Hostage Zero

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Because the enemy was likely to expect them to emerge from the far side of the building, Jonathan and Boxers instead emerged from the same spot where they’d entered. They cut left when they were clear of the building, through the searing alleyway between the barracks fire and the factory fire, shooting the same fields as before.

When it felt like they’d passed their enemy’s left flank, they buttonhooked to the right and began killing in earnest. Any silhouette with a gun was a legitimate target.

They moved together, their bodies nearly touching, firing and reloading without pause, zigging and zagging at random to frustrate any effort to stop them. This wasn’t about covering fire anymore. This was all about accuracy on the move, firing two bullets at a time, each pair finding their target and killing it. Where an enemy shooter presented a frontal profile, Jonathan went for a double-tap, a bullet in the heart followed by a bullet in the head. If it was a sidelong silhouette, he aimed for the ear. If they were running away, the choice target lay between the shoulder blades.

Where they pointed their weapons, people died. Jonathan made no attempt to count, but he knew for a fact that he dispatched five in the first ten or fifteen seconds. The enemy returned fire, but it was all wild and random. As far as Jonathan knew, not a single round came within five feet of him. By comparison, not a single round that left his muzzle missed its intended target.

Twenty seconds into the assault, the enemy was at a dead run, their instinct to survive obliterating their desire to win. All but a few ran in straight lines, among the surest ways to meet one’s maker during a firefight.

Jonathan and Boxers never slowed. Where bodies clogged the path, they vaulted over them. Under other circumstances, with an enemy who was better trained or more operationally aware, this kind of full-on assault would have opened the door for a counter-flanking maneuver, where bad guys would hold back and wait for the attackers to pass and then assault from the rear or the side. As they charged forward, Jonathan continued to check his six o’clock, but the maneuver never materialized.

They charged northward along the eastern edge of the compound, and as they passed what was left of the gasoline shed-Building Alpha-Jonathan saw asses and elbows retreating into Building Bravo, which, judging from the construction design was a mirror image of the kids’ barracks, but minus the locked doors and wired windows.

Jonathan and Boxers slid to a halt against the near wall of the building, well below the window, but easily vulnerable to anyone who thought to shoot a rifle through the thin siding.

The shooting had stopped, but Jonathan knew that the silence couldn’t last.

“I say we blow the building,” Boxers whispered.

Jonathan agreed. It was the only-

He glanced out into the center of the compound. “Oh, shit,” he breathed.

Evan thought this was like living the scariest movie he’d ever seen-only the explosions were real and the bleeding bodies were real. All of it was real. There wasn’t a single moment of the past few days that made any sense to him, but this topped the charts. People were dying, for God’s sake. Things were blowing up.

And Mr. Jonathan! Jesus. He’d always seemed like a tough guy and all-friendly, but in a hard kind of way-but never in a million years did he imagine the man killing people to rescue him. He felt like his head had been stuffed with glue. There was too much going on for him to understand any of it.

“Evan, what’s happening?” Charlie said way too loudly, unused to the sudden silence. “Who are these people?”

“The guy out there is Mr. Jonathan. He’s-”

“Quiet,” snapped the man who’d joined them back here. Evan had never seen him before, but he seemed nervous. He had the helmet and the gloves and the gun of a soldier, but he seemed scared. That was the thing about Mr. Jonathan: he didn’t seem even a little bit scared. Evan didn’t know if he liked that or not.

“Who are you?” Evan asked. He changed his voice to something north of a whisper but south of a shout so that he could still be heard.

“I’m a friend. My name is Harvey, and I need you both to stay quiet.” As an afterthought, he held out a gloved hand. “You’re Evan Guinn. Nice to meet you.”

Evan cocked his head, confused, but he shook the man’s hand. “Nice to meet you, too.”

“I’m Charlie,” the other boy said, thrusting his hand between the two of them.

“He’s my new friend,” Evan explained. “He’s been here a long time. They killed his parents.”

Harvey shook Charlie’s hand, too, but something changed in his face as he did. He looked sad. “Well, I hope we can find you a nice home,” he said.

“What are we doing?” Evan asked.

“We’re getting you out of here.”

“But how?”

Harvey gave him a funny look, as if he didn’t know the answer to the most obvious question in the world. “Watch and learn,” he said.

“Are we hiding?” Charlie asked.

“Damn straight we’re hiding,” Harvey answered. “Their job is to eliminate the threat to you. My job is to make sure you stay safe while they do it.” As if to punctuate his point, he readjusted the grip on his machine gun. “To get to you, they’ve got to come through me.”

Harvey heard the tough-guy words coming from his mouth, and he nearly cringed. He hadn’t felt this terrified since The Sandbox. Nor had he felt this alive. Warfare was the God-awfulest experience life had to offer to anyone; but out here, in the middle of this firefight, he recalled the addiction he’d felt back in the day. Bathed in mortal terror, the world became supernaturally vivid; the colors brighter, the fear sharper, the jubilance greater. It wasn’t until after it was over, when the enemy dead and friendly dead all looked human again, that the remorse and doubts sneaked in to steal your soul. It wasn’t until it was all over that the thrill transformed to horror.

