Primary Valor

by Jack Mars

  The soldiers were close.

  Ed stepped inside the plane and leaned against the wall. He looked out into the darkness at the approaching lights.

  “I’m going to lay down some covering fire,” he said, very quietly. The gentle, almost sing-songy way he said it suggested he was speaking to the girl, not to Luke.

  “And when I start shooting, you run straight out of here and across those woods, away from me. Get as far away from me as you can. Just run straight ahead, as straight as you can go. Don’t worry about me. I will catch up.”

  Ed was already pointing the gun downhill.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” Charlotte said. Her voice was barely above a whisper.

  “I’m going to run, too,” Luke said. “My ankle is bad.”

  Ed nodded. “On the count of three. Okay? One… Two…”

  He crouched low in the ragged hole, making himself a smaller target.

  “Three.”

  * * *

  They were running through the jungle, staying low, moving fast.

  Charlotte was holding hands with Luke Stone, who was running faster than her, pulling her along. He was grunting as he ran. Her own breaths were loud gasps. Her throat was raw from breathing so hard.

  She slipped in the mud, fell, and slid along as he dragged her. She found her feet, one step, two step, and then was up and running again, right alongside him.

  The big black man was behind them somewhere. Ed. His name was Ed. She couldn’t turn to look. But she heard bursts of gunfire and flashes of light back there. The gunfire was very loud, angry blats, like farts. Her shoulders hunched every time it happened.

  “Big gun! Get down! Get down!”

  Luke pulled her to the ground. He dove and she fell after him, sliding through mud. Machine gun fire came from off to their left. The shots went flying just over their heads. She thought she could feel the wind from them. She didn’t know if that was real.

  Luke was crawling like a worm now. He dragged her behind him. She started crawling like he was, her face and belly pressed to the wet ground. Luke started moving faster and faster. Now she was crawling faster than she ever had in her life, faster than she ever thought was possible.

  Her breaths came like: “Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh.”

  It was raining, and they were crawling through the rain. Above their heads, the wind was blowing, and the trees were swaying.

  BOOOM!

  A huge explosion erupted behind them. The noise was so loud, it was impossible. She screamed and covered her ears. Light turned night into day, for a long second, like a giant flashbulb popping. Images of trees, like people reaching to the skies, were imprinted on her eyes.

  “Wait… Wait…”

  BOOOM!

  Another explosion.

  Somewhere, men were screaming now.

  Then Ed was there, crawling alongside them in the dark.

  “That’ll keep ’em for a minute,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Luke yanked her to her feet. They were up and running again. She was stumbling along behind him now, gasping for breath, barreling through the darkness, the lights from the explosions still in her eyes.

  Luke was limping as he ran. Every step he took, his body lurched to the left. He was running like a monster from a movie, or from a nightmare.

  Ed was just ahead of them. He seemed to be screaming into his chest.

  “Do you have my location? Beacon is on! Repeat: Infrared beacon is on. Approaching clear-cut, south and west of the crash site. Bringing out survivors. Need immediate extraction. Do you have my location?”

  A voice crackled.

  “Uh… roger that, Ed. We see you. Your location is very hot at this moment. They are right behind you.”

  “I’m in my location! I know how hot it is. Just get us out of here.”

  “Roger. Coming in. First pass is suppressing fire. Second pass is extraction. Cluster your people in a bunch around that infrared signal, and eat dirt for about sixty seconds. We’ll try to miss you.”

  “Roger that,” Ed said.

  He leapt over the top of a ridge of dirt and disappeared on the other side. Charlotte and Luke were five steps behind him. They scrambled over the same ridge. It was a steep embankment. They fell and slid down to the bottom.

  Ed was there, on his side.

  “Wait here,” he said. “Stay down.”

  Charlotte looked up. She could hear the sound of a helicopter approaching. A dark shadow was in the sky, moving fast, coming toward them. On the other side of the ridge, guns started firing. A missile went up, like a Fourth of July firework. Then another one went up.

  A machine gun on board the helicopter started firing. The shots lit up the night, printing on her eyes again. They flew like Roman candles above her head, dozens of them.

  The sound was metallic. DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH.

  The helicopter whizzed by, right over them.

  “Up!” Ed said. “Up! Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Luke lay in the ditch.

  The girl was trying to pull him to his feet. They were a team now, he supposed. But getting to this point had hurt his ankle. A lot.

  “You go. You can run faster than me. Stay with Ed.”

  Her eyes were wide and horrified. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m coming. Don’t worry. I’m not going to stay here.”

  He shooed her away.

  “Run!”

  She gave him a last look, then was gone in the night. He worked his way to his feet, and bounced a bit on his good leg. He took a deep breath. Then he was running, in a crouch. Each step was pain. He kept going. If he made it, he was going to pay for this.

  He reached the wide open clear cut and started across. This was the most dangerous part. He was a sitting duck out here.

  It was hard to see his feet. He stumbled over a cut log. He lost his balance and fell. He scraped himself against cut and ruined wood.

  “Unh-ah!”

  He lay there for a few seconds, breathing deeply. The rain poured down on him.

