Hold Fast (20 page)

It doesn’t matter. I will try again tonight as I had planned originally. Yes. In a few hours, after dark, when all is quiet, and Jennie comes to bring me water and whatever food she’s managed to squirrel away. It doesn’t matter.

I repeat it, crying out the mantra in my mind, until I fall asleep in my corner, resting up for my next try. It seems like I’ve barely closed my eyes when pebbles against the wooden walls of the box jolt me back to awareness. It’s dark already, but they haven’t turned on the floodlights yet and only the silvery light of an almost full moon streams through the cracks in the roof and walls.

“Courtney! Courtney!” Jennie whispers. I peer through the cracks and smile at her. “I’m sorry, Courtney,” she whines. “I couldn’t get you any food tonight.”

“It’s okay, baby.” I tell her. “Don’t worry. I’m going to be just fine.” She sounds so forlorn, and it hurts not to be able to take her into my arms and bring a smile back on her face.

“It’s because of Nathan. He was watching me all the time.” The poor thing is almost in tears.

Yes, that makes sense. Nathan is anything but an idiot. He knows Jennie and I are close, and he’s seen enough people stagger out of the penance box to know what a
truly
starving and dehydrated woman should look like. If someone has been feeding me, she’d be the obvious suspect. And that means she’s in danger. He’s probably going to try and prove it, try to score points with his father.

“Be careful of him, Jennie!” I warn her. “He’s dangerous. If he catches you helping me, you could get hurt!”

“Oh, I know
that
,” she says, in a tone of disgust. I laugh softly, almost able to see her eyes rolling at the stupidity of grownups who warn children about something so obvious, but she’s so sweet and trusting that I felt like I needed to warn her.
So
sweet and trusting that I hesitate to ask her for one last favor, but I have to. She’s my last hope.

“Would you do something for me, Jen?” I ask.

“Of course, Courtney, anything!”

“Okay, do you think you could bring me back something I could use to open the latch?” It kills me to think of Jennie putting herself in danger to sneak back up here again, but I can’t think of any other way to get that latch open. “Something, I dunno- something flat, thin, something I can use to lift the bar from in here?”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” she says. “The lights are off right now. Brother Jonathan couldn’t get the generator started tonight, but he’s fixing it. I don’t know if I could come back later.”

“Jennie, please,” I beg. “There’s nothing in here I can use to lift the latch, and unless you help me I’ll never get away.”

“That’s just stupid,” she snorts in a very grown-up whisper. “Don’t be stupid.”

“What? What do you mean?” I’m utterly in shock. Stupid? You have a better idea, kid?

“Why would I go and find something for you to try to open it yourself?” she asks, as if I should be able to figure this out all on my own. “I’m right
here,
Courtney, I could just open it for you.”

Out of the mouths of babes comes wisdom. I’ve wasted so much time. Five. Whole. Days.

Jennie easily slips the latch on the door in an instant and crouches back down in the darkness against the wall.

“Anything else?” she asks.

“No, that’s it. That’s everything I could ever ask for,” I tell her, my eyes filling with tears. “I want you to go now, go back to the dorm and hide. Make sure you don’t stay alone.”

“You’re going to try to run away again?” she asks. “I’m going to miss you, Courtney.”

“Yes, honey,” I tell her. “And when I do, I don’t want anyone suspecting that you helped me. I don’t want you to get in trouble.” She shrugs as if being punished for helping me wouldn’t matter at all.

“So I’ll never see you again?” she whispers. I know there are tears rolling from her eyes. I can’t hold back my own, either.

“I’m going to miss you so much, Jennie.” My voice is choked with emotion. This little child has shown me more kindness and generosity than my mother ever did. “Go, honey. Go and don’t look back.” Watching her leave through the cracks of the shack, I feel my heart crumble a little more. I thought I was done feeling after Sean’s death. I was wrong. There’s still enough left of me to feel fresh pain.

I give my tiny savior several minutes to get clear before I open the door and begin hobbling away, crouched as low as I can. Even with the floodlights off, there are still no shadows in which I can hide in the open area around the penance box. My dress glows almost ghost-like in the light of the full moon, but no voices call out in alarm. Once I get to the cover of the small buildings, I can steal a dark shawl or something off a clothesline, then make my way into the woods. Halfway there.

I only make it a few more steps, though, before I hear the rumble of the big generator coming to life, and the floodlights begin to glow, their intensity slowly increasing as the generator spins up. I’m so close, though, only a few more steps until I’m out of the ring of light.

Sighing in relief, I slump against the wall of the barn, out of the glow of the lights, and start looking around for something, anything, to cover my light-colored clothes, and almost immediately spot a clothesline swinging nearby, still heavy with laundry. Oh, Sister Ruth! You lazy, lazy creature. You were so busy preparing for my wedding, you didn’t get your laundry done in time. Thank you so much!

