Born of War (13 page)

The stubbornness she had inherited from her father gave Karen a chance.

The captors held their guns to their chests yelling as if they were more frightened than the prisoners. There were four of them with the little white pickup truck. It had one tire that was the wrong size, causing the truck to be on a slant. One of the guards pointed for them to sit down. She tried to not make eye contact and pulled her scarf further over her head and face. Her knees hurt as she held her hands above her head.

“Stay easy,” Peter whispered to her.

The guard heard him say something and went over and struck him with the butt of the rifle. Peter rubbed the blood from his cheek but continued to look down.

It soon became clear who the leader was. He seemed to be barely in his twenties, skinny, with bony knees that stood out with his ragged, torn shorts. He would yell at the others and move his hands in a frantic shake.

Finally, they pushed the old man aside and told him to go. It seemed a decision of necessity. She would learn later that the little food they had meant that an extra person was a burden that could not be fed. The burden needed to be dismissed if it was little threat and shot if it was more. Because of a small silver cross Mataa wore on a necklace, the guards realized he was a Christian. One of the guards pulled out a machete and was ready to use it when they squabbled for some time and he put it down.

Karen watched the old man trying to move as fast as he could despite his age and tired legs. As he reached the top of the hill, the youngest one fired his AK-47 with what seemed to be a well-aimed shot. Without meaning to, she screamed, causing the others to turn towards her. She could see the bullet kick up some dirt near the rock by the old man. He never looked back. He only ran faster and then finally disappeared. Her scream had saved him from a second shot.

As the old man disappeared over the horizon she thought about how much she wanted to run and catch up to him.

But she hesitated and Mataa shook like a leaf.

The young one ran over to her yelling, shaking his fist, and then raised his rifle up ready to strike. But the leader intervened, putting his arm between the young one and Karen. She barely spoke the language but got the sense that the leader was more concerned for his newfound goods than feeling any sympathy for the captives.

A third man, with a pockmarked face, drove the truck and turned it around while the three prisoners knelt by the rutted road. Both she and Peter remained still.

The driver yelled as the smaller wheel got stuck in a rut, and the two guards came over and pushed. The leader kept watch over the captives. The truck rocked back and forth and then jerked out of the furrow. It turned towards the village of the dead.

“They are dead. A disease.” She struggled to speak. It was hard to both breathe and say anything.

“You say nothing.” The leader spoke English. He turned to the young one, who pulled a length of cord from the cab of the truck. He tied the hands of Karen and Peter, on separate ropes, to the back tailgate. Mataa's hands he wrapped tightly with the cord, but left him free from the tailgate. It was as if they cared little whether Mataa made the journey. In fact, it seemed that they hoped Mataa would run and be shot. They then sat on the back end as the truck started to move towards the east. It meant that they would all pass through the village of the dead.

“See, lady.” The leader pointed to the huts. The village was silent. “They won't follow.”

He was right.

The old man would bring news of the capture of the two Western doctors. He would also tell Ferfer of the village of death. The Ethiopians would hesitate to follow the trail.

They continued on well past midnight, heading south and then east. She overheard them talking. They were determined to avoid the larger town of Beledweyne. They were set on keeping on the move; their bounty, like two sacks of gold, in tow.

Finally, sometime after midnight, they stopped at a grove of trees near the Shebelle River. She could see that the road went straight into the water, as if it had been used in the dry months without restriction. Now, the crossing took more of a plan.

Karen could tell, after listening to the conversations between the men, that the leader was called Xasan. He had yellowed fingernails, which were broken, and dirt was jammed underneath.

“We are thirsty,” Peter bravely spoke up.

“There is a river.” Xasan pointed to the water. It ran red like all of the mud puddles they had passed.

The guards let them go down to the water's edge.

“Don't drink,” Peter whispered. “Don't drink.” He repeated the whisper.

She cupped the cool water and poured it over face.

“God, I want to drink.” Her self-control gave her the only chance to survive.

As they stood on the river's edge, Xasan suddenly stopped. He pointed to the shore just a few yards from Karen. He silently waved his arm for her to move towards him. The moon's light glimmered on the surface with one beacon of light extending in a straight line like a flashlight. She saw something move across the river's surface.

