by Naomi Niles
“Thank you. It’s all I ask,” Zack replied.
Finally, we reached the top of the ladder. From the deck of the observation station, I could see the jungle for miles around: the scorched treetops slowly being cleared away to make room for industry; the Congo River snaking sinuously along to the east; in the distance, a collection of hovels outside of which a couple of scrawny children stood watching a tank roll past. One of them appeared to be doing the dance moves to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.”
“I don’t guess there’s any chance you’re going to tell me what happened last night,” I said after we had stood there for some time in silence.
“If I was going to, I would have done it already,” said Zack. There was enough of an edge to his voice that I knew better than to keep pushing the issue. I studied his face with a growing sense of frustration. What was the point of traveling halfway around the world if I was going to be barred from finding out the very things I had come to find out?
It was tempting to take my own fact-finding mission into the jungle. But I knew it could never happen, first because of the risk of being killed, and second because Sergeant Armstrong would never allow it. From the moment I stepped foot on base in the morning, my every step was carefully monitored. They’d have noticed if I went missing for more than a few minutes.
I would have to discuss this with Evan during our next Skype call. Until then, there was no chance of learning what they were determined to keep hidden.
“What about you?” I asked, sensing that the conversation was going nowhere. “You must have a family somewhere.”
“I do,” said Zac, looking relieved at the change of subject. “Down in East Texas.”
“How many brothers?”
“Four, last time I counted,” he replied. I raised one brow at him. “One of ‘em we don’t talk about much.”
“Fair enough. What made you decide to enlist in the Navy?”
Zack stared out over the guardrails, scratching the back of his head. “I don’t know if I could point to a particular reason. I just always really cared about my family and country and wanted them to be safe. I was never great at the guitar like my brother Braxton, or especially good at farming like my dad. But I was strong and motivated, and I knew how to swim, and one day in my last year of high school it just hit me, what I wanted to do. It was like I was being called, almost. Would you believe a man could be called into the military?”
“If you say it happened to you,” I said, smiling, “then I’ll believe it.”
“Anywho, so that’s what happened.” He turned to face me. “And I’ve been here for a couple years now, and in another year, my deployment will be up and I’ll be headed home. And I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”
At first I hadn’t been able to shake the suspicion that he was just feeding me canned answers because of his distrust of all journalists. But as he had gone on talking, a sincerity had crept into his face and his voice. By the end, I felt my heart being strangely moved. “Have you thought about becoming a recruiter?” I asked him. “You could go to schools and talk about your experience. I bet it would be really powerful.”
“Yeah, I might do that,” he said, but without much conviction. “You wanna start heading back?”
“Sure.” As we began descending the ladder, I told him, “I don’t guess there’s any place we could go to get dinner around here, but I would like to talk to you more, when you’re ready.”
He stared down at me for a moment as though attempting to measure my honesty. Whatever he saw in my face, it must have reassured him, for he nodded coolly and said, “Yeah. I’d like that, too.”
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 fro
nt 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.
Chapter Ten
Kelli
I didn’t like the feeling of being shut out by the guys. Ever since my arrival at the base, it felt like they were closing ranks trying to keep me from learning anything of value. In some cases, as on the night when Jake was shot, there was no good reason for this. There wasn’t some vital strategic interest that was forcing them to withhold information; they were doing it purely out of spite.
If it wasn’t for Sergeant Armstrong, the whole trip might have been wasted. He was the one who took me aside on the morning of the ambush and explained what had happened. Of course I knew about the militant raid on the boarding school, having already heard about it from Evan. The rest I could pretty much piece together myself: the SEALs had undertaken a moonlit excursion during which they presumably parachuted into enemy territory.
“It was a brave thing they did,” I said to Sergeant Armstrong. It was early morning, and the only thing keeping me on my feet was adrenaline and spite. “I don’t understand why they would be reluctant to talk about it.”
“I think I know why,” said Armstrong with a vexed smile. “They’re embarrassed by the fact that Jake was wounded in the line of fire. They think it could have easily been prevented, and they hold themselves partially responsible. But there’s more to it than that, I feel.”
“How do you figure?”
Armstrong sat down at
his desk, removed a pipe from one of the top drawers, and lit it. He waved it in the air as he spoke without once putting it to his mouth. “Because I think from the moment you arrived on base, they had you pegged as the enemy. Some of the guys, they see the world in terms of ‘us’ vs. ‘them,’ and your fact-finding missions just reinforce their sense of being oppressed by the all-powerful media.”
“Right, so how do I combat that?” I hated the feeling of shunned and held in suspicion no matter what I did, simply because of who I was. It was like a permanent knot in the pit of my stomach.
Armstrong shrugged, as if it wasn’t his problem, which I suppose in a sense it wasn’t. “You’ve just gotta show them that you’re a person first, before anything else. You’ve got to get them thinking you’re one of them. Until then, I’m afraid they’re always going to be reluctant to open up to you.”
I kept coming back to this conversation again and again during the next two weeks as I quietly went about my job and the SEALs continued to keep me at arm’s length. I knew I shouldn’t take it personally, but it was hard to ignore the feeling that they were punishing me just for doing what I had come here to do.
I talked it over with Azzadine as we ate breakfast together in the lobby of the hotel on my last Thursday in Kinshasha. We were eating a traditional Congolese meal of goat stew and cassava leaves with smoked fish, eaten with a sweet and slightly tangy sauce whose name I did not know.
“I know at first you didn’t wish to come on this trip,” he said, reaching for his mug of tea. “But now that you’ve settled in, I would think you would not want to leave.”
“I’m actually looking forward to being home,” I said with a trace of bitterness in my voice. “At least back in the office, I’m only ignored by two or three people instead of the whole team.”
Azzedine peered at me quizzically for a moment, as though attempting to extract my innermost thoughts. “Do you feel that you’ve been mistreated?” he asked.
