Destiny Warriors -Thomas Calabrese

Fortunate Sons and Daughter of the Righteous Realm

Thomas Calabrese – It seemed that Sergeant John Slidell had always awakened early. Maybe he was just born with an internal alarm o’clock because even as a young boy helping on his family’s small avocado farm in Escondido, California he would automatically wake up at four am to do his chores before heading off to school. One of his father’s favorite euphemisms was; If the sun rises before you do then you’ve overslept. Serving in The Marine Corps had only reinforced that habit as John swung his legs out of his cot and got dressed. He went outside before even thinking about looking at his watch, it was 0345 and it would be daylight in two hours. It was eerily quiet around the camp except for some faint noises coming from the direction of the mess hall so John walked in the opposite way and into the darkness.

John Slidell had served one tour in Iraq and this was his third deployment to Afghanistan, but he was mentally exhausted and bone tired and he needed this time alone to put on his game face. He could not let his men see any weaknesses in him because they were looking to him for strength and leadership and it was his duty not to let them down. The last two months had been extremely tedious for the platoon and there had been minimal enemy contact and boredom often led to carelessness and irritability. There are many things that can kill a Marine grunt in the field and once he stopped doing the little things to keep himself alive then trouble usually followed.

Three hours later, the Marines of third squad were standing outside their hooch and fire team leader Corporal Simmons eyes were closed as he was gently swaying from side to side. John gently tapped him on the shoulder, “Put a bookmark in that dream, you can come back to it tonight.”

“I’m awake, Sergeant, I’m just trying to control myself about going out on another exciting patrol,” Simmons replied.

“You can do that with your eyes open.”

John knew that if he came down too hard on his men, he’d demoralize them, so he walked the fine line between their Platoon Sergeant and their friend. He went down the line and checked every man’s gear, “We need a call sign.”

Walters yelled out as he pulled a package of candy and held it up, “Starburst!”

“Starburst it is,” John turned to Lance Corporal Monaco, the radioman, “Call it in.”

The platoon had been patrolling the same area for several weeks because command did not want the Taliban to establish a foothold, but as it is with many high-level decisions, it looked better on paper than it was in reality.  John knew how easy the enemy could plan an ambush if they knew the predictability of Marines movements through the sector so he brought his concerns to Command with suggestions about changing their routines and patrol routes. They refused and John knew why, Command was using Marines as bait to draw the enemy out.

When the squad got within three hundred meters of the village, John called out, “Take fifteen.”

The squad immediately complied and dropped right where they were standing as John pulled out his binoculars and scanned the village.

There was no movement, but on previous patrols, there were always villagers out, but not today, why?

He called to radio operator Monaco, “Get command on the hook.”

Monaco called Command on the radio, “Charlie Popa, this is Starburst, over.”

“Charlie Popa, go Starburst.”

“Permission to bypass village, suspect ambush, over,” John stated clearly.

Lt. Colonel Jarrett overheard the transmission and walked over to Captain Johnson, “What’s going’s on?”

“Sergeant Slidell suspects an ambush,” Captain Johnson replied.

“I’ll take it.” Lt. Colonel Jarrett took the handset, “Sergeant Slidell, this is Lt. Colonel Jarrett, situation report, can you confirm enemy movement?”

“No, sir”

“What do you see?”

“Nothing…there is no movement in the village, that’s the problem,” John replied.

“Unless you have confirmed enemy movement then continue with your mission straight through the village.”

There was no response.

“Do you read me?” Lt. Colonel Jarrett said.

 There was still no response.

John alternated looking at his men and then at the village.

“Do you read me…over!” Lt. Colonel Jarrett repeated, “You are ordered to continue with your mission, acknowledge!

“Acknowledged,” John dropped the handset and walked off.

Captain Johnson turned to Lt. Colonel Jarrett, “Sergeant Slidell wouldn’t ask to bypass the village if he didn’t feel it was the right thing to do, sir, he’s a damn good Marine.”

