Age of Blood

by Weston Ochse

  “Wait,” shouted YaYa. “We don’t have Hoover!”

  Everyone spun to stare out the back, when suddenly the dog broke from the edge of the brush. She ran as fast as she could, but the plane was already going too fast.

  Holmes grabbed the crew chief. “We’re not leaving without the dog. Either slow down or park this fucker.”

  The crew chief, a thirty-something Mexican who looked like he didn’t take shit from anyone, immediately began to yell through his communications gear for the pilot to slow down. He had to repeat the word “perro” three times, but eventually the pilot got it. The plane slowed to crawl long enough for Hoover to close the distance, leap aboard the ramp, and collapse in a pile at the feet of YaYa. The dog’s fur was matted with blood and brush. Her tactical harness was also bloodstained. A piece of uniform was caught in her teeth.

  “Looks like she took care of the drivers,” YaYa said.

  The ramp snapped shut about the same time the pilot took the C-130 Hercules straight up into the air. Everyone held on, praying the engines wouldn’t stall before the pilot had a chance to level out.

  40

  MEXICAN SPECIAL FORCES C-130 HERCULES. 22,000 FEET.

  Ten minutes later they leveled off.

  Laws and Yank were recovering and organizing equipment.

  YaYa was cleaning Hoover’s fur as best he could.

  Holmes had produced a Thuraya satellite phone and was speaking animatedly to Billings.

  Which left Walker, who took some time to check each of the SPG civilians, leaving Jen for last. For the most part they’d held up. As firefights went, it had been pretty one-sided. Still, as one of the techs mentioned, it was much louder than the first-person shooters he liked to play in his mother’s basement.

  When Walker finally sat down beside Jen, he placed a hand on hers. She jumped, then gave him a quick look.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was just…”

  “I know. Let’s talk through it,” he said. “Tell me what you saw.”

  “I saw them come after us and I saw your bullets go into them.” She stared at him with a look halfway between awe and fear. He hoped she’d never look at him like that again. She licked her lips and lowered her eyes. “You’re very good at what you do.”

  “And the man with the LAW? Did you see him too?”

  She nodded. “He just … disappeared.”

  “He was trying to do that to us, Jen.”

  She looked at him sharply. “Don’t you think I know that?” She pulled her hand away and covered it with her own. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop it from shaking.

  “What is it you thought we do, Jen?! We’re SEAL Team 666. We fuck up those things no one else is capable of fucking up.”

  She stared at him in shock.

  Looking around, he realized that everyone was looking at him now, too. Even Holmes.

  He turned to her. “Jen, I’m sorry. Listen.…” She turned away from him. He put his hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off.

  Laws came over and pointed to where he was sitting. “This seat taken?”

  Hell yes, it was taken. Walker was sitting in it. But then he saw Laws raise his eyes and make a serious command face. Walker reluctantly stood and traded places, going over to help Yank with the equipment.

  “Looks like you handled that pretty well,” Yank said after a few moments.

  “Fuck you,” Walker said. He lowered his head and began the mechanical work of breaking down the SR-25 and cleaning its separate parts.

  “Although maybe yelling at her and dropping F-bombs wasn’t the most sensitive choice,” Yank added.

  Walker felt the heat rise in his face as he glared at Yank.

  “Easy now,” Yank said, not even bothering to look in his direction. “There’s a lot of stress bouncing around this here Mexican airplane. No reason to let it affect you. Why don’t you recite some poetry or something.”

  “Poetry?”

  “Yeah. Poetry. Shit like, I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. That sort of poetry. I’m told it calms you down.”

  Walker couldn’t help laughing. “You were told that, were you?”

  “Sure was.”

  “And who told you that?”

  Yank glanced at Walker before he answered. “Oprah.”

  “As in the talk show woman?”

  “The same.”

  Walker laughed again. “You watch Oprah?”

  “Don’t go hating on the big black successful woman. She got more money than Trump.”

