Hostage Zero

by John Gilstrap

  Harvey appeared on Jonathan’s right, looking for all the world like a dedicated warrior. His weapon at the ready, he sank to a knee and took over the work of covering the door. “Don’t you have a job to do?” he asked Scorpion.

  He did indeed. Per the plan, Boxers had taken bolt cutters to the lock, and the bolt was ready to be slid out of the way. Jonathan joined him on the stoop and locked his gaze just as he’d done so many times in the past. Once the door was crashed, Boxers would go in high and to the right to engage targets, and Jonathan would go low and to the left.

  The snapped their night vision back into place and threw open the door.

  Evan was terrified. The explosion startled the crap out of him, and the gunfire was downright horrifying, but it was the blast of heat through the windows that completely undid him. He rolled out of his bed onto the floor and curled himself into as tight a ball as he could manufacture. Throughout the barracks, all pretense of toughness or machismo evaporated. They were now a roomful of boys who were terrified of dying.

  Next to him, Charlie was on the floor, too, doing his best to slide under his cot. Evan’s mind screamed to get out of here-to claw at the wire over the windows or maybe slam his shoulder into the door to bust it open-but his body refused to respond. He was frozen. He’d heard that expression before-frozen in fear-but he had no idea that it was possible in the literal sense.

  “What’s happening?” Evan screamed to Charlie.

  The other boy’s eyes were wide and red. He shook his head.

  Evan heard two gunshots, really close ones, and then a rattling sound at the front door. It was like every bad dream he’d ever had, where the monster is clawing at your door to get in, and you can’t do anything to stop it.

  He shot another panicked look to Charlie, then flattened himself on the floor as if to dissolve through the wooden planks.

  Please God, he thought. But then he realized he didn’t know what to pray for.

  That’s okay, Father Dom had told him once. God sees your heart. He doesn’t need to hear your words.

  So just please God would do.

  The door burst open, and the monster entered. Actually, it was two monsters, and they had guns.

  “ En el piso! ” one of them yelled. He was huge-from this angle bigger than the door he’d just come through. “ En el piso! ”

  Immediately, on the far end of the room, there was a clatter of beds and people as boys dropped to the floor.

  “Evan Guinn!” the other one yelled.

  Something dissolved inside him, launching him to a new plane of fear. They were coming to kill him. Then all of that changed with the man’s next words.

  “Evan Guinn, we’re here to take you home!”

  Inside on the left was for shit-literally, it turned out-so after a quick glance to clear that part of the room, Jonathan shifted his attention to the right.

  Boxers yelled, “On the floor!” in Spanish, and then repeated it. To a person, the kids obeyed. Instantly. And kids they were, too. Not a whisker among them.

  By Jonathan’s estimate, they were already two minutes into the assault, and that meant they were behind schedule. It wouldn’t take long for somebody to connect the dots on what they were doing, and then the heat of the fire would pale in comparison to the heat of the battle.

  “Evan Guinn!” Jonathan yelled. Details of skin tone and hair color were hard to discern with the NVGs in place. “Evan Guinn, we’re here to take you home!”

  Two seconds later, there he was. The closest bed to the door on the eastern side of the building. He saw the boy first as movement, and then there was the mop of hair and the white skin. So much for skin tone and hair color being hard to discern. In here the kid was as visible as chalk on a blackboard.

  “I’ve got him,” he announced to Boxers.

  “Roger that,” Boxers said. The Big Guy sidestepped closer to the western wall to give Jonathan space to grab Evan, but he kept his weapon trained on the room.

  The boy was still finding his feet when Jonathan grabbed his upper arm to help. When he was in the aisle Jonathan stooped to the boy’s level and snapped the NVGs out of the way. “We’re the good guys, Evan. From America. We’re here to take you back where you belong.”

  In the dancing, deflected light of the fires, Jonathan saw the kid’s eyes go wide. “Mr. Jonathan?” he said.

  Jonathan smiled. “The one and only.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “That’s a very long story,” Jonathan replied. “For now, I need you to keep quiet, stay close to me, and let’s see if we can all get out of here alive.”

