Latakia

by J. F. Smith

  The red-headed guy was laughing, but then did a slight double-take when he saw Matt. He grinned and said, “Hey hey, look here! The doc was able to pull him through after all! You feelin’ better after your nap?”

  Apparently, this guy knew something about what had happened. Matt nodded and said, “Yeah, I’m ok.”

  The red-head glanced back over his shoulder and realized where Matt was headed. He grinned again and said, “Actually, you know what? That head has been without water for two days now. C’mon, I’ll show you another one so you can actually clean up.”

  The dark headed guy said, “Petey…”

  Red-headed Petey jerked his head so that Matt would follow him. “It’s not far. You won’t get lost,” he said, interrupting the dark headed one. He made sure Matt was following, turned down one passage, went a short distance, and then turned down another before stopping in front of a closed door.

  Petey asked, “Think you can find your way back from here?”

  Matt felt very discouraged. He wasn’t lost and he could find his way back to his bed or bunk or rack or whatever the hell they insisted on calling it, but he did feel totally lost in general. He was completely out of his element here. He had no idea who any of these people were, what they knew or didn’t know about him, what was supposed to happen next, and he really just wanted to get into the shower and clean off.

  Matt sighed and said dejectedly, “Yeah, right right here, then the next left and the room with my bed is there.”

  Petey corrected him, “Your berth with your rack.”

  Matt scratched at the heavy growth of scruff on his face. “Yeah, ok, whatever.”

  Petey opened the door and motioned for Matt to go on in. As soon as Matt stepped in, Petey grabbed the towel around Matt’s waist and yanked it off. He immediately pulled the door closed behind Matt.

  Before Matt even realized what had happened, he heard the one called Petey laughing and yelling from outside, “Hey Mope, here’s the little ass pirate! He said he wanted to give you a knob job!”

  Matt realized the very cramped bathroom space was already occupied. There was one shower in it with nothing surrounding it, and there was a guy already under the spray of water, less than two feet away from him.

  Matt’s eyes locked onto the guy under the water just as he, Mope, looked at him. All Matt managed to see was dark hair and a pair of ears that stood out from the guy’s head before he realized what Petey had yelled.

  Several harsh things hit Matt at the same time; he was standing naked in front of this person; he had just been referred to as an ass pirate; he no longer had a towel and a long walk back to his fucking “rack”. Matt felt beaten and humiliated. He turned to face the wall, away from the guy in the shower.

  It took a second to pull himself together before he could say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know… That guy… said I should use… I’m not in here trying… to… uh…” Matt stopped and exhaled heavily. What was the point, he wondered? He leaned his forearm against the wall he was facing, lay his head against it, and closed his eyes. Matt really wanted off this Iwo Jima thing.

  He vaguely heard the guy behind him say, over the spray of the water, “Whatever. Didn’t think you were. Besides, I don’t have anything you haven’t seen before. And forget Colorado. He’s just being himself.” His voice reverberated in the enclosed shower area.

  Matt wasn’t really paying attention at this point, though, even as the water behind him turned off. It finally hit him that the red-headed guy knew he was gay. It was hard for him to imagine, but that guy had to be the one that had referred to him as the “pole smoker” when he was being rescued. Why did he have to be rescued by a complete asshole? A homophobic asshole.

  He stood there, naked and leaning up against the wall, eyes closed and trying to hold himself together. Matt wanted to go home more than anything in the world. If he had been rescued, why did this feel almost as bad as being in the empty room? Why couldn’t he just be with Brian? Why couldn’t he be away from these people? Why couldn’t he be home? Familiar and safe.

  Matt heard the door open and then close again, almost like it was in the distance, while he was lost in his thoughts.

  A few moments later, he stood back up and looked around to find he was alone in the shower. He didn’t have a towel, but he could go ahead and get cleaned up. He forced himself to shave, and then got under the water. He had to admit, a shower for the first time in who knew how many days felt like being reborn. He didn’t think a shower had ever felt that good.

  While he was feeling the water wash off everything from the last few days, he heard a quiet knock at the door and someone say something from outside. Before he could respond, the door cracked open and a hand tossed in a towel over on the lavatory.

  Chapter 9 – Next Question

  Once done showering, Matt felt much better, although food was definitely his next order of business.

  But as he got back to his rack, he found a black girl waiting on him. She introduced herself as Keisha and said she was there to take him to go see the fellow named Wickland. Matt asked who this Wickland person was, but Keisha replied that she didn’t know anything about it, she wasn’t supposed to know anything about it, and didn’t care to know anything about it. She just needed to get Matt to the cabin where Wickland was waiting for him.

  Matt changed back into the clothes they had given him while she waited outside, then they headed off on another bewildering tour of passages, hatches, twists and turns.

  Along the way, they actually did pass a dining area, and Matt smelled food for the first time in days. It made him a lot hungrier suddenly.

  “Can I get something to eat first, Keisha?” he asked.

  “Nope. This guy’s waiting on you right now. But you’ve seen where the chow hall is now, so you can come back and get whatever you want.”

