Hostage Zero

by John Gilstrap

  The rain had slowed to an unpleasant drizzle by the time Jonathan and his team arrived at the village, which itself seemed strangely quiet. Clearly, the place was occupied, but the residents were apparently all inside. The three of them gathered in the center of what would be the town square if the village were in Ohio. A face appeared in the window of a nearby hut, and then disappeared.

  “I’m taking theories,” Jonathan said.

  “Maybe they’re all just staying in out of the rain,” Boxers offered.

  “Or maybe they’re scared shitless because we’ve got enough guns and bullets to take over the country,” Harvey countered.

  Jonathan leaned more toward the latter than the former. He shouted, “ Hola! Hay alguien aqui? ” He meant that to be, Hello, is anyone here?

  More faces appeared in windows, but no one stepped out to greet them. Jonathan tried again. “ Me gustaria hablar con su lider, por favor. ” I want to speak to your leader. “ Somos amigos. ” We are friends. Then, to drive the point closer to home: “ Estamos aqui para herir sus enemigos! ”

  Boxers chuckled. “We’re here to hurt your enemies,” he translated. “I like that.”

  And so did the villagers. Two and three at a time, they wandered from their huts to see. They didn’t draw closer, but they didn’t run away, either. They gathered in clusters, talking among themselves but watching the newcomers.

  “There are no men,” Harvey said.

  Jonathan called out again, “ Me gustaria hablar con su lider, por favor. ”

  A woman stepped forward. She could have been fifty or eighty. “Our leaders are dead,” she said in Spanish. “ El Matador killed them.”

  Jonathan removed his helmet and offered his hand. “How do you do?” he said, also in Spanish. “My name is Jones. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Many losses,” she corrected. “I am Isabella. Is that man a doctor?” She pointed to the medical emblems on Harvey’s equipment pouches.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jonathan said.

  Harvey doffed his helmet and tucked it under his arm. “Hello.”

  “They attacked my daughter today,” Isabella said. “I think she needs a doctor.”

  “Show me where,” Harvey said. “I’ll be happy to help.”

  Isabella led the way back to her hut, the one from which she’d just emerged. Jonathan held back while Harvey led and Boxers stayed in the middle of the yard, looking scary. Hey, do what you’re good at. Isabella stopped at the doorway and motioned for Harvey to go in first. As they approached, Jonathan heard moaning, and then caught a glimpse of movement inside. It had the look and feel of a bedside death watch. Harvey must have caught the same vibe, because he shot a concerned look back at his boss before stepping across the threshold. Jonathan started to follow, but Isabella held up a hand to stop him.

  “Not you,” she said. And then she shouted something to the gathered villagers in such quick dialect that Jonathan caught very little of it. He heard the words for welcome and food, though, so he had a good idea what the intent was.

  Moving as one, the villagers closed in. Instantly friendly, they surrounded Jonathan and Boxers like they were family, flooding them with offers to sit and relax. Benches appeared in the middle of the compound, and then some tables, and within a couple of minutes, food started to arrive. Jonathan had no idea what it was, but the enthusiasm with which it was presented told him that he was receiving special treatment.

  Following Jonathan’s lead, Boxers slipped out of his gear and helmet, but kept it all close by. Neither of them removed their weapons. This was a party, and they were the guests of honor. The villagers seemed fascinated by Boxers’ size. Jonathan took odd pleasure in the Big Guy’s obvious discomfort at being scrutinized.

  Jonathan had positioned himself in a way to be able to watch the hut that had swallowed the third member of his team. Thirteen minutes into the party, Harvey reappeared, absent all of his equipment but his sidearm. He looked shaken, and there was blood on front of his uniform.

  “Excuse me,” Jonathan said, and he rose from the table.

  Boxers mimicked the action, moving like Jonathan’s reflection. “What’s up?” Then he turned and saw it, too. “Oh, this can’t be good,” he mumbled.

  Jonathan closed half the distance and waited for Harvey to join him. “Are you all right?” Jonathan asked. “You look terrible.”

