He walked swiftly to the van and tried one of Victor’s keys in the door. It opened. Chris hopped in and drove. Stepping harder on the accelerator, he increased the distance between himself and Jim Bob’s and Victor’s corpses.
If I were Hannah, where would I go?
He switched on Victor’s GPS tracker and waited for the main screen to pop up. When his eyes returned from the GPS to the road, he saw the road had curved and he was heading for a ditch. He steered quickly and recovered. He glanced at the GPS again. It displayed a map icon and tracking icon. Touching the tracking icon led him to another screen where he saw an icon labeled SW—Switchblade Whisper. A map highlighted his current location. After touching a green button, a violet arrow showed the road and direction he should take to follow the Switchblade Whisper. It had already traveled northeast into Turkey.
Using the GPS to calculate distance, he figured it would take him sixteen minutes to reach Highway One then fourteen minutes to the border. But he didn’t have a visa for entering Turkey. He’d have to find a way to sneak across. During the first minutes in the dark solitude of the van, he felt sleepy and just wanted to close his eyes for a moment, but he didn’t dare for fear of drifting off.
On the yacht, Jim Bob had spoken in his fatherly tone, telling Chris that his accusations of foul play were crazy. When Chris was little, his father had thought he was crazy. The week after his rescue, he’d been sitting in the living room on the couch reading a book when his father interrupted.
“What are you reading?”
He looked up from his book. “The Three Musketeers.”
“Oh, do you like it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Yes.”
“You remember the psychiatrist who you talked to when you came home?”
“I don’t remember his name.”
“He said that you told him a voice spoke to you, saying you would be rescued, but no one was around.”
Chris nodded. The voice had said, Fear not. On the morrow when the night cometh, you will be saved.
“Sometimes when people become tired and weak like you were in the well, they see things or hear things that aren’t really there. They have hallucinations.”
Why don’t they believe me? He wiggled his fingers anxiously. “It wasn’t a hallucination. It was real.”
“It might have seemed real, but you were tired and weak.”
“I know what I heard.”
“You know what you think you heard,” his father said. “But God doesn’t speak to children like that.”
“He spoke to me!”
“Son, the psychiatrist is worried about you. You can’t tell people things like this because they might think the wrong things about you.”
His mother stepped into the living room. She gave his dad the death stare. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Trying to talk some sense into him,” his father said, his voice agitated. The psychiatrist thinks he has schizophrenia and wants to see him again—run a PET scan and fMRI.”
“He’s not going to medicate my son,” she said. “The psychiatrist isn’t experienced in spiritual matters.”
“I don’t want him to medicate Chris, either.”
“But you’re trying to tell him that what he heard wasn’t real,” his mom pressed.
They were talking about him like he wasn’t even there, and he crossed his arms over his chest.
“Don’t tell me that you believe him, too,” he said.
She raised her voice. “I wasn’t there, okay? But yes, I believe him.”
“Come on. God doesn’t speak to kids.”
“Jesus did. And Chris is a lot closer to Jesus than you or me. We’ve always felt that.”
His father paused for a moment. “Events in the Bible happened a long time ago.”
“Are today’s events so much different?” she asked.
“Well, he can’t go around telling people he heard God, or they’re going to think he’s a lunatic and put him on medication and turn him into a walking vegetable!”
She turned to Chris, ignoring his father’s outburst. Her eyes softened. “Honey, I believe you.”
His parents rarely argued, and while he hated hearing them go at each other, he loved that his mother believed him.
She continued, “You had an experience that was special—like the pearls on a necklace. But some people don’t appreciate how special pearls are. You can only share special things with special people.”
Chris could still hear her voice in his ear and sighed at the memory. He’d felt so alienated when his father had thought him crazy, but his father had questioned Chris’s sanity because he didn’t understand. And Jim Bob had questioned Chris’s sanity because he wanted to shake his conviction that he’d been double-crossed. Chris wondered if he was brain deficient for becoming both a SEAL and a minister, but he held on to his conviction anyway.
