Title: Journey Through A Quiet Mind – Day 4
Wordsmith: mor_tru
Email: mor_tru@yahoo.com
Category: Gen/AA/HC/Angst/Humor
Archived: To our website – www.oocities.org/mor_ag2001/
Linked: JackFic.com,
Status: Complete
Pairings: None
Spoilers: None
Season: Pre-Stargate
Rating: R
Content Warning: Language, violence.
Summary: Jack comes out of a nightmare and writes about a mission from his earlier days in Special Forces.
Author’s Notes: What’s so fascinating about Jack O’Neill is the man behind the one we see. That’s why a journey through his mind maybe the way to understand why Jack is so Jack.
Beta Reader: Thanks go to one beta reader who looked at this story a little deeper, and understood.
Disclaimers: The character of Colonel Jack O’Neill belongs to ‘them’, but what he’s ‘thinking’ is totally ours.
Date: update 04/15/06
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Journey
Through A Quiet Mind©
Day
4
mor_tru
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Date: 04:00
Woke hard. Real hard. Came out of a nightmare with... with... ‘shadows’.
Wandered through the house
trying to find some balance.
Dark - no lights, except for a full moon flooding in through
the patio doors. Silvery light
like that can cast unexpected shapes to the dark and with them sometimes there’s movement. Not sure if the movement is real or in my head, because there are some places where shadows turn
deadly and come at you with an agenda.
Survival rule #3 in the SF Manual of keeping
your ass safe - It’s always better if you’re the shadow
and it’s your agenda.
<thinking>
Those shadows were... were...
<thinking>
Okay – gonna do what Daniel said and write this
stuff down.... see what falls out. See if I can look at
it from a distance.
So here goes -
One time I was in this
place on the north face of the
So this was a while ago, Okay?
Yours truly was a lot - no, a LOT! younger, and the knees definitely ached a hell of a lot less
back then. Back in those days there were several missions that cut out across the ‘stans. Some north of there too, at least five or six of them over a couple
of ‘real hot’ porous borders. Most
of the later ones though were in the
Anyway, on this one mission to the west-facing
edge of the
The kidnap... that a noun? ... wasn’t a high-visibility character per se but as fate would
have it, he was well connected – i.e. the brother-in-law of a certain senator. So when he didn't show up for a scheduled
meeting and his car was found crashed and trashed, word finally filtered back
to those who gave a damn, and within a couple of days ‘said senator’ was on the
phone creating his own kind of noise. Enough
so that within another 48 hours, me, my ass, Momma,
Bang and Moose – the 3 other members of the team - were on a MAC flight heading
out over several times zones.
Just so you know,
kidnapping in the slow world is a national sport. It's even possible to
make a living at it, to become a real professional. Most of them target western businessmen,
the occasional odd group of tourists, hikers, missionaries. Most are resolved via negotiation and payoff. Most are not political - just the high-profile
ones. Most are strictly financially
motivated because BIG companies pay up fast and in certain parts of the world this is a well established motivational fact. It’s strictly
business. Usually no one gets hurt –
bruised maybe - money changes hands, and the kidnap eventually gets dropped off and sent home to the wife and kids and a
sound bite on CNN. No
problemo. The world turns once
more on its axis and the next ‘victim’ drives into view.
On the other hand, ‘rescues’ are never the
first option to a long haul kidnap. Mainly
because they’re so high-risk for everyone involved and
therefore strictly considered as a last-resort. If a team has to be called in, it's only because negotiations look like they're going
totally south. But
the truth is, no one really wants to engage in a rescue because someone usually
dies, or is already dead before the rescuers show up. Then it’s a case of
Monday Morning Quarter-backing and ‘shoulda’ and ‘coulda’ and the sound-bite on
CNN turns into an old college snapshot and an obit. But you gotta try
anyway, right? That’s
what they pay you the big bucks for. And besides, in this case, the ‘rescue hand’ was forced into
play because of the high placed connection. Senators have pull, and when they pull it, the
Motorola on your belt sings out.
