The Clinic

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The Clinic Page 9

by Ray Carole


  ‘No Harry. No we stay here, the guys will make it.’

  ‘Make the break now under my fire, that may give us half a chance.’

  Decker knew this three-foot mound would get torn apart shortly when the bad guys rallied some back-up, it would only take a few RPGs and a car or two to come bouncing across the wasteland in a suicide fashion.

  ‘Time’s running out go, NOW.’

  She didn’t even react to the words that he was now bellowing out as an order. Leaving him wasn’t an option. This wasn’t an all-American hero screenplay getting rolled out with the classic cliche ‘you never leave a man behind.’

  This was deeper.

  Decker had honed her operator’s skills to a level that now had strategic value. She was only just beginning what would be a prolific existence in the field of indigenous covert operations.

  He knew that she was more than a mentor and colleague. He was an inspiration, an idol and the only reason that they were both still here, alive.

  Together they held one more secret, known only to them, driven by the animal instinct and the lawless attitude Decker had for life. A secret not even Decker could afford anyone to know.

  As he barked out his demand for her to get a move on and go he was met again with a final resistance. No reply just another burst at the enemy.

  ‘Larnaka, you’ll get us both killed.’

  His ears were blown due to the over-pressures of the last magazine he had discharged, but the screech of rubber tyres and a loud clatter of a car bumper detaching was unmissable. It had to be their back-up team mounting the curb and entering the battlefield.

  The situation was looking up.

  ‘Harry, move, move,’ Dave shouted giving covering fire from the driver’s side of the car.

  Larnaka crawled over to him, knowing that he couldn’t stand on his own. Behind the mound they pulled each other up. Johnny, operator two, was 10 metres to the right of the car with a Minimi machine gun. His multiple bursts of 5-7 rounds of suppressing fire was overwhelming causing any remaining terrorists to hit the deck behind the row of traffic, knowing a burst will spilt them in half. They started to shuffle to the car under Johnny’s cover.

  Slowly making their way back to the car Johnny swung his weapon left pointing it towards Decker and Larnaka.

  Knowing there must be another threat behind them they both kept moving ignoring Johnny’s barrage of fire zip past them.

  A huge explosion sprayed dirt all over the place. Naturally diving to the floor, slightly disoriented, the dust cloud was thick. Knowing it was great cover to get up and move, they forced themselves to make their last dash. Decker squinted, his eyes still blurry with fragments of debris and dust irritating them, he located Dave’s car. A few muzzle flashes caught his gaze, they were close, it had to have been Johnny’s weapon. It was hard to work out with his eyes focused on the open rear door of the car.

  Larnaka pushed Decker into the back seat as he screamed with agony.

  ‘Go, go, let’s go!’ Dave shouted getting back into the car.

  With Decker seated, Larnaka headed around the back of the car as Johnny passed her to jump into the passenger seat.

  Opening the door, she put down one last burst of covering fire. Decker seated pointed his weapon out of the window to do the same. As soon as his got up on aim the weapon was tossed out of his hand courtesy of a few rounds of 7.62 short from a terrorist’s AK-47.

  ‘Jesus Christ, GO, GO,GO,’ Decker shouted as Larnaka slumped in the back seat next to him. The car wheel spun away doing a 180-degree turn, coughing up a dirt cloud obscuring everyone’s vision. Hearing and feeling a few more 7.62 rounds bounce around the car, they headed back to the road with another huge bump.

  Within ten seconds they were nearly 100 metres away, out of danger and members of the innocent population again speeding down the highway.

  Decker was in agony, he gritted his teeth looking at Larnaka. She was white as a sheet and in shock. He couldn’t read her expression. Looking down he saw her clenching her stomach, blood was seeping through her hands.

  ‘MOVE, MOVE guys, she’s hit bad, let’s get straight to the hospital.’

  ‘Roger that,’ Dave replied.

  Clasping his hands on top of hers he knew there was nothing he could physically do but reassure her.

