William Christie 02 - Mercy Mission

by William Christie

  Welsh pointed his thumb the other way. "We go back where we came from. But we stay on the rocks so we leave no sign. One slipup and we're screwed."

  "Just tell me what to do."

  Welsh gave her a boost onto a large, flat boulder that projected out into the stream. He handed up his pack, and she passed down a water bottle. They drank the bottles dry. Welsh refilled all the containers from the stream, liberally adding iodine tablets. He pulled himself up on the boulder and shook as much water off his clothing as he could.

  It was a tricky climb to the top, and a few times they had to jump from rock to rock. At the top was a ledge that, although thankfully short, was nearly sheer. Welsh had to drop his pack and climb up by wedging his fingers and boot edges into a long crack in the rock. Scanlan handed up both packs. She had to grab his outstretched hand and swing up before she could push off with her feet. It meant temporarily hanging out over the edge. She scrambled over the top on her hands and knees. "I didn't like that," she informed him once again.

  "I hate like hell to keep telling you this," he said. "But it's going to get worse."

  "I don't doubt it."

  The brush was thick at the top of the hill, just what Welsh wanted. "Why don't you wait here and catch your breath while I poke around?"

  "Be glad to."

  Welsh crawled on his hands and knees, using the staff to hold back the brush and hopefully come in contact with anything unpleasant before his face did. On one side of the hill a cluster of deadfalls had brought up some secondary growth. There was a beautiful thicket of thorn bushes and wait-a-minute vines, whose little hook-like thorns grabbed onto clothing and wouldn't let go. Welsh pushed a little path into the thicket and then went back to get Scanlan.

  She followed him in, both on their hands and knees and their packs in front of them. Welsh hacked out a small space in the center of the thicket and stamped it down to leave a reasonably flat surface. "Have a seat on your pack and relax," he told her. "I've got to erase our trail."

  "How long are you going to be gone?"

  "Fifteen minutes or so. But don't move around or make any noise."

  Welsh crawled down the tiny path until he was at the spot where they'd come off the rocks. Backing towards the thicket, he scattered forest duff on any gouges in the earth and repositioned branches and grass that had been bent down.

  "What now?" Scanlan whispered when he returned.

  Welsh pulled a green nylon tarpaulin from his pack and spread it on the ground. "We couldn't keep running. They'd get an idea from our track where we were heading, and radio for other groups to be waiting out ahead of us. Even if they didn't, we wouldn't be able to stop, and eventually we'd get so hungry and tired they'd be able to run us down. This way, they're going to follow our trail down to the stream and lose it. They'll think we climbed up the rocks on the other side, or walked up or downstream in the water. I'm taking the chance that they wouldn't dream we'd stop moving, backtrack, and hide. And even if they did, they won't be able to find the trail we made into here."

  "What about the water that dripped off us onto the rocks?"

  "The sun will dry them off in a heartbeat. Tracking across rock is the ancient equivalent of mastering particle physics. If they have someone who can do it, we're screwed no matter what we do."

  "So we just sit here?"

  "That's right."

  "How long?"

  "As long as it takes."

  "Oh, no, not Zen again."

  "I've got worse news. Pretty soon we're not going to be able to speak or move. Not one single sound. You'll have to take five minutes to unscrew a water bottle."

  "All right."

  "Don't be so quick to say that. If an ant bites you, if a mosquito stings you, you can't move to slap it. Even rolling over could snap a twig and get us killed."

  "What if I'm not able to do it?"

  Welsh stared straight into her eyes. "Every time you feel you can't stand it one more second, just think about being raped. All ten of them. Because that's what'll happen if they catch us."

  "I know," she whispered.

  "Then we'd both spend an even longer time dying. I don't want that to happen, and I don't want to watch it happening to you. So whatever we have to go through to avoid that is worth it, isn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm sorry to have to be so brutal about it," he said.

  "I know you are," Scanlan replied. "If I don't get another chance to say it, thanks for everything so far."

