Soldiers Betrayed

Wartime Afghanistan, two Recon Marines and a female Corporal are pitted against traitors.

Hello fellow writers and readers. I'm interested in your thoughts about this first chapter of a 131,000 word novel. This is the first of three in the 'Blacksteel' series. Novel number two, 'Deep Cover Takedown' is also finished, but the third is only a work in progress. My sketches will not be able to be seen on this site, but will all the changes in military weapons and vehicles, I added a few for clarification in the actual story. Please feel free to contact me, Dennis King, at [e-mail] if you have questions, comments, or corrections. If you have any TV or movie industry connections, I would love to hear about them.
Soldiers Betrayed
ISBN 9781005942250
All Rights Reserved
Copyright 2024 WC 131,945
Dennis D. King

This chapter is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. Characters, events, and locations are fabricated. Any appearance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental or novelized truths gathered from public information. Trademarked products are owned by their respective corporations and have been mentioned without permission or endorsement. Depictions of activities concerning any living persons, NATO and the Department of Justice-Overseas represented in this novel are entirely shaped through dramatic license and literary liberties. To my knowledge, the DOJ has no Overseas Unit designated as DOJ-O.

Background Notes
This is based on experiences within the United States Marine Corps, Army, plus contacts within the Navy, and Air Force. Characters and events are fabricated, though some relate directly to authenticated facts of the Afghanistan war era. The brief accounts of treasonous Americans reflected within this story are based on their convictions, the evidence presented at trials or publicly reported information.

PROLOGUE
My name is Robert Nathan Steele, with the ‘e’ on the end silent. My military rank is Captain, O-3, and I'll soon to be kicked out of the Crotch. In case you are not familiar with the word Crotch as applied here, it is an endearing nickname for the United States Marine Corps adopted by those who serve within. My mind had just wandered off into never-never land. I didn’t snap back into focus until the last few spoken words about me penetrated the haze that had enclosed my mind. Then I felt the weight of this prestigious award and its blue and white ribbon slipping over my head to rest on my chest. Obviously, I had zoned out and utterly oblivious sitting there in my wheelchair.
How could I have missed hearing all the ceremonial reading of my Navy Cross, the second-highest award a Marine can receive? As the presenter advanced to the next man in the line, I looked down in my lap and lifted the empty blue box to pick up and uncurl the program’s handout, and reviewed the words unheard.

The Citation
The President of the United States takes enormous pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to Robert Nathan Steele, First Lieutenant, United States Marine Corps, for extraordinary heroism serving Headquarters Company, First Marine Expeditionary Force. In August 2010, as a Ground Intelligence Officer on a classified, long-range reconnaissance patrol, Lieutenant Steele observed a US Army vehicle blasted over by a remotely detonated, improvised explosive. Without hesitation, he left a secure, mountainside observation post bordering Korangal Valley, Afghanistan and immediately traversed rocky, exposed ground towards the carnage. At the blast site, he and his Sergeant fell under heavy small arms fire. Wounded several times, disregarding his individual safety, and exposing himself repeatedly to harsh and continuous automatic weapons fire, he, in repetitive trips pulled three soldiers from the wreckage and carried them to a more secure area.
Then at extreme personal risk, with unfamiliar captured weaponry, engaged two enemy positions with his accurate, superior firepower. With reckless disregard for his safety, he charged and overran the enemy’s fortified stronghold. By his conspicuous display of gallantry, decisive leadership, untrammeled courage, and utmost devotion to duty, Lieutenant Steele reflects great credit upon himself and the traditions of the United States Naval Service and Marine Corps.

