Smoke and Shadow

by Gamal Hennessy

  The girl didn’t scream and she didn’t struggle. Between the wild strands of dark hair covering her face, her eyes bulged wide from shock and terror. Her heart pounded so hard in her chest Trent imagined he could feel it in his own body. But she didn’t scream. Maybe she couldn’t scream anymore.

  Trent held a finger up to his mouth, just to be sure. Her only response came in a frantic twitching in her limbs, a natural byproduct of her trauma. He scanned the area with his eyes, ears and predator’s mind to sense other threats. It didn’t make sense for the rapist to be out here alone. The slave pit and its guards might be close. Some patrol vehicle could be parked near them.

  Trent heard a gruff laugh barked in the darkness. The rapist had friends, maybe the same men Trent saw patrolling on the beach. He didn’t deal with them before, but sooner or later they would come looking for their partner. He couldn’t let them find the corpse and raise an alarm. Trent clenched his jaw and accepted the invitation to violence.

  He looked back into the victim’s eyes and continued to hold his finger over his mouth. She nodded, as if understanding both his demands on her and his intentions for the sentries. She pointed in their direction and nodded along with Trent. He moved his hand away an inch. She didn’t scream. Her tear stained face held its terrified expression and her arm quivered as she pointed, but she didn’t scream. Trent held up his hand to tell her to stay put, then he crept towards the sounds of crass laughter.

  Chapter Three: Execution

  Trent’s intended victims stood around soaking in the afterglow of their gang rape.

  He approached them from behind the glare of their floodlight to ensure his movements would be obscured. Two of them stood next to a surplus US military transport, smoking and laughing without a care in the world. One had his shirt open and his belt loose. Sweat glistened off his skinny fat skin in the shine of artificial light. Did he rape the girl first? Did they all plan to take turns with her before morning? What did they plan to do with her when their fun ended? Would they throw her back into the pit or just slit her throat and leave her in the bushes? Trent planned to discard their bodies in the forest, but he couldn’t just leap out and start shooting.

  He scanned the area to formulate a plan. The truck and the floodlight sat in the center of what looked like a crude power station. Mobile generators hummed beneath camo nets suspended in the branches above his head. Black cables snaked across the ground in several directions like the strands of wet hair on the girl’s face. Trent couldn’t see a pattern at first, but he soon realized all the cables headed in the same direction. A small structure, similar to an outhouse, sat about thirty feet away and swallowed up all the cables through a hole in its closed door.

  But an outhouse didn’t need seven generators to power it. Did the door lead to something else? Maybe the generators powered lights and air filtration in a tunnel. It made sense. The Vietcong used tunnels to avoid and ambush Marines in Vietnam. Hamas used tunnels to hide and attack Israeli positions in the West Bank. Why couldn’t Los Zetas use tunnels to hide and warehouse their slaves? It would explain why the structure couldn’t be seen from the air and it would explain the generators in the middle of the forest. Maybe the slave pit wasn’t a myth after all. Trent could record this location and finish his mission, but before he pulled out his camera, he slid the suppressed SIG from its holster.

  His two targets weren’t alone. A third man sat in the cab of the truck, nodding off after a long night of rape. Trent didn’t see any other guards. These four must have been assigned to protect the generator, but they weren’t serious about the job, since they spent their shift raping little girls. Their rifles lay impotent on top of the generators. They had nothing in place to secure the perimeter or protect their flanks. But why would they? Who would be stupid enough to attack them on their remote island in the middle of the night? Trent wrapped around the truck like a shadow until he stood close enough to see the stitching on the first guard’s uniform.

  The men stood facing each other. They continued to laugh and joke and mimic barbaric gyrations with their hips. Trent didn’t understand their Spanish, but he knew what the content of their conversation. They spoke in the male language of sexual exaggeration. Trent’s fingers curled a tighter grip around the pistol.

  The victim with his back turned said something to make his friend roar with laughter. His head flew back. He had to lean against the truck to keep his balance. In the split second the skinny fat man took to look away, Trent burst out of the darkness.

  He grabbed the first victim by the collar to hold him in place. The man froze in a split second of surprise, but he didn’t get the chance to move or make a sound before Trent force the suppressor against his temple and pulled the trigger.

  The subdued bark of the gun and the delicate spray of blood and brain pelting his chest got the attention of the skinny fat man. His laugh turned into a gasp. The cigarette fell from his mouth. He watched his faceless friend drop to his knees with disbelieving eyes. He looked past the corpse into the darkness of Trent’s face. He moved his hands up to surrender or beg for his life. Trent ended him with a Mozambique drill. The first round blasted through the man’s breast. The second shot landed in his throat. The final shot caught him in his chin and bounced his head off the side of the truck.

