Yeager's Getaway, page 8
part #3 of Abel Yeager Series
Pettigrew hunkered beside him. He lit a cigarette, keeping the flame cupped behind his hand. The breeze blew at a slant, away from the campsite, so Yeager didn’t say anything. Pettigrew spoke in a barely audible tone. “Well, we found ’em. Not sure who we found, but that’s got to be their base camp.”
Yeager grunted. What the hell do I do now?
THE DOOR SHOVED CHARLIE in the back and forced her to step away as it swung open. Kong the Giant filled the doorframe. No exaggeration. His shoulders brushed the jamb on either side, and the tips of his spiky hair tickled the top of the frame. He ducked and entered the room, which had gone silent at his appearance. A collectively held breath seized all the women simultaneously. Charlie included herself in that suspended moment of dread, but she forced herself to exhale even though she wanted to crawl under a cot and curl up in a ball. The man’s piggish eyes roamed across the room, brushing over Charlie and leaving an oily stain on her nerve endings before moving on.
“You.” Kong pointed at Lu Kim. “Come with me.”
Charlie experienced a tiny flutter of relief that the thug wasn’t interested in her. Shame, followed by anger, broiled her face. She knew that if she looked in a mirror, her neck and cheeks would be cherry red.
Lu Kim shrank back. Betty Pyle stood with her, chin lifted in defiance. The other captives exchanged looks of fear and dread—and outrage, in some cases. It was too sudden, the reality of violence too foreign to many of the hostages. They didn’t know how to react, and no one wanted to take the lead. The crowd dithered.
Charlie swallowed sandpaper. “Leave...” The word came out as a whisper. She sucked in a deep breath and tried again. “Leave her alone!”
Kong barely glanced her way. His backhand whipped at her face so fast it blurred. He hit her with the speed of a whip snapping. Crack!
Charlie was on her butt on the floor, with no memory of falling. Her lips blossomed with acid pain. Her teeth ached. Migraine-strength bolts of purple agony rocketed through her skull. When the lights stopped flaring behind her eyes, Kong was pulling Lu Kim through the door. He held her by the wrist and hauled her along like a reluctant child. Betty held her other arm, dragging back in a one-sided tug of war. Kong barked a threat and jerked the small woman loose from the older lady’s grip.
Betty screamed at the top of her lungs. Others were shouting. The sounds rang hollow in Charlie’s ears.
The door slammed, leaving the hut murky with shadows.
Blood dripped off Charlie’s chin. It left bright red blotches on her yellow blouse.
A hand touched her shoulder. Betty Pyle. “Are you all right, sweetheart?”
“No,” Charlie said, looking up through shimmering vision. It hurt to speak. It hurt worse to think of Lu Kim in that monster’s clutches. “I’m not all right. Not at all.”
YEAGER VOICED HIS THOUGHTS aloud, testing his theories with Pettigrew. “Those middle barracks... the hostages are probably in the middle barracks.” His mind skittered away from the image of Charlie locked in a hot, stinking cabin. “The two guards seemed to be hanging close to the middle one.”
“And at least one is the barracks for the... what the fuck are they? Terrorists? Chickenshit North Koreans invading Hawaii?”
“Let’s go with terrorists for now. I’m thinking there has to be a connection with the attacks in Honolulu.” Yeager grimaced when his stomach grumbled. “What do we know about them so far? At least five, probably more, individuals. How many could they house in one of those barracks?”
“Eight, maybe twelve. More if they stack the bunks.”
“Worse case, forty-eight. Probably less, but we can’t count on that until we know. Armaments include AKs and sidearms. Men professionally trained, with good discipline.”
“Asian for sure. Not Vietnamese, and that’s a fact. I know me some Cong, and these ain’t them.”
“At least one guy was Polynesian,” Yeager said. “Probably native Hawaiian.”
“Strange mix.”
“Objectives?”
“Unknown.”
