CHAPTER 5
Being home was hell. The aftermath of the mission had been, and remained, community-wide shock. They were calling it the single greatest loss of life in Special Forces in over thirty years. Every flag on the base flew at half-mast for a week. Teams held private gatherings for the fallen, and for those who survived. Professional counselors were available around the clock, seven days a week. An official funeral, with full honors, was held for all of the men who gave their lives, but private memorials seemed to go on forever. The Battalion spaces were deathly quiet.
Open displays of emotion were not permitted; that was the unspoken rule. Men wept, and there was a place for it, but that place was within the team, within the brotherhood. Organic support personnel—those techs, administrators, and so forth assigned to the Battalion—felt the impact of the loss, but they were not part of the brotherhood, and so they remained separate. Besides, what could they say? What comfort could they offer? They issued greetings, asked after families, attended services, and helped where they could. Constantine ignored them.
The tragedy put a temporary halt to all the other miseries associated with his home life, but those miseries could not be held at bay forever. The Commander of Army Special Forces, a three-star, attended the military funeral and held an all-call. He spoke about the legacy of Army SF, the place in history these fallen would occupy, and the burden of sacrifice the public would never know. He reviewed the names and accomplishments of the fallen. Last and perhaps most of all, he asserted that, while their losses were grave, the Company had won a profound victory against superior numbers and arms. That was true, and in a way it was a relief. How many of special operations’ losses in recent decades had come in defeat, and as a result of terrible mistakes and poor judgement? At least this had been a victory. A lot of men had a lot of questions revolving around why no one had anticipated such an open attack upon them, why every assurance had been made that they would encounter no resistance from indigenous forces, but at least they could say that they met the resistance, out-maneuvered it, and annihilated it—all without air support. It had been down to the sheer grit of the boots on the ground.
Memories flashed in Constantine’s mind, images that had been burned there and, he was certain, would never fade.
There were interviews, debriefs, and after-action reports. The men in charge gathered every detail they could find in their efforts to reconstruct the battle and comb it for intelligence and for lessons learned. The press were being told a cover story, about a training mission in conjunction with local militias and an ambush by unspecified guerilla fighters. That would hold for a while, at least, but it would beg questions by the public as to why they were there at all, and about the national interest their presence served. Under no circumstances would the truth ever be admitted: that it was a botched extraction of a nobody spy—at least, a spy everyone seemed still to consider a nobody.
With absolute honesty Constantine described every moment of his experience, as best he could recall it. He was not sure what he had seen against the trees on the far side of the road. It could very well have been one of his own people, one of the other men from their company, in camouflage. In the heat of battle, there was no telling how perceptions might be warped. As to the explosion under the covered truck, there were any number of explanations, the most likely of which was some pack of munitions inside it going high-order after taking an errant bullet. As to poor George’s final testimony, who knew what to make of that? All he could do was quote it, as accurately as his memory allowed, and let them ponder over whether there was some sensible interpretation to be found there.
The intel folks took down everything, collected everything, recorded everything, and eventually they filtered away, leaving the Battalion to gather itself together. The three detachments had been decimated—no, technically far more than decimated. 47% of them were dead or would never fight again. There remained not enough manpower amongst any of them to make a viable unit, so decisions would have to be made as to what to do with them. Would they be rolled into other units? Combined? None were in a hurry to say, and in the meantime the Battalion was left to mourn and take stock. During that time, the normal world slowly, inexorably reasserted itself.
That began with the appearance in command spaces of two men in suits whom Constantine knew—at least, he knew who they were, and for what they were here. He eyed them, and they eyed him, and then they entered a stairwell leading up to the command suite, and he continued on into the cages, the warehouse of wire lockers in which team-members stored their gear.
“Guess things are back to normal,” observed one of his coworkers.
“Yeah,” he said. “Fuckin’ normal.”
Home was no better. His wife had been civil toward him for the first two weeks, but the loss of his comrades did not change the realities of their situation except, if anything, to exacerbate them. Her arm around him during those two weeks felt qualified, like a statement of qualified support: “I am here for you, but…” But, this event—about which she could know only the public line—only reinforced her ever-deepening hatred of the teams. The life.
In the absence of a mission or a work-up cycle, in this dead period while the powers that be decided what to do with the still rattling skeletons of 544, 558, and 561, there was no training to call him out before breakfast, no planning and coordinating to keep him at the office through dinner. They ate in silence, he and his wife, their son between them and also silent, and her eyes told him they would be talking soon; just as soon as she deemed that he had had enough time to grieve.
At the Battalion, he pulled aside their Intelligence Officer.
“Hey, chief. How’s your family holding up?”
“Fine. They’re good, thanks,” he said. “Look, has there been any word? On our op?”
“About what, specifically?”
“Any of it. Why they hit us like that. What the guy’s intel was.”
