by Fiona Quinn
Jack was in a camp with thirty-six newly dead bodies. The smell would quickly fill the forest and call the predators in. He shut the front gate without a lock, he wasn’t sure how much good it would do. He’d seen it time and again when he was on maneuvers in Africa with the UN, that smell drove the beasts crazy. He needed to work fast.
Having angled the lighting over to tent B, Jack did a thorough search. There was a small pile of wrappers from the meal replacement bars he had recently updated in Suz’s zombie bag. This was definitely her queen sized sleeping bag and ground matt. She had definitely been here. Her bag had been, Jack corrected himself as Lynx came to mind. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. If Lynx’s knowing was interpreted correctly Suz should be here. Even if it was just her body he found. Jack swallowed hard and dug into his conviction. He could feel Suz alive and thinking about him. That was what he was telling himself. It kept him sane.
He wondered if Lynx had any knew intel. Any updates. That there had been a video made of the boys scared the hell out of him. Once the captors got what they wanted, there was no reason to keep the prisoners alive. The only flicker of hope he felt in that moment was Lynx’s ominous knowing. He pulled out his phone and got nada. He hadn’t expected to.
With his high powered headlamp, Jack found Suz-sized boot prints where she jumped backwards from the tent opening. Deeper than he would have expected, that meant she was carrying some weight. Perhaps her zombie bag. It was interesting that she was allowed to keep it. If she were the one staying in this tent like the cell commander said, she definitely had the bag coming in to camp. Perhaps she was allowed to keep it to supply herself and the boys. He wasn’t sure. That was odd. But in the field he’d seen plenty of odd things. Jack bent to examine the foot prints. They twisted to the left and two more sets of small foot prints showed up in the muddy soil. Carefully, he followed along. The drizzle that had started as they stood in the tree line waiting to enter the compound had stopped, he could actually see a bit of sky.
It was pre-dawn. Time for those of the Muslim faith to rise and pray. He thought of all of the devout Muslims he had met over his life time, and he was sad that the actions of the extremists, who used and manipulated the religion for their own goals, made life so difficult for so many really good people. He wasn’t the least bit sad that this cell of would-be suicide bombers was history, he thought as he passed the silent tents. The heaters now turned off. There was no one to keep warm.
Where are you Suz?
The tracks lead towards the latrine tent. He thought they would end there, and he was going to be out of luck. Except they didn’t. At the far corner of the shower tent, Suz’s feet had stopped, her prints side by side, weight on her toes. She had pushed off, leaving deep marks in the mud. The boys as well. At the front corner of the latrine tent, she had turned and leaned forward before turning back and walking on. She was checking to make sure she was alone with the boys.
He followed the tracks to the corner of the fencing where a wide puddle had formed. He checked to see if it was deep enough to show she had dug under, but it wasn’t. As he rose, he found mud on the fence on either side of a fixing, where someone with short arms would have grabbed for balance. When he twisted the nut, it spun smoothly loose, despite the rust.
“Son of a gun,” Jack whispered. “Suz dodged three dozen armed terrorists with two six-year-olds in tow.”
He shined his light out of the fencing and could see scuffling at the edge of the puddle.
Jack backtracked, moving to the front entrance. How long ago did she leave? He pulled the opening wide and shut it again. If the Mossad unit was coming back in tomorrow, they’d appreciate it if they weren’t fighting panthers and wild boar to gather up the munitions.
With a slow steady pace Jack followed the trail. How far did you get, Suz? You had to have left after they went to bed. We should have passed you on the trail. A frisson on fear trickled like sweat down his spine. Two kids in the forest? He thought about how fast a predator could move and how little power even a trained soldier had against their attack. With his gun in hand, even he didn’t have a huge chance against one of these beasts. On the way toward the camp, they hadn’t seen any remains on the ground, but that didn’t mean a thing. Jack forced his mind in a different direction. His head was on a swivel as he watched the forest and the tracks, slow and steady, he followed the trail. Until there was no more trail.
