by Vince Milam
“Catch! Incoming!”
My words sounded a split second before the explosion. A deafening blast that drowned out rifle fire. Chunks of stone rained down on the immediate battlefield.
“Shitfire!” Catch called, his voice full of pain. Followed with a loud grunt, followed with another “Shitfire!”
“Catch!”
Three heart-ripping seconds of silence.
“The sons of bitches blew me off the top. I’m stuck in a rocky-ass crevice. Think I broke something. Gimme a second.”
Relief washed over me, but we were still screwed, blued, and tattooed. The dynamic had to change, and change right freakin’ then. Everything hinged on getting past those SOBs behind the outcrop.
“Case! Can you advance?” Marcus asked, his voice filled with fight but for the first time tinged with anger and concern.
“No choice. Cover me.”
I poked my head out, rifle aimed, prepared to dash right at the bastards. No other options on the table. I saw it fly through the air. An RPG, headed my way. Flung myself backward, hugged dirt. It entered the crevice, flew over me, and exploded against a rock wall. Much of the fragmentation blew forward, out the crevice above the steep drop. Much, but not all. Shrapnel and stone chips peppered my back as the explosion lifted me an inch or so off the ground. Son of a bitch.
“Pistol only, my brothers.”
Bo was in dire straits.
“I’m stuck, dammit!” Catch said. “And one of my legs won’t work right.”
“You still with us, Case?” Marcus asked.
“Yeah. Gimme one to pull it together. Then cover me.”
My ears rang, and my back side was on fire. Crawled to my knees, then feet. Staggered, braced against a rock wall, the cool surface pressed against my cheek. Gotta go, gotta move. Gotta attack. Best bet—come flying out of there before they started shooting at me again or, God forbid, fired another RPG. I shoved off from the stone wall with my head, breath harsh, and checked my weapon. Blood dripped down my face and arms. It pooled within tiny indentations along the assault rifle’s stock.
“Now, Marcus!” I called, asking for cover fire.
My brothers were dead unless I went full-frontal on the attack. Straight into the teeth of their defense. I set my weight on my back leg for a push-off. Released and sprang forward. And met a bright light and blast and unconsciousness.
Chapter 34
Bright blue sky framed Bo’s face as a warm breeze lifted strands of his wild red hair. The flyaway ends were singed, burnt. As were his eyebrows. He sat cross-legged on the dirt alongside my head and smiled down at me.
“Pleasant trip, my Georgia peach?”
I couldn’t answer and sought an anchor, a grab-point. Farther beyond his countenance, the massif wall—steep and several hundred yards high. And it was quiet, tranquil. I blinked, groaned, and started rolling over so I could, at a minimum, rise to my knees. Bo placed a gentle hand on me.
“Lie still for the moment. Let’s assess what the recent chaos has wrought.”
No argument from me. My head hurt like hell, my entire back—from calves to shoulders—was a continuous dull ache as dots of sharp pain barked at random intervals.
“You’re shot.”
It was all I could muster at the moment. Bo, shirtless, displayed multiple taped-over gauze areas on his upper torso. The dressing along his left shoulder wrapped over the top and under the arm—an entry and exit wound wrap. Congealed blood showed through every gauze patch. He pulled a soft-sided water bottle and lifted my head to drink.
“More than a minor mishap,” he said. “Less than a punched ticket.”
The water was beyond fine, and I drank my fill.
“It’s quiet.”
My bearings began coming together—snippets of ultraviolence pieced together, ending with an attempted attack from my own personal crevice.
“It’s over,” he said.
“Marcus? Catch?”
“Worse for wear, for sure. But upright and kicking. Well, our brother bear won’t be kicking anytime soon. It’s you we thought we’d lost.”
I groaned again and rolled over. Bo placed a gentle hand under an armpit and helped raise me onto my hands and knees.
“Move with caution. Allow the internal gyroscope to resettle. So sayeth a man who quite recently navigated the same procedure.”
I gathered my bearings and performed a slow lift onto my knees. My head pounded, every muscle ached, my back side now on fire.