So as it turned out, the kidnappers waited a
whole 5 days before finally contacting the company with their first demands. This isn't unheard of
btw but it's not standard either. It's significant, but not definitive. This can indicate dissent within ranks and
therefore exploitable disorganization. BUT, it can also indicate patience and discipline and thus
total professionalism on the part of the kidnappers. Either way it was too early in the game to
know what to make of it. And meanwhile, because of the senator’s bleating, and the
fact that intel already had leads on which warlord was responsible – based on
the locale and recent unrest - the team got cleared and flung. This translated into a fast ride on a blacked
out bird, flying low through an area where RPGs were plentiful and the local
population used them regularly. The bird
eventually dumped our asses incountry, and within hours we were heading north
with about a days hike of where intel said we needed
to be. So we
walked, because imaging says our kidnap is on the move and heading in our
direction. It seems they’re
moving him from one village to another and we just need to intercept his sorry
ass when it shows up at the next one.
Again - no problemo, because kidnaps don't typically occur in 'battle areas', nor do they occur
in the midst of equal prosperity, they occur in areas of ‘instability’
(different from out-and-out war), and gross financial differences. They tend to occur where people think their
agenda has a shot at advancement, no matter how splintered or far out it is -
and for that to happen, there has to be both a mix of competing agendas, not
one monolithic mass and a mix of people, not just one single majority. Alternatively, they occur where men feel their
only shot at earning money is in human trade, places where there are only the
very very rich or the very very
poor. This region is a perfect example
of the latter and thus a perfect place for a kidnap to succeed because
‘Kidnapper’ is a recognized job description and legit means of employment in
this part of the world.
As it turned out this one had no real political
agenda despite the businessman’s connections. Maybe he’d kept his
mouth shut about his influential brother-in-law, maybe he hadn’t. Either way a demand had been
made to his company to leave the country forever and ever, turn over several
resources the warlord believed the company had illegally 'confiscated', and
publicly issue an apology. And, Oh by the way, we also want a few million dollars in
small-unmarked bills - the usual bullshit. And while we’re at
it, a few extra SAMs would be nice.
Yeah, right. Like that was gonna
happen. Impasse!
Red flag. Situ heading south in a
hurry. Call in the rescue squad –
aka yours truly et al - because rumor had it the Senator’s wife was withholding
until he did something constructive with all that power he had in the form of
helping to find her brother.
So we insert and start walking and make it
cross-country to the target village by night. The team smoothes into the surrounding high
rocks and surveys the hamlet. Momma, the
team leader, sends me in close to snoop around because we need additional local
intel on the layout of the structures.
<thinking>
Y’know, this job’s not
called boots-on-the-ground for nothing. It’s somebody’s boots that do that walking. HUMINT – human intelligence – is the only way
to get a close look at what’s really going on in some
of these redacted areas. Besides,
carrying big guns or not, the team wasn’t there to
start a war, the mission directive was to snatch back the businessman with as
little interdiction as possible and be quietly on our way.
So I strip down to a knife and slip in with the
dark and the midnight’s fog. And just so
you know, darkness in the ‘stans can be utter and
absolute, the kind where, if cloud cover or fog settles in - as it often does
in these mountain passes - it's like being blindfolded. But equally, when the
fog lifts, the starlight blazes like silver showers - light enough to actually
read by. Beautiful.
But that night,
the fog was thinning fast so the hand of cover wasn’t entirely on our side.
Started snooping, moving
around quietly in the shadows.
The village was small. It turned out to be a collection of about ten
families based on the number of houses. Maybe around sixty people total. Figured most of them were likely just the elderly,
the women, and children. You learn to
extrapolate in this job, because waiting for 100% data means Death gets there
first. In this case, you judge the
number of healthy, strong male population that might be present by looking at
the relative condition of the buildings, which was poor. There were only two vehicles - one on blocks -
and no obvious jerricans of fuel. And every little house had at least a pen with a cow or a
few sheep. There were
also a couple of horses here and there too. Plus, I just knew
from past experience that there were probably sleepy chickens in the
crawlspaces, and at dawn they'd all be stirring and vocal.
So I kept my ass moving, quiet but fast, because
there's no knowing for sure whose village this really is, or the true character
of it. You can only guess. Are the
animals well-tended?
Are there any signs of crops? Are
these people really isolated, humble farmers? Or are they armed and
ready to roll if the local warlord snaps his fingers? How much vehicle traffic does this dirt road
see? Is this dark wet patch at my knee where a sheep was recently killed, or a man?