The shawl is wet, but it’s long enough to cover me. It’ll work very nicely.

As I reach for the first clothespin, I hear shouts of alarm starting.

“The door’s open!” Brother Lucas yells. “Find her!” The door! Oh, I’m stupid. Did I forget to latch close the door shut? Did the latch just not catch? Did I leave it ajar? No matter. Just the clothespins left, then I can head for the woods. Please, please, please, pleeeeease, let this work.

And for the second time in one day, God ignores me.

The clothesline shifts ever so slightly, but it’s fastened into the thin sheet metal sides of the hovel in which Sister Ruth lives with her husband. The slight change in the pressure of the line causes the wall to flex, popping like the vacuum seal on a jar lid. Just as the wall is bigger, so is the sound, and alert ears are already looking for me in the silent darkness.

Wrapped in the wet shawl, I make for the darkness outside the compound, but all my efforts are in vain: after only a moment I hear gravel crunching behind me, and when I turn around, Nathan stands there, Brother Lucas behind him, looming like a terrible shadow.

“I told you she’d try again!” Nathan sneers, but this tone of voice doesn’t reach his eyes. He’s curious. He’s thinking. Does he wonder why I still try to run, after everything they’ve done to me? Does he try to understand? Will he ever?

“You were right,” the older man says. “I told your brother he should not have given such a generous wedding present, but… it’s not my place to interfere between a man and his- almost wife.” Lucas shakes his head sadly, but the moonlight shows his eyes are eager. “Your lessons tomorrow,” he continues, “will simply be far,
far
more intense.”

* * *

T
he T-shirt Courtney wore
, a relic of my years with SEAL Team THREE is still a blue-and-gold heap on the small table, and deep rusty-brown stains on the floor bear mute witness to the fighting on Monday.
Has it been so long already?

Memories of the wonder and beauty of Monday morning, turned to pain and fury by evening, fill my mind. On the one hand, a few hours from now I’m going to need every scrap of that rage as fuel, but on the other? Sitting here staring at the bed I shared with her and getting maudlin isn’t going to get me in the right frame of mind, so I go back outside to wait.

Bill went home to Portland as soon as my Blazer was off the jack, with brand new tires mounted on the spare set of wheels from the garage. The camp is dark, quiet. I’m alone. But not for long: the heavy rumble of a big diesel engine thundering up Camp Road from the south is attenuated by distance and dense forest, but I recognize the sound of Angela’s crew cab Ford. Moments later, the big vehicle sits next to mine, the last dying summer twilight glinting dully off its deep red paint.

Time to see what sort of miracles Max Anghelescu has been able to gin up for me.

“Thanks for coming up, Angie,” I grunt under my friend’s bear hug but still manage to reach up and tweak his bare chin. “What happened to the beard? Last time I saw you, it was magnificent! Glorious! How’s anyone gonna know you’re an
operator
without the tactical beard?”

“Last time you saw me was in Trashcanistan when I was loading your ass into the meat wagon. We’re not on deployment anymore, and they’re being assholes about grooming standards. So, yeah.” He runs his fingers glumly through the imaginary mass of hair from his memory.

“How’s school going? You still working on that?”

“School.
Fuck
school, man,” he rumbles angrily. “I’ve got exams on Monday, and I should be studying about ancient near-eastern trade routes, the socio-sexual-political implications of priestesses in the Hittite empire, and how conflict between the Hittites and the Egyptians has had lasting implications for the Middle East thirty-
fucking
-five centuries later.” Angie’s eyes have glazed over, and he shakes his head as if to clear it. “Gotta have an advanced degree to get promoted, though, and if I want to make master chief, it would help to have a PhD,” he says with a hint of glum whining. “I’m supposed to be a hootin,’ lootin,’ parachutin,’ door-kickin’
killin’
machine, not some ivory tower academic.”

“
Doctor
Angie, two-fisted history major!” It’s funny, though, in a way. SpecOps troops are selected for high intelligence, in addition to physical prowess, and tend to be very well educated men. And these days? The only path to promotion
is
education. You don’t make chief petty officer without a degree, and to get senior chief or master chief, you’d better have a masters or a PhD. “I’ve only got a few credits to go for my bachelor’s. Maybe I’ll get around to finishing that up, just in time to never use it again.”

“Yeah, yeah. Indiana Jones, but without the stupid whip. But seriously, Sean. You okay?” He stares straight into my eyes, looking for pupil dilation and tracking. “You had enough down time to be ready for this?”

“Enough?” I shrug. “Depends on your point of view, I suppose. Not enough according to the medical profession. Possibly too much, depending on what I find up north. And speaking of finding things?"