At this moment, the reality of his life back home-the tent, the perpetual state of fear, and his general sense of uselessness-felt light-years away. They felt as if they belonged to someone else. Here he was in the middle of a by-God war, and he had something worth fighting for. Something worth dying for. He remembered his drill sergeant from a million years ago in Basic Training telling him that the only life worth living is the one worth dying to protect.

He’d understood the words intellectually back then, but now they resonated in his heart. Maybe he needed to lose everything once before he understood the need to protect those things that were important to him. These two kids were his responsibility. If they died out here, it would be his fault, but if they lived to see tomorrow, that would be his fault, too. His victory.

God help anyone who threatened that.

Out in the compound, one of the boys ran in a tight, panicked circle, clearly not knowing what to do. He stopped at the body of a soldier who’d fallen dead just thirty feet away. Jonathan remembered shooting him.

He didn’t know where the other children had gone, but this one was very much in harm’s way. Jonathan yelled, “ Tu! Nino! A cubierto! ” You! Boy! Take cover.

The boy didn’t respond. Instead, he wandered closer to the corpse, where he bent at the waist to look more closely at the face. Then he stomped on it with his heel. Once, twice, then a third time.

Jonathan spat a curse under his breath. “ Parar! ” he yelled. “ No hagas eso! ” Stop! Don’t do that! But the kid wouldn’t listen. “Shit. Cover me, Box.”

“What the hell are you-”

Jonathan was already gone. The kid kept kicking the corpse. No cadre of soldiers would stand by and watch-

Gunfire erupted from Buildings Bravo and Delta, ripping the night and the ground. And the boy. He dropped where he stood.

“Motherfucker!” Jonathan yelled, and he brought his M4 to bear, spraying the windows and walls just inches from Boxers, who in turn unleashed withering fire on Building Delta on the north end.

Return fire ceased as the enemy dove for whatever cover they could find.

After reloading, Jonathan knelt and scooped the boy’s limp body into the crook of his left arm while he emptied another mag with his right as he ran for cover.

Back in the shadow of the building, he skidded to a halt and let the boy slide to the ground. Most of his throat was gone, and two holes had been punched through his chest. In the light of the fires, the boy’s fixed pupils looked as lifeless as glass.

“He’s gone, Dig,” Boxers said. “Nothing you can do.”

He couldn’t have been more than eleven years old. That’s a blink. What had the kid been thinking? What would have driven him to stand in the open like that and assault the body?

“Dig, we gotta go. He’s dead. Fuckers killed him.”

Jonathan felt terrible thoughts encroaching on his consciousness, and he pushed them away. This was warfare, for God’s sake, where the entire world consisted of current facts and future objectives. The past becomes irrelevant the instant it passes. You can’t worry about the dead at the same time that you’re planning to protect the living. But he was so young.

“Focus, Dig,” Boxers said.

“Fine,” Jonathan said. “None of these assholes gets out alive. Not one.”

Boxers nodded. “Works for me.”

Jonathan reloaded his carbine, then let it fall against its sling as he lifted a fragmentation grenade from his vest. “Keep their heads down in Building Delta,” he said. “I’m gonna frag these fuckers in Bravo and then roll ’em up.”

“You’re making me hard,” Boxers grinned. He slid a fresh magazine into his rifle. “Say the word.”

Jonathan settled himself with a deep breath. “The word.”

Standing to his full height, but using the corner of the barracks for cover, Boxers aimed at the farthest building and raked the front windows with three round bursts.

Jonathan used the cover to push out in a crouch and moved to the left, down the front of Bravo, keeping his left shoulder pressed against the wall. Behind him, Boxers threw out an amazing volume of fire, while ahead of him, in Building Bravo, nobody seemed to know what to do.

Jonathan nestled the spoon of the grenade in the web between his thumb and forefinger and pulled the pin. He duck-walked three feet out from the wall, barely in sight of anyone with the courage to peek out, and let the spoon fly. At this range, he didn’t want to give the enemy time to throw it back, so he let it cook off for two seconds before he threw it through the open window.

“Frag away,” he whispered into his radio, cuing Boxers that an explosion was coming. Jonathan dropped to the ground and two seconds later was rewarded with the crisp bang! that meant victory. The screams of the wounded followed instantly. He moved down two windows and repeated the procedure. “Frag away.”

After the second detonation, it was time to finish the job up close and personal. “I’m going in,” he said into his radio.

“Rog.”

Jonathan snapped his night vision back into place and reached for the Mossberg again, stretching it against its bungee sling. All of this in one continuous motion as he charged up the three steps to the stoop and kicked open the door.

Outside, Boxers reduced his rate of fire by two-thirds. It made no sense to waste the scores of rounds in suppressing fire when the man he was covering was inside a building and invisible.

The instant he crossed the threshold, Jonathan pivoted right to clear the area behind the door and damn near yelled when he came face-to-face with a soldier. The man just stood there, disoriented and bleeding. The man held an M16 in his hands, but it seemed foreign to him. Such was the disorientation that commonly followed a blast in close quarters.

The temptation to let him live gave way to the reality that once recovered, the dazed soldier would be lethal again. Jonathan killed him with a blast from the Mossberg at point-blank range, shredding his chest with nine. 32-caliber pellets.

