“Boss, maybe that’s not so smart.”
Akil’s words glanced off Crocker’s back as he hurried west. When he closed within a hundred meters of the trucks, he stopped and squatted in a row of new corn. The headlights shone almost directly in his eyes. Squinting, he saw figures standing near the front of the first truck and what looked like shorter, thinner people unloading objects from the backs of the vehicles.
What the hell are they doing?
He continued another fifty meters, then pushed south in a long, wide arc until he reached a row of bushes. Here the thick smell of human decay entered his nose and throat again, and he thought for a moment he’d be sick. It was a smell he’d experienced before but never gotten used to-like the reek of a putrefying animal, only a hundred times worse.
From this vantage, perpendicular to the trucks, he saw frail, gaunt figures-short, like teenage boys and girls-unloading naked bodies and carrying or dragging them to what appeared to be a long trench. He counted twenty teenagers in rags, and as he did, his whole body started to burn with rage. He couldn’t even begin to count the number of bodies, because the trucks were large, and stacked high.
Sick, evil fucks…
From here he couldn’t determine the number of guards and drivers, so he continued west, past the front of the vehicles. Now he made out several uniformed guards standing beside the farther truck-the one without the trailer-holding AK-47s. One guard was wearing a rain poncho with a hood and had a cigarette clenched in his teeth.
As one of the teenagers passed him, dragging a corpse, the guard kicked the kid in the back so that he stumbled, let go of the body, and fell into the trench. The uniformed man threw his head back and issued a shrill, high laugh that hit Crocker in the face like a Mike Tyson uppercut.
His anger sent him scurrying closer on his hands and knees. The teenagers moved past like zombies, their knees, ribs, and cheekbones sticking out at sharp angles, while the guards with the guns made comments and cracked jokes.
Outrage, disgust, fury, and the conviction that someone had to pay for this motivated him to return the way he had come until he reached the back of the trailerless truck. Waiting until the coast was clear, then scooting under the rear axle, he removed the suppressor from his belt and screwed it into the barrel of the SIG Sauer thinking that his colleagues were far enough away to escape should something happen to him.
Crocker slowly crawled forward, located the legs of the guard wearing the poncho, and came up slowly. He was so close he could hear the guard clearing this throat, then spitting at the back of one of the teenagers.
The girl turned to face the guard. That’s when Crocker rose, aimed, and put a bullet in the base of the guard’s skull just below the green helmet. His head exploded and he fell forward, the sound drowned out by the noise of the engines. No one seemed to notice. Not even the girl, who turned away with dead eyes and continued pushing the body toward the trench.
The kids did their grim work silently. The rain hissed. Steam rose from the headlights to Crocker’s right.
Five more rounds.
He cut down the second guard with a shot between his shoulder blades that tore through his heart.
Four.
The driver of the truck saw the guard slump and leaned out of the cab to see what was going on. Crocker sprang out from under the truck and yanked the driver’s leg out from under him so he slipped and hit his head on the metal step. Finished him off with a swipe of his knife across his throat.
Thunder rolled in from the north like a reproach.
Two guards down, one driver.
He skirted around the front of the trailerless truck low to the ground, wet from head to toe, forgetting the smell, where he was, everything except the task in front of him. Crouched near the right front bumper, he saw the back of another guard, his AK propped on his shoulder. Crocker rose, aimed, and squeezed the trigger in one continuous motion.
The bullet entered under the guard’s chin and clanged as it hit the top of his helmet. Almost immediately another uniformed man at the front of the second truck lowered his AK and fired. The first shot tore through Crocker’s left shoulder and into his collarbone. The second whizzed past his chin as he dove into the man’s chest, causing him to fall backward and let go of his AK, which flipped and landed on the back of Crocker’s leg. Partly stunned, Crocker reached behind his back and grabbed the barrel as the guard reached for his pistol. Two kids dragging bodies stopped and stared in disbelief as Crocker drove the butt of the AK into the guard’s throat.
Behind him he heard footsteps, but was blinded by the headlights. Breathing hard, he circled left around the trailerless truck, then slipped and fell so that the AK he carried slithered into the trench and disappeared in a mound of twisted limbs and torsos. Glimpsing the horror frozen on a dead’s woman’s face, he decided not to go in after it, and felt for the SIG Sauer in the wet grass instead.
He found it but couldn’t remember if it had one round left or two. Covered with mud and blood, he spotted a driver forty feet ahead of him running in the direction of the camp. The rain had picked up, making it harder to gain traction, but Crocker pulled himself up and pushed. Got within twenty feet of the driver, and was trying to aim in the dark when the man turned and fired three shots in succession that barely missed Crocker’s head.
He shot back, then slipped and hit the ground with his chin. On his belly, he heard the sound of feet running past. Thought for a second that they belonged to soldiers, then realized it was the young prisoners running away.
Noticing the dark splotch of blood that had traveled all the way down his chest to the top of his pants, he limped back to the trucks. In the glove compartment of the first one he found a Type 54 Chinese military pistol and two egg-shaped Soviet F1 hand grenades. He ripped a web belt from one of the dead guards and tightened it under his arm as a makeshift tourniquet.
Then he hobbled away, hoping the teenagers would find sympathetic countrymen who would take them in and nourish them back to life. It was the best he could manage, he thought, but hardly enough.
Across the field where his colleagues were waiting, Crocker watched Akil smear QuikClot into the wound, then climbed back to his feet and led them south. He refused to answer Akil’s questions about what had happened. “No time to talk about that now,” was his reply.
Despite his loss of blood, the encounter seemed to fill him with determination. When the sun came up, the four men consumed the last of the rice, rested twenty minutes, and continued past farms and around hills, avoiding roads and any kind of structure, Akil and Crocker carrying the tarp containing Sam, and Dawkins following.
Crocker urged them on. “Faster. As fast as you can.” A grim, resolute aspect had come over his face, and his eyes seemed focused on a single objective. The rain proved equally relentless, resulting in slick paths and difficult mud.
Dawkins had no idea how Crocker was able to continue, carrying Sam with his injured right arm and shoulder, but somehow he did. When they stopped, which they did every two hours, he noticed that Crocker had difficulty raising either of his arms above his waist.
They had ample water but no food. Akil suggested that they wait in a forest stretching up a hill while he circled around it and recced.
Crocker refused. “No, no,” he said. “We can’t stop!”
“Why?”
He offered no reason. He seemed pushed by a relentless will to get to the border and safety, and to report on what he’d seen.
Sometimes he couldn’t remember if he was awake or asleep, especially when the sky turned dark and the rain fell in a steady whisper.
In a state of semiconsciousness, he heard Akil call, “Boss! Boss!”