The Hunters

by Tom Young

  “I will not argue with you on that, Hussein.”

  Hussein could not remember the last time he’d had a friendly conversation like this. This flying mechanic was not such a bad fellow. Yes, when the time came—if it came—Hussein would kill the others but, if possible, he would let Geedi live.

  32.

  After everyone finished eating, Parson ordered the flashlights turned off. Chartier picked up the AK-47 and took watch by the bunker door. The Frenchman moved his bandaged arm stiffly, though he insisted he could still shoot. Parson lay in the darkness, listening to the breathing of his crew members and to the occasional crackle and thud of weaponry—sometimes barely audible, sometimes closer than he would have liked. He tried to sleep, but his mind raced with problems and possibilities.

  In leaving the cellar and coming to the bunker, he had accomplished his main goal: getting enough radio reception to reach Lieutenant Colonel Ongondo. But Ongondo had offered little in the way of good news. In Parson’s mind, he replayed the conversation with Ongondo:

  “It’s good to hear your voice, Spear Alpha,” Parson had said.

  “And yours as well. I had almost given up on you.”

  “Spear Alpha, be advised we are close to our previously reported position.” Parson spoke in vague terms because his civilian nav/com radio did not encrypt transmissions. If al-Shabaab had enough initiative to tune in the aviation emergency frequency and find a good English speaker, they could listen in.

  “Understood,” Ongondo had said. “My unit is still in contact with the enemy. We hope to receive some support from your kindred, if you know what I mean.”

  At first, Parson did not know what that meant. Support from the American military? Unlikely, given the drawdown at Djibouti. If the Pentagon learned American aid workers were in trouble, the brass might send help, but that help couldn’t arrive this quickly. To task a Delta Force team or a SEAL unit and get them here on a C-130 would take a few days of planning. Even if SEALs or Air Force pararescuemen were on alert as close as Mogadishu, they’d need Parson’s exact location—which he’d never transmitted.

  Then Parson realized that by “kindred,” Ongondo probably meant aviators—just not American aviators. An air strike by AFRICOM forces? Entirely possible. Parson remembered that Ugandan L-39 Albatros attack jet on the ramp at Mogadishu. So, after the air strike, maybe somebody could come in with a helo?

  “Ah, Spear Alpha,” Parson had radioed, “do you think we can get a ride?”

  “Unknown at this time.”

  Unknown? That meant no. Negative. Not happening.

  That was when Parson realized he and his crew needed a hell of a lot of luck—and they’d have to make that luck for themselves. He’d tallied up what he knew—what little he knew: An air strike might happen. But a rescue chopper wasn’t coming. He and his team would have to effect their own rescue by trying the same bold move Parson had considered briefly back at Nadif’s cellar. He’d considered it briefly because it was so crazy.

  Funny how crazy starts to make sense, Parson thought, when you’re running out of options. If the air strike scattered al-Shabaab forces, maybe that would give Geedi time to make the DC-3 flyable.

  Geedi would have to change a tire, and he’d probably have to patch or plug bullet holes in fuel tanks. The aircraft had carried all the necessary parts and tools—unless those terrorist bastards had stripped the plane. They might have stolen anything remotely useful, and they might have smashed instrument panels and shot up the engines, just for fun.

  Or maybe the running firefights with AMISOM had kept al-Shabaab too busy to mess with the DC-3. No way for Parson to know except to go take a look, as soon as he could try it without getting shot.

  Then there was the question of fuel. He’d have only what was left in the main tanks. Not enough to reach Mogadishu. Where could he fly?

  He was close to Kenya. Maybe the old bird had just enough gas to hop over the border and get to the little airport at Kiunga. That would at least get Parson’s group out of the combat zone. Hell, he didn’t even need an airport. He could just limp the DC-3 over the border and set her down on any flat patch of dirt or grass.

  Yes, it was crazy. But he could think of no other option except to wait around like some damsel in distress. That ran against everything in his nature and was probably no safer than trying to fly out.

