I Am Calvin Luthor: The God Of War

Attack in iraq

Chapter 2

Calvin POV

The fighter jet touched down on Iraqi soil and the heat hit us like a wall. The desert smelled of dust and metal and old violence. I carried my rifle and the rest of my gear: grenades, comms, spare mags, anything that meant I would not be caught off guard. Every step I took made the sand shift and my boots scuffed the air. I have been strong since I was a boy. Training, hard hands, and a life of blows had made my legs steady and my arms hard. Now all I wanted was to make them pay for what they had done to me.

Memories came in flashes , quick, sharp images that burned and then vanished. For nineteen years I had replayed the way my father trained me. He had been an ex-military man from Campbell City. They called him the God of War. His name was Kaelor Thane. I saw him in a dozen frames: a young man in uniform, a shadowed face standing over maps, hands that taught me to hold a gun, to move without sound, to hate weakness.

He had taken down evil men and corrupt officials. After his parents died, he hunted those who had done it. He brought them to justice in a way that left no question. People said his name made men tremble. Some said when he became president, terrorists found it harder to breathe. They whispered that no one could touch him. But killers always find a way. They sent a spy to poison him. I did not remember everything after that. The accident that smashed my life and put me in a coma for seven years stole pieces of me. I lost ninety percent of my memory. I woke as if from a long, black ocean and found only ropes and a name I could not always place.

The clearest thing I held onto was the memory of my wife being taken. That image kept me awake and sharp. It beat like a drum in the place where softness used to live. Now that we were in Iraq, I would hunt them down. My honors, my medals, my name, they would not be dust. Not while I still had breath.

James walked up beside me. The desert around the crossroads villa was a rough place: low walls of sunburnt stone, gates that had seen too many hands, tracks burned into the earth where vehicles had fought to cross. James pushed through a rusted gate and it gave with a noise like a broken promise. 

He moved with the force of a man who never waited. Maximus and Josh were at the screens, their heads bent over feeds that sliced the sand with pixels and lines. They tracked the houses, the compounds, the places terrorists liked to hide.

A man in traditional Arab clothes and a weathered face came toward us. He carried himself like someone who had been on watch his whole life. He asked in a low voice what we wanted. He spoke slow, careful, eyes like a hawk.

James did not have time for talk. He moved too quick and the guard stepped back. “Calm,” I said sharply. “I am your commander. Orders first. Questions come later.”

The man bowed his head and muttered. He seemed afraid of trouble and also tired of it. I did not let James loose on him. We had a mission. We had no time to waste on men who had no part in our cause.

We moved through the gate. The spy team broke into formation like steel taking shape. Hendrick went to the west wing.

 He was a sharpshooter, a hunter who could make a shot count through wind and time. The rest of us took the east wing. We moved with cover, with eyes scanning roofs and windows. The desert was quiet in a way that made a man listen to his own blood.

“Sir,” Josh said into my ear with the calm voice of a man who prefers data to drama. “Drones are over the area. Maximus and I are feeding you the live view.”

“Tell me what you see,” I said.

The feed came steady, black and white dots turning into faces, into frames. I watched as the images crawled across the screen. Then Josh’s voice dipped low. “Sir… what we see on the east wing is bad.”

I did not want his voice to sound scared. I do not let my men show fear in my face, but I do not lie to myself. “Say it,” I ordered.

Maximus answered, slow. “Children. Skull and bones. Some skeletons. Some with rags. Some still breathing, but... wounded bad.”

I could feel the ground tilt. The world closed in. The thought of children, small faces, being treated like trophies made something in me split open. My chest went tight and a hot burn rose to my eyes. I reached for a rag in my pocket, not to hide tears but to steady the sides of my mouth. “You mean small children are dead?” I said. My voice had the edge of a blade.

“Yes, sir,” Maximus and Josh said together. “But — sir, they don’t look Iraqi. They look American.”

That phrase hit harder than anything. American children in a desert compound, stripped and left like trash. I tasted bile and the sand stung my nose. “Americans?” I repeated. The idea made anger crawl up my spine like ants.

“Americans, sir,” Josh confirmed. “From what we can pull, it looks like they were taken, moved here. Their IDs burned. Clothes ripped. Some of the clothes have tags.”

I tightened my grip on my rifle until my knuckles bled white under the leather. “Break free,” I ordered James and the rest. “We move fast. We move loud if we must.”

James nodded and led the way. We went through broken gates, past burned cars and walls marked with spray paint, and into the heart of the compound. A smell hit us it was filled with rot and smoke and the ghost of old blood. I moved like a machine. My training took over: check the corners, clear the door, keep your muzzle low, move with your team, watch the windows.

We pushed through a narrow doorway and the scene that met us made my steps slow for half a breath. Bodies lay in rows. Some were wrapped in rags. Some had been left to the elements. Little shoes sat beside shells of skulls. One child still breathed with a rag shoved over the mouth. The sight launched something raw and animal out of me.

“They will pay,” I said. My voice was low, a threat in the dark. I moved forward and fired. My shots were clean and quick. I killed ten of them in a breath, each pull of the trigger a small justice. I saw one man aim at James from upstairs and I fired before he could squeeze the trigger. James did not fall. He turned and met my eyes with a look that said he owed me his life, but I had no time for thanks.

We pushed deeper. The men who attacked tried to run and hide. They wore scarves and cheap armor, the kind of men who believe they can frighten a world by blocking out faces with cloth. They smelled of sweat and the sour rot of a compound left to rot. I did not stop until the last man moved and the last radio went dead.