“It’s over? What the hell happened?”
“It would appear you were shot from your hidey-hole like a watermelon seed. And took a tumble down the hill.”
I performed a slow head turn and focused on the massif wall, followed it upward where the exit of my crevice was discernible. Beyond, dark smoke rose from several spots within the Janjaweed encampment.
Bo, Marcus, Catch—alive. Thank God. And according to Bo, it was over. Double thanks. But the pieces, the battle snippets didn’t add up. We had been in deep shit. Beyond deep shit. End of the road and kiss our raggedy butts goodbye. Until something happened. Something that blew me out the narrow chute and downhill.
“Will he make it?”
Marcus’s voice, far distant and filled with concern. A slow head turn—all I could perform at the moment—captured Marcus farther south gingerly working his way down a ravine. Above him, Catch remained on his backside, sliding downhill with arm thrusts and one leg lifted above the ground.
“Our master and commander wishes to know if you plan on remaining in the current cosmic realm,” Bo said, his face near mine.
Neither Bo nor myself still had radio earpieces. Bo’s pistol was holstered at this side. One final grenade dangled from a torn-up webbed battle vest, now tied around his waist. I lifted a single hand, thumbs up, toward Marcus a hundred yards distant. Even at that distance, a relaxing of his shoulders and a slow head nod were visible. Catch, too, halted his backside descent and watched my returned signal. A wide grin within the black bristle flashed, and he began the arm thrusts downhill again.
“Acquaintances in high places,” Bo said. “I’d suggest you remain on your knees while I perform less-than-tender ministrations. I’ll start with your head and back. Although we, and especially you, must suffer through with a one-armed Nurse Nightingale.”
“What? High places?”
It was a surreal setting, but my senses started coming together. Several high-flying buzzards rode thermals above the massif’s top. No shooting, no screams. Scrub brush rattled as a strong gust of breeze passed through. I glanced toward Marcus and Catch. Anchors, confirmation we lived.
Bo undressed me with his knife. My shirt stuck to my back as he peeled it off. Sticky blood caused the fabric to tug against tender skin.
“Do you remember your Aristotle, goober?”
“No. What happened up there?”
“The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.”
The ear ringing faded, replaced with my heartbeat’s dull thump. Bo poured water over my head and used gauze to swab dried and drying blood from my face and scalp. It was over. The one item I held onto while pulling together the pieces of what had happened. We were alive. The Janjaweed were dead. One helluva big item. The battle complete, the bounty lifted. An event soon dissipated into the ephemeral realm of rumor and campfire lore among the clans of western Sudan. Over.
“Buckle up, brave Ulysses. This part is less than pleasant,” Bo said as he removed forceps from the small field medical kit tucked into my removed battle vest. He squirted wound wash along the forceps’ working end, as well as his fingers and a large wad of gauze. He began on my face. Pressed the skin down on either side of entry wounds, allowed access to whatever was buried.
“While you mangle me, can I entertain hope you’ll explain what happened?”
He focused on the task at hand and asked, displaying a stone shard pulled from my upper cheek, “Do you
wish to keep this?”
“No.”
“Sure? It is a potent totem.”
“No. There was an explosion. Let’s start with that.”
He plucked another slice of rock from my skull and then another skull item that howled with pain. He displayed a small shrapnel chunk for my purview and waited while I confirmed or rejected his offer to keep it. It was shrapnel from the RPG. There were more of those across my back side, no doubt.
“No. The explosion, Bo.”
He shifted to my back. I checked on Marcus and Catch. They’d reached flat ground and Catch now had one arm across Marcus’s shoulders, hopping on one foot. In his other hand, a Janjaweed AK-47. Catch wasn’t prone to go anywhere unarmed. They made slow progress toward us.
“A few of these I shall leave for later treatment,” Bo said. “I can stop the bleeding, but they have nested deep.”
He spread skin and plucked out several near-surface fragments. The white-hot pain brought clarity and improved mental function.
“Sometimes you irritate the fire out of me,” I said and winced at his latest excavation.
He leaned forward and whispered into my ear.
