The Genesis Plague - Michael Byrnes [32]
And it all began on a calm day in 2003, when Randall Stokes lost his leg …
*
While US forces bombed Baghdad, Stokes’s Force Recon unit had still been routing out Taliban from the Afghan mountains, just like they’d been doing since October 2001, when Operation Enduring Freedom responded to the terror attacks in New York and Washington. Shortly after Iraq’s capital had been seized, his unit had been redeployed to northern Iraq to pursue Saddam loyalists who were fleeing Mosul and heading north over the mountains for Syria and Turkey.
The Department of Defense had issued a deck of playing cards listing Iraq’s most-wanted men in four suits, plus jokers. In the first two weeks, Stokes and his six-man unit had captured two diamonds, one heart and one club. By the end of the first month, they’d hunted and killed fifty-five insurgents, without one civilian casualty. The worst injury his unit sustained was a non-lethal bite from a Kurdistan mountain viper whose fangs punctured more boot than skin.
Things had gone smoothly.
Perhaps that should have clued Stokes that his luck was sure to turn.
On an uncharacteristically mild Tuesday in late June, Stokes and fellow special operative Corporal Cory Riggins were heading south to Mosul for a weekly briefing with the brigadier general. Their Humvee was forced to a stop in a congested pass where a group of Iraqi boys had turned the dusty roadway into a soccer field. The kids made no effort to move.
‘I should just run over them,’ Riggins said. ‘A few less fanatics in our future.’
‘Never did like kids, did you?’ Stokes said, hopping out from the Humvee. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
Stokes had made it only four paces from the truck when one of the boys scored a goal that sent the soccer ball rolling up to Stokes’s feet. He didn’t think much about the fact that the kid playing goalie didn’t come running after it. The kids simply jumped up and down, waving their arms for Stokes to kick it back. Grinning and shaking his head, Stokes cranked his leg back and planted a swift kick on the ball.
That was the last time he’d seen the lower half of his right leg.
What Stokes didn’t know was that the soccer ball had been packed with C-4 and had been remotely armed the moment it rolled to a stop, waiting for the force of Stokes’s kick to compress its concealed detonator.
The explosion was fierce, lifting Stokes into the air and throwing him back against the Humvee. He dropped to the ground at the same moment a combat boot smacked the window above him, spraying blood. The boot plunked into the sand beside him. He remembered seeing the jagged bone and stringy meat sticking out above its laces. Only when he looked down at what remained of his right leg - nothing but peeled raw flesh just inches below the knee - did he realize that the boot was his own.
There was no pain. Just the woozy haze from shock and an overwhelming urge to vomit.
The boys scattered as the trio of militants broke cover to ambush the Humvee. With their machine guns raised up, they shredded the Humvee’s interior, before Riggins could escape or return fire.
Then they circled around Stokes, jeered him as he spat bile into the sand. Since his eardrums had been blown out, he couldn’t hear what they were saying, and his eyes, coated in blast residue, struggled to focus.
Then came the beating.
The Arabs mercilessly kicked him about the face until he spat out teeth. Next, they simultaneously pummelled his ribs and testicles. When they began stomping on his bloody stump, Stokes passed out.
They’d done everything possible to maim him. Yet for some reason, no doubt wicked, they let him live. Perhaps they’d determined that his mutilation was punishment far greater than death.
Big mistake.
For hours he lay there, bloodied and beaten, cooking in the sun. Onlookers came and went, going about their business, some stopping to spit on him. All he could think was how he’d given