"All right. You go out and tell the chickens to get ready. You tell them Esma's coming."
"Okay."
Her blue eyes sparkled in the sunlight as she danced across the grass to the chicken pen. She had to move a bucket over to reach the sliding wooden clasp that kept the pen door closed. But she made it, climbed down, and stepped inside.
But now what? No sooner was she inside than realized she couldn't reach back up to lock the door again. So she stood there, chickens flowing around her feet as they scrambled out the door and jumped and flitted across the grass, headed for the jungle and the fruit they knew was there. It was always there, flavoring the air, beckoning, and the flock was on its way.
The little girl stepped outside of the pen, moved the bucket back, and relocked the gate.
"There," she said to no one. Then she went back inside the house.
"Well?" said Esma as she took off her apron. "Did you tell them?"
"There's no one there."
"What you mean, no one there?"
"The chickens aren't home."
"What?"
Esma hit the door at a trot. Señor Ignacio Velasquez would be furious if his chickens were gone. They were prize-winners, all of them, added to his collection from around the world. When she reached the pen, she threw up her arms and yelled, “¡Caramba! All gone!"
She turned and looked for the girl with the blue eyes. There she was, near the jungle, staring into the green maze with her hands raised. "Come back," she cried again and again.
By the time Esma caught up to her, the little girl was weeping and wouldn't stop.
"There, there, I'm in trouble, not you, Poquita. I let you out of my sight. Esma knows better with one so young."
"I want my mommy."
It must have been the hundredth time that day. Esma, flabbergasted and frightened, couldn't hold back.
"Your mommy is dead, and she isn't coming back!"
"No!" the girl little turned to the woman's body and began flailing her with fists and kicking with her feet. At a total loss as to how to react, Esma tried gripping the child firmly. But still, the flailing and screaming wouldn't stop. So, finally losing control, she drew back her arm and backhanded the girl across the side of the head. She staggered back, slumping, arms dropped to her sides, and sat down on the deep grass in a daze. As she sat there, she realized she couldn't see anything. Her eyes wouldn't focus. So the crying began again, but now it was more in the mode of wailing for something precious that's been lost. This went on for several minutes until Esma, who by now had snapped out of her rage and terror, realized what she had done and scooped the child up with her arms. She began crying over the child and patting her back and kissing her head, which prompted the child to respond in kind and now both were weeping as the woman carried the child to the porch. The two men who had been talking there were half-raised out of their chairs.
"If you hurt her and Iggy can't sell her he will kill you," said the darker of the two. He made the universal slicing sign across his throat.
"Did you damage her, Esma?" demanded the second man. "Let me look."
He stooped over and peered down into the child's face, studying her features with his own dark eyes.
"This one I might keep for myself if no one wants her now," the second man said. "She is perfect for my son."
"No way," said Esma. "She belongs to Señor Velasquez, and you don't want me to tell him what you said."
The second man's eyes grew opened wide. "You don't tell him nothing, Esma. Or I cut your throat."
Meanwhile, the blue-eyed child was hearing these words and becoming even more scared. Her crying peaked like never before, and all three adults stood there, watching and listening, without an idea between them of what they might do.
But then they heard the helicopter coming.
"Oh, it's your mommy!" Esma crooned to the child. The little girl replied by making fists and wiping furiously at her eyes until the tears were gone.
"Mommy? Coming for me? Yeah, Mommy!"
The helicopter spun down through the air, landing in the pasture between the jungle and house. While the props were yet spinning, a dark man in a navy suit and white shirt with red tie ducked down and trotted for the house. At the porch, he opened his arms and motioned the little girl to come to him. She didn't. She only stood and stared at him; her vision was back. Then she looked around behind him.
"Mommy?"
Ignacio Velasquez, the man in the suit, broke into peals of laughter. "Daddy, sweetheart! Come to Daddy!"
"You're my daddy?"
"I am, I am!"
"Do you have my mommy?"
"Yes, she's waiting for us at our new home."
"Do we have to go on that?" she said, pointing at the helicopter.