  From his military courses, Parson knew many tales of leaders who escaped bad situations by pulling off bold moves. He recalled a War College discussion about how Joseph Hooker tried to trap Robert E. Lee at Fredericksburg. With a force nearly twice the size of Lee’s, Hooker planned to use part of his men to pin down Lee’s army, while sending another element to smash Lee from the rear.

  Lee responded with maneuvers so audacious they bordered on attempted suicide. He divided his already outnumbered army—sending most of them to surprise Hooker head-on. Then Lee divided the troops again, to circle around and hit the Federals at a place called Chancellorsville.

  The Confederate counterattack came with such surprise that it caught some of the Union troops eating their evening meal, their weapons stacked. The first sign of trouble for the Federals came when deer and rabbits bounced out of the underbrush. The animals were driven by enemy soldiers advancing through brambles supposedly too thick for marching. What started as Hooker’s confident plan to stop Lee once and for all turned into a near rout for the Union.

  Parson didn’t sympathize with Lee’s cause, but he admired the general’s military prowess. And he took from the story this lesson: When you get trapped, when you find yourself in a bad way, do what the other side least expects you to do.

  We’ve already been shot out of our airplane, Parson reasoned. They sure as hell don’t expect us to try to fly out.

  At midnight, Parson was still awake when Chartier came to get him and hand off the watch duties. He sat up as soon as Chartier stepped toward him.

  “You’re already up?” Chartier whispered.

  “Never got to sleep,” Parson said.

  “Then rest a while longer.”

  “Nah, I got it, Frenchie. Too keyed up to sleep anyway.”

  “As you wish, sir.”

  Chartier passed the AK-47 to Parson and lay down on the floor. With the rifle, Parson sat on an overturned bucket they’d found in the bunker. With this makeshift stool, he perched by the half-open door, peering into the darkness and listening for any sound. The RPK they’d taken from the dead al-Shabaab fighter rested against the wall near the door. The weapon would do little good; when Parson had checked its magazine, he’d found only five rounds left. The magazine in the AK-47 was getting low, too; it had only ten rounds. If another firefight took place, the ammunition might last only seconds.

  Parson sat listening to the breeze, the breath of the landscape, and he let his mind work on details. Hussein was one of the loose ends. What to do with him? Just let him go? Try to turn him over to AMISOM?

  The group had discussed all the options, and Parson didn’t like any of them. If they let Hussein go, he’d probably return to al-Shabaab—and, worse yet, identify Nadif and his wife. Turning Hussein over to AMISOM required making contact with Ongondo’s men before taking off in the DC-3. That called for two miracles. Just getting the plane started and airborne would probably prove impossible. There would be no time to find AMISOM forces first.

  The night remained clear except for the occasional cumulus cloud. Where Parson sat, far from any urban area, no light pollution competed with the stars, and silver dust blazed overhead. In better circumstances, he might have enjoyed gazing into the heavens with night-vision goggles to bring thousands more stars into view. Or perhaps with a telescope, which could magnify some of the silver dots into elliptical galaxies, deep-sky coins.

  Trained as a navigator before becoming a pilot, Parson could set courses by stars. He considered himself part of an ancient guild going
back to the days of Magellan, a guild whose members bore a special kinship with the cosmos. Tonight, however, the stars gave him no answers. They presented a beautiful backdrop, but he could not choose one of them, sight it with a sextant, and determine which way to go. With a busted GPS, he couldn’t navigate by manmade stars, either.

  Behind him in the bunker, someone exhaled. Not the regular breathing of a sleeper, but the sigh of a person frustrated by insomnia. Parson could sympathize. He heard the shuffling sounds of someone getting up, then footsteps. Carolyn Stewart emerged from the gloom. She stood next to him for a moment, then sat cross-legged beside him.

  In the light of the moon and stars, Stewart appeared nothing like the actress who’d graced the cover of magazines. Fatigue sagged the skin under her eyes, and her red hair looked matted and dirty. In such a state, without makeup, she might have been mistaken for an anonymous, exhausted relief worker.

  “Can’t sleep?” Parson whispered.

  Stewart shook her head.

  “Me neither,” Parson said.

