There was a twitch in his face, a break in the tough-guy mask he was trying to wear, and I knew I’d scored. Unfortunately, making him lose his cool and not think also made him lose his cool and not think. He lunged at me, an awkward, wild swing, the kind of punch a man throws when he’s never fought someone who knew what they were doing. He’d had unarmed combat training in Basic, but that was a long time ago and, unlike the Recon Marines, Drop Troopers didn’t have to maintain proficiency in it…unless we wanted to.
I slapped the punch aside, stepping to the outside and pushing. Butler stumbled forward, trapped by his own momentum, losing his balance, and I helped him along with a side-kick to the outside of his thigh. He squawked like a toddler getting their first spanking and clutched at his leg, collapsing to the ground, cursing loud enough to wake people a kilometer away. It hurt getting kicked in the big nerve on the outside of the thigh, the common peroneal. It would hurt him for a couple days, most likely, and he wouldn’t be walking on it very well for at least a few minutes.
The other two looked gobsmacked like they hadn’t expected me to actually put up a fight, being nothing but a pansy butterbar second lieutenant and all, but they shook it off and began to move in.
“You two shitbags might want to consider your next move carefully.”
The voice was unmistakable, though I hadn’t known its owner all that long. Gunnery Sgt. Bang-Bang Morrell stepped out of the shadows, hands by his sides, arms loose like he was ready to throw down.
“There are so many reasons why you might want to get the hell out of here,” he went on, staring the two enlisted men down. “First of all, I’m now a witness who could put you here as part of an attempted assault on a superior officer. Second, you can bet people know I’m here. And finally, if you think what Lt. Alvarez just did to your squad leader looks like it hurt, well, let me tell you something…it was a fucking love-tap. Butler fights like an eight-year-old and the LT could have killed him if he’d wanted. And no offense to Lt. Alvarez, but I am so much better a fighter than he’ll ever be.”
The two enlisted men looked at each other, then took off running the other direction.
“Maybe the first good decision either of those assholes has ever made,” Bang-Bang mused.
Butler was trying to stand, keeping his weight on his good leg, eyes flickering back and forth between the two of us.
“You have a pretty clear choice here, Butler,” I told him. “I am way too fucking tired to call the MP’s and have you hauled away while I stay up the rest of the night filing a report, but you can either stick around and let Gunny Morrell laugh at you while I kick you around some more, or you can use whatever brains God saw fit to give you that you haven’t pissed away already, and get your stupid ass out of here.”
Butler didn’t say a word, but the hatred on his face didn’t change even as he limped back into the darkness. I watched him go, wary he might have a gun hidden somewhere back there, but he didn’t come back.
“Come on, sir,” Bang-Bang said, waving a hand. “I’ll walk you back to the barracks so no more of the big, bad men pick on my helpless little platoon leader.”
I barked a laugh and fell into step beside him. I noticed his eyes flickering back and forth as we walked, though, and I knew he’d been at least half-serious.
“How did you know?” I asked him. “How did you know where I’d be, and that they’d be coming after me?”
He snorted humorlessly.
“Sir, shit like that doesn’t happen without someone talking about it. Even if Captain Cronje or his First Sergeant, Breed, pulled dipshit there….” He motioned back the way Butler had gone. “…into a back room and told him to keep his mouth shut, there’s no fucking way he wouldn’t brag about it to someone, or make the mistake of telling the two goons he brought with him where they were going and why. Someone heard, someone told me, and here I am.” He shrugged. “I coulda brought the MP’s, or I coulda brought a fire team with me, but I didn’t think that was how you’d want to play it.”
“You know me pretty well after just a few weeks, Gunny. Thanks for looking out for me.”
“It’s my job, sir.”
He didn’t say which of those was his job, but I wanted to think it was both.
8
I was making a mistake. I was sure of it. But it was just the sort of mistake I’d been making my whole life, and if you keep screwing up the same way that many years in a row, it ain’t a bug, it’s a feature.
It had taken a few questions, a couple days of quiet observation to get the intelligence I needed to carry out the mission, but Greg Cronje was a creature of habit, even huddled in our safe zone on an enemy-infested city. Every night at 2100 hours local time, he would walk alone from his quarters down to the latrine, however far it was in whatever base on whatever planet we were on, and take his daily dump. I was frankly surprised he only took one per day, since he was so full of shit.
I’d taken a recon run on the path from Alpha Company living quarters down to the latrines earlier in the afternoon, so I knew just the right spot to wait. It would
