Honor Road Jason Ross (any book recommendations .TXT) 📖

she set him back down on his feet. He clawed at his dead mother, patting her face, running his fingers through her dark hair. A bloodless, fist-sized exit wound gaped where her right eye had been.

“Report,” Mat keyed his radio.

“Rickers is dead. Friendly fire,” Cabrera replied over the radio. “Two others wounded.”

Mat’s team was okay, other than a grazing wound and what looked like a sprained ankle. Mat plowed through the woods to Cabrera. He stood over the corpse of Deputy Rickers, shot through the liver and bled out in the muck. His skin was the color of chalkboard dust. Mat turned and stormed back to the center of the refugee camp.

They hadn’t planned for what to do with enemy wounded, and there were a lot of them. Six, at least. Gladys darted among the shredded and sagging shelters, organizing whomever would listen to collect the wounded. Mat had no idea where she planned on taking them.

He still couldn’t bring himself to think about the highway. There would be a bumper crop of dead and wounded on the road.

He keyed his mic. “This is Actual. Overwatch One and Two, come in.”

“Copy,” they chimed overtop of one another.

“Return to town.” Mat hoped the order would be enough. If they could all just walk away from this, that might be best. “Everyone return to town. Now.”

Juan Cabrera waded toward Mat through the underbrush.

“Sergeant Best. I have four guys who pursued rats to the south. I can’t raise them on their radio.”

As if on cue, rifle fire crackled in the distance.

Mat sighed. “Fuck ‘em. They can find their own way home. Tell everyone to RTB. Return to base. Regroup at the sheriff’s station.”

Mat hoped that’d end the conundrum about the enemy wounded, but Gladys still darted around the camp, giving orders. She had no rank, but people listened to her. Some of the strike team had begun to come down off the rush and they were doing whatever she told them. Sheriff Morgan shuffled his bulk around in her wake, gathering up the broken remnants of the refugees.

“What’re we gonna do with those guys, Sarge? What are your orders?”

“Go home. RTB.” Mat didn’t wait for acknowledgement. He’d done his job. They’d obliterated the camp. Questions of decency were not his to answer. “RTB.” He circled his finger in the air. “RTB, folks!” Mat shouted as he walked toward town. He didn’t turn around to see if anyone was following.

He breech-checked his rifle, shuffled through a tactical reload, inventoried his magazines, yanked out his radio earbud, and trudged alone toward the Objective Rally Point.

“Sarge?” Wiggin called over the dangling earbud. He sounded like a mechanical spider on Mat’s shirt. “Sarge? You okay?”

There were questions within the question. Am I okay? Are any of us okay?

Mat didn’t answer. His thoughts felt heavy, sluggish. This was not the first time an operation produced collateral damage. But in his mind, a trollish thug in a suit and tie made the case prosecuting Mat for the massacre at Brashear wood.

Cue the video...

People running for their lives, some shot from behind.

Mat defended himself in the mock court in his battered cerebellum. “They killed our townspeople! They killed Marjorie Simms. They killed a baby, for God’s sake.”

Mat remembered the open, sightless eyes of Bob Rickers, killed by his friends.

“That’s not my fault. There was no time to train.”

He remembered his girl, Caroline, dead in a hospital bed, one leg missing under the cruel, flat sheet.

“I did everything I humanly could to save her.”

Mat stumbled on a root and went down to one knee. In an instant, the wet ground soaked through to his skin. His head felt like it might explode. He squeezed his eyes shut and covered them with his hands, pressing in with the heels of his palms so hard that purple lightning bloomed behind his eyes.

The images stopped, but there was little relief. They were replaced with one, constant refrain. Two words, relentlessly in their finality.

MISSION FAILED.

“I can’t protect these people,” he said out loud to the dead leaf litter and the soaked, mossy tree trunks. “I can’t protect anyone. Caroline is gone. William’s parents are dead. Rickers is killed,” he babbled out loud, to himself.

This was not what Mat had been trained to do. He was an attack dog, not a guard dog. A missile, not a shield. A fighter, not a savior.

“I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what you want of me,” he despaired at the forest canopy.

Mat waited for an answer from the sky. All he heard was the quiet dripping of the forest and the distant sounds of his men bearing the aftermath of the strike. He was alone. So utterly, profoundly alone.

Later, Mat wouldn’t remember his route back to town, or how he avoided confrontation with refugees in the woods. He wandered, circumnavigated a swamp, passed through a three-mile gap in the HESCO, drifted through neighborhoods, then arrived at his doorstep. It was a wonder he hadn’t been bitten by a cottonmouth. At some point, William silently prepared him food and Mat ate mechanically.

He fell asleep before dark and he dreamt of assaults.

Sergeant Mathew Best raised his binoculars and glassed the mountain village from his position 700 meters on a ridge above. He and Airman Perez, TACP, were tasked with confirming the presence of an Al Qaeda HVT for a Predator strike. The winged missile platform circled on station where the late afternoon sun would conceal it.

In the compound, they celebrated a wedding. Some chieftan’s cousin’s sister was marrying an elder’s brother’s son. Most of the males from the village were in attendance, and the men served food to one another. Mat was focused on the guests who traveled to the wedding.

Six small pickup trucks and one incredibly-dusty sedan were parked a short walk outside the compound.

The “compound,” as described in his briefing, consisted of a larger house than the rest of the village homes with a few outbuildings huddled inside a wall. Mat couldn’t