Ballistic(30)

He saw a big Chevy pickup truck pull up next to the pond. From it stepped his father and Chase, his younger brother. They beckoned him to get up and jump in the cab; they told him they were heading into town for pancakes, and they wanted him to come along.

Court spoke back to them, and with the movement of his scratchy vocal chords, the vision dissipated, leaving him right where he’d lain for fourteen hours.

Dammit.

He wanted to die. He did not want to be alive when the sun rose the next morning.

In the bright moonlight a helicopter hovered just overhead, landed next to the pond, and from it leapt Maurice, his CIA principle trainer and long-time mentor.

“Get your lazy ass up, Violator!” the old Vietnam vet shouted, calling Court by his code name.

Court did not reply at first. He just shook his head. He thought to himself, I’m too damn tired.

“Charlie don’t care if you’re tired!”

“I can’t, sir,” replied Court aloud. “I can’t.”

But when he spoke, when he brought true noise to the night, the vision disappeared. He was alone. Frail, hurting.

Dying.





But he did not die that night; he lived to see morning. The three hours of daylight before the storms came were the worst of his ordeal. He prayed for rain, and when it came, it cooled him and quenched him, but the mud all around his body caused the water to pool, and it became deeper. A few times he even felt his body move slightly, he was floating in the downpour over the saturated earth. He wondered if he would be pulled into the pond, and he was horrified at the thought of drowning in the murky water.

But mercifully, the rain lulled him to sleep.

He awoke to the sound of birds, then voices, human voices. He knew it was day, the rain had stopped, and the sun singed through the humid air and burned his skin.

He heard voices once again; this time he assumed the voices to be nothing more than the beginning of another vision. He did not feel elation or fear; he only lay there, barely alive but drifting away.

The voices were soft at first, but they became louder, as if the speakers were getting closer. Court began to realize he was not dreaming, was not imagining this, and he felt a faint sense of concern. He had no weapon, not like it mattered—he wouldn’t have been able to thumb a safety catch or pull a trigger, much less identify a threat and point a weapon towards a target.

The voices were all around him now, and they were speaking Laotian. They had found him, and as far as he was concerned, they could have him. They could shoot him right here; that would surely be preferable to them dragging him up the hill and hoisting him into a vehicle only to bounce around on the shitty roads on his way back to a cell in which he would certainly die within hours.

Fuck it, he thought, his mind incredibly lucid on this one subject. He’d fight them. These little bastards weren’t taking him anywhere.

Two men knelt over him, peeled off the few banana leaves that were left covering his body. He reached up to punch one, but his arm just sort of wiggled a little next to his body. There was no swing, no punch.

More men came, and he was lifted off the ground and into the air; he screamed in protest and then in pain as his left arm was yanked in a different direction from the rest of his body. He felt himself being hauled up the hill; he heard the men’s guns clanking against metal on their belts as the weapons swung free; his legs were dropped once, and men fell along with them, yelled and barked at one another until he was lifted up again.

The steady slap, slap of boots in mud as they left the muddy pond behind.

Their clipped and impenetrable language felt like ice picks into his ears.

They hoisted him onto the road finally and hauled him towards a black van. Gentry was carried headfirst and faceup, but his head hung upside down and bounced with the strides of the soldiers. The back of the black van opened, and it was dark inside. The men spoke quickly and gruffly amongst themselves, as if they were arguing with one another. Their uniforms meant nothing to him, but their weapons were AKs and long SKSs, the same as the local cops and the prison guards.

They slid him into the back of the van, and the doors shut. The van lurched and sped off, bouncing on the gravel alongside the paved road. Court tried to lift his head but gave up, rolled it from side to side. It took a moment, but he soon realized none of the soldiers had gotten in with him.

He was alone.

Huh?

No, he was not alone. A figure moved into the back from the front passenger seat; Court’s weak neck muscles had dropped his head back on the hard surface of the van, and it rolled towards the wall.

A hand went to his forehead as if taking his temperature. “Bad news, Sally, no luck on the root beer. I brought you some Beerlao. It’s the local brew. That work?”