Z: The Final Countdown

by Bob Mayer

  “I do not know, sir. I have ordered the men to clear the roadblocks. We can proceed across the river when that is done.”

  Monoko wrinkled his nose. “What is that stink?”

  Ku pointed. “Bodies. Burning.”

  The lieutenant’s eyes widened. “What has happened here?”

  Ku felt fear now, an icy trickle running down his spine and curling into his stomach. He pulled aside the curtain to the next hut with the steel of his rifle barrel.

  Monoko cried out and turned away. Ku heard his officer vomiting as he stared at the sight that had greeted both of them. A woman was on a dilapidated mattress, her legs spread wide. Between her legs was an aborted fetus. At least that’s what Ku hoped it was. All he could see was a pile of dark black blood and putrid flesh. The mother was dead also. Ku forced himself to stare and take note. Blood had poured out of the woman. Not just from between her legs but from her eyeballs, her nostrils, her ears, her mouth, every opening. The rags she had wrapped herself in were soaked with red as if she had even sweated blood. Skin that wasn’t covered in blood had angry red welts crisscrossing it.

  Ku finally turned away. Monoko was on his knees, still retching. Ku grabbed his arm. “We must go, sir! Now!”

  Ku looked about. The men had figured out what the burned pile was. That was evident from the amount of effort they were putting into clearing away the trees. The first roadblock was clear and the second halfway done.

  “We must look for survivors,” Monoko whispered.

  Ku shook his head. “There are none, sir.”

  “We must check all the huts.”

  Ku frowned. “All right. I will do it. Move the jeep and truck forward. We must leave as soon as the trees are clear.”

  Ku quickly ran to the next hut. It was empty. The next four held bodies, or what had once been bodies, but were now just masses of rotting flesh and blood. In the next-to-last hut, there was a person lying on the floor. A young woman. She turned her head as Ku opened the curtain. Her eyes were wide and red, a trickle of blood rolling like tears down her cheeks. Her skin was covered with red welts.

  “Please!” she rasped. “Help me.”

  Ku stepped in, every nerve in his body screaming for him to run away. He knelt next to the woman. Her face was swollen and her breathing was coming in labored gasps. From the smell, there was no doubt she was lying in her own feces.

  Suddenly the woman’s hands darted forward and she grabbed the collar of Ku’s fatigue jacket. With amazing strength she half-pulled herself off the fouled mat, toward Ku’s face. Her mouth opened as if she were going to speak, but a tide of black-red matter exploded out of her mouth into Ku’s face and chest. He screamed and slammed his arms up, but couldn’t break her grip. Struggling to his feet, he moved backward to the door, but the woman was still attached to him.

  He jammed the muzzle of his AK-47 into her stomach and pulled the trigger. The steel-jacketed rounds literally tore the woman in half, but even in death her hands held on. Ku threw his gun out the door, then pulled his bloodied shirt up and over his head and left it there, clutched in her dead fingers.

  He staggered out into the clearing as soldiers ran over, weapons at the ready. “We go!” Ku screamed at them as he wiped at the blood and vomit on his face. “We go!”

  Chapter 2

  Aragon Island, 9 June

  The helicopter was barely twenty feet above the tops of the trees, moving at over a hundred miles an hour. Inside, soldiers with camouflage paint on their faces and the double-A patch of the 82d Airborne Division on their left shoulders pulled back the charging handles on their M-16s and put a round in the chamber, ready for action.

  In one of the center seats facing to the rear, Dave Riley’s hands twitched, missing the feel of a weapon in them. It was instinctual, and as he caught himself doing it, he smiled and forced his muscles to relax. He glanced to his left at Conner Young. She wore the same armband he did over the loose-fitting khaki, indicating she was with the press. On Riley’s right, their military escort, a young captain from the Pentagon named Kanalo, was watching the actions of the paratroopers with wide eyes. From the shield insignia on the left collar of Kanalo’s battledress uniform, Riley knew that the closest the officer had ever come to a situation like this was probably in his basic officer-training course. The shield with stars on it indicated Kanalo was in the adjutant general’s corps, and the rest of the army had a saying about that branch of service: Twinkle, twinkle, little shield, keep me from the battlefield.

