"I'm sorry, Hannah," John said.
"What is going on?" Hannah demanded once more.
"It's a long story," John said.
"One I want to hear also," Neeley said. "We've got a problem."
Hannah was still looking at her husband. "John, who is this woman? What is going on? Where did you go?"
Neeley leaned forward and spoke very clearly, biting the words off as if she were speaking to a wayward child. "If you want to live, shut up and listen." That caught Hannah's undivided attention. "We don't have much time. John has a story to tell us and once we hear it we need to make some decisions."
“Listen — ” John began, but Neeley pulled the hammer back on the gun.
“I want to know what happened.”
John’s eyes shifted between the two women, and then he sighed in defeat. “All right. I was in the Army. In the Engineer Corps. A dumb second lieutenant. My area of expertise was oil pipelines. Pretty boring stuff. Putting in my time to pay off my ROTC scholarship.”
Hannah’s eyes were boring into her husband, as if she were trying to see beyond the words he was saying and was looking at someone she’d never seen before.
John continued. “Then I got a visit from this guy named Bailey in August ‘93. He had orders assigning me to him. He didn’t say why. We flew overseas to Germany. I met Gant in Berlin. As soon as I met him I knew I was in over my head. Like Bailey, he wasn’t wearing a uniform, but he sure had a lot of weapons. They told me that he would take care of me.”
“Who was Gant?” Hannah ignored Neeley’s look and concentrated on her husband.
“The man who was in charge of the mission,” John said. He pointed at Neeley. “She knows — knew — him.”
“Keep going,” Neeley ordered.
“They told me that they wanted me to listen in on a meeting and judge the viability of what I heard. I didn’t have a fucking clue what they were talking about and no one busted their butt to inform me of anything else.
“We flew out of Berlin aboard military transport. To a staging base in Saudi Arabia. There, in the middle of the night, Gant wakes me, makes me grab my gear and drags me to a waiting Combat Talon — a modified C-130 cargo plane. There was some sort of all terrain vehicle with big tires strapped down in the cargo bay. An army version of a dune buggy with lots of cans and stuff tied off on it.
“We got on and the Talon took off. We were in the air a long time. They were flying low level, below the radar. I knew we were over Africa, but had no clue exactly where. The plane was jerking around so much I got sick, puking my guts out into the barf bags the crew gave me. Gant, hell, he slept most of the flight.
“Then the plane slows down and descends even further as the back ramp opens. Gant cuts the straps holding the all terrain vehicle and tells me to get in the passenger seat. As soon as I was in he told me to buckle up. I strapped in just in time. The 130 touched down on the desert floor, rolling. Gant cranks the engine as the ramp lowers even further, until it’s just about a foot above the sand. It was night and there was sand blowing everywhere and I couldn’t see a damn thing. Gant had on night vision goggles and his hands were on the wheel.
“We’re still moving and Gant throws the thing into gear. Scared the shit out of me as he hits the gas and we literally fly out of the back of the plane, hit the desert floor, bounce and then he’s tearing ass away, even as the plane accelerates and lifts off. Whole thing took less than thirty seconds from the plane touching down to it was back up and we were driving away.
“I had no idea where the hell we were.”
John came to a halt, beads of sweat on his forehead. Neeley glanced at Hannah. She was surprisingly calm, still simply staring at her husband.
“And then?” Neeley prodded.
“Gant drove for about an hour, then parked in a wadi. I helped him throw a camo net over the all-terrain. All he was doing was issuing orders, not explaining a damn thing. We grabbed our rucksacks and climbed out of the wadi toward a ridge about a mile away.
“It took us about two hours to get a spot just below the top of the ridge. We maintained listening silence after radioing in that we were on the ground in position. We broke that silence only twice in the ten days we were on the ground.” John’s voice was flat now, his sentences clipped as he recited his story.
“It took us two nights to dig the hide site. We hid under camouflage netting during the day. God, the sun was hot. And that hole — ” he shook his head. “It was six feet wide by four feet front to rear and five feet vertical from the small slit that we looked out to the bottom. The overhead cover was made of small metal rods with canvas on top. Gant covered the whole thing with sand before sliding in. The site was set on a ridge looking toward the compound.”
“What compound?” Neeley asked.
“I saw it the first day as we hid. A cluster of buildings in the middle of nowhere. Pickup trucks with machineguns in the cargo bed coming and going. A chopper flew in that first day. Russian design, but that didn’t mean dick in Africa.” He looked up at Neeley, backtracking slightly. “Gant finally told me after we had begun digging that we were in the Sudan, about fifty kilometers south of Khartoum. That a meeting was supposed to take place in the compound soon — he wasn’t sure quite when — and we were going to listen in.”
Neeley felt the sweat on her hand, between the flesh and the plastic of the pistol grip. Gant had never told her he’d even been in the Sudan, but she had a good idea who they were trying to listen to. During the early nineties the Sudan was a hot bed for terrorists.
John continued. “With our backpacks, radio and water cans crammed in that hole, it was almost impossible to move more than a few inches in any direction. The smell was the worst part. We urinated in a small cup and carefully dumped it out the left front into the sand. We collected our feces in small plastic sandwich bags and buried it in a narrow trench Gant dug in the rear bottom.” John gave a short laugh. “There wasn’t much shit because we only brought enough food for one cold meal every day. Hell, we’d both lost ten to fifteen pounds by that last day, maybe more. I’d never done anything even remotely like it. But, Gant, it was like he was on vacation. He was so calm about it all.”
Neeley remembered how gaunt Gant had looked when she met him in Templehoff. Masterson’s recitation — he’d done this before and she knew when — his debriefing after the mission.
Hannah cut in. “All this—“ she waved her hands indicating Neeley and John, “is about something you did before you met me? That’s why you ran away?”
John nodded.
“It has nothing to do with me?” Hannah pressed.
“I’m sorry,” John said. “I thought—“
“Finish the story,” Neeley said, checking the glowing clock in the kitchen.
“Gant — ” John Masterson shook his head as he remembered. “He could handle doing that. Sitting in that fucking hole, shitting in a bag. It drove me nuts.” John nodded, thinking back. “Gant’s biggest concern going in had been water. He’d tied down four ten gallon cans on the all terrain. Every three days he went and retrieved one. By that last day only one still held a little bit of water. I was getting nervous but Gant didn’t seem worried. He’d check the satellite radio twice a day, just listening.
“So we sat and waited.
“Then the activity in the compound picked up. A convoy came from the north, from Khartoum. Ten pickups with machineguns and two Land Rovers with tinted windows. Around a dozen people got out of the Land Rovers and moved into the main building while the ones on the pickups took security positions all around.
“Then the helicopter came and a half dozen people off-loaded, including several Westerners. They went into the same buildings. Gant pulled out this device — some sort of laser. He aimed it at the building, at one of the windows. They’d painted them all black, so you couldn’t see inside but this laser could pick up sound vibrations off the glass. He hooked it up to a laptop computer. Then he plugged in two headsets, handing me one.