by Dixon Hill

With ten years’ service in the U.S. Army behind him, first as a military intelligence analyst, then as a Special Forces engineer sergeant (a Green Beret explosives expert), Dixon Hill is clearly writing of what he knows in this story of conflict and murder on and off the field of battle. A native Arizonan, Mr. Hill has a degree in journalism and contributes to various publications, but his main occupation these days, aside from stay-at-home dad, is writing fiction. He debuted in our Department of First Stories in 2008.

* * * *

The Hotel Mozambique. Aptly named.

It was a dingy, stained little five-story walk-up in a part of Chicago most residents tried to forget, wished they didn’t have to read about in the morning paper. But crime reporters re-minded them with sensational headlines nearly every day.

Of course, this was where I’d find Jai—where he’d go to ground. A man with a boy’s name: Jai, Tarzan’s son in the movies. Jai, the man who had never been a boy, except that he was bright-eyed, always laughing. And damn tricky.

A little too tricky—he’d outsmarted himself this time.

I knew a man could do that, could outsmart himself and live long enough to regret it. I’d seen it happen to other men, the first time thirty-odd years ago. I’d been a teenager then, nearing the cusp of twenty. Now I was graying up top, as if my weathered hair were storm clouds gathering over my brow. The African sun had burned my face to leather. My knees popped on cold mornings, but I tried to pretend they didn’t.

Gary Chandler had outsmarted himself and I’d seen it, when I was in the Rangers. That was back when I fought honorably in a war called dishonorable. I fought for my nation then; not cash. Or perhaps I fought for something else.

I said it was to keep the dominoes from falling, so that South Vietnam might breathe free. But I’m a selfish man. In retrospect, I’m sure I was really fighting for myself—even then—to test my mettle, explore what I was made of. To discover who I was by walking the edge of that sharp, slippery ridgeline overlooking the Valley of the Shadow.

Maybe I fought for selfish reasons all along. The difference was: I fought in that war—all the long months of three tours—with patriotism burning hot in my breast, while circumstance and people conspired to extinguish the flame.

Gary Chandler outsmarting himself, that was a big bucket of cold water dumped on the spirit. Took me awhile to get over that one. Maybe I never did.

Our Ranger company was posted to a firebase in the hinterland. We drew supplies from Saigon every two weeks—drove a small convoy of deuce-and-a-halfs down the hill, spent a night on the town, then drove the loaded trucks back out to the fire base. A three-day operation. And always, in Saigon, there were the half-castes, the street urchins fathered by G.I.s.

Everywhere, they scampered about, always underfoot and with a hand outstretched. Yet, you could not deny them, these little girls and boys—all under ten, though most looked five or six—you couldn’t turn your back on their ragged, soiled clothing, without feeling the phantom kick of guilt in the hollow pit of your stomach. To see them, so young, outcast, scrabbling on the streets because no one wanted them. To know they would not be there, if we were not there.

I could not turn my back on them, but I couldn’t face them, either. I gave them chocolate and coins—threw handfuls in the air, so I could run off, escape while they scurried in search as if it were gold.

We called them Street Monkeys.

The Street Monkeys were the ones who told us what was happening to our supplies. Every two weeks, our convoys returned to the firebase missing supplies. Not much, just enough to be a nuisance. A few boxes of foodstuff or equipment. Boxes that started out on trucks in Saigon, but disappeared during the trip. The Street Monkeys explained that they were being stolen by Cong—our enemy, the Viet Cong guerillas—at a spot just outside town where a sharp bend in the road made it necessary to slow the convoy to walking pace. There, Cong ran out from the jungle, grabbed boxes off the back of the rear truck.

Gary Chandler, our squad leader, formulated a special plan for dealing with the Cong. The next time we left Saigon, he rode in the back of the deuce-and-a-half I was driving. He had gotten the biggest meat cleaver in their inventory from the cooks, before we left the firebase. He held it ready in one hand, a .45 in the other.

The convoy left Saigon with our truck in the rear; I let a large gap open between our vehicle and the one in front of us. The gap opened to a quarter mile by the time we left the city. As I slowed for the turn, I rechecked that my M-16 was charged and off safe, that my co-driver had his ready in his hands. I geared down and let the truck creep around the corner, chugging in granny low. We made it nearly all the way through the turn. I had begun to straighten out my wheels, was getting ready to up-shift. And then we heard the scream. And Gary screaming, too.

I changed up gears, punched the accelerator, took us out of there. The truck bounced and rattled, raising billowing clouds of dust as I raced down the road for two minutes—branches and vines snapping against the windshield, whipping the canopy. Then I slammed on the brakes, grabbed my M-16, and ran back to join my co-driver at the tailgate—our weapons raised for action.

