by Sean Black
‘I want to get you checked out again,’ said Muir. ‘Can I walk you over there?’
‘I know where it is,’ I replied.
‘Humor me.’
We headed across camp in silence. When we reached the triage area, Muir and I were greeted by an army surgeon who had already examined me a couple of times. He was holding a wooden clipboard with a form that he handed over for me to sign.
I glanced down at it. ‘What’s this?’
‘Consent form for the RDF chip.’
‘What?’
‘New procedure, Sergeant. If you’d had one of these we could have avoided what happened back there.’
I studied the form a little more closely. The RDF chip was a bio-powered subcutaneous implant placed in the neck, which allowed constant monitoring of an operative’s vital signs. It also had a GPS function, ensuring that the operative could be located via satellite anywhere in the world at any time.
‘Forget it,’ I said, tossing the clipboard back in the surgeon’s direction.
‘It’s only ever employed when you’re active. It’s not like we’re going to be counting how many times you go take a dump,’ Muir said.
To be fair, mention of the chip hadn’t exactly come from left field. I already knew a couple of other field agents and undercover operatives who were using the technology. Lone operatives went missing all the time, and if the worst had happened, I wanted those who knew me to have the closure offered by a body. The consent form reassured me that even if data was gathered while I wasn’t active it could never be accessed, never mind used. The argument was the same you got with every additional layer of security. If you don’t have anything to hide, then what’s the problem?
‘I’ll pass,’ I said. ‘Anyway, that was probably my last time out now that I’m carrying this head injury.’
‘Headaches?’ said the surgeon. ‘We should get you out of here ASAP and have a full set of tests done.’
‘Listen, Doc, I just want to get back Stateside. After that, you can do what the hell you like.’
‘Of course,’ said Muir. ‘We understand.’
Another look passed between them. I turned round and walked away. This time no one followed me.
Sasha visited me in the dead hours of the morning when the camp was at its quietest. She stared at me with big brown eyes that filled with tears. It was only as they rolled down her cheeks that I saw they were blood. When I looked back at her eyes, they were black from the hemorrhage.
I forced my own eyes open and felt a shiver of vibration next to me on the pillow. My first thought was a cell phone, which didn’t make sense. Cell phones weren’t allowed on base.
Lying on my side, I reached underneath the pillow. There was nothing there apart from the sheet. It was then that the back of my hand brushed the side of my neck, and I felt it: a rice-grain-sized bump just under the skin.
I sat up and felt it with my fingertips. I got out of bed, threw on a jacket and headed for the shower block.
I stood side on to the mirror and studied the red welt of raised skin on my neck. I set off to find Muir.
EIGHTEEN
Muir’s face turned from scarlet to purple as I tightened my grip around his throat. Four grunts rushed forward and did their best to pull me away. One caught my left elbow in the face. The force of the blow sent him flying backwards. More men rushed in to help.
‘You’re going to kill him.’
Muir was staring at me, eyes wide. His mouth fell open. His eyes began to close as he started to lose consciousness. I relaxed my grip, and he collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath.
I found myself surrounded by a semicircle of military personnel. They stared at me but kept their distance.
‘Why’d you do it?’ I said to Muir.
Muir held up an open palm as he continued to gasp for air. ‘Do what?’ he said finally. His glasses had fallen off. I picked them up off the floor and handed them to him. One of the lenses was cracked, a fissure spidering out from the center.
‘Put the RDF chip in.’
‘What the hell are you talking about, Sergeant?’
‘And why do you keep calling me “Sergeant”?’
Muir put his glasses back on, and slowly got to his feet, one hand massaging his windpipe. ‘You consented to the RDF implant, Byron. Yesterday. You can talk to the surgeon if you don’t believe me. I have your signature on the papers. You remember what we told you about Lewis, don’t you?’
Either Muir was one hell of a liar or my brain was more scrambled than I knew. I swallowed hard and tried to think back to the conversation. All I could remember was very definitely refusing permission. The memory was clear.
My headache was back, a crushing pain that left my hands and feet tingling. Muir was looking at me like I was crazy. His face was changing color. The center of his forehead shifted from a natural skin tone to a blazing orange. A third eye opened in the middle of his head.
I blinked, suddenly less sure of myself. When I glanced back, Muir’s face had returned to normal. The mess hall was silent.
I’d signed the papers? Yesterday?
‘Listen, Byron. You’ve been through a lot over the past while. Let’s get you through this debrief and back in shape. Forget this,’ said Muir, as a couple of the men standing at the edge of the assembled audience began to drift back to their tables.
NINETEEN
There are two keys to a successful escape and evasion, at least in the initial stages, and the second flows from the first. The first is the time between the escape and discovery of the escape. The second is distance. Time buys you distance, and distance from point of escape made it much more difficult for someone to find you. Get a hundred yards outside a wire before the alarm sounds, and you’re screwed. Get fifty miles and you’ve made the searcher’s job a whole different story. Not with an RDF chip, though.