  ‘Stay with me sweetheart, it’s going to be fine it’s going to be okay.’

  Looking back at him, his reassurance went unheard as tears flooded from her eyes and washed down her face.

  ‘Larnaka, look at me baby, keep looking at me, we’re nearly there, hold on.’

  He noticed she had been hit a few times and immediately looked to Johnny in the front passenger seat, remembering the shots ringing out from his weapon through the smog. Tensions running high, it was past speculation. This was no accidental blue on blue in an intense cross fire.

  ‘Johnny, Johnny!’ Decker shouted at him making Dave look across at him too. Johnny remained slumped in the passenger seat.

  ‘Christ, he’s been shot Harry, through the head’, Dave exclaimed.

  Seeing the exit wound at the back of his head and a number of bullet holes in the passenger window, the maths was done.

  ‘Hospital, Dave for Larnaka. Hospital, we’ve no time to stop’. Decker ordered desperately trying to stay focused himself.

  That moment he would never forget.

  In all the hype Decker didn’t notice his own blood-loss from the gunshot wound to his leg. Seeing the bloodstained footwell it hit him too. In shock and as white as she was, he felt himself drifting away as both their hands were clenched tight…

  ‘Larnaka!’ he yelled. Decker awoke shouting, realising that he was back in his tent and not in central Baghdad. Fuck. How many more agonising dreams like that was he going to have? Wiping the sweat off his brow he searched for her photo in the diary. Holding it in his hand his mind raced back to the hospital, waking up to see his Commander standing at the end of his bed.

  That moment he will never forget. No build-up, no explanation, just the cold hard facts. Shaking his head his Commander simply told him ‘She didn’t make it, I’m sorry.’

  Rubbing the photo his eyes were welling up now as indeed they had the moment those words were uttered from his Commander’s mouth.

  He sucked in a long hard breath. Something was still amiss. What was it? Banging his head in frustration reminded him of banging on Andy’s door the evening he was supposed to go on leave from Baghdad. Leave that he had ordered Andy to take after catching him ruffling through his laptop that night before.

  Andy’s issues were clear cut back then. He had a load of stuff going on in his head, like fifty per cent of coalition forces in Iraq fighting a war that couldn’t be won.

  Decker recalled getting back from the Green Zone in Central Baghdad in the evening. When someone was due to go on leave, they would be packed ready and buzzing about the place. Yet the moment he had entered the sleeping accommodation and seen Andy’s door closed he had a heavy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  He even felt it now.

  Andy’s body was slowly twisting in mid air. Suspended by the rope around his neck that was connected to the central beam.

  Looking at Andy in the photo to wipe the image of him hanging, he rolled his finger over Mohammed. His belief change conversation resonated and then Johnny.

  In that last room during the hostage rescue they knew Larnaka would be in it to stay safe. She was the undercover informant that delivered the Intelligence for the rescue mission. Her uncle was the terrorist cell leader and her bravery had already delivered them some big names.

  More than an informant, she had become Decker’s lover too, and their relationship had evolved over a year.

  Why had Johnny tried to shoot her? Decker thought. That moment of madnes
s was looked over, put down to adrenalin, fog of war. But the gun battle at the checkpoint in Baghdad? The one he’d just been dreaming about?

  ‘I know what I saw in the crossfire, it was his Minimi that killed her’, Decker whispered to himself.

  Only two of them remained in the photo that he couldn’t attribute some sort of strange behaviour to.

  Himself and Larnaka, although as far as he knew it was only him and Mo, who were still alive.

  ‘I wonder where you are Mo? Not in this god forsaken place piecing it all together.’

  This last year or so had seen him deteriorate to the point of destruction. He was fine for that year in Baghdad. It was only after he had come home that it had all caught up with him.

  But what about Larnaka? She was fine back then too, just like me. Decker pondered to himself.

  If he really thought something was going on back then, why didn’t he see it sooner? His own demise confusing the issue?

