“I’ve heard of them. If another unit is clearing an area and they find chemical ordnance, they call in a TEU.”
“They’re supposed to. But that doesn’t always happen. A grunt doesn’t always know what a chemical artillery round looks like. In Iraq the enemy didn’t have any, remember. Not officially. So they’re not marked properly. Or they’re deliberately mismarked. Plus they look like other shells. Signal shells, especially, because they also have a separate chamber for the precursor material. And even if the guys know chemicals are involved they sometimes try to handle it themselves. They don’t want to wait. With the best will in the world it can take twelve hours for a TEU to respond. Sometimes twenty-four. That’s up to an extra day of exposure to enemy snipers and booby traps. And an extra day they’re not clearing other areas. That leaves other caches for insurgents to find and raid, or for civilians to stumble across, maybe getting hurt or killed. So quite often Michael’s team would arrive at a scene and find it contaminated. Like the first one they ever responded to. It was a brick chamber, underground. Some infantry guys literally fell into it. They busted through the ceiling. They started poking around, then got cold feet. The shells in there were old. They were in bad shape. The guys must have cracked one without realizing. It contained mustard gas. One of Michael’s friends got exposed. It was horrible.”
“Did he make it?”
“By the skin of his teeth. They medevaced him. The hospital induced a coma before the worst symptoms set in. That saved him a lot of agony. And probably saved his life.”
“Did Michael get exposed?”
“Not on that occasion. But he did later. You see, however they come by chemical shells, the TEU has to dispose of them. If the area they’re found in is inhabited, they have to move the shells before they can blow them up. And if there’s some unusual feature, they have to recover them so they can be studied. That’s what happened to Michael. He was transporting a pair of shells that the pointy heads wanted taken back to the Aberdeen Proving Ground. He had them in the back of his Humvee, heading to an RV with a Black Hawk. One of them leaked. It made him sick. He managed to get back to base but the medics wouldn’t believe his symptoms were real. He had no burns. No blisters. No missing body parts. He was accused of malingering, or treated like a drug addict because his pupils had shrunk. Anything to put the blame on him, not the army. He had spasms. Chest pain. He couldn’t stop vomiting. His whole GI system was messed up. They finally sent him to Germany. To a hospital there. It took him weeks to recover.”
“That’s harsh.”
“It was. The way they treated him was bad enough. But the real kicker? Michael, and his friend with the mustard gas, and a whole bunch of others who got hurt—the army refused to recognize them. There was no Purple Heart for them, either. You know why? The poison didn’t leak out during an active engagement, so their injuries weren’t deemed to have been caused by enemy action. It was like the army was telling them they did these awful things to themselves. And you know what? In the exact same circumstances, the Marines do decorate their guys. It just wasn’t right. Michael was demoralized. He left the army at the end of his next tour. He drifted for a few years, and I guess he went off the rails. I kept trying to reach out to him. But then I had problems of my own.” She patted her leg. “And I was busy with my work.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a lab technician. In a place near Huntsville, Alabama.”
“That the job that sent you to Afghanistan?”
She nodded. “I went to supervise some sample collection. Stuff we had to bring back and analyze. My boss knew I was ex-army. He thought I’d be OK. I was out of action for a while, afterward. Surgery. Physical therapy. And then I was a bit down. A bit self-absorbed. But when I got Michael’s message it shook me up. It was something I just couldn’t ignore.”
“What did it say?”
“？‘M—help! M.’ It was handwritten on the back of a card from a place called the Red Roan. It’s a café here, in town.”
“So you dropped everything and came?”
“I dropped everything. But I didn’t come here right away. Old habits die hard. First, I did some digging. I got in touch with his friends. Some contacts of my own. Tried to find out what he might have been into. Where he might have been. Everyone said they didn’t know. A few promised to ask around. Then a buddy from the Sixty-sixth told me about a guy, kind of like an agent. If you were a vet and you wanted work, and you weren’t too particular if it was legal, he could hook you up. I got in touch. Leaned on him. He admitted introducing Michael to Dendoncker. Indirectly. I pressed him some more and he admitted to placing a few guys with Dendoncker over the years. Sometimes Dendoncker just wanted anyone ex-military. Sometimes he wanted people with specialized skills. The guy recalled placing an ex-sniper who was an expert in .50 rifles. Michael got hired because he knew about land mines.”