Chapter Nine
Zack
Over the next week, I didn’t get to see Kelli much one on one. She was still there every day at the break of dawn standing over by the helipad as we did our morning exercises. But opportunities for private chats were few and far between. It was disappointing, especially after we had spent a whole afternoon together wandering around base.
I could tell being around me and the other guys made her nervous, but I had hoped that spending some time with her might give me an edge over them. She would realize she could come and talk to me about any questions she might have, like a rabbit being lured into a cage with promises of leaves and carrots, but it didn’t pan out that way. She spent more of her time visiting with Chuck and Sergeant Armstrong. Sometimes the three of them sat together at lunch, sharing fries and laughing while the rest of us looked on with resentment.
The one positive thing was that Bernie was being less of an ass. Not that he had much of a choice. On the day of his outburst, Armstrong called him into his office and gave him a stern talking-to. Armstrong seemed like a gentle guy at the best of times but it was wise not to get on his bad side. I didn’t know he was capable of yelling that much.
Carson, who was in the dining room when it happened, heard everything.
“I’m giving you a choice here,” Armstrong said to Bernie. “Either you receive a letter of reprimand, which would basically be the end of your naval career. Or you can do jingle-jangles until I get tired.”
Well, what choice did he have? Bernie chose jingle-jangles, and he was still doing them that night when the rest of us went to bed.
“It’s nice to see that son of a bitch brought down a peg,” Carson told me as we washed up, and I was in no mood to disagree.
I went to bed late on Thursday night and had only just managed to fall asleep when all the lights in the room flickered on. I groaned in despair and rolled over, hoping to shield my eyes from the harsh light.
“Chuck, what the hell are you doing?” demanded Carson, rubbing his eyes wearily as he sat up in bed. “PT’s not for another three hours.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Chuck, walking over to Jake’s bed and shaking him roughly by the shoulders. “Y’all need to get up. Get dressed. You’ve got three minutes to get your gear and be out that door.”
“Will you just tell us what in hell’s going on?” Carson said again.
“Report just came over the wireless,” Chuck replied. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a hostage situation in Bafwasende. A group of militants just raided a girls’ boarding school, murdering several teachers in cold blood and kidnapping most of the 200 girls who lived there.”
“Great, and what do you want us to do about it?” asked Bernie.
Chuck threw him a cold glare. “Currently they are fleeing into the jungle, armed with high-powered weapons. If we wait until morning, they will scatter like roaches into their holes, and we will never find them. Our best hope of rescuing the girls is by going after them now while they’re fleeing on foot through the rainforest.”
By now, we couldn’t have gone back to sleep even if we had wanted to. I climbed out of bed and was dressed within three minutes, though my eyes burned and my bones ached and every moment was agony. Being woken up when you didn’t want to be should be classified as a form of torture under the Geneva Conventions.
Bernie and Carson and the other guys were all standing waiting for me at the front of the room. But Jake had gotten out of bed later than the rest of us and only after Chuck splashed water on him. He was still putting on his armor when Chuck grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. “It’s time to go, man,” he said.
“Will you chill for just a second?” Jake shouted. “I’m not dressed yet!”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Chuck, “we’re leaving now.”
Chuck turned and stormed out the door, motioning for the rest of us to follow him. Jake, realizing that we really were going to leave without him, swore loudly and raced out after us.
While the rest of us had been dressing, Floyd Axton had already started the helicopter. It stood waiting for us at the end of the helipad, its blades whirring ominously in the pitch darkness.
It was so dark, in fact, and the forest was so dense that even with my night vision goggles I could barely see more than two feet in front of me. As the helicopter circled over the outskirts of Bafwasende, we parachuted down without difficulty, landing in a clearing beside a pile of dry timber. In the distance, I could hear the echo of gunfire and occasional shrieks that might have been animal or human. Thick limbs rose and stretched over us, obscuring moonlight.
The smell of wood smoke and gas fires came drifting toward us on the end. The militants must set fire to the schoolhouse on their way out. That would have had the effect of driving any remaining students out of hiding, at which point they’d have been gunned down or herded up with the rest. The girls’ only chance of escape was to slip away under cover of darkness as the militants led them toward their forest compound.
While I stood about twenty paces away relieving myself into a thick shrub, Chuck and the other guys hurriedly scoped out the area.
“Why are we here?” asked Carson, brandishing his marksman rifle. “Why not go where they’re going instead of chasing ‘em through the woods?”
“Because we don’t know where their base is located,” said Chuck. “If we knew, that would make our job a hell of a lot easier. But this raid they just conducted might work to our advantage if we’re able to trail them back to their hiding place. At that point, it’s just a matter of rooting them out while rescuing the hostages.”
