Knife (9780698185623) by Ross Ritchell Page A

off the rucks for the entering squadron.
    Red taillights crept up to the hangar in the dark and four black short buses wheeled onto the concrete floor. The squadrons just off the bird threw their hop bags and rucks into the trunks and Shaw sat in a middle seat with Massey, in front of Cooke, Dalonna, and Hagan. The seats were rough with dirt and hard spots. Mud or melted hard candy was worked into the fabric. The buses left the hangars, the smooth concrete giving way to rough rock, and Shaw looked back through the dark windows. None of the men in the hangar watched the buses leave.
    â€œMan,” Hagan said a little while later. “That smell.”
    â€œI’d already forgotten about it,” Cooke said. He winked at Hagan.
    â€œAt least we’re not building a FOB out of a damn hillside with Hajji pissing down on us,” Hagan said. “Remember that, Donna?”
    Dalonna didn’t answer, so Massey and Hagan looked back. Dalonna had his head on the window glass, and his snores and the sound of rocks hitting the underside of the bus filled the cabin. He might have been faking it but was more likely already asleep. Cooke stared out the window and, though he’d dug the forward operating base out of the hillside with Hagan and Dalonna years ago, said nothing. Massey and Shaw had been with another team then, another country. Hagan shrugged and closed his eyes.
    Their FOB was one of the largest in the country. Not yet a full-blown base with Burger Kings and McDonald’s, it was nestled in a low valley separating Shiite and Sunni communities where a formerly private airport had been turned into a public engine of war for the Americans. The original dirt airfield had been paved, expanded, and maintained for the cargo planes that unloaded endless troops and mountains of munitions daily. Numerous helipads had been erected on both sides of the runway, where gentle mounds of earth and air-traffic shacks once stood, and rows of dust-colored clapboard buildings erected from cheap siding and tin roofing housed expensive air conditioners and even more expensive computer systems. The rows of clapboard buildings expanded from the airfield in all directions like the ripples sent out from a rock thrown into a pond. The ripples spread throughout the low valley until the land had been turned into a blanket of concrete slabs, watchtowers, concertina wire, and temporary architecture linking the two Islamic communities that were often at war with each other. Most of the structures lining the perimeter of the FOB housed supplies and troops who would patrol the nearby Sunni and Shiite communities. Smaller communities that flanked the main airfield were separated from the larger FOB by twelve-foot-high concrete blast walls on all sides. Special operators lived in the small communities and built their own private helipads off the main airfield. They maintained their own aircraft for the missions that would take them hundreds of miles away from the FOB in all directions. The maze of concrete checkpoints leading from the main airstrip to the Special Operations communities took the longest to navigate even though they were closer to the airstrip than the conventional unit communities—in some cases by five miles or more.
    The buses maneuvered through the endless concrete barriers and checkpoints in the moonlight while small flashes of light burst through tiny holes and cracks in the concrete. If Shaw had strained his neck he could have seen stars and clouds floating above the barriers, but he was asleep. They all were. The buses wheeled past two large concrete slabs joined by a large metal gate with concertina wire coiled from the ground to the top, and then took a nauseating set of sharp turns to pass through a quarter-mile of stone switchbacks, erected to prevent suicide bombers. Then the brakes hit and the buses stopped. The men woke up, got out of the buses, and grabbed their bags and rucks from the