Lt. Colonel Jarrett looked dismissively at Captain Johnson, “I’m not interested in Sergeant Slidell’s feelings.  Did you ever stop to think where the hell the Marine Corps would be if we listened to every grunt’s feeling about following orders? Good Marines do their job without question.”

John continued his surveillance and there was still no movement in the village and the uneasy feeling deep inside his gut only worsened.

Radioman Monaco asked, “What are you going to do?”

John felt something under the sole of his boot, so he slowly lifted his foot, reached down and picked up something that resembled a coin and glanced at it for a split second then put it in his pocket without thinking. He had other things on his mind.

John turned to Corporal Marcos who was carrying the grenade launcher, “Give me that.”

  PFC Reilly called to him, “Are you going to tell us what your plan is or do you want us to guess?”

“If the enemy is there, I’m going to draw their fire,” John answered, “That’s what Command wants, so that’s what I’m going to give them.”

“PFC Reilly asked, “What do you want us to do if that happens?”

“Cover fire might be nice.” When Sergeant John Slidell got within one hundred meters of the village, he fired two 40mm rounds from the grenade launcher and they exploded in the field behind the first building. John didn’t have to wait long to see if his suspicions were correct because Taliban fighters started pouring out of several buildings; twenty, thirty, forty, seventy in total, all heavily armed. Bullets and explosions began hitting all around him.

John dived into a ditch as the Taliban fighters began a full-frontal assault. He was out-manned and out-gunned and in a matter of a few seconds, he came to the grim realization that he was not going to make it out. His platoon was doing their best to give him cover fire, but they couldn’t do it indefinitely and since survival was no longer an option, killing as many of the enemy would have to suffice. John hoped that his actions would slow the enemy assault long enough for his squad to retreat to safety. He jumped up and charged toward the Taliban fighters, but there were no more enemy fighters, just villagers walking about as if nothing had happened.  

As the squad returned to base, the questioning among the Marines was non-stop.

“That’s the craziest damn thing I ever saw,” Corporal Foster commented.

“They had us then poof they were gone,” P.F.C. Davis added.

Radioman Monaco interrupted. “There must have been a tunnel that they jumped in, that’s the only way they could have done it.”

When they got closer to their firebase, John turned to Monaco, “Tell them we’re on the way in.” then walked to the back of the column and looked back over the terrain to see if they were following them when he felt something and pulled out the coin, it was vibrating.

Monaco said, “I can’t contact the C.P.”

When the squad got closer, John noticed that the camp had changed dramatically since they left that morning. It had more structures and equipment, so he called out, “Marines inbound!”

When the squad got to the perimeter, the Marines on guard duty stared at them. John didn’t recognize any of them and when he looked to the center of the compound he saw the unit designation on the flagpole. It was Hotel Company, 2^nd Battalion, John’s unit was Lima Company, 3rd Battalion. What the hell is going on?

Captain Matthews and a group of Marines approached, “Name and unit, Sergeant.”

“Sergeant John Slidell, 3^rd Platoon, Lima Company, Third Battalion.”

“Where have you been?” Captain Matthews asked.

“We’ve been out on patrol.”

“I mean where have you been all this time?” Captain Matthews expanded his question.

“Sir, we’ve only been out seven hours, Captain Johnson knows what time we left, you can ask him, sir.”

“I don’t know Captain Johnson.”

“Where’s my unit?” John demanded.

“Easy Sergeant,” Captain Matthews hesitated for a moment. “Do you know what date this is?”

John looked at his watch, “Wednesday.”

“Not the day, the date.”

“June 20th” Sergeant Slidell responded.

Captain Matthews looked at the Marines before him, “One more question…what year is this?”

John snapped back, “2012!”

The Marines in the camp still had not taken their eyes off John and his men.

“Why is everybody eyeballing us?” John asked impatiently.

