Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team)

by Jeremy Robinson

  Felice quickly found the med kit and knelt beside Knight. “What’s done is done,” she said, holding the glow stick close to survey the wound. She couldn’t tell if he’d made the injury worse by pulling the splinter out or if it had actually relieved some of the pressure, but one thing was evident: his eye was ruined beyond hope of repair. She tried to act clinically detached as she rinsed the area with saline solution. “But from now on, keep your grubby hands away from it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Is he okay?” Bishop asked, speaking to Felice as if Knight wasn’t even there.

  She placed the back of her hand against Knight’s forehead. “He might be feverish. I can’t tell. It’s so damn hot here all the time.”

  “I’m good,” Knight said, sounding almost manic. “Fully mission capable. Drink water, and get back in the fight, am I right?”

  Felice turned so that only Bishop could hear her. “Is he always like that?”

  Bishop’s head shake was almost imperceptible in the darkness.

  Before either of them could say more, an eerie hum reverberated through the woods. It reminded Felice of crowd noise—hundreds, even thousands of people all talking at the same time, their voices blending together into a strange hum. It lasted a couple seconds, stopped, and then was repeated, growing louder and more intense, until it seemed to be coming from everywhere.

  “What is that?” Felice asked. “Is that a tank?”

  Bishop shook his head as he searched the darkness for the noise’s source. “I don’t know what that is. Get him bandaged up. We might—”

  He abruptly brought the M240 to his shoulder, ready to fire. Felice had seen it, too, a hint of movement in the night, the kind of thing that triggered primal fears.

  Something lurked in the darkness, just out of sight.

  She didn’t see it so much as sense it, disturbing the air with its presence. With a focused effort, she turned her back on the jungle and resumed tending to Knight’s wounds.

  The machine gun let loose with a roar that made Felice yelp. The burst lasted only a second or two. The muzzle flash, almost blinding in its intensity, somehow failed to give any illumination. Bishop continued to scan the darkness, jerking the gun back and forth, but did not fire again. For several seconds, all she could hear was a faint ringing in her ears, the lingering auditory assault of the weapon’s rapid-fire report, but then the humming sound returned.

  “Hurry,” he urged. “We can’t stay here.”

  Felice wrapped a length of Coban around Knight’s head to hold a large gauze pad in place over his eye, and then hastily packed the med-kit and everything else into the rucksack.

  “I’ll get that,” Bishop said, but she hefted it onto her shoulder, and then helped Knight to his feet.

  “You’re going to have your hands full keeping us alive,” she replied.

  He just nodded.

  “What’s out there?” she continued. “The rebels?”

  “Might be an animal. Or a pack of them. I don’t know.”

  She mentally ran down the list of animals that she knew roamed the Congo. “Lions, tigers and bears, oh my,” she whispered to herself. That wasn’t quite right. More like lions, leopards, gorillas and warthogs. Oh my. Yet, none of those, nor any of the other dozens of dangerous animals she could name, felt like a good fit for the thing—or things—moving in the darkness.

  Felice kept a hand on Knight’s uninjured right arm. She wasn’t sure if she was doing this in case he stumbled and needed help staying on his feet, or because she felt safer being in constant contact with another person. It was probably a little of both. She would have put her other hand on Bishop’s arm, but he had already moved ahead, and she struggled just to keep up with him. At times, it was so dark that she couldn’t see him—or anything else—at all, and had to simply follow the sound of his footsteps.

  The strange droning noise came back from time to time, but if it was the call of a predatory animal, it did not announce an impending attack. After a while, Felice realized that she could see a little better. Dawn was breaking.

  What little sleep she had gotten did nothing to refresh her and as they trudged on, fatigue affixed itself to her muscles like barnacles on a ship’s hull. The terror she had awakened to had become a fog of misery, and when Bishop called a sudden halt, it was all she could do to not simply drop to the ground in a fetal curl.