A lot of this is instinct. Seen enough of these villages that after a
while you can guess how they're going to be laid out, and even who lives where,
who the local big fish is, who's the old guy just hanging on by his
fingernails, who the widows are. It’s like being able to smell how right something is. Maybe it's not
instinct, maybe it is extrapolation, figuring odds, connecting pixels. Dunno. One thing though, in order to act fast you
have to take leaps of faith. And as far off the beaten path as this village was, my gut said
it was a nice quiet place to do just about anything, including get rid of a
body.
Maybe I’m making this
all sound easy, but this really was the hard part - getting as much info as
possible, keeping quiet, keeping away from the dogs. Got to move fast but
very controlled because starlight illuminates, which means you can be seen too.
Then there’s
the long shots, the remote possibility of a booby-trap or a mine. And don’t forget the
ordinary stuff of life – like tripping over something or bumping into someone. Plus, in this part of
the world, sanitation facilities are typically outside, so there's always the
danger of running across some night pisser.
So yeah. Just my luck. I’m moving around the edge of a house on my way back to
Momma, crouching low under a window frame, when a door creaks. Froze, then folded
silently to the ground, face in the dirt blending in with the house shadow. An old man shuffles out. Probably got the call as he’s
undoing his pants as he moves. He stops,
maybe two feet from my head, facing away and fumbling.
He’s grunting,
making impatient noises until he finally frees the horse and sighs. I wait. Figure it won’t take long
providing there’s no prostate issues to slow the whole process down. I wait. Then out of
the door slinks this cat, all black with bright yellow eyes. I know they’re yellow
because it sees me and arches. It moves
sideways, hissing as it challenges. I stay frozen, just stare it down, my fist holding the
knife. Don’t
want to take out a cat because it means the night pisser is next. Then the old man hears it and hisses his own
‘get the fuck outta here’. The cat’s insulted and snarls his response by taking out a strip
of my left eyebrow. Can
feel the blood immediately. It’s
trickling down into my eye. Meanwhile the old man tidies himself away,
farts a couple times for good measure and then heads back in through the door. The cat’s long gone, but
I’ve still got the scar. That section of
eyebrow never did grow back.
Apart from that, the village stayed sleepy.
Eventually I made it back to Momma and got greeted with an affectionate WTF when he saw the
eyebrow. He accepted the ‘don’t ask’. Then I downloaded the
layout, and we incorporated it into the original rescue plan. After that all we could do was settle in and
wait. And based
on time and distance, we calculated the businessman and his escorts were due in
well before dawn. In the slow world,
illegal business always moves at night. So we figured when they arrived we had the time to determine
how many men made up the escort, how well armed they were so we could take up
positions all before the morning sky.
This is where the first ‘oh-shit’ to the rescue
plan hit - the businessman and his escorts didn’t show
up until first light.
That’s when we get our first look at him – oh shit,
sure enough. Usually kidnaps are drugged
when they're not otherwise needed for demand or for
proof-of-life purposes, which is the best possible option if you think about
it. It means the kidnappers are really
kidnappers for one thing and want their target to survive. Better to be drugged into submission than beaten
there, and drugs can make it impossible for the victim to identify his
kidnappers or where he was taken, which means it's more likely they're planning
on not killing him. If you find a victim that's
wide-awake, that's usually bad news. It
means the kidnappers aren't worried about
identification. It can also mean the
victim's probably not been cooperative for proof-of-life and needs to be
coerced, which is bad enough except that an uncooperative victim can make the
whole thing head south all on his little ownsome.
So here’s Mr. Businessman and not only is he not
hooded, he’s wide-awake. Not drugged,
and he’s been beaten around quite a bit. This was a very bad sign. A major oh-shit. No blind-fold, no
hood, damaged goods like that. Might as well put a sign around his neck saying ‘Dead man’. Suddenly everything changes and it’s obvious they’ve only hauled him to this village because
it’ll be a good place to eventually dump his body. They may hold off killing him until they see
if some money does change hands. But on the other hand, this could be his last few hours. Either way if it dissolves into an overt spray
and shoot we’re all fucked.
It’s clear we need a plan B. This includes waiting ALL day until nightfall
again and hoping to hell that ‘he and we’ have got the
time. Couldn’t
go overt and take him during the daylight hours because of the villagers – too
much of a chance some of them would’ve been caught in the crossfire. Killing women and children isn’t
the first option.
So we lay low and watch. The escorts stick the kidnap in a shed and
leave a lone guard outside. This is a
good sign. The village stirs. They’re not going to
kill him just yet. Not
publicly, anyway. The rest of the
escort stays long enough to rest and eat then heads back down the mountain pass
leaving a total of five behind, all lightly armed. No problemo. Patience.