  ‘Me and her, if I could understand what was happening to us, then this will all make sense’.

  Looking at the photo, the only word that came to his head was ‘ THE FEAR.’

  Chapter 9

  Watching the tent walls getting battered was somehow therapeutic to watch he thought. Knowing it was blowing a cool 40-50 mph and hitting lows of minus 30-40 degrees outside he took great pleasure in splaying out on his sleeping bag, warm albeit not overly comfortable.

  Holding his diary above his head as he laid on his back, his read the page title that reminded him of why he wasn’t in any mood to start relaxing.

  ‘THE FEAR’ was written across the opening page.

  ‘FEAR?’ he said out loud. ‘FEAR? Why did I call this thing the FEAR? Why? I know the explanation lies in these words somewhere…’

  He recalled the preceding morning of events that led to the beginning of his FEAR concept, over a year ago.

  It had been a crisp winter morning, sun shining high in the sky as he was walking along the coastal cliffs of Studland Bay, to a local tourist spot called Old Harry Rocks. He wasn’t there to take photos. Overlooking Studland Bay with a bottle of Belvedere vodka in his right hand, and the photo of her in his left, he was poised on the cliff edge like an Olympic board diver setting his position.

  Earth crumbling slightly under the pressure of his signature desert boots, he remembered looking straight ahead like a diver, and not some fuck wit loser looking down for an excuse to not jump.

  This point had been a long time coming, a total demise of man from local hero to local alcoholic ashamed of his predicament. Knowing he had lost his fight because he wasn’t strong enough, completely heartbroken with no will to fight on and survive. No family, no friends and no future the decision was the easiest one to date.

  Looking at her he placed the photo in his top pocket, gave her a tap then took a deep breath. In that brief moment he centred himself, closed his eyes and clenched his toes ready to explode off the cliff’s edge.

  A Union Jack flag was all he could see fluttering away in his mind. The flag then started to calm itself before settling on a coffin. A coffin being carried by six guys he recognised. Imagining how touching that would be seeing this happen, he recognised one person that made him freeze.

  In full dress uniform brandishing a rack of medals the guy was cut deep. Tears filling his eyes like the other five knowing the man they were carrying had lost his life prematurely.

  The back right guy he recognised was him. Distraught but strong, resolute, fresh-faced and still up for the fight regardless of having a close friend’s body on his shoulder.

  His eyes opened and without knowing it the bottle of vodka slipped out of his hand and over the cliff. Wiping his tears away he turned to walk back, hoping that the figure in the distance, some 300 metres away, that was probably flying the buzzing drone across the cliff face, wouldn’t come running over to see if he was okay.

  Snapping back into his wind-battered tent and away from the cool sea breeze above of Old Harry Rocks, Decker started his mumblings again. That was the point, it all started to change. What this invention had started off as that day, and how he now thought of it, were worlds apart.

  ‘Is it a codeword? An operational name? Some kind of trigger mechanism?’ It was these kinds of assumptions running through his mind that scared him on two fronts. One being that his thinking was that of a madman who had lost it again, or front two, if it was true, he was in deep trouble from a new outfit that he had somehow detected or been mixed up in.

  He had written the concept of neural hijackings down long ago, and was now eagerly rushing to locate it. The critical question now was how he could connect the neural hijackings to the FEAR concept he’d invented, without any doubts. And critically associate it to the rest of the team’s demise

  ‘There you are,’ he murmured pinning the page down with his thumb whilst licking the remains of his lunch from his stubble and reading the title, that was dated about a year ago.

  NEURAL HIJACKINGS.

  ‘Neural hijacking is the poison in my head, I’ve researched this and it’s when a thought, phrase or image you didn’t generate just pops up without conscious knowledge. Something or someone is inside my head and blurting this stuff out, showing me torturing images that were designed to humiliate and depress me. I am being hijacked by my own mind as the rhetoric that has been intensifying over the last year is designed to do one thing – destroy me from within. I know I still have some sort of control over my thinking, and it’s now or never Decker, I have to fight back before it’s too late and I don’t recognise what my sane behaviour and thinking look or sound like.’

