Hunt the Viper

by Don Mann

  Saw nothing to be concerned about, but knew that could change in a second. The taller of the two men they’d captured tripped and fell. Because his wrists were zip-tied together, CT had to stop and help him up.

  The tall man, with a prayer cap on his head, spit some curse of disgust.

  CT responded with a growling “Shut the fuck up!”

  They continued running as fast as they could; a gust of wind threw up a curtain of sand, so the helo disappeared for a moment. Crocker hoped one of the prisoners was Abu Omar, but had his doubts. Something always went wrong on every mission. The injury to Rip concerned him more.

  He’d taken an AK round into his right upper hip. Crocker had applied QuikClot to the back entry point and sealed it with an Israeli pressure bandage. Luckily the bullet hadn’t ruptured the femoral artery or Rip would have bled out by now.

  Last time Crocker checked, Rip’s blood pressure and heart rate had stabilized, and his body temp was a little lower than normal. All good. They were drawing close. He’d require surgery to clean the wound, deal with the likely fracture to the ilium bone, and make sure any bone fragments hadn’t pierced the stomach or other organs.

  Crocker was trying to keep his mind off the aches in his arms, quickly approaching unbearable. Reminded himself that pain was weakness leaving the body, and they’d be out of there soon.

  “Stop a second,” Akil gasped, holding the front of the makeshift stretcher.

  “No can do!” Crocker responded. “Suck it up!”

  Akil groaned and picked up speed. “Yo momma so fat, I took a picture of her last Christmas and it’s still printing.”

  Crocker pushed harder. “Yo momma so fat her belly button gets home fifteen minutes before she does.”

  “Yo momma so ugly that when Santa came down the chimney he said, ‘Ho! Ho! Holy shit!’”

  It hurt to laugh, but he couldn’t help it.

  Sixty more meters.…Behind them, he saw headlights wash across the side of the compound.

  “Push, guys! Push hard!”

  Every part of Crocker’s body was screaming now—especially his lungs, shoulders, and calves. He tried recalling the lyrics of “House of the Rising Sun” to stave off the pain—so intense that he was on the verge of losing consciousness. Refused to stop.

  “‘Mother tell your children, not to do what I have done…’”

  He used to pump iron to the Animals’ version in his dad’s garage. Dozens of reps at a time. Never tired.

  Now he made out the outline of rotors of the Black Hawks, spinning over the embankment like in a dream. Akil caught his boot on a rock, started to trip, grunted, and at the last second recovered his balance.

  “Clumsy fuck.”

  Rip groaned. “I’ll get you back for that.”

  Crocker wanted to laugh again, but his body had turned numb. He struggled to stay conscious.

  “‘I got one foot on the platform…the other…on the train.…’”

  The next thing he remembered was one of the Night Stalker copilots helping him load in Rip, and then the sensation of lifting off, like rising on a magic carpet. Stars sparkled through the window. He thought he recognized Orion’s belt.

  CT, on the bench beside him, had his face in his hands.

  “You okay?”

  CT looked up and nodded. “‘No more than eight to ten’ guards…Bullshit.”

  He’d spent the night running through the streets of Tikrit with his deceased wife Fatima, being chased by demons. The horrid-smelling Ibah multiplied by three, sometimes four. Hand-in-hand with Fatima he ran along the banks of the Tigris River, through the ancient stone gates to Old Town, where the two of them first met more than twenty years ago. Memories returned of a cool evening in May before the summer heat. The town safe and quiet then.

  He didn’t mind that Fatima’s great-grandmother on her father’s side had converted to Islam from Christianity. Or that the town had once been the center of Assyrian Christianity.

  All he cared about were Fatima’s dark beguiling eyes, and the way they gave him confidence, and the strands of black hair that blew out from under her white scarf. She represented hope, strength, and a kind of intuitive wisdom.