“Suz?” Jack stood on their last set of footprints that shifted into the tree line. “Suz?”
The sky was just starting to show color. The trees were still black. He faced his headlamp toward the tree line, then bent to examine their treads. Here, where the foliage was a thick carpet, the footsteps had to be found in the shift of flora instead of mud puddles. He took two steps in.
“Jack?” Suz’s voice wobbled with incredulity. In a moment, Suz had sprung into his arms and was sobbing hysterically against his chest. He leaned over and breathed in her scent — rain, dirt, and fear. He wrapped her tight against him and let himself sob, too.
It was only now that he held her in his arms that he realized he had assumed she was dead. He had been mourning her. He hadn’t believed he’d ever hold her again. Never believed he’d even get the closure of bringing her body home. She’d just be gone from his life, leaving an echoing void.
He kissed her hair. This was what a miracle felt like. This was the pinnacle of his life. This moment was every emotion that he had ever experienced balled tight and exploding outward.
He wrapped his palms around her cheeks and tilted her face up so he could inspect her. She tucked her chin and squinted her eyes against the bright LED in his headlamp.
“Sorry,” he said. Flipping the light to dim. “Are you okay?”
Suz wasn’t to the point she could speak yet. Rescue was always a shock, and he had seen this particular look a few times. The brain stutters and tries to re-align itself with hope and relief when it had decided on consequences that looked very different.
“Just nod. Are the boys under the tarp?”
Suz nodded.
He bit at his middle finger of his tactical glove and pulled it off so he could touch her skin. He swept his thumb across her cheek, muddy from her tears, exposing a green and purple bruise beginning to fade.
“It’s not safe out here. We need to go back to the camp.”
Suz’s eyelids stretched wide, and she took a step back. Not out of his arms – just enough that she could take in the information.
“I came in with a foreign unit working in the area. I jumped in on their mission, because our intel pointed the search for you and the boys in this direction. The jihadists were eradicated and the unit took the commander off to learn what he knows about life. The camp is clear.”
“Of live people,” Suz finally said.
“Yeah, you and the boys aren’t going to want to visit the sleeping tents. We can go to the eating tent and wait. The unit plans to come back during the day. They’ll have transport with them.”
Suz snuggled back into Jack’s arms, form fitting her body to his as if she didn’t want a molecule of air to come between them. “The boys are pooped out. I’m not sure they’re going to make it back that way. We came this way far.”
“You only made it a few miles, Suz. We’re still a hell of a ways from civilization. Back is our best bet.”
Suz nodded but didn’t move.
“Come on, let’s gather everything up. We’ll help the boys. And you need some sleep.” His voice was gruff. He bent over to kiss the top of her hair, she leaned her head up and his lips caught on hers. It wasn’t a passionate kiss. There was no tongue or desperately seeking lips. The kiss was soft and moved through his body. It was a kiss of exhaustion. And sadness. A kiss that tasted of a heart-break that Jack didn’t understand. A kiss that bruised his soul. And all Jack wanted in that moment was to get Suz safe, and comfort her.
30
Suz
Breaking Dawn, Wednesday
, February 23rd
The Forest, Refugio Tatí Yupí, Paraguay
“Walk through the fear,” Jack had said with a chuckle as they heard snuffling along the trail. SEALs feel fear, they just learn to walk through it. She bet they didn’t feel like she did. Their kind of fear surely felt different. They had skills, and she did not. Having a chance at coming out okay must feel different than feeling pretty darned sure that it was grace alone that kept her alive this far.
They were moving back to their prison. Back to tents filled with dead bodies.
She put one foot in front of the other. That was all she tasked herself with. This was not the direction she had planned to head today.
Jack and his teams—all of them—planned, planned, planned, and practiced the plan until it was polished and seamless. In. Out. Boom, done. Except when it didn’t work out that way. Every mission had a little bit of surprise. She bet it surprised the heck out of him to find himself jumping off a building aiming for a car roof. She thought for a moment about how far off the ground three stories really was, how small a car roof would have measured from that distance, and how really lucky he had been to hit it dead-center. Sure he was trained to jump and hit a target. He had a better chance than most anyone else. That’s why he lived. “Expect the unexpected,” he said. Nothing was going the way Suz expected – or could even dream up in her wildest and hairiest dreams.
