Knight relaxed from his frozen posture and eased himself to the ground, using his rifle like a walking stick and keeping his left arm tight against his torso. Felice squatted down next to him.
“How are you doing?”
He returned a wan smile. “Believe it or not, I’ve been better.”
She nodded. Humor, even dark humor, was a good sign. “Any fever? Chills?”
“Yeah. But I think the antibiotics are keeping it at bay.”
She laid the back of her hand against his forehead and then drew her hand back in alarm. He was burning up. “How is the pain?”
He made a strangled sound that might have been laughter. “Hurts like a mother — ah, well you know.” He reached up and touched the bandage as if trying to figure out how it had come to be on his face. “The jarheads always say, ‘pain is just weakness leaving the body.’ I guess my weakness must have been twenty-fifteen vision.”
She touched his forearm and gently moved his hand away. Humor was good, but self-pity under these circumstances might be deadly.
“It’s okay,” he said after a moment. “I’ll get an eye patch and talk like a pirate. Girls dig that, right?”
“Depends on the girl, I suppose. Now, if you get yourself a parrot…” Even though his teeth were chattering, his smile broadened and seemed more genuine, so she pressed on. “So, is there a particular scurvy wench you’ve got your eye on?”
“Ha. Yes. And I think she’d actually get a chuckle out of being referred to that way.”
“What’s her name?”
“Anna. Anna Beck.” Knight’s good eye seemed to lose focus for a moment. “We’ve been together… I guess, a couple years now.”
“It must be tough… a relationship, I mean, doing what you do.”
He nodded guiltily, and then started rooting around in his rucksack. Felice took that as a sign that he didn’t want to discuss the topic any longer, but to her surprise, he kept talking. “Actually, before Anna, I don’t think I had been in anything that you could call a relationship. And since I met her on the job, so to speak, I guess we both knew what would be involved.”
Felice wasn’t sure if he was referring to the long periods of separation or the inherent danger of his profession. She knew that military wives had to reconcile themselves to the possibility of losing their loved ones in battle, but she wondered how Anna Beck would react when she got her first look at Knight’s maimed face. Then it occurred to her that Knight was probably wondering that as well.
“Does Bishop have someone at home?”
“Not Bishop. I don’t think he’s ever even been on a date. He’s way too intense.”
“I kind of picked up on that. Just figured it was a Rambo-thing.”
“Bishop makes Rambo look like Ronald McDonald.” Knight took out a cell phone, identical to the one Bishop had crushed earlier in every way but one, namely that it was still intact. He probed it with a finger, held it near his ear and shook it, and then turned it over and began picking at an almost imperceptible seam along its edge. After a few seconds, he succeeded in popping loose the back cover of the phone, exposing its electronic innards.
Felice let the subject go, allowing Knight to focus on what he was doing, but she found her thoughts occupied by the enigma that was Bishop. She had caught a glimpse of the man that lay just under the rigidly held mask of self-control. There was a beast inside him, a monster of rage that he fought with every minute of his life, a monster that, if loosed, would destroy him and anyone close to him.
That was something Felice understood very well. She had her own beast with which to contend.
34
Bishop moved further away from the road but kept it within sight as he tracked the smell of burning wood. Soon, he detected other odors: strange smells that he couldn’t quite pin down, until his stomach rumbled and he realized it was the smell of cooking food.
Further down the road, he heard voices, women talking in a strange unfamiliar language, and small children shouting and laughing. He took that as a good sign. The cook fires might have belonged to a camp of rebels, but he doubted very much that the men pursuing them had brought along their kids.
He slowed his pace and stopped completely when he caught sight of the village. It was little more than a collection of ramshackle huts with concrete walls and thatched roofs, lining the sides of the road. There was a large fuel tank at one end, but there was not a single vehicle anywhere to be seen. Nor was there any sign of modern conveniences: no electric lights, radio antennas or satellite dishes. Bishop was willing to bet that there was no running water either. The smoke rose from makeshift open-air cooking pits outside the huts. The women tending them wore brightly colored dresses and kerchiefs tied around their hair, while the children wore T-shirts and soccer jerseys. The village was primitive, he decided, but not completely cut off from the rest of the world.
He remained there, watching the villagers’ day begin, weighing the choices this discovery presented. He had already decided that he wouldn’t attempt contact with them. There was no way to determine their loyalties, and it would take only one informant to alert the rebels to the presence of outsiders. The question he now pondered was whether to sneak into the village for food, medical supplies and perhaps even a map, or to simply give it a wide berth and keep going.
He had just settled on the latter option when something changed. The children reacted first, leaving their play and running into the huts to tell the adults. A few seconds later, Bishop heard what they had: the rumble of a diesel engine and the creak of a vehicle chassis rocking back and forth on its suspension. A truck creaked into view a few seconds later. It was a mongrel construct of indeterminable make and model, but there was one feature that was easy to recognize. Affixed to a metal post that had been welded to the floor of the rear cargo area, was a beat-up but serviceable PKM machine gun. A man wearing a soccer team logo T-shirt and camouflage trousers stood behind the gun, mostly using it as a handhold to avoid being thrown when the technical—a military term for a civilian vehicle that had been repurposed to serve as a war machine — bounced over ruts in the road. Two more rebel fighters rode in the front. The truck rolled to the center of the village, where it stopped. The man on the machine gun turned the weapon in slow circles, none too subtly letting the villagers know that he could kill any one of them with indifference. The two men in the front got out, their Kalashnikov rifles held at a low ready that was, if not quite menacing, then certainly not friendly.
An older man wearing tattered trousers and a short-sleeved shirt emerged from one of the huts and headed toward the truck. He moved assertively, stamping his bare feet on the ground, but he stopped a respectful distance from the armed men. They spoke what Bishop assumed was Swahili, and while he couldn’t understand a word of it, he got the sense that the old man was reprimanding the young guerillas, but was careful to do so in a way that would not end with his own execution.
One of the rebels laughed, then lifted his head and shouted something meant for the whole populace. The old man took a step forward, raising both hands. The gesture looked to Bishop more like a protest than a surrender. The rebel stepped forward, too, reversing his grip on the rifle and jabbing the stock into the old man’s midriff.
The women of the village let out a wail of protest, but no one moved to assist the old man. The man at the machine gun made a show of racking the bolt on the weapon, while the two dismounted rebels hurried into the hut from which the old man had come.
There was no hesitation in what Bishop did next. On some level, his decision was the product of a strategic calculation, but that was not what drove him. He was ruled by instinct, and his inner voice did not argue.