  All things he longed to use to fill a space inside himself. Imagined his needs were simple as they ran together up a hill toward the ruin of the Assyrian Green Church—family, work, children. Like the three stately archways gleaming in the moonlight—the ones President Saddam Hussein had restored before the wars. When life made sense. When all he wanted was simple happiness.

  Thoughts filtered through his head as they ran with the demons on their heels. At some point he knew they would grow tired and have to give up. Fatima, beside him, showed no fear. When he turned to her she smiled as if to say, It’s okay, Abu Samir. You’re safe with me.

  Just as he smiled back, the multiple Ibahs snorted and lunged, one of them knocking her to the ground, and, as he stood helpless, devouring her in the most disgusting manner until all that remained was red slime and bones.

  His whole world stopped. His insides turned numb. He wanted them to kill him, too. In weakness and shame, he begged them.

  “Take me, too!” he shouted. “Don’t leave me here…alone!”

  Instead, the three beasts turned into the night and disappeared.

  Now it was morning. Feeling like an old man, he descended the narrow stone steps at a snail’s pace, all the time praying under his breath and asking Allah to give him strength. What awaited him in the low-ceilinged basement beneath the mosque, he didn’t know or care.

  The news of Fatima’s death had sent him into a terrible emotional spiral. Grief and anger fed one another as he imagined her shattered body, the violence that had been visited on his favorite wife, their house, and their few family mementos. From the air, no less, borne by a diabolical unfeeling machine.

  “The devils,” he muttered under his breath. “Godless cowards.”

  “Who?” asked Yasir Selah, at his side.

  Fingering the wooden beads at the side of his robe, he remembered the words in the Quran about revenge. “If you punish, then punish them with the like with which you were afflicted.”

  He wanted the drones he had heard about to rain destruction down on the infidels, to attack their women and children in their beds, to feel his pain and hatred, so they knew how he felt to have his homeland, his dreams, and his family violated the way they had been.

  He stopped three steps from the bottom and looked up at his aide. “Yasir,” he said, “when the Lord spoke to His angels about the kafir, what did he say?” Kafir were infidels, or literally “concealers of God’s word.”

  “He said they were hated by them for their arrogant, disdainful hearts.”

  “And he said, ‘I will send terror into the kafirs’ hearts, cut off their heads, and even the tips of their fingers.’”

  Chapter Seventeen

  A bone to a dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog when you are just as hungry as the dog.

  —Jack London

  The sun shone on the five-vehicle DWB convoy as it passed over green fields on its way east into Syria. Aside from the garbage and burnt-out vehicles alongside the road and occasional crater, it was hard for Séverine to tell that they were approaching the most destructive war zone in the world.

  She felt emboldened with a sense of purpose as she rode in the backseat of the first Mercedes Sprinter with a UN jeep escort in front of them. This is where she belonged. Not planning social dinners at the Delage estate, or choosing fabric for new curtains.

  “If you want to be Mother Teresa,” her mother had said before her departure, “you must surrender your pride.”

  The words still stung. Drawing within fifteen kilometers of Aleppo, she realized this might be the last time she could be honest with herself, and questioned the reasons she had left her mother in Paris.

  Am I still mad at her for scolding me when I filed for divorce?

  In her opinion, her mother
had always been too impressed with the Delage family name, and had fawned over Madame Delage, Alain’s mother. Séverine didn’t mind that her mother enjoyed the regular visits to the Delage estate in Rémy, and other privileges.

  Do I still hold a grudge for the way my mother put her petty self-interests above mine, when I’m the one who had married Alain and took on the burden that came with that? Did I want to elevate my position in society, too?

  Maybe…yes. To be perfectly honest, she had thought in the beginning that his social position and money would give her freedom. And, yes, she had loved Alain in certain ways and still did.

  She’d quickly realized she made a mistake and ended their marriage. She wanted nothing. She held no grudges. She wished Alain and his family the best.

  Alain had moved on. He was dating other women and had started a successful new business. It was her mother who mourned the most and expressed bitterness, as though she was the one Séverine had hurt.