“It came from above. Redemptive lightning.” He gave a gentle bump with his forehead to an unwounded section of my head and returned to the work at hand. “We were watched by our former associates at the Company. Perhaps they missed us and yearned for the good old days.”
A drone. A killer drone hovered high above the battlefield equipped with Hellfire missiles. From a secure room at Langley, Marilyn Townsend had watched our battle play out. Of course. I’d written the CIA off after the meeting with Townsend. Didn’t consider they’d keep an eagle-eye on activities.
Such a weird world. While we engaged in desperate battle with killing and death and gore aplenty, a locked conference room back in the States held a handful of men and women who watched, observed, drank coffee. Pass the freakin’ popcorn.
Our battle’s culminating event raised an immediate unknowable question. Fodder for Ace of Spades ruminations. Did Townsend perceive both the desperation of our situation and our individual locations as sufficient protection from the blast? Or was it a wipe-clean effort? Take us all out. No dangling strings, no aftermath loose ends. Close the Company book for this chapter. Move on. The Musa Kibir clan and the four of us dead. Too bad, so sad.
If the latter, did another Hellfire missile await us as Marcus and Catch approached? Finish the job? Oh, man. Townsend watched as Bo dug for shrapnel and Marcus and Catch struggled our way. All it took was her soft and matter-of-fact command thousands of miles away. Adios, Case, Bo, Marcus, and Catch. My brothers wouldn’t be filled with such uncertainty. They’d take the drone’s Hellfire release as an act of camaraderie from the Company. I didn’t have the same perspective. Between my twisted outlook and the battle carnage and the numerous wounds, one thing stood clear: I needed a career change.
“I never thought of you as a man with a plan for rapid evac,” Marcus said, now within speaking-voice range. “We couldn’t find hide nor hair of you until Bo took a gander downhill.”
“Exit strategy,” I said, grunting as Bo dug. “Always a critical component. How are you two?”
“Screwed up my knee,” Catch said. “Hurts like hell. Otherwise, okay.”
Okay covered the several leaking gauze patches across his upper body.
“You shot?” I asked him.
“Nowhere important. That RPG blew me off the top of my position. The fall was a bitch. The good news—I was tucked into a deep crevice when the missile hit.”
Marcus grabbed wound wash, applied it to his hands, and assisted Bo. “You’re not a bad one-armed gauze-hanger, Bo. But let’s cut this guy some slack and get it over with.”
“Marcus?” I asked. “Tell me how you’re doing.”
“Farthest from the blast. If you remember, I was behind a boulder attempting to cover you. A concussion and a few nicks. Otherwise good to go.”
Marcus displayed several gauze patches on his skull and upper chest. I imagined we all had concussions. We were too close to the blast wave. The impact of overpressurization on a body caused havoc. My head pounded—a migraine-like throb. And I was still unsteady, even on my knees. Marcus had me return to hands and knees as he worked down my back. The RPG had scattered a fair amount of hot metal across my back side.
“How’d you survive it, Bo?” I asked. Catch’s crevice and Marcus’s distance were credible protections, but Bo had been at ground zero.
“Proximity. You sure you don’t want me to keep a few of these totems for you?”
“No. What does proximity mean? In this freakin’ context?”
Marcus pressed on either side of another skin wound while Bo dug around with the forceps. Son of a bitch, it hurt. They instructed me to drop drawers.
“I was down to a few pistol rounds. My knife and final grenade and throwable rocks were next. So I hunkered among welcoming cracks and crevices. The enemy—are you sure about these totems?”
“I’m sure.”
I groaned as he pulled the latest fragment from under the skin on my upper butt.
“Well, the enemy was forced into close proximity in order to have a go at me. They tried a couple of RPGs, but my location was tucked deep into rock and stone and ancient tales.”
“Bo, when we wrap up sticking our fingers in Case’s dike, let’s go get the jeep,” Marcus said. “You two assume a defensive position behind those.” He pointed toward a nearby collection of large boulders. “Give us an hour. None of us are moving too quick. But we have to get the hell out of here.”
