by Naomi Niles
By now, we couldn’t have gone back to sleep even if we had wanted to. I climbed out of bed and was dressed within three minutes, though my eyes burned and my bones ached and every moment was agony. Being woken up when you didn’t want to be should be classified as a form of torture under the Geneva Conventions.
Bernie and Carson and the other guys were all standing waiting for me at the front of the room. But Jake had gotten out of bed later than the rest of us and only after Chuck splashed water on him. He was still putting on his armor when Chuck grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. “It’s time to go, man,” he said.
“Will you chill for just a second?” Jake shouted. “I’m not dressed yet!”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Chuck, “we’re leaving now.”
Chuck turned and stormed out the door, motioning for the rest of us to follow him. Jake, realizing that we really were going to leave without him, swore loudly and raced out after us.
While the rest of us had been dressing, Floyd Axton had already started the helicopter. It stood waiting for us at the end of the helipad, its blades whirring ominously in the pitch darkness.
It was so dark, in fact, and the forest was so dense that even with my night vision goggles I could barely see more than two feet in front of me. As the helicopter circled over the outskirts of Bafwasende, we parachuted down without difficulty, landing in a clearing beside a pile of dry timber. In the distance, I could hear the echo of gunfire and occasional shrieks that might have been animal or human. Thick limbs rose and stretched over us, obscuring moonlight.
The smell of wood smoke and gas fires came drifting toward us on the end. The militants must set fire to the schoolhouse on their way out. That would have had the effect of driving any remaining students out of hiding, at which point they’d have been gunned down or herded up with the rest. The girls’ only chance of escape was to slip away under cover of darkness as the militants led them toward their forest compound.
While I stood about twenty paces away relieving myself into a thick shrub, Chuck and the other guys hurriedly scoped out the area.
“Why are we here?” asked Carson, brandishing his marksman rifle. “Why not go where they’re going instead of chasing ‘em through the woods?”
“Because we don’t know where their base is located,” said Chuck. “If we knew, that would make our job a hell of a lot easier. But this raid they just conducted might work to our advantage if we’re able to trail them back to their hiding place. At that point, it’s just a matter of rooting them out while rescuing the hostages.”
“Oh, is that all?” Carson shot back. “Here I was under the impression this was gonna be difficult.”
“If you want to leave, be my guest,” said Chuck, motioning to the helicopter that continued to circle overhead. “Floyd will escort you back to base.”
But before Carson could respond, the forest on all sides exploded in a hail of gunfire.
Before I’d even had time to register what was happening, I was lying flat on the ground, on my face. The noise drove all thought out of my mind, leaving only those base emotions: fear, surprise, a certain animal impulsiveness. A part of me wondered whether I had died, if maybe this was what death felt like: a burning in the lungs, an acrid smell in the nostrils, darkness suddenly illuminated by a blaze in the treetops.
“They’re all over,” I heard Chuck shouting. “Looks like we’ve been ambushed.”
“There are, what, seven of us?” said Jake, his face glistening with sweat. “And God knows how many of them. Both sides have got weapons, but they have a tactical advantage. We need to get out.”
“I estimate we’ve got four to five minutes till contact, at best,” said Chuck as he reached for his two-way radio. “I’m gonna call Floyd and tell him to pull us out of here.”
Within moments, the helicopter descended out of the night sky like a colossal bird, the rope ladder swaying precariously from an open door in the back. Carson was the first to clamber aboard, followed by Bernie and the rest of us, with Jake taking the rear.
But just as he placed his right foot on the ladder and began to make his ascent, there was a second explosion of noise about a hundred paces away and out of the shrub where I had relieved myself not three minutes before emerged nine men carrying assault rifles, screaming excitedly in a foreign tongue.
Jake wavered perilously at the bottom of the ladder, transfixed by the approaching horde as by a car crash on the side of the road.
“Hurry up, get in!” shouted Carson. “We can’t leave until you’re inside!”
But Jake hesitated, a lost look in his eyes. With an exasperated air, Chuck pushed past us and extended both hands. Jake grabbed onto them and allowed himself to be pulled up the ladder.
I had heard stories of guys in the army who sensed danger approaching a split second before it rained from the skies, who had some kind of weird instinct that allowed them to save the lives of their buddies. You could argue that we had already been ambushed, and I knew that, so it didn’t require a psychic to tell us we were in trouble. But somehow I knew in my bones what was about to happen, could see the bullets ripping into Jake’s flesh. I screamed, and in the same instant, Jake groaned in agony as the militants unloaded their cartridges into him.
Chuck pulled him inside, and we took off. Jake placed a hand on his torso, and when he lifted it, his palm was wet and glistening with blood.
“We need to get him to the OR immediately,” Chuck said. “Otherwise he’s not going to make it through the night.”
Within a few minutes, we had returned to the base, where Dr. Owen and a team of nurses were already waiting for him. The rest of us waited outside in the hallway as they performed surgery, pacing restlessly, not daring to look at each other. Carson sat down on an overturned bucket and smoked a cigarette while Chuck spoke to Sergeant Armstrong privately in his office.