There was bright blood on the tailgate—a great wet splash—like fire-engine red paint splattered over the olive drab, across the rusted patches where the truck’s paint had long worn through.

Above the tailgate, Gary stared down at us. Tears pouring from his eyes fell to the metal tailgate where they mixed and ran with the blood. “I didn’t know!” he screamed. “Oh, God! I didn’t know!” He was holding up a hand. A little, tiny brown hand.

Cong hadn’t been stealing our supplies; it had been the Street Monkeys.

In less than twenty-four hours, Gary was dead; he ate his pistol.

I survived.

* * * *

I thought of that—thought of my survival—as I made my way back to our own temporary quarters in Chicago.

I followed mean streets to meaner streets, thinking that hiding in the thickest, thorniest underbrush was the safest way to sleep on a long-range patrol behind enemy lines, and that we had followed this practice—even here. Within the dense concrete foliage of the city, Rick and I had hidden ourselves among its thorniest inhabitants, in a tenement rooming house where the two of us slept on surplus cots, cooked our food on scorpion stoves we’d used in the field, slept on bedrolls we’d brought with us.

My eyes took in all this when I shut the door to our room, turned to look at Rick. He was bent over picking up a canteen cup from a scorpion stove. He held it out to me. “You want some coffee, Claw?” It was springtime in Chicago—not warm at all to us. Our blood had been thinned on the savanna’s savage heat; Chicago winds cut through our guts like cold steel.

I shook my head, sat on my bunk, looked at the city map we’d tacked up to one wall. My eyes slid over to the two duffel bags standing upright in one corner, the olive drab canvas bulging and misshapen over the weapons and ammo inside. “What did you do, Rick?” I nodded at the duffel bags; they had been moved since I’d left.

He took a sip of coffee, careful not to burn his lips on the hot steel of the canteen cup. “Cleaned my weapons.” He tossed lank blond hair out of his face with a careless shake of his head. “Nothing else to do while you were gone.” He looked at me. “Did you see him?”

“No. He’s lying low. Looks like he sends out for chow. Even sends out for his girls, from what I heard.”

Rick slipped his skinny body onto the bunk across from me. In the closet-sized room, our knees nearly met. “How are we gonna get to him, Claw? I mean, if he’s holed up like that. He must have the money up there with him. Don’t you think?”

I scooted back on my bunk, my horsehide A2C leather jacket creaking as I leaned back against a plywood wall worn smooth by the oil of a thousand backs. I’d found that jacket in a downed DC-3 outside Luanda. Some crazy post-war pilot, who thought he could make a living flying around the unmarked skyways of Africa, had discovered the pitfalls of navigating without reliable radio transponders below.

He wound up nose-down, his payload stripped years before I stumbled across it, body mummified by the baking heat. But his jacket lay over the back of his seat. The looters had missed it, or maybe it was too dried and cracked to interest them. But I took it, nursed it back to life with saddle soap, constantly rubbing until it was soft and supple again, got a shanty-town seamstress to put in a new lining. Jai ribbed me about it, said if I’d done the same thing to the pilot’s mummified corpse, maybe I could have brought him back to life too.

I kept my voice low as I leaned against the plywood wall, didn’t want anyone to hear me but Rick. “I don’t know. The money might be in a bank, but I don’t think so. Knowing Jai, he’s keeping it right there in his room, where he can keep tabs on it.”

Rick leaned over his coffee, let the rising steam heat his face, looked up. “He has to come out to make phone calls, doesn’t he? Or does he have a phone in his room?”

“I think he’s got a mobile phone.”

“How’d he get that?”

“This is the nineties, Rick. We’re not in Africa anymore. We’re in the States, the land of opportunity and enterprise. Mobile phones are all over the place—even construction contractors have them here; I’ve seen them.”

He nodded, his eyes like runny eggs. He looked down at his right arm, unwound the bandage there, inspected the burn that was healing, where he’d brushed up against a steam fitting in the freighter.

That freighter had followed Jai’s freighter across the dark unknowable depths of the Atlantic. It was the only way we could travel—the only way he could travel—because we sure as hell couldn’t take all that hardware on a plane. We had to make the crossing by ship, work our way across by rusted-out freighter. Work our way home.

And homecoming—that homecoming—made me think of the last time I’d come home, the first time I’d come home.

I had returned from Vietnam with the fire in my heart smothered to nothing more than a smoldering coal—but still hot to the touch.

I returned home, having fought as honorably as I could for my country, in a war far from its shores. Only to find ragged, meandering files of young people screaming at me, hurling insults into my face, telling me that I had acted dishonorably. In a dishonorable war.