  “What is it?” Knight asked. He sounded breathless, as if just asking the question had exhausted him.

  “There’s a road here,” Bishop said. “Dirt track. Overgrown and probably not used very often, but it’s there.”

  Felice peered ahead, but couldn’t distinguish any difference in the forest’s density. Nevertheless, she felt the fog of hopelessness lift a little.

  “Risky,” Knight observed.

  “Why?” she asked. A road was something definite, something they could follow without fear of wandering in circles. A road would lead, eventually, to some kind of human habitation, perhaps to a village, where they could make contact with the outside world and get some help.

  “They’ve got vehicles,” Bishop explained. “They’ll be using the roads to look for us. But I don’t think we have a choice. We can’t just wander aimlessly around in the woods. We’ll skirt along the edge of the road and see where it takes us.”

  The trek—Felice was starting to think of it as a ‘death march’—resumed, and she soon saw a thin ribbon of twilight overhead and off to the left. Before long, it brightened enough to reveal the trunks of the trees through which they were passing. Further off to the left, a clearing with parallel strips of dirt was packed by the repeated passage of four-wheel drive vehicles.

  Bishop stopped abruptly, raising one closed fist. Knight froze in place, and Felice followed his example, even though her curiosity was burning. After more than a minute during which Bishop remained statue still, he turned slowly and whispered. “Do you smell that?”

  Felice sniffed the air. There was a hint of wood smoke wafting through the jungle.

  “Stay here. I’ll check it out.” Without waiting for their assent, Bishop moved off, following his nose.

  Knight relaxed from his frozen posture and eased himself to the ground, using his rifle like a walking stick and keeping his left arm tight against his torso. Felice squatted down next to him.

  “How are you doing?”

  He returned a wan smile. “Believe it or not, I’ve been better.”

  She nodded. Humor, even dark humor, was a good sign. “Any fever? Chills?”

  “Yeah. But I think the antibiotics are keeping it at bay.”

  She laid the back of her hand against his forehead and then drew her hand back in alarm. He was burning up. “How is the pain?”

  He made a strangled sound that might have been laughter. “Hurts like a mother—ah, well you know.” He reached up and touched the bandage as if trying to figure out how it had come to be on his face. “The jarheads always say, ‘pain is just weakness leaving the body.’ I guess my weakness must have been twenty-fifteen vision.”

  She touched his forearm and gently moved his hand away. Humor was good, but self-pity under these circumstances might be deadly.

  “It’s okay,” he said after a moment. “I’ll get an eye patch and talk like a pirate. Girls dig that, right?”

  “Depends on the girl, I suppose. Now, if you get yourself a parrot…” Even though his teeth were chattering, his smile broadened and seemed more genuine, so she pressed on. “So, is there a particular scurvy wench you’ve got your eye on?”

  “Ha. Yes. And I think she’d actually get a chuckle out of being referred to that way.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Anna. Anna Beck.” Knight’s good eye seemed to lose focus for a moment. “We’ve been together…I guess, a couple years now.”

  “It must be tough…a relationship, I mean, doing what you do.”

  He nodded guiltily, and then started rooting around in his rucksack. Fe
lice took that as a sign that he didn’t want to discuss the topic any longer, but to her surprise, he kept talking. “Actually, before Anna, I don’t think I had been in anything that you could call a relationship. And since I met her on the job, so to speak, I guess we both knew what would be involved.”

  Felice wasn’t sure if he was referring to the long periods of separation or the inherent danger of his profession. She knew that military wives had to reconcile themselves to the possibility of losing their loved ones in battle, but she wondered how Anna Beck would react when she got her first look at Knight’s maimed face. Then it occurred to her that Knight was probably wondering that as well.

  “Does Bishop have someone at home?”

  “Not Bishop. I don’t think he’s ever even been on a date. He’s way too intense.”

  “I kind of picked up on that. Just figured it was a Rambo-thing.”