  “We’re hunting animals, Boss,” Harvey said. “Fucking animals. You should see what they did to that little girl in there. She’s fourteen, for God’s sake.”

  Jonathan felt the heat in his neck. He had no desire to see. He’d seen enough and lost far too much to the kind of human predators that Harvey described. Everything that Felipe had told him was turning out to be true.

  “Will she be okay?” Jonathan asked.

  “I think she’ll live,” Harvey replied. “Being okay is a little too vague. A little too relative.”

  “Where is your weapon and equipment?” Boxers asked.

  Harvey pointed back to the hut. “I’ll get them in a minute.”

  “What, are you crazy?” Boxers said. “You can’t just-”

  “Hush, Box,” Jonathan said.

  “And what’s with the real names all of a sudden?”

  “What part of ‘hush’ confused you?” Jonathan grumped. To Harvey: “Are you okay?”

  Harvey shifted just his eyes to look at him. “She’s fourteen,” he repeated. “Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just been a long time.” He pivoted on his heel to return, then stopped and looked back. “More and more mission capable every minute.”

  Navarro drove a twenty-year-old Ford Bronco with enormous knobbed tires and more rust than paint on the body. “Buying vehicles is one of the toughest parts of living an anonymous life,” he explained to Gail as he carefully piloted the vehicle onto the main road off his potholed driveway. The attackers were all dead, and everything he owned was on fire. They’d hung around checking things out for about fifteen minutes, but then knew it was time to get going before emergency vehicles started responding to the smoke.

  Bruce hadn’t so much as cast a longing glance at his blazing home as they drove away. “If your car’s not a piece of crap that you can pick up for a few thousand bucks, you’re either going to leave a paper trail, or people are going to notice. That was hard for me, getting over the need to be noticed.”

  They drove in silence for a while. “Think I’ll see jail time?” he asked.

  Gail looked at him and gauged her answer, which could not have been more different than the one she would have given a year ago, when she was still a cop. “Not if you play your cards right.”

  She had his attention.

  “Think about it. You’ve got the kind of information that will make a prosecutor’s case. You can make them heroes. That kind of information comes with a price.” She let it settle on him. “If I were you, I’d hold out for immunity and a new identity.”

  “They’d give that to me, you think?”

  Gail shrugged. “Play a little poker. Lawyer up first chance you get, and then make your conditions clear. I happen to think they’ll roll over.”

  Navarro smiled, then chuckled. “Wouldn’t that be a kick in the-oh, shit.”

  Gail saw his eyes locked on his rearview mirror, and turned in her seat to see a sedan with a light bar pulling him over. “Do you know the car?”

  Navarro slapped his blinker and drifted to the right shoulder. “I know the guy. It’s Jerry Soaring Eagle. He’s sheriff around here.”

  Gail’s mind raced, but came up blank. What else was there to do but pull over? “Do you like him?”

  He gave her a look. “He’s the sheriff. It’s his job to know everybody. Mine was to keep from being known. We’re not buddies, but I think he’s a decent fellow.” Bruce rolled down the window and waited for the sheriff to arrive. “I left my wallet inside the house,” he mumbled.

  Gail turned in her seat to watch the cop approach. She noted that his weapon was holstered,
and that his gait was easy. He didn’t have a face from her angle-not until he got to the driver’s window and bent at the waist to look in.

  “Mr. Planchette, how are you?” the sheriff asked. Gail had almost forgotten Navarro’s alias.

  “I’m just fine, Sheriff,” Navarro said.

  The sheriff looked beyond the driver to lock eyes with Gail. His Indian blood was obvious in his features, and his face was set hard. “That so? I think if everything I owned was on fire, I’d be a little, I don’t know, something other than ‘just fine.’”

  Navarro paled and shot a look to Gail.

  Before she could say anything, the sheriff asked, “Are you Gail Bonneville?”

  Her jaw dropped. “I, uh, yes.”

  He fixed her with a stare. “Uh-huh. Well, could I ask you both to step out of the car?”