  The battlefield was not a place that Riley had been kept from in his eighteen years of active duty. In his time in the Special Forces, he had been on covert combat missions into Colombia and mainland China; even live operations in the United States itself that had involved death and destruction. After leaving the army two years ago, after the death of the woman he loved—a Chicago police officer he’d met on his last mission under the streets of Chicago—Riley had worked for an international security firm and gone down to the wastelands of Antarctica, where he’d run into commandos from North Korea trying to appropriate atomic weapons.

  His official job now was to watch over Conner Young and keep the reporter safe. Hard to do with no weapon, he reflected, as he noticed the crew chief indicate one minute out to the lieutenant in charge of the soldiers. The landing zone was supposed to be clear, but from the intelligence reports Riley had looked at, over the course of the past week—ever since this unit of the 82d had deployed here to bring peace—the rebel forces had had a strange habit of showing up, at just the worst time, in places that had been “secured.”

  Riley was shorter than most of the men in the helicopter at five and a half feet. He was dark skinned, an inheritance from his mother’s Puerto Rican side. His muscles were like rubber stretched over his bones. His body emanated barely restrained tension as the helicopter began slowing, but his dark eyes reflected the patience he’d learned over the past thirty-seven years—from the streets of the South Bronx through all his years of service.

  The lieutenant reached over and tapped Conner on the knee, ignoring Riley and Kanalo. “We’re one minute out!” he yelled to be heard above the sound of the engines and rotor blades.

  Riley understood the reason he was being ignored. He knew the effect Conner had—any man would. She was a beautiful woman, with dark eyes, a thin nose, and a wide mouth. Her skin was the most alluring aspect of her face: soft and white, it highlighted her features to maximum advantage. She had not applied the camouflage stick that Riley had given her earlier this morning and he understood her reasoning behind that, but it was something he noted for future reference. Tucked under the bush hat that Riley had given her was Conner’s trademark—thick black hair, cut short and framing her face.

  Riley knew that Conner knew the effect she had, and he also understood that was partly the reason she wasn’t wearing camouflage paint on her face. And he respected her for that self-knowledge, and for the fact that, while she did use it to her advantage in her job, she didn’t complain about the times when it worked against her and people treated her like she was just a pretty mouthpiece for the network. Even in the midst of all this, Conner’s charm was working on the lieutenant, who should have been thinking about other things.

  They cleared a tree line and the Black Hawk swooped down into an open field on the edge of a small hamlet. As soon as the wheels touched, the soldiers scrambled off, weapons at the ready, forming a loose perimeter as a second bird came in. Within a minute an entire platoon, over thirty infantrymen, was on the ground. Riley crouched with Conner on the inside of the hasty perimeter. The hamlet consisted of eight cinder block buildings with tin roofs. A dirt road ran through the center.

  “Let’s move in,” the lieutenant called out, and the men stood.

  Two black men dressed in cutoff shorts and T-shirts appeared on the edge of the village. They had AK-47s in their hands.

  “Put down the weapons!” the lieutenant yelled to the men.

  “This is our vi
llage,” one of the men yelled back. “You put down your weapons.” Despite the rhetoric, the two men were not holding their rifles in a threatening manner. The paratroopers came to a halt, forming a line less than forty feet from the edge of the village.

  An old black woman came out of one of the buildings. “Let me talk to your leader,” she said, her accent similar to that heard in the hills of Jamaica. According to intelligence, this area was sealed by descendants of runaway slaves from that island, and they valued their independence fiercely. Unfortunately, this village was in the buffer zone being established by the United Nations peacemakers between the government and a dissident rebel group.

  Riley could see that the lieutenant had not expected this type of challenge. “I’m in command,” he said.