I wondered how they could say those things when their boots had never touched that foreign soil, when they hadn’t slogged through even one rice paddy, had never cleaned the mess that had once been Gary Chandler out of their bunker—his blood and brain matter dyeing dark the wood supports, soaking iron-brown into the earthen floor.

The coal of warmth in my breast grew cold.

It wasn’t a big step from there to realizing that I no longer fit in within my own homeland, and then to making that fateful move to do the one thing I did understand, to go to the one place where I knew I fit in. Looking at the Army, however, I could see that it was winding down, getting rid of people, preparing to wage peace. Television footage of the fall of Saigon, of Huey helicopters being pushed off a carrier, was like a final punctuation to the thought.

So I looked for the military life elsewhere. I found it on the plains of Africa, in the bush and, sometimes, in the heat of an African jungle so very different from the jungles of Vietnam. Yet, so similar in hot lead, in agony writ large on the faces of the dying, in the fierce stab of revenge as I beat the kill-zone with red-hot rounds during an ambush.

I found it in Angola, the Congo, Mozambique—a hundred nameless places, hundreds of pain-filled marching miles, thousands of miles flown or ridden across, hundreds of thousands of rounds expended. Thousands of dollars flowed into my pockets—and out the other side. Paid out in shanty-town bars, high-end restaurants in well-heeled cities, on a Rolex Submariner I picked up in Cape Town, and in the everlasting pursuit of women. Women to whom I made love, without love; perhaps in unsuccessful search.

Somewhere along the way, I met Jai. He was cadre at a training compound—when I joined 6 Commando, I think, somewhere in Zaire, or maybe Cabinda. I can’t be sure anymore; they all run together.

I hated Jai at first, for that smirk he always wore, a smirk that shouted how tricky he was. He shouldn’t have advertised, I thought, should have kept it hidden—like a long sharp blade up one sleeve. Instead, he flashed it, banked on it, used it to gain the confidence of his superiors. And this just made me hate him more.

Then, one night in a firebase in the bush, at a place where we were acting as advisors—acting unit leaders for our African employer’s indigenous troops—things changed.

Some very bad guys started out by laying down a heavy mortar barrage. I don’t remember who they were; things changed so fast back then, all those acronyms and initials jumble into a meaningless paste within my mind these days. They softened us up for five minutes with those mortars, and continued laying it on pretty thick as they came running with torches, firing on the run, from the south—looked like thousands of them.

But when we checked the bodies next morning, we found every man with at least four torches strapped to him. The torch-lit army on the south side was fake, a feint attack; they broke in through the north wall—swept in quick and silent, so that no one knew they were there until their Bangalore torpedoes breached our wire and mines.

They took over our .50-caliber machine gun in the northwest corner, tried to turn it against us as their comrades poured in through our breached defenses. I saw the men on the north wall trying to stand, to climb out of their trenches to meet the invaders on even ground, only to be cut down, overwhelmed.

Lying beside me, in the south wall defenses, Sergeant Savimbi, my platoon leader counterpart, looked up at me. He tried to speak, but his voice was caught inside his bulging eyes, sweat glistening in the fire light reflecting off his blue-black skin, face muscles sketched in fear.

I stood and grabbed him by the collar, yanked him to his feet. “Get up! If we lay here and they overrun us, they’ll kill us all. Get everybody up!” He ran down the line in one direction, pulling soldiers to their timid feet, as I did the same in the other direction. We formed a hasty skirmish line, facing in, aiming our weapons into our own camp, against the invaders pouring through the north wall. We worked to make the men move out.

Getting terrified men into motion is an exercise in overcoming inertia. There is a lethargy which men develop when they believe the end is near. It is a sort of giving up, of giving in to what must come, of hoping to hurry their passing, get it over with. They just want to get terror out of their beating hearts, even if it pumps itself out through bullet holes or knife wounds. It’s a desire to make their passing as painless as possible, as peaceful as they can achieve, to make quick the jump from this frightening place into one of rest and no more fear forever. Getting men moving, forging them into an attacking unit, means breaking thislethargy, overcoming the inertia that roots them in place, stock-still.

Sergeant Savimbi and I did it at knife point, jabbing men in the buttocks to key them forward. They began to move.

Once moving, the terror shifts, the inertia works for the attack instead of against it; once moving, men never want to stop. They want to run forever—run out of this place of death and keep running—to run for life. If left unchecked, however, this inertia will break them, will cause them to run willy-nilly to their deaths, because they will meet the enemy as individuals, instead of as a collective force grouped into active teams. So, as they moved, Savimbi and I threw them together into fire teams, issued orders they could wrap their minds around, pin their hopes to. We constructed organization from the chaos.

Then we ran into the tide of men receding from the north wall defenses. Broken men, running in terror and confusion. Blind men, mindless in their route. They crested against us, as a wave crests against a beach. My platoon faltered.