I wanted to lie down. My head ached, and I felt spent both physically and emotionally. As much as I complained about the agony of our morning exercises, this was the part of my job that I hated the most: the uncertainty of not knowing whether a friend was going to live or die, the way an ordered and routine existence could be upended in a moment.
“You know what? If y’all aren’t gonna say it, I will,” said Carson. He threw down his cigarette on the stone floor and stamped it out. “Chuck is the reason that man is in there dying. This wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t have been for him.”
“Why, because he called us out of bed?” I replied. “We had a job to do, and we did it, or we tried to.”
“No, it’s got nothing to do with that,” Carson said. “He dragged us out before we were ready. He—he wouldn’t even let Jake get his goddamn armor on. If Jake had been wearing his body plate he wouldn’t be bleeding out!”
“You’re forgetting that it was Chuck who rescued him,” said Bernie, speaking up for the first time. “Jake froze on his way up the ladder; he had that deer-in-the-headlights stare. He would have died if Chuck hadn’t dragged him up.”
“Stay out of it, Bernie,” muttered Carson, giving him a nasty glare.
“No, but Bernie has a point—” I began, but stopped abruptly when I heard a noise of footsteps at the end of the hallway. A second later, a slender figure came into view: the fair but unwelcome form of Kelli Pope.
“A point about what?” she asked, looking around at each of us uneasily.
We glanced nervously at each other, none of us wanting to be the one to explain what was going on.
“I happened to get here a bit early this morning,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you to be out of bed yet. And why are you all grouped around the medical office?”
Carson shot her a filthy look, the sort of look he usually reserved for militants and liberals. “Nothing that concerns you, princess,” he said, and, pushing past her, he stalked out of the hallway.
Chapter Ten Kelli
I didn’t like the feeling of being shut out by the guys. Ever since my
arrival at the base, it felt like they were closing ranks trying to keep me from learning anything of value. In some cases, as on the night when Jake was shot, there was no good reason for this. There wasn’t some vital strategic interest that was forcing them to withhold information; they were doing it purely out of spite.
If it wasn’t for Sergeant Armstrong, the whole trip might have been wasted. He was the one who took me aside on the morning of the ambush and explained what had happened. Of course I knew about the militant raid on the boarding school, having already heard about it from Evan. The rest I could pretty much piece together myself: the SEALs had undertaken a moonlit excursion during which they presumably parachuted into enemy territory.
“It was a brave thing they did,” I said to Sergeant Armstrong. It was early morning, and the only thing keeping me on my feet was adrenaline and spite. “I don’t understand why they would be reluctant to talk about it.”
“I think I know why,” said Armstrong with a vexed smile. “They’re embarrassed by the fact that Jake was wounded in the line of fire. They think it could have easily been prevented, and they hold themselves partially responsible. But there’s more to it than that, I feel.”
“How do you figure?”
Armstrong sat down at his desk, removed a pipe from one of the top drawers, and lit it. He waved it in the air as he spoke without once putting it to his mouth. “Because I think from the moment you arrived on base, they had you pegged as the enemy. Some of the guys, they see the world in terms of ‘us’ vs. ‘them,’ and your fact-finding missions just reinforce their sense of being oppressed by the all-powerful media.”
“Right, so how do I combat that?” I hated the feeling of shunned and held in suspicion no matter what I did, simply because of who I was. It was like a permanent knot in the pit of my stomach.
Armstrong shrugged, as if it wasn’t his problem, which I suppose in a sense it wasn’t. “You’ve just gotta show them that you’re a person first, before anything else. You’ve got to get them thinking you’re one of them. Until then, I’m afraid they’re always going to be reluctant to open up to you.”
I kept coming back to this conversation again and again during the next two weeks as I quietly went about my job and the SEALs continued to keep me at arm’s length. I knew I shouldn’t take it personally, but it was hard to ignore the feeling that they were punishing me just for doing what I had come here to do.
I talked it over with Azzadine as we ate breakfast together in the lobby of the hotel on my last Thursday in Kinshasha. We were eating a traditional Congolese meal of goat stew and cassava leaves with smoked fish, eaten with a sweet and slightly tangy sauce whose name I did not know.
“I know at first you didn’t wish to come on this trip,” he said, reaching for his mug of tea. “But now that you’ve settled in, I would think you would not want to leave.”
“I’m actually looking forward to being home,” I said with a trace of bitterness in my voice. “At least back in the office, I’m only ignored by two or three people instead of the whole team.”
Azzedine peered at me quizzically for a moment, as though attempting to extract my innermost thoughts. “Do you feel that you’ve been mistreated?” he asked.
“I do.” I scooped another spoonful of rice from the side bowl onto my plate, smothering it in the tangy sauce. “I won’t be upset to see the back of the Congo. You and the sergeant have treated me well, and I’ll miss both of you. But I think the rest of them will be as relieved to see me go as I am to be gone.”
Azzedine steepled his fingers and rested his chin on them thoughtfully. “And what reason do they have to be upset with you?” he asked.
“No reason that I can think of. Because I’m a reporter and I insist on doing my job, they all hate me.” There was no use trying to keep the resentment out of my voice; it had crept in despite my best efforts.