"We do. But guess what? You get to wear headphones and hear the pilot talking."
"I like headphones."
"Of course you do, sweetheart. How is she?" he then said to Esma.
"Doctor says she's fine now."
"What did she have?"
"I don't know. He didn't tell me. But I gave her the medicine he brought, and she opened her eyes in just one day. So she's fine now. Good as new, aren't you, Poquita?"
"Poquita? I think we'll call this one Maria. Would you like that name?" he asked the little girl.
"I like Lisa. That's my best name. Lisa."
"Well, we need a new name for you. We'll call you Angelina and save Lisa for special times. Is that all right?"
The girl ignored him. "I want to fly to see my mommy. Let's go now."
With that, Velasquez took the girl's hand and walked her out to the helicopter. Like any gentleman would, he pulled open the door and then lifted her up onto the seat. When the door closed, Esma could see the man talking and smiling at his newest venture. She knew he would keep her for a few years, teach her the language, and then sell her for at least one million dollars. Probably to Dubai. Dubai loved white women with blond hair and blue eyes.
The girl's future was guaranteed.
"Lisa," she said. "The world is yours."
14
CW3 Mark Sellars
"Mister Sellars, spool 'er up," shouted CW3 Mark Sellars' crew chief. Sellars tossed off a salute and turned to his controls. The AH-64 Apache out of Kandahar air base lifted into the air joined one other Apache and set off in the direction of a firefight with U.S. soldiers pinned down. Two men posing as maintenance workers on a mountaintop water reservoir near the Afghan village of Issa Quel had fed supper to the First Platoon of Charlie Company in the shadow of the highest water reservoir. But then, as the troops began making their way downhill, the repairmen began shooting at the troops with a Russian-made machine gun. Five troops were reported wounded when the call came in, with one U.S. staff sergeant on the verge of death. They needed air support and a medevac without delay.
Two medevac helos were already inbound from a base nearby. They would meet the Apaches midway when the heavily armed Apaches swooped ahead to provide covering fire.
The site of the attack wasn't hard to find--the Army already had a nearby observation post mapped out, and the reservoir was on the highest hilltop. No other villages or qalats were around it, so no civilians would be put in harm's way by the attack the Apache pilots had in mind. As they bore down on the water reservoir, CWO Sellars quickly shot two rockets at the south side of the water reservoir to suppress the insurgents. The platoon on the ground was "danger close" to the helicopter's fire, which indicated that friendly forces were within close proximity to the target. The soldiers were flattened down on the north side of the ridge, only fifty yards down the slope. Meanwhile, the horrendous fire from the Russian gun kept raining hellfire down on them. Sellars could see from the Apache that the First Platoon had an impossible angle to return fire. If they didn't get help from Sellars and CWO Ambrose in the companion Apache, all could very well perish before sunrise.
Later, Sellars would admit to the Taliban that he was a little bit nervous in a
situation that required heavy gunfire that didn't hit friendlies. The Americans, at the pilots' direction, had scurried around to put down strobes to identify their position, which greatly relieved the pilots' nerves. Plus, Sellars and Ambrose had operated in that area many times before and, with their precise control of their guns, they were able to put the rounds where it counted. Nevertheless, the machine gun fire continued, and the troops were at a very high risk.
Sellars made a rocket pass and Ambrose swooped in from the north side of the ridge, spraying the insurgents' position with his .50-caliber machine gun. The pilots' night-vision goggles let them see the ghostly green infrared-targeting beams emanating from the troops' weapons. The beams crisscrossed the water reservoir. The pilots could also see an increasing spark and twinkle of bullets bouncing off the water reservoir’s walls as the First Platoon was increasingly better able to return fire thanks to the pounding given the insurgents by the Apaches.
As the air assault continued, the Apaches took turns shooting at the insurgents. One aircraft would fire as the other maneuvered for a weapons run in the opposite direction of approach to the ridge.
"Can't imagine two Talis could create so much commotion with one gun," Sellars radioed to Ambrose.