Around midday, the guard lets his prisoner out
to take a piss. Businessman’s
hands are tied in front of him. He looks
around wildly the whole time but he’s clearly trying
to be obedient and cooperative. This is
a familiar look. Civilized people get it
when they find themselves in uncivilized situations. They’re trying to
make sense of the senseless and fall back on old rules they believe still apply
– i.e. if I’m good, if I do what they say, I’ll get out of here. Someone is initiating a Rescue even now. All I have to do is
live long enough to see it. Then I get to go home.
The hours pass, we wait, take turns resting. The village goes from low to high and then
back to low activity. Late afternoon
slides in and an old woman shuffles towards the shed. She has a bowl in her hands and gives it and a
chunk of bread to the guard. A couple of
his pals stroll on up, their rifles shouldered. One has a bottle. They share whatever it is, and
the bread. Meanwhile the businessman gets nothing. This is confirmation - no point in wasting
precious food on a condemned man. Momma
figures that come nightfall the package will be wrapped.
Occasionally the guard talks on his
radio, keeping in contact with his other pals. All in all they’re
looking bored and lazy as the sun sets and the light goes out on the mountain.
Time for Plan B - because it
was now or never. Momma checked CON as soon as the skyeye was
overhead. Texting came back that the
negotiations had gone south, which meant the guard with the radio was waiting
for ‘that’ call. Either that, or the pals who had left earlier would be back to
partake in whatever they planned to do to the kidnap. If they’d had enough
of the abusing, then a shot to the head would end it sometime in the night. If not, then there’d be more beating and a
slow knifing at the end of it, depending on their supply of munitions and how
pissed-off they were that there wasn’t going to be any money for their effort.
My part in Plan B was to sneak in, take out the
guard lounging in front of the shed, pull the package out, and take to the
hills. Meanwhile Momma, Bang and Moose
would separately take out the other four escorts and meet up at a set point on
the next ridge. This had to be done
quiet – ‘real’ quiet - because the rule was ‘don’t
engage’. We needed time to make distance
between us and the village. We needed
time to disappear into the dark. Because
gunfire echoes in those high passes like a flare going
off. If we got into a firefight, we’d likely be trapped and that wasn’t a working option.
So, to Plan B and the second
oh-shit.
Company’s coming.
Oohya!
I’m about 20 yards from the shed when Bang’s
gravely voice scratches over my earpiece that there’s a light heading up the
dirt road. He’s
on the other side of the village and they’re heading towards him. I freeze and smooth
to the ground. I
can hear the low rumble of a straining engine in the distance. The villagers don’t
stir. They know better. Doors and windows stay closed. Any lanterns, candles,
are suddenly extinguished; the mountain is now in pitch-blackness except for
the single headlight of the oncoming vehicle.
Bang reports that it looks like a lynch party. There’s maybe six,
seven men hanging out the back of an old beat-up truck. Its shocks squeak as tires hit rock and
potholes. Quiet doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen any more. Momma greenlights me - get the package and haul ass to the first set point. He’ll meet us there.
So I take out the guard. It was clean and quick. He was distracted and more interested in the
light and his pals so he didn’t hear me. Came up behind him, slipped my
hand over his mouth and nose, snapped his head back and cut deep. You can’t ever
hesitate when cutting a throat. You can’t think about it. It has to be a smooth action. Straight in to the vocal cords first off, then
saw on down through the jugular. This
stops all chances of a call out and the quick bleed-out minimizes the fight in
them.
Eased the body to the ground then opened the
door to the shed. The businessman
was just sitting there, looking scared and tired. I guess he knew he was going to die and had
decided sleeping wasn’t worth it. I told him to get up
and be quiet, that he was going home now. He looked pole-axed and just stared at me - confused. So I grabbed his arm sharply – move your ass. Trying to snap him out of it because I needed
the guy to be onboard - time was ticking.
He moved, stumbled, as he stepped over the body
of his guard on the way out of the shed. He hesitated, just looked down at it,
wide-eyed, and then looked at me again. Looked at the blood on my hands and the damp
patch on his sleeve where I’d left a bloody print. I can see him
struggling to register what to do with the knowledge of what had to be done to
save him.
