65 Below

by Basil Sands

  Our Commando Troop discovered that all the people we had been sent to rescue had been massacred only minutes before our transport dropped us off. As we were searching the village, we were ambushed at the mission in the jungle of northern Sierra Leone. Everyone was killed but me. It was May 14th, 1998.

  I had been badly injured, but was rescued by a local minister named Sambako Tonega. He nursed me back to health and now I and another man, Temebe, a former Legionnaire who lived in Sambako’s village, are leading the people out of this area to a refugee camp in Guinea.

  If all goes well, you will get this letter from me personally, or at least by post. If not, and you receive this by someone else’s hand or in a package with my belongings, presume me dead, and move on with your life.

  I love you Lonnie. I always have, and I always will.

  Dreams of you kept me alive these past months when infection and sickness tried to kill me. I can hardly wait until I hold you again. It has been so long.

  I am intoxicated by the anticipation.

  Marcus

  Intoxicated…a poem for you

  He inhales deeply

  The flowery scent of beauty hangs in the air

  Her nature-given perfume

  That which is felt more than breathed

  Quietly permeates

  The places she has been

  Soft, shining

  Images of her fill his mind

  Eyes sparkling in the light of the falling sun

  Silken, smiling lips shimmer

  Luminescent amidst the dancing glimmer of candles

  He awaits the hour

  In which he will see her again

  To no longer be lost in the imagination

  Of that lovely form

  He so strongly yearns to touch

  To wrap her with his arms

  Hold her body in a strong, warm embrace

  Passionate, tender, powerful

  Pulsing in spiritual harmony

  Their hearts take up the rhythm of the heavens

  Beating as one

  The song played before the dawn of time

  The day’s labor is made worthwhile

  The night’s peaceful glow sustained

  As they imbibe the wine of their souls

  Growing intoxicated

  As they drink the vision

  Of the radiance of their love

  He folded the letter and placed it in an envelope Sambako had provided. After sealing it, he wrote her address on the front, placed it in a small Ziploc bag Sambako had saved from some of the medical supplies he carried, and put the letter into the breast pocket of his camouflage shirt. He hoped that if he died, whoever found his body would mail it for him.

  Thirty minutes later, the people of Senga Village moved as silently as possible through the darkness of the predawn morning into the forested hills that lead to safety beyond the horizon.

  Chapter 31

  Richardson Highway

  East of Fairbanks, Alaska

  20 December

  00:10 Hours

  Marcus’s Jeep led Trooper Wyatt and the convoy of SEALs along the highway at almost eighty miles per hour on their way to Fairbanks.

  Marcus sat behind the wheel, staring out the windshield onto the long dark highway. Wasner looked at him from the passenger seat.

  “So, Mojo. Forgive me for prying, but I have to ask. What is it between you and Trooper Wyatt?”

  “Do I have to answer that, Waz?”

  “Well, I can’t force you, but I’ve already made several assumptions. I’ve known you for more than eight years, and you never mentioned a woman in your life. I’ve never even seen you so much as wink at a barmaid, even after half a dozen brewskies. I was pretty sure you weren’t a back-door warrior and so always just assumed you were one of those chaste monk-types who got your kicks killing bad guys instead of chasing chicks. Is she an ex-wife or something from before you knew me?”

  “No, not an ex-wife. She’s more like, an ex-almost-wife.”

  “Oh. Well, that makes it clear,” the chief said sarcastically. “What in the world is an ex-almost-wife?”

  “We dated since high school,” Marcus explained. “I proposed to her halfway through my second enlistment. She said I had to quit the Corps to marry her, I asked her to reconsider, and she wouldn’t. When I went missing in Sierra Leone, she assumed I was dead and stopped waiting. She got pregnant and married another guy, and that was the last I heard from her until the day before yesterday, when her dad showed up at the Salt Jacket General Store.”

  “Well, she ain’t wearing no wedding band, so I assume she’s single again.”

  “Yeah, her dad said the other guy left her a few years back.”