  Welsh rooted around in his pack again, found two small bundles, and handed her one. Mosquito head nets, worn over the whole head down to the shoulders, with a flexible hoop to hold the net away from the face. "Put this on, and tuck your pants legs into your socks. The bugs will be a little easier to deal with." He removed the Beretta from the holster, made sure there was still a round in the chamber, checked the sound suppressor, and flipped the safety off. "If you hear anyone come close, don't move a muscle and don't look directly at them. Hard to believe, but sometimes you can feel another person's eyes on you. They might walk right over us and not know it, so don't let them panic you into running. A situation like this, all that determines the winners and losers is they both wanted to give up but the winners held out just another minute more."

  "So we sit here in the briar patch," Scanlan whispered.

  "Exactly." He set the pistol on the ground next to his hand. If they were discovered it would be useless to have Scanlan run while he tried to hold them off. Where would she run to? Welsh had already decided that they weren't going to be captured. He'd kill as many as he could, and the last two bullets in the Beretta would finish it.

  When everything was ready, they lay down on the tarp, side by side and very close together. Welsh knew they'd disappeared into the green thorns, and even if the bad guys did get on line and try to cut their way through, he and Scanlan would be invisible up to only a few feet away.

  Three hours passed. At the beginning Scanlan had made several little movements, almost involuntary, and each time Welsh laid a warning hand on her arm. The tarp kept the ground moisture from soaking up into their clothing. The insects hovered about, but the head nets, gloves, and repellent were keeping them at bay.

  At close to the five-hour mark Welsh began to smell cigarette smoke. Then he heard voices where they'd first gone down to the stream. One man was directing the others, and another was speaking very softly, with an unfamiliar Spanish accent. Then the voice trailed off.

  Welsh strained to hear everything that was happening around them. The sound of voices grew louder; the men were coming down the stream toward the rocks. They were making a lot of noise. Unprofessional bastards. Then there was nothing but the sound of the birds. Hours before, Welsh had known they were well hidden when the birds settled down and began to feed. The jungle had resumed its normal rhythms around them. Only the arrival of these new intruders had sent the birds back into the air.

  Welsh's chest and thighs, which he'd been lying on, were incredibly painful. Every unscratched itch escalated into something maddening. He fought to take his mind away from those internal problems, concentrating all his senses on what was happening around him. He periodically took sips of water, moving so slowly he used it as a game to occupy himself, and nudged Scanlan to remind her to do the same.

  He tried to keep his eyes off his watch, but two more hours passed. Then it began to rain, a hard blinding tropical downpour where the moisture arrived before the clouds even began to darken. It was a fantastic stroke of luck. The rain would cool them down, and more important, wash away any mistakes he'd made in covering the trail.

  The voices returned: louder, angrier, and more urgent. They knew they had to regain the trail before the rain obscured it. They were back on the near side of the stream now, then even closer. Backtracking, Welsh thought. Trying to see if he and Scanlan had gone down to the stream and then walked back up the hill in their own footprints, jumping off the trail somewhere along the line.

  The brus
h crashed, and a loud harsh voice demanded, "Did you find anything?"

  Scanlan jumped, and Welsh rested a comforting hand on her back. It was also there to hold her down if she panicked.

  The soft voice with the strange accent replied, "I told you they did not backtrack."

  "Then where is their trail?" the loud voice demanded. "I thought you Indians knew how to track."

  Other voices laughed together in ridicule, as if it were now permitted.

  That explained the strange accent. An Indian would not have learned Spanish as his first language.

  "The man knows about tracking," the Indian replied, still softly. "He played a trick on the other side of the stream."

  "I'll show him a trick," said the leader's loud voice. "I'll make him eat his own balls."

  A third voice broke in. "But we'll give that woman something else to eat, eh?"

  They all laughed. Scanlan was shivering, and Welsh didn't think it was only from the sudden chill of the rain.

  Then Welsh thought he heard a very quiet sound in front of him. The grass began to move. He slowly raised the Beretta.

