“What the fuck does that mean?”
Akil’s wide face creased into a grin. “It means you’re feeling better. Later we’ll go looking for some Korean babes to keep us warm.”
“You’re crazier than me, and always have been.”
“Crazy keeps me sane.”
Now that Crocker’s mind was clearer, he realized that he’d forgotten to examine Sam. In the reflected light from the fire he cut away the right leg of Sam’s wet suit. His ankle was completely dislocated, and the fibula and tibia had both sustained compound open-wound fractures. The pain had to be excruciating, yet as far as he knew, Sam hadn’t swallowed any medicine, nor had he complained.
Most of what Crocker found in the med kit were Israeli bandages, tourniquets, tape, QuikClot, and triangular bandages-more suited to dealing with combat wounds. At the bottom of Suarez’s pack he found a universal SAM splint and a vial of extra-strength Motrin.
He fed Sam two pills, cleaned the wounds, and stabilized his ankle by placing the splint around the bottom of his bare foot, wrapping it around both sides of his ankle and securing the aluminum alloy bands with a bandage and tape.
Crocker slept for thirty minutes and woke up remembering Suarez, Naylor, and Hutchins. He asked Akil, who was still awake, to watch the camp and keep the fire going while he went back to look for them.
“Is that smart, boss? You want the pistol?”
“You keep it. Guard the camp.”
At the beach he looked out over the bay and saw that the Ung-do complex was no longer burning. Patrol boats and helicopters with searchlights traversed the seas south, west, and even east of the island. None of them bothered to look north.
Eventually they’ll turn this way, he said to himself, trying to be realistic. Their current vulnerable state afforded no margin for error. Nor could they rely on hope.
He searched up and down the beach along the east side of the peninsula, then along the little area that jutted south, then west, making sure to walk along the water’s edge so as not to leave footprints.
No sign of Suarez, Naylor, or Hutchins. No wreckage from the SDV, either. He gazed south one last time, praying that they were still alive and hadn’t been captured.
Then he searched the beach again and tried not to feel sad.
He awoke stiff from his neck down and squinted into the sun shining through the leaves. The air carried the scent of burning wood. He saw Akil cleaning and drying his SIG Sauer by the fire pit. Sam lay beside him, sleeping. As Crocker stretched, he noticed that the skin around Sam’s ankle was purple and swollen.
“How long did I sleep?” he whispered. “Where’s Dawkins?”
“He went to the stream to wash himself.”
“This isn’t a fucking camping trip. You shouldn’t have let him go alone.”
“He insisted. I think he shit himself.”
“Which way’d he go?”
Akil pointed to his left-generally east.
Crocker pushed through bushes still wearing the smart suit and Merrell boots. Past a patch of honeysuckle, he saw Dawkins naked except for a gray T-shirt, with the water midway up his thighs-pale, vulnerable, and lost in his own thoughts. He was the kind of guy Crocker had passed hundreds of times in the mall and never given a thought to. He was the quiet, smart, physically meek student he used to terrorize in school.
Crocker had never asked him about the circumstances of his captivity, but wanted to. Now, as he stepped down the embankment toward the six-foot-wide stream, he saw something move up ahead on his right. The flash of a blue shirt, and then a boy of maybe seven holding a bamboo fishing pole. The kid turned right when he reached the stream and walked away from them, disappearing around a bend.
Back in the clearing, Crocker knelt beside Akil and said, “There are people living nearby, which means of one of us has to recce this end of the peninsula. You know anything about it?”
“From what I remember reading, it’s sparsely populated. Small family farms and swampland. The population centers are farther south.”
“The other thing we’ve got to do is locate an exfil site big enough to land a helicopter,” Crocker said. “If we find one that’s far enough from civilization, we’ll signal tonight.”
“Sounds like you’ve been thinking.”
“If we don’t find one, we’ll keep moving and searching, which won’t be easy with Sam. But if we follow the stream and use the purification tablets, we should have plenty of water. We also need to start looking for food.”
“Prime rib?”
“Fish heads and rabbit balls. I’ll set some traps.”
An hour later, while Crocker was boiling water, a Russian-made Mi-14 helicopter passed overhead, then banked left back over the bay and returned. They hid under the thickest foliage they could find and waited. After a half-dozen passes it moved on.
After the sun went down, they feasted on two large trout Akil had speared in the stream, drank water, and rested by the fire. Shortly after midnight they broke camp, covered the fire pit, and hiked three-quarters of a mile northeast, picking their way through pine trees and swamp to a camping area that had been cleared near the beach with two rotting picnic tables. The overgrown narrow dirt road that fed it from the north looked like it hadn’t been used in months.
While Akil, Sam, and Dawkins waited in the woods, Crocker stood in the clearing and activated the Emerson GPS distress marker for a full minute, then flashed it three times according to the prearranged emergency signal. He repeated the process three more times and waited. When an hour passed and no one came, he signaled again.
Crocker repeated the same sequence for the next three hours, while Akil sat with Sam and Dawkins. Straining his ears for the sound of an approaching helicopter, he grew frustrated. The signal from the Emerson distress marker wouldn’t last forever, and they had no extra batteries.
Figuring that there was a possibility that the North Koreans had picked up the signal, he joined the others and they hiked as fast as they could two miles north along the beach, skirting several huts, until he found what he thought was a suitable clearing. They made makeshift beds of twigs and dried grass to elevate their bodies off the cold ground. Then Sam, Dawkins, and Akil slept while Crocker kept watch.
As the sun spread its fingers across the sky Crocker considered the possible reasons why the Carl Vinson’s rescue team hadn’t responded-weather, mechanical problems, North Korean air patrols. He decided there was no reason to lose hope. They would try again tonight and every night after that until the battery wore out. Then he’d think of something else.
Three nights later, Davis sat in the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) on the Carl Vinson, positioned approximately eighteen nautical miles from the Hamgyong Peninsula, staring at the large digital map of North Korea in front of him, praying for a red beacon to appear. Even though the clock on the wall read 0213 hours, the dark room was still crowded with more than a dozen male and female techs sitting before screens and computer terminals, monitoring nearby ships, aircraft, and weather.
Davis had spent the past several nights and mornings right here, watching in frustration as the emergency beacon moved north up the east side of the peninsula, and the Air-sea Rescue Team (ART) failed to respond. He had volunteered to be part of the four-man team that would fly on the specially designed stealth Blackhawk helicopter-the same one used in the Bin Laden raid-that waited fully fueled and geared up on the Vinson’s flight deck. All he, the other three members of the team, and the 160th SOAR Night Stalker pilot and copilot needed was a go order from the carrier’s commander, Vice Admiral Stanley Greene, who had been granted final authority by the commanders at SOCOM in Tampa, and they’d be aloft.
The first night the emergency beacon had showed on the screen, Greene ordered the rescue team to stand down because of the number of North Korean air patrols in the area. The second night he used the excuse of unstable weather. Last night he’d explained that the survivors on the ground were signaling close to a populated area. Davis had pointed out that the latest satellite imagery and heat signatures indicated that it was only a collection of small farms about four miles from the site.