At around ten that evening, I headed to the latrines with a scalpel filched from a medic’s bag earlier in the day. I had been shown the consent form with my signature and initials. Both the surgeon and Muir, with a nurse, had told me the same story, and a lot of stuff about someone called Lewis. I had consented freely to the RDF chip being inserted in my neck. But I had no idea who Lewis was.
Fifteen minutes later, I emerged from the latrines, the shirt of my collar turned way up, covering the fresh wound on the left side of my neck. Rather than head back to my bunk, I hung a left, striding across the camp to the vehicle depot I had scoped out earlier.
Part of the camp’s remit was to serve as a secure distribution center for humanitarian aid. I walked toward it, a man with a newly found sense of purpose. One of the first things I had learned on covert operations was that being overt worked better a lot of the time. Look like you belong somewhere, and you tend to blend into the background. If you’re hesitant, it comes off you in waves, like the stench of rotting meat in summer.
Because the camp was considered secure, the trucks were lightly guarded. They were close to the mess hall, which also made an approach easy. It was simply a matter of walking through the open gate ringed by chain-link fencing.
You could tell the vehicles weren’t military just by looking at how they were arranged. Rather than neat rows, they were all over the place. The only system I had observed was that the ones nearer the gate were those already loaded and due out at first light. By looking at the weight on the axles, I counted four that were good to go. It was possible but unlikely that they would be searched thoroughly before they left. Coming in was a different story as there would be no better way of delivering an IED into the camp than by humanitarian relief – Oklahoma bombing Taliban-style.
The tiny RDF chip I had just dug out from my neck was in my front pocket. I lifted the edge of the truck tarp and took a peek. I didn’t care so much about what was being hauled as whether the cargo gave me an accessible space. There wouldn’t be a full security check but, no doubt, there would be some cursory count to ensure that what left matched up with what got
to the destination. Thankfully, there was no weighbridge to tip anyone off to an extra two hundred pounds in back.
I passed on the first truck full of cooking oil and settled for the second, which held bags of grain. Time was ticking away, and I couldn’t be choosy. I clambered in, trying to make as little impression on the interior as a man of my size could.
There was some space nearer the cab. Even with the coughing of the diesel engine, I was pretty sure I would be able to pick up any conversation between the driver and the guard allotted to each truck.
Hunkering down, my knees touching my chest, I pulled a sack of grain back into place. I was pretty certain that it would pass casual inspection. If someone was actively looking for a stowaway I would be found, but if it was just a quick check I was in good shape.
I didn’t dwell too much on what would happen if I was found. After all, it wasn’t as if I was regular military, or that I was being held against my will. It had been made clear to me on several occasions that the program Muir seemed to be trying to recruit me into was voluntary. Like the Army Ranger motto, the Latin for which was sua sponte, you signed up ‘of your own accord’.
So, if that was true, then why the hell was I sneaking out like a thief in the night? What the answer lacked in logic, it made up for in certainty. I didn’t trust the people around me anymore. I needed answers to things I hadn’t even been able to form into a coherent set of questions yet. I felt like I was losing my mind. The approach from Muir. The RDF chip I’d refused but that had been implanted. My signature on the consent form when I had no memory of signing it.
I must have dozed off because I woke a short time later to the sound of sleepy drivers and their guards standing around in the freezing cold as they divided up the convoy between them. A chink of half-light found its way to my eyes as the rear tarp was pulled back. As I had suspected, the check was cursory and followed swiftly by the opening and closing of cab doors.
A sea of engines rumbled and the convoy was on its way, settling for less than a minute at the gate before hitting what passed for freeway in the barren landscape. The trucks picked up speed. I listened keenly to pick up any conversation up front but either driver and guard weren’t talkers or, more likely, it was just too late.
Now that they were on the road, I could find a more comfortable position. I had cut enough of a slit in the side tarpaulin to get eyes on the landscape so that I could pick out not only my own departure point but that of the tiny RDF chip. The truck slowed as the convoy began to climb a steep incline. I slashed again at the tarp, creating enough of a gap that I could stick my head out and get a better sense of the terrain. I could see the horizon rise in front of me. By the edge of the road was a ditch – as good a place as any to deposit the RDF transmitter, and the crest of the slope was as good a place as any to get out. I calculated that we were less than ten miles out from the camp but I had also worked out that, for every mile I hitched, the chances of someone figuring out I had left the facility edged ever upwards.
I pitched the transmitter as hard as I could out of the side of the truck. It arced its way the first ten feet or so toward the ditch.
The truck slowed with a lurch. I could hear the other vehicles beginning to brake. It wasn’t a good sign, not when they were climbing a slope. A radio crackled in the cab. The message coming in was about a checkpoint up ahead.
Looking back to the spot where I had thrown the tracking device, I cursed my luck. Checkpoints were bad news – especially at night. Masquerading as a security measure, they were either set up to gather information to be passed on to insurgents or, more often, to shake down money. Soliciting bribes here, as in many developing nations, was an art form. Approaches were never direct and often took the form of simply keeping someone in one place until that person realized the fastest way of getting back on the road would be to offer a token of their appreciation for the work being done in holding them up.
