Hostage Zero

by John Gilstrap

  “I’ll try, but remember the four-minute delay.”

  “I understand. Do your best to keep us informed. Now let’s clear the channel for a while.”

  Venice was unsurpassed in her skills and her commitment to mission, but left to her own devices she could get very damn chatty on the radio. Sometimes you just had to cut her off early, before she could develop an unmanageable head of steam.

  “I’ve got a question,” Harvey said after a couple of minutes had passed in silence. “In The Sandbox, we had a problem with Hadjis faking shit for the satellite coverage. They knew we were watching, so they’d put on a show. Any chance that our bad guys are doing that?”

  “Impossible,” Boxers said with hesitation.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Jonathan took that one. “Because Josie never knew about the satellite imagery. We kept that just for us. If he didn’t know it, then he couldn’t have told anyone.”

  There’d been an argument between the guards as it came time to herd the boys into their sleeping huts, but Evan had no idea what it was about until Charlie explained it to him after the fact. “Some of the guardia think it’s a mistake to put you and me in the same hut. They worry that we can make plans that no one else can understand.”

  Evan shrugged. “Well… yeah.” When he said it, “yeah” had two syllables.

  The argument had lasted long enough for them to be the last to enter. Charlie’s feet had barely cleared the jamb when the wooden door slammed shut and something heavy slid across the opening. After the bolt or whatever it was slid into place, Evan heard a heavy rattle that sounded like a lock being snapped closed.

  The hut held ten army-style cots, arranged in two ranks down either side of the rectangular interior, but with everybody inside, Evan counted only nine occupants, including himself. The heat and stench of the place were off-the-chart awful. Ten seconds in, he was seriously thinking about vomiting; but then the puking plan was derailed when one of the hut’s residents threw a pair of flip-flops at Charlie, beaning him on the forehead with the first one, and missing with the second, which sailed into the corner near the shit can. The rest of the kids cheered at that, and then there was a long string of angry Spanish, punctuated with pointing and derisive laughter.

  The kid who threw the shoe jutted out his neck and made a move on Charlie, his shoulders and arms set for battle. As the distance closed, the fight seemed inevitable, so Evan stepped out to help his new friend. He met the attacker with a football-style forearm block to his chest, and the force of the collision knocked the other kid to the ground. His eyes hot and angry, the attacker tried to stand, but Evan knocked him down again. On the far end of the hut, the other boys started to shout, and they surged forward.

  Evan didn’t care. Every one of them was smaller than he, and he was tired of being pushed around. If they wanted a fight, he’d give them one. He needed to hit someone, to break something. If it had to be noses and teeth, that was fine. God knew it wouldn’t be his first time.

  The boy he’d knocked down crab-walked backward toward the others, who helped him to his feet. The war was on. Shit was going to fly.

  Amid all the shouting, he never heard Charlie yelling at him to stop. He was surprised as hell, then, when arms clamped across his chest from behind and swirled him away from the fight. “Stop it!” Charlie yelled.

  Evan was appalled. “Stop? Are you kidding? That kid just threw shoes at you!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Charlie said.

  Behind them, the door to the hut flew open, and three guards stormed in, rifles at the ready.

  Charlie darted over to them, his arms outstretched to show restraint. “No, no, no, no,” he said. And then there was a long string of Spanish. The guards seemed unmoved at first, but the longer Charlie talked, the more the men seemed to relax. On the far side, the other occupants of the hut had fallen silent, and went through the motions of climbing into their cots.

  After thirty seconds, the incident had passed. From body language alone, Evan could tell that Charlie was finishing up some kind of negotiation. Cautiously satisfied, it seemed, the guards nodded and backed out the door. The locks slid shut, and it was over.

  Charlie turned and glared at the residents, then walked the few steps to pick up the flip-flops that they’d thrown at him.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Evan asked.

  “Don’t ever try to fight my fights for me, okay?” He pointed at the end bunk-the one closest to the shit can. “That one’s yours. The newest guy gets the stink.”