I grabbed one of the fleeing men who still had his AK-47. I slapped his face to wake him up, spun him around and pushed him forward. When he tried to turn around, I reached my arms round him and grabbed his AK, brought it to his shoulder and fired a burst into the enemy twenty yards away—one went down. I felt the shift in his body then, released him and watched him run back into the fight. My platoon had seen me, and my men now followed suit. Soon we were one large force moving in counter-attack. Our pace was not a run, but was more than just a quick-time. We hustled toward the enemy.

As I moved, I spotted a figure on the ground, a ragged bloody crater where his chest had been. He had an M-60 machine gun strapped across his shoulders. I yanked it loose. Something snapped under his back, where the strap ran across it. Or maybe it snapped inside his back; his eyes came open and he looked at me. No voice could be created by those shredded lungs, and yet I heard a mewling sound. He looked at me as a baby might look at a man who broke its arm—as if asking why I had done this to him. I scooped the M-60 into my arms and moved out, the salt tang of tears biting my tongue, the weapon slick with blood. The man beside me grabbed the spare ammo box.

I fired the M-60 as I moved. The heavy thud of the weapon kicked reassuringly back against me as I fired. Its deep-throated voice—whop-bop-bop-bop-bop—comforted me. And then Jai appeared on my right.

It was like a magic act: he wasn’t there; then he appeared. He wore that tricky smile, carried a Swedish automatic rifle. His weapon had a faster rate of fire than my M-60. I heard him empty a magazine—Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip! Then I opened the deep voice of the M-60—whop-bop-bop-bop-bop! The twin sounds made my heart sing. It was the same beat, the same tune played by the lawn sprinklers of my childhood in Arizona—only louder and in a lower key. I recognized it and, in the midst of battle, I laughed. Tears ran down my face as I raced forward. Jai and I alternated fires, until the enemy was routed.

Friendship was forged; hatred turned to admiration, perhaps a type of love.

* * * *

Rick dumped the dregs from his canteen cup out the window into the narrow alley. “Is the door to his room as weak as the one on ours, do you think? If so, I can crack it with just one shell.” He was talking about his shotgun, about jamming it between the doorknob and jamb, blowing the bolt off the door with one shot.

I peeled off the false beard I had been wearing, worked at the spirit gum with my fingernails. “The room I rented there had deadbolts.” I looked up at him as he walked back from the window, set his canteen cup upside down on a bunk post to dry. He was thinking two shots would crack it. Two quick shots from his pump shotgun, then we’d be in, be on him.

I shook my head. “They also have dressers in those rooms. Heavy dressers. Wide, but not too tall. I think he’ll have one across the door.” I saw Rick nod. “I think we need to blow a hole through the top half of his door. Maybe use the det cord to blow out a hole we can get in through. I’ve seen that done a couple times. It works. Maybe one of us outside, providing cover fire, while the other one goes in through the hole, makes sure with a head shot—maybe Mozambique him. Then we take the money and run.”

Rick sat on his bunk. “We’ll need wheels.”

I nodded. Rick could do that; he’d been sent away for joy riding to begin with. That’s how he wound up in the Air Force. Then he got out, went to work running guns.

Rick had turned up, not long ago, in Angola. We were hanging out—Jai and I—acting in an advisory capacity at a dog-and-pony-show UNITA headquarters, which claimed to control the Angolan equivalent of a state. There were about thirty mercenaries on post, with Jai in command, plus several hundred UNITA soldiers who thought the fighting was over and dreamed of going home.

A lot of agreements had been signed between UNITA and the government, and a cease-fire had set in. The first round of elections had just been held in Angola, but no one had gotten enough votes to secure victory; a second round was being set up. Rick had come in-country on one of the Santa Lucia Airways planes flying arms and ammo to UNITA awhile back. Since then, he’d bummed around Africa, until he’d finally decided on merc work and wound up being dropped off the back of a truck on our doorstep.

Rick showed up when UNITA and the Angolan government had started bumping heads over who had to leave the country and who could stay; discussions about the upcoming elections were growing heated. For the last few weeks there had been a lot of saber rattling, and when I looked at the slack crew around the headquarters I worried. If those sabers came out, we’d be right in the middle of a zone the government would want to control. And they had men—Angolans, as well as twelve thousand Cuban troops—to take us out. The home-looking soldiers around post had become soft, wouldn’t stand a chance if we got hit by angry men who knew what they were doing; Jai and I didn’t want to get killed with them.