  “I’m not hating on her. I just thought it was funny, you watching Oprah.”

  “Got shot in Afghanistan last trip. Had to remove my spleen. It was either that or watch Maury do DNA tests for people who shouldn’t even be having kids.”

  “I didn’t know you were shot in the Stan. What happened?”

  “Playing rodeo with the MARSOC boys in their motorcycle gang.”

  “What?”

  “SOCOM created a long-range reconnaissance unit with motorcycles as our primary delivery mechanism. We moved in and out fast and we could go where other vehicles couldn’t. This one group, AMC 120—stands for Afghanistan Motorcycle Club—was mostly Marine Special Forces with me as the token SEAL. We were doing village stabilization operations, trying to win hearts and minds, when this truck took off like a bat out of hell. Me and a jarhead followed it into an ambush. My buddy got his head crushed by a boulder. Can you believe it? They set an avalanche on us. Talk about fucking old-school. Anyway, they shot me and my bike up pretty good, but I managed to escape. My armor took all the damage except for the round that took my spleen.”

  “Motorcycles and combat,” Walker said, shaking his head. “Where’d you learn to ride?”

  “My adopted father used to take us out on the sand dunes and let us go crazy on little 250s. Riding is cool.”

  “Even when there’s an avalanche coming down on you?”

  “Maybe not then.”

  Walker looked over at Jen for a moment before he spoke again. “I was always worried she’d find out about the blood and violence. I used to come home and she’d claim to know what I did, but she only knew what she saw on video or read in a report. Being there is so different.”

  Yank grunted. “I’d never let my girlfriend go out on a mission. Well, if I had a girlfriend.”

  “Like I had a choice.”

  “You had a choice who your girlfriend was. There are plenty of girls outside the fence who are screaming to get into SEAL UDT shorts.”

  “But they aren’t Jen.”

  “But they aren’t Jen,” Yank repeated. “She got you good, brother.”

  “Yeah. She got me real good.”

  “So what about that poem. Do you know one?”

  “I know a couple. There was this guy on the USS Tennessee who used to recite it at all hours. It made me want to find a girl just like the one in the poem.”

  “What is it, There was a girl from Venus?”

  Walker kicked Yank good-naturedly. “No. Nothing like that.”

  “Okay, Mr. Poet Master, give.”

  “Let me see if I can remember.” Walker put down the pistol he’d been cleaning and stared into space. Then, when he was ready, he said, “‘She walks in beauty, like the night, Of cloudless climes and starry skies, And all that’s best of dark and bright, Meet in her aspect and her eyes.’”

  When he finished, Walker looked over at Yank, whose jaw hung open. His eyes shined wistfully. “Man, that was beautiful.” He reached out toward Walker.

  Walker pushed him away. “Very funny.”

  Yank laughed. “Seriously. Where’d that come from?”

  “I wanted the woman from the poem and I found her.” He stared over at Jen with a longing he usually kept a tight hold on.

  “Then you’d better figure out a way to get back over there. If your woman is all that, then she’s completely out of your league.”

  “Oh, I knew that from the beginning. Completely.
”

  “You ever tell her about the poem?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Why not?”

  Walker gave him a look that meant to convey Do you know how embarrassed I’d be?

  Yank shook his head. “Fuck that. A poem like that is like a nuclear weapon or a silver bullet. You use it and that’s all you’ll need.”

  “You think?”

  “Am I black?”

  “Wait? You’re black? With a name like Yankowski I never knew.”

  Yank chuckled as he cranked up a middle finger. When he was done, he asked, “So who wrote that poem?”

  “Lord Byron.”

  Yank nodded. “Of course he did. The original lady-killer strikes again.”

  41

  SOMEWHERE DARK.