"Roger that," came the reply crackling in Sellars' headset. The noise-canceling headset tempered the engine noise in his own cabin, but the noise from Ambrose's cabin heavily penetrated their exchanges and vice-versa.
When Sellars was out of position for a rocket shot, his "left seater," First Platoon commander Capt. William Yeats fired his M4 out of the open side of the aircraft to maintain suppression. As soon as they cleared the target, Ambrose swooped in and fired more .50-caliber machine-gun rounds, followed by two rockets from Sellars.
The flurry of explosions and bullets had the intended effect. First Platoon was no longer taking contact from the two insurgents, and the medevac birds had some breathing room to fly in and treat the wounded. A half-hour earlier, at 8 p.m., a pair of UH-60 Black Hawks had lifted off from the same FOB as the medevacs from the pitch-black airfield. "Dust Off Two-One" led the way as the chase bird responsible for navigation to the battle and radio comms. "Dust Off Two-Two" was the medical bird that would evacuate the priority casualties. Arriving on-site, the pilot of Two-Two held the aircraft steady as Staff Sgt. William Banister hooked a cable to the front of his extraction vest. The external hoist on the side the Black Hawk rapidly lowered the flight medic to the ground.
Chief Sellars continued pounding the area with rockets and machine-gun fire as the lift-offs of the wounded began with the hoist and cable. It was a moment of tense navigation and run-ups and all pilots were in constant visual contact as they worked around the others.
Without warning and never seeing the business end of the weapon, Sellars felt and heard the RPG rip into his aircraft as he was swooping in on a gun run at 150 feet over the target. The distinctive "Whump!" of the explosion and the jolt to the airframe threw him sideways in the seat. He felt the aircraft immediately fall out of control but activated emergency procedures reflexively as the Army had taught him. The Apache came down straddling a rocky outcrop, and it split crosswise, the tailpiece falling down the mountain and the front of the aircraft dumping the pilots in a nose-down position against the hilltop. Almost immediately, four insurgents stood and began running at the Blackhawk, their AK's blazing. When they received no return fire, the Taliban fighters ceased firing, knowing they either had KIA they could ignore or they had prisoners who could be tortured and made to give up important operational details.
Unconscious, CWO Sellars had no memory of being jerked viciously out of his seat and dragged off through the rocks and moon dust. His Left Seat was KIA. Sellars was wounded, suffering a broken leg and arm and disfiguring facial wounds that left him losing enough blood that he would soon bleed to death without help. The helicopter exploded and roared into searing flames when Sellars was but fifty feet away. Sellars saw none of this.
The T-Men dragged him all the way back to Issa Quel where he was unceremoniously dropped inside a mud-walled room inside a labyrinthine warren of rooms, all of which were encircled by a thick perimeter wall that small arms couldn't penetrate. He was left alone in the room for several hours, moaning and crying out deliriously for help. Fractures in his arms and legs and the pain they caused were switching him in and out of consciousness, and still, no help came. Just after dawn the next day, an old woman and her daughter came into the room. They gave him a drink of water, the first he'd had in fifteen hours. The daughter was a nurse. She examined his wounds and then went to the village chief and argued with him on the pilot's behalf. He needed a hospital, and he needed extensive medical treatment, she insisted. The village chief brushed her aside, telling her the pilot was the enemy and if he died, it made no difference.
The daughter and mother decided they could listen no more to the man's suffering. They bundled him up, commandeered one of the Taliban's pickup trucks from a friendly soldier, and dragged the pilot up into the bed of the Toyota. They then drove him for three hours over gravel and dirt roads before coming to a paved access road leading into Kandahar. Two hours later, Sellars was a patient at Kandahar General Hospital and received the treatment he required. Following two surgeries to pin a leg and his left arm, he was moved to recovery, where the daughter was waiting for him. She assisted the nursing staff with his care, refusing to leave his side, and refusing to allow the Taliban soldiers to take Sellars and torture him for information. At one point she threatened them with the reminder that her father was a high-ranking member of the Taliban and that she would enlist his help in allowing the man to heal. The Taliban soldiers left the recovery room and didn't return.
