four times, sending the agreed signal for the assault to Alpha and Bravo.
Aguilar’s team slipped across the clearing. Two men whipped around the corner, going for the generator. Cooke could hear voices inside. This was the moment of greatest risk—the moment before the assault, when the team was outside the building, exposed in the clearing. They waited for the interior to be plunged into darkness. Cooke could feel his heart beating faintly. The Filipino troopers were crouched and ready, waiting. Cooke wished they’d pull the plug on that generator. Aguilar was whispering into his microphone. Cooke came up to him. “What?”
“The generator is in a locked shed. They cannot get in.”
Shit. The aerial surveillance photos hadn’t been angled enough to reveal that sort of detail. It’s always the little things. “They’ll have to blow it,” Cooke told the Lieutenant. The message was relayed. As the others waited, the soldiers charged with assaulting the door inched slowly toward it, easing across the veranda.
The old wooden floorboard creaked faintly and Cooke winced. One of the soldiers on the veranda jerked to a halt, over-reacting, and a piece of hardware on his harness clinked. They all froze for a moment. It seemed so loud out here, but surely it would go unnoticed by the people inside. Seconds ticked by. Slowly, they resumed their approach. One soldier moved to either flank of the heavy wooden entrance. The Filipino sergeant approached to place small shaped charges at the hinge points.
It all unraveled in an instant. The sound of approaching voices and footsteps from inside the building triggered a push of adrenaline through Cooke’s body. He crouched, breathing deeply to focus his mind through the rush. He brought his rifle to bear on the door as it was flung open, throwing light across the crouching attack force. Cooke closed his eyes because the wash of light through his night goggles would be intense. A shout of alarm, and someone fired a quick burst. Then the door slammed shut. He couldn’t be sure who had fired, but Cooke heard a yelp of pain. He yanked his goggles up and alerted the other two teams. “We’re spotted.” Bantay was laying face up, his torso in the dirt and his legs on the veranda. Aguilar was calling for his medic and simultaneously ordering the blowing of the generator. The other troopers were poised, waiting.
Cooke knew combat viscerally, and everything in him urged movement. This is where lack of experience showed. Aguilar and his men were good, but they had been caught off-guard and now hesitated. Right now, every second that bled away meant that their enemy would be better prepared for the assault. Cooke’s nerves screamed with urgency. He had to get his men moving.
Cooke grabbed Bantay by his harness and hauled him out of the way. Aguilar was fumbling for the detonator, dropped somewhere in the dark. Cooke grabbed him by the shoulder. “No time!” he grunted, swinging his shotgun around and blowing the hinges off the door with two quick blasts.
The blast seemed to shock the troopers back into action. They rocketed through the door like a human torrent. Cooke heard the generator finally cut out and the assault force poured into the farmhouse, leading with their rifles and shouting for the occupants to get down.
The rule was simple: anyone inside holding a weapon was shot. Anyone not immediately compliant with a shouted order to lie down was shot. Muzzle blast was bright in the confines of the farmhouse. A man with an AK-47 screamed at them and loosed off a volley, turning to run even before he stopped firing. A trooper caught him with a tightly spaced pattern—three shots stitched up the side from hip to chest. The terrorists were stumbling over one another, some trying to escape, others lunging for cover. They were disoriented in the dark, and the room was cluttered with overturned chairs.
Good training made the difference. Despite the rocky start, the Filipinos recovered well. The soldiers worked the perimeters, moving quickly with a maximum of force to keep up the shock value. They swept through the three rooms with precision, progress punctuated by the crack and flash of rifle fire. They encountered some resistance toward the back of the building, and Cooke could hear the report of weapons toward the river. A few stray rounds whacked by his head, powder flying off the walls of the farmhouse, but by the time Cooke reached the back of the building, it was all over.
The words crackled over his headset as the other teams reported. “Alpha. Clear.” Cooke stepped out of the back of the house and approached a body that lay sprawled in the grass, his M-4 at the ready. “Bravo. Clear.” Cooke kicked a handgun away from an outstretched hand and nudged the body over. “Charlie. Clear.” Aguilar’s voice sounded both excited and relieved. The lights came back on in the house as someone restarted the generator. Cooke pushed up his night goggles. The man lay in the oblong patch of light that reached out from the back doorway. Dirt was smudged on the man’s face, caked on his lips and nostrils by the blood.
The dead man had been clutching something in one hand, as if protecting it in his last moments. Cooke squatted, picked the videocassette up, and wondered what it contained that was so important. Aguilar approached him.
“The trucks are here, Sergeant Cooke.” The American could see the spill of light from the vehicle-mounted flood lamps. The Filipino forces dragged the dead out of the farmhouse and lay them in rows. Specialists who had arrived with the trucks began to examine the building and its contents. Someone snapped a picture of the dead bodies. The prisoners lay face down while plastic cuffs were yanked tight around wrists. Their mouths were taped shut. There’s my tape, Cooke thought idly. The prisoners were hooded and manhandled into the trucks.
Aguilar gestured at the building. “All secured. We’re policing the building now. Our intel was good—there was a meeting of some sort here. They were watching something on a TV screen.”
Cooke held the black oblong videocassette gingerly and showed it to Aguilar. There was Arabic writing on the white label, but it had a dark smear across it. “Probably make some interesting viewing,” the American said. Aguilar nodded, but was more focused on policing the area and seeing to his men. Cooke scanned the area: sprawled bodies in the grass, the wet-eyed, hunched prisoners being trucked away. He smelled blood and cordite and his own sweat. Cooke wondered again what was on the videotape, what had been so important that his team had been rushed into action, but he was used to a world where not all his questions got answered. Most days, it was enough to get through an op in one piece. Mission accomplished, he thought. He straightened up and turned the tape over to one of the specialists working the scene. Then Cooke put it out of his mind and went to see how the wounded sergeant was doing.
I sold my car when they did away with my job at Dorian University. With a life-long and inadvertent genius, I had managed to alienate both upper administration and the faculty there. The two groups were usually at each other’s throat, engaged in an academic blood feud whose mythic origins were by now irrelevant. The struggle gave meaning and shape to their lives, however. They would fight about anything—or nothing, for that matter. It was a refreshing change of pace for them to share a common object of contempt. Or it would have been if I hadn’t been that object.
Academia is an odd place. Stately buildings and ivy, wrought iron fences, and libraries fragrant with the smell of old books. Young people scurry to and from class, fresh, energetic, and naive. But in the long halls and narrow offices, those who work there fester in the dark like overeducated viral agents. Wet-eyed professors with obscure, irrelevant specialties and inferiority complexes browbeat students. Administrators, buffeted by faculty contempt and general inefficiency, sink into venal scheming. Any college campus is a circus, complete with color, entertainment, and the occasional glimpse of something really amazing. At Dorian University, the circus had a large number of clowns and a truly impressive freak show.
I’m bitter, of course. I had worked there as an adjunct for years, the lone specialist in