Y’know, no one ever questions the morality of
having to kill while its being done in the name of
getting their ass out of a tight spot. ‘Kill the motherfucker before he kills
me.’ That’s all
they think about, right up until it’s actually done and they ARE safe. It’s only then that the need to kill becomes a
questionable act because maybe the ‘saved’ can’t reconcile how you’re able to
do the job and still deal in your gut with Big God’s First Commandment - ‘Thou
Shalt Not Kill’. Because there’s no job-related qualifiers tagged to it, like
- Thou Shalt Not -unless really pissed offf, or -unless in self-defense, or
-unless target is Evil. Oh no, Big God didn’t put any of those in there, no - just one flat out
‘Thou Shalt Not-’. Period.
So suddenly the kidnap’s assessing you and you can see from his expression
that he’s already forgotten that the guy on the ground is the scum. He’s forgotten that
his battered and bruised face was most likely done by the recently dead and
some of his pals. Oh yeah, and he’s forgotten entirely that his guard would’ve probably
been an enthusiastic participant in the final deed of killing ‘him’ later on
that night. Yet here he is looking at me
with that same expression behind his eyes – you’re all
the same.
What color does that make me
- black, white, gray?
Fuckit – this is why we don’t
talk about this shit.
<thinking>
At that point I hear a
bap-bap-bap and know we’re no longer covert. So I grab the guy
and pull him in close and say – ‘You wanna live? Follow me.’ Because my prime
objective is to get him out of there and let Momma and the boyz handle the
surprise party.
I finally hauled him away from the echoes and
the chaos. He kept up, stumbling now and
then. It was rough footing in the dark,
but the fog has completely lifted, so it’s easier. After about a mile, he starts grabbing at my jacket pleading for me stop, just stop. He has something to ask me.
‘Where are the others?’ He whispers this like five or six times. Just kept asking it and looking around, back
towards the village, until I finally just grabbed his
jaw, and eased him to face me straight on. ‘I’m it for now Pal. You wanna file a complaint, then follow me to the suggestion box.’
Can’t spend a lot of time listening to this shit. Job is to stay alert, stay in the moment. We needed to put some serious distance
between us and what was happening further up the pass.
My
responsibility right at that moment was to get his ass safely to the
prearranged setpoint, wait there for Momma and move on towards the pick up
point. It’s all
about focus.
Shut up and keep moving.
A couple of miles further on he
wants to rest. Needs
to rest. Not
yet.
It took over a day to get in and it’ll take more than that to get out. Coming in was easy, no one was looking for us, all we had to do was stay low. Getting out means evading the warlord and his
men, all of whom will be mightily pissed-off at not only losing out on the
money, but now the kidnap has disappeared along with any satisfaction they
might have had at dismembering him. Then
there’s the pile of bodies left behind. Had no doubt Momma and the boyz would clean
up. But
eventually someone would come looking for the party in the truck, or become
suspicious when no one answers the radio. Bound to happen, so figured we had to gain a 6
to 10 hour lead on the distance factor.
Shut up and keep moving.
Three miles further on there’s a cave. We had spotted it on the way in and marked it
as the first setpoint. Figured one of us
would be stuck to the package while the others stayed back. Momma appointed yours truly.
Get there and the chatter through the earpiece
is cryptic, sporadic - one for safety, the other because of the mountains. Can tell that the team is on the move though,
but they’ve got hostiles on their asses so they’re
heading off at an angle to where they know we are. Knew this was a high probability at the onset
– that they’d swing a wide arc and meet us at the
second setpoint. By then it’s getting light so resting up in the cave is safest. Signal Momma and shut down.
But the businessman’s mind is wandering around to
what he would do when this was all over. He was jumping over 'now' and going on to
'later', without considering that ‘later’ ain't a sure
thing, only ‘now’ is. He wasn't going to consider any other option. Couldn't blame him,
‘now’ wasn't real pleasant, but doing anything else was a luxury. So listened to what he said, but didn't engage.
Then he said – ‘Don't you think about things? Feel?’
WTF?
Reckon he was frustrated, no feedback. He wanted a biography. Later, he said - ‘Jack?’.
That's not much
to go on, just a first name. Jack.’
I finally told him – ‘You don't need to go on
there, then.’
