Victory Point - Ed Darack [84]
“An American doctor?” Bartels shot a puzzled look to Sultan.
“Yes, and he says that he is shot, bleeding a lot. Dirt all over his face. Very bad condition. He is a doctor who is doing work on himself !” Bartels immediately realized that the survivor must have been a Navy Corpsman—possibly connected to the search Kinser was awaiting orders to undertake from his patrol base at Kandagal, many miles and thousands of feet of elevation gain from Salar Ban, but still closer than any other American troops in the region. Shina then remembered the note. He handed the folded green paper to Matt.
“I can barely read this . . . what is this? It isn’t even legible,” the lieutenant muttered to himself. After a few moments, Bartels managed to decipher the glib message scratched in black ink:
BEEN SHOT
VILLAGE PEOPLE TOOK ME IN
NEED HELP
SIGNED
Below signed, he read the name Marcus and then struggled with what he thought spelled “Little” or “Lateral.” Is this some sort of a hoax? Is someone trying to lure us up the Shuryek? the lieutenant wondered. Bartels, intimately familiar with U.S. military protocol for “blood chits,” knew that all units, conventional or SOF, mandated the inclusion of some uniquely identifying personal information, such as mother’s maiden name, name of a first pet, name of a high school, etc., in order to confirm the identity of personnel in duress; the lieutenant even looked for some hidden message, but couldn’t decipher anything. Still, he sprinted to the COC with the note, where he immediately scanned it, then sent it by SIPR (secure e-mail, pronounced “sipper”) to Rob Scott and Tom Wood, and then called the OpsO.
“What’s the note say, Bartels?” Tom barked.
“I just e-mailed it to you, sir. You should have it now. But it’s a real short type of blood chit.” Matt read the message to Wood. “If it’s real, somebody’s in really, really bad shape. I mean, this is barely legible—like its written by someone gasping their last breaths.”
“Is there a name on it?” Wood asked.
“Marcus something . . . maybe Marcus Little or Marcus Lateral. I can’t read the last name.”
“Hold on.” The OpsO, now at Asadabad with a contingent of SEALs under the command of an O-6-level SEAL (a Navy captain, a full-colonel equivalent in the Marine Corps—one rank higher than MacMannis) in Bagram, made a quick inquiry. “Marcus Luttrell?” Wood asked the lieutenant.
“Yeah. Yeah! I can just barely see it spelled that way.”
“Okay, Bartels. Make sure that that walk-in doesn’t fuckin’ walk out. And hold on; someone at Bagram, a SEAL captain, wants to talk to you. He’ll be calling any second now.” The SEAL asked Matt a litany of questions. Bartels could only tell him the few facts that he had before him, and quickly sensed that the captain didn’t believe a word he said.
“Well, sir. We have this note, and we have the walk-in who has seen one American in the village of Salar Ban—that’s all I can say.” The SEAL ended the conversation, then Matt returned to the tearoom with Sultan and Shina. Back at Asadabad, a line of SEALs, clutching their M4s, launched a verbal attack against Wood, demanding to gain access to Shina and get a grid on Gulab’s house in order to launch what Wood sensed the SEALs planned to be a direct-action raid/hostage rescue mission.
“Look, this is just a friendly local somewhere, helping one of your guys. Hopefully there are more survivors that other villagers are helping, too—”
“As far as I’m concerned, your career as a Marine is over. Fuckin’ over. Gone. You’ll be out of theater in less than twenty-four hours!” the SEALs spat at the shocked OpsO.
“We have a Marine patrol literally one valley over from