“And why take hostages from the Breezes? It would have been easier to shoot them all, like they did Tom.” Yeager ignored the clutch in his chest. He had to compartmentalize—put Charlie in a mental box, lock it, and bury the box down deep. Otherwise, he’d be incapable of acting—damn near incapable of thinking.
“We don’t have enough intel,” Pettigrew said.
“And we got shit for resources. No food, no weapons, no comms.”
“And lookie here—I’m damn near outta butts.”
“We’re fucked,” Yeager said.
“Roger that.”
For a time, Yeager did nothing. The rock scuffed his back when he shifted, and the sourness of his own sweat wafted up to him. Night birds he’d never heard before called to one another. Smells he couldn’t identify drifted on the breeze. It was as dark as only a place far away from modern electrical service could get.
He felt alone in a dream universe that he didn’t understand and didn’t like. The last time he’d felt this way, he’d been a boot in Buttfuckistan, wide-eyed and near peeing himself at every owl hoot and goat fart.
Charlie had used a good word the other day when they were touring that damn volcano on the big island, Mount Waka-waka or whatever Hawaiian vowel-job name it was. “Surreal,” she’d called it. Well, this was for damn sure a big can of surreal, opened up and poured over his head. Surreal as shit.
Yeager’s head snapped up.
“Did you hear that?” Pettigrew asked. “Sounded like—”
“Screams. Coming from the camp.”
OPEN SEA, LOCATION Unknown
Saturday, 8 May
2147 Hours
For longer than she believed possible, Jan Osterchuk had stroked toward Molokai. For every yard forward, the current carried her a foot sideways. She rested after every hundred strokes, floating on her back and closing her eyes against the intense sun. The rest periods carried her even farther away from the island, but it couldn’t be helped. She needed to catch her breath.
The salt water was colder than she’d expected, and it drained her strength faster than the exercise of swimming, which was bad enough. Spitting seawater and blinking her burning eyes, Jan fought through bouts of shivering.
At last sighting, the island had been nothing but a blob on the far horizon.
As the sun sank into the west and darkness swallowed her, Jan admitted to herself for the first time that she wasn’t going to make it. She was tired. So very tired. And she could no longer fight the current or tell which direction to swim.
Jan rolled over on her back and gazed at the blanket of stars covering the night sky. She felt at peace. God was there, waiting for her. The beauty of the night sky provided more than ample evidence of that, if one knew how to see with the heart instead of the eyes. The vastness of space and the tiny mote of her own existence convinced her she had nothing to fear from death. Who else but God could have created such wonder?
But Danny. Poor Danny. What will he do without me?
Jan wept at the pain he would experience at losing her. The man could barely find his shoes and socks without help. How could cope without her being there to keep him safe and well? Their youngest daughter, Cindy, lived close by. She would check on her dad from time to time. Hopefully, it would be enough.
“Goodbye, Danny,” she said to the stars. “I love you with all my heart.”
AFTER KONG HAD LEFT, their captors recorded videos of each of the captives. A scrawny boy barely out of his teens had used a compact digital camera with a light grip attached to record each person giving his or her name and place of residence. Two stoic guards with automatic rifles flanked him throughout the process. He needs the protection, Charlie thought. Even I could knock this kid out flat with a solid right cross.
That was two hours earlier, and three hours since the brutally ugly man had taken Lu Kim. Charlie had no illusions about what the man intended. Her lips flattened into a grim line, and goose bumps prickled her skin.
I’ve seen that movie up close and personal. Don’t want a sequel.
The long shadows had swallowed the room as night fell. Two dim LED lanterns provided enough light to navigate the interior of the barrack. Charlie leaned her back against the closed door and surveyed the room.
Sixteen cots. Seventeen people. One five-gallon pee bucket. No paper.
“Fricking awesome,” she muttered.
