Hostage Zero (42 page)
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
.
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 was 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.
C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-TWO
HAPTER
F
ORTY-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?
him.
How are you supposed to live with something like that?
“Does it hurt 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.
It had been a long time since Jonathan had played medic, but he proved to be pretty adept at it. It helped that Harvey had gotten the kids stabilized on the ground before they took off, but for the duration of the flight, vitals all stayed stable. He worried a lot about the kid with the chest wound. Twice during the flight Jonathan had had to lift the occlusive dressing to allow his lung to reinflate. The good news was that even though the boy remained unconscious, his vitals all stayed good, and his pupils remained equal and reactive to light.
Like any flight in any aircraft, this one had certain rhythms associated with it, such that Jonathan knew without being told that they had begun their approach to the little-used general aviation airport on the distant outskirts of Santa Marta. Using Jonathan’s money, Jammin’ Josie had arranged for Gulfstream transport back to the States for the tail end of the mission, using a plane that belonged to a former Nicaraguan Contra who’d done very well for himself. As it turned out, flying
out
of Colombia was no problem at all as far as the government was concerned.
out
of Colombia was no problem at all as far as the government was concerned.
“Hey, Boss,” Boxers said over the intercom. “I think you want to take a look at this.”
Jonathan stepped around one of the wounded kids and over Evan and his friend to rest his hand on the back of the pilot’s seat. Boxers pointed to the airport runway up ahead, where a cluster of ambulances stood at the ready, awaiting their arrival. “What can I say?” Jonathan quipped. “Venice’s true to her promises.”
“I’m not talking about the meat wagons,” Boxers grumped. “Look at the line of soldiers.”
Several dozen had clustered around one of the jets on the tarmac, and Jonathan could only guess that it would prove to be the tail number they were looking for. “Well, shit,” Jonathan cursed into the microphone.
“What do you want me to do?”
Jonathan ran the options and couldn’t come up with any. Clearly, they’d been made. Jonathan had known all along that it was a possibility given Josie’s betrayal, but he’d been hoping for a break. If they aborted this landing and headed for another airport, they’d just prolong the inevitable, and they certainly couldn’t fly all the way to the States in a helicopter.
“Go ahead and land,” Jonathan stated.
“What’s Plan B?”
“I don’t have one,” Jonathan admitted.
“Maybe Panama will take us.”
“Look at your gas gauge,” Jonathan said, pointing. “Even if they’d take us, we don’t have enough fuel to get there.”
“Well, we can’t fight that many.”
“True enough.”
“And I ain’t rotting in some jungle jail cell.”
“One crisis at a time, Box,” Jonathan cautioned. “Put us on the ground and I’ll give diplomacy a shot.”
“I’ve still got about a hundred rounds of five-five-six diplomacy there on the floor,” Boxers quipped, eyeing his cache of weapons on the seat next to his.
“There are more lives than ours in play, Big Guy. Just get us on the ground.”
Boxers sighed loudly enough to be heard over the ambient noise. He shook his head in disgust and squared up the aircraft for a landing. “This shit grows old, Digger,” he said. “This shit grows very, very old.”
Jonathan pulled his .45 from its holster and placed it on top of the other weapons. Depending on the mood of the soldiers, he’d get to say a lot more without a gun on his hip than he would with one.
He turned to his passengers. In Spanish, he instructed them to stay where they were after they landed, to wait for the ambulance people to come and get them. Then he told Evan in English, but with the addition, “You don’t leave with anybody but Big Guy or me, okay?”
“You mean die on the street before getting into the car?” Evan asked.
The familiarity of the phrase startled him, and it must have shown in his face.
“You told us that at an assembly,” Evan clarified.
That earned him a wink. “I remember that. One way or the other, we’re getting you home today.”
Jonathan positioned himself in the doorway to the cargo bay as they made their final flare to land, standing there like a human
X
, his hands and feet braced in the opening. As the wheels touched and Boxers killed the engine, the soldiers moved forward, even as the rotors were still turning.
X
, his hands and feet braced in the opening. As the wheels touched and Boxers killed the engine, the soldiers moved forward, even as the rotors were still turning.
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