They gave me a nice little room with a bed and a little bathroom and two guards who were ordered to stand outside the door every hour of every day to make sure I didn’t go anywhere. Anyone who wanted to take me out from my room was required to present identification, and then the guards would still radio it in before releasing me.
There was only one guy in charge of me. Every time the guards radioed in a request, it went directly to that one guy, and he was the only guy who could say yes or no.
His name was General Chesney. He was as tall as he was wide and he was always chewing on unlit cigars. He didn’t like me, but I didn’t like him so it was at least mutual. He was ex-Air Force, and he was more decorated than a goddamned Christmas tree. That was about all I knew about him. I only met him briefly after my plane landed within the base walls.
Every morning, I’d wake up to the loud rumbling of engines. The days would be silent, and then I would fall asleep to the same rumbling. A long caravan of army vehicles and large trucks drove out around midnight, every night, and didn’t come back until the morning. I asked one of my guards where they went each night, and he said nothing—following orders like a true military man.
It was a week before I saw Chesney again. He ordered the guards to bring me to his office, which wasn’t far from the little room I was being kept in.
Chesney’s office was large, filled with bookshelves, all loaded with books I’m sure he’d never read in his life. The place smelled of bourbon, which didn’t surprise me in the least. Chesney waited for the guards to leave before he said anything.
“You’ve got your choice, Sykes. Poland or Uruguay,” he said. His voice was a low growl, and he never removed the cigar from between his teeth.
“Choice for what?” I said.
“Relocation. You prefer Spanish or Polish? Before we ship you out, we’ll make sure you can speak the language.” He finally removed the cigar from his mouth, only briefly so he could sip his bourbon.
I didn’t want to go to Poland or Uruguay. Hell, I didn’t even know where Uruguay was on a map—in South America somewhere.
“What about France? I know some French from elementary school,” I said.
“No, we don’t do France. We only do Poland and Uruguay. Sometimes we do Sweden, but their relocation advisor is on vacation for the next few months. His daughter just had a baby. Nice looking kid, too.”
“Can I have some time to think about it?”
He sighed and grumbled something under his breath. “You can have a day to think about it. In a month, you’re gone. The Easter Talent Show is in two months and the guys need a place to practice. Unfortunately, we need to make sure you can speak the language before we can send you out. Our base won last year, you know. The guys did a number from Rocky Horror Picture Show.” He dug into his big desk and pulled out a file. “Take these brochures. These are the two towns. Morato and Bartniz—Bartnizikis… I don’t know how the hell to say it. Maybe you can figure it out.” He handed me two brochures that looked like they were part of some half-assed high school project.
The pictures in the brochures looked like they were taken with an old cellphone, and the attempt at an English translation was mostly gibberish. “I used to recommend Uruguay to people because I thought it was warm and tropical. But it’s actually kind of cold and shitty. Poland’s no better. At least in Uruguay you don’t have to deal with Polacks. It’s your call.” How generous…
The guards escorted me back to my room.
Both towns looked like shitholes. I couldn’t even find the town names on the map I found.
I wondered if Greg was being sent to one of the towns, or if he was sent elsewhere, to one of the many detainment camps in and around the States. I tried to push the thought out of my head. It hurt too much to think about, and it was ignorant to think that there was any chance Greg was out on his own somewhere. Yeah—that and my dad really did take our childhood dog to go live on the farm. It was easier not to think about.
And it was easier to think that Bremkin didn’t lie to me about Kyla, that she was simply given a warning and allowed to continue her life as if nothing ever happened.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I’d hoped that I would figure things out with a good night’s sleep, that the decision would be obvious after some rest. But after three sleepless nights in a row, the only thing that became obvious was that I wasn’t going to get a good night’s sleep until I made a decision.
If I made the sacrifice—if I threw my pride to the sharks and broke Liam’s heart—there was a good chance nothing would come out of it. Hunter might stay missing. It was a gamble—even that was an optimistic way of putting it. At least when you gamble, you get your bet back if you win. Even if they send Hunter back to Nintipi, I would still the laughingstock of the media, the Witch of Nintipi. Even some drunken gambling-addict in Vegas wouldn’t take those odds.
But if I didn’t get up in front of those reporters and make that statement, Hunter would never come back. They might even kill him… If they hadn’t already.
I was working in the bar when a young girl came in. She looked too young to be in the place, so I IDed her. Her ID said she was twenty-six, but the thing looked faker than Victoria Beckham’s chest. There was nothing I could do to dispute it though, so I let her order a drink. “A Bloody Mary,” she ordered. I didn’t put any liquor in, and she didn’t seem to notice.