The Intel O sighed. “Look, Rob, some of that we’re never going to hear. I’m sure whatever he was carrying was all special-access. There’s an investigation into the pre-mission intel, but we gave you guys the best data we had.”
“No, I know! I know you did,” said Constantine, realizing then that the Battalion’s Intel shop was probably losing as much sleep as anyone in the aftermath of the event. “No one doubts that. You got bad info. We all got bad info. I just want to know why.”
“I don’t know how much we’ll learn, but there is an investigation, I can tell you that for sure.”
“All right.”
“If we hear anything, you’ll hear it.”
“All right,” Constantine said again. This was no help. He returned to the team’s “shed,” the room dedicated as 558’s private workspace. No one else was there. His computer told him the time was a little after 1600, a little after four in the afternoon, and he had nothing left to do.
Dinner would be waiting.
He picked up a phone and began making calls.
Two hours later, he had learned nothing. He had been able to track down a few of the Army Intel and Agency people who had initially briefed his team on the mission, but they had nothing for him that his own Intel O had not already said: an investigation was in process, and anything he would be privileged to learn would be disseminated to him in due time. At least now he would not be in time for dinner.
The Command made the decision to roll all three teams into one and give them some busywork. They would resume training, as if on the normal interdeployment cycle, but no one had any expectation that they were on tap for any kind of mission. It was the most expeditious way to get them out of a dangerous doldrums, and little more. Constantine used it for all it was worth, though, for the men needed an example set. He would be the senior warrant for the new Detachment 544. There was work to do, getting to know his new boss and those soldiers who had not previously worked for him. There were leave requests to review and approve, letters of designation and award citations to route to the Battalion CO, training evolutions to plan… He took it day by day, finding work where he could, and making a special effort to get out to the bar with the guys. It was important to build comradery. Take that shared tragedy and use it to forge a positive bond. Keep the men looking ahead. Keep the eyes up.
“No, it’s fine, I’ll get the dishes,” said his wife as he moved from the dining room to the den. “I know you’re working so hard.”
Three weeks was all the deaths of his friends had bought him. She had let him be for three weeks, but now she was back at it. “You want me to do the dishes? I’ll do the dishes,” he said.
This did not satisfy her. He knew it would not. He knew it would only make her angrier, and he watched as it did exactly that. She breathed hard through her nose and stacked the dishes roughly, and then she stalked toward the kitchen with them. Constantine did not follow. There was no point. There was no pleasing her. Letting her be was better than enduring a tirade about how he didn’t understand, didn’t get it, and it wasn’t about dishes.
He understood perfectly well. She wanted him to quit the teams. She wanted him to spend more time with her and their child, be a husband, be a father. Constantine would have been happy to be more of a father to his child, but that meant spending more time around her. He wondered idly if that would satisfy her, hearing that truth: He stayed at work because he did not want to spend more time with her. She was not pleasant to be around—indeed, far from it. He was who he was, but being himself seemed to be the cardinal sin, in her mind. Being around her was an exercise in scraping his face with a cheese grater.
It would end in divorce, sooner or later. He knew that. She had to know that. Neither of them had brought it up, though. Constantine did not like to think about it, about the arbitration, about the money, about the inevitable custody battle that he would inevitably lose. It would happen when it happened, and it would be miserable, and it would probably be devastating to the boy. There was no point in dwelling on it. In the meantime, he kept her around because that was the only way he would get to have a son at all.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Constantine sat in his chair in the den, staring into space, as his mind played back over the fight.
Even that was less unpleasant and more productive than contemplating the future of his marriage. Besides which, the more he thought back over what he had seen, the less he believed the obvious explanations.
The greatest gift he ever received was a phone call transferred to him in the team shed a few days later.
“Five Four Four, Chief Warrant Officer Constantine speaking,” he answered, and then added, “Unsecure line.” It felt dumb to say it, but the Command had recently cracked down on phone protocols, given the sensitivity of material being discussed in the spaces.
“Robert Constantine?” asked a man’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“My name is Roy Sing. Do you have a moment?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Constantine. He thought of the two men in suits and his chest tightened. “Can I ask what this is about?”
“I’m with the Agency. I want to talk to you about, uh, things you may have witnessed…” Constantine sat up. “What do I call you?” asked the man. “Chief? Officer?”
“Rob is fine.”
“Rob? Okay… do you have a red line?”
“I can get to one.”
“Can you take down my VOSIP?”
“Yeah, hold on.” Constantine scrambled for his notebook and pen. “Go ahead.” Sing passed him a phone number, which he read back digit for digit. “Call you right back?”
“Yeah,” said Sing. “Please.”
Constantine hung up and went with some hurry down the hall to the Company-level offices.
“Ted, can I use this red line?”
“Yeah, sure, man.”
He ducked into the unoccupied office, sat down, and dialed the number.
