Hangman (Jason Trapp: Origin Story Book 1) Read online

  Hangman

  Jason Trapp: Origin Story

  Jack Slater

  Mailing List

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  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Mailing List

  Also by Jack Slater

  Prologue

  Al Anbar province, Iraq.

  November 2003.

  Soft rock blared through a CD player stored in the passenger footwell of the dust-jacketed Humvee. The music trod a careful balance between sufficiently loud to keep everyone awake, but not to distract the driver from the road ahead. Just.

  “You awake back there, Chino?” he called out.

  “You betcha, Sergeant,” the young soldier replied, reflexively fingering his carbine. The weapon was warm to the touch, even as the desert’s brutal heat faded with the setting sun. The cooling breeze now gusting through the Humvee’s cracked windows was a welcome respite from the relentless dry heat that punctuated the movement of the sun through the sky. His skin was blistered and chafed a dull red where the scratchy cloth of his uniform had met salt crystals dried from his own sweat and ground them against the soft flesh.

  “Only a couple more hours of this, then we’re done,” the sergeant added, twisting in his seat and throwing Chino a thumbs-up. “Just gotta make sure the civvies make it there without getting their dicks shot off, and we’re home safe.”

  “And then what, Sergeant?”

  “What the fuck are you expecting, Chino? A pitcher of cold beer, a couple hookers and –”

  Sgt. Brian Harper’s voice fell away, garroted with shock as the lead vehicle in the small convoy blasted violently upward into the sky, the scene briefly backlit as a dull orange flash detonated beneath it. A second later, a cloud of dust hissed against the windshield of the Humvee they were riding in, followed a second later by the plink of buffeted debris.

  “Shit, IED, IED!” Chino yelled, his voice shrill inside his own head. “The hell do we do, Sarge?”

  The NCO’s reply was clipped with stress but nevertheless professional as he stomped his foot on the brake and brought the vehicle to a screeching halt just a couple of feet behind the now smoldering lead element of the short procession of vehicles. Behind them, the two heavy trucks they were escorting came to a less graceful stop, their noses askew as steam gushed out of their engine blocks. “Hold it together, Chino. Call it in.”

  Chino reached for the radio handset with numbed fingers and brought it to his lips, calling out their unit call sign and requesting immediate support. “Say again, we’ve been hit, we’ve been hit.”

  He released the transmit button but heard only static in response. “The hell, we in some kind of valley or something?” he muttered. “It’s like the radio ain’t making it out.”

  “Nothing but flat, empty desert for 50 miles, kid,” the sergeant yelled back as he grabbed a couple additional magazines, thrust them into his combat vest, and kicked open the driver’s side door. “Try again. Let’s hope it’s just a hit and run.”

  Chino did as he was told but received the same response, accompanied in quick succession first by a vise clenching his stomach in its grip, then the metallic clang of bullets impacting the vehicle’s steel chassis. He twisted in his seat, his attention instinctively drawn to the sound of the impacts. In the back, Cpl. Miles Roth and Pvt. Stan Oxley had hunched low, behind the protection of the metal sides.

  “Incoming!” Roth yelled out, his voice hoarse. “Get us out of here, Sarge.”

  “No can do,” Harper replied, who briefly fell quiet as he fired several rounds into the darkness before raising his voice and yelling gruffly, “Everybody out!”

  Chino sat, frozen by shock. This was the first time a patrol he’d been part of had been hit. He knew he was supposed to be moving, to get down low and return fire – but he was incapable of movement. He crushed his weapon against his ribs and squeezed his head between his legs, rocking back and forth.

  A roar like a fireworks display erupted as Harper threw open Chino’s door and reached in with both hands, dragging him out and throwing him onto the desert sand. The impact drove the wind from the soldier’s lungs, and he lay there for half a second too long, staring into the speckled, starry sky, his peripheral vision colored a dull orange by the vehicle burning a few yards away. A stream of fireflies zipped straight overhead next, rapid and incisive.

  No, not fireflies…

  Yet the shock also cleared the fear from his mind, at least for a time. He twisted over onto his belly and selected his weapon’s three-shot mode, bringing it into a firing position and aiming into the distance. He squeezed the trigger twice, surprised that he could barely hear the sound of his own shots. Roth and Oxley were already crouched next to the Humvee, firing steady bursts into the darkness.

  “Into the ditch, now,” the sergeant ordered, gesturing at a deep irrigation gully that ran alongside the hard-packed dirt road. “Keep your fucking heads down!”

