Hostage Zero

by John Gilstrap

  “My God,” he breathed. “My God, my God, my God…” He couldn’t begin to calculate the millions this was going to cost him. Into the intercom, he said in Spanish, “Look for white-skinned soldiers. Kill any that you see.”

  Behind him in the cargo bay, the gunner made ready his AK-47.

  They came in low and fast, barely above the treetops, sweeping by quickly to make the helicopter a harder target to hit. No one shot at them, however. No one moved. The dead remained still, but the physical devastation stood out in sharper relief.

  “Incredible,” the pilot said.

  And then it was gone, the tableau of destruction giving way to the blackness of the lightless jungle. “Make another pass,” Ponder ordered. “More slowly this time.”

  The chopper slid to a stop in the air and then pivoted on its axis to reverse direction. “If we go too slowly, we’re more easily shot down,” the pilot warned.

  “If they wanted to shoot us down they’d be firing their guns,” Ponder said. “And if they don’t they’re either dead or they’ve made their escape.” He took a deep breath. “It looks to me like everything’s dead.”

  “I see movement in the jungle,” the gunner said. “On the right-hand side.”

  Ponder turned. Thanks to the night vision, he could see them now. A dozen people moving about. They were children.

  “Those are the workers,” Ponder said. At least they were still left to him. Even as the thought formed in his mind, he realized that with his soldiers and supervisors gone, the children would have to die now, too. He could not afford to let the story of his weakness filter back to the villagers.

  “Look there,” the pilot said, pointing. “One of the supervisors is still alive.”

  Sure enough, a dark-skinned man, barefoot and shirtless, staggered out into the clearing, waving his arms and beckoning the chopper down to the ground. The pilot parked the aircraft in a low hover, blasting the man with the rotor wash and making him cover his head.

  “Do you recognize him?” the pilot asked.

  Ponder shook his head. “I don’t know. He looks half-dead.” The man stood with a distinct list to his left, and he appeared to be wounded in the leg.

  “It could be a trap,” the pilot said. “What do you want me to do?”

  Harvey hoped he wasn’t overselling the limp. Playing decoy had never been a part of his repertoire in the past, and as he staggered out into the open, he couldn’t help but fear that his hunched, staggering gait was a little too Quasimodo. As the chopper slowed and drew to a hover, he knew that he had their attention, but as they continued to hover, he could feel the gun sights settling on his chest and head, readying to call his bluff.

  He’d removed his protective gear, shirt, and shoes just to look more like the guards he was impersonating; but the lack of clothes meant no place to conceal a weapon. He was entirely dependent upon his acting ability and on Jonathan’s and Boxers’ marksmanship. Otherwise, he was going to die right here in a place where he’d never in a million years choose to live.

  The roar of the rotor wash kicked up dirt and soot and firebrands, enveloping him in a cloud of crap that made it impossible to see anything.

  Careful to keep in character, Harvey closed his eyes, covered his head, and hoped that God and great aim would make it all right.

  When something changed in the pitch of the helicopter noise, he knew they’d made their decision to land.

  Then the shouting started.

  Crouched low, with the corner of the barracks as concealment, Jonathan settled his sights on the helicopter’s cockpit, while above him, Boxers had taken a kneeling pose to aim at the cargo bay, where the doors had been removed from this Cadillac of executive helicopters to provide for a door gunner. The plan was simple: the instant the wheels touched the ground, Jonathan would take out the pilot first and then the front-seat passenger, while Boxers killed anyone in the cargo bay. The whole thing shouldn’t take more than a few seconds.

  Jonathan found himself feeling an odd paternal pride in Harvey and his willingness to take this risk. To willfully disarm oneself in the middle of a firefight took a unique brand of courage. When this was over-

  A terrified scream split the night from behind. “Help! Mr. Jonathan! Mr. Jonathan! Help!”

  As Jonathan scrambled to see, something heavy hit the side of the barracks building hard enough to create the sound of splintering wood.

  Evan worried that he might have pissed himself. It was hard to tell in the pooled water under the sleeping hut where the crying and moaning and pleading continued without break. It probably didn’t even matter, except to him. It was just such a baby thing to do.

