Hostage Zero

Of the choices available to him, that truly was the best one. Normally at night, the smart move was always to remain still when there was an increased likelihood of being seen because the human eye is much more sensitive to movement than to static objects; but when bathed with this much light, such nuances didn’t matter.

Still bent at the waist, Jonathan holstered his weapon and threaded his way back through the accumulated clutter and aimed for the hole he’d cut in the fence. Dropping to a push-up posture, he rolled over onto his back to inchworm back out into the night. His chest had just cleared the opening when Boxers hissed, “Stop, stop, stop. Abort. He’s going to be right on top of you. Shit.”

Jonathan froze. Without any cover now, he cranked his head to the left and then to the right, trying to eyeball the threat. And there he was: a uniformed soldier quick-walked into view from his right, making a beeline for him. Jonathan thought he was a dead man. He reached for his. 45 and realized with a flash of horror that the small opening in the fence blocked his access to his weapon.

Shit indeed.

Only the soldier, it turned out, wasn’t heading for him, after all. The beeline he was making had nothing to do with Jonathan. It had everything to do with a need to urinate. Even as he passed within ten feet of Jonathan, the soldier was unzipping his fly and his eyes were trained on the shadows. The urgency in the soldier’s body language reminded Jonathan of a man who’d sat at the bar for one beer too many. Two seconds later, Jonathan heard a forceful stream being released into the jungle foliage, and you could almost feel the man’s sense of relief.

With the soldier’s back turned to him, Jonathan used the moment to drag himself the rest of the way through the hole in the fence. He rolled over and brought himself up to one knee just as the stream died away and the only remaining sound was the steady churn of the diesel engine.

As he’d feared, the soldier sensed the movement and turned to face it.

To call the soldier a man was to overstate it significantly, but like soldiers the world over, this teenager’s eyes showed lethal intent even as his face showed utter shock. His hand reached for the grip of his assault rifle.

Jonathan drew his Colt in an instant and leveled it at the kid’s forehead. They were close enough to each other that Jonathan could have counted the pulses in his neck. The kid froze, his shock turning to terror as Jonathan raised his left forefinger to his lips to signal for silence.

The soldier’s face was a mask of indecision as duty and obligation battled with survival and pragmatism. Jonathan could almost hear him deciding to be stupid. He shook his head to talk the kid out of it, but youthful resolve is a strong force to deal with.

As the soldier opened his mouth and took a breath to yell, Boxers’ enormous silhouette rose from the shadows behind him. Big Guy grabbed a fistful of the soldier’s hair and lifted him while at the same time thrusting his KA-BAR knife through the side of the kid’s neck. In half of a second, the blade severed both jugulars, both carotids, and the voice box. Amid a fan of blood spray, the soldier dropped without a sound. In less than a minute, he’d be dead.

Jonathan watched for a few seconds as the kid’s body struggled against the inevitable, and he offered up a silent apology. If there could have been a way to let him live, they would have; but it was the nature of war that sometimes you just wander into a place where you don’t belong. The price for doing so was always unspeakable.

Harvey watched in horror, swallowing the urge to vomit. It wasn’t the gore, or even the fact of the killing; it was the efficiency of it. He’d spent five years of his life in the company of professional Marines, three of those in a no-shit killing, shoot-’em-up war, so he was no stranger to the product of battle; but in the past, there had always been an element of hesitation, a humanizing sense of fear. Here, there was none of that. A young man strayed to where he’d no doubt strayed for the identical purpose hundreds of times, and he’d been dispatched with no more hesitation than if the same act had been perpetrated on a troublesome insect.

As the soldier bled out and the fountain of red subsided to a trickle, Boxers wiped his blade on the dead man’s trousers before sliding it back into its sheath. Harvey had no idea why he found that one gesture as horrifying as he did. Perhaps it was because he knew to a certainty that he would never be able to do such a thing himself. He understood now why the Big Guy didn’t want Harvey to be there: Hesitation was a sin that could cause others to die.

For Harvey, though, that meant that being human was a sin. If a moment of hesitation in taking a life triggered the loss of another life, was that so bad? Wasn’t it better than the alternative-to kill indiscriminately on the off chance that a bad guy might win?