“Yeah. I managed to liberate a few things for you, temporarily. Deniably.” Angie pauses to open the back door of the truck. “And speaking of deniability? I have no interest in spending the rest of my life in Leavenworth, okay? So, I’m not going in with you.
I’m
here to make sure this gear makes it back home safe and sound to DEVGRU, where it goes back into its invisible hidey-hole.”

“Roger that. I hadn’t really expected anyone to go into the compound with me anyway.”

“You’re not listening, tadpole,” Angie says, opening the back door of his truck.

“Tadpole?” I shake my head sadly. “Angela, what’d I ever do to you to make you call me a thing like that? I’m a full-fledged
Frogman
, not some fucking new-meat
tadpole
.”

“Frogmen are smart, and retirement’s done somethin’ to your brain.” Anghelescu’s voice is muffled as he digs around inside the cab. “Or maybe it’s just the head injury. Ah! There we go!” He hands me a gray metal case. “You’re not
listening
,” he says. “Tadpole.”

The case is heavy, and I’ve handled one just like it a thousand times. I don’t need to look at the data plaque to know what it contains. My heart races as I open it to find the finest night vision instrument known to man: the GPNVG-18, the four-lensed, vaguely insectoid headgear that let American SpecOps troops utterly fucking
rule
the nighttime battlefield.

“I’m here to make sure this gear gets back to base without anyone having the opportunity to look at serial numbers and question how they wound up in the middle of the woods in East Bumfuck, Maine. If those NVGs are attached to your head, then anything I do to bring
them
back is probably going to be of some minor and purely incidental assistance to
you
as well.”

“Overwatch, then?” Having the Eye of Sauron looking down on me is almost better than having boots on the ground behind me. I can go on a sneak-and-peek, and anything out there that’s not Courtney is an enemy.

“Yeah. I’ve got a suppressed Mark Twelve. I’ll scratch your back if you need it, but, Jesus fuckin’ Christ,
please
try not to need it, okay? When we’re done up there, I want to put all this shit back into the truck and melt away into the darkness like I was never there.”

“Right. Hey, Angie?” I say, opening the box running an adoring finger over the night vision goggles in their foam-padded case with as nearly as much pleasure and anticipation as I’d touched Courtney’s body.
Fuck, yeah!
“I ever tell you how much I love you?”

“Hey, now, I told you—we’re not on deployment.” The chief laughs. “I’ve got the armor you wanted. The heavy shit. It’ll stop an AK round, but these backwoods fucks probably have deer rifles. You take one of those straight on, it’ll blow in through the front plate and out the back plate, and take a lot of your insides with it.”

“No kidding?” My voice is earnest, serious. Certainly no hint of sarcasm. “All those years in the Teams, how’d I miss learning about that?”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Just want to make sure you remember. You’re retarded, sorry,
retired
now.” Angie holds out a meaty paw to me. “Gimme the Beretta, I’ll swap out the barrel, get you ready for the silencer while you get suited up.”

Once I’m dressed ready to go, we load the coordinates into Angela’s GPS.

“Rendezvous point here,” I tell him. “We’ll keep some separation between the vehicles on the way up. And Christ. Gotta keep my foot off the gas. Five over, no more.”

“Yeah,” Angie agrees. “Probably don’t want to get pulled over.”

“Leavenworth’s got a good volleyball team, I hear.”

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas is home to the US Army’s Command and General Staff College, but the part that
we
worry about is the
other
half of the base. Leavenworth is
also
home to the Department of Defense’s only maximum-security prison. If we get pulled over with this load of illegal weapons and carefully-prepared improvised explosive devices, we’re both going to spend a lot of time there.

“Yeah, well, leave volleyball for the fighter pilots,” Angie says, his voice dripping with scorn. It’s an article of faith in the SEALs that the rest of the Navy is made up of the prissy weaklings who couldn’t hack it at BUD/S. Fighter pilots? They’re the worst of the worst. Vain creatures, unable to form a deep and meaningful relationship with anything other than a mirror. “You ready to roll, killer?”

“Let’s get it on.”

Insertion has always been the worst part of any mission for me. The interminable waiting. In the back of a C-130, waiting for the ramp to drop and the jumpmaster to give the order. In the back of a truck or personnel carrier, jostling over cratered roads or spine-shatteringly rough off-road terrain, waiting to get somewhere.

Time doesn’t pass any faster, no matter how often you look at the clock, no matter how often you look at the pipper on a moving map screen showing your route.

Waiting.

Music is an important part of gearing up for a mission. Gotta be in the right mindset. I
need
my hate, my rage. I
need
the love, with it. It’s a weapon, in and of itself. I
need
all of it, heated and forged into a blade, tempered and ground down and honed to the barest razor’s edge, and insertion is the time for that preparation. In the back of a C-130, I’d be listening to my phone on earbuds, barely audible over the sounds of the airplane itself. The sound system in my truck?
Much
better than cheap earbuds.