  “Bishop makes Rambo look like Ronald McDonald.” Knight took out a cell phone, identical to the one Bishop had crushed earlier in every way but one, namely that it was still intact. He probed it with a finger, held it near his ear and shook it, and then turned it over and began picking at an almost imperceptible seam along its edge. After a few seconds, he succeeded in popping loose the back cover of the phone, exposing its electronic innards.

  Felice let the subject go, allowing Knight to focus on what he was doing, but she found her thoughts occupied by the enigma that was Bishop. She had caught a glimpse of the man that lay just under the rigidly held mask of self-control. There was a beast inside him, a monster of rage that he fought with every minute of his life, a monster that, if loosed, would destroy him and anyone close to him.

  That was something Felice understood very well. She had her own beast with which to contend.

  34

  Bishop moved further away from the road but kept it within sight as he tracked the smell of burning wood. Soon, he detected other odors: strange smells that he couldn’t quite pin down, until his stomach rumbled and he realized it was the smell of cooking food.

  Further down the road, he heard voices, women talking in a strange unfamiliar language, and small children shouting and laughing. He took that as a good sign. The cook fires might have belonged to a camp of rebels, but he doubted very much that the men pursuing them had brought along their kids.

  He slowed his pace and stopped completely when he caught sight of the village. It was little more than a collection of ramshackle huts with concrete walls and thatched roofs, lining the sides of the road. There was a large fuel tank at one end, but there was not a single vehicle anywhere to be seen. Nor was there any sign of modern conveniences: no electric lights, radio antennas or satellite dishes. Bishop was willing to bet that there was no running water either. The smoke rose from makeshift open-air cooking pits outside the huts. The women tending them wore brightly colored dresses and kerchiefs tied around their hair, while the children wore T-shirts and soccer jerseys. The village was primitive, he decided, but not completely cut off from the rest of the world.

  He remained there, watching the villagers’ day begin, weighing the choices this discovery presented. He had already decided that he wouldn’t attempt contact with them. There was no way to determine their loyalties, and it would take only one informant to alert the rebels to the presence of outsiders. The question he now pondered was whether to sneak into the village for food, medical supplies and perhaps even a map, or to simply give it a wide berth and keep going.

  He had just settled on the latter option when something changed. The children reacted first, leaving their play and running into the huts to tell the adults. A few seconds later, Bishop heard what they had: the rumble of a diesel engine and the creak of a vehicle chassis rocking back and forth on its suspension. A truck creaked into view a few seconds later. It was a mongrel construct of indeterminable make and model, but there was one feature that was easy to recognize. Affixed to a metal post that had been welded to the floor of the rear cargo area, was a beat-up but serviceable PKM machine gun. A man wearing a soccer team logo T-shirt and camouflage trousers stood behind the gun, mostly using it as a handhold to avoid being thrown when the technical—a military term for a civilian vehicle that had been repurposed to serve as a war machine—bounced over ruts in the road. Two more rebel fighters rode in the front. The truck rolled to the center of the village, where it stopped. The man on the machine gun turned the weapon in slow circles, none too subtly letting the villagers know that he could kill any one of them with indifference. The two men in the front got out, their Kalashnikov rifles held at a low ready that was, if not quite menacing, then certainly not friendly.

  An older man wearing tattered trousers and a short-sleeved shirt emerged from one of the huts and headed toward the truck. He moved assertively, stamping his bare feet on the ground, but he stopped a respectful distance from the armed men. They spoke what Bishop assumed was Swahili, and while he couldn’t understand a word of it, he got the sense that the old man was reprimanding the young guerillas, but was careful to do so in a way that would not end with his own execution.

  One of the rebels laughed, then lifted his head and shouted something meant for the whole populace. The old man took a step forward, raising both hands. The gesture looked to Bishop more like a protest than a surrender. The rebel stepped forward, too, reversing his grip on the rifle and jabbing the stock into the old man’s midriff.

