by J C Ryan
“Hey!” he shouted. Whereupon the monkey with the stuffed cheeks began spitting soggy dog food into his paw and throwing it at Rex. Then it became a full-on attack. The monkeys surrounded him, separating him from Digger, and pelted him with dog food and other soggy stuff, the origin of which he didn’t want to know.
Abandoning his food, his knapsack, and Digger’s bowls, he beat a hasty retreat toward the van, shouting “Come Digger!”
He hadn’t gone ten steps before the leader of the unruly troop rushed up form behind and jumped on his back. Rex was not unaccustomed to a pack weighing thirty pounds or more hanging from his back, but an angry male monkey of the same weight, and ten or more following in support of the one on his back with bared teeth and making angry, high-pitched noises, was a different matter altogether. He didn’t even have time to worry the animal would bite him, before in the corner of his eye he caught something moving from his left side in a flash and hitting the monkey on his back, carrying it sideways.
Rex whirled to see Digger throwing the monkey on the ground.
“Digger, leave it!” he yelled, but it was too late.
Digger ripped the monkey’s throat out with one savage jerk of his head.
“Oh, shit!”
While all the other monkeys in the vicinity set up a howling like a whole herd of banshees, Rex looked around. There were no witnesses except the monkeys. He and Digger were in big trouble if they stayed. He didn’t even think to go back for the knapsack and bowls. They could be replaced. Digger couldn’t.
“Come on, boy, let’s get out of here!”
He ran for the van, with Digger on his heels. The monkeys followed, but at a respectful distance. They were still howling with rage. Rex opened the driver’s door, urged Digger to jump in, and jumped in after him. He peeled out of the parking lot like the devil was pursuing him, and indeed, the monkeys might have been possessed. Some of them chased the van, jumping from tree to tree at a rate Rex couldn’t believe. He was forced to slow for the speed limit and because he didn’t want a constable to stop him and inquire why twenty or thirty pissed-off monkeys were following him.
The monkeys gave up their pursuit, just as Rex entered the village of Bilaspur and pulled into the nearest parking lot to check on Digger to see if he came out of it unscathed. He was good.
While scratching him behind the ears to comfort him he said, “Digger, thanks buddy. But let’s not kill any more monkeys while we’re here, okay?”
As if he understood, Digger growled low in his throat which could have meant, “Okay, but only as long as they don't attack one of us.”
Rex looked around to get his bearings and noticed a restaurant across the street. “I can’t get you a steak in this country where cows are holy animals, boy, but you deserve a chicken at least. I’ll be right back.”
A few minutes later, he was back, with two orders of chicken baked in a tandoor oven in a to-go bag. He drove leisurely to the park where they’d had lunch the day before, or rather where Digger had had Rex’s lunch the day before. Rex didn’t remember seeing any monkeys, but he took the precaution of eating inside the van, anyway. He took out his chicken and then handed Digger the other bag. Digger took it delicately in his teeth and jumped over the seats, into the cargo compartment, where he ripped the bag apart and devoured the chicken inside.
While he ate, Rex thought about his morning, which led him to think about families. He’d had a family – a mother, father, sister and brother. Terrorists killed them, as he’d remembered in depth he didn’t often afford himself today. It wasn’t just about oaths. He often felt isolated, alone in the world, and save for Digger, he literally was alone.
When he’d joined the military, his family had been his military brothers and a few sisters. The rigors of basic training had made them fast friends, even while it made them rivals. He’d lost those friends, except for Frank Millard, when he was plucked straight from basic and transferred to Delta Force training. He hadn’t known at the time just how extraordinary that had been, but he learned soon enough. It was unprecedented.
He’d made other friends during his Delta training, but fewer. All those men had been focused on surviving the toughest course there was, or so they thought. They saw him as a threat to their own successful journey to become elite Delta Force operators. When the time came for the survivors to be assigned to a squad, they’d become even closer than brothers, but that time never came for Rex. Once again, an inexplicable circumstance had washed him out. He’d spent more than half a week drunk before CRC caught up with him.