  He swiftly read on:

  ‘I could also be schizophrenic for Christ’s sake, all the symptoms are alarmingly present. I even researched it and shat myself when the things like false beliefs came up, confused thinking, lack of motivation, auditory hallucinations, the list goes on and I keep ticking them off. What scares me senseless is the last confirmatory observation, abnormal social behaviour and failure to recognise what is real. Umm…?

  Left-side brain logic tells me to see a quack but there was no way I can see a quack with my previous experiences, he would just diagnose me with PTSD to be safe and it wasn’t that. Next thing I would end up on drugs, in an institution forever donning white overalls, playing table tennis and getting belt fed drugs. This freaks me out and I wouldn’t be granted a second opinion anyhow. And second opinion off who? I have ditched all my mates now, I am off the grid completely knowing I am not with it. I am a sober maniac, this is frightening, being a pissed maniac was okay.’

  He remembered with pure clarity what to call ‘them’, even though he wasn’t actually sure whether ‘they’ existed.

  ‘You’re now known as THE FEAR. I don’t know what you are, but you’re not me. You’re simply trespassing through my mind and before long you will pass on by.’

  THE FEAR was his constant critic.Branding them as he did the bullies of his childhood who always put him down years ago. Any horrific ideas, images or feelings he couldn’t justify as his, or things that made him freak out he attributed immediately to them, THE FEAR.

  Years ago all his enemies were physical and could be killed or captured. Now he had a new threat to deal with, a new enemy playing mind games, as opposed to the ones in the past that had lined him up in their telescopic sights. This was an enemy within that he couldn’t see, which needed him to be smarter than ever before to recognise their actions, and even smarter to stay one step ahead. THE FEAR was a relentless adversary, unlike a modern-day army that stopped attacking when they all died or lost the will to fight, these mental intrusions never seemed to let up.Derailing him at every opportunity with negative rhetoric, hell-bent on destroying him.

  ‘THE FEAR is a committee in my mind, around five or six people designed to torment me in every aspect of my life. Each one of
them an expert in whatever area they wanted to destroy. Now it didn’t take me long to get a grip on those amateurs. I began to notice their tactics, they were committing the oldest mistake in the book. Patterns, they set patterns. My techniques to figure out their moves, even pre-empting them became ridiculously complicated. Anyone would have thought I was mental if I’d explained it, yet these techniques were, and still are, ahead of the latest thinking. It was like being the grand chess master of my own mind, countering these mind intrusions. As I silenced their voices and blurred their imagery in my mind, I knew I was ready for the journey back to the elitist past that I craved, that feeling of belonging to a special fraternity, the .5 percent club.’

  Decker remembered feeling like an alcoholic discharging himself from an addiction clinic, when he started turning a corner. He also knew he had to keep busy, keep momentum, knowing in order to rebuild you had to be destroyed first.

  ‘The South Pole and back.’

  Not even he knew where this mad idea came from but he didn’t care and knew he had to do it alone.

  Thinking about that idea and now thinking about Day 30, 500 miles later in minus 45 degrees, starting to shiver slightly. He knew his logic had worked, he was on the cusp of unlocking the key to his downfall.

  ‘Back then my thinking was simple,’ he thought. ‘If I can beat these bastards in my mind whilst in the hardest, coldest, windiest continent on Earth, on my own, then they’ve lost.

  He now knew for certain The FEAR had delivered those hijackings. It was the final theory he was shit-scared of. He clutched the camera, set it up on his flexi-tripod and hit record before he could change his mind.

  His options were limited now. A few blips of power left, a confession to a camera about his conspiracy. If it was true, then he knew this may be the only recording that uncovered it.

  Worst case scenario, would his theory being correct and looking behind him to see a weapon in his face, or returning home and being found dead under suspicious circumstances.

 

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