A memory popped into her head: the dinner table back at their home in Texas, deep in the Hill Country. She had been just starting to show her baby bump. Abel was still having difficulty with his left hand, having survived his latest venture into Mexico by the skin of his teeth and with the sacrifice of a few good men. Charlie cut his meat, listening as Abel told David a story about being cut off in Afghanistan and how he’d made it out alive.
“What would you do,” Abel had asked David, “if you were walking in the woods out back of the house here, and it came up a storm? A big mother—a big whopper of a storm. Gobs of rain. Lightning. Winds like to tear your hair off.”
David frowned. “I’d run for home?”
“It’s dark as hehhh—heck. You can’t see nothin’. Anything. You can’t find your way home, and you get lost.”
“Umm. Find shelter?”
“That’s good. Yep. But what do you do first?”
David’s eyebrows drew together. Charlie smiled, liking how Abel was letting David find the answer on his own. “I don’t know. I’d have to think about it.”
“That’s right,” Abel told the boy. “You think first. Take a minute, no matter how much noise and light and scary sh—stuff is happening around you. Stop and think it through. Make a plan. Work on your plan. If things change, change your plan.”
The discussion had continued throughout the meal, Abel coaching David on how to survive in adverse circumstances. Her boy—their boy now, as Abel had adopted her son—had soaked up the lessons, coming up with the right answer more often than not.
Now it was her turn. She had to think, plan, survive—just as she’d done in that cooler in the convenience store when the maniac, Skeeter, had come for her. There she’d created a plan of pure desperation. She had dug down deep and tapped into a fiery core of strength she didn’t know she possessed. Armed with nothing but a box cutter, Charlotte had fought the dragon. And won.
“Now,” she said to herself, “if only I had a box cutter.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
An exposed root reminded Yeager that running flat out through the jungle on a moonless night was a stupid idea. He scrambled upright and proceeded at a more cautious pace, ducking and weaving around barely seen obstacles. Pettigrew caught up and stayed close behind.
They crossed the stream again and dropped belly down to worm the last few feet to the same observation point they had previously occupied, and they saw... nothing.
Whatever had caused the commotion had passed, and the camp was quiet again. The two guards remained as before, one circling, one stationary. The generator kicked on and burbled in the background.
Yeager put his lips next to Pettigrew’s ear. “What the hell happened?”
He got a shrug in response.
Using hand signals, Yeager directed the old vet to scout the perimeter in a clockwise rotation while Yeager moved counterclockwise.
“Use the generator to mask your movement,” he murmured.
Pettigrew shot him a look that said, Teach your grandma to suck eggs. Yeager patted the older man’s shoulder and oozed away to his right, moving like a stop-motion film of the world’s slowest lizard. Stones roughed up his belly, and vegetation scratched his cheeks. Insects skittered across his hands and wriggled under his shirt. Damp earth soaked him from collar to cuff. Yeager ignored all of it.
Moving silently through the jungle did not mean never making a sound. It meant making only small, natural noises easily dismissed by the human ear. Creatures moved at night—wild pigs, deer, rodents. Leaves rustled with the breeze. Twigs and acorns fell from trees and plopped on the ground. Keeping movement small, slow, and random allowed a stalker to blend in with the sounds of the night.
In Afghanistan, Yeager had been a master stalker. In the woods, at night, with or without NVGs, he feasted on sentries and observation teams. Many a Taliban had gone to hell with a surprised look and a hole under one ear from six inches of double-edged Gerber steel. The piss stink of their last minutes on earth haunted some of Yeager’s deep-night, sweaty wake-up moments, filling his nostrils with a ghost scent that he’d never quite forgotten.
The generator cut off, and Yeager froze in place. He had traveled less than twenty yards from his starting point, which had been about the five o’clock position relative to the camp. The building with the light over the door loomed closest, and Yeager detected the glow of interior lights—very dim ones—through the ventilation slots near the eaves. Either some low-light lanterns or electronic screens.
