Aftershock (2 page)

“Let me stress that we do not want any vigilante group trying to take matters into their own hands. We will have various … indicators planted throughout the area. Until further notice, this area is closed to all hunting. It is now under the control of the United States government. Anyone carrying a weapon of
any
type will be detained and questioned.”

The way he said that would have scared off most people all by itself.

T
he FBI team never caught the killers. But even after they left, hunters avoided that horseshoe-shaped section of woodland like it was diseased. Maybe it was those notices posted all over the place
that the sector was off-limits because of an investigation in progress. Maybe it was something else.

People who lived close to that horseshoe of forest didn’t say it out loud, but you could tell they were relieved. In this state, you can get a hunting license just by filling out a form. No tests. And with the weapons some of them used, there should have been. Every once in a while, a wild shot would fly out of the woods.

Years ago, a little girl who had been playing in her own backyard had been crippled by a stray bullet. They never found who fired that shot. People knew something like that could always happen again. Not that they were against hunting, they made sure to tell you.

“Why” doesn’t count, only “what.” And what the hunters did was stay out of that section of the woods.

T
hat’s how I was trained. The best way to secure a perimeter is to raise the stakes. The more the enemy had to ante up, the fewer would even sit down at the table.

Dolly spent a lot of time behind our house. Gardening, fixing shelters for animals, always coming up with some new idea. The chances of a stray bullet hitting her weren’t high, but I’m not a gambler.

I met Dolly when she was a nurse, working with a Médecins Sans Frontières team, deep inside a kill-zone they should never have entered. They believed that their
raison d’être
—to save lives without regard to ideology—was known throughout the world, and that their mission was respected by all. So it wouldn’t matter if they were captured by the “wrong” side, especially in a war where people changed sides every day.

But once they were on the ground, it only took them a short while to realize that none of them were safe. Especially the women.
Still, they stood their ground. Some soldiers get “brave” and “stupid” mixed up, but no one with Dolly’s team did.

I found that out when I came to. I’d been walking drag, so the land mine’s explosion hadn’t torn me up the way it had the column in front of me. But my right thigh took a shrapnel fragment that tunneled in like a metallic termite.

I knew I had to cut it out. I sterilized the blade with wooden matches. My hands were steady enough, but the damn thing was buried too deep for me to get at it without risking the femoral artery. So all I could do was squeeze a tube of antibiotic paste into the wound, gauze-wrap it down, tape it tightly in place, and start moving.

The leg wouldn’t take any weight, and I knew that every movement would send blood pulsing even harder inside me. But anything was better than staying where I was—it’s only in movies that people sneer at torture.

I was carrying what the guy who sold it to me had called a “Vietnam tomahawk.” It made a crutch out of a tree limb so easily that I vowed never to work without one ever again.

After that, I could move pretty well, but not as quietly as I wanted to.

T
hey’d issued us GPS units, promised all we had to do was tap the little screen and they’d send in an evac team. Even if I’d believed them—and I don’t think any of us did—I knew what they’d do if they only got one signal, instead of at least half a dozen.

So I took off my GPS, set the alarm on my electronic watch for three hours, tapped “vibrate,” and shoved it between the pulled pin and the contact point on the baseball grenade, so that only the unit’s width kept it from exploding. With any luck, the “vibrate” alarm would pop the watch loose and set off the grenade.

That was for the people who’d sent us in. The people we’d been sent to kill couldn’t know how many had been on our team. If the grenade did its work, anyone coming across the bodies would think the land mine had gotten us all.

And even if someone stationed behind us was also radio-signaling to the other side, a body count wouldn’t help much, not with all that splatter.

That was all I could think to do. That, and get as deep into the brush as I could, following my compass to true north. For a man like me, true north was always away from the enemy.

I
kept hearing the voice of my old
juteux
, playing like an endless loop in my head:
“Aujourd’hui, vous allez me haïr, et certains vont même prier pour que je casse ma pipe. Mais un jour, vous souviendrez de moi et vous me remercierez. Parce que ce jour-là, si vous êtes toujours en vie, ce sera grâce à moi.”