I stuck my head back through the tarp to get a visual. The checkpoint was like none I’d seen here. The road at the top of the rise was lit like the Fourth of July, with big arc lights either side of the road illuminating what looked like four Dodge Charger police cruisers with flak-jacketed white cops leaning against their vehicles. It was a surreal sight.
I tried to shake the cobwebs out of my head. I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them again, the lights were gone, replaced by the beams from two local Afghan police pick-ups. Not that any of it mattered. If I was still in the truck at the top of the rise, the slit I had cut in the tarp would betray me. It was now or never.
I ducked my head back inside, my blood chilled by what I was seeing. The sacks of grain were gone, replaced by dozens of dead bodies. Men, women, children lay all around me, their limbs contorted, like a scene from a concentration-camp death train. Looking down, I saw that they were behind me too. I was standing on one, my boots imprinted on a man’s naked back.
The smell of death was everywhere. My stomach lurched and my mouth filled with bile. Panicked, I grabbed my Gerber and slashed at the tarp. Pushing off with my left foot, I climbed onto the edge of the truck, imagining hands clawing at my feet, trying to drag me back inside, and launched myself out onto the road, the truck still moving.
I hit the ground with a force that jarred my spine. The truck behind almost clipped me as it drove past. I rolled down into the ditch before I could be picked up by the headlights of the next vehicle in the convoy.
There was about a foot of freezing muddy water in the bottom of the ditch. The trucks were rumbling past toward the checkpoint. I shook my head, trying to clear everything I’d seen from my mind.
When the lights from the rear security vehicle had swept over the ditch, I clambered out on the other side. There was no time to dwell on the last moments before I had bailed, but I allowed myself a single backward glance up the rise. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the scene playing out, just four local cops who wanted to hold up an aid convoy until someone grew bored enough to pay them.
I plunged forward into the desert scrub. Time was short so I needed to fill it with as much distance as I could. Breaking into a run, I set a steady pace, the canopy of stars overhead guiding me south.
TWENTY
Moving forward seemed to keep the visions at bay and allowed my mind to settle. I tried not to dwell on my decision to flee the camp. It was done now and nothing would change that. All that concerned me was getting home. If I kept that at the front of my mind, I would be fine. Escape, like most things, occurred in the mind. It was a question of attitude and determination. I had seen it at the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) course at Fort Bragg. I had been one of the last to be captured. When I was finally taken, I had also been one of the last to crack under interrogation. Everyone did, you were told up front: it was how long you lasted that mattered. As with resistance, the key to escape was to stay in the present and focus on your goal.
My goal was the city. Once there, I would be able to find people who could help me. My contacts were extensive and this was still a shadowland of a country where, for the right price, anything could be secured, including travel documents and a flight out.
My plan was to travel by night when my ambient temperature was most closely in sync with the land and I wouldn’t be picked up by any drones or piloted aircraft using FLIR (forward-looking infrared) imaging. Moving at night, when the temperature was lowest, would keep me warm and I’d be less likely to suffer dehydration. At the camp I had noticed that the temperature was considerably higher than it had been in the mountains. By midday the heat was oppressive. I would find shade in daytime and rest up.
Along with the heat, the landscape had surprised me. It was drier than I had expected. A lot drier. Finding water would be the biggest challenge. I was already experiencing hunger pangs but those I could safely choose to ignore. Water was another matter. Dehydration would kill you just the same as a bullet through the heart. It wouldn’t be pretty either, and it was something you
could slide into without knowing it was happening. Lack of water messed with your mind so you had to be vigilant for the warning signs.
From nowhere, I felt a jab of pain in my foot. I reached down and pulled some kind of thorn from the bottom of my boot. I held it up to my face. It looked like the barb from some kind of cactus. It had gone straight through the leather. Looking around, I didn’t see any kind of bush or tree or cactus that matched up. I tossed the spike, shrugged off the pain and kept moving.
Every once in a while, at irregular intervals, I would stop, listen, retake my course from the stars, using basic astral navigation, and scan the land ahead. The most I heard was the howl of a dog as I skirted a farmhouse, the livestock skittish at my approach. I doubled my pace to get clear before anyone came out to investigate what had alerted the animal.
A short distance beyond the stone buildings of the smallholding, I came upon a wadi. Miraculously, the bottom had water. Not much, but water nonetheless. Its presence explained the livestock and the smallholding. I filled one of the empty water bottles I had brought with me, dropped in a purification tablet, and jumped down into the riverbed.
I waded for a few hundred yards, got out and reset my course. I estimated that I had only an hour until dawn. I would keep walking a little past sunrise but not for long. As I moved, I scanned the horizon for somewhere to hole up.
With dawn came heat. There was no sign of shelter save a couple of trees. My piss was already running yellow – a bad sign. I sipped at the water I’d collected from the wadi. It tasted stale and brackish. I thought about doubling back to the smallholding and finding shelter there but decided against it. It would take ninety minutes, more with the heat, and I couldn’t afford to lose the ground.
Ahead I could see the mountains on the far horizon. If I could survive and evade capture until nightfall, they would be within striking distance. Beyond the mountains was the city. More importantly, the mountains held water, vegetation, food and better cover.