Jack was chatting with the boys. He had one sitting on each of his broad shoulders. Their hands held on to his backpack straps through their dangling legs. With his left hand, he held each of the kids’ feet hanging in front of his chest – this allowed his right hand to hold his Sig. His head moved back and forth, scanning constantly.
Suz saw him favoring his right leg. But that was all she could see by way of fallout from his recent surgery.
Suz had missed the stream of Jack and the boys’ conversation and tuned in when Ari said, “Maybe we could just make a raft and take it down to the river.” They had just rounded the bend and were walking up to the gate.
“We walked all the way across the river when we go on the plane. It was really wide,” Caleb said.
Ari kept speaking right over Caleb. “And when we get to the river we can paddle to a town.”
Jack set the boys down. His eyes moved over the area, taking everything in. He pushed open the front gate.
“We can’t get near the water here guys,” Suz said as she maneuvered them in to the encampment. “There are dangerous fish in the water called piranha. And there are alligators, too.”
“Captain Jack can fight any old alligator. I’m not afraid of them. You?” Ari asked, searching out his brother’s eyes over the top of Jack’s head.
“Yeah, I’m afraid of them. I guess.”
“You could fight an alligator couldn’t you, Captain Jack?” Ari asked as Suz reached up and took one boy then the other from Jack’s shoulders.
“I never tried. I’ve eaten alligator though. Have you ever done that? They cook them down in Louisiana. There are lots of alligators down there.”
“Ewww.” The boys sang out.
“What do they taste like?” Caleb asked.
Jack smiled, “Chicken.” They walked into the eating tent, and Jack put his bag on the floor.
“Captain Jack has a best friend named Gator, you know how he got that name?” Suz asked.
“’Cause he swims like an alligator?” Ari guessed.
“’Cause he hunts alligators?”
Jack chuckled. “He wrestled an alligator, just one. But it was a big one. Bigger than Gator is for sure.”
“Bigger than you even?” Caleb was wide eyed at the idea.
“The alligator was bigger than me. It was about as big as if you stood on my shoulders and reached for the sky. It was a great big gator. What happened was, Gator was swimming in a swamp.”
“You shouldn’t do that. Swamps aren’t good places to swim. He could swim in our pool with us, though.”
“Shh Ari, I want to hear.” Caleb scolded.
Jack moved to a bench and sat down. The boys had huddled in front of him. “Alligators are stealthy. They don’t make any noise. This massive alligator snuck up behind Gator and grabbed him.” Jack reached out and squeezed Caleb around the waist.
Caleb giggled.
“Gator knew he had to do something to get himself free so he reached around the alligator and hugged him.”
Both boys reached their scrawny arms around Jack and hugged.
“Tight. Tight. Tight. Tighter than that.”
They scrunched their faces up and tried to squeeze Jack harder yet. Then Jack fell over onto the ground and closed his eyes. The boys looked at each other, astonished. Slowly they crawled up giant Jack. Ari reached out and lifted Jack’s eyelid. Jack sat up with a roar and grabbed the boys to tickle them. They were laughing hysterically, and Suz’s heart was warmed. She was so glad to see the boys looking like themselves, feeling happy and safe, even if they were in the middle of a tropical forest.
Suddenly, Jack froze.
“Red light” he whispered. The boys instantly froze.
Something had caught Jack’s attention. His eyes stared down at the ground, but Suz could almost feel the rings of his attention spreading wider and wider like a ripples of water after pitching in a stone. He flicked his wrist up and checked his watch at the same time as he pushed himself up.
“Come on guys we’re going to take a little walk in the woods.” He yanked the straps of his pack over his shoulders.
“But we just got here, I’m zonked. You?” Ari asked.
Caleb sat down on the bench. “I can’t take another step.”