  “It’s also exceedingly obvious that she still has eyes for you.”

  Marcus was silent.

  “Well, she is …” Wasner shifted in his seat. “I’ll only say this, if you promise not to strangle me like that FBI dude.”

  Marcus tossed a glance at his friend across the dark interior of the Jeep. “I promise.”

  “She is one hot lady, and she was seriously looking at you back there.”

  “It ain’t that simple, Wazzy.”

  “What?” questioned the Seal. “You are obviously still in love with the woman. Any idiot could see that, the way you jacked up Tomer for his remark.”

  “It’s that obvious?”

  “Ummm…yeah. Kinda like, your hair is on fire, kind of obvious.”

  Marcus stared out the windshield to the dark, empty highway ahead of the Jeep.

  “So, she screwed up,” Wasner said. “Just take her back. Be the new daddy to her kid and live happily ever after. No more of this mighty warrior crap. Be a backwoods Alaskan redneck, or whatever it is you want to do, and enjoy life.”

  “There is no kid.”

  “What, the runaway husband took the kid?”

  “She miscarried when she found out I was alive.”

  “Oh, jeez.” Wasner scrunched up his eyes.

  Marcus’s heart pounded in his chest. Images of Lonnie flashed through his mind’s eye.

  “Look, Wazzy, how about you stick to being a Navy Seal and cut the Dr. Phil bit, okay?” “All right,” Wasner said. He turned to look out the passenger side window into the dark night beyond the edge of the highway. Power poles snapped by, reflected in the light of the vehicles behind them. The aurora had again appeared, much smaller than the earlier display. It swirled in the dark night sky above the trees.

  “You still love her, don’t you?”

  “Like the air that I breathe,” Marcus replied.

  Wasner snapped his head around to Marcus. “Whoa…that was kind of poetic. I didn’t know you had it in you, Mojo.”

  “There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll tell you a secret if you tell me a secret.”

  Wasner’s voice sounded like a chiding adolescent trying to coerce a younger sibling.

  “What?” said Marcus.

  “You go first,” Wasner said.

  “Oh, man…this is crazy.”

  “No, it isn’t. You go first. Tell me something about this relationship with the lovely Miss Lonnie Wyatt, and I will tell you a secret.”

  Marcus felt like a little child trying to hide his attraction to a girl in grade school. If it hadn’t been so dark, Wasner would have noticed that his friend’s face had abruptly turned very red. For some reason, Marcus complied. “I write poetry.”

  Wasner’s eyes widened in surprise. “That’s a good secret. USMC Master Sergeant Marcus ‘Mojo’ Johnson is a poet. What, like limericks, haiku, what?”

  “Romantic prose.”

  “Uh….what’s that?”

  “A kind of poetry.”

  “Give me sample.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, it’s me…Wazzy.” Wasner edged closer to Marcus and muttered, “Remember Jalalabad?”

&nb
sp; “That’s not fair,” Marcus protested.

  “Let me hear a shot of this ‘romantic prose’ you do.”

  “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.”

  “I’m waiting,” Wasner said.

  Marcus sighed and quickly recited,

  “The candle flickers softly between us

  Lights her cheeks with a soft glow

  Highlights the curve of her face

  Her almond-shaped eyes sparkle

  In the candle’s flickering light”

  “Oh Marcus,” Wasner replied in a falsetto voice, “I will marry you….”

  “That is romantic prose, all right?” Marcus answered, grinning in embarrassment. “And back off, sailor…I’m not your type.”

  “Okay, that’s actually pretty good. I might need to borrow that for a barmaid I met in Fairbanks last week.” Wasner said, “So, like, how much of this romantic prose have you written?”

  “Over four hundred poems.”

  Wasner looked at him incredulously. “You mean to tell me that all this time, Mr. Hardcore Poster Marine, few and proud, force recon warrior, is actually pulling a Shakespeare on us in the background?”

  “Screw you, Wasner.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t my type.”

  “You’re too ugly.”