He didn't know squat
about surviving, about running. It was a
long while before he really understood there was no cavalry coming, no bird
swooping in to whisk him back to hot coffee, hot food, a shower and clean
sheets. That for the time being it was
just him and me and a long walk ahead of us through a
territory that was filled with people who would shoot first and ask questions
later. And if we were real lucky only
then could we open up the sat phone – which Momma was holding - and call in the
Angels to come pick us up.
After he got past 'baffled', he moved into
'angry'.
‘You're it? This is it?’
He kicked at the ground, spent a lot of energy
being angry. I
was trying to rest, so I let him go on. Don't much like caves, even small ones, too closed in, but
we were close enough to the snatch that air patrols were a danger. A little hidey like this wouldn't
last - if we could find it, someone else could find it too - but it was the
closest to safe sleep we were going to get and we needed to hold out undercover
until the safety of dark.
Eventually I got tired
of listening to his bitching so I told him to lay the fuck down.
He stopped pacing and looked at me, half
puzzled, half hurt and said – ‘Just that, lay down? That's it? That's all you're
going to say? Lay the fuck down?’
Well that WAS all there was to say at that
moment. I wasn't
trying to be glib with him. We’d been running for a while through rough country and I
was tired. End of story. Couldn’t go anywhere
until dark anyway. So
that's where it was, that moment. Rest. He just didn't get it.
Couldn't tell him that I Was actually trying to figure
what to do next. Ain't
no payphones to call a cab. There's just miles and miles of nothing out there, and our
present situation was a real kick in the ass. Even if Momma showed up
we were way too close to risky to key up and call in the Angels. Sure, they would've
tried, but afterwards the debriefing would've been a killer, trying to defend
that decision. Assuming it was
successful, of course. So wait and rest was the option.
Couldn't tell him any of this of course, because one
thing they absolutely need is complete confidence in you. So when he was snapping like that, I finally had to talk to him, say something, try to settle
him down.
So yeah, I said – ‘Lay
down. Yeah, and that's
it, that's all there is. You lay down and rest when I tell you to lay down and rest, you
get up and run when I tell you to get up and run, and when I tell you to shut
up, you shut up. There's
nothing else for you to think on. You
let me do my job and I'll get you home. It won't be easy and
there's going to be a time or two when you'll be thinking you're fucked, but
you won't be, because I won't let it happen. Got it? I won't let it
happen. Now please. Lay down.’
He looks at me for a
long count. Then his knees sort of folded and he finally sat down in a heap. ‘I'm going to rest,’ he says.
He stopped being angry after that. Rested for a few hours.
Passed out more like
it.
Later I took a chance
and headed out in early evening. Once we’d cleared the cave, I broke coms
long enough to check in with Momma. Setpoint
2’s location had changed - they’ll meet up with us 5
miles further east. No
problemo. I
pick up the pace and we get a couple of miles on when I hear a patrol coming
around the ridge. So
I took another risk and channeled the businessman down through a gorge, still
trying to stay low and not engage. Unfortunately,
the gorge turns into a trap now. Some
gambles just don't work worth a fuck because the
patrol heads into the gorge too.
Here comes the third oh-shit!
So I whispered to the businessman: ‘ I'm not leaving
you, remember that.’ Then I fade back into woods. But to his mind it
likely felt like I sure as shit did leave him, abandoned him to face them
alone. He stares after me, his mouth
open, but I’ve gone too fast. He turns, uncertain, then
freezes stiff. Across the clearing the brush rattles and parts and suddenly three
AK47s are there. They start jabbering at
him in a language he doesn't get. Fatman, Skinny, and Boy are the three
characters on the opposing team. Who
knows if they're a regular patrol sent out by the
warlord, or part of a larger group that’s hanging back. I can’t break coms and call for Momma in case that brings them all in. And all the
businessman understands from their questions is the word 'American'.
I can see him shaking – I’m
hoping he stands up to them long enough, that he’ll hold it together. They're gesturing. He puts his hands up, shakes his head, repeats
- 'Please, American, I don't understand'. They're nervous,
looking around, unwilling to split up. Possible
they're thinking he has a companion somewhere, dunno. Or maybe they’ve
already been told there would be more than one. Or they're just
surprised to come out into this clearing and find him standing in the twilight.