We made a plan and took Rick into our confidence, gave him impromptu training when we tried to train the UNITA soldiers we were stationed with. The UNITA guys blew us off. Didn’t we know the war was over? Rick listened to us, did what we told him, didn’t have to be told twice. He was a smart kid, but young. Two weeks after he arrived, the payroll came in. UNITA flew it in on a twin-engine Cessna—a huge sum, meant to pay off all the back wages owed to every UNITA supporter in the state.

The day after it arrived, all hell broke loose. The government had started killing people in Luanda. They attacked a UNITA post there, then the police force armed civilians and led them house to house killing anyone associated with UNITA. They brought them in from outside the city limits, too, trucked them into Camama Cemetery where they gunned them down and plowed them under in mass graves.

The slackers at our post wandered around in shock.

That was when we started taking mortar fire. The mercenaries bailed out of the barracks and tried to rally the UNITA guys. I’d worked a lot with UNITA, and most of the field men were very good, extremely tough, dependable. But these guys were toast, and they knew it. When Cuban trucks rolled up out front, with two BRDM armored scout cars, the UNITA guys started running the other way. They threw down their weapons, tore off their uniforms as they ran. The Cubans and their Angolan counterparts cut them down like stalks of grain in summer sunshine.

It was bedlam. I ran to the building Jai, Rick, and I had designated as our “Go to Hell Point”—the place we’d meet up if everything went to pieces. When I got there, Rick had hot-wired one of those old Land Rovers UNITA used as jeeps. I stepped on the gas and we flew past UNITA guys running in their underwear, blood mingling with the sweat on their backs. I dodged the Land Rover among groups of men running in terror, screaming to each other, seeking help from others who could provide none and were seeking help themselves. I drove through them, headed straight for the airport, because Jai knew how to fly a plane. Rick had only been a load master; but having spent some cockpit time, he was the designated copilot.

The airport was worse than the base. A logjam of UNITA soldiers was trying to squeeze through the gate in the chain-link fence, while others tried to hold them out. I hit the horn, but in all that confusion nobody noticed. Government soldiers and Cubans came around a far corner—a flanking maneuver. They poured tracer rounds into the crowd up ahead. Behind us, armored scout cars and trucks were coming on fast, mowing down the mob of UNITA men we’d just passed.

I spun the wheel and floored it, ran the Land Rover right through the old fence. It was shabbily constructed to begin with, and had years of rust. It split open like an egg, and we were running over the tarmac. For a moment we dragged a length of chain-link with us, but then it dropped off.

Ahead, I spotted the twin-engine prop job they’d brought the payroll on. There was a truck up there. Looked like a mercenary contingent was trying to simultaneously secure the area and load up a heavy cargo. The UNITA bigwig who’d come with the cash stood on the small plane’s wing, urging them on with his hands.

I headed for that plane. Its engines were already turning over; the time saved might mean our lives. I hit the brakes just short of the plane and we piled out. Our fellow mercenaries smiled, glad to see us. Glad to see Jai, their commander.

* * * *

Rick and I carried our duffel bags into the Hotel Mozambique. The desk clerk looked up for a second, nodded from behind the glass; I’d checked in two days before. He didn’t offer to carry our duffel bags, didn’t ask what we had in them.

Past the desk, we circumnavigated the foot of the stairwell where it came down onto the bottom floor. It was a giant wooden monstrosity, poorly lit, with moldy wood darkened Tahitian pearl green-black by the oils of a thousand hands, thousands of dirty shoes and bare feet, maybe blood. It looked like a haunted staircase from some old black-and-white spook-house film with Vincent Price. We walked around winos sitting on the bottom step sharing a bottle with others whom we stepped over in the hallway, as we made our way to my ground-floor room. Inside the room, we slid our weapons from the duffel bags. I pulled out the det cord—all set and primed to blow the hole.

“You sure the car’s okay out there?” Rick worked the action on his Remington as he asked this.

I strapped on my .45, pulled my combat vest over my shoulders and snapped it in place. “I watched this place for two days. No cops went near that rear parking lot. Besides, you swapped the plates. Right?”

Rick nodded, snapped up his own vest, tightened the strap around a loose-hanging grenade. “Yeah. I did. It’s not the cops I’m worried about.”

“Relax. We’ll be done in fifteen minutes—one way or the other.” I smacked a magazine into my CAR-15, gave it a double up-tap to be sure it was firmly seated, then pulled back the charging handle and released the bolt to lock and load. The fake beard made my face itch. The wig kept sliding around on top of my head. I was sweating. It hadn’t been so bad when I was here before, running my recon. But I hadn’t been about to hit Jai then.

“How much you think he’s got in there, Claw? You really think it might be more than a million?”

I nodded. “Told you: They were going to pay off all the UNITA supporters. All the back wages. Gotta be a couple million, easy.”