  “I lead this village,” the woman replied. “What do you want?”

  “We’re here to protect you,” he said.

  The woman held up her own rifle. “Ourselves, we protect. Help, we don’t need. You will only bring the infiltrators here.”

  The lieutenant was sticking to what he’d been taught and ordered. “We can help you defend yourselves.”

  “Ourselves, we have done that quite well. Your help, we don’t need.”

  “We can add our strength to yours,” the lieutenant said.

  “For now,” the woman agreed. “Maybe. But what about when you leave?”

  “We—” the officer began, but he was cut off.

  The woman spit. “Somalia, you left. Vietnam, you left. A long history you Americans have of offering to protect people, getting them to join you, then abandoning them and leaving them worse than they were before you came with your fine help.”

  If the lieutenant’s face had not been painted green, Riley would not have been surprised to see it get red. “We are here to enforce the United Nations resolution regarding the peace between—” he tried, but again the woman interceded.

  “What do we care for the United Nations, eh? Over a hundred years we have lived here. Our land this is and we want no outsiders here. Leave us alone.”

  “I can’t do that,” the lieutenant said. “My orders are to secure this village. A demilitarized zone is being—”

  “This village is secure!” the woman yelled. Several other villagers had joined her so that there was now a small crowd of ten, eight adults and two children. All the adults were armed. The lieutenant shifted his feet nervously. This was not at all going the way he had hoped, and they hadn’t covered this type of scenario in his Infantry Officers’ Basic Course at Fort Benning and most certainly not in Ranger School.

  The woman looked at the soldiers for several moments. “How do I know we can trust you?”

  The lieutenant was taken aback. “We’re Americans. We’re here at the bequest of your government and under United Nations charter to—”

  “Our government,” the woman’s voice was full of scorn. “What does our government care about us? They’d rather see us dead out here in the swamp. Tell me, American man, why should we trust you?”

  The lieutenant glanced at his platoon sergeant, searching for advice, but the woman beat him to it. “Lay down your weapons and I will believe you. I will let you into our village and we can talk.”

  “I can’t do that,” the lieutenant said.

  “Then leave. We will never allow you in our village with your weapons.” The woman turned away.

  “Wait!” the officer cried out. The woman paused.

  Riley knew the lieutenant was seeing his career go down the tubes with the failure of this mission.

  “I will put down my rifle and join you. We can talk.”

  “And leave thirty armed men waiting to attack my people?” the woman replied.

  Conner leaned close to Riley. “What do you think?” she whispered.

  “I think we’re going to see a fuckup,” Riley quietly replied. He was looking about, checking out the buildings, the wood line. He had a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. The paratroopers were strung out in the open, waiting for their leader to make a decision. The lieutenant had become so preoccupied with the confrontation with the woman, he had lapsed in control of his platoon and the overall tactical situation.

  The woman smiled and took the magazine out of her AK-47. She tucked it into her waistband and ejected the round still in the chamber. “There. See?” She gestured and the other men did the same. “We are willing to compromise. Unload your weapons and join us in the village.”

  The lieutenant stood a bit taller. He turned to his platoon sergeant. “Have the men unload.”

  The veteran NCO stared at his officer. “But, sir—”

  “Now!” the lieutenant ordered.

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant said reluctantly.

  “Magazines out of weapons, chamber empty.”

  In the tradition of the 82d, the men did as they were ordered. Satisfied, the woman turned toward the first building. “Come, join us.” She disappeared into a doorway. The platoon had started moving forward, when the rooftops suddenly erupted in a cacophony of small arms fire. Riley dragged Conner down to the ground as firing also roared out of the tree line to their left.

  The paratroopers dived for what scant cover there was in the open field, tearing magazines out of their ammo pouches and desperately jamming them back into their weapons.

  “Fuck, I’m hit!” one young soldier called out.

  A loud beeping noise chirped off of Conner’s web gear. “What is that?” she asked above the sound of weapons firing.

