A rogue platoon's Afghan windfall

By Elliott Sawyer

Bridge Works. 237 pp. $23.95

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Reviewed by Frank Wilson

Elliott Sawyer's debut novel is an entertaining mystery set in an Afghan combat zone. Sawyer knows whereof he writes: He was an officer in the 101st Airborne Division and served in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

When Capt. Jake Roberts, the protagonist of The Severance, is trying to make it to cover during a firefight and catches a glimpse of a dark shape moving and a gun barrel glinting, we fully believe that "what happened next was instinct, nothing more." A very handy instinct, it turns out, as "one of his rounds [made] contact with the figure, which shuddered and disappeared."

The platoon Roberts commands, dubbed Kodiak, is a "rehabilitation platoon." As Big Joe Eastman, the unit's usually gentle giant, puts it, "We've all made mistakes." Big Joe's was to assault a lieutenant, specifically during an awards ceremony. Benakowsky went AWOL. Sgt. McBride hit the bottle far too often and got one too many DUIs in too short a time. And "Doc" Ramirez got too fond of using cocaine "just to get by."

As for Capt. Roberts himself - well, you don't learn about that until near the end. They all think of themselves as a "21st century 'Dirty Dozen.' "

The purpose of the platoon is "to be kept close to the battalion and used at the discretion of the battalion commander on any task or objective he wanted, but didn't want to waste good soldiers on." Among their more routine assignments was one delivering a trailer full of mail to a combat district one night.

On the way back, one of their RG-31 armored personnel vehicles gets stuck in a mud hole. On one side of the road is a rock wall, on the other a 200-foot drop into a ravine. While trying to get the vehicle on its way again, Big Joe notices a car coming down the road without its headlights on. Given the nationwide nighttime driving curfew, plus driving without headlights, everyone is suspicious, especially when the car doesn't stop after Joe aims an intense bright beam directly at its windshield.

Ordered to fire a warning shot, Joe finds that his M4 carbine is stuck, so he has to make use of his M240 machine gun. The car by now is only about 200 feet away. Joe fires a five-round burst intending to miss. Only he doesn't. The bullets rip through the windshield on the driver's side, and the car swerves into the rock wall.

By now, Roberts and McBride have arrived. What they discover in the car's trunk is a couple of gym bags loaded with $100 bills. Roberts tells McBride to put the gym bags in his truck, then tips the car into the ravine. Back at the barracks, Roberts and McBride count the money. It adds up to a very cool $4.6 million.

That is the "severance" of the novel's title. Roberts already knows that the military is going to renege on some key promises made to the platoon if its members would keep their noses clean. The severance is going to compensate for that. All they have to do is get the cash from Afghanistan to the United States without the authorities learning of it, and they think they've got that figured out.

Naturally, though, just when things look like they're going smoothly, they start to go awry. To begin with, getting the customs seals for the package holding the cash proves a little too easy - or so Roberts suspects. Someone also seems to have it in for Roberts, to the point of nearly running him down with a truck. Then there's Sgt. Olsen, the most hated man in the platoon, who missed out on the mail delivery mission "because of a knee problem that only seemed to be a problem when long missions came up." Sgt. McBride, it seems, has let Sgt. Olsen in on the plot.

From first to last, The Severence is taut, well-paced, and well-plotted. More than that, the characters and the situations ring true. Big Joe, Ramirez, McBride, and Benakowsky all come off as individuals, and Sawyer manages this with remarkable economy.

It's hard to think we won't be hearing more about Jake Roberts once the captain is Stateside again.