I remember that sadistic scum like it was yesterday. Smiling at our pain. I didn’t bless him like he’d once promised I would. But I reluctantly acknowledged that, were it not for that training, I might not still be moving.

There’s a reason why the finest credential any merc could carry back in those days was to have served in La Légion Étrangère. I’d only done the minimum—five years. Long enough to earn my citizenship, but not long enough to qualify for speciality instruction.

That last, it was only for lifers. Why would I want that? That whole “loyalty to France” they never stopped preaching was a one-way street down a blind alley. The citizenship you earned by war didn’t make you French. All you really earned by signing on was the right to be expendable.

But the training
was
the finest—if you survived it. The Legion lost more recruits during training than any other fighting force
in the world. Gave the survivors still another useless medal to show off.

Today, they say it’s different. Now they ask questions. The Legion’s image as a haven for those who wanted to leave their past behind is out of date. Now aspiring recruits are subjected to detailed Interpol background checks.

“We don’t accept the hardened criminals anymore, the murderers or rapists,” the paper quoted an officer, “so this makes our job easier.”

I didn’t need to be fluent in French to understand what the officer was saying: “We have no more colonies, so we have no need of disposable outlaws.”

I
don’t know how much ground I actually covered. When I woke up, I was in some kind of medical tent, lying on a cot, an IV running into each arm. I twitched the toes on the leg that had taken the shrapnel, and gave thanks for the pain that followed.

I kept my eyes slitted so I could gather data. There was a lot of movement inside the tent, but I couldn’t see any weapons, so I knew I wasn’t a captive. Or a comrade.

Voices. Not frantic, but tight and clipped, the way medics talk in the field. English, French, Italian, Spanish. Couple more languages I couldn’t recognize.

I made a little noise, opened my eyes just as she came over.

Dolly, I mean.

“Vous parlez le français?”

“Un peu,”
I lied.

“English, then? American?”

“Yes.”

“Me, too. I’m a farm girl. Born and raised in Indiana.”

I didn’t say anything more. I didn’t know if she was asking me
where I was born and raised, but I did know that answering her by claiming I was a citizen of
any
country would brand me for what I really was—no armed white man had any business being where they found me.

“My name is Dolly. I’m a nurse. The surgeons took a little metal out of your leg. The IVs are an antibiotic feed and a saline solution. You won’t be able to move for a while, but you should make a full recovery once you’re evacuated.”

“Where am I?”

“In the Triangle. Just north of the RBC.”

“RBC” was what the French used to call the area that the Belgians held on to for such a long time. For us, it was just “the Congo.”

Mercenaries might tell you all kinds of stories about why they’re fighting, but the only truth is that they get paid to do it. Who the paymaster is, that’s a question you don’t ask. The money’s always in hard currency, directly into your “home” account.

They
have
to pay good. Whether a merc claimed he signed on to fight Communism or liberate the downtrodden proletariat, it wouldn’t matter if he was captured. There’s a Geneva Convention for POWs, but fighting under a foreign flag meant you weren’t entitled to that protection. Ask whoever’s the current dictator of Equatorial Guinea.

Not so when I’d been a
légionnaire
. Every one of us—not officers, they weren’t “us”—was fighting under a foreign flag. None of us were French. But the Legion was exempt. If any of us were ever captured, we’d be entitled to POW status.

Some said that this was only right. After all, why should we be regarded as mercenaries if we could only be called into action by one country?

They told us this POW business many times. What they didn’t tell us was that guerrilla fighters didn’t give a damn about any Geneva Convention.

Some of us, you could see they didn’t care if they lived or died.
Such feelings were permitted, but only if they accepted that the enemy had to die before they did.

None of that ever mattered to me. I knew how the French regarded all of us. We might be citizens on paper, but none of us could ever be one of them.