  Evan cocked his head, stunned. “You’re welcome,” he said.

  Charlie turned on him. “I didn’t thank you,” he snapped. “Don’t think you understand this place, Evan. We have rules here, and one of the rules is that the new guy gets the stink. Because I’m your guardian angel, I get you, which means that I get the stink, too.” He moved to the second-to-last cot, leaving an empty one between himself and the next guy. He sat on the edge, then lifted his filthy feet on the end of the cot closest to the aisle and lay back. “Now try to sleep.”

  Evan followed, but sat on the edge of his own cot, facing Charlie, his elbows resting on his knees. “He threw shit at you, man. You can’t let that happen. I live in a dormitory, too, and I’m telling you, you’ve got to fight for your reputation.”

  Charlie rolled his head to make eye contact, his expression one of mild amusement. “Does this really look like a dormitory to you? This is a concentration camp. Siberia without the air-conditioning. Around here, you can fight every day or live every day. The fuck do I care how close to the shit can I sleep? This whole fucking place smells the same. Up there, back here, what difference does it make? Its not worth getting your nose broke or balls beat. It’s just not.” He shifted his gaze back to the ceiling, then closed his eyes. “Now go to sleep.”

  Outside, in the distance, an engine fired up, and a moment later, bright light flared through the windows, turning the inside of the hut to day and casting sharp shadows on the walls and ceiling. Almost as one, the boys in the hut all sat up and whispered their concerns to each other.

  “Well, that’s different,” Charlie said, sitting up. “People really coming to get you?” he asked.

  Evan screwed up his face and shook his head. “I wish. Anybody wants to, I’m happy to come along.”

  Charlie chuckled, then lay back down, placing his forearm over his eyes.

  Evan followed suit, but was so many miles away from falling to sleep that he was already worried about how long the night was going to be.

  After about five minutes, as the kids at the far end began to fill the room with the sounds of sleep, Charlie whispered, “You awake?”

  “Oh my God, yes.”

  “I want you to do me a favor. If some away team does beam down here for you, take me back to the mother ship with you, okay?”

  Sometimes, it’s the stupidest images that give you the giggles.

  Jonathan’s earpiece crackled, “They’re moving again. Away from you.”

  Venice had been tracking the movements of the two men who had left the compound with guns, and had been fortunate enough in two four-minute cycles of pictures to catch them in the act of setting a booby trap on the trail they were walking. Because of the jungle cover, she wasn’t able to determine what munitions they were using, but the fact that it took them so long told Jonathan that it was something pretty rudimentary. By zooming in closely to the operation and using a stylus on her computer screen back in Fisherman’s Cove, she’d been able to mark the location of the trap to within a fraction of one second of latitude and longitude, and she’d already uploaded that location to the GPS devices Jonathan and his team were carrying.

  It only made sense that the team would travel to the farthest point to set the first trap and then work backward. Reversing the order would be a terrific way to get snared by your own genius.

  “Scorpion, I show you only about a hundred and fifty yards from the location of the trap,
” Venice said.

  Jonathan keyed his mike. “Keep focused on the bad guys, Mom. I’ve got the coordinates of the trap here. We’ll find it. I want to make sure that we find the second one if they set it.”

  “I’m liking my decision to come along less and less every minute,” Harvey grumped. “Booby traps. Jesus.”

  Jonathan admired Boxers for just letting it go. It was safe to say that the Big Guy didn’t like strangers in general-make that people in general-and he hated having tagalongs on missions. For him to keep his mouth shut on a setup like Harvey just offered took enormous self control.

  It took all of five minutes for them to close the distance and arrive at the site of the first trap. When the GPS said that they were ten yards away, Jonathan brought the team to a halt and gathered them around, combining them into an unacceptably compact target, but judging the risk to be low at this point.

  Besides, given the darkness of the night, they’d have been invisible to anyone more than just a few feet away.

  They spoke in whispers. “Okay,” Jonathan said, “the trap they set is about ten yards up the trail. Harvey, go find it.”