  She added, “I think they got the red death in there today. Stay away from that.”

  “Uhh…” said Matt, wrinkling up his nose.

  “Corned beef and cabbage,” she explained.

  They walked a little further, Matt finding out quickly that the narrow passageways meant he had to duck under pipes and conduits pretty often or flatten up against the wall to allow others to pass. Matt asked Keisha, “So, are you curious about why I’m here?”

  Keisha didn’t seem too impressed with his question. “I heard they brought someone in yesterday. You, I guess. We get riders occasionally for whatever reason. Other than that, why you’re here is above my pay grade. Lot of times, there’s some rumors, but they’ve kept this one pretty tight, which ain’t usual. But I’ve been around long enough to know that curiosity just gets you more work on your plate.”

  Matt was hoping maybe she had heard some rumors about what had happened and would tell him since he himself understood so little about it.

  “How about the Marine guys that brought me here… do you know anything about them?” asked Matt.

  Keisha stopped suddenly and turned around to face Matt. Her complacency and boredom replaced by a little more fire in her eyes.

  “Those guys weren’t no dumb-ass jarheads!” she replied, derisively. “Seabags can’t handle anything that requires an IQ of more than dip-squat! All that ‘ooo-rah’ bullshit all the time! Those guys that brought you in were SEALs.”

  Matt realized he obviously had hit a nerve. But it still didn’t really mean anything to him, other than it clearly wasn’t Marines that rescued him.

  “So,” he tried again, “the tall guy named Petey, with the really bright red hair… he’s not a Marine?”

  “Hell no!” Keisha replied, adamantly.

  “Uh, I don’t know anything about the military… what’s a SEAL, then?”

  Keisha stopped again and looked back at Matt like he was the stupidest two-year-old child she had ever run across.

  “SEALs? Shit! That’s what those dumb ass jarheads dream of being! SEALs are pure Navy, all the way. They’re the cream of the bad-ass crop! The tough
est and smartest of all the Spec-Ops guys. They’ll take a mission that other teams wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole attached to a remote controlled Predator, and they’ll make it look easy. Those guys that brought you in? They are the deadly serious shit, man.”

  She led Matt a little further to a door and stopped again in front of it. She smiled a huge smile at Matt, only barely tinged by sarcasm, and said, “You have arrived at your destination! Thank you for flying Air Keisha, y’all!” before she walked off back down the way she had come with Matt.

  Matt stood there for a moment, thinking about how Keisha had referred to the guys that rescued him. The words “deadly serious shit” raced around in his head. He finally took a deep breath and knocked lightly on the door and heard a man’s voice say “Come!” from inside.

  Matt walked in. The man inside was short, much shorter than Matt, probably somewhere in his fifties, with silver hair parted neatly on the side. What struck him was that he wasn’t in any kind of military uniform – he was wearing plain khaki casual pants with a white knit polo shirt and had what looked like a fairly expensive steel wristwatch on his left wrist.

  The man stood up and introduced himself to Matt as Randall Wickland, with no title or rank preceding it. Matt shook his hand and Randall gestured to the chair for Matt to sit in.

  For some reason, Matt was expecting something like an office or a conference room. A conference room like he was used to in an office building. This wasn’t like that at all. It was tiny and could barely fit four people comfortably. But unlike the bland gray and steel that he had seen everywhere else, this room was finished with a more “decorative” fake wood paneling. In front of Randall’s chair were a few folders filled with papers and printouts.

  They both sat down and Randall started looking through one of his folders for a moment while Matt continued to examine the room he was in. He also noticed the room didn’t have any windows in it. Matt realized he had not seen a single window since he woke up in the infirmary.

  He asked Randall, “Are you assigned to this boat?”

  Randall glanced up and corrected him, “Ship. It’s a ship. No, I’m not.” He flipped through a few more papers and offered no more information than that.

  Randall got his papers in the order he wanted them and began, “Ok, so let’s start by getting…”

  Randall paused a minute and cocked his head slightly before he started over. “Sorry. The docs got you fixed up ok?”

  “Yeah, I’m doing ok. Glad to be out… of… uh… you know.” Matt suddenly realized that thinking back to being in the room, naked and captive, made him feel nervous and shaky. He started bouncing his leg nervously under the table. It was only barely more than a day since he had been held captive and in mortal peril, and barely mentioning it here made the memories flood his mind and start to drown him.

  Randall watched him closely. Matt got the feeling that Randall was busy studying his face and not really listening to anything Matt said. Randall finally nodded before continuing. “Matt, if you would, I’d like to cover two areas with you. First, I’d like to hear about you and about what you were doing in Syria. Then I’d like to get into the details about your abduction, and I’ll ask a lot of questions about that. Please help me with this… I want every detail you can possibly remember. Nothing is too small to leave out. So, let’s start with the easy part. Just tell me all about you, please. Your name, where you live, where you work, why you were in Syria, who you were there meeting with… all that.”