The urge to move, to do something, ate at Yeager’s nerves. He forced himself to hold in place. The guards were no longer visible from his position, but abrupt movement might bring them running, alert and ready. Half-formed plans to kill the roving guard—bash his head in with a rock, maybe—and take the man’s weapons flitted around the edges of Yeager’s thoughts. In order for such a plan to work, he needed the guards bored, complacent, and tired of staring at nothing, rather than agitated by strange noises.
And then what? He would have a single automatic rifle against a platoon-strength cadre of trained soldiers. Rambo lived on the movie screen, not in real life. Aimed fire from the bad guys would not miss the way it did for the action heroes, and he had no sequels for which his survival was required. A sustained firefight would get him dead quicker than telling Martina, his ex-wife, that yes, those slacks did make her ass look fat.
The generator kicked back on, and Yeager allowed his joints to unlock. He resumed his slow crawl, looking for anything, hoping for a miracle.
DANNY OSTERCHUK AND Gomer Pyle hoped to make it back to the overlook before night fell, and they further hoped the four-wheeled vehicles that had brought them up from the embarkation point would still be there.
They failed in the first objective, so there was no way to judge the second. Night descended like a drawn curtain, plunging them into a groping, gasping forward progress measured in feet per minute rather than miles per hour.
Osterchuk blamed their tardiness on a combination of extreme caution and a need to stay off the main trail that forced them into a cross-country hike through some really shitty terrain. More than once, they’d had to backtrack out of a dead-end path to find another route forward. Add to that the fact they were both old as Moses’s Little League coach and could only move as fast as their geriatric muscles allowed.
Not that I ever moved fast to begin with, you betcha.
When true night fell and they began flailing through unseen vines and tripping over invisible obstacles, he and Pyle made a command decision to sit the fuck down and wait for some light. They hunkered together at the base of an enormous tree and shared the rations they’d packed for the hike. Bottled water and energy bars. Yum.
Osterchuk kept his griping to himself. Having a conversation with Gomer was out of the question. For one thing, he’d have to damn near shout, thereby revealing their position to any lurking terrorists, and for another, the responses from Pyle would often be unrelated to the subject under discussion. The man heard about half of what you said, and half of that he heard wrong. No, best to stay quiet. Try to get some rest. So sayeth Osterchuk.
Only a few thin, high clouds whispered across a night sky so brilliant with a wash of stars that Osterchuk felt the impact of his insignificant existence on the galactic stage deep in his belly. That was saying something, since one thing Osterchuk could do was hide a Ford Explorer—with room left over for a Jeep Wrangler—inside his belly. Only the most profound revelation could register deep inside his gut.
He grunted a short laugh at his own expense, and Gomer looked a question at him.
“Nothing,” Osterchuk said with a shake of his head. “Pay me no mind.”
The day’s exercise claimed its toll. A deep ache stole into his muscles and throbbed with every heartbeat. Tiredness pulled at his eyes. Osterchuk let his head flop forward and felt sleep lurking just around the corner. One thing he could do was sleep at the drop of a hat. That he could do. Oh my, yes—
NEAR PHU BAI, SOUTH Vietnam
24 December, 1967
Danny’s Story
On 31 January, 1968, the North Vietnamese launched a surprise attack on several targets in the South, including Hue City, located six miles from the coast and sixty miles from the DMZ. The NVA called this undertaking General Offensive-General Uprising, but Western news outlets would soon refer to it as the Tet Offensive.
The Battle for Hue City featured some of the most brutal house-to-house combat faced by the US Marine Corps since... well, ever. The Marines drove the NVA and Vietcong from the city. The result: more than six hundred Marines killed, somewhere between four and ten times that number of enemy dead, half the city reduced to rubble and, despite the ultimate victory, a public relations disaster in the US.
In the days leading up to Tet, the North Vietnamese struck bases south of Hue in coordinated attacks on the Marines stationed around Phu Bai and Phu Loc and all along Route 1. Those strikes might have been meant to weaken support for Hue from the south prior to assaulting the city, or they might have been the random mayhem of war throughout the province.