  Lying here like this, unable to see anything that was going on around him, but hearing the sounds of so much violence, he had to talk himself into believing that they had not been abandoned, that Mr. Jonathan was stating a fact when he assured them that everything would be fine if they just didn’t move.

  Next to him in the muck under the hut, Charlie had fallen completely silent except for his breathing, which sounded a lot like the old steam trains from the movies, chugging and huffing at a rate that couldn’t be healthy.

  “Are we going to die?” Charlie whined.

  “I don’t think so,” Evan said. He tried to sound more certain than his words, even though his mind was screaming the same question. He didn’t have the luxury of panicking, though, because Charlie had gotten there first, and one of them had to keep a level head.

  “Who are they?” Charlie asked.

  “It’s a long-”

  Before Evan could finish his answer, his head exploded in pain, and he found himself being dragged through the miserable soup of mud and cold water. “Ow!” he yelled, and when he reached for the top of his head, he found a fist wrapped around a handful of his hair. By touching the fist, he seemed to have accelerated the rate at which he was being dragged out from under the hut.

  He clawed at the ground with his heels, but there was no stopping his attacker. In just a couple of seconds, he was completely clear and dangling on tiptoes from his hair.

  It was Victor, towering huge as ever, and now slicked with what looked in the dim light to be blood. His eyes burned with an anger that Evan could actually feel.

  Evan wrapped his hands around the man’s forearm for leverage and kicked out for the man’s crotch, scoring a hit solid enough to make him lose his grip, but not enough to make him drop.

  “Help!” Evan yelled. “Mr. Jonathan! Mr. Jonathan! Help!”

  Victor still had his Louisville Slugger. He unleashed a two-handed home-run swing at the boy’s head. Evan ducked, barely dodging the blow that splintered the hut’s wall, and fell back into the mud. He screamed again.

  In the flashing, dancing light of the fire, he saw Victor smile as he brought the bat high over his head. Evan shrieked, first in terror, and then in agony.

  Jonathan understood in a single glance what was happening, and he kicked himself for having dropped his guard. You never put all eyes in one direction, and you never leave the precious cargo alone. He had done both, and now a large and very pissed-off local was threatening to ruin everything with a baseball bat.

  Jonathan pushed away from the wall. “Stay on the chopper,” he commanded to Boxers. With Harvey’s ruse on the edge of working and the helicopter flaring to land, Jonathan couldn’t afford the noise of a gunshot. He drew his KA-BAR and rushed the man.

  Evan was on his left side on the ground, cowering, his knees up and arms protecting his head, screaming like a terrified animal as the attacker raised the bat high over his head, as if it were an axe. Jonathan sprinted toward him, but he was still two strides away when the bat came down with everything he had on Evan’s raised shin. He saw the bone break, heard the resonant crack.

  The agonized shriek churned his stomach.

  Jonathan hit the attacker hard, driving his shoulder into the man’s side and burying the knife to its hilt into his belly. The man tried his best to yell, but it w
as a weak effort. Jonathan’s blade had found the descending aorta that he’d been aiming for, dropping the man’s blood pressure to zero in an instant. By the time he withdrew the KA-BAR from the gaping wound, the man had already gone limp.

  Behind him, as Evan wailed, “My leg! Oh, God, my leg!” Boxers opened fire on the chopper.

  Ponder sensed that something was wrong the instant after he gave the order to land. The man in the rotor wash-the man who, on closer inspection, truly did not look familiar-became distracted by something off to the helicopter’s right-hand side. Ponder looked, but he didn’t see anything.

  When he returned his gaze to the front windscreen, the man in the rotor wash had changed. His posture seemed to have recovered.

  Ponder yelled, “It’s a trap!” the instant the wheels touched the ground. “Get us up! Up!”

  The pilot jumped, and his hands shifted on the controls, and an instant later, his head burst open, dousing the windscreen and the controls with blood and brains. Behind him, in the cargo bay, the gunner made a sound like a barking dog, and when Ponder heard his weapon clatter to the floor, he knew that the gunner was also dead.