  One of the other children scrambled to his feet and rushed toward them, but Boxers planted a hand in his chest, stopping him in his tracks. “Take me with you,” the boy said.

  The English startled Jonathan, but he started for the door anyway.

  Boxers said, “Go back to bed, kid. We’re here for just one.”

  “No!” the boy shouted. “Evan, you promised!”

  Evan squirted out of Jonathan’s grasp and buttonhooked around his hip to beckon Charlie to join them. “Come on,” he said.

  Jonathan grabbed Evan’s arm again, tighter this time. “No, you come on.”

  “But he’s my friend.”

  “You’ll make a new one,” Boxers growled. “Scorpion, we need to move.”

  With his rifle trained on the other boys, he started to back out as Jonathan half pushed, half dragged Evan through the door. “Mr. Jonathan, Mr. Jonathan, listen to me. That’s Charlie. He was the only one who helped-”

  “We can’t,” Jonathan said. “We just can’t.”

  Evan yelled, “Come on, Charlie! He said you can come!”

  Boxers appeared at the door, his jaw dropped. “What the hell?”

  Jonathan was stunned. And then the other kid was there. Well, shit. What was he going to do, shoot him?

  It would take less time to capitulate than it would to argue. “Fine,” he said. Then, to Boxers, “Let-”

  A chorus of screams whipped Jonathan’s head to the far end of the compound, where the fire had reached the farthest of the barracks-Building India-and was starting to consume the west wall-the one that faced the interior of the compound. Tongues of flame licked up the siding and up to the eaves and the thatched roof. At a glance, he realized that the fire would be rolling into the interior of the building through the high windows. If they didn’t do something, the children would burn to death.

  Harvey said, “Boss.”

  Jonathan shot a look to Boxers. “We have to,” he said. He let go of Evan’s arm and said to the boy, “Stay with me. Step for step, you understand?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned on his heel and ran toward the growing conflagration, his rifle at the ready. This was the nightmare scenario-the one that he had driven home a thousand times to Unit wannabes when he was an instructor at the OTC-operator training course. On an 0300 mission, the precious cargo was the mission. Everything was secondary to the rescue. And by God, once you have the PC in your grasp, you never do anything to risk their safety. Yeah, well, that was the training course. He’d survived it once and taught it three times, and he knew for a fact that there was no scenario involving the incineration of a dozen children.

  The fire grew with startling speed. In the ten or fifteen seconds that it took Jonathan to cover the distance, the far end of the barracks was fully involved. The screams from inside were as terrifying a sound as he’d ever heard. He was certain that they were screaming words, but he didn’t try to catch them. The timbre of the voices told him everything he needed to know. As they closed within the last few yards, Harvey sprinted past him to get to the door first. Jonathan didn’t think the little guy knew how to move that fast.

  A burst of machine-gun fire from close behind made Jonathan slide to a stop and bring his weapon to bear. It was Boxers, and his weapon was up, his eyes focused to the southwest corner of the compound. He followed his sight line and turned i
n time for a second burst to drop a soldier who’d been readying a shot of his own.

  “Make it fast, Dig!” Boxers shouted. “This is spinning out of control. We are officially in trouble.”

  Jonathan could count on two hands the number of times he’d heard his friend sound this unnerved. Whatever advantage they’d earned through their massive diversion had now been lost. In fact, the diversion itself had become their biggest problem. With the element of surprise squandered, this whole mission would come down to marksmanship.

  Harvey pulled on the barracks door, trying to get it open. It was not lost on Jonathan that none of the local soldiers or bosses were doing anything to help the children.

  “Move, Harvey,” Jonathan barked. He let the M4 fall against its sling, and raised the Mossberg. He jacked the breech open, ejecting one of the buckshot rounds, then reached to his bandolier of shells and thumbed out a slug round. He slipped it into the breech and closed it before sweeping Evan and his friend behind him. He placed the muzzle two inches away from the shackle loop, calculated the ricochet angle, then pulled the trigger.

