Grey Redemption

PROLOGUE

I awake to a hot, humid hell.

I’m lying on my side outside a small boma, one of many circular grass huts in the village. It must be a cooking boma. I can still smell the food from last night’s meal. “Sunday” the black in our Grey team lies beside me. We’re so drenched in blood our fatigues feel like cardboard.

Stiff and unyielding, they reek of the day’s contacts and will no doubt draw leopard or hyena come sundown. Not that we are likely to see that spectacle one more time. We have multiple hits past our body armour and we’re exhausted. We don’t need to talk, we know the situation is far past dire. Sunday props himself up and is rewarded for this heroic effort with a bullet grazing his head. It moves his black beret like an unseen hand and I hear the mad bee-like buzz as it passes over my left shoulder to end in the red earth a meter from my knees. Sunday falls into my lap as I try to see if I can spot the sniper.

Another mad insect of death buzzes past into the wet earth with a light thump. Light Russian sniper rifle, in all likelihood, but the shooter can’t correct for the down angle shot he needs. I feel Sunday rummaging around and stop when he hears my pistol clear its holster. I lean my body’s mass against him in an odd, erotic-looking shooter’s brace, as I catch a glimpse of a scope flash. I raise my weapon, a .44 magnum. My army buddies had teased me about my Israeli arms Desert Eagle.

“Compensating!” they taunted.

But now the gun’s long distance afforded me a chance, albeit small, of hitting the shooter. The shot was 100 meters up and angled, in humid conditions. I didn’t have a scope on my pistol so it was going to be a best guess. I aimed carefully at the opposing scope’s reflection and I raised it up to the point of aim. Sensing, far more than sighting, I started a gentle squeeze. Another round whizzed by to the right of my head. But this time I saw the shooter’s muzzle flash. With a strength and steadiness that belied my condition, I continued to squeeze. The retort of the gun was deafening. It rocked backward out of my grip and hit Sunday’s head on its way to the blood-soaked red earth. I never knew if my round had found its mark or if the shooter had decided to move on, but no more rounds came our way. Snipers hate to be spotted.

Sunday had dug out our last bag of “Bleed Stop,” which contained a white powder-like material to help clotting and stop serious blood loss. The problem was it burned like a bitch, as if you had thrust the area of skin into a swarm of blister beetles. Those little bugs could push out a fluid that would immediately cause second degree burns on exposed flesh.

Sunday pointed to my side and pushed the bag at me. I debated using it. I was in serious shock and pretty much dead. I figured why die in more pain or of heart failure from the shock to the system. But I remembered God’s words: “Thou shalt not fall.” The General was not really God, but I would have angered God far more quickly than him. I ripped the bag open and jammed the open gash of the bag to the open gash on my side.

The pain was immediate and unbearable. Thankfully, I passed out. When I awoke the sky was crimson red and I wiped my eyes figuring this was from the blood in them. No change, the clouds were unreal in the way they stood out against the red sky. I was reminded of my old man saying “red sky at night, sailors delight”; too bad I wasn’t in the Navy! I chuckled a little and noticed Sunday had moved us into a little better hiding position inside the cooking boma.

Sunday saw my eyes and signed in battle language, a rough slang sign language all of us knew to various degrees. “The extraction chopper was on its way.”

The effort to hope was almost too much. Sunday saw it and spoke.

“That big hand cannon of yours probably saved our butts.”

I nodded in agreement and for some odd reason wanted – no, needed to – know how The Greys got their name. Despite being a member for three years, it had just occurred to me: I wasn’t sure of our origins, so I asked. Sunday most certainly saw this as an odd request; I could see it reflected in his eyes. He slid down close, granting a dying wish or distracting a mind to abate shock, and told me.

The Greys, he explained, probably got their name from the Grey’s Scouts, a Rhodesian mounted infantry unit created in 1975 and named for George Grey, a hero of the Second Matabele War. They were based in Salisbury, then the capital of Rhodesia, now Harare, Zimbabwe. The General probably heard of them there. Or he was just being a racist bastard! With that Sunday laughed (more of a gurgle, really) and continued.

“As a Black there are places I can go where you can’t. The opposite is true as well. Another rumous that he needed to create a team that could go anywhere, kill everything and disappear into the grey mist.” I passed out once again.

Before the time of Moses there was only one Commandment.

Very few of us ever broke that edict from “God.” Yet for those few, the falls were such glorious examples of death and bedlam that one could almost forgive them of their transgressions. Almost, except that if one of the Grey’s fell it meant the total destruction of that Grey Team.

The “Greys” comprised one Black and one White Special Forces Operator. Their combined skills were far greater than the sum of their abilities. They were the terror battle-hardened soldiers told each other to insure they stayed alert in the inky black, on watch. In reality, alert or not, if a Grey wanted your life it was theirs for the taking, for the dark caressed them like a cloak. Allowing them to move and exist in the zero point fields of reality and between an ethereal “not there” region. That’s until they chose to unveil their existence with the fury and love of death only a truly super predator understands. Then, alone and dying, coming to terms with your own frail identity, the cold creeping along your spine you would understand: they were not the Operators legends celebrated in the annals of soldiering. They were creatures of myth that hunted the hunters.

Then it stopped. Our world no longer needed us and we were banished, separated and tossed aside to live out the remainder of our days. Broken and alone, many of us chose to end this fresh hell created by this new world order. Acknowledging there was nothing in this world honourable and deserving of our blood. Refusing to die slowly, rotting like some great forest giant only to fall soundlessly out of this world. Oddly enough, when one of the separated Greys took their own life the other would come to the same conclusion. Despite being separated by the thousands of miles and cultures each still worked as a team: a harmonic and gorgeous ballet of fatality.