“Mamba.” Xasan pointed to the snake as it moved back into the reeds next to the water's edge.

Oh, God.
She tried to control her breathing again. The land was as terrifying as these people. Hunger and thirst and death.

The young guard seemed the most frightened.

He moved around the road looking back and forth with his rifle pointed into the darkness. He constantly pulled it up to his shoulder ready to fire. He yelled out a warning in his language, as if the shouting would scare off the mamba.

The snake had reason to be feared. Karen recalled the briefing she had been given before coming to Ferfer.

“Avoid the mamba! It will run from you if you let it. But if you corner it, it will come after you and you cannot avoid its strike!” the instructor had told her.

“But how do we treat someone if they come to the refugee camp with a mamba bite?” she naively asked.

“Don't worry. He will never make it to the camp.” The instructor was right. The victim would be dead before the snake released its bite. The venom was considered to be the most deadly in the world.

They fear mambas but not Neisseria meningitidis?
She thought of how strange the dichotomy. With a mamba at least one had a chance. Given an escape route, the snake would run. There was no such option with the meningitis.

Xasan yelled at him again. And then things became quiet again.

They all lay down at the base of a tree with Xasan and the young one on the other side of their prisoners. The driver had the luxury of sleeping in the cab of the truck, which was parked under the branches. The fourth guard had broken his leg sometime in the past. It was deformed and he dragged it as he walked. He slept in the bed of the truck.

It seemed that the captors were all of the same family or at least of the same clan. They all had large, curved noses that seemed to reflect a common inheritance.

“You not tied up.” Xasan untied both of them as Karen and Peter huddled together next to each other. “Nowhere to go.” He left Mataa tied up.

The two understood. It seemed that all of the bushes were full of thorns and any escape would be, without a weapon, as deadly as staying with their captors. Mataa stood the best chance at escape but they seemed to care little about him.

“My backpack.”

One of the guards had tossed it into the back of the truck.

“It has a net. Can we have the net?” She had remembered to always carry a net with her in the bottom of the sack.

“You afraid of sick?”

“Yes.” She didn't hesitate. “We are doctors.”

“You are doctors?” Xasan asked.

“Yes, we don't come here to fight.”

“Where were you when my son died of malaria?”

“I am sorry. If I could, I would have helped.”

He didn't seem to care.

“Here, here is your backpack.”

She lay down next to the tree and Peter. She reached deep inside the backpack and felt for the mosquito net.

“We will have to share,” she whispered.

Fortunately, both she and Peter wore boots. They huddled close together as they wrapped as much of their upper bodies as they could with the net. Her scarf also helped protect her from the constant buzzing that came from being so close to the water's edge. She waited for all to quiet down. She nudged Peter and handed him a bottle of water she found in her pack.

“You first.” He pushed it back.

She drank from the warm water, trying to stop at the halfway point. It seemed more brutal to stop without emptying it than to not drink from it at all.

Karen handed the half-filled bottle back to him. He finished the bottle in what seemed to be one gulp.

“Here, save this.”

She put the empty bottle back into the backpack. Only a day before, a plastic bottle meant nothing. Now, anything had to be saved as it might have some other use later.

“I also have this.” She had half a pack of chewing gum; she had forgotten it was at the bottom. They split the four pieces and ate one each. She chewed on it until finally the exhaustion and fear took over. She wadded up the backpack and used it as a rough pillow. She took her scarf off and balled it up into as tight a wad as she could manage, and then she buried her face into the center and started to sob in as muffled a cry as she could manage. The silk became wet and she immediately thought how its dampness might attract more mosquitoes. The buzz was a continuous hum circling around her head. The smell of the plastic gloves from the visit to the sick village still lingered on her fingers. It brought back her thoughts of that horror as well.

“We will make it,” Peter whispered to her. “Don't let anything else get into your brain.”

If only she could believe it to be true.

S
everal thousands of miles away, and some many hours later, Skip Nease held his watch up close to his eyes. He pushed the button causing the green glare to illuminate the dial.