  Gail’s stomach tumbled and her mind raced, but options still evaded her. Obviously, the guy was really a cop. But how could he know who she was? She pulled the door handle as he opened Navarro’s door for him. “Sheriff, I need to tell you that I’m armed,” Gail said.

  “I figured as much,” the cop replied. “Don’t touch yours, and I won’t touch mine. How’s that?”

  Oh, this wasn’t right at all. At the very least, he should have asked to see a carry permit. She let Navarro leave the car first and then took her turn, so as not to overload the cop’s senses. Her door opened over a ditch, so she lost six inches in height on her first step. She walked around the right front fender and positioned herself directly in front of the worn Ford medallion. Ahead and to her right, Navarro looked terrified.

  The sheriff looked from one of them to the other and winced a little as he shook his head. “You know,” he said, “I just got the damnedest phone call about you two.”

  Navarro shot her a panicked glance. “Is that so?” Gail asked, trying her best to look unmoved.

  “It is, indeed,” the sheriff said. “I’ve been in this business for a long, long while. I’ve seen and heard a lot of strange things. After a while, given the nature of the job, you get used to being surprised. But this phone call beat everything else combined.”

  He took a deep breath, and his scowl deepened. “It’s just not every day that you get a call from the director of the FBI.”

  Isabella reemerged from the hut with Harvey and joined the others in the center. He had his helmet crooked on his head, his MP-5 in his hand, and his pack slung over his shoulder. He looked like he needed a very long nap.

  Isabella made a shooing motion with her hands-the exact same gesture Mama Alexander would use to chase away pigeons when Jonathan was a boy-and the villagers dispersed, leaving the table for Jonathan’s team and Isabella.

  “I’m sorry for your daughter,” Jonathan said in Spanish.

  “She is just one of many,” she said. “The soldiers are very bad men.” She looked uncomfortable. “Not you. Them. You saved my daughter. I am very thankful. Are you here for the white-haired boy?”

  The directness startled him-more so because this was a culture known for obfuscating everything from the weather to the color of the sky. Slipping a question like that into an unrelated discussion was an old interrogator’s trick, and Jonathan was pissed at himself for showing a reaction. With the option of a bluff gone, he said, “Yes. What makes you ask?”

  Isabella smiled ruefully, exposing a set of well-worn teeth, from which several were missing. “I notice things,” she said. “Sometimes those things are hard to see, sometimes they are easy. A white boy with white hair is easy to see. Soon after, white soldiers with guns are easy to see. I think maybe one has something to do with the other.”

  “His name is Evan,” Jonathan said. “He was taken from his home, and we are here to take him back.”

  Isabella’s eyebrows scaled her forehead. “Just three people?”

  Jonathan shrugged.

  “They are many,” Isabella said. “Thirty, maybe forty.”

  “Holy shit,” Boxers grunted.

  Jonathan ignored him. “Thirty or forty total, right? Not thirty or forty soldiers.”

  Isabella nodded. “Twenty soldiers. But many people with guns. Men and boys with guns keep men and boys without guns from running away. Keep enemies out.”

  Jonathan and Boxers had seen it before throughout the world. Young men with nothing to lose confuse firearms with manhood. You see it on the streets of the United States, too, but in the third world, those young men with guns had jobs to do, and they were handsomely rewarded for them. In his experience, the average age of guards and terrorists and pirates all hovered in the mid-teens. Like teenagers everywhere, they were genetically wired to be fearless. Combined with indoctrination to kill without hesitation, that fearlessness made them fierce warriors.

  Sensing the pall in the air, Jonathan changed the subject. “You say that Evan was here yesterday? How long ago?”

  Isabella nodded. “Five, six hours. Maybe longer. With the men who hurt my daughter.” Her eyes hardened. “With the boys who did that to her.” Clearly, she’d sensed their discomfort in engaging young people in combat. “The boys who do that to many of the women in the village. At fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, they are already devils. Do not pity them.”

  “How was Evan?” Jonathan pressed. “Was he in good health?”