“I can go back home. I can go see Stacy Miller, walk up and knock on her door. When her dad opens it, I’ll say, ‘Hi, Mr. Miller! It’s me, Rick Hanley, the guy you told your daughter would never amount to anything. Well, that’s my limo out there by the curb, and I’ve come to take Stacy for a ride. A long ride.’ “ He laughed.

“Keep it down, Rick. We’re not out of this thing yet. Don’t jinx it by counting chickens.”

He nodded, his eyes looking down. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just stay frosty. Keep your eyes peeled.” I opened the door and stepped out into the hallway—scanned left to right, the CAR-15 stock tight to my shoulder and cheek, sweeping the barrel along with my eyes.

The hallway was empty.

I knew then that we should cut our losses, run. But I also knew it didn’t make much difference; once we’d started this thing with Jai, we had to finish it. Or he would finish it some time later, when we weren’t expecting it.

Five minutes before, a dozen winos had lined the hallway sharing a bottle. Now they were gone. Someone among them had been his eyes and ears, G2 gathered for the price of a bottle.

Jai knew we were coming.

I motioned for Rick and he stepped into the hallway, hugging the opposite wall. “He knows we’re here, Rick.” I started moving, hustled for the ancient wooden staircase. Rick’s eyes wore a wild, hunted look. I’d seen that look before—the day Jai screwed us. The day Jai was a little too tricky, outsmarted himself.

* * * *

I braked the Land Rover to a halt between the plane and the cargo truck. Jai hopped out and climbed onto the Cessna’s low wing, stood beside the UNITA bigwig. Jai looked huge standing on top of that wing, yet he looked tiny standing beside the giant UNITA guy. That guy was a four-hundred-pounder, easy—at least six feet tall, fat and round as some giant jet-black medicine ball. Rick and I had followed Jai. We stood on the ground, just behind the wing. I wondered if the wing could take that guy’s weight, it looked like the plane was tilting to that side.

Jai spoke from on high. “How far has the loading progressed?”

A mercenary shouted from inside the truck, “Cargo’s all on the plane. We were getting ready to draw straws, see who’s going along.”

“Sounds good.” Jai pulled out his 9mm, shot the UNITA guy in the head. Blood and brains exploded everywhere and the guy dropped like a chopped ox. As the giant fell, Jai gave his body a flip with his arm and wrist. The UNITA guy’s body bounced straight off the wing to land on top of me, where it floored me, knocked me into the dust and gravel on the tarmac so that I cracked my head, chipped a couple of teeth, ate dirt. I couldn’t move, but I heard an Uzi open up on full auto—Jai’s Uzi—men screaming, feet scrambling, bullets striking bodies, ricocheting off the metal truck. I felt the thump of increased weight on top of me; someone else had fallen there.

Then, in the silence that followed, I heard the sound of gunfire from the airfield perimeter, the tin-can pop of someone walking across the wing, the closing of the Cessna’s door, the revving of both engines as they blew sand and gravel over us, the Cessna taxiing away.

I was still stuck beneath the giant UNITA guy and whoever had fallen on top of us. A second later, I felt the weight shift. Someone had gotten up. I scrabbled with arms and legs, but made little progress. Then the heavy body above was lifted a little, the crushing weight reduced, and I crawled out from underneath him.

Rick stood there, still trying to heft the UNITA guy by one arm, that wild, hunted look in his eyes, blood all over his tunic. Someone else’s blood; it had saved his life.

There were only a few mercenaries left alive, and most of them were wounded, some very badly. Looking up, I saw government troops running on foot, almost on us now. They switched from AKs to machetes as they came, planning to hack us up, a blood bath of ancient tribal fury.

I pushed Rick into the Land Rover, clambered behind the wheel, and hit the starter. The engine roared to life and I pulled out, floored the gas pedal, speed-shifting as the Rover raced across the tarmac. Behind us, the mercenaries’ cargo truck pulled out, but it was facing the wrong direction. They lost time turning it around in a wide arc that took them too close to the enemy. In the rearview mirror, I saw them jumping up on the running board, hacking at the driver, dragging him out. The truck rolled to a stop, was overwhelmed, hundreds of arms lifting high their machetes, whipping them down with brutal force—again and again—decimating the men in the truck. Machetes coming up red, showering drops of blood through the air when they hit the tops of their arcs, whacking down and coming up more wet with blood, until blood seemed to overwhelm the entire scene.

A rapid-fire line of 20mm rounds exploding just to my left shifted my attention back onto the BRDM armored scout cars. They had driven around the scene of the massacre, were giving chase, firing at us. I began to turn the wheel back and forth in my hands, sending the Rover into a dangerous, tilting, serpentine movement to dodge the cannon fire. A moment later, we hit the fence at the far end of the airfield.