  That was understandable in a way. Her mother was a sixty-year-old woman suffering from arthritis and living alone in a one-bedroom apartment, surviving on her husband’s pension as a train conductor with the SNCF.

  So, yes, she is limited in what she can do and what she can accomplish. But aren’t many of her limits self-imposed?

  It was an old quarrel. The truth was that mother and daughter had never gotten along so well. Séverine’s independent nature and rejection of conformity clashed with her mother’s belief that there was a proper way to behave in all social situations and it was necessary to compromise one’s pride in order to advance, and moving up the ladder of society was the key to achieving the only kind of happiness one could rely on.

  She accused her daughter of excessive pride, ignorance, and even disliking men. Or, at least, expecting too much of them.

  But why should I have to settle for a man I didn’t love and respect, and a life that didn’t excite me? If that’s what my mother considers excessive pride, I’ll live with it. Or maybe not…

  Séverine wrestled with her conscience as the convoy wound up a particularly scenic hill. She leaned out of the side window to let her hair blow freely and fill her lungs with fresh air.

  “Look,” said Marku, their Hungarian driver, pointing left.

  “What?” Per asked beside him.

  Séverine couldn’t see past their big shoulders at first. When she craned her neck, she was blinded momentarily by sunlight slanting through the windshield. She felt fear and excitement stir in her colleagues seated around her.

  “What is it?”

  Shielding her eyes, she made out a mass of people moving quickly across the green hilltop about a hundred meters away. Because of the beautiful setting, she thought it was some kind of happy group excursion at first.

  Then she heard Marku mutter the word “refugees,” and looked more closely, and the reality hit her.

  “From Aleppo most likely,” Marku commented. “Headed to Turkey.”

  “I thought that the people who wanted to leave had already been bussed out,” someone said.

  Séverine estimated about two hundred men, women, and children. The red sweater of one young boy, being carried on his father’s back, stood out in the morning light.

  “Why are they walking so fast?” Séverine asked. They seemed to be carrying only basic possessions in suitcases and backpacks.

  “They’re afraid of something,” Per answered. “Let’s find out.”

  The vehicles rumbled across the field and stopped. The refugees seemed apprehensive until they saw the DWB logos on the sides of the trucks and relaxed.

  A thin, long-faced man explained to an Arabic-speaking doctor that they had remained in Aleppo through the ISIS occupation and many years of fighting, but were forced out by recent Russian and Assad air strikes.

  “We were under the impression that the bombing had stopped,” Per said.

  Séverine, who had been studying Arabic, tried to follow as the man explained.

  “He says that ISIS and the other rebel groups are gone. All the government is doing now is killing Sunni civilians. That is their aim, he says. They’re savages and cowards, who drop bombs and rockets from the sky on houses and apartments.”

  “Disgusting,” Séverine said in Arabic.

  “Disgusting, yes,” the Syrian man responded. “Why does God allow this?”

  Séverine shook her head. While she had been talking to the man, she noticed a bruise on the face of a girl wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sweatshirt. When she knelt to examine her, it looked like a lesion caused by cutaneous leishmaniasis.

  She pointed this out to Per and suggested that the rest of the team examine the other members of the group for lesions, so she could conduct biopsies.

  “How?” he asked.

  “A skin scraping with microscopic analysis is best,” she answered.

  “You can do that quickly? Because these people seem to be in a hurry.”

  “I can.”

  “All right, let’s move fast.”

  The lesion, on the girl’s right cheek, was the size of a coin. The girl’s mother held her hand while Séverine gently did a scraping, and hurried to the lab truck to examine it.

  Indeed, it was a case of cutaneous leishmaniasis parasitic disease. Two dozen other cases were found. Séverine stopped at each infected person and used a needle to aspirate tissue fluid from the margin of the lesion, which she would later use to isolate the organism and identify the particular species.

  There was no time for that now. Instead, she cleaned each lesion thoroughly and applied a coat of sodium stibogluconate.