  He also sensed that he was next. He reached for the door handle, but in the panic, he fumbled the effort. Something big and invisible kicked him in the chest, driving the air from his lungs. Whatever it was-and he knew it was a bullet-had rendered his arms useless.

  As blood spilled down the front of his white shirt, he was surprised how little it hurt to die.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  While Harvey tended to the wounded, Jonathan and Boxers secured the scene. That meant walking the entire perimeter of the compound looking for living threats and then dispatching them. The fact that he’d heard no gunshots told Harvey that the first round of destruction had been successful.

  As the time stretched to ten and then twenty minutes, children who’d run away began to wander back into the camp and to gather around the rescuers. They wanted to know what they should do. Some of them wanted to come along with Jonathan’s team, not even knowing where they would be going.

  “We can’t take them all,” Boxers said.

  “So how are you going to choose who gets left behind?” Harvey asked.

  “The wounded get first priority,” Jonathan said. “We’ll decide on the others later.” Until Evan was safely at home, everyone understood that the rescue team could not return for the stragglers.

  “So what happens to the rest?” Harvey asked.

  Jonathan shrugged. “They have to be patient. They can fend for themselves. For a while. Hopefully, the villagers will take care of them. Maybe someone else. We’re not in the refugee business. Not today, anyway.”

  Harvey listened to the words, and he knew right away what he had to do. “I’ll stay with them.”

  “Oh, no,” Boxers objected. “I’m not getting to safety and then have to fly all the way back here to pick you up.”

  “I don’t expect you to,” Harvey said. “I mean I’ll really stay.” He looked to Jonathan. “I’ve got nothing to go to back there. I’m a predator, remember? No job, no place to live, lots of people pissed off. This’ll do for me for a while.”

  Jonathan stared, unsure what to say.

  Boxers objected, “You’re talking shit. Boss, say something.”

  Jonathan gave Harvey a long, hard look. “We’re talking a career decision here. Think about it carefully.”

  Harvey smiled. “Hey, I’ve got no passport in a country that I invaded outside of any law-abiding entity. What could possibly go wrong?”

  When he saw that the humor landed flat, he changed his tone. “Seriously, Boss. Over here I get a new lease. Back home, I’m nothing but an embarrassment to everybody.” He spread his arms to include the crowd of kids. “I have my flock.” His eyes bored into Boxers. “And I’m not what they say I am.”

  The Big Guy grew uncomfortable. “Suit yourself,” he said. Then, to Jonathan, “I can have the bird ready to fly in five minutes. If we’re getting out of here, we need to start loading up.” He walked off to attend to it.

  Jonathan said, “Harvey, this was never the plan.”

  Harvey laughed. “It certainly wasn’t mine. But sometimes opportunities come wrapped in odd packages.”

  “How will you make a living?”

  “Adapt and improvise. Isn’t that your motto?” He shrugged. “Look, back in the world, nothing went right for me. I pissed on some opportunities, and some stuff just spun out of my control, but when it’s all said and done, I’ve got nothing back there. Seriously, these kids we liberated all need to find their families. They all need an education. Maybe I’ll copy your example and build the Colombian version of Resurrection House. I’ll do fine.”

  Jonathan could not have been prouder. “Help us load, then?”

  It only took a few minutes. The most seriously wounded got the white leather sofas, while the rest took up space on the floor with Evan, who seemed to be handling the pain of his leg pretty well. Because of weight restrictions, they drew a solid line in the sand that the dead would all be left behind, as would the uninjured children. As Boxers put it so succinctly, “We’re not a damn school bus.”

  After some fierce debate, though, an exception was made for Charlie. A promise was a promise, after all.

  With the cargo bay full, and increasing numbers of children pressing to climb aboard, it was time to go. Jonathan turned to Harvey one last time. “We can make room for you. Say the word.”

  Harvey smiled. “I’ve already said my words. Someone should stay. I want to stay.”