Suz was on her feet pulling the zombie pack in place. She wasn’t sure what was going on but something had come to Jack’s attention that wasn’t right.
“Quick, quick, guys, we’re going to need to run, okay?” He had pulled the boys up in his arms, not waiting for an okay. He was leaping over the single stair and dashing for the fence line just to their left. Now they were jogging along the perimeter. “We’re headed to the far corner,” Jack whisper-called back to Suz.
Suz wondered why they were taking this long route. Why didn’t they just move across the open space. All too soon she had her answer. The sound of ATV engines. As she ran they came closer and closer. “Do you know who they are?”
“Don’t think so – not willing to take the chance.”
Suz had a stitch in her side that was a hot poker of pain, trying to double her over. She knew she was slowing Jack down, even though he had a full pack and both kids, clinging to his sides. “Go Jack, get the kids out of here, I’ll catch up.”
“Suz, I—”
“Just go!”
Jack’s stride widened, and she watched his powerful muscles pumping hard. She did her best to stay up, but she was over a foot shorter than he was, and she didn’t run ten miles a day with a heavy pack the way he did before breakfast. All she could do before breakfast was sit very still and wait for the coffee to take hold.
The ATV pulled up to the front gate. Jack had moved through what looked like an opening in the fencing and had the boys off in the tree line. She was out in plain view. She went down on all fours and started crawling. For the first time in her life, Suz was glad for her petite size. Dressed in jungle camo with a digital backpack, maybe if she was slow enough she could get out the hole before anyone saw her. She tucked her chin. How many times had she heard, “Slow is fast and fast is slow”? She knew from the Strike Force stories that sometimes these guys spent whole days moving into range. Creeping along at a snail’s pace to get where they wanted, undetected.
It was an agonizing crawl. She heard the clang of chain at the gate and the call of confusion in a foreign language. She heard shouts and commands go up and the gate creaking wide. She refused to look at anything except for the open hole in front of her. She crawled forward. Slowly. Slowly. She had started to cry. Her arms shook with fear and fatigue. Suz tried to play a game. She thou
ght of the Animal Kingdom reruns. Prey stalk their dinner slowly so the gazelle never knew it was on the menu. She tried that on for size, I am a panther and that hole is my meal. It felt silly and very unhelpful. Suz’s hands sunk up to the wrists in mud, her knees went deeper. The wetness from the ground had seeped up her clothing, wicking up the cloth of her pants to her t-shirt, up her t-shirt and into her bra. The light padding held the cold wetness against her breasts, sucking her core warmth from her body.
She heard the ATMs moving closer. Suz hoped they were just being brought into the encampment, and they weren’t headed her way. Suz collapsed flat into the mud and held her breath. Now she heard shouts of anger and dismay coming from the tents. Jack said they were full of bodies. How creepy was that? She pulled her leg up and tried to push off, but it merely slipped back into place in the mud. She slowly rocked up to her knee and continued the crawl. She was up to the hole. She heard Jacks low resonant voice.
“Perfect. That was perfect. You’re doing it right. Stay as low as you can and keep moving.”
Suz didn’t lift her head, she was hyper aware that her red curls stood out against the green like a neon sign, but she lifted her gaze and scanned. She didn’t see anyone.
“A little farther. Almost there.”
He was right beside her but Suz couldn’t see him.
She pushed through the fence and a green cloth flipped over her. She and Jack lay under his ghillie bushrag that made him look like a jungle Yeti.
“You okay?”
Suz shook her head.
“Let’s get over to the boys.”
Together they crawled into the tree line. Jack pulled back the camouflaging cloth and looked her over. He gave her a nod. He had taken in her tear stained face, but this wasn’t the time for cuddles. He rounded the massive tree and held his binoculars on the group. “Who are they Jack?” she whispered in his ear.
“I don’t know yet. But this might be a problem. They certainly aren’t our friends who expected to give us a ride home. And they aren’t Middle Eastern, not looking like Paraguayans either. They’re too fair skinned, and they’re in civilian clothes. They’ve got AKs and side arms.”