“Oh, is that all?” Carson shot back. “Here I was under the impression this was gonna be difficult.”
“If you want to leave, be my guest,” said Chuck, motioning to the helicopter that continued to circle overhead. “Floyd will escort you back to base.”
But before Carson could respond, the forest on all sides exploded in a hail of gunfire.
Before I’d even had time to register what was happening, I was lying flat on the ground, on my face. The noise drove all thought out of my mind, leaving only those base emotions: fear, surprise, a certain animal impulsiveness. A part of me wondered whether I had died, if maybe this was what death felt like: a burning in the lungs, an acrid smell in the nostrils, darkness suddenly illuminated by a blaze in the treetops.
“They’re all over,” I heard Chuck shouting. “Looks like we’ve been ambushed.”
“There are, what, seven of us?” said Jake, his face glistening with sweat. “And God knows how many of them. Both sides have got weapons, but they have a tactical advantage. We need to get out.”
“I estimate we’ve got four to five minutes till contact, at best,” said Chuck as he reached for his two-way radio. “I’m gonna call Floyd and tell him to pull us out of here.”
Within moments, the helicopter descended out of the night sky like a colossal bird, the rope ladder swaying precariously from an open door in the back. Carson was the first to clamber aboard, followed by Bernie and the rest of us, with Jake taking the rear.
But just as he placed his right foot on the ladder and began to make his ascent, there was a second explosion of noise about a hundred paces away and out of the shrub where I had relieved myself not three minutes before emerged nine men carrying assault rifles, screaming excitedly in a foreign tongue.
Jake wavered perilously at the bottom of the ladder, transfixed by the approaching horde as by a car crash on the side of the road.
“Hurry up, get in!” shouted Carson. “We can’t leave until you’re inside!”
But Jake hesitated, a lost look in his eyes. With an exasperated air, Chuck pushed past us and extended both hands. Jake grabbed onto them and allowed himself to be pulled up the ladder.
I had heard stories of guys in the army who sensed danger approaching a split second before it rained from the skies, who had some kind of weird instinct that allowed them to save the lives of their buddies. You could argue that we had already been ambushed, and I knew that, so it didn’t require a psychic to tell us we were in trouble. But somehow I knew in my bones what was about to happen, could see the bullets ripping into Jake’s flesh. I screamed, and in the same instant, Jake groaned in agony as the militants unloaded their cartridges into him.
Chuck pulled him inside, and we took off. Jake placed a hand on his torso, and when he lifted it, his palm was wet and glistening with blood.
“We need to get him to the OR immediately,” Chuck said. “Otherwise he’s not going to make it through the night.”
Within a few minutes, we had returned to the base, where Dr. Owen and a team of nurses were already waiting for him. The rest of us waited outside in the hallway as they performed surgery, pacing restlessly, not daring to look at each other. Carson sat down on an overturned bucket and smoked a cigarette while Chuck spoke to Sergeant Armstrong privately in his office.
I wanted to lie down. My head ached, and I felt spent both physically and emotionally. As much as I complained about the agony of our morning exercises, this was the part of my job that I hated the most: the uncertainty of not knowing whether a friend was going to live or die, the way an ordered and routine existence could be upended in a moment.
“You know what? If y’all aren’t gonna say it, I will,” said Carson. He threw down his cigarette on the stone floor and stamped it out. “Chuck is the reason that man is in there dying. This wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t have been for him.”
“Why, because he called us out of bed?” I replied. “We had a job to do, and we did it, or we tried to.”
“No, it’s got nothing to do with that,” Carson said. “He dragged us out before we were ready. He—he wouldn’t even let Jake get his goddamn armor on. If Jake had been wearing his body plate he wouldn’t be bleeding out!”
“You’re forgetting that it was Chuck who rescued him,” said Bernie, speaking up for the first time. “Jake froze on his way up the ladder; he had that deer-in-the-headlights stare. He would have died if Chuck hadn’t dragged him up.”
“Stay out of it, Bernie,” muttered Carson, giving him a nasty glare.
“No, but Bernie has a point—” I began, but stopped abruptly when I heard a noise of footsteps at the end of the hallway. A second later, a slender figure came into view: the fair but unwelcome form of Kelli Pope.
“A point about what?” she asked, looking around at each of us uneasily.
We glanced nervously at each other, none of us wanting to be the one to explain what was going on.
“I happened to get here a bit early this morning,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you to be out of bed yet. And why are you all grouped around the medical office?”
Carson shot her a filthy look, the sort of look he usually reserved for militants and liberals. “Nothing that concerns you, princess,” he said, and, pushing past her, he stalked out of the hallway.