He pulled his hat down so the brim would be just above his eyes. Nease lifted the night vision goggles and scanned the horizon. A farm building's fluorescent light some ten miles away gave off a glare that lit up the goggles. He turned them away from the light and scanned down into the mud village below the monitor's bench. Nothing was moving in the complete darkness.

Nease looked to his left along the bench where his other monitors sat, as they also were scanning the simulated village. On the far end, one monitor had a pon-cholike blanket over his head that also covered his laptop.

“Good. Can't see him,” Nease whispered to himself.

“Boss?” His friend leaned over to him.

“Nothing.”

They continued to wait in the darkness. It was a perfect night to simulate what they wanted to do. The moon was hidden behind a total cover of clouds from a front that had been moving in all day. Nease had confirmed the weather was a “go” to Camp Lejeune midafternoon.

The last monitor on the far end wore a headset that was tied to a radio. There should have been no traffic. In the airspace of Georgia the aircraft had to report in, unlike during combat, until they made their final turn to the target.

Nease continued to wait, growing more uncomfortable as he did so.

My damn back!
He had made too many jumps fully loaded with combat gear. The drop of over an extra hundred pounds of water, food and, most important, ammunition, was only a problem over the last ten feet. He was one of the few who could claim a combat drop that came only once in Iraq and Afghanistan. Helicopter drops and fast ropes were common, but the parachute drop was rare. However, it had come at a price to his body.

Damn foot.
His right foot had started to go numb whenever he sat on a hard surface for too long. He stood up for a moment. Standing always helped, and soon the leg and foot came back to life.

The others looked at him but didn't say anything. They knew he could be grumpy.

Nease sat back down and lifted the NVGs again to his eyes.

They have come a long way.
He had bought these at a local gun store and was impressed. They lit up the darkness with a clear glow that helped him make out each of the T-20 targets behind the walls.

If we had these back in the day.
He remembered the ones in Panama that were classified as top-secret gear, twice as bulky, with batteries that lasted for two or three nights at best.

A dull “whoop” caused the forest to become silent. It was followed by another sound that echoed the first. He scanned the night horizon for any signs of movement but saw nothing.

Nease sat up in the chair and as he did, his head rose above the embankment. His face felt the slightest of breezes from across the village. He waited a moment. It became silent again.

They have pulled it off.
He had to admit that he was impressed by the MV-22's ability to stay quiet. As an Army Ranger, he wasn't a fan of the tilt-rotor aircraft that the Marines had been using. It had speed, but he preferred the quiet Blackhawks that he had been trained on for years. The Blackhawks didn't have the range or the speed of the Ospreys but they were not fragile. The helicopters could take multiple rounds of green tracers and keep on moving. It was an oddity of war that Soviet ammunition had a different color for their tracer rounds than American ammunition. They always knew who the bad guys were.

Nease waited and felt the tension grow. It was a dangerous silence. It was the type of silence he enjoyed.

The next sound was the silent thump of a round from an M4 rifle. He knew the quiet noise of each and every particular weapon that both the Marines and Rangers used. He turned his NVGs to the left and saw the train of men stepping through each doorway and the slight flicker of a spark as the round hit the target. It was, to Nease, a work of beauty. The Marines moved, shot, and moved again. These were live rounds and each bullet meant something. The village was made for live rounds.

It was the distance that caused the Marine Special Operations Command to want to visit the farm. It required the Ospreys to leave New River in North Carolina and make the run, with refueling, across South Carolina and most of Georgia. It was as close as they could come to simulating the hit on an embassy or a village in mid-Africa from a base like Djibouti.

Nease had hoped to see the aircraft and meet MarSOC Team 8132, but he knew better. They would be back in North Carolina before first light. It was important that the operation came as close as possible to the real thing. No one lingered to discuss what happened. His monitor would download the target-hit value and send it on to the MarSOC team back at Lejeune.

“In and out,” he said to himself. The mission went as planned. “In and out.”

 

 

“It went well.” The Marine lieutenant colonel was bent over speaking to the young officer sitting in the sling seat of the MV-22.

“Yes, sir.” He had his M4 pointed to the floor, or deck, of the aircraft. He had to pull up his earphone to hear what was said.

“Less than ten minutes.”

