65 Below

by Basil Sands

  “Navy? Heh, heh, don’t drop the soap around that guy.” Tomer laughed aloud at his own joke.

  Stark stared spitefully at him.

  “Get it? Don’t bend over to pick up the soap….Navy….ahh, never mind.” The FBI agent waved a dismissive hand through the air. “Back to business. So the two Arabs,” Tomer pronounced it ‘Ayrabs’, “were working for this Mr. Kim, who is a North Korean Colonel.”

  “They’re not Arabs,” Stark said. “They’re Albanian.”

  “Whatever,” Tomer replied. “Why would they steal a TVEC truck and run around during a power outage?”

  Stark straightened in his chair. “That brings us to another part of this tale. I don’t have all the details, but I was just informed that a team of Navy SEALs on a training exercise on Eielson came upon a whole group of what they identified as North Korean commandos digging into some old bunker. There was a firefight, and eight men were killed. Four got away and one was taken prisoner. We are waiting for more information on that situation.”

  Tomer’s mouth dropped open, stupefied. Pulling himself together, he stood up and paced around the room in silence. He looked frightened, like a child whose game just turned seriously dangerous.

  “Dead?” Tomer said finally. “Eight men are dead? These SEALs—who gave them permission to kill people on American soil?”

  “I assume they came under fire and did what they do best.”

  “Holy Mother! Does Eielson know about this?”

  “I don’t know. I only found out about it myself a minute before you arrived.”

  “Where is this SEAL team and the prisoner?”

  “They’re in a cabin out in Salt Jacket, not too far from where it all happened.”

  “Salt Jacket? I should’ve guessed it’d be out there, among all those redneck yahoos.”

  “I’m sending a couple of troopers out there as soon as we get out of this meeting. Do you want to ride with them?”

  “To Salt Jacket? I don’t know if that’s necessary.”

  “What’s the matter, Tony? Is that too far out of town for you?”

  Tomer’s face reddened at Stark’s challenge. “What? No, no, that’s not it. I just, uh, I just think I should check things out here a bit more first.”

  “You really should go check it out. Kim’s locked up and secure. Those SEALs might lose control and treat that prisoner badly—then you’d have a real mess on your hands, since both they and you are federal, and you said yourself, you are in charge. Therefore, you are responsible for whatever happens in this case now.”

  There was a knock on the door. Trooper Wyatt opened it and leaned in.

  “Chief, I’m going to head out to the cabin in Salt Jacket now. Edwards left about five minutes ago.”

  “Good. Keep an eye on things out there and make sure you get a good report from Marcus and that SEAL chief.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “By the way, Trooper Wyatt, this is Special Agent Anthony Tomer, FBI. He’s been put in charge of the case now from the federal side.”

  Tomer held out his hand to the trooper. His expression shifted from that of a frightened schoolboy back to his more natural lounge-lizard demeanor. “You can call me Tony.” He took her hand and leaned down to kiss her fingers. She crunched her face in disgust and yanked her hand away before he could touch his lips to her skin.

  “You can call me Trooper Wyatt,” she replied in a cold tone.

  “Ooh! A live one!” he said. “Can I ride in your car out there to Salt Jacket?”

  “No.” She replied flatly and turned to leave.

  “Tomer, you should just follow her in your car. She may have other duties that will keep her out there late.”

  “I would gladly follow her anywhere.” He stared at her rear end as she walked down the hallway. “Wow.”

  “Oh, and uh, Tomer,” the chief called to him.

  Tomer look back at Stark

  “The guy who led the SEAL team on their training exercise is her boyfriend. You’d best not make a fool of yourself out there. I don’t want to have to explain to your boss how you ended up in traction.”

  Tomer raised an eyebrow and said with a smirk, “Her boyfriend’s a SEAL, huh? Remember what I said about the Navy and the soap? I wonder what she’d think of real man instead of a sailor. Heh, heh.”

  As he walked out the door, Stark muttered under his breath. “Lord, please let him get his ass kicked.”