  “ What? ” His tone was one of abject horror.

  Jonathan laughed. “I’m kidding,” he said.

  Harvey brought a hand to his chest. “Holy shit.”

  Jonathan turned serious again. “From here on out, we’re prepared for battle. I want weapons charged and safeties off, which means special attention to trigger discipline. Roger that?”

  Harvey made a show of thumbing the safety switch on his MP5 to three-round burst. Jonathan and Boxers had both been in fire mode since they’d slung their weapons. Trigger discipline meant that you kept your finger away from the damn thing until it was time to shoot. The American public would be horrified to know the number of their sons and daughters who had been killed in various wars by some inattentive yahoo who tickled his weapon’s trigger at the wrong time.

  Jonathan continued, “I’m going to go on white light to find this trap, so keep your eyes averted. Box, I want you for close cover. Harvey, stay back here and turn your back to me. One of us needs continued good night vision. We good?”

  “Good as gold,” Boxers said.

  “Oo-rah,” Harvey grunted.

  Jonathan smiled. Oo-rah was the Marine Corps version of the Army’s hoo-ah (Marines always had to be different), and it meant that Harvey’s Inner Marine was being reborn.

  Snapping his NVGs out of the way, Jonathan brought his muzzle-mounted flashlight to life and pointed it at the ground at a spot three feet in front of him. He bent low at the waist to a half-squat and advanced cautiously, scanning the light from one edge of the path to the other to search for any signs of a trip wire or other triggering device. Next to him, his hips pressed to Jonathan’s ribs, Boxers advanced in lockstep with him, his rifle trained on the trail up ahead, trusting Jonathan to find any hazards they might step on. The two men had depended on each other so completely and so successfully over so many years and through so many battles that it seemed sometimes as if they knew each other’s thoughts.

  They advanced with agonizing slowness-the kind of advance that made younger soldiers impatient and frequently cost them their lives. A minute or so into it, Jonathan stopped and consulted his GPS, which said they should be within a foot or two of whatever they were looking for.

  Where was it? What was it? He took another few tiny steps forward, then stopped and consulted his GPS again. “Okay, Box,” he said, “don’t move anymore, okay?”

  The Big Guy froze. “Am I in danger?” he asked. He never stopped scanning for potential targets.

  “I don’t know. This is definitely the spot that Venice marked, but I’m not seeing anything. I was expecting a trip wire. A grenade or something. I’m not seeing anything.”

  “What about a mine?” Boxers asked.

  Wow, Jonathan thought. Could these guys be that sophisticated? He pulled the light from its muzzle mount and stooped to his haunches, scanning the dirt of the path for any signs of disturbance. “I don’t suppose you have a ground-penetrating radar on you,” he quipped.

  “I left it in my other pants.”

  The hairs on Jonathan’s arms and the back of his neck felt electrified as he lowered himself to his knees and leaned to within a few inches of the dirt. “They’re damn good,” he mumbled. He saw nothing. Leaning closer to the ground, he moved the light to the side, hoping that the different angle might give him a different perspective.

  He was about to abandon the effort and move on when he saw the brush marks. They were just light track marks in the dirt-an obvious effort to even out the ground-too regular in their appearance to be a natural occurrence. There was only one reason Jonathan could think of for someone to brush over an area like that, and it was to conceal a hole that had been dug for a mine. (If anything else had been concealed, the burier would have just used his foot-something a mine installer would be foolish to try.)

  “I found it,” Jonathan announced. “Good call, Box.”

  “I live to serve,” Boxers replied. “Now mark it, and let’s get on with it.”

  “No, we need to pull it out.”

  Big Guy sighed loudly. “I hate it when you say macho shit like that. I hate it even more when you play with toys that can turn us both into humidity.”

  “If we leave it, we’ll have to worry about it during extraction,” Jonathan explained. “We’ll be moving a lot faster then, I expect. For now, we’ve got the luxury of time.”