“Any left alive after the blast?” I asked.
“A few,” Marcus said.
No further elaboration needed. Marcus performed final cleanup duties. The sun beat down as they completed their extractions and patching on my rear hide.
“How many left back there?” I asked, referring to the deepest shrapnel. It didn’t matter at the moment, but a number provided a basis for future plans. A low number and a qualified medic could handle it. A bunch would require a legit hospital.
“A few,” Marcus said.
Catch would require serious help for, at a minimum, his knee. Bo’s shoulder, as well, although his recuperative powers never ceased to amaze. We were down to Marcus’s HK rifle and Catch’s scrounged AK-47. We still had pistols. We divvied up the remaining pistol ammo. The extra HK rifles, still in the jeep and brought at Marcus’s insistence, would replenish our armament for the drive to safety.
I stood with Bo’s help, unsteady, and lifted bloody drawers and shredded fatigues. Spare shirts and pants were back at the jeep. Catch hopped one-legged over to me, placed a gentle arm across my unwounded shoulder, and pressed his face against mine. His beard bristles rubbed and scratched my tender face wounds. I didn’t mind one little bit.
“We thought you’d bought the ticket,” he said. “Couldn’t find you anywhere. After we patched each other, depressed as hell about you buying the farm, hippie-boy peeked down the hill. And saw your sorry ass napping.”
Bo stepped forward and joined us, his good arm light as a feather against our bloody bodies.
“A man of sublime calm, taking a brief respite from ugly activities. Commendable, my goober. Commendable.”
Marcus’s Zippo clacked. He fired a cigar and joined the circle, his arm on top of Bo’s.
“Well done, gentlemen. Well done. Mission accomplished.”
We stood silent, wavering, wounded, alive. Wrapped with relief and pain and accomplishment. And love.
“Did you remember the champagne, Marcus?” Catch asked.
“Funny.”
“He’s getting forgetful in his old age,” I said. “He used to be prepared for anything.”
“I sure wasn’t prepared for the Hellfire. I don’t wish to experience that again.”
“One of life’s grand and glorious markers, for sure,” Bo said.
“You really are batshit crazy, Bo,” Catch said. “
It’s why I love you.”
“This whole effort was batshit crazy,” I said. “And we pulled it off, men. We pulled it off.”
Catch and Marcus started chuckling, a hyper-stress release mechanism.
“Roger that,” Marcus said as he shifted to full-blown laughter.
Bo and I joined him, soft chuckles escalating as relief and aftermath and realization sunk in. We’d made it. Bo issued a sharp Comanche yell. Our shoulders shook with near-hysterical laughter. Laughter at the absurdity of us standing there, isolated and alone in western Sudan. Shot-up warriors who’d taken on an entire clan of Janjaweed fighters. Miles from safety, still surrounded by wandering enemy bands. It didn’t matter. We’d done it. After all these years, we’d done it, the bounty gone. Tears rolled, and headshaking laughter filled the space as Bo continued his war yelps. As screwed up as it sounds, we each knew in our hearts it didn’t get any better than this moment, this place, this band of brothers.
Chapter 35
Marcus drove. He strove for a fine balance between speed and the need to avoid jostling wounded operators. There was no happy medium, and each passing mile along rutted dirt and sand roads was well marked with blue commentary on his driving skills, eyesight, and overall mental fitness. One gnarly moment cropped up prior to crossing back into Chad.
A small pickup truck, loaded with Janjaweed soldiers, approached along an intersecting dirt track. We’d seen their approach, the dust plume evident from a distance. We stopped short of the intersection, preferring confrontation with them at our front rather than have them tail us down the road. They too stopped, fifty yards from us.
Their truck bed held six turbaned fighters, two more in the cab. AK-47s and a couple of RPGs evident. Our weaponry was displayed as well, and Marcus suggested we remain sitting. Movement on our part would highlight the beat-up nature of the little jeep’s occupants. A sign of vulnerability, weakness. Catch sat in the front passenger seat, giving his bum leg more room. Bo and I occupied the crammed space of the back seats.