  Chapter 25

  Friday, May 15th, 1998

  Bukurana Mission

  Sierra Leone, Africa

  06:30 Hours

  The dream continued for what seemed an eternity. Marcus stood at the edge of a cliff, barely resisting the urge to release his foothold and tumble into the darkness below. Below him, shrouded in deep shadow, lay the crushed bodies of his comrades. He looked back, away from the precipice, and there stood Lonnie, patiently waiting for him. Fear was in her eyes. She spoke to him, her voice soft, soothing.

  “Marcus, please hold on. I’m waiting for you. I will wait for you. Please hold on."

  He held on, even as wave after wave of ceaseless, throbbing pain washed over him like the hammering of the ocean’s tide. After a long period of putting all his effort merely into standing, he forced his legs to take a small, stumbling step away from the cliff’s edge. He moved toward the woman who held her arms out for him.

  “I’m coming home, Lonnie.” His voice echoed.

  Pain exploded through his whole body. It jerked him out of the dream. A voice mumbled above his head, the words unclear. Marcus felt light brush across his eyelids and sensed his body being turned over.

  “You are alive, my friend,” said a deep voice with a heavy African accent. “This is good—not all hope is lost yet. You must hold on to whatever dream you have been having, because it has kept you on this side of the river.”

  Marcus tried to open his eyes. The heavy lids would not respond to his thoughts. He felt himself being dragged across the ground for a long distance.

  Muffled sounds tumbled into his hearing, and flashed of light sparked in his vision. He was unable to open his eyes or force his mouth to utter more than groans. Hands slid under his armpits and dragged him onto some kind of stretcher. Rough strands of rope tightened around his torso, lashing his arms to the hard wooden poles.

  The sun was in his face. The deep voice continued to mumble incomprehensibly. At some point, Marcus lost consciousness again.

  Fever broke over his body. He drifted along surreal lines between earthly consciousness and some other world. Lonnie appeared often. His mother and father, sometimes his grandparents, called to him to stay alive. “Don’t surrender, son!” They would say. “Never give up, Marine!”

  Then darkness would overcome him again.

  The deep voice spoke to him frequently, usually accompanied by someone or something tugging at his legs or wiping his brow. At times, surges of pain ripped through his body and he found himself shivering with an icy chill, then sweating as if he were on fire. The faces of the British Royal Marine Commandos of 2nd Troop gazed at him from across a crevasse. They waited for him, but did not call him to hurry.

  Marcus awoke. Heat bore down on him like a heavy winter blanket on a summer’s day. He opened his eyes, blinking against the unfiltered sun light that attacked his senses through a nearby window. The ceiling of a small wooden hut came into focus.

  “Ah, you are awake. Is it for real this time?”

  Marcus forced sound through his larynx and out his lips. Speaking never hurt so much before. “Who are you?”

  “I am Sambako Toniga, but it is more important to ask who are you, my friend.”

  The man was short and thin, with very dark skin and thick lips that stretched in a friendly smile over a set of perfectly straight, brilliantly white teeth. His deep voice had made him sound both taller and heavier than what Marcus now saw before him.

  “My name is Marcus.”

  “Well, Marcus, do you have more than just
a first name? I knew from your appearance that you were not African, and now can tell from your accent that you are American. Are you a mercenary?”

  The man’s English, while accented, sounded as though he were well educated.

  Marcus looked at him for a moment without answering. He tried to sit up on the cot. Excruciating streaks of pain shot up from the back of his legs. The skin across his calves and thighs felt as though it would tear open.

  Sambako put his hands on Marcus’s shoulders and gently pressed him back down to the bed. “Don’t do things like that yet, my friend—your legs were very badly injured. Only now are you recovering from a terrible infection that nearly took your life from fever. I have had to open the injuries to cut away dead flesh several times in the past three weeks. You must not move them yet—for several days more, at least.”

  Marcus eased back onto the cot, panting from the pain and exertion. “Three weeks? What happened to me?”