  “I’ve been thinking about Hussein.”

  “Me, too.”

  “And what are you thinking, Colonel Parson?”

  “Call me Michael. I’m thinking he’s a pain in my ass.”

  Stewart smiled for a second, bringing back for a moment a hint of celebrity, but then her face resumed the worry of an unknown relief worker.

  “Well,” she said, “I have an idea. That is, if you want to hear an idea from me.”

  So, she still feels guilty, Parson thought. Not necessarily a bad thing. Parson disagreed with the notion that everyone should feel good about themselves all the time. A little pang of guilt could remind you of a lesson learned. Once, as a young navigator, he’d taken off on a high-profile training mission—the Red Flag air combat exercise at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. The crew included an observer who happened to wear three stars on his uniform.

  Before takeoff, Parson did the usual oxygen check: He put on his helmet, clipped on his mask, and tested his oxygen regulator for proper flow. In the normal position, the blinker blinked white every time he inhaled. But he left the regulator in the emergency position, which let oxygen continue to flow whether he inhaled or not.

  Parson took off his oxygen mask so he could use the helmet’s boom mike, not realizing he was depleting the aircraft’s oxygen system. Nobody noticed the quantity needle dropping until the LOW OXYGEN light illuminated. By then, the C-130 was airborne and the mock fight was on, the Herk zipping through mountain passes to avoid getting locked up by a fighter jet.

  The crew had to break off the fight and go back and land to service the oxygen system, all because Parson screwed up. The general was pissed. For a couple days, Parson felt like turning in his wings.

  But Parson’s aircraft commander was a pretty good dude. The guy told him, “Everybody does that one time, nav. Don’t worry about it.”

  Not everybody did it with a general on board, however, and Parson did worry about it. But he never, ever made that mistake again.

  Since Stewart seemed properly remorseful, Parson decided to emulate his supportive aircraft commander.

  “Of course I want to hear your idea,” he whispered. “I’ll take all the help I can get.”

  “Thank you, Michael,” Stewart said. “What if we see if Hussein wants to come with us?”

  Okay, Parson thought, maybe I don’t want to hear this idea after all.

  “Why would he do that?” Parson asked. “Why would we do that?”

  “He has nowhere to turn here. If he stays in Somalia, he’ll go back to al-Shabaab, and he’ll die violently and soon. And he might be smart enough to realize that.”

  “We can’t save everybody in Somalia.”

  “Yes, but we can save him, if he wants to be saved.”

  “That’s a big if, and what if we do save him? That is, if we actually make it out of here. The Kenyans will just love us when we show up with an illegal alien terrorist.”

  “I’ll take responsibility for him,” Stewart said.

  “How are you gonna do that?”

  “He’s a minor. My organization will take him in.”

  “Ah, yeah,” Parson said. “Good luck with that.”

  “We’ve taken in children before.”

  Yeah, but not children who are killers, Parson thought. And there was still the issue of dealing with the Kenyans: Hi, folks. We got a passenger without a passport. And he has a history of violent crimes.

  Parson reminded Stewart of that little problem. As if to emphasize his point, four distant gunshots echoed while he spoke.

  “We can say he stowed away in the airplane,” Stewart answered.

  “Forget it. I’m not losing my pilot’s license and my Air Force commission over this kid.”

  “We can say he’s a refugee. We can say we had reason to fear for his life if we left him. And it would be the truth.”

  Parson thought about that for a minute. He didn’t know what laws and air transport regulations applied to refugees in this situation. If this had been an Air Force mission, the decision would have been easy: We don’t do anything like this without approval from Air Mobility Command or some other adult supervision.

  But, Parson reminded himself, this is a civilian mission. He’d been operating in a gray area since he started the engines on that DC-3.

  None of this mattered, he realized, if Hussein didn’t want their help. Flying out a willing refugee pushed legality hard enough; kidnapping a minor went way over the line.

  “I’ll ask Geedi to find out what the boy is thinking,” Parson said. “He’ll probably tell us to go to hell, and that will be the end of it.”

