Six

by Charles W. Sasser

  Ortiz stepped in. “Take it easy, Alex.”

  Taggart turned to walk away. “We’re done here.”

  Caulder stopped him. “You don’t walk away from this, Rip.”

  Rip froze with his back to the others, his lean body rigid with barely controlled rage.

  “Do you remember what you said to me?” Caulder continued. “About killing? That the hardest lesson to learn is when not to pull the trigger. And you said, watch out for the dudes who can’t tell the difference.”

  He shoved Fishbait’s camera at Rip to emphasize the bloody indictment it contained. “If you can’t control your emotions, Rip, you can’t lead us.”

  “I made the call,” Rip retorted, his back still turned. “I’d make it again.”

  “You crossed the line, Senior Chief.”

  After a descending silence in which a breath seemed to echo, Rip turned to confront the others. “Bear?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a problem.”

  “Ricky?”

  Ortiz fidgeted. Torn between two men he admired, his eyes wandered the tent, from the entrance flap down to his boots. “Maybe you shouldn’t have shot that kid.”

  Having taken that stand, he then turned on Caulder, his voice sharpening. “But no one’s saying shit. Understand? This is the team. Brothers.”

  Caulder still held his ground. “I won’t do another op with you, Rip. Ever.”

  Rip glared. Then he seemed to deflate before their eyes. “Fuck it.”

  Without another word, in total quiet, he began removing his battle gear. He dropped each piece on the ground—body armor, pistol, webbing—as though ritually stripping himself of his SEAL identity in front of his brothers, his family. He walked out of the tent after a last long, searching look at Caulder.

  Bear exploded once the team chief was gone. “Caulder, you asshole! What’s wrong with you? That’s Rip!”

  Caulder looked suddenly uncertain and appealed to Ortiz. “You know I’m right, Buddha.”

  Ortiz slumped onto his cot, head in his hands. “It’s this fucking war,” he said, as though to himself.

  Outside in the night with the Hindu Kush rising faintly in the distance against the stars, Taggart wandered aimlessly past the TOC tent and stopped next to the cab of a parked deuce-and-a-half truck. He stood motionless gazing out toward the mountains they had just left. He failed to hear Graves’s approach.

  “Rip …?”

  Taggart walked away, past the truck and out of sight into the darkness.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Nigeria

  The intensity of flames stabbing and leaping from the gas vent down the road at the refinery competed with the first break of dawn as Rip Taggart led his desperate band of fugitives on a final dash for safety. They were so close, only a few hundred yards away from possible sanctuary. Detritus from the plant cluttered the road—broken pipe, damaged oil barrels, puddles and stains of spilled oil and gunk. Trees lining the road near the plant were bare of foliage and clotted with oil.

  “Hurry!” Rip urged.

  He heard the predatory growl of a truck approaching fast.

  “Move!” he shouted.

  Na’omi’s terrified schoolgirls put out all they had left in them after days of near starvation in captivity. Na’omi snatched into her arms the smallest child, nine-year-old Abiye, who lagged behind. She ran with the tiny girl under one arm while waving the other frantically to hurry the children to greater effort.

  A flatbed truck loaded with cheering riflemen rounded a curve down the road, kicking up dust against the brightening sky of a new day, its headlamps shining like a monster’s eyes. McAlwain, who puffed along behind Na’omi, the stump of his arm windmilling and slinging fresh blood, cast a fearful look back. He stumbled and fell.

  Rip yanked the exhausted man to his feet and slapped him on the back for encouragement. McAlwain struggled on, panting and on the verge of collapse. Up ahead, Nick slowed and stopped in the middle of the road.

  “Go!” Rip shouted at him.

  McAlwain went down again. Rip started to go back for him, except he realized it was over for the oil exec. The man hadn’t the strength to go any farther, and he was too heavy for Rip to carry. He was as good as dead.

  “Save the girls,” McAlwain urged bravely. “Go!”

  At the end, the man had balls bigger than Nick and Hakeem put together. Rip raced after Na’omi, rifle slung across his back.