  “I do not know the specifics, but you and your party were ambushed at the Burukana Orphanage Mission.”

  Sambako handed Marcus a glass of water, and gently helped to prop his upper body up with a large duffel bag and some pillows.

  “Ambushed.” The memory came back to him. He had been standing next to Sergeant Barclay, about to open the door to the big stone building. Someone had said they found a bunch of dead bodies, women and children, then hell exploded on them.

  “An RPG,” Marcus said. “I remember now. I got the bastard, but he had already fired when my rounds hit. I was on the ground, on my belly. The rocket hit the wall behind me.”

  Sambako scrunched up his face as he strained to see the events Marcus described.

  “That would explain the leg injuries,” Sambako said. “You are lucky, then, that it didn’t kill you. The men on either side of you were not so lucky. As a matter of fact, none of your compatriots survived. I counted thirty-one of your men dead on the field. I was very surprised to find a breath in you when I found you. “

  He paused and looked at Marcus. “I thought you were a ghost at first. I heard a quiet voice in a pile of bodies. You sounded French. Do you speak French?”

  “Why? What was I saying?” Marcus could remember the dream as if it were still happening in his mind. Had he been dreaming in French?

  “You kept saying ‘La nee’, which is ‘the birth’ in French. You have been repeating it off and on for most of the past three weeks.”

  Marcus thought for a moment. Why would he say that? He repeated it over a few times, and then realized it was not ‘La nee’. “It was a person’s name. A woman named Lonnie.”

  “I see. Well, perhaps whatever she said in your dreams gave you reason to live. You had lost a lot of blood. But here you are.”

  Marcus’s gaze drifted away. He tried to visualize the faces of Smoot and Barclay, but he could not remember them. He could not draw up a memory of what they looked like.

  “I am sorry about your friends,” Sambako said. “Which brings me back to my original question. By their uniforms, I could see that your friends were British. But yours looks different and has no identifying patches. So tell me, my lucky ghost friend, who are you?”

  “I’m a US Marine, on assignment to the British Royal Marines. We were sent in to rescue the staff of the mission, British citizens. It looks like we were too late.”

  “Yes, I am afraid you were too late.” Sambako’s mouth turned down in a deep frown. Moisture welled up in his eyes. “Father Raymond and all the sisters, and all the little children of the mission, more than two hundred souls, were massacred by the Soviet dog and his animals just minutes before we heard the roar of your airplane. The cries of the little ones died out as your rescue ship touched the ground.”

  “How did you escape?” Marcus asked.

  Sambako looked at the ground, his face flushed with emotion. “I had been in the forest gathering sticks to make kites for an outing we were to take the following morning. When I heard the commotion, I started back to the mission. Shots were fired and I ran through the jungle to save the little ones. In my haste, I foolishly ran my head into a tree branch. I lost consciousness for a few minutes. When I came to, I crawled to where I could see. Those beasts were tossing the bodies of the children into a pile. Some were not yet dead. They were torturing the boys and raping the girls. I lay there unable to do anything as more than a hundred men systematically killed every person they could find.”

  Tears overflowed the edges of Sambako’s eyes. They streaked down his dark cheeks and dripped onto his shirt. “As they finished abusing the last poor child, the engine sounds of your plane came from over the horizon to the north. When it got louder, they hid in the jungle and waited for you. I ran and hid from the coming battle, in hopes of finding survivors after they left. You were the only survivor I could find.”

  Marcus’s eyes were locked on Sambako. The man looked as if his soul had been crushed. “You were a worker there at the mission?”

  “I am a minister. I worked with the mission as a medical aid, even though they are Catholic and I am a Pentecostal Protestant. I was trained in England and worked with an American missionary society from Texas. Father Brandt, the other priest who worked there, was away in Freetown on business, and so was not killed. Father Raymond was a good man, whose only interest was in helping these poor children who have been made orphans by the civil war. Now he, like all of those in his care, is dead.”