  The women of the village let out a wail of protest, but no one moved to assist the old man. The man at the machine gun made a show of racking the bolt on the weapon, while the two dismounted rebels hurried into the hut from which the old man had come.

  There was no hesitation in what Bishop did next. On some level, his decision was the product of a strategic calculation, but that was not what drove him. He was ruled by instinct, and his inner voice did not argue.

  He chose a path that brought him into the village behind the technical and opposite the crowd of wailing women and frightened children. A few disbelieving eyes turned toward Bishop as he broke from cover, but the gunner did not recognize the importance of their behavior. He was still glowering at the assembled group when Bishop sprang up into the bed of the technical and broke his neck with a savage twist.

  Bishop didn’t stop, but instead hopped over the side of the truck and ducked low, keeping it between him and the hut, where the other two rebels had gone. With the coolness of a stalking lion, he padded around the rear of the truck and approached the hut at an angle that kept him out of line of sight of anyone looking out the door.

  The old man struggled to rise, his face twisted in pain. When his eyes met Bishop’s gaze, there was something else there, too. Apprehension? Pleading? Bishop couldn’t fathom why the man would be looking at him that way. He was already helping the villagers. There was no time to ask for an explanation. Bishop pressed his back against the side of the hut and waited.

  The rebels emerged a moment later. The first man passed by Bishop without even looking in his direction. When the second man emerged, Bishop stepped in front of him and delivered a close in blow that instantly knocked the man unconscious, and then spun on his heel and delivered a roundhouse punch that landed squarely at the base of the other rebel’s skull.

  As the second man collapsed in a heap at his feet, Bishop saw the old man moving toward him, shaking his head and repeating a phrase over and over. It didn’t sound like a ‘thank you.’

  “English?” Bishop asked.

  The man frowned. “Non.” He then said something in what sounded to Bishop like French, but was just as incomprehensible. He gestured at the rebels and then pointed an accusing finger at Bishop.

  Bishop fought a powerful urge to simply turn and walk back into the jungle. A little gratitude would have been appreciated, but he understood why the villagers were afraid. It was easy for him to show up and crack a couple of heads, but he would leave, and they would still have to deal with the rebels. There might even be violent reprisals.

  The old man tu
rned away from Bishop and addressed the villagers in a loud clear voice. Almost as one, the people began dispersing to their huts. It had sounded like a call to arms, but as Bishop studied the faces, he saw women and children, mostly girls, and a few elderly couples.

  “Where are all the men?”

  The old man looked at him, as if waiting for the question to be uttered in a language he understood, then pushed past him and entered the hut.

  Bishop felt another pang of guilt and helplessness. There weren’t any able-bodied men in the village. Maybe they had all gone off to the city to work, been conscripted by the army or shanghaied by the rebels, who were notorious for kidnapping young boys—anyone big enough to hold a rifle—and forcing them to serve as foot soldiers. They would be indoctrinated and set on a lifelong path of violence.

  A few moments later, villagers began to emerge from their huts. Some of the women had large cloth-wrapped bundles on their heads, while others carried baskets and herded small flocks of goats. Bishop spied the old man, likewise carrying a sack full of supplies. “What’s going on? Where are you going?”

  The old man gave him an appraising stare for several seconds. Then, as if his actions were answer enough, he turned and joined the procession heading down the road.

  “Was it something you said?” a voice called from across the road.

  Bishop turned and saw Knight and Felice emerge from the trees. “More like something I did, but I’m not really sure.”

  Knight shuffled toward him, but Felice started after the old man. “Hujambo, bwana!”

  The man glanced at her, but just as quickly turned away and kept going. Felice shrugged and walked back to join Bishop and Knight.

  “Where are they going?” she asked

  “To hide in the jungle, I think,” Bishop replied. “Probably afraid of getting caught up in this. I don’t blame them. When we’re gone, they still have to live here.” He pointed at the men on the ground. “And what I did.”