  He passed Nick, who had given up flight, tossed the dead guard’s AK-47 into the brush and was running back down the road toward the truck loaded with BH shooters. He had his arms lifted in surrender and was flapping them eagerly to stop the vehicle. The jeering horde of armed goons on the flatbed seemed to be urging the driver to run down the infidel.

  Instead, the truck skidded to a halt in a cloud of road dust, out of which Aabid emerged with his rifle. Rip heard the shot and glanced back in time to see Nick’s head explode in a pink mist. BH troops broke into bloodcurdling cheers.

  Na’omi and the girls rounded a sharp bend in the road. Up ahead lay the metal buildings and stacks of the refinery enclosed in a ten-foot-tall chain link security fence. Gas vents speared red and yellow flames to scorch the morning sky. The guard shack next to the locked gate appeared abandoned. So did the rest of the plant, with not a worker or security guard in sight. That didn’t make sense. What had happened to everybody?

  Still, the plant afforded the fugitives’ only chance. If Rip had to make a stand with his purloined AK-47, against odds of at least ten to one, better it be behind the fence where cover and concealment helped even out the contest.

  Shots cracked from the truck as it geared back up after Aabid executed Nick. It barreled down the road, closing fast. Screams of terror from the girls shredded the morning air.

  “Move!” Rip bellowed at them and at Na’omi. “Get to the gate. Hurry. The gate!”

  To himself he was muttering, “Too many … Too many …”

  SEALs liked to pick their fights. This was one he would never have picked had he a choice.

  He reached the gate and scurried up the wire where he stopped, prepared to help Na’omi and the children across. There was still no sign of help anywhere within the compound. He was reaching down toward the children, urging them to run faster, when the truck skidded to another halt where McAlwain had gone down. Taggart expected him to be shot too. Instead, men dragged McAlwain up to the truck and hoisted him onto the flatbed, which likely meant Aabid thought SyncoPetro might still put out ransom money for his return. Nick’s life, on the other hand, had had no such value.

  Yelping and whooping like a pack of dogs, BH soldiers charged toward the refinery, firing their guns into the air. Gunfire, the roaring of the truck, all the excitement proved too much for the three schoolgirls. Only yards away from the gate and Rip’s reaching hands, they panicked and bolted mindlessly in different directions, like dust bunnies blown out from underneath a bed. To them the trees seemed to offer more safety than the refinery compound. Na’omi chased after them, scolding at the top of her lungs for them to come back.

  Rip held his fire. To engage now while Na’omi and her students were scattered all over the woods and being pursued by Aabid’s men put them in jeopardy of being slaughtered. Aabid wanted him, not the females so much. After all, he was worth ten million dollars. Rip had no doubt Aabid would torture and execute Na’omi and the kids one by one if that was what it took for Rip to give up.

  From his vantage point at the top of the gate, Rip’s eyes again searched the compound for signs that it might be manned and that help was available. Nothing moved anywhere except for flames of fire escaping the towering gas vents. The captives’ last chance for rescue was turning out to be a mirage.

  Boko Haram soldiers rounded up the scattered girls as though they were a flock of lambs. Quayum, the demon with the crossbow, captured Esther and pulled her back to the road by her arm. Aabid had Na’omi. No one approached Rip, and no one shot at him. Apparently, th
e troops had orders not to kill him.

  Aabid hurled Na’omi to her knees on the road, the muzzle of his rifle barrel grinding into the back of her head. He looked toward Rip. The implication was clear, the threat real. Either the SEAL surrendered, or Na’omi was the next to die with her face in the dust.

  The expression on Na’omi’s face was a mixture of terror, defiance, and entreaty for Rip to save himself. He would only get himself killed trying to help them, and in the end they would all die anyhow.

  Rip was a man who weighed his choices, a trait that had made him a successful SEAL leader. This situation offered two choices. The first was the easiest; he could leap from the top of the fence, land behind the guard shack for cover, and run. Chances were he would not be pursued. Even Aabid dared not openly challenge the government by invading one of its cash cows, whether it was manned or not. Not yet at any rate.

  That choice would lead to Na’omi’s immediate death.

  Her eyes hadn’t left his, even with eternity confronting her. He read them even from this distance. Run, Richard! they said. Go! Save yourself!