  The grass parted, and the triangular head of a snake emerged. It was brown, with paler brown geometric markings. Fuck, Welsh thought. The shit just kept piling up. The snake was a fer-de-lance, the barba amarilla in Guatemala. A big bastard if the size of the head was any indication. They were so poisonous that if you got bit and didn't have any antivenin, you had just enough time to drink a beer before you croaked. Welsh didn't have any antivenin. He also didn't have any beer.

  If he shot the snake, even using the sound suppressor, the bad guys couldn't help but hear it. And if it bit him in the face he was dead. Great choices. Welsh was glad Scanlan had her face in the ground and couldn't see it.

  The snake stopped, about eight feet from Welsh's head. Welsh couldn't remember if the fer-de-lance looped its body before striking. The snake wavered back and forth for a moment, and flicked out its tongue to taste the air. The rain must have confused it, because when its sensory apparatus picked up the heat of two very large creatures, the snake visibly twitched and coiled itself. Welsh aimed carefully and took up the slack on the Beretta's trigger. Then the fer-de-lance, probably because all that large heat in front of it neither moved nor attacked, suddenly uncoiled and slid gracefully through the grass away from them.

  Welsh let out his breath and got off the trigger. That's what happens when you get cocky, he told himself. They'd been incredibly lucky. The fer-de-lance was lethal, but its regional cousin, the much more aggressive bushmaster, probably would have attacked instantly.

  Preoccupied with the snake, Welsh hadn't been paying attention to the voices. Now they were arguing.

  "Why not wait for them to come out of the jungle?" one asked. "If they do not emerge, then the devil take them."

  "We have people in the villages watching for them," the leader said. "And if you wish to go home, after failing to kill them on the road as we were ordered, then that is your affair."

  "I will stay," the man replied sullenly. The others laughed at him.

  "How will we find them now?" another asked loudly.

  The Indian answered him. "They have walked in the stream to hide their tracks. We must search up and down, and find where they emerged."

  "They had to go down," the leader decided. "Upstream leads back to the road."

  "As you wish," the Indian said quietly.

  The rain stopped, having gone from a downpour to nothing in an instant. The sun came out just as fast, and the heat made steam rise from the wet ground.

  "There, you see," the leader told his men. "An omen."

  Welsh felt the same way. Then the leader must have spoken to the Indian. "There will be no payment if you do not find them."

  The Indian had probably started back to the stream, because Welsh could hear movement, and the voices, though still arguing, grew fainter.

  Another two hours, and the voices didn't return. The shadows were beginning to lengthen. Welsh's extremities were completely numb, but he felt the warmth of pure satisfaction. Even, he admitted to himself, joy. Patience, self-discipline, mental and physical toughness had won the day once again, as they always did. And Scanlan. She had been simply magnificent.

  Welsh leaned over and whispered very quietly in her ear. "How do you feel."

  It made her jump. "Terrible," she whispered back hoarsely.

  "No, you don't," said Welsh. "What you feel is alive."

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It took Welsh and Scanlan several minutes of hard and painful effort to work the blood back into their muscles. An obvious solution would have been to rub each other's extremities, but even if it had occurred to them, each declined to broach the subject to the other.

  Scanlan whispered, "Please tell me I can go now."

  Welsh handed over the machete and toilet paper. "Don't wander too far, and be as quiet as you can."

  "I'll do my best."

  When he was able to sit up, Welsh crawled in the opposite direction and urinated. When she returned, he asked, "Are you hungry?"

  "Not a bite all day? I'm starving."

  "Got any food?"

  Her face fell. "No."

  Welsh smiled and rummaged in his pack. He came up with a bulging plastic bag.

  "Fig Newtons?" she said.

  Welsh shrugged. "They're filling, hold up in the heat, and I happen to like 'em."

  "Nothing else?"

  "Hey, I only thought I'd be out in the jungle for a day or two. By myself, I might add."

  "Forgive me for sounding ungrateful," Scanlan replied. "But what happens when we finish them?"