  A sudden wariness changed Isabella’s face to a mask of suspicion. All trappings of hospitality evaporated. She seemed suddenly angry. “Leave now,” she said; but she didn’t rise.

  Jonathan recoiled. He looked to Boxers and got the shrug he knew he was going to get before he looked. “Have I done something wrong?” he asked.

  “Leave,” she said again. “I want no part of this.”

  Jonathan made no effort to comply. In fact he leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Isabella, if I have offended you, I apologize.”

  She glared. “You offend me by being here,” she said. “You see my daughter, I tell you about the devils on the hill, and all you care about is the white boy. The American. The gringo. My son is dead. Many sons are dead because of the devils, but no one cares. The white boy-your Evan-is another mother’s son. I help you help him, and I bring danger to all the people of my village. You don’t care about my people, I don’t care about yours. You must leave now.”

  Harvey cleared his throat, drawing all eyes around to him. “Where are the men?” he asked.

  “Dead,” she replied.

  “All of them?”

  “All who were old enough to fight. The others work up there.” She pointed toward a spot in the air that only she could see.

  “What work do they do?” Jonathan asked. He knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it from her.

  “Coca drug,” she said. “They have a factory up there. Young men and boys put to work up there. We stay here and bring them food.” She looked away as she said the last part, and Jonathan interpreted that to imply other services that one would expect from a village of slaves.

  “Why don’t you leave?” Harvey asked.

  “They are our sons,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “They work or they die. We stay or they die. If they try to escape, then we die. That’s why they work for the devil.”

  “Jesus,” Harvey breathed.

  Jonathan had seen it before, in all corners of the third world. The average American, accustomed to twenty-four-hour cable television and air-conditioning on demand, found it impossible to comprehend the suffering endured by the other eighty-five percent of the world’s population. While we prosecute hate speech, the rest of the world enslaves their enemies.

  Jonathan sighed noisily. “If you help us, we will fix it for you,” he said. “If you can help, we can make them stop hurting you.”

  Boxers got squirmy in his chair. “Um, Scorpion?” he said in English. “What are you doing?”

  Isabella looked interested. “I don’t think I understand,” she said.

  “We’ll kill some, and make the others too frightened to
ever hurt you again.”

  “We need to talk,” Boxers said in English.

  “There are only three of you,” Isabella said.

  “But we’re very good at what we do,” Jonathan countered.

  “Scorpion, stop!”

  Jonathan slammed the table with his hand. “Quiet!”

  “Are you listening to what you’re saying?” Boxers railed. “Do you think maybe a team meeting is in order?”

  Jonathan’s eyes flared. He shifted to English. “What’s the alternative? What would you have me do? We’re just going to sneak in, take our one precious cargo, and then leave the rest for these people to live with?”

  “That’s exactly what I’d have you do,” Boxers fired back. “That’s the mission. We’re surgical, remember? Not tactical. In a perfect world we sneak in and sneak out and never fire a shot. You’re talking about going to war.”

  Jonathan cocked his head. “Since when did you start backing away from starting wars?”

  “When I learned to count and discovered that three against a lot was really bad odds. What they have going here is not our fight. It’s their fight.”

  “But our fight is going to make it worse for them.”

  “So? Our fights always make things worse for somebody. It’s what we do.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.” Jonathan stood. He thought more clearly when he paced. “Just once, wouldn’t you like to actually finish the job we started? Just once, wouldn’t you like to solve the problem behind the problem and bring justice to everybody?”

  Boxers looked confused. “Are we still talking about Evan?”

  “Think about it,” Jonathan went on. He was on a roll. “Vietnam, Grenada, Mogadishu, Heavy Shadow, two Gulf Wars. Hell, Afghanistan. We moved in, we did what we had to do, and then we left a mess behind. We told ourselves we were successful because we achieved our objectives, but then we left misery behind.”

  “What’s this ‘we’ shit? We did our jobs. We would have stayed for as long as it took. But we were just the muscle for the assholes in Washington. Don’t lay their shit on me.”