  He could hear the chopper. It had circled around and was coming in again, a dark shadow against the night.

  Behind him, the shooting started again. Maybe he should just crawl the rest of the way. The chopper was coming down, dead ahead. Then he was up and running for it. He didn’t remember climbing to his feet. He ran and ran, groaning with every step.

  “Ah, ah, ah, ah…”

  Gun shots fired from somewhere.

  Please don’t let them hit me!

  The chopper was down. No, it was three or four feet above the ground. The ground was uneven, soaked, littered with junk. There was nowhere to land. The bay door was open. Bullets whined all around.

  THUNK. THUNK. THUNK.

  They were hitting the skin of the chopper.

  He screamed.

  He slid inside the door head first, like stealing home base.

  The girl was here, and Ed was here, both on the floor. Ed was strapping the girl to the metal slats.

  “Go!” Ed screamed. “All in! Go!”

  The chopper lifted off.

  Gunfire ripped into the side of it. A rocket flew, whistled, glanced off the metal.

  BANG!

  Then they were up and out, banking hard, zooming.

  Luke lay there breathing, just breathing.

  The gunfire was increasingly far away, nothing up here but rain and wind. Luke gripped the floor. The chopper was still banked. To his left, the dark jungle passed, well below them now.

  After a long moment, the chopper leveled out.

  “Welcome aboard,” a female voice said. Rachel.

  Ed lurched to his feet and pulled the bay door closed. He slumped in one of the seats and looked down at Luke, where he was still sprawled on the floor. It had been quite a night so far. Luke thought he might spend the rest of it right where he was.

  “Hot,” Ed said. “That was hot.”

  Luke nodded. He cou
ld hardly speak. “Hot.”

  Ed shook his head. “I said you were gonna want me with you. Right? When you left me behind on the plane, I said that?”

  Luke didn’t answer.

  Ed turned to the girl now. Her name was Charlotte. That was her name. Maybe she would give an objective ruling on the situation.

  “I told him, but did he listen?”

  She looked at Luke, lying across from her. Luke looked back at her. She tried to suppress a sheepish smile, but couldn’t. For a split second, her smile brought him a surge of images, memories, feelings. The images passed so fast he couldn’t catch them all. High school football games. Backyard barbecues. A summer day on a lake somewhere.

  In just that instant, she was a normal kid, an all-American girl. After everything that had happened, would she ever be a normal kid again?

  “I doubt it,” she said.

  CHAPTER FORTY ONE

  March 30, 2006

  3:05 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  Dark Waters International, LLC

  Boca Raton, Florida

  Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

  They called the man Max.

  Max Impact. Max Resistance. Max Pressure.

  It wasn’t his name, or anything close to his name. Although he was American born and bred, his real last name was Zivojinovic, a Yugoslavian brick wall of a name that most Americans had trouble biting off and chewing on.

  Nobody cared what his real name was. He didn’t even care.

  He was a brute, larger than the vast majority of men. And he was smarter, too. At least he thought so. His sense was that the urge people had to put him in charge of things was not because of his size, but because of his brains. He was a plumber, in a sense, and they had called him here because a pipe had sprung a leak.

  “Here” was a nondescript brick building in a suburban office park, the headquarters of the private security contractor Dark Waters International. The logo on the building simply read DWI. It could be an insurance company.

  He was sitting in an undecorated conference room, several people around the table with him. He recognized a few of them. One was a retired four-star general, down here in Florida most of the year because he liked to play golf. Another was an active duty major assigned to Central Command in Tampa. Tampa was four hours away by car. How the man had arrived here at something like a moment’s notice was outside of Max’s responsibility. Everyone in the room was dressed in civilian clothes.

  There was a pot of lukewarm coffee on a narrow table along one wall. There were also sugar packets and a container of that fake powdered creamer that everyone hated, but people continued to insist on buying. There was a pile of napkins. There was a small coffee spill on the table, which no one had bothered to deploy the napkins against.

  The coffee was swill. Max had already drunk two cups of it since he got here.

  There was a black rectangular speakerphone device at the center of the conference table. Everyone stared at it. Max couldn’t tell if they were staring in disbelief, or if they were staring at something anyone could have seen coming a mile away.

  A voice squawked out of the box. “They left the country,” it said.

  Max had no trouble placing the voice. It was a man named Darwin King, a man who had become so well placed over the years that he had decided he was allowed to do anything he pleased.

  He was a necessary evil, or maybe he was a friend, or maybe you owed him a favor, or maybe he had something on you. Whichever it was, and that depended on the individual, everyone had turned a blind eye to what he was doing. Worse than a blind eye, people had covered for him. They’d been doing it for so long, that what had once been damage control had long ago become policy.

  “And who are they again?” a youthful middle-aged man at the table said. He was wearing a light blue dress shirt with the letters DWI over the left breast. He was awake, he was alert. He was clean shaven. His hair was perfect.

  Max recognized the man, but he didn’t care to search his own mental databanks to get the man’s name or his position. He could very well be the CEO of Dark Waters International. One of these guys definitely was.