It was strange that she was alone, a girl her age on a weekday night. Our bar wasn’t exactly popular with the younger crowd. Even stranger, she kept staring at me, watching me as if I was some sort of exhibit at the zoo. She had a notebook out on the bar that she was scribbling in, so I figured she was doing some sort of high school research project—maybe some Career Studies assignment. “Do a two-page report on the worst job you can think of. Single-spaced, 12 point font. Pick something exceptionally pathetic for a woman nearing her thirties.”
She ordered a second Bloody Mary. When I dropped it off, I decided to ask, “What are you working on?”
“Are you Kyla Rose?” she asked, ignoring my question.
I tried my best to hide the shudder that crawled up my spine. “If you want anything else, just wave me down,” I said, turning away.
“Wait,” she said, sitting up, straightening her back. Her perky tits were a sad reminder that I was getting older. “Can I ask you a few questions?”
The bar was practically empty. There were no good excuses out of it. “What kind of questions?”
“About Sergeant Sykes.” She smiled. Her eyes were bright.
“I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to talk to reporters right now.” I turned away. Now was as good a time as ever to go clean the bathrooms out.
But she stopped me again. “I’m not a reporter. It’s for a book I’m writing about the military history of Nintipi. It’s my Creative Writing masters thesis. I’m just finishing it up, but I don’t have much on the whole Congo thing.” Masters thesis? Great, maybe the perky little girl really was twenty-six—only a year younger than me. The thought stung. Had I not cheated on Sammy, I would have been finishing my masters program in astrophysics. Instead, I was struggling to make ends meet as a bartender on the rough end of town.
“You know a lot about military history?” I asked.
“History was my second major, and my father fought in Vietnam.”
I sighed. The last thing I wanted to do was answer her questions, but there was nothing else to do, and I had little else to hide. “What do you want to know?”
“Well, let’s start from the beginning. How long have you known Sergeant Sykes?” she asked. I couldn’t help but laugh. “What’s funny?”
“Sergeant Sykes. It’s funny.”
“Why?” Her eyes narrowed and her head bobbed to one side.
“He would hate being called that. I can’t even imagine…” When we were younger, Hunter wouldn’t tell anyone his last name. He would tell everyone he didn’t have one. He liked being called Hunter, and that’s
it. “I’ve known him since… probably the third grade. I didn’t talk to him until the seventh grade, and we weren’t friends until the eighth or ninth grade.”
“Wow. The third grade?”
“Maybe even the second grade,” I said.
She put down her pen and bit her lip. “I bet he was a really cute kid,” she said. Her eyes were glowing. That was something that hadn’t changed since we were little—women mindlessly swooning over him.
“What were your first impressions of Hunter?” she asked.
“I thought he was sleazy and full of himself,” I said.
She nodded and scribbled everything down into her notebook. “Mhm,” she muttered as she wrote. Her notebook was nearly full, crammed with pages and pages of notes from similar interviews. She wasn’t kidding; this wasn’t just some quick little homework assignment.
There was a comfort in knowing that my voice might be heard in a book. For once, people would actually hear my side of the story. I could defend myself without being cut off and slandered. Everyone could finally understand that Hunter was a womanizer, that we were drunk that night, and that I had just caught Sammy cheating on me.
But what was the point in telling the world any of that? What did I stand to gain from resurrecting my reputation? Besides, it was all my fault. Throwing the blame on Hunter and Sammy might make me look better, sure, but could I live with that shame? I would truly become the Witch of Nintipi. “I thought he was sleazy and full of himself, but I loved that about him. Once I got to know him, I realized that was just an act. Hunter was sweet and loyal to everyone who was loyal to him. He still is.”
“You slept with Hunter, right?”
That lump in my throat was becoming far too familiar. “Yes, I did,” I said. One of the nearby regulars turned and looked at me, but I pretended not to notice, not to care. “The night before he left on tour.”
“But weren’t you and Sergeant Patrick dating at the time?”
“We were, yes. It was a mistake, and I regret it.”
“Why’d you do that? We’ve all heard the rumours, but what’s your side of the story?”
Now every face in the bar was turned my way, eyes peeled wide, waiting for the answer they’d waited half a decade for. My heart was pounding. I wanted to tell her, ‘Because he cheated on me; he took advantage of a young girl.’ But I fought back the urge and instead I said, “Because I loved Hunter. I still love Hunter.”
The girl’s eyes became wide. Even she’d expected me to defend myself.
“I only ever dated Sammy to get closer to Hunter.” Saying it aloud was hard. The center of my chest suddenly hurt and I had the urge to burst in to tears. But I stayed strong and kept my head high. “Do I regret it? Sure. Every day. I loved Sammy, too—as a friend. He treated me like gold for the most part, and he had his bad days like anyone else. But I never loved him the way that I love Hunter.”
The girl was frozen. When she finally came to, she snapped her head down and began to scribble into her notebook. There was a sense of relief having everything out in the open, admitting my faults. Sure, the regret was still there, along with the guilt, but I finally felt like I could breathe, like a weight had been taken off of my shoulders for the first time in five years. The girl paused and looked up at me. “You know this is going in my book right? You sure you’re okay with me writing about this?”