CRC turned out to be even tougher than Delta Force, and Rex hadn’t minded. Someone, he thought maybe the Old Man, John Brandt, had been behind the scenes since his dossier had crossed his desk, right at the beginning of his Marine enlistment. He’d funneled Rex through his initial training and then cut off his choices. And Rex had become, he thought, a valuable asset.
He didn’t know what to think about CRC now. His orders that led to an ambush had come from the Old Man himself. Rex didn’t want to believe that he’d become a liability that needed to be sanitized, but he had gone against his orders not to interfere with the drug trade he’d been monitoring. If Brandt had wanted to be rid of him, he’d have preferred a shot to the back of the head to an ambush that killed his friends. Frank Millard had turned out to be the head of Phoenix Unlimited, his assigned logistics resource. And Trevor, the irrepressible Aussie he’d met on a previous mission had been there, too.
All were lost to him. Even Frank and Trevor were gone, killed in the ambush, and leaving him only Digger. And Digger had just risked his own life to save Rex’s.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite that dangerous, but maybe it was. Rex knew monkeys had killed people in the cities of India. They were big, smart, dangerous animals with fangs the size of a big dog's like Digger. A bite could get infected, and a troop of monkeys could have brought him down, if Digger hadn’t intervened. If they’d all turned on Digger they would have ripped him to pieces.
Digger is my family.
It was the first time he’d thought in those terms, and the first time he’d missed his CRC family since the explosion that killed his friends.
His thoughts kept on being occupied about family, and about sacrifice. About Gyan’s broken family, with a daughter missing.
No family should go through that kind of pain just because of a merciless moneylender.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHEN HE PASSED the beautiful and beaming young bride, he knew what the feeling was that bothered him at the pool earlier and gave him pause and prevented him from continuing with the ‘cleansing act’ — it was rage. The young woman reminded him of the Gyan’s stunning daughter. Overcome by the contrast in her situation and the lovely bride’s, he accelerated his pace to get to his van, let Digger in and got behind the wheel.
He called Digger to come up front, looked at the dog, sitting in the passenger seat, staring at him. “We should help them, right?” he asked, nodding his head.
Digger smiled. Rex doubted he had any idea what the question meant, but he took the smile to mean, “Why do you even ask? Of course, we have to.”
“I thought that’s what you would say.” He started the van.
Half an hour later, he found himself at the door of Gyan’s little house again. In the daylight he could see that the plaster on the outside walls was of assorted colors, no doubt patched from time to time rather than painted all at once. In his hand was another small box of candies, this time in apology for dropping in without an invitation.
Digger sat at attention by his side.
This time it was Akshara who answered the door. When she saw Rex, her eyes grew round before she cast them downward.
Rex was embarrassed. “I’m sorry to intrude,” he said in Hindi. “Is your husband at home?”
In broken Hindi interspersed with a familiar-sounding but unintelligible dialect, she answered that he wasn’t. Could she give him a message?
Rex handed her
the box of candy. He spoke slowly, hoping she could understand him, and not sure that he should be speaking to her at all in her husband’s absence. But it had occurred to him that Gyan might wave him off if he offered to help the daughter. Maybe her mother wouldn’t.
Akshara had stepped back into the house, leaving the door open, but she hadn’t invited him inside. He felt certain it would be improper to follow her in, so he waited. A moment later, she came out with two folding stools that had three legs and a seat of sturdy cotton canvas. She set them down and sat on one of them, gesturing for him to take the other.
When he was settled, she told him she had enjoyed watching his clever dog the night before. He was catching on to the dialect. It was definitely related to the more formal Hindi he knew.
After a few pleasantries, during which Rex thanked her again for the best dinner he had in many years, he broached the subject he’d come for. “Mrs. Gyan, tell me more about your daughter, Rehka.”
Akshara’s face instantly changed to a mask of grief. “My daughter is dead,” she said.