“Roy Sing.”
“This is Rob Constantine.”
“Mr. Constantine—Rob. Thanks for calling me back.”
“Of course. How can I help?”
“Rob…” The man on the other end hesitated. “So, I’m part of the team doing the post-incident analysis for Operation Press Hook.” The fact that he used the classified name indicated his access. “Do you have your high side email where you are?”
“Yeah, I think I can log in here. It’ll take a while. What’s this about?”
“Well, like I said, I’m working post-incident analysis, and I just had some, uh, some follow-up questions based on your reports.”
“Hold on, logging in now. It’s gotta load a profile or whatever. This isn’t my regular machine.”
“No problem.”
They waited in awkward silence while military’s state-of-the-art secure internet protocol routers chugged away, and eventually the operating system logged him in and allowed him to fire up its email application. That only needed a few minutes more to configure itself for the new user and download all of his folders—“Got it,” he said, when the latest messages finally appeared and, at the top of them, was an unread mail from one Roy Sing. The domain of Sing’s “high side” email address and his digital signature further verified his credentials. “Looks like some attached photos?”
“Yes. Can you view them?”
“Loading now. Yeah—oh, yeah. That’s that fuckin’ weird-ass drone, isn’t it.”
“Er, are you saying that’s the UAS you witnessed during Press Hook?”
“Yeah. Yeah, definitely. You got this from the chickenhawk feed?”
“Unfortunately, no. The FMV feed from your drones on the mission was not recorded, because you were not streaming to a TOC at the time.”
Ah, yes, thought Constantine. Of course. They’d had only satellite-phone connection to the operations center during the drive, with no air overhead to relay other signals, and the small RVR devices offered no recording capability. The drone recorded its video onboard, but that drone had eaten a MANPAD a few minutes later. “Wait, if… how did you get this picture?”
“That’s… Can I get you to open seven-one-seven-four? And seven-five?”
Constantine looked at the attachments again. The photos all had long alphanumeric filenames that made no sense to him, but he found the two ending in 7174 and 7175 and opened them. “The truck.”
“Yes, sir. You described in your report…” Constantine could hear the hesitation of a man reviewing said report as he talked. “…that you… witnessed a bright white flash and experienced a concussion which knocked you to the ground, and that this explosion lifted the, uh, the tail end of the truck into the air…”
“That’s right. Stood the whole truck on its nose for a moment before it fell back down. Fuckin’ did a number on the back end, too. Tailgate and rear axle and frame were complete—well, I mean, you can see it in the photos.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Seriously, Rob is fine.”
“Okay, Rob. Did you take these photos?”
“No, I had one of the guys snap them while we loaded up. We couldn’t stay, but it seemed like… Well, I’d just never seen an explosion quite like that, before, so I figured it couldn’t hurt.”
“Is that what prompted you to take the photos—to have them taken? The unusualness of the explosion?”
Constantine furrowed his brow. “That was one factor.”
“Did you feel any heat?”
“I’m sorry?”
“During or associated with the blast. Your medical report says that you had first- and second-degree burns to exposed flesh. Was that a sunburn, or did it come from being exposed to that blast?”
“Uh… yeah, I guess. Yeah. I mean, well… so, I don’t know if it comes across in the report, but I was a bit, um, dazed, at the time? I had taken a pretty bad hit from an RPG just before then. Fuckin’ miracle I survived it, actually. I was rattled pretty bad—”
“Meaning a concussion.”
“Oh yeah. I was definitely concussed. I was just getting to my feet and starting to get my senses back when that truck went off like it did.”
“But thinking back, you do recall heat associated with the blast?”
“Yeah, though it wasn’t anything that stood out to me at the time. I remember the sunburn. I guess that was probably—I mean, no, I don’t think I was sunburned prior to that. But I don’t remember the blast feeling all that hot. A little, yeah, but not so it sticks in my memory, you know?”
“I understand. And it was a single detonation? Or multiple?”
“What I remember is one. One white flash and a God-awful thump that flattened me out again and probably gave me another concussion.”
“Okay. And this was right after you witnessed several men hit with automatic fire from across the MSR.”
“Yeah…”
“You’re hesitating?” the man said, with an interrogative inflection.
“No, I mean, that’s how it happened.”
“Was there anything unusual about that automatic fire? You describe in your report that it ‘must have been AP’—armor piercing, because you saw it penetrate through the enemy. You mean through the people? The truck? Both?”
“Both. And the fuckin’ up-armored four-by-four. They shot the gunner first, before he could smoke me—and, thanks, whoever it was—and then put a few bursts into the guys on that side of the bigger truck. I saw rounds exiting both vehicles.”
“What do you mean, you saw rounds exiting?”
“I mean I saw sparks, like metal sparks, where the bullets exited. As they exited.”