Fatman pushes the businessman’s
shoulder. It spins him around, he raises his hands and puts them on his head,
looking confused. Probably only part of
that is an act. ‘Calm down,’ he says to
Fatman. ‘Calm down, I don't
understand. I'm an American.’ There's more
jabbering, more pointing, he keeps turning from one to the other, and then
Skinny uses his rifle, hard, in the businessman's ribs, urgent. The businessman stumbles
forward, he can't pretend to misunderstand that signal.
The look on his face finally says he's reliving everything that already happened since the
kidnap, that everything he went through to get away was for nothing. Oh yeah, and likely there's
something in there about what a traitorous, treacherous, cowardly pansy-assed
SOB you are.
I wait for them to move out of the clearing back
into the woods, then strike. Fatman gets
the first choice, knife in his back. He flops forward pulling my knife with
him, it's stuck in a bone – that happens - but he's so
heavy I can't fight his falling weight and have to let the knife go. Without the knife, Skinny just gets a kick to
the groin because I’m still trying to keep it quiet
because of the possibility of more of their side close by. But
Skinny changes that plan when he regains and squeezes off a shot. Could feel the sucker burn a crease along the
side of my neck. Quiet’s gone now, so
I twist sideways and fire off a shot of my own. Skinny's face gets the
blow full on, and he goes down inhaling his teeth in a spray of blood. The Boy is paralyzed, but he’s
put himself between me and the businessman. Too close for me to
fire without possibly taking out the package. Boy backs slowly away then pulls his rifle up
to shoot point blank. But I sidestep the
package and grab the end of Boy’s rifle and shove it forward, hard into his
throat. Never pull away, too much danger
the finger on the trigger will fire. Always shove it at them, that way the finger CAN’T pull the trigger back.
The businessman's
still standing there, frozen, surrounded by bodies.
I step on Fatman's back, brace, and wiggle the
knife out. Stuff comes with it, a little
sliding out on its own and trailing across his back. Grab Fatman's arms, crouch down way low and
pull him deeper into the brush. Stay
crouched, follow the same path, return to the
trampled, broken area where this happened. Cut Skinny's throat
to finish the drowning process quicker. Boy is barely breathing, neck's already
swelling like a fall squash. Drag each
of them into the brush. Businessman is watching me, wide-eyed wondering what the
hell I’m doing and why the hell we aren’t just beating feet outta there. What he’s not thinking about is other patrols.
The two shots are bound to bring them
in. A sound like that carries for miles
in those passes so I needed to give us some time to
move away from the area. Shoved some
dead branches, leaves, grabbed dirt and smeared it on them, trying to blend
them in a little, break up the pattern of bilateral symmetry. It's clumsy and won't
fool a real search, but a casual eye twenty feet away won't see them.
We need time.
The package is breathing hard now. He breaks his freeze, goes down on his knees
almost formally, carefully, like he's kneeling down at
an altar, and throws up.
You wait until the retching
stops, touch his arm. Stand up, you tell him. It'll pass. All of it will. I promise.
After that he reckons
that maybe we're different after all. He
stops asking for my bio. Doesn’t want to know
who I am. He can’t
reconcile knowing you on a personal level with what he’d seen you do.
Initially he had wanted to be friends, but you’d rebuffed him, over and over. That's hard. It was hard. He was a nice guy in
over his head. But
he didn't ‘really’ want to be friends. Not
after he’d looked at all the bodies and at you. Reckon that kind of
colored how he saw you after that.
The rest of the walk out was relatively
uneventful. Mainly quiet. Reached the second setpoint and met up with
Momma. Bang filled in all the details,
the body count. After that it took two
more days to reach a distance that was safe enough to call in the Angels, and
finally the businessman got his cavalry in the form of a Black Hawk and a
couple of hardass door gunners.
At some point the
package – James, Jim - stopped calling you Jack. After that night, it was a direct word here
and there but mostly he spoke to the team in general terms. Talked a lot about fly-fishing and what he’d do when he got home. To him you were now just someone dressed all
in black who’d shown up carrying a gun and a knife,
and your job was to rescue him no matter what. He was just grateful and didn't
know the difference between that and friendship. Deep down he probably figured you operated
without emotions. That maybe you were
just a machine. Just a
killer. Job
done. Move on. He couldn’t
understand, or maybe wouldn’t want to understand just how strongly you do feel.
That you do have emotions, but that you can’t indulge in them out in the field, because to do so
means you don’t come home.