  Other sounds came from the front of the truck now. Trent anticipated more opposition. The suppressor reduced the report from the gun, but couldn’t silence it completely. His four shots made enough noise to rouse the sleeping rapist from his nap. A head poked out of the open truck window. The eyes were bleary and confused. The sight of two fresh corpses on the ground might have turned his confusion into terror, but he didn’t live long enough for his brain to process the information. Trent shot twice into the open truck window, turning the sleepy face into a bloody mess.

  Trent spun on his heel and crouched in the shadows, listening for any signs of alarm or retaliation. The generators continued to hum. The crickets resumed their song, but no one reacted to Trent’s ambush. The smell of propellant and released bowels hung in the humid air. He could feel the blood pooling beneath his feet.

  He looked down at the carnage and wondered what Los Zetas would think when they found this scene. The three corpses lay in a rough triangle. Their position gave him an idea. Unscrewing the suppressor from his SIG, he placed the still warm metal in the hand of the closest victim. He took the man’s holstered gun and stuffed it into his own belt. The hasty setting suggested one man fired on his two friends and then killed himself, removing Trent’s existence from the picture.

  The ruse wouldn’t fool any competent detective. The shooter didn’t have any powder residue on his hands. The angle of the shots wouldn’t match the position of the body. The gun he had in his hand would be different than his normal weapon. And what were the chances of this man having a motive to kill all three of his associates and then himself? The setup collapsed under simple investigation, but these were slave traders, not cops. The gun and the position of the bodies might create enough doubt and confusion to explain away an outside attack.

  Trent got out his camera and began to conduct his own investigation before someone else walked into the clearing. He took pictures of the generators, focusing on the make and serial numbers. Baker might be able to trace the equipment to purchases by a Los Zetas front company or get access to other bank transactions. He got images of the suspected tunnel entrance and marked the location on his GPS. The time on the screen motivated him to move. Sunrise was little more than an hour away. He needed to be off Barameja by then to meet the extraction boat. He rifled through the dead men’s pockets taking their iPhones and shoving them into his bag. The missing phones would undermine his staged murder suicide, but Baker would want the potential contact information on the devices. Trent stepped back into the shadows, leaving the flies to buzz over the new corpses in harmony with the generators.

  He went back to where he left the girl, but she was gone. The fear of staying close to
her rapists must have won out over her fear of running off alone in the dark. Trent didn’t know if the girl knew how to get to the village or if anyone would help her once she got there, but he couldn’t control those variables now. He might be able to track her through the forest, but he didn’t have time. He needed to be in position by dawn or the boat would leave without him. Trent moved double time through the forest, hoping both he and the girl could avoid any more contact with Los Zetas tonight.

  Chapter Four: We Are Monsters

  Trent got out of the cab in front of the Carambola Resort Hotel. He slipped the old driver a hefty tip and they shared the last laugh of the night.

  The community of cab drivers, like the island itself, had a sense of close community. If you stayed longer than the average vacation, you understood everyone knew everyone else and everyone talked about everyone else. Trent couldn’t stay anonymous, but he could use the local cabs as an informal surveillance network. If he paid them well and stayed friendly, they’d be more likely to tell him about strangers who might come to the island hunting for him.

  He walked with a casual stride around the three sides of the sand castle colored resort. His aimless wandering fit in with his cover as a writer searching for inspiration, but his eyes searched the beige marble courtyards for police. He looked behind the billowing white curtains for operators and other occupational hazards. He didn’t sense any threats. Couples on honeymoon held hands on the beach, cuddling in a persistent tipsy haze. Parents followed behind their scampering children with the drawn faces and slumped shoulders of people who needed a vacation from their vacation. Retired couples bickered in the restaurant with the familiar comfort of a ritual and an ancient lady sat alone on the wide patio, sipping wine and looking out at the sunset in silence. But no one showed any sign of following Trent or even noticing him. He looped back into the hotel without rushing and took the stairs to Baker’s suite.

  The door opened before Trent knocked. He expected Baker to watch the hallway for his approach. He didn’t expect to see Chu standing in the doorway instead. The sight of his closest friends brought a smile to his face, but it also raised questions. Chu was supposed to be in New York. Why was he here? The deflated look on Chu’s face created more agitated confusion. Trent felt like he walked into a wake instead of a hotel room.

  “What’s up?” Trent said as the two men hugged. Chu didn’t respond. He glanced back into the hall one last time and locked the door. Trent’s mind raced with possibilities. “Did something happen to Ghost?”

  “No. I’m right here.” Baker limped into the room from the wide balcony. “I asked Smoke to come with me for moral support.”