He glanced back at the GPS tracking monitor. When he returned his eyes to the road, a man was in the middle of the intersection riding a donkey across Highway One. And he was naked except for his boots and the charred remains of a shirt around his shoulders.
I must really be losing my mind. He blinked. Still there.
It was so surprising he almost forgot to slam on the brakes. The wheels screamed horrifically as they locked up and slid. The naked man lifted his legs, saving himself from being crunched between the vehicle and the animal. The donkey fell over and brayed loudly enough to be heard for kilometers. The man rolled across the little hood, and his white buttocks briefly pressed against the windshield in front of Chris’s face before he slid at an angle and landed in the road.
Both Chris’s engine and the vehicle came to a stop, but the lights were still on in the dark night. The naked man stood with his privates in full view now. His mouth opened wide, and he screamed at Chris, but the donkey brayed so incessantly that Chris couldn’t understand him.
Chris tried to start the engine, but it just stuttered. He tried again. No luck.
The naked man limped over to Chris’s window. The donkey fell silent. “Where in the hell did you get your driver’s license?” the naked man demanded in a New York accent. He was short, bald, and looked like an angry Elmer Fudd. “Walmart?!”
Chris stared at him in disbelief. “Who are you?”
The naked man’s brow furrowed in the middle. “What?”
Chris rolled down the window a couple of inches so they could hear each other better. “Who are you?”
“I’m the guy on the donkey you almost killed,” Elmer Fudd said, indignant. “Who are you?”
Chris tried to start the engine again, but it wouldn’t turn over. “I’m the guy whose engine won’t start,” he said with frustration.
“I can’t stay around here. I’m in a bit of a hurry.”
“That makes two of us.”
“Why don’t you pop open the hood, and I’ll take a look at it,” Elmer Fudd said.
Chris watched the man carefully. What could an American be doing way out here in a country fighting a civil war? He could be faking the New York accent, but it sounded real enough. Chris hadn’t met him in the Teams. Maybe he was Delta Force. Or CIA. Maybe one of Jim Bob’s goons. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing out here, and right now, I’m not feeling too much peace on earth and goodwill to men.”
“Name’s Sonny.” He held out a hand to shake.
Chris ignored it but hesitantly responded, “Chris.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have any spare clothes, would you?”
Chris shook his head, but he reached under the seat and felt around for a poncho he’d seen Jim Bob stash there when they’d first arrived. He rolled down the window the rest of the way and handed Sonny the raingear.
He put the poncho on and smiled.
Chris couldn’t help but return the smile. Something about this guy was oddly comforting. He handed Sonny a compact yet powerful, flashligh
t.
Sonny took it and examined it. He eyed Chris suspiciously.
It looked like they both needed a change of fortune, and maybe a little faith was the ticket. Chris rolled the dice and pressed the hood release.
Sonny hurried to the front, lifted the hood, and flashed the light around the engine.
“How’s it look?” Chris called.
“Some of the electrical connections in your fuel injection on the air intake side got knocked loose,” he answered.
“Can you fix it?” Chris asked anxiously.
“I hope so.”
Arabic voices sounded from the woods to the west, breaking the still night. “Friends of yours?” Chris asked.
“Probably an al Qaeda tracking team,” he said casually.
Chris’s pulse burned through three stages of rocket fuel. “How do you know?”
“Lucky guess.” A sedan shining its high beams stopped fifteen meters behind them. “Friends of yours?” Sonny asked this time.
“Police,” Chris said matter-of-factly.
“How do you know they’re police?” Sonny closed the hood, hurried to the passenger side, and waited.
“Lucky guess.”
Chris unlocked the door and let him in. Sonny stared at the long, grey travel duffel between them.
From behind, a PA system sounded. “Police, surrender yourself now!” At the same time, muzzles flashed, and shots rang out from the woods.