“But if you’ve done your job,” said Azzedine slowly, “isn’t that something to be proud of?”
“I suppose it is.”
“Then you have nothing to be upset about. You are free.”
Azzedine seemed to think that settled the issue, though I didn’t think it was so simple. In my head, I had always known I shouldn’t be troubled by what others thought, but in my heart, I took their rejection as proof that I wasn’t doing my job right. In school, I had valued the good opinions of my teachers better than perfect scores on tests; being subjected to their disapproval, regardless of whether I had earned it, was worse for me than failing a class.
We arrived at the base that day at around mid-morning. The air was cool, and the summer sun shone in a golden haze through the tops of the trees. Though the rest of the SEALs had been awarded an off-day, Sergeant Armstrong’s platoon continued to toil away with extreme focus. Carson groaned in exasperation as he sat up for what must have been the hundredth time; it couldn’t have helped that most of his buddies were out playing basketball on the tarmac. I wondered what kind of intense determination it must take to keep doing that day after day and to force yourself to go on when your whole body was crying out for relief.
Sergeant Armstrong led me to the medical ward, where I found Jake sitting up in bed looking surprisingly cheerful. He grinned at me boyishly as I came in.
Feeling encouraged by this reception, I pulled up a swivel chair and sat down beside him. “You feeling any better?” I asked.
Outside the window the basketball game was getting heated. For a moment, his gaze shifted to the window, and when he turned back to me he looked surprised, as though he hadn’t seen me come into the room. “I’m feeling loads better, actually,” he replied. “Dr. Owen said I should be able to leave within the next week.”
“It must be a relief to have had a few weeks off.”
I regretted saying it almost instantly; it couldn’t have been much of a relief to be fired upon in the dead of night and to have doctors picking metal out of your body, but Jake only smiled. “I feel lucky in some ways. While the rest of the team is out there languishing in the intense heat, I’ve been reading Our Mutual Friend . It’s the one Dickens novel I’ve never finished.”
“Can’t say I’ve ever read it, though that is really impressive.” Remembering what I had come in here to ask him, I said quietly, “Listen, I know there’s been some discussion that one of the other guys might be to blame for your injury.”
Jake’s smile froze instantly; the effect was more unsettling than if he had been glowering the entire time. “Who said that?” he demanded.
“Just something I heard through—”
But Jake cut me off. “Nothing and nobody is responsible for what happened to me except the bastard who fired the gun. Chuck and Zack, they saved my life. So you can go back to your website and let them know we’re the good guys.”
He gave a small snort of contempt, and I could see there was nothing more to be gained from the conversation. I thanked him for taking the time to talk to me. But when he didn’t respond, I turned and left.
Before I left for the hotel that night, I stopped by Sergeant Armstrong’s office to ask him a favor.
I found him seated at his desk rubbing his eyes wearily, a pile of papers in front of him. He had lit at least three cigarettes, then snuffed them out into an adjoining ash-tray, apparently without even having placed them to his lips. A tall bottle of sherry stood at the corner of the desk, unopened.
“Hey, Kelli,” he said absently as I came in. “What do you need?”
“There’s something I’ve been thinking about,” I said, pulling up the only other chair in the room and sitting down across from him. “In the three weeks I’ve been here, the only guys who have treated me with any decency have been you and Zack.”
Armstrong looked up at me, his brows knitted with concern. “Do you need me to talk to them?” he asked. “Have they been bothering you?”
“No, it’s nothing like that,” I replied. “I’ve felt really safe here apart from that one incident. But everyone seems relucta
nt to talk to me, and I can’t fault them for that. That’s why I was wondering if I could take Zack out for the day tomorrow—with your permission, of course. I still don’t think I have enough material to write a full report, and he could help me. You and him are the only guys who have been willing to give me the time of day.”
Armstrong frowned pensively, as if weighing the repercussions of losing one of his men for the whole day. “How much time do you need?”
“I was thinking we could meet over breakfast at my hotel. It might be good to get away from the base camp for a while. I think he would be able to relax and maybe open up more.”
It wasn’t the greatest sales pitch, and I fully expected him to say no, or to promise me he would “think about it” until I was already safely gone. So I was surprised when he rose from the desk and said, “Yeah, take all the time you need.”
“Great!” I exclaimed, sounding maybe a little too excited. “Do you want me to tell him?”
He shook his head. “Nah, I’ll let him know. I need to talk to him before he goes, anyway.”
I turned to leave the office, feeling elated, but as I reached the door he called my name. “Hey, Pope.”
I froze in the doorway, fearing he had already changed his mind. “What’s up?”
Armstrong smiled. “Don’t let the other guys get you down too much. I know you’re doing good work, and you know you’re doing good work. That’s all that really matters.”
Radiant with encouragement, I returned to the hotel at twilight. For the rest of the night, I checked my phone every few minutes, fully expecting Armstrong to email and tell me Zack had cancelled, that he wasn’t interested in talking to me. In a way that would have been a relief—Zack had left a deeper impression on me than any of the other guys in the platoon, largely because he had been the only one who treated me like a human being, and for the first time in my career, I found myself dreading an interview because I was too shy.