Captain Matthews took a deep breath, “The year is 2013 and you and your men have been gone a year, everybody thought you had been captured.”

John and his men were assigned a hooch, and three Marines were placed outside as guards.

John lied down on his cot and just as he closed his eyes, the coin in his pocket began vibrating, “Do you read me, over, acknowledge,” and when he opened his eyes he was back on patrol outside the village.

Radioman Monaco said, “You better answer him.”,

“Repeat your last transmission,” John stammered.

“Do you have confirmed enemy movement, over?” Lt. Colonel Jarrett ordered.

John tried to get his mind back into the present situation then replied, “I have visual confirmation, over”  Monaco whispered, “I don’t see anything.”

“Look harder,” John mumbled.

Monaco rubbed his eyes in an effort to see an enemy that wasn’t there.

Lt. Colonel Jarrett responded, “We have surveillance over your position and we don’t see anything, over.”

“You must have a malfunction, over, request artillery support,” Sergeant Slidell reiterated.

 Lt. Colonel Jarrett responded, “You better be damn sure.”

John called out, “Garcia, front and center.”

Garcia the assigned forward observer responded, “Yo.”

“Light up that field one hundred meters straight ahead,” John ordered.

Garcia opened his artillery computer map and placed a marker where he wanted the laser guided rounds to land then marked the target and sent the coordinates to fire command, “What kind of rounds do you want?”

“Beehive anti-personal,” John responded, “Get ready to fire on my command.”

Lance Corporal Garcia prepared to relay the fire command as John counted to himself, then took the grenade launcher from Lance Corporal Marcos and fired two rounds behind the first building., “Now!” The incoming rounds were in the air as the enemy fighters came out of the buildings. The artillery barrage of beehive rounds landed in the field at exactly the same time that the Taliban fighters ran into it, killing every one of them.

“How did you know that there were Taliban fighters in those buildings and that they would run in that direction?” Garcia asked.

John deflected the question, “Where else would they be and where else would they run to?”

Eight months later, Sergeant John Slidell waited for his flight home in the terminal at Bagram Airfield and when it was time, he boarded his flight and found a seat in back.  The jet engines revved up and the plane prepared for departure as John looked out the window and saw two men standing next to an airport vehicle.  Suddenly one of them pulled out a stinger missile from under a tarp and fired it. His plane exploded into a massive ball of fire and killed everyone aboard, including himself.

John awakened to the sound of a familiar voice.

“Johnny! You didn’t go back to bed, did you, your dad is waiting.”

John Slidell jumped up and saw he was back in his bedroom in his family’s home in Escondido, California and walked over to the mirror and his reflection showed that he was a teenager again. He opened the door to his upstairs bedroom and looked over the railing and saw his mother and father standing by the front door.

The coin vibrated in his pocket and suddenly he was back in the Bagram Airfield terminal. Sergeant John Slidell found a door that led to the tarmac then located for the two men and waited.  When they reached for the Stinger missile, he quietly walked up behind them, quickly grabbed one man by the head and twisted his neck until it snapped then crushed the other’s man windpipe with a powerful punch to his Adam’s apple.

John reached into his pocket, pulled out the coin and held it in his hand.  Its intense energy raced through every fiber of his body as a kaleidoscope of images flashed across his mind. When John returned to Camp Pendleton, he kept what had been happening to him a secret from everybody. but he had to know what was going on so he began a relentless search into the subjects of time travel, fate and destiny. The more he read, the more he realized that there were a lot more unsupported theories than there were hard facts.  The only thing John felt pretty sure of was that everything was connected to the coin. He was at the Camp Pendleton base library when he noticed the San Diego Union Tribune newspaper on the table.

John picked it up and browsed through it until an article caught his eye; Professor Dani Shepherd would be speaking at the University of California in San Marcos on the following Saturday and the subject of her speech was; Preordained Destiny versus Free Will.