The Land Rover flew for a moment, clearing the drop between the tarmac and the bush land. Then we hit the ground and I floored it again, running as fast as I could, the slower, heavier scout cars disappearing into the distance, with the airfield.

We kept the Land Rover as long as we could, running flat-out cross-country in daylight, still running but moving slower so that we didn’t use our lights at night. We stole fuel in the early-morning hours, in small villages that couldn’t afford to lose it. But we had no choice; we were white men trying to hide out and escape in a black man’s country. I knew that was why Jai had left me alive; he didn’t think I’d make it out. But he wasn’t merciful enough to put a bullet between my eyes, wanted me to check out the hard way. A tricky way to kill, without pulling the trigger.

The Land Rover died when I estimated we were still a good twenty miles shy of the border. Between the constant strain and sucking up all that dust, the engine seized up. We ditched it, hid it as well as we could to cover our trail, then moved at night, holed up in the daytime. The only water we had was in a steel five-gallon can. I pulled the fan belt from the Rover, used it to strap the water to my back. We kept our weapons with us, and what little food we had—stolen from villages over the past few days. Rick carried the food in a duffel bag. In the other, he carried explosives, some extra ammo.

It took us five days to cover that short twenty miles, dodging patrols, working around villages so the dogs wouldn’t give us away, the sun beating down on us in the day, the freezing nights making us shiver. Rick started going down just shy of the halfway mark.

He began begging me to leave him behind, let him just lie there to die in the heat, freeze to death in the night. I couldn’t do that. “I’m gonna need you when I run into Jai again,” I told him.

Sometimes I slapped his face; other times I simply talked to him, cajoled him into forging on. “He left us to die, Rick. Left us to get hacked to pieces by dull, rusty machetes—like those guys in the truck. He killed them, murdered them as surely as the guys who cut them down. We gotta keep it together, gotta make it through this, make Jai pay for those guys we heard screaming as they got chopped up alive. You gonna let him get away with that? You gonna lay down and die here, out here, after we’ve come so far, lay down and let him win! You gonna quit? Hell no, you’re not gonna quit. Now get up and walk.” Sometimes he walked on his own. Sometimes I dragged him, or pushed him along in front of me. I couldn’t leave him out there; I needed him too much.

Nor did I point out that if our go-to-hell plan had panned out, he and I would have flown off in the plane with Jai—and those guys would have been left behind to meet the same fate anyway. If they lived that long. Since they were already drawing straws, it’s a good bet they wouldn’t have just stood aside and watched us fly away; we’d have had to fight them. In fact, if Jai hadn’t tossed the giant UNITA guy on top of me, I’d probably have turned around and added my lead to the fight, helped him cut down the opposition so we could un-ass the A.O. Jai had different ideas, however, and that was what pissed me off, drove me on, to hunt him down. To make him pay.

Screwing over a bunch of mercenaries you don’t really know is one thing. But it’s something completely different when you leave your buddy to die out in the bush after you’ve picked his brain to create your escape plan. When that friendship stretches back over years, like mine and Jai’s, over battles and blood that raged and boiled for so long, it really ups the ante.

I wasn’t about to say any of this to Rick, of course. It wouldn’t have served my purpose.

I knew, though.

That was enough.

Finally, we made it over the border into South Africa, hitched a series of rides that took us to Cape Town. There, on the docks, we heard about a thin white man with a sly smile who’d lugged three heavy duffel bags up the gangplank when he shipped out on a freighter the week before. Another week and we shipped out on a freighter, too, following behind him. As hot on his trail as we could get.

Now, on the ground floor of the Hotel Mozambique, I kept my CAR-15 covering the bottom flight of that spook-house staircase. We couldn’t really see the second-floor landing; the staircase made an L-turn at a small landing about halfway up, so that the rest of the steps ran parallel to the hallway. The steps and banister ran up to disappear where my field of vision was cut off by the second floor, effectively concealing anyone waiting at the top of the steps until we made the turn at that small landing.

The section of stairs I could see was clear, so I adjusted my aim point to where the banister railing began to appear as it came down from the second floor. From there, I scanned through the CAR-15 sights for any sign of shoes or pants, feet or legs. When I saw none, I motioned for Rick to join me.

“We’re clear down here,” I whispered. “You go across to the other side of the stairs. Try to look up the stairs to the second-floor landing. Let me know if it’s clear.”

He nodded.

“And Rick. Watch out. He knows this is a blind spot. He’s probably up on that landing waiting for us. Keep your eyes peeled as you go across, and keep your weapon trained on the top of the stairs. If you see him, don’t forget that he’s also able to see you. Shoot first. Don’t stop to ask questions. Believe me, he won’t. He’ll gun you down the instant he sees you.”