Rex knew it wasn’t literally true. “She indentured herself,” he responded. “Surely she is still alive.”
“We can only hope that she is alive. We don’t know if she is. We haven’t heard from her in months. I’m afraid we might not see her ever again.”
Rex asked gently why Akshara thought that. The story poured out of her quickly, so fast Rex could barely follow her, and it wasn’t at all what he’d been told the night before.
“My daughter was ashamed to tell my husband, but she was worse off than what he told you. That was her fiction. What really happened was she lost her job. Her supervisor wanted her to give him her innocence. You understand?” She waited for Rex to answer.
He understood, and the rage was about to erupt in him. “She refused, and what then?”
“She was dismissed, of course. India does not protect women as it should.” Akshara’s defiance showed in her raised head. She looked directly into his eyes for the first time. “My baby was unfairly dismissed, but that was not the worst of it. Her boss falsely accused her of stealing money and even showed her some documents to prove it, all falsified, of course. But it was a woman’s word against a man’s. She had no chance. He demanded she submit to him or pay him an impossible sum, more than she had saved or could ever hope to gather on her salary. With no job, she could not pay, and if he told anyone she had stolen money from her employer, she would not get another job and probably end up in jail. His word against hers.
“So, she borrowed the money.”
Akshara’s face was now streaked with the tears she couldn’t hold back as she told him the rest of it. “Yes. She borrowed the money. But then after her boss got the money, because he couldn’t have his way with her, he went and told people about the stolen money anyway. My daughter did nothing wrong! But she ended up with no job, and she could not pay the money lender. That was when she entered servitude to the money lender rather than dishonor our family by sleeping with her despicable boss.”
“Why then are you saying that you don’t know if she’s alive?”
“Because she is not with Dhruv, the money lender anymore. We don’t know where she is and what happened with her.”
She broke down completely and sobbed into her hands.
Digger had been watching her as she spoke, and now her tears seemed to distress him as well. He whined softly and moved closer, until he was leaning against her legs. He put his head in her lap.
Akshara gasped when she felt the weight against her legs. Tears still streaming, she clapped her hands over her mouth, suppressing a small scream.
“It’s okay, ma’am, don’t worry,” Rex said. “He knows you’re sad. He’s trying to comfort you.”
Akshara tentatively touched Digger’s head, between his ears, where his long hair was softest.
Digger groaned, which Rex knew for a sign of pleasure, but Akshara snatched her hand away.
“He likes that,” Rex said, reaching over to demonstrate how to pet the dog. “His name is Digger, and he can understand you if you praise him. I can see he likes you very much.”
Akshara followed his lead, stroking the dog’s back and murmuring what sounded to Rex to be baby talk. Before long, she forgot to cry and was giving all her attention to Digger.
However, Rex’s blood was about to reach boiling point. Unscrupulous money lenders who victimized the vulnerable had just joined his list of human vermin, which already contained terrorists, arms dealers, and drug dealers.
“This Dhruv, he lives in Mumbai?” Rex asked.
“Yes.”
“And how long ago did your daughter indenture herself?” he asked.
“Four months.”
“When was the last time you heard from her?”
“Six weeks ago. But not directly. One of her friends sent us a letter to tell us that her ‘owner’, Dhruv has been arrested and is now in jail but that Rehka has disappeared.
Rex was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again he had made up his mind. “Do you have something she wore? Perhaps a scarf? May I borrow it? Also the picture of her?”
Bewildered, the old woman went into the house and brought out a finely-woven cotton scarf. “This is the only thing I have of hers and here is her picture.” Rex had second thoughts about that. Gyan might miss it. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and snapped a few pictures of it and made sure they were of good quality. He handed it back to her and asked her to hold up the picture close to her chest and took a few more pictures. She was intelligent enough to know that the reason why he did that was to show those pictures to Rehka, if he found her, as proof that he knew her mother.
