The Last Hour (Thompson Sisters), Sheehan-Miles, Charles [reading an ebook .txt] 📗

I replied. He reached in his pocket and passed over a small digital camera. I leaned back against the door, trying to get a decent shot. He kept driving but had a fierce grin on his face. Kowalski was a real dick sometimes. But he loved his little girl.

I took half a dozen pictures, just in case they came out blurry.

“There you go, man.”

“Thanks.”

“How’s she doing?” I asked.

“Alicia? Just great. My mom sent me an email yesterday with pictures from her birthday party.”

“Did she get everything she wanted?”

Kowalski grinned. “Yeah. You should have seen the pics, man. Best birthday ever.” After he said that, his face screwed up, unhappy. “Wish I could have been there.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking out the window at the white mountains in the distance. Say what you will about Afghanistan, it’s a breathtaking country. But it wasn’t New York.

“Any luck with her mom?”

“Fucking bitch,” he muttered. I guess that answered that. Nasty divorce. For whatever reason—I had no idea what—Kowalski had gotten custody of their daughter.

We were quiet the rest of the drive. Kowalski wasn’t much of a talker anyway, and I was watching outside, an activity that served dual purposes: it was heartbreakingly beautiful out there, and I needed to keep an eye out for bad guys.

It took almost seven hours to get there. Seven cold, lonely hours. We traded off driving, and after the second switch, sometime during the fourth hour, Kowalski started a running monologue about life in the Army, his three previous deployments (twice before in Afghanistan, once in Iraq), his ex-wife, who he once loved but now hated, and his observations about the soldiers in our company, which ranged from racist to hero-worship, depending on the object. I kept half an ear tuned, but Kowalski wasn’t really talking to me ... he was talking just to keep occupied.

It was three in the afternoon when we finally rolled into Dega Payan. It’s a shitty little village up in the mountains, and until recently was completely cut off from the rest of the province. No electricity, no jobs, no nothing. The biggest employers in the area were the opium smugglers and poppy growers.

The first thing we saw rolling into the village was the burned out girls’ school: one of two that had been firebombed late last year. The building looked forlorn, abandoned. Near the road, a line of woods stretched. Not enough to count as a forest, but enough to hide a sniper. A line of small dun-colored walled compounds comprised the village, maybe a few dozen dwellings in all, spread over a half-mile stretch. Smoke rose from holes in the roofs of a few, but the eastern edge of the village was ominous, a dozen or more houses nearly completely covered in snow, rock and ice which had slid down the mountainside.

I swallowed when I saw it, my stomach tensing. By this time, the other two squads, 18 men in all, had already peeled off, surrounding the village to provide security. Staff Sergeant Martin’s squad, including my own fire team, continued to the center of the village, where we dismounted. The moment I stepped out of the Humvee, I felt the snow through my trousers above my boots.

Lieutenant Eggers and Staff Sergeant Martin were already standing at the lead vehicle with Jamshed, our translator. “Stay here,” I said to the others, and then I slogged through the snow to the command group, getting there at the same time as Sergeant Hicks.

An elderly man stood shivering in the cold, speaking to Jamshed. Jamshed ... I didn’t know his last name ... wore the uniform of an Afghani policeman, and gesticulated wildly as he spoke with the old man. Finally, he turned to Eggers and said, “Lieutenant, he says only the worst wounded leave. But there may be survivors in the houses, a family was pulled out alive about an hour ago.”

Eggers eyed the houses buried under the snow. “All right. Martin, get your squad moving ... we’ll work west to east. Just go right over the walls and shovel out near high windows. We need to get those people out of there if we can.”

“Roger,” Martin said. Then he turned and shouted, “Third squad, form up! Bring your entrenching tools!”

The guys ran over, breaking out folding shovels as they approached. After a few moments of discussion, we moved toward the first house. Eggers left to go check out the positions of the rest of the platoon, and we were soon joined by Sergeant Colton.

Our goal wasn’t to completely uncover the house, it was simply to gain access to a door, a window, or any opening we could fit through. No one had to be asked to dig: we knew how urgent it was. Not to mention, it was cold as hell out there, and the movement helped. Every once in a while I stopped, peeled off my gloves and scarf, and chafed my ears and nose, trying to warm them up.

You don’t make it through any length of military career without doing a lot of digging. It just comes with the territory. Sand bags. Slit trenches. Foxholes. Digging is part of military life. But this was different. I could feel the tension, and see it on the frozen faces of the men. All of us had been in this village, several times. We’d all seen the kids running around, the families. We didn’t have any idea how many, if any, had survived. And that gave us an urgency to dig as quickly as we possibly could.

“I got a door!” Paris shouted just a few minutes after we started at the first house. I looked ... he had dug down to what appeared to be the top of a doorframe. I don’t know whether the place had a door in the first place, or if the snow had knocked it in, but there was certainly nothing there now, just an opening, with the barest corner clear of snow.

“Kowalski, Roberts,” I called, and pointed to