Slayer and The Deftones, Faith No More and Anthrax bring the base material of emotion to a white heat, ready to forge; Metallica’s precise rhythms and blindingly fast guitar riffs are a steam hammer, pounding me into the right shape. The heavy brutality of Type O Negative, Nine Inch Nails and Rob Zombie grind the raw forging into a blade. It’s a long drive, but I need it to be: by the time I pull in to the rendezvous point, sparks fly in my soul as Megadeth’s
Symphony of Destruction
puts the finishing touches on my cutting edge.

I’m ready.

We separate at the rendezvous, after Angie pulls one more miracle from his backseat.

“Thought this might come in handy for you,” he says, handing it over. My eyes go wide when I recognize what it is: an MP5-SD. The German-made 9mm submachinegun, long obsolete, and replaced years ago by the newer MP7, is perfect for tonight’s mission. Lightweight and easy to carry, it features a built-in suppressor so effective that the mechanical
click
of the trigger is audible over the shot.
Much
better for my purposes than a full size – and above all
noisy
– rifle, and a good adjunct to my suppressed pistol.

There’s no long goodbyes here, no need for them. We’re both in the zone, and it’s time for action. A quick radio check to verify comms, and I’m off on foot while Angie creeps my Blazer along as quietly as he can toward my observation post on Trout Mountain.

It’s a twenty-minute hike to the edge of the compound, studying my objective through the green filter of the panoramic NVGs, when the bone-conduction radio headset crackles to life like an itch inside my skull.

“In position,” Angie says.

“Roger that,” I reply. The subvocalized whisper, barely enough to trigger my matching microphone, is inaudible from more than a yard away. “Moving in.”

Only one area is brightly lit up: the penance box, standing alone in the empty area in the middle of the compound. This late at night, there’s nobody visible outside, and few of the windows show lights inside the buildings. There’s a flickering light--a candle?
--
in an upper story window of the main house, but it grows faint and vanishes.

Someone’s moving around up there. Late night piss call maybe. Stay alert.

The main house is my first stop of the night anyway. I’m not loaded any lighter than I would be on a recon patrol, but I don’t have any need for a sleeping bag or other snivel gear, and I don’t have to hump ammo for the squad’s machine gunner. All the extra weight I’m packing tonight? Just like me, it’s here for a single reason--one way or another, Courtney is leaving this place with me. The things I’ve brought with me on this mission will be used to noisily break as much shit as possible to create distractions, and quietly kill anyone who refuses to be distracted.

I really,
really
hope that Lucas, Jeremiah and that son of a bitch Emmanuel refuse to be distracted.

Slipping from shadow to shadow, I easily make it to the propane tank by the main house, and the first distraction comes out of my rucksack. The number 1 written with an infrared-reflective marker, glows bright green in the goggles, and a strong magnet sticks it to the bottom of the steel tank. I hope you assholes paid your gas bill and got this fucker filled up.

Next stop is their motor pool. They don’t want anyone to grab a car and drive away, so there’s only one locked and chained gate in the metal fence surrounding the vehicles. I don’t want anyone driving away tonight either, so it looks like we agree on something, at least. Distractions two through five are tossed over the fence, and at least a couple of them roll underneath one or another of the ramshackle vehicles. Just in case, though, a couple drops of a fast-setting epoxy in the padlock ensures nobody will be opening the gate easily, either to rescue a car or to use one in pursuit while we make our escape. More of my distractions wind up attached to electrical panels, and the last one goes on the big tank of kerosene for the generator.

A quick sweep through the inside of the chapel reveals it to be empty, but it’s been decorated. Streamers and bunting made of bleach-whitened sheets and scraps of cloth hang over the door and throughout the inside of the small building. Great bundles of flowers fill the air with their scent.

It looks like a wedding. Has it already happened, then? Or is this set up for tomorrow?

Movement catches my eye, phosphorescent green, and a sudden flare of light washes out the sensitive night vision for an instant before the optics adjust automatically. Someone’s sitting on the front stoop of one of the shacks, a tiny glowing spark in front of their face.

A cigarette.

The flare was probably a lighter.

Go ahead: destroy your night vision along with your lungs.

Stupid enemies make my job easier. I can’t identify who it is – even high-end NVGs don’t like too much light when it’s otherwise dark – but it’s not as if I’ve got a chart of all the faces and names here anyway.

The pin that Courtney dropped on my phone’s map said her hovel should be right about … here, but there’s just empty space between two other shacks. The ground’s been turned recently. A new garden? Odd place for it. Doesn’t matter right now. Where is she? Where else could she be? Heather’s place? The women’s dormitory?