Thomas relayed while they moved. Minutes later, he was talking directly to the helo, coordinating the extraction with the team spread out in a perimeter around him.
“I’ll pop smoke. You identify.” He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade, knowing it would be a beacon for the NVA but vital to get them out.
The pilot’s voice came back calm and mechanical. “Roger. I see green smoke.”
“Roger. That’s us.”
The team could now hear the chopper and smell salvation. The first Huey was sliding into position when a 12.7mm heavy machine gun opened up from the camp, strafing the tail. The gunship immediately obliterated the fire with its miniguns, but the damage to the first helo was done. Hale watched it pull off and begin limping back toward the South Vietnamese border. He prayed it would make it.
The second Huey came overhead and dropped the rigs, the rotor wash beating the brush around them in a mini hurricane. As the men were frantically getting inside the slings, one of the Yards began screaming and pointing. Out of the wood line, Hale saw Houng stumbling toward the hovering aircraft, weaponless, one arm dangling uselessly at his side, his face a bloody mess. In the distance behind him, he saw swarms of NVA drawn by the smoke and noise of the helicopter. He slipped out of his sling to give it to Houng.
Thomas shouted, “What are you doing?”
Hale looked at him with sadness and said, “You know what I’m doing.”
Thomas started to leave his sling as well, tearing at the slip noose around his wrist. Hale stopped him.
“No. You’re not getting off. Remember what I told you about the camp. Get that information back to the FOB.”
“Fuck that! No way! You die, we both die.”
Hale pointed to his chest and side, both freely bleeding from the multiple wounds. “I’m already dead. Go.”
Without waiting for an answer, Hale turned and assisted Houng into the last sling. Thomas helped as tears left tracks through the greasepaint on his face.
The NVA began running forward and firing through the trees in a desperate attempt to stop the extraction. Doing figure eights overhead, the gunship unleashed its twin miniguns, knocking soldiers down by the dozens as if they had been swatted by a giant hand.
“Go, go, go!” Hale screamed. He turned and stumbled away, wobbling toward the brush while firing his last magazine into the advancing soldiers. The enemy paid no attention to him — not even realizing he was there. Instead they focused all of their fire on the helicopter as it lifted off. Hale crawled forward underneath a tree that had been shattered by lightning, pulling brush over his body in an attempt to hide himself, the fear of death coiling in his belly like a snake. Wheezing from his destroyed lung, he watched the team lift off, dangling beneath the helo like spiders on a web, heading toward safety. Toward home.
He remembered he still had the camera in his rucksack, with the proof of the meeting. Intelligence of tremendous value to the war effort. He cursed himself at the oversight, knowing the information would die out here with him. Disappear as if it had never existed. At least Thomas would pass the basics along.
As the helo got smaller, another heavy machine gun opened up. The tracers arced through the sky and cut into the aircraft, punching through the thin skin to the avionics beneath. Hale watched the bird lose tail-rotor function and begin spinning out of control, the team now flung out on the end of the ropes like a pinwheel from the centrifugal force. He watched in disbelief as the helicopter slammed into the earth in a fireball. He heard the NVA cheering.
The fear left his body, replaced by despair at the futility of it all. He closed his eyes and drifted into unconsciousness.
2
Brett Thorne’s head jolted forward, snapping him awake, as the decrepit Japanese pickup hit another rut. He gazed at the stars above his head as they drove through the Sudanese desert, the sky infinitely brighter than anywhere he had been in the States.
He nudged a form in front of him with his boot. “How much longer?”
The man, a tall, lanky member of the Zaghawa tribe from the Darfur region of western Sudan, said, “Another hour, maybe less. Are you regretting your decision to ride back here with us? I can have him pull over.”
Brett shook his head. As a CIA operative, he could have easily traveled in the cab of the pickup, but he wanted the ability to fight — and run — without restriction. The cab was too confining. Even if it meant being crammed in the back with five other men, all smelling like they hadn’t bathed in over a month. It was like riding in a basket of clothes that had been dipped in sour milk.
Brett leaned out into the wind, catching the dust from the truck ahead of them but enjoying the escape from the fetid air. He sat back down and reflexively patted the rucksack at his feet.
If they fight half as ferociously as they stink, we might not need this anyway.
The truck abruptly slowed, shutting off its headlights and driving with parking lights alone. Brett stood up and noticed the lead truck had done the same. He heard excited murmurings from both trucks in the tribe’s native tongue, something he couldn’t understand.
He turned to the tribesman who spoke English. “What’s going on? Why are we stopping?”
“Janjaweed. Over there.”
He pointed to the north, and Brett could make out several sets of headlights bouncing across the desert, moving closer.
“You don’t know they’re Janjaweed, and even if they are, this mission is more important than killing some low-level militia. If any get away, we’re screwed.”
“Nobody else drives around in convoys at night. It’s Janjaweed.” The tribesman smiled, his teeth gleaming white in the moonlight. “And I agree with you, Mister Brett, but I cannot make the others agree. They have suffered many times at the hands of the Janjaweed and will not be denied. We just need to make sure we kill them all.”
Brett muttered under his breath, cursing his boss at the Special Activities Division in Langley and cursing his poor, dumb luck to be born African American. Because of it, he was always chosen for any mission in Africa that involved infiltrating with the natives, regardless of the fact that he was a five-foot-five-inch fireplug of solid muscle, and the Zaghawa were all six-foot string beans. He looked nothing like them, although he’d known that before he’d crossed the border at Chad. At the time, he’d laughed about it because all of his buddies in SAD had been denied a seat on the trip based on the color of their skin, no matter how hard they bitched that Brett looked about as native as they did. Bigotry at its finest.
Now, as he often did when plans started falling apart four thousand miles from help, he was wondering about his career choices. He tried one last time.
“We lose a single man, and I’m aborting the mission. The refinery is much, much more important than a random militia patrol. Think about that. You’re risking a strategic gain for a tactical one.”
The tribesman didn’t answer. He simply slipped over the side of the truck and faded into the darkness, along with everyone else. Brett cursed again and jumped over the side himself. Instead of following, he hunkered down next to the cab of the pickup, intent on hauling ass if things went bad.
The Janjaweed, an amorphous group of militias comprised of nomadic tribesmen, were responsible for a campaign of terror in Darfur, committing atrocities as a matter of course in an effort to run out all of the sedentary farming tribes, such as the Zaghawa. In response, the farmers had banded together, forming militias of their own. The Zaghawa tribe belonged to the Sudanese Liberation Army and had formed ostensibly to take the fight to the Sudanese government for the perceived injustice of the government’s lack of effort to stop the Janjaweed from raping and pillaging. The plan had backfired. Instead of stopping the Janjaweed, the government, fearful of the threat, began arming them.