American Craftsmen Read Online Free

murder instead became a cancerous part of my own mind.
    In the dungeon of my skull, a voice like my own laughed at the curse, and the murders. The voice of the Left Hand, trying to get out.
    Part of a wall tumbled stones at my feet. The dig started to slowly cave in—a dead man’s craft switch. Nothing that I couldn’t have outrun, if I cared to. I didn’t care. I was dying inside, over and over again.
    A rip like a Little Bird’s guns. At the other end of the room, the point of a KA-BAR slashed open the tarp. A soldier peered through the newly created gap. “Captain. Where are you?” It was Master Sergeant Zanol.
    “Sergeant, I ordered—”
    Zee jumped down to the floor. He dashed toward me and pushed me out of the way of another cascading stone. “I don’t give a fuck, sir.” Zee pointed his rifle at me. “They’re … I … you’ve got to help them.”
    After that, my memory was a jumbled slide show. Zee gave me a lift up and out of the excavation, then scrambled up after as I ran across the tell for the town. I hurtled down the mound’s side and screamed into the snap-snap of bullets, “Cease fire! Cease fire! Goddamnit, cease fire!”
    Far too fucking late. Night vision showed me the cooling bodies of women and children everywhere. My team was staggering around, covered in the sacrificial blood, starting to realize what they had done. I couldn’t let that realization sink in. “ Valkyrie , immediate pickup. That’s ASAP. Over.”
    Like someone half-asleep, Doc protested on the com. “Captain, I think there’s some wounded civvies here. Should I treat?”
    “Negative, repeat negative. Withdraw.”
    “You heard him,” yelled Zee, voice nearly breaking with rage and despair. “Move out!”
    We jogged to the pickup point. We climbed back in our ground-hovering copter and started home.
    I grabbed the chopper’s transmitter. Duty still compelled me; I mouthed the necessary words to base. “Ike, this is MAC-66. We need immediate steam vac, MC 9146 4211.”
    “MAC-66, this is Ike. We’ll need to clear that with Mamie.”
    “Negative, Ike,” I said. “I’m calling this, priority Alfa, Last Best Hope.”
    “Roger that, 66. Wilco. Over and out.” It would be easier to explain a mistake from the air than what we had done. I would be destroying a town and ten thousand years of history to do it. I didn’t care.
    I clamped my jaw shut until it ached. Each death exploded in my head. If I opened my mouth without something to say, I’d start screaming and never ever stop again.
    I had to maintain appearances, if only for my men. But they wouldn’t leave me alone. “Captain, what happened back there?” asked Doc.
    “Nothing. Understand? Nothing happened,” I said. “You fired at some bad guys. We withdrew. That’s your report. You’ll speak of this to no one else.”
    But it would have taken more craft than I had left to convince my sergeant. Zee’s face was in his hands. He was sobbing.
    *   *   *
    We landed back at the base. Dawn was coming up over the dead land like an interrogator’s lamp on my soul.
    As we left the copter, Colonel Hutchinson was already on the tarmac and moving right into my face. “Captain, what the hell is going on? Where do you get off calling in an air strike? We aren’t even supposed to be there!”
    I gestured over my shoulder, like a drunk at a bar passing the bill. “Colonel, my team…”
    “Oh, of course.” One of Hutch’s supernatural talents was to calm and reassure in a crisis. “ Good work, men. Get your gear stowed. I’ll debrief you myself at 0800.”
    But my team didn’t look calm or reassured as they left me. Some looked back at me with silent questions and confusion. Sergeant Zee’s red eyes never left the tarmac as he crossed it.
    The colonel spoke in a low voice. “Now, Morton, what the fuck happened out there?”
    I held at attention, silent and steady, until the last member of my team was out of sight in the hangar. Then, my legs