And I knew that any merc claiming to be a former
légionnaire
wouldn’t buy himself mercy from anyone, anywhere.

“The Triangle” could mean Chad or the Sudan. My money was on Chad. Even if Qaddafi had another aneurysm and again proclaimed that Chad was actually part of Libya, he wouldn’t send troops this far south.

And even if that foaming-mouth psycho
did
send them, they wouldn’t go all the way. You can order soldiers only so far. If it’s a choice between jumping off a cliff or lobbing a grenade into an officer’s foxhole, somebody’s going to handle it. And nobody’s going to talk about it.

I didn’t say anything about Chad. I wasn’t posing as a historian, and I didn’t think telling her that La Légion had done some work there before I’d even enlisted would be a smart idea.

“How are you going to get out?” I asked her.

“There’s a road. Not much of one, but good enough. It’ll be a bumpy ride, but we’ll get … we’ll get to where there’s a plane waiting. Probably in less than three hours. Unless we run across some hostiles.”

“Who?”

“You mean, which side? It doesn’t matter. Either they’ll let us through or they won’t,” she said. A warrior’s fatalism: You fight. You live or you die. There is nothing else.

“Where are my … my weapons?”

“The only weapons you had when we found you were a pistol and some sort of hatchet.”

“Can I have them back?”

“No. I’m sorry, but we never carry weapons. If we’re stopped, the only chance we have of being allowed to proceed is if they take
our mission for what it really is. A weapon, that would make it seem as if—”

“I don’t mean this minute; I mean, when you drop me off.”

“Drop you off?”

“What else could you do?”

“Everyone goes back the same way. At the end of the truck road is where we have the plane waiting.”

“To where?”

“This time? Switzerland.”

I calculated my chances. Didn’t take long. I’d have a better chance in Switzerland, even if they turned me over to the UN. The blue helmets would know what I’d been doing in the Congo, but they wouldn’t do anything about it. Far as they were concerned, the Congo was a stable area.

Working as a mercenary was only a problem if I was captured by the wrong side. So, if I could get to a place that thought
all
sides were wrong, I’d be at true north.

Of course, I knew they wouldn’t let me stay there long.

A
fter I healed, I went back to work, but I wasn’t going back to a jungle. Between surviving the land mine and not catching malaria, I figured I’d used up any luck I’d ever have down there.

In the haze of recovering from the wound, getting my hands on my money, and crossing the ocean, I was never sure if I had just fever-dreamed Dolly. But, years later, I saw her again. In an AIDS ward in San Francisco. I wasn’t a patient; I was there for the same reason she was—to do a job.

My job was the opposite of hers. But no less merciful. The people who hired me loved the man who had to die. The man who
wanted
to die. But the doctors were keeping him alive—human
guinea pigs were hard to come by, and who better to test the latest advances in pain management on?

Dolly remembered me. But all we had time for was a cup of coffee—she was moving on again. Some terminal-cancer-cure thing they were trying out. High up in the Chiricahua Mountains, where they could see anyone coming for miles around. Mercenaries work in America, too.

I wished she would stay, but that wish was buried inside a place I couldn’t let show. So I was glad when she left—I couldn’t do what I’d come there to do with her around. It wasn’t that I thought she’d finger me or anything, it was that I … just couldn’t stand the idea of her thinking of me as still doing the same work I’d been doing when we first met. And I couldn’t back up my story by burning the people who hired me—that would be the same as breaking my word.

T
hat cup of coffee was long enough for me to learn her whole name. I didn’t trick it out of her.

I might have told her a bunch of lies, but, considering what I’d been doing when we met, that would have been stupid. Not stupid because she would have seen through them, but stupid because I didn’t want her to think I would lie to her. Ever.

Just because I couldn’t explain any of that to myself didn’t mean it wasn’t true. I somehow knew I needed her to trust me if there was ever to be a chance for … for things I couldn’t allow myself to think about.

A few months passed. She never called the number I’d left with her, and I tried to make myself stop wishing she would.