Why did she go to these lengths for the American pilot? Because her own brother was being held in captivity at the American base in Guantanamo. She hoped to make a trade when the American could travel--the pilot for her brother. Her mother--and eventually her father, when he was made aware--then took every step necessary to protect the pilot from his captors. But the day finally came: upon his discharge from the hospital the military took him to a filthy jail cell and cast him inside. He was without his post-discharge medications and physical therapy that was prescribed. The Taliban was going to allow him to starve and thirst for five days and then question him. They would see how cooperative he was.
But their questions fell on deaf ears. From the onset of the torture, the pilot drew a line in the sand and told them he would not cross over. He would not betray his country, would not betray his comrades, and he was prepared to die to protect them. A conference was held between the head of the camp and the father of the Guantanamo prisoner. A modified form of torture and starvation was applied. The jailers were restrained from killing their prisoner. They would be required to keep him alive until a trade could be made with the Americans for the Guantanamo prisoner.
Six months passed. At times, the pilot was caged inside a six-by-six foot steel contraption without running water and without a toilet and toilet paper. He suffered from severe chronic diarrhea, a condition that would plague him over the next ten years of his captivity.
Then a guard took pity on him and handed him a Koran and suggested he study it. Which he did. He studied and prayed and studied some more. He eventually converted to Islam and soon was attending prayers at the local mosque with other villagers and even his captors. Seeing this, his captors slowly began to assimilate the American into a more relaxed and less punitive degree of imprisonment. This went on for two years. Then he was assigned certain menial tasks around the prison. Another two years. Next, he was trusted with short errands into town, picking up items for the soldiers such as books and mail. Years and more years dragged by. In the end, he had been given enough freedom and found to be trustworthy to the point where his errands could take hours, and no one noticed. This was when the American vanished from the sight of the Taliban and hours later emerged at the American air base at Kandahar.
From there he was
treated for a month for his residual disabilities and systemic diseases--namely the GI issues causing chronic diarrhea. Eventually, he was flown to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland where he was debriefed and fitted with new uniforms and military items of clothing. His back pay was assessed, and a check was prepared for his pay. There was never a question about his captivity; his aircraft had been shot out of the sky during combat, and there was no evidence he'd ever cooperated with the enemy. The Army intelligence officers were concerned that he had converted to Islam and recommended an honorable discharge from the military.
But first, there would be a reconciliation with his wife, Melissa Sellars. He had fantasized about seeing her again for too many years.
Now it was about to take place.
15
TWELVE YEARS LATER
Melissa
A dozen years ago, when I lost Lisa, I swore I'd never lose that entangled feeling that mothers have with their daughters. I'm talking about the feeling I always had that Lisa was still physically connected to me somehow, even though we were two. Call it what you will, our life juices flowed back and forth between us even to the extent that I always knew her mind and her feelings and she always knew mine. When she hurt, I hurt. When she was hungry, I fixed her something to eat. And we did our entangled dance without words between us. It was all here, in our hearts and our minds and we were, and we weren't one living, breathing organism.
I yearned for this feeling a dozen years later, but I couldn't quite re-create how it was. The feeling was gone; it was like music coming from another room where all you can hear is the bass guitar and an occasional painful lyric. That's what our entanglement had become. Just a memory laced randomly with pain.
We had a name, all right. The man's name was Ignacio Velasquez. Mark's parents and I hired everyone we could find who might be able to find him. The trouble is, there are thousands of people by that name in the U.S. There're even more in Mexico and Latin America, not to mention South America and Spain. We spent over two-hundred thousand dollars of our own money on investigators alone. Plus, the CPD and FBI went all out. But in the end, we had nothing substantial. Our people tracked down, surveilled, and interviewed over one-hundred-and-twenty-five men. It was a massive undertaking when I look back on it. Still, our investigation went nowhere.
The Empty Place at the Table Page 8