Darpa Alpha

known that Douglas Freeman’s attention to logistical detail had been justified by every hostile engagement he’d been part of.

“How far to target?” Aussie asked the Stallion’s burly crew chief.

“A hundred and forty-seven miles,” said the chief.

“That by road?” Aussie asked, leaning forward expectantly, elbows pressing down hard on his pack. Sal and Gomez were watching intently.

“As the crow flies,” answered the crew chief.

“Well,” said Aussie, “I’m not a fucking crow!” and sat back, visibly more relaxed. So were the other team members. It was a curious “good luck” ritual for Aussie, normally the least superstitious of men. At some point at the beginning of a mission he would always ask the crew chief, “How far to target?” and hold his breath. If the reply was so many miles or clicks, Aussie would ask, “That by road?” and the reply, common enough in the airborne services, was usually “As the crow flies.” As long as the crew chief’s answer had “crow” in it, it was a sign to Aussie that the mission would be successful.

“Ya hear that, boys?” he shouted at his team. “As the fucking crow flies.”

“What? — ” said Sal absently, checking his weapon. “Oh yeah, crow — right.”

“Gonna be a piece o’ cake!” said Aussie.

“No problem,” said Freeman, who was keen to maintain high morale, but he and Tibbet had pored over the logistics of “the devil’s domain” and knew the crucial element on this mission was not surprise — that had been lost because of CNN — but rapid resupply. Otherwise, as the general and colonel concurred, it could be a monumental balls-up, the general’s second Priest Lake.

What the general hadn’t told Aussie or the team — had never told them — was that he made it his business before every mission to give the crew chief aboard their helo or landing craft a heads-up about Aussie’s “crow.” In a team where there were few, if any, secrets, this was an exception that the general had made.

No matter how close he and his men had become over the years, he believed that for each member there had to be a moat across which neither friend nor foe should venture, an inviolable port that was the private preserve of secrets which only men and their Maker knew, the terrible memories of comrades lost, like Bone Brady, the fatally wounded SpecOp soldier whom, years before, Douglas Freeman had shot at point-blank range. It was the man’s face, head flung back, eyes rolling comically and all the more grotesquely for that, bloodied teeth, bottom jaw sliding from side to side, that haunted the general. No matter that Brady had begged to be put out of his misery, the face would rise up in the gut-tightening minutes before deployment.

For a moment, Douglas Freeman’s head slumped in shame, but he sat up quickly, ramrod straight, and made as if to clear his eye of grit, always a problem with so many men and things aboard, packed tightly together. “Know that fella Orwell?” he shouted at Johnny Lee. “Limey who wrote that Animal Farm?”

“Read it in school,” said Johnny, straining for his naturally high-pitched voice to rise above the roar of the helo’s three big turboshafts.

“Yeah,” said Freeman, pushing Bone Brady’s face out of range, turning his attention to maintaining morale. “Well, Orwell said that he sometimes thought life was a constant battle against dirt.” Freeman wiped his eye with his sleeve, hoping that their brownish green camouflage uniforms wouldn’t stand out too starkly against the ice. In frozen marshland the camouflage would be perfect, but not against the white sheet of a frozen lake. “Aussie!” he called out.

“Sir!” shouted Aussie obediently, like a good marine, that is, more formally than he would have had only the team members been present.

“Joke,” ordered the general.

They hit an air pocket.

“Choir barfing?” asked Aussie.

“Not yet,” said Salvini. “Is that the joke?”

There was laughter now in the dark, stuffy, dimly lit interior.

Choir smiled and doffed his Fritz to Aussie as if his horse had just won the Triple Crown. “Do,” said Choir, raising his voice, imitating an upper-class snob, “tell us your amusement.”

“My amusement?” said Aussie, head back in mock surprise. “Screwing.”

“Screwing what?” shouted a marine, name tag “Picard.”

“Anything that moves!” shouted Salvini.

“Birds,” said Aussie, feigning indignation, using the Australian slang for young women. “Nice-looking birds.”

“How ’bout one of those protected—” began a marine, name tag “Jackson, K.,” who was nursing a squad automatic weapon, “—What d’you call those birds?”

“Cranes,” said Marine Picard. “Yeah, would you screw a crane, Aussie?”

“He’d have to stand very still,” Aussie answered. “I wouldn’t chase the bugger!”

Catcalls and raucous laughter broke out so noisily that they momentarily drowned out the “whoomp whoomp” of the Stallion.

“Fussy,” said Choir, now adopting a cockney accent that made his pronunciation sound like “pussy.”

Aussie was suddenly alert. “Pussy? Where?”

The entire marine platoon was laughing and chortling at the silly banter, Marine Jackson, who’d initiated the exchange with Aussie, now being referred to as “Pussy,” a name that he knew as a marine would stick to him as long as he was in the corps — or dead.

“Joke!” another marine insisted. “That Aussie isn’t quitting on us, is he?”

“No way!” replied Aussie.

“Keep it clean,” said Freeman. “Women aboard.”

Aussie’s head shot up. “Where? Show me where!”

A lone hand was raised. She was an African American, Melissa Thomas, Tibbet’s MEU’s first woman combatant.

“No problem,” said Aussie. “It’s as clean as a whistle.”

“Stand up!” someone ordered Aussie.

“For the lady, sure,” said Aussie. “I don’t mind—”

“No,” shouted a SAW gunner. “So we can fuckin’ shoot you if it isn’t funny.” That got a big laugh, one of the loudest coming from the general who, as much as any of them, probably wouldn’t have laughed at this nonsense during stand-down time but whose unspoken anxiety about going into combat would lead him to grasp on to anything that would offer temporary relief.

“Well,” said Aussie, “this young married couple, both marines—”

“Hey!” shouted someone. “No same-sex marriage in the corps bullshit. Right, Thomas?”

“Right!” Melissa shouted.

“Let him finish,” said a gunny, one of those sergeants who ran the corps.

“Right,” said Aussie, raising his voice to a near shout. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah, yeah, get on with it!”

“So,” began Aussie, “this couple are arguin’ about who should get up to make coffee every morning, and the guy says to his wife, ‘I think you should be the one to brew the coffee. You’re the woman of the house,’ and she says, ‘Don’t give me that crap. We’re both working, so I don’t see why you can’t get up and brew the coffee.’ So this argument goes on about who should brew the friggin’ coffee an’ she sees it’s going nowhere so she says, ‘Will you take scriptural authority on this?’ The guy says, ‘Scriptural? — You mean the Bible?’ She says, ‘Yeah.’ He thinks for a mo, then says, ‘Okay. Bring it out.’ And there it was in the New Testament: ‘He- brews.’”

There was a concerted groan within the Super Stallion. “Shoot ’im!” someone shouted, but still they liked it. The joke had done just what Freeman had wanted it to do, channeling the precombat jitters, especially amongst those, such as Melissa Thomas, who Tibbet had told Freeman had been too young for the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and for whom “Operation Bird Rescue” was their first real mission.

“That,” the general told Aussie, “is the corniest damn joke I’ve ever heard.”

“I like it!” shouted Choir.

“Yeah, you would,” said Aussie, “you Bible-thumping Welsh turd.”