He held up the scarf. “My dog will get her scent from this to find her if we get close,” Rex said. “I can’t promise I’ll find her, but I will bring this back to you, and if I do find her, your daughter will be wearing it.”
Akshara cried even harder and made the extraordinary gesture of hugging Rex tightly. “May your journey be blessed,” she sobbed.
Gently, he extracted himself from the embrace and wished her peace until they met again.
Digger curled around Rex’s legs to reach Akshara’s dangling hand and nudged his head upward, against her palm.
She smiled and petted him a last time. “You, too, my new friend,” she said. “Thank you for comforting me.”
To Rex, she said, “When we meet again, Digger is welcome in my home.”
CHAPTER SIX
BRANDT RETURNED TO his Arizona headquarters the day after the Senator’s death was reported. There was nothing more he could do there until someone found Carson or Carson’s successor was appointed. When the former happened, he hoped it would be in a foreign country and it would be his team who found him. He’d know the job would be done right if that were the case.
When the second happened, he’d have to go and introduce himself and his group to the new DCIA. But the revelations about Carson had shaken up the old guard, and Brandt assumed the successor would be vetted six ways from Sunday before the announcement was made. Then would come the Congressional hearings before approval. It would be a while. In the meantime, the National Security Advisor would lead the CIA, and he already knew Brandt.
At the end of a long day, made longer by waking up in the Eastern time zone and working through to dinner in a time zone three hours behind, Brandt invited his friend and CRC’s lead psychologist, Rick Longland to his quarters for a nightcap. As he poured a generous shot of the eighteen-year-old smoky amber whisky for Longland, he casually asked, “Do you also find it difficult to believe that our boy is actually gone? It doesn’t feel like it to me.”
“You mean Rex Dalton.” Longland said.
“Yes.” Brandt said.
“It’s hard to believe,” Longland said. “If ever we had a recruit who I believed could take care of himself and beat the odds to live to a ripe old age, I’d have put my money on Dalton.
“Why? Have you heard something t
o convince you otherwise?”
“No. It’s just inconceivable that he walked into an ambush. Add to that the fact that no one has been able to identify his body with certainty.”
Longland played Devil’s Advocate. “Well, neither were the bodies of his team mates identified. Apart from that he hasn’t reported in. Surely, he would, wouldn’t he? If he were alive?”
Brandt stared at Longland for a short while before he spoke. “I’m not so sure about that. Consider the circumstances. He’d been over there for just about a year, and he sent back report after report, begging to do something about the drug trade rather than just observe who was doing what. But the CIA wiped their asses with his requests.
“Then we get word that someone has started disrupting the trade. No idea who. A few weeks pass, maybe not even that long. And suddenly, his orders are reversed, by the same CIA who had been ignoring his requests. His orders are to take out a bunch of the bastards together as they have a pow-wow, but it turns out to be an ambush. Now if he was indeed killed it doesn’t matter what he thought. Does it? However, if he somehow survived… what’s he going to think and do?”
Longland took a beat, and then answered. “That he was set up. If he had time to think anything at all.”
“That’s my take on it, too. If it were me, I would not have been contacting us and I am sure neither would Dalton. Only he doesn’t know who did it or why. His orders came from me, which I passed on directly from Carson.
“In his shoes, if I survived, I would have started by not trusting CRC, me, John Brandt, the man who gave me my orders. In other words, to answer your question, no, I don’t think he’d report in.”
While Brandt was talking the blood had drained from Longland’s face, leaving him pale. “Holy shit! That means…”
“Right.” Brandt nodded. “What you said, back before we sent him over there.”
Longland didn’t need a reminder, he recalled vividly what he’d said. They had been discussing how Rex seemed to handle stress better than any other agent. He’d warned Brandt about the consequences, should Rex decide to remember the part of the soldier’s oath that went, ‘I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…’ and realize not all the bad guys were in the Middle East, or south of the border. He’d told Brandt that one day the stress factor might get to Rex and he would ‘snap’.
