced off to the halfway point he stopped and watched Auger continue around his arc. He glanced at his watch from beneath the NVGs, covering the face with his hand to prevent any light from escaping. He waited for a minute and thirty seconds then belly crawled slowly towards the edge of the camp.
    What he saw confused him at first and, then, frightened him.
    The camp looked virtually empty. Only two fighters remained, their faces aglow in the unmasked fire burning under a pot in the center of the clearing. They were boys and likely not much in the way of fighters. But it hardly mattered. The body nailed to the tree near where they sat remained motionless, and Ben doubted he was alive. He didn’t recognize the short, thin boy from the village, but he knew from the grey cloth around his waist and the matching arm band at his bicep where he had come from.
    Both the boy’s legs bent impossibly forward at the knees and below the knees they had turned swollen and black. The eyelids were propped open with