Ten minutes or less had been the goal. The mission was to make the raid and cover the village from one end to the next. The officer had a printout of the satellite shot that had been distributed to the Marines on both teams and both aircraft. He gave a thumbs-up to his boss.

The flight back to Lejeune was in near total darkness. The huge engines that powered the MV-22 were as long as a small car. It was intimidating to stand near the propeller of one. It gave a sense of the force required for a machine to both land like a helicopter and then fly through the air at more than 300 knots. The aircraft was an imposing improvement on technology as long as everything stayed in balance. The cabin was small, and with each Marine fully equipped with his weapon, vest loaded with extra magazines, helmet and radio gear, it was a squeeze. The Marines of Team 8132 made it particularly tight as every one of them, with the exception of the captain, had been linebackers for their high school and college teams.

Captain Abo Tola weighed about as much as the gear he carried; however, he could run each of his fellow soldiers into the ground. His three-mile physical fitness time set records at every Marine base he had been stationed on. If the course was flat, he would turn in something with a twelve in it—such as his best time of 12:58. For three miles, Tola ran four-minute miles.

He had inherited the right to be fast. Captain Tola was born in Ethiopia. His parents applied for citizenship and moved, when he was twelve, from Addis Ababa to Washington, DC. He moved from a small capital to a big one.

“You still running?” the Lieutenant Colonel pulled up a seat next to the Captain.

“Yes, sir.” Tola was quiet. He didn't talk much about his track scholarship to the University of Michigan nor how he acquired his citizenship through his years of service with the Marines.

“University of Michigan?”

“Yes, sir. I went there on a track scholarship.” He always said less rather than more. In fact, he was a record-breaker in the 800 meters at Michigan. He would scorch the track with times in the 1:40s. “I remember the first time we saw snow. We arrived at the airport in the dead of winter. My mother thought it was sugar!”

The two laughed at the thought of the two cultures crossing. His life now, however, was to defend America, and he was very good at it.

Tola looked straight ahead for a moment at the Marine across from him on the aircraft. The aircraft dropped suddenly as it hit an air pocket. The loose gear lifted up, was suspended for a second, and then fell back down.

“I am told my grandparents were from the Kara tribe,” Tola said to the Lieutenant Colonel. He had a very cheerful way about himself, like the Kara tribe was known to be. They were modest people from the village of Kara. More specifically, he was from the village of Labuoko. Tola appreciated that his mother carried him to Addis Ababa where she got a job as a housecleaner for the American embassy. His father worked in a small bank, first as the man who cleaned, and then later, after trust was established, he became a teller.

Tola could remember his people running everywhere. When they got lazy they walked everywhere.

“My tribe is Boston Irish.” His boss laughed at his own joke.

It was true, however, that this American world had tribes but that they just didn't call themselves as such.

“Red Sox?”

“Hell, yes.”

Tola was a member of a special generation of new Marines. Like all of the services, Tola's language skills and familiarity with the African culture of Ethiopia had become a valuable asset. The Marines' Special-Purpose Air-Ground Task Force had teams in at least half a dozen African nations teaching their government forces modern warfare.

“Where was your last rotation?”

“I was on 14.1.” Tola had led a team of Marines to Takoradi, Ghana, as a part of a training cycle for that country's defense force. The teams and task forces were designated by an odd numbering system, such as Team 8132 and Task Force 14.1. The Marines knew what it meant.

The two sat in the aircraft in the dark feeling the vibration of the engines that came through the structure. Tola looked around in amazement at the rows of wires and boxes that covered the inside wall. The Osprey was a flying computer. The green and yellow glow from the flight deck was the only illumination to be seen.

“Are your men ready for Saturday?”

“Yes, sir.” The deployment back to Morón would be his fifth. He was in high demand in Spain, where the Marines African Force was based. The command was called the Special-Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force Crisis Response. It was a long name that covered much of the shield painted on the sign in front of the command headquarters in Morón. It meant that they had the responsibility to be the “911” for any action across the continent.

It meant that Tola had the chance to return to his native Ethiopia and its border with Somalia. He would actually return, however, with another runner and Marine who he had yet to meet.