Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [46]
It was the tail end of 1969, just before the breakaway country of Biafra fell to Nigeria’s overwhelming military superiority. Already at least a million dead. Mostly kids. Mostly from starvation.
Biafra was nothing more than a dream for whoever was left then, a tiny jagged piece of jungle, as vulnerable as a crippled cat in a dog pound. By that time, it was fully landlocked. Their leader had fled to the Ivory Coast. A Red Cross plane had been shot down. Even the media was gone.
Tribalism on full amok. If the Biafrans kept fighting, actual genocide was a real possibility. No point running guns in there anymore, but without food nobody would live long enough to surrender. For a landing field, there was only a dirt track cut into the jungle. We came in, guided by a radio until we got close. Then they fired the string of flares on the ground. A thirty-second window.
Byron set the big plane down softly. Before he could shut off the engine, people charged out of the jungle, desperate the way only starvation can make you. One man ran right into one of the still-whirling propellers. At least his terror died, too.
In a short while, the plane took off. I stayed on the ground.
It was maybe ten days later—I think I already had malaria by then, and things were fuzzy—when it happened. Byron was standing off to the side of the plane, watching the unloading, anxious to get back into the sky. But there were enemy planes in that sky. Huge chunks of ground blew up all around us from whatever they were sending down. No point in running—the blasts were completely random. And nobody ever used that foul tunnel they called a bomb shelter twice.
Suddenly, Byron went down, a piece of shrapnel in his thigh, blood flowing, not spurting. The rest of the crew ran for the plane. “We’ll pick you up on the return!” one of them shouted.
Byron knew what that meant. He started crawling to the plane, pulling himself forward with his arms, the useless leg dragging behind him, holding him back. I ran ahead of him to the cargo door of the plane, pulling the .45 out of my field jacket.
“Hold it!” I yelled at the two men in the bay.
“We got to go!” one of them shouted back over the roar of the engine. “The sky’s filling up!”
“Go get him!” I yelled, pointing with my empty hand at where Byron was still crawling.
“No way, man. He’ll leave us!”
I knew who they meant. The copilot. The pilot now. I gestured them to step back, boarded the plane. “No, he won’t,” I told them. “The faster you get back, the faster you can leave.”
They jumped out to get Byron while I went forward to explain things to the guy at the helm. I stood there explaining things until I heard them come back into the plane. Then I put up the pistol, ran right past Byron and his “rescuers,” jumped down, and headed for the deeper jungle. The plane took off.
I wasn’t sure Byron had made it until a few years later. A group of hijackers I knew were trying to put together a team for a job at a private airport, and his name came up as a candidate. The guy who recommended him said he’d worked with Byron a couple of times and he was solid.
We never did that job, but Byron had come to one of the meetings. It was … awkward. He didn’t know what to say, and neither did I.
And now we had another chance.
“You know,” he said, “I never asked you …”
“What?”
“Why you did it.”
“I don’t know,” I told him, truthfully. I was nineteen years old when it happened. I couldn’t have told you why I was in that jungle, in that war, much less why I …
“I think that’s a problem with people,” he said softly. “Who cares about the ‘why’? I don’t. Sorry I asked.”
“Sure.”
“Okay, what’s on the agenda?”
“I need to check something out. In Vancouver, that’s just—”
“—over the border from Portland,” he finished for me.
“Yeah. Look, I won’t bore you with all the details, but I’m supposed to be dead. So I need a way to go in under the radar.”
“Who better than me?” He smiled. “I live there.”
Byron’s ride was a restored-to-new