My idea was that Rick wasn’t as experienced in urban warfare. If he got hit going across, I could fire through the floorboards at the spot where I thought Jai might be. My hope, however, was that Rick would make it across unharmed. That would put him in a good position to support me, while I mounted the stairs and climbed to that first small landing. From there, I’d be in a better position to assess the threat at the top of the stairs.

I heard Rick scurry across the open area. I didn’t see him, because my eyes were focused on the highest part of the stairs in my field of vision. A moment later, I heard Rick tap the wall on the far side. I dropped my eyes and turned to nod at him, confirming that I knew he’d made it across. I tapped my head then, to tell him to cover me, quietly stepped out to make my way to the base of the stairs.

That’s when the pineapple came flying down from upstairs—fast and hard. Jai must have been in the dead zone, hidden by the intersection of stairs and second floor; he couldn’t throw it directly at us, so he used a bank shot. The grenade rebounded off the wall at the small landing and bounced down the steps of that spook-house staircase. I’d seen him do it before, the tricky SOB.

Rick and I dove right and left, hugged the hallway walls—about as effective as hiding behind a sheet of paper. The grenade bounced off the bottom step, rolled up to Rick’s feet, but didn’t go off.

Rick looked down wide-eyed, shouted, “Dud!” He scrambled up the stairs, hoping to catch Jai off-balance, feet pounding on the hollow, rotted wood as he ran. I spotted the pin, still in the grenade—the double-trick. The setup.

I tried to shout a warning. It died stillborn in my lungs, executed by a heavy-caliber double-tap fired overhead. The slugs kicked Rick’s body backwards, so that he wound up in a heap spilling blood from his mouth at the foot of the stairs. In the end, Rick didn’t look like a man at all, just a pile of blood-soaked laundry.

A haze of blue smoke curled down from the top of the stairs, began to slither lower along the staircase. A step groaned somewhere above my head.

I leaned out around the wall, saw a jeans-covered leg with a boot beneath it between rail and ceiling. The other leg and foot came down, settled on the next step. The feet stopped moving. The jeans began to rise; Jai was bending over, getting ready to aim through the gap between the steps and the ceiling. I fired.

My first shot took out his leg just above the ankle. I saw it snap sideways from the impact of the round, saw his leg get kicked out from under him by the force. As his upper body dropped into view, I fired twice more—but they were snap shots made while he was dropping out of my sights. Jai hit the steps and bounced, his body tumbling forward, his weapon bumping down the steps. I vaulted Rick’s body, jumped onto the stairs, raced up. When I rounded the small landing, I saw Jai lying there on his back. He still wore that tricky smile; he was trying to pull his backup piece. My two snap-shots had missed. The only blood came from his ankle wound, and a cut on his forehead. That blow to the head must have slowed him down, probably saved my life.

Barely bothering to aim, at point-blank range, I pumped two rounds into Jai’s torso—center mass—as he tried to bring his backup pistol to bear. The double impact of my high-powered 5.56 rounds knocked it out of his hands, sent it flying. My third shot drilled his head. Poetic justice I thought.

I heard sirens closing in on the streets outside. At the top of the steps, I spotted a green duffel bag. I ran up and grabbed it, could feel and hear the crisp rustle of bills inside. I threw it over my back and ran downstairs, double-checked to see if Rick might somehow still be alive, but he was already starting to cool off.

The sirens were getting louder. I turned and walked away, leaving the two bodies behind me in the stairwell. Jai and Rick; both friends. One had trained me, the other I had trained. I walked away, recalling that long-ago cadence, a training mantra learned in Africa, when I first met Jai, the one he taught us about shooting to kill:

Twice in the body, once in the head;

That’s the way you know he’s dead—

When you dance in Mozambique!

The refrain kept running through my mind; the sirens seemed to take up the chant. Upstairs, I knew, at least one other duffel bag bulged with money. I didn’t need it; whatever I had, I’d make do.

I ran into the abandoned parking lot, climbed into the car, started the engine, pulled out and made a left out of the alley, cops pulling up out front, behind me. I smiled.

I drove for miles, pulled over near a park. My heartbeat began to slow, coming down from combat mode. I took a deep breath, leaned over to open the duffel bag. He’d packed it tight; the catch was hard to loosen. All at once it popped open.

A grenade flew out, spring-loaded from inside, pin already pulled, spoon flying off as it whizzed past my head, pop of the three-second fuse igniting.

Three seconds: I stiff-armed it—automatic reaction—up and out the window.

Two seconds: I turned to drive, saw the group of children playing in the park beside the car, saw them catch a glimpse of it—must have looked like a ball bouncing out.

One second: They ran toward it, the car rolling as I reached out, willing it back into my grasp, screaming, “NOOOOOO!”