Free Hellblazer 1 - War Lord by John Shirley

the shooting did come, you mostly couldn’t see who was shooting at you. Sometimes you caught a muzzle flash on a rooftop, or in the mouth of an alley; sometimes not. Other times what seemed an enemy muzzle flash came from your own men.
    Gatewood was thinking about this, and about how he could have gone to officer’s candidate school and had instead signed up for the fast track to combat after 9/11, wanting to go to Afghanistan. Since it would have been smart to send a motivated soldier to Afghanistan, they sent him to South Korea, and then Iraq.
    “Gatewood!” the sarge called, a voice out of the darkness, “you go with Binsdale’s platoon, check out that house at the end of the street. We got intel there’s a guy with an un-ID’d weapon hiding down there somewhere.”
    “Sure, Sarge,” Gatewood said, his heart sinking. Binsdale wasn’t a bad guy, but his outfit meant Vintara and Marquand, too. They’d become inseparable. Marquand had pictures of Timothy McVeigh in his room at the base.
    Gatewood circled the edge of the group of men till he found Binsdale, who looked disappointed that Gatewood was coming along. He didn’t like people second-guessing him, and Gatewood had a way of doing that. Also, Binsdale figured—Gatewood was pretty sure that Binsdale figured this—that Gatewood was crazy.
    Maybe I am, Gatewood thought. Maybe I hallucinated that old man, that ghost soldier.
    You must survive, so you can find a way . . .
    Kind of thing a guy with battle fatigue might hear, after all. Not that Gatewood had been in all that many battles . . .
    He followed Binsdale and Muny, a stocky black guy carrying a SAW, joining the rest of the platoon toward the end of the street. He hoped Binsdale had the house right. Seemed to Gatewood that about every fourth time they were told to check out a certain house for hostiles or guns it turned out they were in the wrong house.
    As it happened, there was only one house at the end of the dead-end street. The surrounds were all rubble and vacant lots; to one side was the wreckage of a small mosque. The house they were to probe had been hastily constructed in one of Saddam’s abortive housing projects, a squarish two-story structure of cinder blocks and plasterboard. A light burned in an upstairs window.
    “You see that window up there?” Marquand hissed. He was a man with his head shaved bald, taped-together glasses, thin lips always curled into a disapproving sneer. “Could be a sniper right there, right now. We could just chuck a grenade right through it. Report said someone was sniping from this end of the street.”
    “Chances are they were using that old mosque, one of these busted-up places here,” Binsdale said.
    “So why don’t we check out the mosque?” Muny asked.
    “Because orders are to check out the house. Now shut the fuck up and take Marquand and Gatewood and Vintara and go around back, see no one runs out with a weapon, tries to hide, nothing like that. Me and Norquist and Lemon’ll go in at the front.”
    Gatewood cringed inwardly at the thought of going on any kind of mission with Marquand. Glancing at Marquand, Muny didn’t seem to like the idea much either. “Shouldn’t we have a battering ram, knock the door in?”
    “We’ll get something like that if it’s locked—now get gone.”
    Gatewood trailed after Muny and Vintara and Marquand, his assault rifle feeling heavy in his hands.
    Vintara switched on the little flashlight attached to the barrel of his rifle and they picked their way around the side of the house, over chunks of concrete, asphalt, broken glass, and patches of dog shit. The dog in question growled at them from the darkness of the lot beside the house, but they couldn’t see him. Gatewood hoped the dog didn’t come to investigate—Vintara liked to shoot stray dogs for fun.
    There was a door around back and someone was coming out when they got there. It was a frightened-looking man in a knee-length white shirt, with three