  This was the easy part, so Matt focused on it. He told Randall his full name, that he lived in Richmond, Virginia and about his job at the Virginia Department of Health. He explained all about his volunteering for Doctors Without Borders and his project at Tishreen University. Randall stopped him at several places along the way and asked additional questions, but Matt thought it odd that he never bothered to write anything down.

  After ten minutes or so of going over Matt’s background, Randall shifted the conversation. “Alright, so let’s talk about what happened to you. Again, I need as much detail as you can give me, no matter how unimportant you might think it is.”

  Matt started to feel a little queasy and asked, “So, uh, would it be possible to have some water? I’m still a little thirsty after… everything.” Randall looked at him with a tinge of impatience, but then he relented. He reached back behind his chair and pulled out a bottled water from his briefcase and handed it to Matt.

  Matt opened the bottle immediately and downed almost half of it. “Thanks,” he said through a weak smile. The water wasn’t really making the anxiety go away.

  Randall led the conversation this time, and took Matt through what had happened step by step. Randall’s questions were blunt and very thorough. As they went through the events, Matt became more and more jittery. Having to relive it had an effect on him he had never felt before, and it wasn’t pleasant. It got harder and harder to respond to Randall’s questions, and Matt felt like Randall was having a hard time controlling his impatience towards Matt’s answers. And unlike the earlier questions, Randall took copious notes on everything he said.

  Randall focused for a while on the café where Matt was captured, including the people that had suggested Matt go there. The insinuation of that question was not something that Matt had even thought about before, and it made him visibly upset. Would someone that he had been working with set him up to be abducted?

  Then Randall spent a lengthy amount of time on the one that Matt described as the leader and tried over and over to get Matt to give a name to go with the person, but Matt had heard no one call the person by name. As a backup, Randall asked for an extremely detailed description of the person. How tall was he? What kind of clothes did he wear? What color were they? What about his hair and beard? Did he wear a watch? Did he have any moles or visible scars? What were his eyes like?

  Then Randall wanted to know about Matt’s laptop. Specifically, he wanted to know what the lead abductor wanted for Matt to show him on the laptop. But Matt couldn’t remember. It sounded like a nonsense word to Matt when spoken with the guy’s thick accent. He wasn’t even sure it was English, for that matter.

  When he got to the point where Matt described hearing the yelling followed by the gunshot in the other room, Matt had problems. His mouth dried up and his mind played the sound over and over in his head, along with the feeling of utter despair that he would be next. He could feel himself back in that coffin of a room, bound and naked, waiting for his turn to be shot.

  Matt finally snapped back to the room he was in with Randall smacking his hand on the table in front of him to get his attention.

  Matt forced himself to breathe deeply a few times and said, “Can you just… give me a second here. This is hard. It’s just… hard. I felt like I was… already dead, but… was just waiting for the act… of being killed to… catch up… to where I was.” Matt wiped at his eye and took another sip of water. Why was everyone so completely indifferent to what he had been through? Did no one care? Matt sank down in his chair a little when he realized that what had happened didn’t seem to matter to anyone. He felt small, and tired, and alone. And hopeless.

  Randall finally ran through his patience, cleared his throat, and said, “Ok, let’s continue. I bet you’re hungry, and the sooner we finish, the sooner you can eat.”

  Matt didn’t really feel hungry any more, but he did want to get away from Randall Wickland sooner rather than later.

  Randall finished getting Matt to walk him through the remaining details, including everything he remembered about the SEALs rescuing him.

  When Randall finished scribbling out his notes on the last few details Matt was able to give him, he finally looked up at Matt with a smile. “Good! This helps a lot! Thanks! So, you’re probably starving. You want to go get yourself some lunch and relax a little bit?”

  Matt looked at Randall dumbly.

  “No,” said Matt.

  “No?”

  “I’ve got some
questions, too, if you don’t mind,” insisted Matt.

  “Oh. Yeah, you probably do. Go ahead, I’ll answer what I can.” Randall leaned back in his chair casually.

  “When can I go home?”

  Randall replied, “We’re working on that. We’ll get you home soon, though.”

  “How soon is soon?”

  “Mmmm… Not totally sure just yet.”

  Matt started to feel trapped. “Am I being held here, then?”

  Randall smiled, amused. “No, Matt. Believe me, there’s nothing about you that is even the slightest bit fishy in any of this. It just doesn’t happen instantly, though. For one thing, we’re already working on getting you a replacement passport from the Department of State. For another, we’ll probably have an additional conversation at some point. We may have some photos to show you, based on your descriptions, to see if you recognize any of the people that grabbed you.”

  Matt relaxed a little bit. “Who are you? Are you one of the guys that rescued me?”

  Randall smiled and said, “No. Next question.”

  “Are you with the military at all?”

  Randall didn’t seem put off by the question. He leaned back some more and put his hands behind his head and replied through a sly smile, “Next question, Matt.”

  Matt thought a second before asking, “Do you have my laptop?”

  Randall sat up and said, “Oh yeah, about that… we do have it. We’re going over it now. Sorry, but this is a national security thing. And while we checked for anything they might be looking for, we’re also looking to make sure they didn’t add anything to your laptop.”