Chris turned the key again. The engine started. The fecal matter was about to hit the rotating oscillator, and Chris wouldn’t be able to drive and shoot effectively at the same time. And he wasn’t about to give this stranger a weapon. “You drive.” He climbed over his travel duffel and Sonny.
No sooner had Sonny settled into the driver’s seat than he drove around the lifeless donkey. Then he stomped the gas, and the van leaped forward. They sped north on Highway One, passing through a spattering of vertical dark lines, trees in orchards. The van stank of astringent sweat. Chris didn’t know if it was his, Sonny’s, or both.
Chris unwrapped his rifle. Al Qaeda on foot were no threat, but now the police were a clear nuisance. The fastest way to disable their vehicle would be to take out the driver, but Chris had no reason to kill a cop. He aimed through the van’s back window and squeezed off four rounds. The window blew out, and Chris’s bullets struck the police car engine. The shots wouldn’t disable it, but they’d deliver a message.
The police swerved off the road and stopped following. Message received.
“That was easy,” Sonny said with a nod.
Chris raised an eyebrow. “Where you heading?”
“As far from here as possible. You?”
“Turkey.”
“Turkey’s good,” Sonny said.
At normal speed, it would take about fifteen more minutes to reach the border, but Sonny wasn’t driving at normal speed.
Forests of trees materialized on both sides of them. Chris turned and surveyed a large, shimmering light emerging behind them.
“We’ve got company again,” he said calmly.
“Not driving in jeeps, are they?” Sonny asked.
The glaring orb neared, and it split into multiple lights, a swarm of headlights racing after the van. “How’d you know they’d be driving in jeeps?”
“That’s what I was afraid of.” Sonny accelerated. The forest on the left opened up to orchards with fewer trees and a handful of residences.
Now Chris became irritated, and he didn’t hide it in his voice. “AQ tracking team?”
“AQ revenge team.” Sonny glanced at Chris’s GPS tracker. “That’s an interesting piece of equipment. Who you following?”
Chris turned it off and put it in the thigh pocket of his cargo pants. “Amelia Earhart.”
As the road veered right, Chris leaned to counteract the effect of the centrifugal force tugging on him. Weaving back and forth through both lanes, the men in the jeeps weren’t concerned about rules of the road. AK-47s fired on full auto, pecking holes in the van like the fangs of angry rattlesnakes. One round hissed past Chris’s head and struck the front windshield of the van.
Chris aimed for the driver in the closest jeep, but he wasn’t a hundred percent the shooter he used to be. Even if he was, adrenaline overrode his fine motor skills, the van veered, centrifugal force pulled him, AQ weaved, and the darkness worked against him. He missed. Then his muzzle hissed two-round and three-round bursts through his sound suppressor—still no satisfaction. The bullets’ smokeless powder smelled like chocolate, charcoal, and metal, and the hot empty shells ejected from the side of his rifle, hitting Sonny, who howled and rained f-bombs.
Chris stretched out his two- to three-round bursts to five-round bursts. Sonny’s verbal tirade increased in volume. One of the smoldering shells bounced off Sonny, hit Chris in the neck, and landed inside his shirt on the flesh of his shoulder. It burned, but he had more pressing issues to deal with. He nailed the driver in the nearest jeep. Although the road curved, the jeep didn’t. It headed for an off-road rendezvous with a tree.
“AQ is after you, not me, buddy,” Chris said. “You better start doing some explaining or start doing some walking.”
“I’m the one driving,” Sonny pointed out.
“I’m the one shooting,” Chris said coolly.
Sonny shook his head and scowled. “AQ is trying to imbed themselves in Syrian antigovernment forces, but I kind of distracted them. Now AQ wants my head on a stick. You can guess my opinion on the matter.”
Chris didn’t inquire further; instead, he refocused on the enemy. The AQ vehicles kept coming. Another jeep took the previous one’s place. Al Qaeda loomed large, Leviathan with too many heads to hack off. He and Sonny needed to break contact and escape. He shot as well as he could, and Sonny pushed the van as fast as he could, but they couldn’t escape the beast.