  He wasn’t soliciting votes on this. He unclipped his M4 from its sling and set it on the ground. With the light clamped in his teeth like an old stogie, he drew his KA-BAR from its scabbard on his left shoulder and gently inserted the blade into the disturbed earth. As he’d expected, it went in easily, indicating that the hole had been gently backfilled. Using the tip of the blade, he began the painstaking process of exposing the face of the mine. After three minutes, there it was.

  “Well, well, well,” he mused aloud, removing the light from his mouth. “The Soviet Union lives on. We’ve got a PMN-2 here.” He returned the KA-BAR to its sheath.

  “Of course we do,” Boxers growled. “What’s the sense of finding a mine if it’s not a nasty one?”

  The PMN-2 anti-personnel mine first arrived in large numbers in Southeast Asia. Smaller and lighter than its predecessors, the weapon was extremely man-portable, and with an explosive load of one hundred grams of a TNT/RDX mixture, it carried a hell of a wallop, guaranteed to rip off the foot that tripped it, and presenting a high likelihood of doing substantially more damage than that. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan had seen more than their fair share of these nasty buggers.

  On the positive side, because they were so widely carried by so wide a spectrum of soldiers, the trigger mechanism was a forgiving one, thus explaining how so many untrained insurgents survived long enough to get them into the ground.

  Jonathan said, “If you want to take a few steps back, I won’t think badly of you.”

  “If you blow me up, I’ll beat your ass blue for all eternity,” Boxers said. “Just do what you’ve got to do, and let’s get on with the fun part.”

  Smiling around the flashlight he’d returned to his mouth, Jonathan used the first two fingers of both hands to oh-so-gently excavate the loose dirt from around the mine. Fully exposed, it was about the size of his hand.

  “I’m lifting it out now,” he said around the flashlight. “Last chance to walk away.”

  “A daily ass-whuppin’ for all eternity, boss. Just think about that. Succeed or fail, I figure I win either way.”

  Fair enough. Jonathan raised to his haunches and then to a squat, his feet straddling the hole he’d just dug. He reached between his feet, tickled his fingers under the explosive mechanism, and stood. On a different day, if stealth were not a priority, he might have just Frisbee’d the mine into the jungle and let it blow up, but today he didn’t have the luxury. He was reasonably sure that he remembered how to defuse a
PMN-2, but reasonably wasn’t sure enough. He settled on carrying the weapon five feet into the jungle and gently setting it down.

  He stood tall again, clapped the dirt from his hands, and reassembled his weapons load.

  “I guess some spider monkey is in for the surprise of his life, huh?” Boxers joked.

  Jonathan smiled and turned off his flashlight, then snapped his NVGs back over his eyes. He keyed his mike. “The booby trap is secure. Have our friends set any more?”

  Venice’s voice said, “Negative. I’ll keep watching them and let you know if they stop again.”

  Harvey rejoined them. “What was it?” he asked.

  Jonathan caught him up on the removal of the mine and its current location.

  “They mined a trail that the locals use to travel to and from the compound,” Harvey recapped, his voice heavy with disdain. “These guys are assholes of a whole new order.”

  “I don’t know,” Boxers said. “When your business is using kid labor to produce a product that kills kids all over the world, I think you might have already set the asshole bar as high as it can go.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Jonathan saw the aura of the compound in the sky twenty minutes before they reached its outer perimeter. The factory glowed like daytime, thanks to slung arrays of incandescent lightbulbs that gave the place the look of a 1960s Route One used-car lot.

  Any remaining doubt that the enemy had been alerted to this raid evaporated the instant Scorpion and his team got to see the compound up close. In addition to the lights, teams of soldiers wandered about in random pairs and trios, most with rifles slung, but enough with them at the ready that it was clear they’d been alerted to something.

  But for all their nervousness, they’d forgotten the basic tenets of defense. By turning the center of the compound to day, they no doubt took solace that no one could sneak around the interior; but they’d rendered themselves blind to intruders’ approach from outside their perimeter. Even worse, the noise from the generator they used to create the light masked the intruders’ approach.