  “You’ve been shot,” Riley said. He reached into her combat vest and pulled out a small envelope, tearing it open. It had been placed there at the beginning of this exercise and now he read it. “At least you’re not dead. According to this you’ve suffered a wound to your stomach. You need to call for a medic.”

  “Great game you men play,” Conner muttered.

  “I don’t hear you crying out in pain,” Riley noted. “Wounds to the stomach tend to hurt.”

  “Screw you, Dave,” Conner said. “Keep it up and I’ll show you hurt.”

  Most of the MILES harnesses on the men in the platoon were already activated, indicating that they had been hit by laser beams from the ambushing force. It was over quickly. A surviving squad leader rallied the remnants of the platoon and retreated to the far tree line, calling on the radio for reinforcements. Riley’s MILES vest was silent, but he simply rolled on his back and stared up into the blue Louisiana sky.

  “How do you shut this damn thing off?” Conner asked.

  “The controllers will sort this out in a few minutes,” Riley said. “Give the squad leader a chance to finish his radio calls for help.” He looked around. The lieutenant took a key out of his rifle laser—making the emitter inactive—and placed it in his MILES harness, turning off the beeper. Not a happy camper, Riley thought, but unloading weapons—that was stupid, and the whole purpose of this exercise was to have people like the lieutenant do stupid things here where the price paid was a little humiliation rather than blood and guts.

  A man wearing an OC—observer-controller—armband walked over. “What have we here?” he asked, stooping over Conner. “A dead reporter?” He looked at the card. “Ah, just wounded. Still, very bad for publicity,” he said loudly enough for the lieutenant to hear. He took his controller key and turned her MILES gear off. He looked at Riley. “How come you didn’t run with the others? You’re still alive.”

  “I’m signed for her,” Riley said.

  The OC laughed. “Well, welcome to peacekeeping 101. As you can see, the natives aren’t too friendly.”

  Chapter 3

  Cacolo, Angola, 11 June

  Sergeant Ku buttoned his fatigue pants and threw several bills on the ground. The whore scooped them up and they disappeared into the robe she wore. She hadn’t even bothered to take it off for their brief coupling, simply hitching it up at her waist. Prostitution was not exactly an art form in the Third World but rather a matter of everyday life.


  Ku walked out of the “house” made of cast-off cardboard from relief packages and squinted up at the sun. There was the sound of a helicopter, and he watched as the aircraft banked across the sky and headed to the west. It was a pretty thing to watch. The Americans certainly had better equipment than the Cubans had had.

  “There you are!” A soldier who had been in the patrol the previous day sauntered up. “The major wants to see you.”

  Ku frowned. “What for?”

  “How should I know?” The soldier pointed at the hut with a knowing smile. “How is she?” He didn’t wait for an answer, disappearing into the black hole of the doorway, already tugging at his pants.

  Ku walked toward the garrison headquarters, wondering why the major in charge of the garrison here would want him. There was more going on in Cacolo than had happened in years. The Americans were coming and everyone was excited. After the patrol’s arrival late yesterday evening, the officer in charge of the Cacolo garrison had absorbed Lieutenant Monoko’s men into his own force regardless of Monoko’s original orders. Not an uncommon occurrence in Angola, where communication over distances was slow and erratic at best.

  A guard lounging in the shade didn’t even acknowledge Ku’s approach. He knocked once, then entered. “Sergeant Ku reporting, sir.”

  Major Gungue, the garrison commander, looked up from some papers on his desk. There was another man in the room, a white man dressed in camouflage fatigues.

  “Sergeant Ku. Welcome, welcome!” Major Gungue smiled. “This is Major Lindsay, the commander of the Americans who will be helping us.”

  Ku stood a little straighter “Sir!”

  The American returned his salute.

  “I am assigning my most experienced men,” Gungue said in Portuguese, the official language of the country and military, “to work with the American soldiers who will be coming here. You,” he said, looking at Ku, “will work with one of the units that will be stationed here at Cacolo.”