For the President,
Raymond Marcus, Secretary of the Navy
~{ }~
Unknown to anyone attending that morning’s ceremony, almost seven-thousand miles away, a tall, blonde-haired Slavic- European male and an American US Army Supply Sergeant were sharing an evening supper with a Taliban financier in an upscale restaurant. During their delicious meal of tender Australian beef, New England lobsters, and bottles of overpriced wine, they negotiated a final price for the next shipment of explosives to be stolen from the military munition stockpiles and delivered to criminals supporting the enemy.
CHAPTER ONE, TOO TALL AND TOO RICH
All the trouble for Lieutenant Steele and Sergeant Kelly began unexpectedly on the heights of a mountainside overlooking the Korangal Valley. If there was a singular battleground in Afghanistan that deserved to be named “The Valley of Death” that combat zone was definitive candidate. This heavily contested piece of real estate was on the Afghan side of the Pakistani frontier. Over several years, both men and women troops of the Marine Corps, Navy, Army, Air Force, and NATO forces constantly battled Taliban terrorists to a virtual standstill. Much like the Vietnam war, troops made ineffective sweeps through towns and villages. Physical locations like hillsides for mountain ridges, for artillery batteries, or observation posts, were fought for, seized, fortified, and held. Only to be abandoned later, owing to the ebb and flow of our government’s lack of political will to win the war for keeps. Even better yet, just ‘get the hell out of Dodge’ and stay out.
What a waste of young American lives. The gruesome number of casualties on both sides was horrific. Early in the fall of 2005, a Seal team was ambushed and three squad members massacred. Subsequently, a Chinook rescue helicopter was shot down, thus killing an additional 16 troops, eight of which were also Navy Seals.
Prior to 2010, over fifty Americans were killed and we awarded four heroic servicemen the Medal of Honor. After significant losses, all US operations ended with the withdrawal from the basin. The very next day, the Taliban overtook the city and the surrounding forest of pine trees.
All this and more troubled the mind of Marine Lieutenant Steele as he convalesced in Walter Reed Hospital. Steele’s personal contribution to this inanely orchestrated war was not his life. No, what he gave up was both feet just below the ankles. However, as an eternal optimist, and one that never played the Victim Card for pity, pathos, or condolences, he considered his double amputation a blessing.
Reflecting several months back in time, the maimed Lieutenant mentally revisited the flashes of activities that had deposited him on that godforsaken, unnamed Afghan Mountain ridge. There, as told to Steele later, he and Marine Sergeant Cassius Kelly met and saved the life of Army Corporal Isabella DuLay in a major firefight.
Due to the mandatory high doses of the doctor prescribed, pain-reducing, mind-distorting drugs, he couldn’t remember the exact sequence of the events that preceded the explosion of the suicide vest that severed his feet. He did have an inkling that somehow it was the deliberate fault of an Army Supply Sergeant he had just saved at considerable peril to his own life. At least that is what his Navy Cross award seemed to infer. His diminished abilities of recall and the physiological effects of immense memory gaps scared him more than the other challenges at hand. So he replayed the chronological succession of past incidents, as best he could.
Steele, who had been convalescing for months, was today feeling relatively fit and sitting up in his adjustable hospital bed lost in thought. Remembering and reminiscing about his life now and before the Marine Corps was challenging. Especially when many ‘memories‘ were difficult to isolate from stories other people told about your youthful years or war time service. Let alone the flashback gaps where he knew he should know or remember something but could not, no matter how hard he concentrated. When the voids reappeared, his mind had to reset by going back to a known point and moving forward.
“It has been said that you can’t be too rich. Well, respectfully, I'll disagree. At the moment, I have just received, in several lump sums, more wealth than I had ever dreamed to accumulate. I don’t know what to do with it all. I’m also told there is still more insurance money coming my way as my father’s career for 36 years was selling whole and term-life policies. Seems he certainly had me covered for all contingencies.”
“Also, now I’m too tall. Does that sound strange? Too tall and too rich are at the very top of my newest personal triumphs. Let me confuse the issue more by saying, Three months ago I was the shortest, living Marine Corps to be awarded the Navy Cross. My head to no feet height measured out at slightly less than four feet three inches because of the amputations. Whoever heard of a 51 inch combat marine?”
“To better understand my situation’s uniqueness, please allow me to think back and vocalize the details I can summon to the forefront of my memories. Until the end of my high school freshman year, all I craved to be was a Marine. You know ‘The Few, The Proud, The United States Marine Corps.’ That was my biggest single dream.”
“But the cards were stacked against me, because of an inexplicable birth defect, I was consistently much shorter than my contemporaries.”
“Yeah, my mother and father were perfectly normal, she being five and a half feet and dad a smidgen taller. But not me, because from the day of my origin a couple of my genes were defective. At every birthday, growing up, my body was mostly average above the knees. But below them, my tibia's and fibula's were always a few inches subpar. They didn’t grow much at all. My super short legs sort of gave me a great ape or monkey look, minus the broad shoulders. Even as early as middle school I read everything in Dad’s magazines about medical and pharmaceutical advances that focused on my condition. The only thing I really learned was, statistically; tall people made more money and had happier lives. Go figure, I could’ve guessed that!”
“Thank God at least my legs were uniformly irregular. I grasp that 'uniformly irregular' is a perfect contradiction of terms, an oxymoron. But could you describe my condition any better? As you can imagine, growing up far shorter than my contemporaries, the playground harassment was terrible. Be that as bad as it was, I hate to consider what additional teasing and torment I would have endured if one leg had been a few inches longer than the other.”
“Even before high school, I daydreamed of being Sergeant Rock. I know you might tell me the comic book character was an Army soldier. You are absolutely correct. But back then, I never had the cash to buy any of those expensive, highly detailed action figures from Hasbro. My little guys were green, so I naturally thought they were Marines.”
“I just had a beat-up set of two-inches tall plastic soldiers. Their only actions were when I maneuvered them around the turf in my backyard or dispersed a few to kingdom-come with a contraband firecracker or cherry-bomb. Was GI Joe from the Army and not a tried-and-true leatherneck? Who knew? Not Me! At any rate, my desire was to become a genuine, tough as nails, lean, green, fighting Marine.”


Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One, Too Tall and Too Rich
Chapter Two, ROTC
Chapter Three, Butter Bar
Chapter Four, Ring Knockers
Chapter Five, Walter Reed
Chapter Six, Show Me The Money
Chapter Seven, Old Acquaintances
Chapter Eight, Flashing Back In Time
Chapter Nine, Firefight Heroes
Chapter Ten, Counter Attack
Chapter Eleven, Two Feet Short
Chapter Twelve, Tripping Out
Chapter Thirteen, Bagram Airbase
Chapter, Fourteen, Aerovac
Chapter Fifteen, DuLay's History
Chapter Sixteen, Jail Time
Chapter Seventeen Freedom
Chapter Eighteen, K-Town
Chapter Nineteen, French Date
Chapter Twenty, Impostor Trouble
Chapter Twenty-One, Death Night
Chapter Twenty-Two, Two For The Team
Chapter Twenty-Three, NATO HQ, Kabul
Epilogue

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