  “That’s all I can ask,” Stewart said. “But if he wants to get out and you decide to let him on the plane, I’ll take it from there. Whatever the costs, whatever the repercussions, I’ll handle it.”

  Parson nodded, looking not at Stewart but out at the night. In another hour, it would be Geedi’s watch. Parson could talk to him then and tell him to have a sit-down with Hussein in the morning.

  “Thanks, Michael,” the actress whispered. “You know, I can’t tell you how much I admire what you and Sophia are doing. You two make quite a pair.”

  With that, Stewart got up and went back to her place on the bare floor. Parson shifted the AK across his knees and thought about Hussein. Did the boy stand any chance of redemption?

  Probably not, but you never knew about these things. In Parson’s sleep-deprived state, his mind made unlikely connections. Thoughts of Hussein reminded him of a time he’d gone grouse hunting in the hills of West Virginia. Way back in a hollow, he came across an abandoned farmhouse. The porch sagged, and kudzu climbed the clapboard walls.

  Parson and his dog, a little English setter named Lucy, had worked hard that day. They’d climbed many a steep, wooded grade, and they’d bagged only one bird. For every mile Parson had walked, Lucy had run three. She stood beside him panting, tongue dripping, tail wagging. Clearly, she needed to drink, but Parson had already given her the last of his water. And in the afternoon of hunting, they had not come across a stream.

  However, a few yards from the house, Parson noticed a well. A dented, galvanized bucket hung from a pulley. Kudzu vines encircled the bucket’s chain and the stones that surrounded the well shaft. Parson broke open his Browning double-barrel, placed it on the ground, and drew his boot knife. The sharp Damascus blade made quick work of the vines, and soon he disentangled the bucket and chain.

  Rust had frozen the pulley, but Parson freed it and began lowering the bucket. As the chain snaked through his hands, his leather and Nomex flight gloves—which doubled as good shooting gloves—became caked with rust. From the darkness far below, he heard a faint splash.

  Hand over hand, he pulled the chain back up. Set the water down for Lucy, who had become so thirsty she
lapped for five minutes.

  Parson wondered if Hussein’s mind was like that disused well. If you lowered the bucket far enough, would clean water yet come up?

  33.

  A rattle of gunfire pulled Hussein from a deep sleep. At first he could not remember where he was; he looked around in confusion at the inside of the old bunker. The sight of the gaalos snapped him back to reality. The report of the rifles brought all of them to their feet. The shots sounded closer than they had last night, though still a good distance away—maybe as far as Hussein could sprint in one go without getting winded. Then he felt the ache of his wound, and he remembered he could not sprint anymore.

  Yellow Hair was holding his AK-47 again; she seemed to be the main one on watch. It still irked him to see an infidel—and especially a woman infidel—holding his most prized possession. She might yet pay for that insolence.

  Though Hussein did not like waking to captivity, anything was better than his dreams of last night. In his sleep, he had gone back to the day the Sheikh had made him and other boys stone the adulterer. Hussein saw the condemned man buried to his waist, wailing in agony, one of his eyes dangling from its socket as the rocks rained down. Tears and blood streamed across torn cheeks.

  However, in the nightmare the man did not simply die—he turned into a vengeful ghoul. This was no jinn, but something worse. The living corpse grew to twice, three times the normal size of a man, and it pulled itself from the ground. Dripping blood and showing his broken teeth, the ghoul came after Hussein. Of all the boys who had stoned the man, why Hussein? Why not one of the other boys? Why not the Sheikh? Perhaps because Hussein had hurled the first stone that hurt him.

  Hussein tried to flee, but he could not move fast enough. He had always taken pride in his fleetness of foot. No one could catch him; no other boy could outrun him. Yet he could not get away from this bleeding fiend; Hussein’s arms and legs moved as if trying to run through a pit of mud, and his injured foot kept making him fall down.

  The ghoul said nothing to him. Through its broken mouth it could not speak. It made only the gurgling sounds of the dying as it placed its broken fingers around Hussein’s throat. Somewhere off to the side, Hussein heard another sound: the laughter of the Sheikh and Abdullahi.