  The whistle of another stray bullet passing just a few feet overhead gave Chino no cause to argue. He grabbed his weapon and crawled for the safety of cover on his belly, scrambling low from forearm to knee, his carbine cradled between two elbows.

  Alex “Chino” Woods’ mouth was bone dry, a combination of desert sand and unadulterated fear sucking whatever moisture had once existed there into nothingness. He pulled himself the last few yards and tumbled into the deep ditch, not breathing a sigh of relief until his entire body was covered by the compacted dirt that now obscured his vision.

  The gunfire was almost incessant now. Mostly heavy caliber, from a prepared machine-gun position at least a half mile in the distance. Every ten or twenty rounds, a single streak of red tracer fire erupted, sometimes going high, other times eating dirt a little before their position. Other times still, the heavy rounds chewed clouds of sand into the air just inches from where Chino now lay, his chest heaving with exertion.


  Roth threw himself facedown into the ditch a second later. He twisted as soon as he was down and brought his rifle up to his shoulder, instantly firing several bursts over the onrushing forms of Harper and Oxley.

  He grabbed Chino’s arm and shook him roughly. “Wake the fuck up, Woods,” he howled over the gunfire. “Or we’re all fucked.”

  A scream of pain from just a few yards away attracted Chino’s attention as he finished rolling over, and he looked up just in time to see Oxley crumple under the weight of gunfire. One moment he was standing, the next he was flat against the ground.

  Chino blinked. This couldn’t be real.

  “Cover me!” Harper said, yelling the order as he came to a halt, kicking up a small cloud of dust that coated Chino’s lips when it carried into the trench. He reversed course, scrambling on his hands and knees toward the fallen soldier’s frame. He grabbed Oxley’s body armor and started dragging.

  Chino fired wildly into the night. Where the incoming gunfire had earlier mostly appeared to be confined to a single firing position, now rounds were impacting their position from 9 to 3 on the clock.

  “What the hell do we do, Sarge?” he called out as his weapon ran dry.

  It took a couple of aimless squeezes of his trigger before he realized what had happened. With numb fingers, he ejected the spent magazine, which fell to the ground.

  Harper was only a couple of feet away now, and Roth surged out of the ditch to help the NCO. He caught a round in the center of his forehead for his troubles. Like Oxley, one second he was there, the next he was gone.

  Chino yelled a scream of hopeless despair. He dropped his useless weapon and threw himself into the maelstrom, reaching out for the sergeant’s hand and dragging him into the low trench. Harper fell, but not before a couple of rounds impacted his body armor, momentarily driving the air from his lungs and rendering him speechless.

  Now the last remaining functional member of the unit, Chino reached for his sergeant’s rifle and pumped round after round into the darkness before scrambling up the side of the dirt trench with his fingernails, coating them in dirt, and grabbing first Roth, then Oxley’s prone corpses and hauling them into the ditch after him.

  He fell to the ground again, taking a moment’s respite from the relentless – and encroaching – sound of gunfire. “The fuck do I do?” he murmured, his tone a high-pitched keen of despair. “The fuck do I do?”

  Sgt. Harper groaned, and Chino almost wept with relief. At least the man was alive. He reached for a fresh magazine from his waist and pressed it into the rifle’s stock before calling out over his shoulder, “How you doing, Sarge? Tell me you okay, man. Just tell me you okay.”

  He selected the weapon’s fully-automatic mode and depressed the trigger, emptying the entire magazine in just a couple of seconds. The night lit up with muzzle flash, momentarily illuminating the darkness.

  And that was when he was hit. The first round skipped up off a rock on the desert floor, spinning and somehow following a curved trajectory that led it down into the ditch, burying itself in Chino’s thigh. It was like being bit by a rattlesnake.

  “Fuck!” he screamed.

  The second round hit him in the left shoulder, just above the joint, and outside of his Kevlar vest. That one picked him up and threw him backward until he collapsed, groaning against the ditch.

  In a moment of clarity, as his body filled with adrenaline to ward off the shock and pain, he saw the sergeant’s glassy eyes staring endlessly into the night.

  He was the last one left.

  And not for much longer. He knew that. The blood was flowing from his arteries too fast, coating the desert floor.

  It’s almost over.

  Chino’s finger was still caught in the trigger guard of Harper’s weapon, but he had no strength to lift it. Strangely, the blood flowing from his shoulder felt cold against his skin, though he knew it had to be hot. The pain flickered, then died entirely, as though the wound never existed at all.

