"I say we stop here and build us a fire and dry out and rest awhile," Hal proposed.
"Fucking start a fucking fire?" Troy exploded. "That's a beacon for them to catch us! They'll see a fire from a mile away and we're only about a mile from the top of that ridge."
"Fuck you, man. We've been walking for two days. We barely slept last night. You're fuckin' nuts. If we go splashing down that creek, the odds are even we'll end up with hypothermia. I'm shivering already, man."
"We're out here to evade, man," Troy retorted. "We're not out here to fuckin' submit."
"There's no guarantee that if we do that we're gonna get away," Hal insisted.
"I can guarantee we will get caught if we stay here and start a fire," Troy countered.
It was like debating with one of the wet logs over which they'd been stumbling. It was clear that Hal had reached the end of the line.
Troy looked back up the slope into the wall of damp darkness. The only sound was the chirping and gurgling of the stream, but somewhere up that hill was a team of men with night-vision gear coming toward them. To be captured probably meant days of hell, but none of the people who went through SERE knew exactly what it was like until it happened to them.
Looking up and down the indistinct hillside, and at Hal, Troy knew that he had to make a decision, and make it now. If he was going to continue to try to evade, he had to go, and go now.
Chapter 4
Lieutenant Jenna Munrough looked across the room at two dozen people whose lives had been irrevocably altered by their experiences over the past week. It was a week that seemed like ten.
As she looked at the faces, and as her eyes fell on empty chairs, she realized that the most graphic aspect of this morning was not the expressions on those faces, but the memory of faces not present.
The Combat Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) exercise had begun here in this classroom. It was a classroom like any other; it was a class like any other. The instructors had a lot to say, and the students absorbed the class content to varying degrees. Nothing, though, had prepared them for what was to come.
Many of the more macho guys were cocky, sure that they would get through the exercise with ease. The four women in the group had known that they were perceived as weak links, and they were determined to prove their detractors wrong.
Three of the four had. Jenna was one of this trio.
No woman who had sat in this room a week ago was more determined to triumph than Lieutenant Jenna Munrough. Born in the Ozarks, about fifty miles southeast — as the crow flies — from Fayetteville, Arkansas, she was no stranger to hill country. She had spent the first ten years of her life roaming those hills, and the second ten years of her life yearning to get as far from those hills as she could.
Life in a double-wide is fine when you're seven, but by the time you're seventeen, you start thinking that there has to be a better way.
Jenna had been raised in a world where women are bred not to have ambitions beyond the confines of the community where they were born. A third of the girls in her high school class were mothers by graduation day. Jenna rebelled. Beginning with community college, she had climbed a ladder that led to Air Force Officer Training School, to flight school at Laughlin AFB, and now here. Her yearning to get away from the Ozarks had led her to the rugged wilderness of the Kettle River Range.
It was a hell on earth that not everyone in their section of thirty-two had gotten through — but Jenna had.
So too had her partner in the exercise, a young lieutenant from upstate New York. His twisted ankle had meant that they were finally captured on the fourth day, but he acknowledged that without Jenna's ingenuity, they would have been captured the first day.
The mock POW camp had been its own special kind of hell, but being among those who were captured last, they had endured less of it. After the whole experience, there were several dropouts from the program who had simply given up on a career path as a combat pilot.
Only two in the entire section were never captured — Lieutenant Troy Loensch and Lieutenant Hal Coughlin. Loensch had successfully evaded capture and had walked out. He had walked into a gas station on Highway 395 and asked to use the phone. Hal was found on the third day of the exercise, suffering from hypothermia and near death. He wound up in the hospital, and Loensch had wound up with a reprimand for having abandoned his partner.
As she glanced around, Jenna saw Loensch sitting stoically in the back of the room. On one hand she admired him for successfully evading teams of well-equipped troops with night-vision gear, but on the other hand she despised a man who would go off and leave someone who was physically unable to carry on. This especially angered her, given that she had also been with an injured partner.
As the debriefing session concluded and everyone began getting up to break for lunch, his eye caught hers. He stood, deliberately not making eye contact.
"Don't say it," he said. "I've already heard it. I know I screwed up."
"It's good you know that," Jenna said, her eyes drilling into his guilty conscience. "Because you sure as hell did screw up… big-time. I know what you're thinking."
"What am I thinking?"
"You're thinking that crap about how the ends justify the means," Jenna replied in her Ozark drawl. "You're thinking how evading and getting out at all costs is what it's all about."
"And it's not?" Troy parried. "Seems like this deal was named Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape… not `do good for your neighbor.' "
"You're an asshole," Jenna said, shaking her head. "You know that?"
"I know," Troy agreed. "I've been told that, and I cop to it. I am. I know it. Coughlin knows it. But this world is full of assholes and we're in a business where we gotta deal with some of the worst assholes on earth."
"Nice guys finish last, huh?" Jenna said sarcastically.
She wondered whether she would have made it herself if she had abandoned her partner. The idea had occurred to her while she was out there, but she had never seriously entertained the thought.
"Maybe it's just a case of assholes finishing first." Troy shrugged.
Jenna looked into his hard eyes and wondered what it was about him that would make him react one way, and about her to make her react another.
"What if Coughlin had died up there?" Jenna asked. "How'd that have made you feel?"
"Like shit. It would have made me feel like shit. like I was a bigger asshole than I already am."
"So, why'd you do it?"
"I told you," Troy said coldly. "I went up there to survive and evade, so that I wouldn't have to resist and try to escape."
As he watched the slender woman with the short blond hair walk away in disgust, Troy still felt the sting of her words and the tone of her voice with a trace of a hillbilly accent and more than a trace of seething anger.
He had been honest with her. He did know that he had screwed up. When he heard how Coughlin had been found, nearly unconscious, only about thirty feet from where they had parted company that night, Troy had felt the sharp sting of guilt ripping into him like a combat knife with an eight-inch blade. Hal would survive and make a full recovery — but it had been touch and go.
He had rationalized his guilt to himself as he had to Lieutenant Munrough.
The mission of the downed pilot really is to survive, evade, resist, and escape. If it really had been an operational mission, one pilot who escapes is better than two that are captured.
What probably bothered Troy the most was that in his gut, he really was starting to believe in the survival of the asshole at all costs.