  The only other choice was to give himself up. They wouldn’t kill him; he was too valuable alive. More importantly, they wouldn’t shoot Na’omi either. If he surrendered to save her, it confirmed in Aabid’s twisted mind that she was also valuable as further leverage.

  Rip had never viewed himself as the self-sacrificing sort. It was better that the other poor sonofabitch die for his country, as General Patton remarked, than that he die for his. Mission came first. Always.

  He couldn’t wrest his eyes away from Na’omi kneeling in the road with Aabid’s rifle against her head. As long as he was alive, Na’omi and little Esther still had a chance. And a SEAL was never defeated until he drew his last breath.

  He dropped his weapon. Slowly, he slid down the fence to the ground and, hands up, walked toward Aabid and Na’omi.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Abandoned Village, Nigeria

  Taggart’s escape attempt from the Boko Haram village began at midnight. At full daybreak, the flatbed truck rumbled back into the village, returning passengers to the same place from which they had fled hours earlier. For Aabid’s troops, the chase seemed to have been high sport. They were in good spirits, laughing and jabbering and hanging on all over the truck while Taggart, McAlwain, Na’omi, and the three schoolgirls rode in a tight group in the middle of the bed against the cab.

  As for Aabid, his cruel eyes and hard facial lines wore the constant expression of being pissed off at the world. While he probably wouldn’t kill his captives, at least not right away, Rip suspected he intended to exact from them some form of harsh retribution for the deaths of Chido and the two scouts. His merely killing Nick, whose body had been thrown onto the back of the truck, wasn’t likely to satisfy him.

  The ruined village lay deceptively peaceful when the truck pulled up and cut its engine. A black-and-white goat with bloated teats and a tinkling bell wandered past and stopped long enough out of curiosity to check things out. It bolted when Aabid’s terrorists pushed, threw, and prodded their prisoners from the flatbed and piled off after them. The goat bell took on a different, more frantic sound as the animal continued its flight to the other side of the village.

  Taggart looked back as he and the others were corralled toward their holding cells. Aabid glared at him. A couple of men tossed Nick’s bloody corpse off the truck. It hit the ground with a loud, mushy thunk, kicking up dust. Esther screamed at the gruesome exhibition and crowded with her classmates around their teacher’s legs for comfort.

  Aabid pointed at the dead American with his rifle. “I told you this would happen,” he rumbled. “Next time it will be all of you.”

  Once the captives were again separated as before by rebar in the hut, Rip knelt at McAlwain’s side to inspect his amputation. The oil executive was barely hanging on. McAlwain watched through heavy-lidded eyes as Taggart removed his filthy bandage and cleaned the infected stump from a clay jar of water left in the cell. He rinsed out the bandages and replaced them. It was the best he could do.

  “I was wrong about you,” McAlwain admitted through his pain. He gripped Rip’s forearm with his remaining hand. “You tried, Rip. You tried. For all of us.”

  Na’omi also watched through the bars while her traumatized girls cowered at her feet. Rip felt her looking at him and glanced up. Their eyes met and he immediately averted his. The process of hardening himself against emotional involvements and the pain they always evoked had begun years before. His soul and heart had only grown harder and more impenetrable as time passed and life’s hard knocks validated his outlook. Nonetheless, he could not deny the connection that seemed to be forming between him and the African teacher.

  McAlwain nodded off, then gave a sudden start. “I was supposed to call my grandson today,” he remembered, his speech rambling and disjointed. “He’s turning fourteen. You have kids?”

  Rip looked at Esther. Something about the little girl, her courage perhaps, tugged at the stone that his heart had become. “Didn’t get around to it,” he said.

  McAlwain looked pale and sweaty. Incoherent words spilled out, as though he was losing touch with himself. “Not too late … It just goes so fast … You blink and …”

  His chin dropped onto his chest. His eyes fluttered as he attempted to hang on. Rip shook him gently to keep him conscious and talking. “What his name, Terry? What’s your grandson’s name?”

  McAlwain roused himself. “Jake. He’s right between being a man and a boy, and not sure how to get there. He loves all that SEAL stuff. He’s read all the books, does the workouts, everything. Already talking about going to … BUD/S. Is that what you call it?”