 It wasn’t exactly what John was looking for, but he wasn’t making a lot of progress on his own and it couldn’t hurt to listen to what she had to say. Professor Dani Shepherd was in her mid- thirties and was five foot ten inches in height and looked more like a female athlete than a professor and she commanded the audience with her self- assured demeanor, unpretentious attitude and razor-sharp wit. After her speech, Professor Shepherd took questions from the audience, John was hesitant to speak up, but something compelled him to raise his hand.

“Is it possible to have alternate destinies?” John asked without even knowing what he was saying.

“Could you elaborate?” Professor Shepherd asked.

“Ma’am, if a person died then came back, does that mean his death wasn’t his original destiny?”   Once again the words automatically came out of John’s mouth.

Professor Shepherd quickly evaluated the young man before her, “Are you in the military?”

“What gave me away besides my stylish hairstyle?” John rubbed his short hair, “Marine.”

“You mean having the ability to change destiny?” Professor Shepherd asked.

 “Something like that,” John answered.

            “Do you have any evidence to support that theory?”

“Nothing concrete,” John replied.

“Time travel is an interesting concept, I bet you could find some people that would swear it has already happened to them,” Professor Shepherd smiled knowingly.

 Later, John was leaving the auditorium when a man approached him, “Professor Shepherd would like to speak with you, Sir.” John followed the man into a small office where Dani Shepherd was waiting for him, “Have a seat.”

John sat down and Dani Shepherd walked over, “I need to check something,” and when she got within three inches, she shined a flashlight in his eyes and the image of the coin in his pocket projected through John’s eyes to the wall, “You’re one.”

“One what?” John asked

“A Destiny Warrior, that’s the name we call ourselves,” Dani Shepherd held up a coin and that looked exactly like the one in John’s pocket, “Look familiar?”

John walked over to the desk, pulled the coin out of his pocket and set it on the desk and Dani Shepherd set hers next to it and both coins vibrated in unison.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” John asked.

            “Five years ago, I was working as a teacher at Bakersfield’s Junior College when a shooter came on campus, so I took my class to what I thought was a secure location which was a utility room. The shooter must have seen us go in and he started shooting the lock on the door.  Just about ready to burst in I looked down and saw a coin on the floor and when I picked it up I was gone. When I came back it was three minutes before the shooting, I still put my students in the utility room then found a two-foot-long metal bar and hid in a doorway. When the shooter passed by my position, I crushed his skull.  Don’t ask me why we’ve been chosen to travel through time dominions to protect others. That’s above my pay grade.”

You said that we are Destiny Warriors, how many are there?” John asked.

“Don’t really know for sure in the entire world, but in my group, we have eleven. We have also found the power of the coin is magnified dramatically when it is paired up with its partner. Ten in my group are matched up; I was the only single until now.”

“How did you find each other?” John asked.

“Everybody has a different story and you can ask the others when you meet them. Ask yourself this; what made you come to my seminar and what compelled you to ask a question?” Dani replied.

“I saw a newspaper article about you and I have no idea why I stood up.”

“My point exactly, some kind of power brings us together,” Dani said, “Just like I have no idea why Cal State San Marcos booked me to give a speech on this subject. Sometimes it is just a thought or a feeling and other times it’s an irresistible force far greater than anything we’ve ever experienced. Sometimes we travel years, days or minutes forward or backward through time. In the beginning it is hard to accept, but you’ll get used to it.”

Dani pulled out a revolver with a noise suppressor on the barrel, “If we end up in the same place then we’ll know our coins are a match so please don’t take this personally,” then shot John through the heart and turned the weapon on herself and fired.

 John was sitting up in bed watching reruns of Game of Thrones on television while Dani was in the bathroom taking a bubble bath. She got out of the bath, wrapped a towel around her wet hair and walked out in full view and they were immediately transported back to the office.

            “That was embarrassing,” Dani shrugged.