I shrugged. “Write it. Please. And on that note, may as well note that I’ve slept with him again since he’s been back.”
Her eyes became even wider. She started writing again and then, a moment later, she paused again. “You know they send our master’s theses out to most every university in the country, right?”
I didn’t know, but it made no difference one way or the other.
“A statement like this, given your—um—media record, might get you some unwanted attention.”
“What do you mean, unwanted attention?” I asked.
“You know—media, reporters, and all that. It wasn’t that long ago that this whole Congo thing was a pretty hot topic. Still is, really.”
The dots connected in my mind. If I was going to get Hunter back, I needed the media attention. This girl was handing it to me on a silver platter. But I still didn’t have the full story.
“You said you’ve been with Hunter since he got back from the Congo?” she asked.
“I spent a whole week with him.”
She scribbled some more notes into her notebook. “There’s a lot of controversy surrounding their mission in the Congo. In all of Hunter’s interviews, he dodges the important questions. Is there anything you know that the rest of us don’t?”
She stared at me with hungry eyes. “I know everything,” I said. My heart fluttered.
“Everything?”
“When’s your book due? Can we meet in a few days?” I asked.
She gave me her address on a little slip of paper. Her name was Erin Black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I chose Poland as my eventual destination, but not because that’s where I wanted to end up, or because I was half Polish myself. The base had four guys who spoke perfect Spanish, all ready to teach me whatever I needed to know to live in Uruguay. There was only one guy who taught Polish, and he was at a base in Oregon teaching some other poor bastard. Fluent Polish speakers are hard to come by. Fluent Polish speakers with top-secret military credentials are even harder.
So I bought myself some time, an extra three or four days. Time was priceless. I needed as much of it as I could get if I was going to break out of that base.
It was a decision I made the night Chesney gave me the brochures. I didn’t want to live in Poland or Uruguay. Hell, I didn’t want to live in France or Sweden, or even America for that matter. I wasn’t going to be happy anywhere unless Kyla was there with me. No one would ever find me in some little village in Poland, but the stress would. It would always be on the back of my mind—is Kyla okay? Did they kill her? Did that ex-Marine son of a bitch do something to her? I couldn’t live with that lingering in the back of my head. How long it would take in Poland before I pushed that soldier suicide rate a little bit higher? Shit, probably not long.
So I was going to break out. I had no plan, but luckily I had some experience breaking out of prison camps. Security was greater at Panda Field than it was in the Congo, but the Chesney’s camp had one major disadvantage: they were very organized. They worked on a schedule. Every night on the same minute, 2330, those trucks rolled out. Four times a day, on the same exact minute, the guards knocked on my door and checked on me—0900, 1300, 1900, and 2300. After their last check in, I had thirty minutes to get from my room to the gate when it opened for the caravan.
I hadn’t quite figured out how I was going to get past the guards at my door, the guards outside my building, or the guards scattered all over the facility, but I had about three weeks to figure all that out before I became Sven Ptryoviskyi of Bartnizikiskyz, Poland. Try to say that ten times fast.
I knew if I escaped that base, I could get to Kansas, find Kyla, and get away. Once in Poland, even thinking about Kansas was going to be impossible. It isn’t any secret that military relocation towns are crawling with undercovers, making sure the relocated don’t re-relocate. Even if I could slip past them, I wouldn’t have a passport to get on a plane. Crossing the border by foot was out of the question. The second I vanished off their radar, they would have choppers scanning every inch of the border, ordered “shoot to kill.” It was a miracle they weren’t just shooting me to avoid the potential risk.
But that gave me hope. If they weren’t shooting me, than they probably weren’t pulling the trigger on Kyla. It was only a little glimmer of hope, but it was hope nonetheless.
I fought my way out of a Congolese prison camp for a chance to see her again. If Chesney thought he could just say, “tough shit,” and send me off to Poland, then he was in for a surprise. I was ready to bring that whole facility down in flames before that happened.
Before I could take my story to the media—the story that Matthew Bremkin gave me—I needed that final piece of the puzzle. I needed to know what Frederick Meraux found that the US government so afraid of. I needed to know so they could “prove” me wrong.
I only had one lead to work off of. Before Matthew Bremkin disappeared down the alleyway behind the bar, he told me to take a vacation at the cabin.
So that’s what I did. I caught a ride with the first truck travelling north of Nintipi and then hiked up to the cabin.
I hardly recognized the place. The door had been smashed in by the police and everything had been turned upside down. All of the books from the bookshelves were scattered across the floor. The cushions had been ripped off the couch and torn to pieces, as if Greg and Hunter had been hiding something inside of them. The cabin was cold, the door left open. The kitchen looked like every animal in the woods took turns raiding it for food.
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