  She felt every bump, turn, and stop. With her wrists and ankles tied, she’d been unable to control herself as she rolled around in the back of what she’d come to call the pain box. She sensed it was probably a truck, but without the benefit of sight, her mind had begun playing tricks on her. Once she’d slammed into a side so hard she’d blacked out. Didn’t they know she was rolling around back there? Weren’t they smart enough to know that she wasn’t supposed to die? After all, how could they get the ransom from her father without proof of life?

  She’d seen all the movies. She’d even been to a Secret Service class, preparing her on the possibility of being kidnapped. The instructor, an old agent who’d taken a bullet for President Reagan, had gone into great detail about what to do and what not to do. Antagonizing her captors was one of the things she wasn’t supposed to do.

  But for the last God-knows-how-many miles she’d been doing her best to do just that. She realized that her gag kept them from actually hearing her through the metal of the damn box she was in, but that didn’t stop her one bit. She began with an evolutionary postulate regarding their mothers and specific animals from the order of primates, and the probability of offspring occurring as a result of the unlikely mingling. Then she moved on to the idea that being able to fornicate oneself was possibly a good thing, encouraging them over and over to do this, and to enjoy it, and to do it some more. Finally, she succumbed to the tried and true measure of anger, which was to combine both ideas into one, encouraging and hypothesizing what a creature might look like if it was the result of man on beast copulation, with said procreation coming out their collective asses.

  And then finally the pain stopped.

  The truck slowed, then pulled over to the side of the road.

  And for several heavenly minutes, she was still, unmoving, unrolling, basking in her full body bruises, breathing heavily through her gag.

  She felt the truck shift as someone got out of the cab. The scrabble of a key in a lock, then the rattle of a handle, then light so blinding that it felt like her eyes were pierced by spikes full of sun. She fought to see past the pain. First there were two figures, then one seemed to remove the head of the other; she heard it bounce wetly past her and rebound off the far wall. The body was placed inside, next to her. She willed herself not to scream behind her gag as the man’s neck, still gushing blood, rested inches from the edge of her peripheral vision.

  Then the remaining man pulled her to the door.

  “I am here to rescue you,” he said, his English well-spoken but with a Mexican accent. He removed the ties about her ankles and untied her wrists. Then he put his hands on her shoulders. “Tell them thank you for their help.”

  She tried to speak, but her voice was dry and cracked. Finally, she managed, “What?”

  “You heard me, girl. Tell them the man in the white suit thanks them.”

  “Who … who are you?”

  “Adios.”

  He turned and walked away into the painful light. He was speaking into a cell phone.

  “Wait!” she cried. “Where are you going?”

  “I have a meeting with your father.”

  “Stop—help me. At least tell me where I am.”

  He turned back and said, “Do not worry, little burra. Help will soon be here. Rest. Stay. Your heroes will come for you.”

  There was a certain finality to his words. But as he started to leave once more, she couldn’t help herself. “What about my father? Will you tell him where I am?”

  The man stopped once more. “I most certainly will,” he said with a smile. “Now rest. Help will come soon.”

  He took three steps and merged with the light. She tried to see where he was going, but the light was too bright. Still she stared and eventually the brightness dimmed and her vision started to adjust. She was on the side of a road somewhere. Cars and trucks were roaring by. Occasionally a large truck would pass so close that her smaller truck would rock back and forth.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting or how many times the truck had rocked, but eventually she felt something roll into her lower back. It stayed there. She knew what it was without looking. She couldn’t move. If the head resting against her back moved, she might just scream.

  Then came another truck.

  Then came the rocking from side to side.

  The head rolled to her left and touched the hand she’d put out to steady herself. She stared at the face of the dead man and it stared back at her. And finally she did scream.

  42

  MEXICAN SPECIAL FORCES C-130 HERCULES.

  Twenty minutes away from landing and it looked like Walker might have made up for being an ass with his girl. Laws watched as they sat together, uber-aware that they were the center of attention, their hands resting beside them on the bench, barely touching. Where she wouldn’t even look at him before, Jen was now at least giving him the time of day. Not being able to hear what they were saying, Laws created his own dialogue:

  I’m sorry.