  The Mossberg bucked, and the lock disappeared. He slid the bolt to the side, pulled open the door, and children tumbled out into the night. They coughed and cried, their faces blackened with soot and smoke, but Jonathan didn’t see any burns. Next to him, Harvey did his best to examine them as they streamed by. Apparently, they were all healthy, because he didn’t stop any of them for further treatment.

  A ripple of bullets chewed the wall just to the left of the door, followed an instant later by the sound of the gunfire that launched them. The children yelled and scattered, causing Jonathan to reflexively look for Evan. He was still right where he was supposed to be, his friend close enough for them to share a heartbeat.

  As much as he wanted to bolt out of there, he had to look inside to make sure that he hadn’t left any living children to burn. He cleared the two steps in a single stride. Keeping close to the floor, where the air was still breathable, he crawled a few feet inside and took a look. Just an empty room on this end. On the far end, a wall of fire had become a living monster, consuming everything. If someone had been left behind, they were dead now.

  He scooted back outside.

  The children from the burning barracks weren’t going anywhere. They clustered around Boxers and Harvey, and now that Jonathan had rejoined the scene, they clustered around him, too. One boy of about twelve who appeared in the firelight to be missing his right eye and ear from an old injury grabbed Jonathan by his web gear and said in Spanish, “What do we do? Where do we go? Please take me with you.”

  Others were doing the same with Boxers and Harvey. These kids were in a total panic, yet somehow they knew that the strangers with the rifles provided a better future than the locals who paid for their labors.

  Jonathan said nothing. What could he say? This mission was coming unzipped in enormous proportions.

  “We’ve got to move!” he shouted to his team.

  “Guns to the north!” Boxers yelled.

  Jonathan pivoted right and dragged Evan to the ground by cupping the back of his neck with his left hand while shouldering his M4 with his right. A dozen or more men in various stages of uniform undress had left their instinct to fight the fires and were dialing in to the real threat. Word was passing quickly among them, and many were assuming shooting positions. Jonathan dropped two with two three-round bursts.

  Bad guys opened up from what felt like every compass point. It was panicked fire, largely unaimed and therefore not particularly dangerous, but the old adages of war still applied: If you throw enough lead out there, something’s bound to get hit.

  The children scattered. Most of them. In the barracks hut behind them-Building Hotel, the one still locked but not burning-children screamed and pounded on the walls, no doubt terrified by the bullets that missed the intended targets and slammed through the wooden panels as if they were not even there.

  Jonathan and Boxers both dropped to their bellies to present smaller profiles, Jonathan’s body covering Evan, who was squirming like a grounded fish to get the weight off him. “Get the PC under cover!” Jonathan yelled to Harvey, who seemed momentarily to be frozen in place, neither standing nor crawling, but stuck somewhere in between.

  “Harvey!”

  That snapped him back to awareness.

  Jonathan rolled off of Evan. “Take Evan behind Building Hotel and sit on him. Anybody comes close you don’t recognize, shoot him.”

  For the first time, Harvey seemed to fully understand the stakes, to become fully aware of his surroundings. He stooped low, grabbed Evan under his armpits, and pulled.

  Evan needed no additional encouragement. Once he was free of Jonathan’s weight, he darted like a loose rocket behind the center hut. Charlie, too. Harvey had to hurry just to keep up.

  “We can’t stay here!” Boxers shouted. Bullets kicked up dirt in the space between them, and the Big Guy drilled the shooter.

  Jonathan knew he was right. There was no way to spirit Evan out through all of this. Two-and three-man battle teams were forming all over the compound now. Their movement and their muzzle flashes marked their locations, but with so many of them and one common target, it was only a matter of time.

  “We can’t defend this position!” Jonathan yelled, firing at a running target and missing.

  “Oh, ya think?” Boxers yelled back. He dropped a magazine and slapped in another one.