  It took at least a minute before the gunfire outside slowed and then came to a complete halt. Chino’s eyelids drooped and almost closed entirely. He attempted to raise them, but they were so heavy. He tried reaching for the gun, but it might as well have been welded to the desert floor.

  Another minute, and there was just the quiet of the desert night. No insects, no animal life, save the chuckling of a goat far in the distance.

  Then…

  Engine noise.

  Chino forced his eyes open. Was it friend or foe?

  There was only the sound of vehicles. No lights. That could mean Americans, couldn’t it?

  If he’d had the energy, Chino might have mustered up a bitter laugh. It was as likely to be the insurgents. They were at home in the darkness.

  And then he heard voices. Low, to be sure, but voices nonetheless.

  Speaking English.

  They were Americans. They had to be.

  “Here,” he mumbled, his voice too low to make it even out of the walls of the ditch. “I’m over here!”

  Boots crunched against the dirt, and the beam of a flashlight blinked into existence, playing over the sandy floor. It passed over Oxley’s body, then the other two.

  “Please…” Chino croaked, reaching out his hand. He squinted into the light. It was difficult to make out much, but he saw fatigues and…

  A headscarf?

  “I got a live one,” the voice said, cool and dispassionate. The red and white checked cloth bobbed on his head, tendrils of cloth dancing in the breeze. Chino heard a click.

  Then gunfire, loud and violent. A round crushed the sergeant’s skull, then more followed, rocking the bodies of Roth and Oxley.

  And then it was just him left.

  The gun roared.

  And then there was just blackness.

  1

  August 2005 – Present day.

  “Hey buddy, the girls are that way.”

  Jason Trapp’s gaze jerked upward from the empty bottle of beer in front of him toward the source of the man’s voice before his head did. The bartender was in his 40s, with a fraying head of sandy brown hair and a couple of weeks’ worth of beard growth. His eyes were tired, sunk into sagging bunkers of flesh.

  He tilted his bottle to request another. “I’m not here for skin.”

  The bartender reached out and plucked away the empty. He tossed it into a plastic crate on the other side of the sticky metal bar, and the clinking crunch of glass smashing glass was briefly audible over the powerful bass line dominating the background. The speakers weren’t high-quality, but they were powerful, and occasionally they gave the rows of fresh drinking vessels cause to rattle.

  “Coming right up,” he said, crouching down to open up one of the chillers. He reemerged with a fresh bottle of Budweiser, which he spun in midair, caught with his opposite hand, and popped open all in one slick movement, and without causing excessive foaming. “You mind me asking what you’re doing here, then? Strip club’s an expensive place to drink your life away, man.”

  Brief flashes of gyrating dancers on the mirror behind the bar imprinted on Trapp’s vision as he shot the man a half-smile of thanks, bare skin illuminated by an occasional, half-hearted flash from the club’s lighting system. It was a little before midnight, but the place was almost empty. The girls were there because they had to be. You couldn’t turn down a Monday shift if you wanted a prime slot on the weekends, Trapp figured. That was the way it was in the clubs up and down the last three states he’d ridden through.

  Still, just because they were physically present didn’t mean they were required to look interested, or even wholly sober. Whoever the Landing Strip’s manager was, he either wasn’t around, or he didn’t care about the first impression his performing staff was making. The customers probably didn’t either. It took a special kind of guy to be into that glassy-eyed thousand-yard stare, but that didn’t mean they were rare.

  Trapp himself wasn’t even half watching. Titty bars weren’t really hi
s thing. A few grizzled customers ringed the main stage to ensure the show went on, locals on one side, truck drivers on the other. He pulled his gaze away from the mirror and dropped his eyes back to the beer in front of him.

  “You’re just back from the sandbox, huh?”

  Trapp brought the bottle up to his lips and took a long sip as he worked out whether he was going to reply. The cool liquid sluiced down the back of his throat and down into a belly that was long past full. The next time he stood up to take a piss, he knew he’d be unsteady on his feet. Six beers was about manageable, after fifteen months without. But the first half dozen bottles were already a long way in the rearview.

  He set the drink back down on the bar with a dull thud. “How’d you guess?”

  The bartender shrugged. “Just got that look about you, I guess. I was there the first time. Six months sweating my ass off in the desert without firing my weapon once. I’m guessing you didn’t get off so easy.”

  Trapp glanced back down at the beer. It was already half gone, the remaining liquid a sea of amber waves in the bottle. He needed to slow down, but it was hard to get off the ride once you started. Maybe tomorrow.

  “I guess not. But nothing bad enough to stop me sitting in front of you.”