  “Since when does a debriefing require moral support? I still don’t know why we had to do this in person…”

  “Maybe we all need a vacation.” Baker’s words had the same somber tone and weight as Chu’s face. Trent couldn’t remember the last time he saw his friends act like this. Even when Baker lost his leg, they all maintained their arrogant optimism.

  “What happened?”

  “Things went wrong on Barameja.”

  “What do you mean wrong? Listen, I know I deviated from the rules of engagement, but I ran into a special situation. I put it all in the report…”

  Baker slumped down into the leather desk chair and stared off into space. “I set up the rules to protect you. I tried to keep you out of harm’s way. I worried about the girls in the pit. I didn’t want Los Zetas to cut their losses and kill off the whole inventory if they felt compromised.”

  A hole formed in Trent’s chest. “They’re all dead?”

  Baker shook his head, but still didn’t look at Trent. “No. Mexican Naval cruisers picked up two tramp ships off the coast. They rescued forty six girls, mostly from Eastern Europe and Western Africa.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  “Based on your report, we’re guessing the girl you found lived in the village of Catalina. It didn’t make sense for the sentries to take inventory out of the pit to violate them. From what we understand, rape is a regular part of life inside the warehouse. It seems like the guards you found wanted a little variety and used the village girls as a change of pace.”

  “That makes sense.” Trent sat because the whole in his chest pulled him down with the weight of his dread. “She was gone when I went back to get her. I thought she went back to the village, but I didn’t have time to confirm. Are you saying she never made it back home?”

  “Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t. I’m saying it doesn’t make a difference either way.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? Just tell me what the hell happened?”

  Baker passed him a tablet. A series of thumbnail images covered the screen. “When I first found out, I decided not to tell you. I didn’t want you to feel responsible.”

  “For what?”

  “We got reports of a fire coming from Catalina about forty hours after your extraction. Satellite footage showed the whole village burning.”

  Trent looked down at the screen and scrolled through the images. The first few were overhead shots zoomed in on the north side of Barameja, where the village used to be. The resolution of the pictures was good enough to show individual huts burning and villagers being dragged into the square by men with rifles.

  “The more I thought about it, the more I thought you should hear about it from us.” Trent heard Baker’s voice, but he couldn’t stop looking at the pictures. “I don’t want you to feel like I’m hiding stuff from you and I didn’t want you to find out about it on the news or from Rose.”

  The next picture focused on the village square. Row after row of squat brown refugees knelt in the mud while their homes and history burned down around them. Trent imagined them choking on the black smoke from the fire and wailing in fear of their captors. The riflemen herded them into haphazard rows with shots in the air, kicks to the kidneys and rifle butt blows to the back of the head.

  “We knew about Los Zetas’s brutality. We didn’t know about this.”

  Trent understood satellites had the power to capture images of decapitations thousands of miles above the earth. He knew each little round object with a puddle of red in front of it was a body pouring blood into the ground. He saw each black dark ball of hair and recognized it as a severed head. He guessed none of the villagers fought back or ran because the sicarios shot them all first. But he couldn’t understand how his eyes picked out the girl from the forest among all this carnage.

  The same spindly limbs curled up behind her. A few feet away, the long dark strands of hair stuck to her face and hid her death stare. Trent remembered the fear in her eyes. Did she have the same look on her face when she ran back to her village? Did she get the chance to warn them? Even if she did, what could they have done to protect themselves? Did she remember Trent when Los Zetas attacked her people? Did she try to expose him in exchange for her village? Would someone so young even get a chance to speak? Would she have the courage to face an army of killers to try and save her people? If she did, it didn’t make a difference. Los Zetas still tied her skinny wrists behind her back and still severed her head from her body.

  Did she blame Trent when the sicarios burned her house to the ground? Did she curse everything about him when they killed her parents in front of her? Did she beg him to come back when they raped her again or did she wish Trent could suffer her torment instead? When the bullets came in the end, was she glad she didn’t have to live in a world where men like Trent could exist? Could she take her place next to the nameless child in the crackhouse, Summer Rain and everyone in her village Trent murdered with one misguided choice?

  But what other decision could he have made? Should he have ignored her rape to carry out his mission? Would everything be better if he never took the mission and stayed far away from Barameja? Maybe working for Baker was his mistake. Maybe his fault stretched further back into becoming an operator, or joining the military. Maybe if Trent never abandoned his daughter in t
he first place, he wouldn’t be staring down at the image of a headless teenager now.

  The heat and moisture from Trent’s tears soaked his face and hands. He found himself on the floor, cradled in the strong embrace of Chu as he whimpered. He couldn’t see or hear Baker. His head was buried in his arms and his legs were drawn up in a fetal position, but he felt his friend close by. He spoke in a raw, cracked voice as if he had to relearn how to speak.