  Rip nodded. “Maybe I can meet him,” he said before adding, “Talk him out of it.”

  “You kidding?” He caught a deep breath. “For him and his buddies, you guys are like superheroes.”

  Na’omi at the bars continued to watch Rip intently, something in her deep brown eyes so much different than when they first met at the schoolhouse.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  SEAL Command, Virginia Beach

  Alex Caulder stopped outside Bear Graves’s cage in the Cage Room and watched Bear sleeping on a cot surrounded by his mission gear. The man looked like hell with dark circles around his eyes and stubble on his cheeks. His jeans and T-shirt were wrinkled and soiled. He spent most of his time now at SEAL Command waiting for news about Taggart. Caulder knew how it galled and irritated him at his inability to rush to his old friend’s aid. Taggart would have done the same for him, for any of them.

  Bear appeared to be dreaming. His eyelids fluttered, his body tensed, his trigger finger squeezed rounds from a weapon visible only in his nightmares. Caulder strode across the cage floor and touched his shoulder. “Bear? Hey, Bear!”

  Startled, Graves jerked awake and threw his legs over the side of the cot. He relaxed when he recognized Caulder. “What do you want?”

  Caulder grinned and displayed a greasy paper bag. “Doughnuts. Had to fight five cops for ’em.”

  Buddha Ortiz joined them and took a hard look at Bear. “Tell me you didn’t sleep here last night.”

  “’Course he slept here,” Caulder answered for him. “Lena won’t stop calling me.”

  Ortiz sighed and nodded. “Me, too.” As proof, he displayed her number on his cell phone.

  Graves slipped on a pair of worn sneakers and rose from the cot. “I’m going up to Intel.”

  “Already did,” Caulder said.

  That wasn’t good enough for Bear. “They might have missed something.”

  “Bear, you’ve got a doctor’s appointment,” Caulder reminded him. “You gotta clean up, go pick up Lena.”

  “We got things covered here,” Ortiz assured him.

  Chase, Buckley, and Fishbait arrived. They were laughing about something and poking at Chase.

  “What’s the word on Rip?” Buckley asked at large.

 
; “No updates,” Ortiz informed him.

  Buckley did a double take on Graves. “Jesus, you look like you slept in the gator pen.”

  “Maybe no news is good news,” Chase ventured before realizing from the sharp looks he received that that might not have been his best observation, considering Bear’s state of mind. He cleared his throat and fidgeted with his hands stuffed into his pockets.

  Graves was in no mood for their horseshit. He ushered them from his cage and headed down the hallway for the back door to the parking lot. “Anything comes up, you call me,” he advised.

  He paused and stabbed a thumb at Chase. “And tighten him up.”

  Buckley broke into his wide Miami Vice grin and turned to his teammate. “Saddle up, son. We’re working.”

  If the SEAL drill known as Monster Mash failed to tighten up a man’s muscles and reflexes, they couldn’t be tightened, and he should go back to the regular navy and become a yeoman or personnel clerk. Caulder and Fishbait took positions to one side of the grueling obstacle course on the beach to function as referees and judges while Buckley raced through it with Chase. Buckley was leaner and quicker than Chase, but Chase had the muscle.

  At Caulder’s signal—“Go! ”—the two young SEALs broke from the starting line and sprinted down the edge of the surf, each burdened with a training dummy that weighed nearly two hundred pounds. The objective of the competition was to dash one hundred yards to where two big rig truck tires lay on the sand. There, they dumped the dummies and arm-pressed the tires over their heads a specified number of times before again racing down the beach to a shooting range where the parts to fully disassembled H&K416 rifles lay on two field tables. To complete the run, they had to reassemble the rifles quickly and fire one shot each at a man-silhouetted target three hundred meters away.

  Arms and legs burning from exertion, the two SEALs reached their weapons with Chase in the lead and Buckley trailing by a few steps. They expertly slapped their rifles together from much previous practice. Chase slapped in a magazine, primed the chamber, and fired first. Buckley got off his round a second later. They relaxed, sucking wind and laughing from the challenge.