  “You’re just jealous,” Wasner said. “You should publish the stuff and make some money or something at least.”

  “No,” Marcus said quietly. “They are Lonnie’s.”

  “Man, you are serious about this woman, aren’t you.”

  Marcus changed the subject. “So what’s your secret?”

  “Bannock’s a virgin.”

  “What?”

  “Yep, Charlie Bannock is a virgin.”

  “That’s not your secret! As unbelievable as it is, that would be Charlie’s secret!”

  “I never said I’d tell you my secret,” Wasner replied with a chuckle. “I just said I would tell you a secret.”

  “You’re a jerk sometimes,” Marcus said bluntly. “Are you serious, though? Charlie’s a virgin?”

  “Yep, forty-three years old and never entered the Hotel Silky in his life.”

  “How can that be? He’s Green Beret. And I’ve seen him flirt with women all the time.”

  “He tried to be with a hooker a couple of times when we went to Thailand on leave from the ‘Stan. Ol’ boy was so nervous about getting a disease, he nearly fainted. So he just walked out. He was so scared of having things growing out of or falling off of his Willie that he’d run the other direction from any of the good time girls. And every time that man gets within ten feet of a decent woman, he starts talking gibberish and she ends up walking away before she can even learn his name.”

  “That’s still hard to believe,” Marcus said.

  “What’s so hard about it? I never saw you with a woman.”

  “Yeah, but I had a woman, even if she didn’t have me on her mind.”

  “Well, have you two actually slept together? You do know what I mean, don’t you? Or do I need to get graphic?”

  “You got your one secret. That’s all you get.”

  “So you’re a virgin, too?”

  “Wazzy,” Marcus looked at the chief. “Piss off.”

  Wasner fell silent for a moment.

  “I envy you guys. I have three ex-wives and have endured no small number of trips to the VD clinic over the past twenty-three years. If I could do it all over again, I think I’d choose yours and Charlie’s way. One woman, or no women.”

  The night sky was clear above them and the stars sparkled as far as they could see. The aurora danced brightly on the northern horizon as they moved along down the highway.

  Chapter 32

  Farmer’s Loop Road

  Fairbanks, Alaska

  20 December

  00:30 Hours

  At half past midnight, Lieutenant Shin packed supplies in the Burgundy Ford Explorer in the garage. He’d waited long enough. His commander was not returning. His mind wandered back to the time and place where his career all began.

  Shin Kwang Suk was a graduate of the Los Angeles school system, and earned a Bachelor’s of Science from Stanford University in 1999. He had spent his entire life in the shadows. By the age of eight, he understood the duality of his life when his parents enrolled him in a secret school administrated by a man known only as Tang-Gun, or the General. The school educated children in the ideologies of the North Korean Communist philosophy of Ju-Che, or self-reliance for the common good, while they were young and impressionable. The thorough brainwashing and training they received would have made Adolf Hitler jealous.

  Shin, and dozens like him, were destined, designed, to be tools of espionage and war hidden among the hundreds of thousands of legitimate peace-minded immigrants from one of America’s strongest allies.

  As a deep cover agent in Alaska, he spent nearly two years scouting routes and trails over which special operations teams would move to mount an insurgency against the US military bases to keep them occupied here, instead of sending their troops to aid power-hungry, imperialist South Korea. Posing as a research journalist writing a book in Korean on rural arctic life, he feigned friendship with many people and visited numerous homesteads on the road system and near the bases.

  Had any of the Korean population known who he really was, they probably would have killed him themselves. He and his fellow disciples of the General believed the Korean immigrants in America were traitors. They had left behind the ancient people and rich history of Chosun, Korea’s traditional name, for the sake of money. Their lives were defined not by self-reliance and tranquility, but by unadulterated greed. They were the enemy.

  Every South Korean man was required to serve in the Army after his eighteenth birthday. Therefore, barring overwhelming medical reasons, all the Korean men who immigrated to the US as adults had been soldiers. Some had even fought directly against the People’s Army in cross-border raids.