  “I don’t know who they are,” Darwin said. “That isn’t clear. Assassins, CIA agents, I have no idea. But they attacked my property here. They killed four of my personal bodyguards, as well as several Honduran military personnel who were assigned by that government to protect me. They kidnapped two of my guests, and also my pilot. They stole my airplane and crashed it into the jungle.”

  “And you think they’re American operatives?”

  “I KNOW they’re American operatives,” Darwin said.

  Max nearly laughed. Darwin sounded drunk. He sounded overwrought and dramatic. He should be in a play on Broadway.

  “I met one of them. He spoke English, like an American. The survivors of the plane crash met at least one other operative, were picked up by a helicopter, and went to a secret American airbase in the Rio Platano reserve, near the border with Nicaragua.”

  The major from CentCom raised a hand as if to say STOP. “Let’s be clear,” he said. “There is no American airbase in the area you describe.”

  “Whatever it is, whatever you want to call it, they went there. And from there they went to Jamaica. They left Jamaica in a private jet registered to an American company called Apex Digital Management. We know this is a front company for an American intelligence agency, but we don’t know which one. They are flying on a heading that will bring them to the Washington, DC, area later tonight.”

  There was a long pause.

  “There’s a girl on the plane,” Darwin said.

  Max shook his head and smiled. Now they had arrived at the meat of the issue.

  “She was reported missing about a week ago from North Carolina. I believe there’s been a police investigation. She was with me. The lobbyist Miles Richmond was her grandfather.”

  Max eyed the speakerphone closely. They had gotten him out of bed for this. Miles Richmond was a name familiar to him. Last Max knew, Miles was an old duffer who was also alive and well.

  “You say he was her grandfather?”

  The retired general looked over at Max. “Miles Richmond was murdered earlier tonight.”

  Max smiled. “I guess someone’s been having themselves a day, huh?”

  “There’s a lot here,” Darwin said. “If I go down on this, they’re going to want things from me. Not everyone in that room may know the scope of what’s going on. But suffice to say there’s a lot at stake, a lot that is jeopardized by this situation.”

  “A lot that you’ve jeopardized,” Max said.

  “A lot that I’ve made possible,” the Darwin King voice squawked.

  Max knew all about it. It was Max’s job to know about things. There was a rebel group operating in the Darien Gap of Panama. The Darien was a lawless jungle, out of reach of the Panamanian government. For years, the rebels had allowed drug mules from Colombia to pass through their territory. Recently, for reasons not entirely clear, they had stopped doing that, and had refused to negotiate further.

  So now they’d been labeled a terrorist organization. They had to go. A force of elite American soldiers from Joint Special Operations Command were going to go in there and clear them out. People in this very room stood to make money from this, a lot of money. Darwin had negotiated the terms of the payments with the cartels, and Colombian officials, and Panamanian officials. Drugs were big business. There was plenty of money for everyone.

  And of course, it was important that the flow from South America, up through Central America into Mexico, and finally to the United States, remain impeded. That was practically a natural law. We had alphabet soup agencies whose mandate was to stop the flow. Meanwhile, we had other alphabet soup agencies who quietly guaranteed its safe passage. It was fun and games. No one knew what anyone else was doing.

  No. That wasn’t quite true. Some did. Max did.

  He looked around the room at the faces gathered
there. Max was done speaking to Darwin. Darwin was now beside the point. He was the child who had done the bad thing, and now it was up to the adults to fix it.

  “What are we doing to mitigate?” Max said.

  A man nodded. He was a sandy-haired, youngish guy in an open-throated dress shirt. He was unshaven, a bit bleary-eyed. Maybe they had gotten him out of bed, too.

  “We’re tracking the plane. We’ve got Navy fighters on patrol that are shadowing it. We haven’t made contact yet, and they’re ignoring our presence, but we assume they know we’re there.”

  “Do we have any grounds to intercept the flight?” Max said.

  “Plenty. They left an unregistered airfield in Honduras. They didn’t submit a flight plan to the Honduran authorities. They changed planes in Jamaica at another unregistered airfield. They are not communicating with United States air traffic control. They appear to intend to unlawfully enter American airspace, and proceed to an unknown destination.”

  “Drug plane,” Max said.

  The man shrugged. “Could be. Drugs or other contraband. Human trafficking, in this case.”

  “Can we divert it?” Max said.

  “Of course. What choice do they have? They can go where we instruct, or they can get shot down. The Navy pilots don’t know any better. They’re just doing their jobs. There’s a mystery plane in the air that left Central America.”

  “Then I think that’s what we do,” Max said. He looked at the retired general. The general had a flattop haircut and hard eyes. He clearly kept himself fit. He looked irritated. This thing had probably messed with his 7 a.m. tee off.

  “Divert it,” the general said. “Somewhere we reliably control.”

  “Then what?” Max said.

  “Max, you run the show,” the general said. “We trust you implicitly. Take the girl back. Capture the agents, whoever they are. If they surrender without a fight, lock them up somewhere until they agree none of this ever happened. We’ll bring some people in to talk to them. They’ll understand. National security. That sort of thing. If we have to smooth out some rough waters later, we will. Could be an agency budgetary issue. Could be a couple of citations for bravery are in order. I don’t know. Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s fine.”