  You’re an idiot.

  I’m sorry.

  You’re an idiot.

  Over and over and over.

  He could almost make the words fit as he read their lips. The idea that they might be saying what he was thinking made him smile.

  Holmes scooted down and relaxed beside him. “We got a problem.”

  “Jesus Christ on a Big Wheel, what now?”

  “Do you want the good news first or the bad news?”

  “Fuck it. It’s been a long day already. Between a fake sea monster, a cult of people who wear other people’s skin, a Mexican Monty Python Revival Tour featuring We are the Knights who say Virgin, fucking homunculi, a sorcerer who can make my skin rot, and a fucking attack by some misguided Mexican cartel, I feel like a combat Alice way the fuck down the rabbit hole.”

  Holmes stared at him. “Are you done?”

  But Laws was just getting started. “And it is a rabbit hole. We’re on a one-way trip down a Mexican slip-and-slide, following a fucking Zeta assassin werewolf who looks so much more like Ricardo Montalbán every time I see him that I want to start yelling, ‘De plane! De plane!,’ just like Hervé Villechaize did every fucking episode of Fantasy Island.”

  “Now are you done?”

  “Hardly, Sam. I’m just getting started. I—”

  “We found the girl.”

  All heads turned to Holmes.

  “You what?” Laws used a hand to close his jaw, which had dropped open.

  “We identified the truck. Emily Withers is inside.”

  “Hot damn!” Walker cried.

  Yank and YaYa high-fived.

  “Please tell me she’s alive. Please tell me that’s not the bad news you’re going to give.”

  Holmes nodded. “She’s alive.”

  Laws held up a hand. “Wait, do we have any other proof of life?”

  “Only that their confidential source provided the information.”

  “Confidential source?” Laws laughed. “I’ll give you two guesses who that is. I’m telling you, I don’t trust him.”

  “Me neither. But we have to trust this until we have other information.”

  Laws shook his head. “Then what�
��s the bad news?”

  “Ms. Billings and Senator Withers are inbound on a private jet. They’re scheduled to land forty-two minutes after we land. Our orders are to wait and escort him to the embassy, where he’ll be reunited with his daughter.”

  “What about the girl?” Jen asked. “Who’s going to secure the girl?”

  Laws nodded. “Costello is right, Sam. We need to make sure the girl is secure.”

  “She should reach the embassy about the same time we do. She’s under guard and has a police escort.”

  “It seems too easy,” YaYa said.

  “Yeah, and if it seems too easy,” Walker added, “then it is too easy. Something’s not right here.”

  “Do you feel it too?” Holmes said, voicing his own worry.

  Everyone nodded. Hoover growled as if she were answering, too.

  “Then what do we do, boss?” Walker looked at Holmes.

  “Have any great ideas?” Laws asked.

  Holmes gritted his teeth, his mouth a thin, worried seam. “Not as long as we’re locked aboard the plane.” Then a light brightened his eyes. He stood and walked over to where the crew chief was dozing. Holmes woke him and they had a quick conversation. The Mexican sergeant seemed to be arguing, then acquiesced. He immediately moved to a locker and began pulling out parachutes.

  Everyone stood, watching as he stacked four huge packs in the middle of the floor. Laws recognized them: T-11s. State-of-the-art if you wanted a nonmaneuverable parachute, but pretty fucking crappy if you wanted to actually plan on where to land. They were even slower than their predecessors, the T-10C. The T-11s allowed for a descent of nineteen feet per second, while the T-10Cs allowed for a descent of twenty-four feet per second. Not something he wanted to strap on unless the plane was burning, and even then … “Uh, boss? If you have a plan, sharing is caring.”

  “Musso, go up in the pilot’s cabin and help vector them in to the senator’s daughter.”

  Just as Musso stood, the plane hit a pocket of air and shook with the turbulence. He looked a little green as he caught his balance. One of the other techs handed him a tablet, and he made his way to the front.