  “We’re gonna move left,” Jonathan announced, this time using the radio so Harvey would know, too. “Harvey, stay put. Box, our rally point is the black side of the burning barracks.” He dropped a magazine that still had six rounds in it and inserted a fresh mag of thirty. “Okay, Big Guy, you shoot everything north of two-seventy, I’ll take everything south. Covering fire!”

  Moving with remarkable harmony, they let go with a hail of barely aimed bursts of machine-gun fire as they rose to a deep crouch and made their move for cover. Jonathan dumped his first thirty rounds in seven seconds and two seconds later had a fresh mag that he emptied in six seconds. The goal here was not to kill-although he’d take whatever he could get-but rather to land rounds close enough to the enemy that they hit the dirt. Another basic rule of warfare was that you can’t cower and kill at the same time. Calmness under fire was the single deadliest trait that separated professional soldiers from amateurs. Well, that and the ability to hit what you’re aiming at.

  To Jonathan’s right as they moved to cover behind the inferno that used to be Building India, Boxer managed to unload ninety rounds with such speed that Jonathan never heard his pauses to reload.

  Jonathan arrived to relative safety in the shadow of the burning building first, followed by Big Guy just a couple of seconds later.

  “No return fire,” Boxers said. His eyes were wide with anticipation, his face as anxious as a kid awaiting his turn with Santa. “We can take them.”

  Jonathan nodded. Covering fire, or suppressing fire, was as much a test as a strategy. You learned how thoroughly the enemy cowered under fire. If the roles had just been reversed, and two amateurs had been fleeing a dozen pros while randomly shooting into the night, the amateurs would have been easily dispatched.

  “We have to move fast, though,” Jonathan said. “We’ll roll them up from left to right.”

  “They’re gonna seek shelter in one of the remaining buildings,” Boxers predicted.

  Jonathan smiled. “With any luck.” Hand grenades were invented for eliminating enemies hunkered down inside buildings.

  There was no need to review the strategy. They’d both done this drill so many times that it was nearly as instinctive as breathing.

  When the radio broke squelch, Mitch Ponder heard the sounds of battle before he heard any voices.

  “They’re blowing up the whole factory,” Victor shouted in Spanish. “Huge explosions! There must be twenty of them! Hurry!”

  Without having to be told, the pilot cranked up the engine of their lu
xurious, leather-upholstered Sikorski S-76 chopper. They’d been standing alert, thirty miles away in the yard of a business associate, awaiting the attack that Ponder had known was on the way. The spin of the turbine woke up the machine gunner in the back.

  “Everything’s on fire!” Victor hollered. “They’re killing everyone. The factory is being destroyed.”

  Something jumped in his chest. “What do you mean, destroyed?”

  “Listen!” The mike remained open, and in his mind, Ponder had visions of Victor holding it out a window. The sound of gunshots was unmistakable.

  “Well, stop them,” Ponder commanded. “You’ve got a whole fucking army. I know because I paid for their weapons.”

  “We will try,” Victor promised. “But I can no longer guarantee the safety of the white boy.”

  “Fuck the white boy,” Ponder spat. He owed a debt to the American secretary of defense, but nothing was worth the millions he would lose if the factory was destroyed. Most cocaine manufacturers were lucky to manufacture a few kilos a month; his operation made hundreds of kilos a week. There was no bigger operation anywhere in South America. “It’s better to keep him alive, but if he has to die, he has to die. We’re on our way.”

  He nodded to his pilot, and the ground dropped away as the rotors bit into the humid night. As they cleared the trees and pivoted north, the glow of the attack was evident on the horizon, a dome of yellow and orange that tore the darkness like a floodlight.

  “My God,” Ponder muttered. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. He’d agreed to shelter the Guinn boy at the factory because it was the only place under his control where he could be constantly watched and where he could earn his keep.

  Victor and his soldiers were supposed to have stopped the rescuers from taking the boy. This helicopter was supposed to have been the last-resort insurance policy to be used only if the rescue had succeeded and the attackers disappeared into the night. Equipped with forward-looking infrared technology, and with each of the crew members wearing night-vision goggles, there would have been no hiding for invaders retreating through the jungle.