That was as a second-class scout, still pretty green, his first full year as a scout. The next summer, at the wilderness camp in the Adirondacks, now Star rank, he laughed at the stories, told a lot of them himself, and took a leak whenever he damn well pleased.
He was still a little scared, actually, but no way would he let on, even to himself.
His days as a scout were all flooding back. He remembered one of his toughest tests— to join one of the scouts’ “secret” lodges, he’d had to endure an initiation that consisted of being left alone in the wilderness with only a map and compass. He was given two hours to get back to camp.
He’d hurt his knee a few days before the initiation, and soon after he started he slipped down a ravine and twisted it pretty bad. Mongoose knew from one of his friends that older scouts monitored an initiate carefully; they were always within shouting distance in case something went wrong.
He could have called out. His injury would have been considered a mitigating factor and he would have probably been given another chance at the initiation. But he didn’t. Instead he hobbled on down the mountain, finding a stick to use as a crutch and showing up at camp nearly six hours later, well past the deadline. When the lodge elder— that was what they called the leader— asked why he was so late, Mongoose just shrugged. He’d thrown away the stick before coming into camp, and refused to let his knee be an excuse. He told the others he’d failed the initiation because he had taken too much time hiking in.
A few days later, the kids in the lodge “kidnapped” him from his tent, and made him a member anyway. They all knew what had happened, even though he didn’t tell anyone.
That was one of the proudest moments of his life. Even now. It compared to the first day he’d flown a jet fighter alone, and the day his son was born— actually the day after, when he was telling everyone he knew, because the day it happened was too consuming to feel anything but the moment.
In some ways, the initiation was his most difficult accomplishment. It would have been so easy to make excuses.
Another day strayed into his memory, a snatch of a day. He had his father’s car and hit into another car in a parking lot, breaking the taillight.
He’d gotten out, inspected the cars. There was no damage to his. The other car was a relatively new BMW.
He hopped back into his dad’s car and took off.
Coward.
Mongoose kicked himself for doing that, as if it had happened this morning instead of thirteen or fourteen years before. That wasn’t him — he was the kid who hiked down the mountain on a makeshift crutch, and refused to make excuses. He should have left a note on the guy’s windshield, offered to make good, whatever the consequences.
Plenty of times he had. But the car came back at him now. He pushed down against the ground, kicked out some more dirt in his miniature bunker, felt his knee tweak a bit.
Scouting was a good time. The best camping was during the winter, when you literally froze your tush off just taking a dump. He almost never managed more than an hour or two sleeping at night, even when they stayed in cabins. He was always so tired he’d sleep the entire day when he got home.
It felt colder than that now, and it was going to get even worse. He rubbed his arms against his chest, moved around a bit, stood and walked a little.
He wanted Robby to go into Boy Scouts, assuming they still existed. Assuming they’d let him join with his father in the service. Military life being what it was it could be hard to join an organization. But plenty of kids did.
Tough as hell to raise a family when you were gone fighting a war. To be away when they needed you, when your wife needed you…
He caught himself, got back into checklist mode.
A good radio was essential. He could walk back to the trees, then find his way to the pack from there. He’d use the road as much as he dared; find it from the trees, then walk parallel until he came to the wadi. From there it would be easy to get back to the seat.
First, though, there might be a way to fix the radio he had. Shake it, at least— nothing wrong with banging something to make it work, A-Bomb used to say.
Good old A-Bomb. He’d be busting an artery looking for him.
If he was still alive. More than likely he was in worse shape. Maybe hadn’t even gotten out alive.
And it was Mongoose’s fault. He’d taken the planes low to smoke the Scuds, even though it was dangerous and against all sorts of cautions and orders and common sense.
Not Hog sense, but that wasn’t the same thing.
Mongoose took the radio in one hand and gripped the gun by the barrel. Not exactly something a technician might approve of, but what the hell— he banged them together, then tried another quick broadcast.
When he heard nothing, he put radio away and began walking.
CHAPTER 28
It wasn’t until after Dixon had told Colonel Knowlington about Mongoose that he felt the true depth of his uselessness here. It wasn’t as if he expected to be tasked to fly up there and bring him back— in fact, the air tasking order had already given the Devil Squadron a heavy agenda; there probably was no room in the frag for anything like that and other units were already assigned search-and-rescue duty anyway. But there was no question that Dixon was far from the action, a million miles from where he belonged.
He finished up his work, then checked around to see if anything new had come in on Major Johnson’s flight.
Nothing. Not a good sign. But there was nothing he could do about it, sitting in his Riyadh cubbyhole. Reluctantly, he decided to keep his dinner date with an American family in a “guest” development not far from the center of the city. He hoped real food might take his mind off his uselessness for a few hours.
Thanks partly to their great oil wealth, the Saudis used a large number of foreigners to help run their country. Many of the workers were domestics and drudges from poor countries such as Pakistan. But there was also a fair number of highly skilled workers, including Westerners. Most lived apart from the rest of Saudi society, their “hosts” not wanting to risk the contamination of Western mores in a Muslim culture. His new acquaintances— cousins of an Air Force officer he’d gone through basic training with— lived in one such compound. It was a kind of gilded ghetto where, for the most part, Islamic strictures such as those about women’s dress and alcohol could be safely ignored.
But that didn’t explain why his friend greeted him at the front door in a full-body chem suit.
“You’re late. Where’s your protective gear?”
“Do I have the right house?” asked Dixon.
“It’s me, Fernandez,” said the man through the suit. “I’ve been waiting for you. Come in. We’re on Scud alert. Everyone else is in the shelter.”
“Shelter?”
“It’s not really a shelter, but it will do as long as there’s not a direct hit. The walls are reinforced and it’s airtight. We have an air exchanger but I don’t trust it. Where’s your suit?”
“I don’t have one.”
“What? Well come on, we’ll get you a mask at least. Come on.”
Like a lot of other guys in Saudi Arabia, Dixon didn’t take the chemical warfare threat very seriously. Nor did he think much of the Scuds, which were annoying but not particularly accurate.
Though maybe that ought to worry him a bit.
Inside the hallway, Dixon had to duck around a crystal chandelier that looked like it belonged in an opera house. They walked through the public part of the sprawling one — level house, past a luxurious, Western-style living room and a dining room that could have been in a palace somewhere, then down a second hallway into a back room.