Then he turned left and took his time strolling down what was left of the center aisle between the ranks of bunks. When he kicked at an arm that was protruding from under a bunk, intending to check if its owner was alive or dead, the arm itself skittered freely across the floor.

Ahead and to the right, a man writhed in agony, his midsection wet and black in the night vision. Jonathan assessed the wound as lethal and had just decided to let him be when the man raised a bloody pistol. Jonathan shot him.

Fifteen seconds after he’d entered the room, Jonathan pressed his mike button. “Bravo’s clear. I’m coming out.”

“Holy shit, they’re running!” Boxers’ voice announced in his ear. He started shooting again.

Jonathan darted to the open door and dropped to his knee, switching again to his M4. He watched as a stream of men poured out of Building Delta. They stumbled and bumbled out the door and down the stairs, some of them dropped by Boxers’ bullets, but most just tangling their feet in their panic to get out. They streamed into the woods on the far side of the compound.

Jonathan pressed his mike button.

“Heads up, Harvey. They’re coming right at you.”

Harvey’s stomach flipped. “Fuck.”

“What?” Evan asked, keenly dialed into the change of emotion.

Harvey hadn’t been aware that he’d spoken aloud. He pressed a hand to the boy’s shoulder. “Get down,” he said. “Lie flat. Bad guys are coming. No matter what happens, you stay put until one of us comes for you.”

Both boys showed alarm. “Who?”

“Your old bosses. Now get down.” Harvey snapped his NVGs back over his eyes, and right away saw them scattering into the jungle. At a glance, he saw seven or eight of them, but they weren’t interested in seeing him. They were interested in getting the hell out of there.

Should he shoot or let them go? It was a tough call. His mission was to get Evan Guinn home alive and healthy. By opening fire, he’d give away his position and invite return fire that would endanger the boy. But by letting them get away, he let them live to attack again.

“ Los banditos estan aqui!” shouted a voice from above and behind. The bandits are here! Harvey whirled on the sound, but when no one was there, he realized that it was one of the kids who were still inside the barracks they hadn’t unlocked. Somehow they knew, and then the one voice was joined by others. “ Los banditos estan aqui!”

They started to chant it. And it worked. The fleeing soldiers turned. The closest one raised his weapon to fire.

Harvey’s MP5 chattered out a three-round burst and his target dropped; whether dead, wounded, or just scared, he couldn’t tell. The important part was that he didn’t shoot back.

But a whole bunch of others did. The jungle lit up with muzzle flashes, the staccato pounding of a dozen automatic weapons combining to form the sound of tearing fabric. A fierce and deadly stream of bullets shredded the wall behind them and the foliage surrounding them. Harvey pushed the boys deeper under the barracks hut, while above them the boy who had brought the fire this way screamed in terror and pain as the enemy’s poorly aimed fire passed through the plank walls as if they were made of cardboard.

Harvey knew he couldn’t stay here. If he returned fire from this spot, the response would bring a deadly fusillade that would as likely kill Evan as him.

After all this-after all the blood and the suffering-the one unforgiveable sin would be for Evan to get hurt.

“Don’t move,” he hissed to the boy. “No matter what, don’t move.”

“Where are you-”

Harvey didn’t stick around for the rest. Staying pressed low to the wet ground, he crawled the remaining length of the barracks and emerged into the darkness on the north side. Brilliant muzzle flashes marked the location of the attackers. Where Harvey saw a flash, he fired two three-round bursts at it. The flash suppressor on his own weapon kept him invisible to all but those who would have happened to be looking directly at him when he fired. With all the noise of the continuing battle, his were just more shots fired amid the cacophony.

He damn near jumped out of his underwear as a hand landed on his shoulder. When he spun to confront the danger, another hand blocked the swing of his weapon. “We’re the good guys,” Jonathan said, and then he and Boxers added their firepower to repel the new attack. Within fifteen seconds, it was all over.

As their ears recovered, they could once again hear the subtle sounds of the night. Like the moaning and whimpering of wounded children.

And the sound of an approaching helicopter. Jonathan and Boxers exchanged looks.

“You didn’t call for cavalry, did you?” Boxers asked.

Jonathan kicked at the dirt. “Shit. That’s just what we need. An aerial assault.”

“We need that chopper,” Harvey said. “These wounded kids. We can’t carry them down to safety.” He shot a hard look to Boxers. “And don’t even think of saying that they’re not our responsibility. We did this.”

“If you’ve got an idea, I’m listening.”

Harvey sighed and shook his head as he undid the Velcro fastener on his vest and lifted his helmet off his head. “Oh, I’ve got an idea,” he said as he pulled his vest off. “It sucks to be me, but I’ve got an idea.”

To make it work, though, he had to move quickly.

Even from a mile out, the scale of the destruction was ten times worse than the worst Mitch Ponder could have imagined. Bodies lay strewn everywhere, as if dropped from an aircraft. Everything was on fire-even the ground itself in some places-and what wasn’t burning had instead been chewed mercilessly by gunfire. An airstrike could not have produced more thorough destruction.

“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 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.