            “Not for me, does this mean our coins are a match?” John shrugged.

 It was one year later, and John was out of the Marine Corps and teamed up with Dani. They were currently doing physical fitness training at the Santa Ynez ranch of a multi-billionaire who was one of the coin recipients and their financial benefactor.

John and Dani had just completed a long obstacle course when their coins began vibrating and they were transported to the lobby of the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Bali.

 Five masked men with automatic weapons burst through the front door and sprayed the lobby with gunfire; dozens of men, women and children were killed and wounded before the terrorists escaped. After the bloodbath, John and Dani quickly surveyed the hotel in a calm and analytical manner so that they would have a plan. Since they could not travel through other dimensions with weapons they had to be able to use whatever was available at the location. John ran into the hotel kitchen and grabbed a large butcher knife then came back and placed it behind a couch. Dani went outside and took the keys out of a hotel shuttle bus and hid them in a potted plant. They had barely completed their tasks before they were back in Santa Ynez, California.

Two days later, Dani was back in Bakersfield and John was at his home in Fallbrook when their coins vibrated. In an instant, they were back in the lobby of the Ritz Carlton. John reached behind the couch, pulled out the knife and walked out the front entrance with Dani. He walked over to the valet parking as Dani took the keys out of the potted plant and stood next to the hotel shuttle as the driver napped in the backseat.  In a matter of seconds, a Mercedes sedan raced up and skidded to a stop.

 Dani quickly got in the shuttle bus, started the engine and when one of the terrorists got out of the car, she accelerated and smashed into the back of the Mercedes; the armed terrorist was in front of the vehicle at the time and was crushed to death against a concrete post. John wasted no time stabbing one of the disoriented terrorists in the chest as he stumbled out of the car then grabbed his AK-47 in the process and shot two terrorists that were sitting dazed in the backseat of the Mercedes. Dani slammed the shuttle bus in reverse and floored it, then put it in drive, jammed down on the accelerator and ran over the last terrorist who had crawled out and was dragging himself across the driveway while shooting wildly at anyone he saw. The poor shuttle driver was bounced around in the back of the bus like a ragdoll and oblivious to what was happening.

When the attackers were neutralized, Dani looked at the dazed driver, “Good job, you just stopped a terrorist attack.”

Two weeks later, John was pruning a tree on his avocado farm in Fallbrook when he saw the mailman drive up so he walked over to meet him.  He was glancing at the letters and junk mail when Dani drove up and handed him a USA newspaper with the headline; Shuttle Driver Stops Terrorist Attack in Bali.

            “Did you get a chance to look at your 401k statement?” Dani asked, “It has doubled in the last three months.”

            “Not yet… just came in today,” John answered.

            “It almost seems unfair to have a financial advisor who can move back and forth through time to make investments,” Dani smiled, “I said almost.”

            “I look at it this way, if we’re not worried about paying our bills then we can focus our energies elsewhere,” John rationalized.

            “I can go with that,” Dani nodded, “Remember when we time traveled to that hotel room right after we first met?”

            “You mean after you shot me, a guy doesn’t forget something like that,” John replied with a mischievous glint in his eyes.

Three days later, Dani and John were on the balcony of their Malibu suite at the Harrah’s Resort in Valley Center when John leaned to kiss Dani and just as their lips were ready to touch, their coins vibrated and they were transported to a raging forest fire in Big Bear, California.

Five minutes earlier, a serial arsonist was preparing to start a fire in the dried brush when John and Dani walked up behind him. John took the five gallon can from his left hand and Dani grabbed the lighter from his right.

            “Who are you?” The arsonist asked.

            “We’re Destiny Warriors, “John replied.

            “Others call us the fortunate sons and daughters of the righteous realm,” Dani added.

John kicked the arsonist in the chest and sent him tumbling down a steep hill into the path of a protective and hungry black bear and her three cubs.

THE END

To Be Continued

Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion of The Destiny Warriors