  "We'll see what we can forage while we walk. But plan on being hungry for an indefinite period. The Guatemalan jungle weight-loss plan."

  Scanlan shrugged. "I was a little worried about my thighs anyway."

  Welsh was pleased with her attitude. If there was nothing you could do to change a bad situation, complaining was a miserable waste of time.

  Scanlan consumed her cookies very slowly. Welsh popped his into his mouth one by one, chewed once or twice, and that was that.

  "You don't seem concerned about making them last," she observed.

  "I got used to going hungry in the Marine Corps. Out in the field, that is."

  "Don't they feed you?"

  "It's not that. The combat rations, MREs or Meals Ready to Eat…how should I put this? They really suck."

  "You mean the taste?"

  "They get old, fast."

  "You know, Rich, I have a little trouble picturing you in a Senate office. Or an office anywhere."

  "I do it for money, like everyone else."

  Scanlan wrapped her arms around herself, and if the temperature hadn't been in the ninety-degree range Welsh might have thought she was cold. "God," she said. "I thought it was all over up on the road."

  "That accidental shot saved us. Someone either jumped the gun or got nervous with his finger on the trigger. An ambush has to begin with an instantaneous, massive volley of gunfire, and they just couldn't get it together. And at night there's a tendency to shoot high, especially when you're nervous. Everyone's first burst went right over the jeep. Then I threw off their aim when I stepped on the gas. The guy on the claymore mine didn't allow for the little electrical delay between squeezing the firing claquer and the mine going off. The machinegun on the bend in the road was textbook, though. That would have gotten us."

  "If you didn't drive off the cliff."

  "They should have picked a spot that was steeper, or mined the opposite side of the ambush."

  "I never imagined there was that much to it."

  "Even in the military, people think any moron can be an infantryman. You know, you were really great today," he said, looking her straight in the eye. "Very few people could have done it."

  She was too embarrassed to meet his gaze for long.

  Welsh returned the bag of Fig Newtons to his pack. When he turned around, Scanlan was on he
r feet and had backed up several body lengths. She seemed a little agitated. "What's up?" he asked.

  She wordlessly pointed to where they'd been seated. A cockroach over six inches long was feasting on the few meager crumbs left over from their meal.

  Welsh walked over and crunched it under his boot. "How about that?" he exclaimed. "All you'd need is a collar and a leash, and you could call it Fido and take it for walks."

  "God," Scanlan breathed.

  Welsh had two small plastic bottles in his hand. He popped a tablet into his mouth and handed one to Scanlan.

  "What's this?" she asked.

  "Multivitamin with minerals. You've got to replace the electrolytes along with the water."

  She accepted the tablet and washed it down with a slug from the water bottle. "Thanks."

  "Do you have an anti-malarial drug?" he asked, opening up the second bottle.

  "Yes."

  "Good. Don't forget to take it on schedule." He checked his watch. "In these parts it gets dark really fast. We'll sleep right here tonight." He checked the canopy above them.

  "What are you looking at?" Scanlan asked,

  "Making sure there aren't any dead branches. You probably won't believe this, but in the jungle you've got a better chance of being killed by a falling tree than just about anything else."

  "Don't worry, I'm on the verge of believing anything. What else do we need to do?"

  "Wrap ourselves up in the tarp and go to sleep."

  Something was obviously bothering her. "Do you intend for both of us to sleep in this thing?" she finally asked.

  "You don't have to," Welsh replied politely. "Pick any spot you like and curl right up on the ground."

  They looked at each other, and all that could be heard was the buzzing of the insects.

  "My sense of chivalry extends only so far," he said.

  "Then I guess we share the tarp."

  "It's light to carry and low-profile. Even using night-vision goggles, someone could walk right by us and never see anything. The British military use hammocks and make pole beds, but the last people they fought in the jungle were the Indonesians. The people who taught the people who taught me fought the North Vietnamese." He handed her a water bottle. "Let's drink these up, and after dark I'll go down to the stream and refill them."