  Jonathan found himself speechless-a condition that rarely afflicted him. He held out his hand. “Thank you,” he said. “We couldn’t have done this without you.”

  Harvey accepted the handshake. “Oh, I bet you would have found a way. Thanks for thinking I would be crazy enough to come along.”

  They held the handshake long enough for it to become uncomfortable. Jonathan wanted to tell this Marine that he should be proud of himself, but he knew that speaking the words would cheapen the moment. Instead, he said, “We gotta go.”

  “Yep,” Harvey said. “Give my best to anyone who gives a shit.”

  “I’ll do that. You take care.”

  “I’ll take care of me,” Harvey said. “You take care of those kids. I hope you kept current on your combat medic skills.”

  “It’s only about a fifty-minute flight,” Jonathan said. This, down from a nearly ten-hour truck ride under the original plan.

  “You’ve got the ambulances arranged?”

  “They should be waiting for us. Venice said she’d take care of it, and that’s as good as dispatching them ourselves.”

  Harvey offered his hand again. “Then get the hell out of here.”

  Before climbing into the cargo bay, Jonathan stripped himself of all weapons and armor, keeping only his Colt on his hip and his. 38 in his pants pocket. He’d be moving from one patient to another, and the fewer encumbrances he had, the better off he’d be.

  Up front, Boxers turned in his seat to look back at him. He offered a thumbs-up as a question, and Jonathan donned the bulky headset intercom with its long cord. “PC is secure.” Even before the final word had cleared his throat, they were airborne.

  Evan had never had the experience of flying in a helicopter before, but even though he knew that he should be impressed and grateful, he found himself overwhelmed with a feeling of sadness. May-be even a little shame. Surrounded by all of these wounded boys, he couldn’t help but feel responsible for their suffering. No matter how you cut it, he was the reason they’d been shot. When he thought of the ones who’d been killed, he felt his eyes go hot.

  And he still didn’t know why any of it was happening. He didn’t understand why he had been taken in the first place, and he didn’t understand why Mr. Jonathan and the others would risk so much to get him back. Yet they did. And they did it for him. How are you supposed to live with something like that?

  “Does it h
urt much?” a voice yelled over the sound of the engine and wind.

  Evan hadn’t realized that Charlie had repositioned himself at his side. While Evan felt like he’d aged thirty years, Charlie seemed to have grown younger. He seemed meek. Needy, maybe. As he answered, Evan touched his leg without thinking about it. “The splint helps.”

  “You know your friend killed him, right? Victor, I mean?”

  “He killed a lot of people tonight.”

  “But he killed Victor with a knife. I saw it. I saw the look in his eyes while he did it. I think he liked it.”

  Maybe by mere coincidence, a pain shot through Evan’s ruined shin, and he grunted against it. “I’d have liked it, too,” he said through gritted teeth. “Son of a bitch said he was going to break my legs with that bat if I tried to escape. Guess I’m lucky he only got one.”

  They fell quiet, but in the silence, Evan sensed that Charlie had sat with him for a reason. He liked the company, so he just waited for it.

  “What’s gonna happen to me?” Charlie asked after a while.

  “What do you mean?”

  The boy shrugged. “Just that. Where am I going to go when we get wherever we’re going? Is your friend going to take me back to America with you?”

  “His name is Mr. Jonathan. And I’d guess so.”

  “And then what? I don’t know anybody in America. I don’t have a place to live.” Charlie waited for Evan to get it. “I’m going to need a place to live.”

  Finally, Evan understood. “You want to come and live with me at RezHouse? It’s a nice place.” He gave a wry chuckle. “And they come and get you if you get kidnapped.”

  “Would they let me?”

  Evan shrugged, and in doing so somehow made his leg hurt again. “I don’t see why not. If anybody complains, just let Father Dom know. He’ll take care of it for you.”

  “Who’s Father Dom?”

  “He’s a priest. A nice one. He kinda runs the school. You’ll meet him.”

  “Will he like me?”

  “He likes everybody.”

  Charlie thought about that, nodding his head gently. Then he scowled for a moment before dissolving into deep, racking sobs.