Bibi had heard those words before, although in her current condition she could not quite remember when.
Alone in the near dark, she could not decide if something extraordinary had happened or if she had hallucinated the encounter.
She flexed her left hand, which was still moist with the dog’s saliva. She could feel her body to all its extremities. She wiggled her toes. When she tried to roll onto her back, she had no difficulty doing so.
As a great weariness descended, she wondered if she was awake or dreaming. In the absence of the loving dog, whether or not it had been real, a bleak sense of isolation pierced her, and she felt alone and lost. Her voice shamed her for the misery it revealed. Valiant girls did not so boldly disclose the distress of mind and heart, but it was all there in his name when she spoke it—“Paxton, Pax. Oh, Pax, where are you?”—and then a wave of darkness washed her into sleep or something like it.
The head-shed—senior commander—planners called it Operation Firewalk. They had an endless supply of colorful names for special-ops missions, some of them literary, which proved they had gotten a well-rounded education at Annapolis. There would be no firewalk, no doves from scarves, no lady sawn in half, no other illusions that made magicians’ audiences applaud, just a street-level strike that should be, to the bad guys, as unexpected as an earthquake.
Paxton Thorpe and three guys on his team had come down from the cold hills in the night, having taken two days to make their way from the insertion point, where the helicopter left them, to the outskirts of the town. Had they been dropped closer, the helo noise would have been an announcement no less revealing than if they had been preceded by a bluegrass band on a flatbed truck draped with red-white-and-blue bunting. They wouldn’t have been able to cross the open ground and enter those streets without being cut down.
Surrounding the town were fields once tilled, now fallow. The last planting had never been harvested. Months of searing heat and stinging cold and skirling winds had threshed the crops and withered the remaining stems into finely chopped straw and dust, all of it so soft that it produced little sound underfoot. Depending on where he stepped, Pax caught a musty scent that reminded him of the feed bins and hayloft in the barn on the Texas ranch where he had been raised.
The moon had risen in daylight and had set behind the mountains before midnight. Under feeble starlight tens of thousands and even millions of years old, the four men relied on night-vision goggles.
As far as the world was concerned, this place ahead of them was a ghost town. If you believed in spirits, you would want to pass on by, because here the hauntings, if there were any, would surely be horrific. The remote town had been established above a rare aquifer in otherwise barren territory, and the citizens tapped the deeply stored water to transform the surrounding fields into productive farmland. For a few generations, people had lived here in rural peace, unschooled and mostly happy in their ignorance. And then the barbarians arrived in a fleet of stolen military vehicles, bearing rocket-propelled grenades and automatic carbines. Perhaps six hundred residents were killed in the taking of the town, half the population, and the flag of the conquerors—black with a red slash—flew on every street by the second day. After the prettier women endured gang rape and dismemberment, the remaining citizens—men, women, children—were executed in the following three days. Bodies were stacked by the hundreds in pyres, sprayed with gasoline, and set afire. On the sixth day after the invasion, the killers took down their flags and left. They had wanted nothing in that settlement, only its destruction.
Savages though they were, they nevertheless filmed the massacre and made a recruitment video that spoke to the souls of like-minded radicals everywhere. It had found an eager audience on the Internet.
Seventeen months after the massacre, Lead Petty Officer Paxton Thorpe and three warriors, three friends, three of the finest men he’d ever known—Danny, Gibb, and Perry—were on the hunt for big game where, only a week earlier, no targets were thought to exist. Some in the American media called their primary target the Ghost, which lent him an air of glamor—intentionally or not. Pax and his guys called their quarry Flaming Asshole, FA for short.