Because here’s the
irony he’d never understand, the complete irony of doing this job: it IS the fucking emotions. Because if you feel the pain of the innocents,
you never forget what it's like to be terrified and
hopeless, or what it's like to want and need and pray. It's your humanity,
it's your soul, it's what makes a man human. It's what keeps you
from being corrupted. Because your
training and your skills can maybe make it
terrifyingly possible for you to feel somehow above morality. Like being able to take the law into your own
hands while you’re out there, like indulging in your
own private code of justice or opportunism. And its exactly
because of this that it’s absolutely vital to be able to FEEL as sharply as
possible the ramifications BEFORE that temptation were ever to occur.
Does any of this make sense? Dunno.
Because telling anyone this theory - or
whatever it is - saying that you feel pain because it keeps you straight,
because your sense of character knows you’re doing
what is right even if you're out of coms and away
from control. Even if you're
totally solo and surrounded only by poor dumb bastards that couldn't know you
were doing wrong and couldn't stop you even if they did. Even if you were so far off surveille that no
one could ever know for sure how things went down, they’d
have to trust you that the soul in you would always do what was right. They’d have to take
your word for it that you wouldn’t handle a situation any way other than the
right way. Because the truth is, you
CAN”T, you can't EVER do otherwise. Because if you do, that
would be the end of it. It would
make everything truly pointless. It
would make you no better – no, make you WORSE – than what you were fighting,
because it'd be like telling some kid to trust you and then screwing him over. So you have to, HAVE to keep feeling to be
able to navigate that microfine line that can
differentiate right from wrong.
And if you said that out loud to anyone they'd be
packing you into an on-site hidey-hole and watching you carefully. They'd be thinking
'powder keg' when they looked at you, because they think that doing this job
means doing it without emotions. What
they want to see is you eating raw snakes and making napalm out of pig's blood
and paint, or quoting Heraclitus and von Clausewitz. But what they don’t want to see in you is the slightest
expression of the agony of continuing to feel even when you know any normal,
reasonable man would shut down completely and move into some kind of machine
mode if he was confronted with just a fraction of what you’d seen and what
you’d been asked to do. They’d shut you away.
So here’s the last big secret and maybe it’s
something Jim would’ve understood if friendship had really been an option – and
that is that you’re not devoid of emotions, but in absolute contrast, you have
a real good grasp on your emotions so that you can do the job effectively and
survive without destroying yourself. That
you’re not a mindless soldier – the myrmidon that he
thinks he saw up there on the mountain. That you feel everything – and deeply. And that the only way
you survive this life you’ve chosen is to carry it all home and
compartmentalize it. You take what you
saw or what you did and you put it in a box. You lock the box and stick it where you know
how to get your hands on it ASAP, in case you need it, but you keep it locked
tight so that you don't accidentally stumble over
what's inside it. You don't
want to be randomly accessing these memories, and you don't want them running
loose, wreaking havoc either - that's when you get flashbacks. But at the same time,
you also want them immediately accessible because one of them could save your
life. That's
how you get to be really, really good at what you do. That's how you keep coming back mission after
mission, that's how you keep yourself safe, that's one of your special skills.
<thinking>
It gets a little wearing to, keeping everything
under control sometimes. I mean --
picture Pandora's box with all those monsters whaling
away at each other and at the lid. She
had to sit on it to keep it closed but eventually they overwhelmed her and
forced their way out.
<thinking>
For years I hoped that
someone would be able to think about what it was like to walk around carrying a
load of secrets. To go from a real mess – Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Chulak - to, like the supermarket. It’s like - you're
hungry and wet and cold and tired and trying to make a satcom point in time to
arrange a pickup without, oh, I dunno, getting shot, maybe. And then a few days
later you're at the supermarket, in clean clothes, bare of weapons, weighing
the relative merits of sirloin versus fresh salmon for dinner whilst listening
to some Led Zep song that's been squeezed through the
Muzak strainer. Does anyone ever think
how damned schizophrenic that life can make you? Could Jim ever understand that? That you wake up and the skills that work in
one place are maybe of little value in the other. That maybe without a friend, a someone, to
understand this you’d split in two because there's this huge contrast between
the two halves of your life and sometimes it’s just hard to figure out which
one is real.
So maybe the lid blows off now and again. And maybe its 04:00
and you’re in the shadows feeling nothing but that emotion. Only this time you’re
the one looking for that friend, that someone to listen and maybe understand.
Gonna call Daniel, he’ll be awake.
J
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For
Humpty