  “Who is this Soviet you mentioned?” Marcus asked. “The Russians aren’t called that anymore.”

  “He is a former Spetsnatz advisor who got abandoned here during the collapse of the Soviet Union. His name, the only name I know for him, is Sergei. He runs a band of marauders, terrible criminals and murderers, who have taken advantage of the civil war to make themselves rich. Sergei and his animals have been ravaging this region for several months now, and will probably stay in the area for a while longer, as the Nigerians have stationed peacekeepers in the next province to search for him. I wish….”

  Sambako tried to say more, but the words would not come. Silent tears flowed freely instead, giving true voice to his sorrow.

  Chapter 26

  Marcus Johnson’s Cabin

  Salt Jacket, Alaska

  19 December

  23:05 hours

  Sergeant Choi sat immobile against the ropes that bound him tightly to a straight-backed wooden chair. Eighteen inches away, Marcus’s woodstove glowed red. Choi still wore his parka. Sweat rolled down his face as he baked in the visible heat waves that emanated from the black iron stove.

  Forester sat on a wood bench in front of Choi. He put a hand on the man’s shoulder and said in Korean, “So, tell me my friend, what is in the vial?”

  “What is in the vial? It is death to you and your countrymen.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  Choi said nothing.

  “Look, your friends are all dead—there’s no use in holding out.”

  “They are not all dead. Some got away, and you will pay for what you have done.”

  “So you say,” Forester replied, “but where did they go? What is your rendezvous point?”

  No response.

  Sergeant Choi was a fairly young man in his early twenties. He was physically fit, but the SEALs agreed that he did not impress them as a commando type. The high-tech gadgets they had found on him led them to the conclusion that he was probably brought on the mission for his technical knowledge rather than his military prowess.

  Forester continued the interrogation. “You seem like a smart man. How old are you? Twenty-three? Twenty-four? You probably have a family back home, a mother and father, maybe even a wife or girlfriend, eh?”

  Choi showed no reaction.

  “You probably have little siblings at home. How can you live with yourself if this chemical you have stolen is used to kill little children? Innocent little children may die because of what you have done.”

  Beads of sweat ran down Choi’s face and soaked t
hrough his clothing. His skin was red from the heat. “I am too hot,” he mumbled. “Please let me take off my coat.”

  “Too hot?” Forester turned toward the others and said in Korean, “He says he is too hot!” Then switching to English, “He says he is too hot.”

  Stingle, Andersen, and Forth came forward. Andersen slid a large knife from a leather sheath on his thigh. The razor-sharp blade came into view with an evil sound. The SEALs moved in close to Choi. “Let’s help the little man out of that coat, then,” Andersen said.

  Choi’s eyes widened in horror as the giant American approached him with the knife. Stingle and Forth grabbed his shoulders and held him. Anderson extended the knife to the North Korean’s neck. Choi squeezed his eyes shut and prepared for the pain of the knife slicing into his flesh. A desperate, muffled cry whimpered from his throat.

  Anderson slashed the knife across the shoulder of Choi’s parka and proceeded to shred the sleeves and the main part of the coat and the shirt underneath, except for the areas in contact with the ropes. Once he was done, strips of cloth and parka stuffing hung raggedly between the strands of rope that still held Choi tight against the chair, his naked flesh bared.

  Stingle and Forth lifted the chair and carried the terrified and confused North Korean outside into the frozen night air. Anderson followed, the knife blade gleaming in the moonlight.

  They set Choi down hard on the snow-covered parking area and turned to leave. As the trio walked back to the cabin, Forth looked at the thermometer next to the front door. The temperature had dropped considerably in the past hour. It was nearly thirty below zero.

  “Ooh!” Forth called out. “That’ll shrink your manhood!”

  When they came back in, Wasner asked, “Did you see the temperature out there?”

  “Yep, thirty below. Talk about a nutcracker.”

  Marcus spoke. “Frostbite won’t start for fifteen minutes on his bare skin, so leave him for about ten. After that, bring him back in and set him back down next to the fire.”