  “That’s the best we can do for now,” she explained to Per. “I imagine there’s nothing we can do to alleviate the stress and bad nutrition that helps the parasite spread. And there’s no way we can eradicate it completely until we develop a vaccine, which will take time.”

  “We can only do what we can.”

  While Séverine attended to those with signs of the disease, her colleagues spent the hour treating people for tooth- and muscle aches, sprained ligaments, diarrhea, incontinence, and other minor ailments. The worst case involved a three-year-old boy—the boy she’d seen wearing the red sweater—suffering from an infection caused by a recent shrapnel wound to the back of his neck. The infection was advanced and though they lanced, cleaned, and bandaged it, and administered antibiotics and ibuprofen to relieve the pain and swelling, the three-year-old’s condition remained serious.

  Per explained to the boy’s father that he really should rest in a hospital for a few days. There was a risk that the infection could spread and the boy could die.

  “Which hospital?” the father asked.

  Per, through a translator, offered to take the boy and his father with them to a special DWB clinic housed in a guarded UN compound on the outskirts of Aleppo. But the father balked. He was leaving his dead wife and five other deceased members of his family behind in Aleppo, and had no interest in returning.

  All the DWB doctors and nurses could do was give him antibiotics to administer to his son, and advise him to take the boy to a hospital as soon as they reached Turkey.

  Séverine stood beside Per, watching as the boy with the red sweater climbed on his father’s back, and smiled back at them as he left with the rest of the refugees.

  As she waved and prayed the boy would survive, tears gathered in her eyes.

  We can only do what we can.…

  “Where exactly did you find these men?” Lt. Colonel Smithson asked from the video screen in the operations room of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Crocker sat with his feet propped up on the chair in front of him to relieve the pressure in his lower back. The two Advil he’d swallowed recently hadn’t taken effect.

  Crocker didn’t hear her at first, though he was aware of the massive vessel creaking in the background, and rocking him to sleep. His mind was on Rip, who had just been medevaced to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Ramstein, Germany. When Crocker spent time there tw
o years ago, a nurse had told him that on a typical day the hospital accommodated twenty-three new patients and nine acute emergencies—more than many civilian hospitals admitted in the space of two months. He wondered about the damage the AK round had done to Rip’s hip.

  Will he ever be able to run again? Or bicycle long distance, which he loves to do? Or rejoin the team?

  “Crocker? Crocker, can you hear me?”

  Her voice jarred his attention. He focused on her dark eyes on the screen. She seemed to be scowling. “Yes, Colonel. I’m sorry. What was the question?”

  His mind was numb with exhaustion. The last six hours had been a blur of downloading photos from the compound, filling out reports, processing the prisoners, and watching them being loaded onto a Gulfstream with two men from CIA Ground Branch, who would escort them to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan to be interrogated. He’d managed to catch a couple hours’ sleep and a quick breakfast of ham and eggs with a few cups of coffee.

  Even so, he could barely focus. Now he was thinking ahead to the next target, a Greek freighter sailing west through the Mediterranean on its way to Turkey.

  “I asked you about the two prisoners, who we’re calling Benji One and Benji Two. Benji One being the older and taller with the short white beard.”

  “Yes.”

  “You should be able to see their photos on the screen. Can you confirm that?”

  He didn’t want to concentrate, but did. Neither appeared to be lighthearted fellows. Maybe he wouldn’t be, either, if he lived in the post-Qaddafi chaos of Libya.

  “Crocker, you see them?”

  She seemed impatient. It was 0923 where he was, and 0323 in DC. “Yes, I can.”

  “I believe these are pictures you took shortly after you seized them at the compound.”

  He was trying to remember. “Yeah.…My teammate Akil took the photos. That’s correct.”

  “My question to you, Crocker: Where were these militants when you captured them?”

  The questioning annoyed him. He’d already been debriefed twice, and didn’t want to go over the op again. It hadn’t been a great one from his point of view. One of his men had suffered a serious injury. They hadn’t found a weapons cache. Nor did it seem as though the arms dealer who had been the target of the mission had been on-site.