Between firefights, my mind wandered back to the old whispers: the first president before my father, President Mark, had made deals with the Iranians and other terrorists. The story said he and President Wilson later allowed certain trade lines that sold American citizens as if they were property. I had heard it as a rumor buried under the truth, as the kind of thing men in bars said to scare children. But the sight of those kids, with the edges of foreign life in their faces, made me think that dark rumors might root in blood.

We found evidence, scraps of paperwork, burnt letters whose words would not come back whole. I kept a piece folded into my pocket. I wanted to believe that someone would stand in court and force an answer. I wanted to believe in law. But the law has not stopped my life from breaking. That faith lay dead with someone else.

I felt the pull of my past ,my father’s name, the power he once held, the way he had fallen into traps that twisted family into war.

 I remembered how my face used to be mine until the accident tore it and we stitched it back with steel and skin and the cost of living. The plastic surgery had left me looking like someone who could be anything but myself. No one remembered me after the accident. That was part of the plan. They wanted me hidden, scattered. They wanted my life buried.

They had taken my wife and destroyed chunks of my memory. 

They believed I would be nothing more than a story people told at night to frighten quiet children. But they did not know the powers I held, not powers of myth, but powers of will and of team and of violent, cold focus. I held the ability to make men pay for each thing they had taken from me.

James moved a wounded child into his chest and carried him like a soldier carrying a promise. Hendrick kept his rifle ready, eyes trained on the horizon. Felix, where was he? I could not see him in the first house, but I heard him break wood with his bare hands somewhere down the hall. Maximus and Josh kept the feed alive, fingers flying over maps and networks. Sometimes I thought the world ran on men like them: the ones who could make a camera follow a heartbeat or pluck a satellite feed out of dark air.

We did not stop at the compound. We moved through a cluster of houses that smelled of stale cooking fires and fear. There were rooms with signs of life that had been snuffed out too soon. Dolls lay with missing eyes. A mother’s shawl lay folded on a couch, as if someone had planned to come back and never did. The whole place felt like a wound opened and never closed.

It was in one room that we found proof. A stack of documents, soaked and half burnt, had names on them. Not all were readable. But among them was a list of people — names, dates, and small notes. Some notes were numbers. Some were cities. A pencil mark crossed my wife’s name. My stomach dropped. I took the scrap and pressed it into my palm like a brand.

“You men see this?” I asked.

They leaned in. Josh’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a transport list, sir,” he said. “Looks like people were moved through routes and sold. Some went through the Med, some through the desert. The handwriting is messy, but—”

“But our people are on it,” I finished. My voice had the iron of a hammer hitting steel. I felt anger twist into a colder shape. The thought that men in power could trade people like goods made the floor drop under me. My father had fought some of this, but not all. The network ran deeper than anyone had said.

We knew then the mission was bigger than we thought. This was not simple terror cells hiding in caves. This was a trade, a pattern. Men had taken lives and moved them like cargo. A line ran from my country to targets in the desert and beyond. The faces of the children we had found were the price of a long, rotten deal.

I closed my hand around the scrap of paper until the edges dug into my palm. The pain was real and sharp and it grounded me. I had been broken before, but I was not broken now. My hand shook a little, not from fear but from the pressure of all the things I wanted to do to the men who had built this.

“Call it in,” I said. “Find the routes, the names. Strip them of hiding places. We move fast and we move dirty if we must.”

Maximus hit a command and the screen filled with lines and red dots. “We’re pulling everything we can. Satellites, comms, transaction traces. If they moved people, money moved too. We’ll follow the money.”

Good. Follow the money and the trail will show a face. Follow the face and you find the hand that moved it.

That night, we took the wounded and left the dead where they lay. I wrapped the photograph of my wife in cling film and tucked it into my inner coat pocket. I do this every time I go into the field now — a small ritual to keep her close. The sky over the desert was a hard black that smelled of oil and old lightning. A thin moon cut the dunes into a shape like a blade.

I walked the compound slowly once more, fingers brushing against rough stone and cracked tiles. I did not say a prayer. I never learned the words for how a man like me should ask for mercy. Mercy had long since been a language I did not speak. Instead, I said a promise into the wind. I would find who did this. I would take what they had given us — pain — and return it to them in a language they understood.

We left at dawn. The jet waited again, its belly a dull white against the desert sand. Men climbed aboard with wounded wrapped in blankets. Maximus and Josh had pulled a dozen different threads into a map that now looked like a spider web — routes that crossed borders, names that linked to places I had only heard of in whispers. The list I had found went into evidence with a chain that would not be broken. We had proof now. We had a direction.

As the jet took off, I stood on the sand and watched it leave a white streak through the blue. I felt the weight of the day settle into my shoulders like a Veteran’s coat. I thought of my father, of Kaelor Thane, and the war he had left me as both a gift and a curse. I thought about the men who had cut my life into pieces and the one thing they had not cut: my will.

They did not know the powers I hold. They did not know I could be a storm. I was more than a name on a medal. I was a force built from loss, sharpened by betrayal, and honed by the men who had stood with me.

I closed my eyes for a moment and the image of my wife flashed like lightning. I whispered a single word that meant everything to me and nothing to the desert wind: “Soon.”

I knew then that this mission was only the first step. The country was larger than one compound, and the list was only a thread. It would take everything I had and more. But I am Calvin Luthor. They took my wife, they tried to bury my past, and they woke a man who was not done. Mortal men would learn what they had done. They would learn the cost of touching what was mine.

We left the crossroads behind, but the smell of dust and blood stayed with me. Th

e jet rose and the desert fell away. The map in Maximus’s hands had new pins. The hunt had begun.