“So you saw showers of sparks projecting outward from the vehicles on the side opposite where the attack was coming from, indicative of rounds exiting.”
“That’s correct.”
“And after that, the detonation occurred at the back of the truck.”
“Yes.”
“Did you see who fired those rounds?”
“Like I said in the report, no. I saw some movement, but couldn’t make it out. Someone in camo maybe.”
“That’s what it says here.”
“I figure someone from one of the other teams probably changed out in the time between when I first saw the drone and when we hit that first pursuit force.”
“When the fight was over, and you continued with your egress, did you note any of the others wearing camouflage?”
“Well, no…” Constantine could tell where this man was going, toward what destination he was driving with his questions. At least, he thought he could, and he did not like it. “Look—”
“Rob, you said there were other factors which induced you to take the photos you did.”
“I told you, I didn’t take the photos. Half our people were down. My GFC was dead. I had to see to my team. I appointed a guy, and he took the photos.”
“You directed him to take photos of the truck, though.”
“Sure.”
“And the armored vehicle.”
Constantine hesitated. He did not remember directing that. Had he? “…That’s possible,” he said. “I don’t really remember.”
“You did. I have the photographer’s account. He said you told him to get photos of the covered truck—specifically the damage to the rear end caused by the unusual explosion—and the armored truck— specifically the entry and exit holes where it had been hit by fire.”
“Okay. I don’t remember doing that, but like I said, I was pretty rattled.”
“This was several minutes later, after the fight. You were lucid enough to direct the actions of your team, and delegate the task of taking photos.”
“Yeah, well, lucid, maybe, but fuckin’ exhausted and knocked to hell. I don’t remember most of that. Also I was losing blood, so that probably didn’t help.”
“Of course.”
“Why, Mr. Sing? What’s the issue?”
“Call me Roy.”
“Okay, Roy. What’s the issue?”
“What did you really see on the other side of the road, Rob?”
“Beg pardon?”
“In your final report, you said you could not make out the source of the automatic fire that neutralized the machinegunner in the armored vehicle, but you thought you might have seen someone in camouflage.”
“Yeah. That’s correct.”
“But in your initial interviews, you said you saw ‘something move’ in the trees.”
“Okay.”
“Not ‘someone,’ and you did not make any mention of camouflage.”
“So?”
“What you saw,” pressed Sing. “Was it standing upright or lying down?”
Constantine thought back, reviewing the memory, replaying that tiny, one-second clip of it in his mind. He could not be certain. The more he thought about it, the more he could imagine it any number of ways. The more, in his mind’s eye, he could see it any number of ways. A person in a ghillie suit moving. A shift in the foliage as of someone moving through them. There was no way to be sure.
Definitely not someone lying down, though.
“Standing up, I guess.”
“Did you see someone in a combat shirt and vest?”
“I already said, no.”
Apparently, Sing was reading his mind, or else he was not so clever as to come up with a genuinely new theory: “Could someone have dressed out a ghillie suit in the time between when you first dismounted in contact and when you saw this unknown movement?”
Constantine had not considered that. A ghillie suit was little more than a net until the sniper added clippings of local vegetation to it to complete the camouflage effect.
“Rob, did anyone bring a ghillie suit on this mission?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“The answer is ‘no.’ I reviewed the loadouts for all participants. None of the snipers packed a ghillie suit.”
“Okay.”
“What did you see, Rob?”
“I don’t know, a fuckin’ alien? A ghost? I told you, like I said in my reports, I didn’t make anyone out. I just caught a glimpse of movement.”
“Why did you say ‘alien?’”
“I’m sorry?”
“Did you see something that made you think ‘alien,’ or are you referring to George Plitnik’s last words before he died?”
“I knew it. What’s going on, here? I know you don’t think there are aliens, here. Are you trying to make out like I’m the crazy one? I never said aliens. I said I saw movement.”
“Rob…” There was silence on the line for a moment. “Rob, do you think you could find time to get out here sometime soon? I’d like you to… I’d like to get your opinion on a few other things I can’t send over SIPR.”
Constantine frowned. “What’s this all about?”
“I’m… I’m working on a theory, but it’s—look, it’s not you that sounds crazy. It’s me. I’m trying to convince my superiors that there’s a pattern… Anyway, you’re an eye-witness. One I can actually interview. I want to show you some things, see if they match what you saw.”
“Okay,” said Constantine, feeling himself grow sober. So, not aliens, but something serious nonetheless. “I can’t afford to just fly out—”
“It would be official travel. I can get you a line of accounting.”
“Okay.”
“How soon can you get here?”
“Uh, can you talk to my CO? If you ask for me, I’m sure he’d approve the TAD. I can leave as soon as it’s approved.”
“Okay. Can I have his number? And email address?”
“Yeah, hold on.”
A few days later, Constantine was on a plane. His wife was furious, but he felt great, and better the farther he flew.