  One Fairbanks man in his late forties had been an officer in the Republic Of Korea (ROK) Marines for eight years before moving to Alaska to take over his cousin’s shoe repair business. An elder in his church, he often preached long into the night about the need to evangelize North Korea with the Christian gospel. He ranted about the need to overthrow Kim Il Sung and his reportedly psychotic son Kim Yong Un and unite the two Koreas under God. The former Marine even claimed to love the people of North Korea.

  One night, Shin had shared a copious amount of soju, a strong, vodka-like Korean rice wine, with him. Under the influence of the soju, Shin elicited stories of the elder’s years as a ROK Marine. He boasted of a night in the early nineties, when his squad of commandos slipped onto what he claimed was a North Korean spy ship disguised as a fishing vessel. They killed all the men aboard, then hung their bodies from the radio mast and set the boat on a course back to its own coast.

  In the next breath, the man wept and claimed that he should have saved those men instead, and that they may even have been friends had it not been for the damned communist leader of their country. The elder apparently could not make up his mind. Should the North Koreans be killed or be saved?

  Shin despised the Americanized Korean traitors. He kept a list of those he would make sure were killed with the most humiliation when the revolution began here.

  Although Shin despised America, its weak form of government, and its fat, lazy people, it did have one redeeming quality. Shin had developed an affinity for Italian food. He loved chicken parmesan, creamed fettuccini and poached fish, and of course, fresh hot loaves of garlic bread dipped in olive oil. Italian food was the only redeeming thing in the US. Other than that, they and their way of life could all die.

  “We have waited long enough, and there is no sign of them,” Shin said. “I’m in command now.”

  The other men, showered and changed into clean clothes, gathered on the couches in the spacious living room.

  “Wait until seven o’clock toni
ght to be in position. By that time, Sergeant Sun and I should be in position at the Eklutna water facility in Anchorage. Nikola,” Shin faced the Albanian who was sitting on a couch to his left, “what comes next?”

  Nikola looked up. “I will coordinate with our men in Anchorage and Valdez to turn off the power at precisely seven o’clock.”

  Shin turned back to his fellow North Korean commandos on the opposite couch. “And you, Pang?”

  “We will be in position at the water utility here in Fairbanks immediately after the power goes out,” replied Sergeant Pang. “Once it has been out for ten minutes, we will pour ten vials of the chemical into the water supply. You will do the same in Eklutna.”

  “Make sure you are wearing the rubber gloves and face masks,” Sun added. “Do not get any on you, or you will not survive to escape.”

  Everyone nodded in understanding.

  “As soon as the vials are emptied, get out of the water utilities and start your escape plans.” Adem continued. “We give it fifteen more minutes for the virus to replicate in the water, then at 7:25, allow the power to come back on. That will cycle the pumps and disturb the water sufficiently to spread the virus throughout the system rapidly.”

  Nikola spoke. “We leave the power on until four days later. The chemical agent will have destroyed the filters and the bacteria will have spread into the population en masse. At that time, we turn off the power completely and leave it off as they suffer and spread the disease.”

  “That is correct,” Shin replied. “As soon as the power returns, we Koreans will proceed with our escape plans. We report back to the General in forty-eight hours. After the four-day period, the Albanian teams will follow your escape routes and disappear.”

  Shin narrowed his dark eyes to sinister slits as his gaze moved over each man’s face. “You must not get caught, under any circumstances. If you think you cannot succeed or that you will be captured, your life must end here. Let none of what we are doing escape your lips, even after the operation is over. Is that clear?”

  The men nodded their agreement and immediately set about their tasks. Shin and Sergeant went to the Ford Explorer in the garage. They placed two folding-stock AK-74s within reach under a blanket on the back seat. A padded fiberglass case, containing a dozen vials encased in protective plastic boxes that held three vials each, was placed on the floor behind the passenger seat, where it was covered with a dark blanket that made it nearly invisible on a cursory search of the vehicle. Each man carried a 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistol in their waistband, and extra ammunition magazines in their pockets.