14
_______
The tangos in the nearest jeep pressed forward more militant than the others. Their AKs rattled without pause, even as a small pickup truck pulled up alongside the jeep. A tango standing in back of the truck seemed to be wielding a rocket-propelled grenade.
“RPG!” Chris warned. He tried to shoot the RPG thug, but he rushed the shot and accidentally hit a tango sitting in the passenger seat.
The RPG launched with a swoosh, a white tail of smoke trailing behind it.
Sonny pinched a tight curve to the right, Chris falling against Sonny. The rocket passed their van on the left side and pounded the trees with an explosion, its shockwave knocking the van.
Chris crawled away from Sonny, but now the same tango in the back of the pickup truck brought out another RPG to launch. Something told Chris that, this time, the RPG wouldn’t miss. He felt like a little bug about to be stomped by a giant. He said a silent prayer.
Meanwhile, bullets hammered the van. Their shooting concerned him, but the RPG concerned him more. A near miss from a bullet wouldn’t kill him, but a near miss from an RPG would.
The van slowed just before they hit a hairpin turn to the left. RPG Thug couldn’t take a clear shot, but the van was too top-heavy, and its side wheels caught air. “We’re gonna roll,” Sonny warned.
Chris struggled against centrifugal force by making his way to the outer edge of the passenger seat, hoping to redistribute some of their weight and prevent them from tipping over. He didn’t know if his weight would make a significant difference, but he did whatever he could to survive. The two-wheel ride seemed to last a minute but was probably only a few seconds. The van came back down on all four wheels.
The road straightened again, saving them from another two-wheel adventure but giving RPG Thug an easier shot. The straightaway gave Chris an easier shot, too. Aiming through the truck windows at RPG Thug’s upper body, he squeezed the trigger.
Click.
Oh, Lord. In all the excitement, he hadn’t noticed he’d run out of ammo. Frogmen called it a dead man’s click for obvious reasons. Although he couldn’t catch h
is breath, he felt a strange serenity. He regretted not being of more assistance to Hannah, and he regretted not having time to tell his congregation good-bye.
Lights from a large truck illuminated Chris and Sonny, approaching them head-on. Sonny veered to the side, narrowly avoiding it. The truck slowed but hit the smaller pickup with a horrific crack.
The al Qaeda jeeps didn’t lose a beat, and the vehicles behind continued their pursuit. Then another tight curve shook the heat off al Qaeda’s firepower. Chris’s right index finger depressed the button on the side of his rifle to eject the empty magazine. Simultaneously, his left hand drew a full magazine and inserted it firmly into the HK416. As the van slowed and swerved, the jeep sped up. The van didn’t tip onto two wheels this time, but the jeep gained on them. Chris seated a new bullet in the chamber of his rifle.
After Sonny pulled out of another hairpin curve, the jeep closed the gap. The decreased distance suited Chris fine for shooting. When the road straightened into the middle of a small town with buildings on both sides, Chris let out a controlled three-round burst, pounding the jeep’s driver. They pursued for a moment longer before slowing. Sonny accelerated, pulling farther away, but more al Qaeda overtook the decommissioned jeep.
“What’d you do to piss these guys off?” Chris asked.
“They were born pissed off.”
Upon exiting the small town, they gained elevation, climbing the mountain into the woods. Although al Qaeda outnumbered Chris and Sonny, they could only fit two vehicles abreast on the road. Now they only followed single file, and they seemed hesitant to near the van. But they still followed.
“We’re nearing Turkey,” Sonny said as they reached the top of the mountain.
“If we stop now and head out on foot, al Qaeda will spread out in the woods and outflank us,” Chris said. “Even if they don’t catch us, they’ll make so much noise that they’ll alert nearby border patrol units and we won’t be able to sneak into Turkey.”
“If we stay on this road, we’re five minutes away from getting trapped between the Turkish border crossing station and AQ.”
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