HUNTER Page 16

  It was sad seeing the cabin in such disarray. All of my memories of the cabin were happy ones, days spent reading by the fire, watching the stars, hiking, fishing, camping… Now it was just a creaky, broken shack in the middle of nowhere.

  I cleaned the cabin up, looking for Bremkin’s secret evidence as I did so. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Maybe a computer or a photograph? Whatever it was, it needed to be big. It needed to be enough to make every reporter in the United States hop on a plane destined for Nintipi.

  But there was nothing in that cabin that hadn’t always been there—with the exception of Hunter and Greg’s old clothes, which were left behind when they were arrested. I checked all the pockets but found nothing of interest, unless the secret truth behind Frederick Meraux was hidden inside an old pack of cigarettes.

  I smoked the last cigarette in the pack.

  It was hopeless. There was nothing in that cabin but animal feces, old books, a pile of old clothes, and the scattered vaccination records for Cuddles, the Pomeranian/Shih Tzu cross—Matthew Bremkin’s dog.

  Matthew Bremkin’s dog?

  Just a few days before, he told me he hated dogs. I grabbed the papers and started to read through.

  The first few pages were nothing of interest—literally information about some dog named Cuddles’s vaccinations. Then, about five pages into the document, the topic changed.

  There were six pages of “witness accounts,” taken from Iraqi locals who claimed to have seen experimental American warplanes flying over their village. The planes were described as looking like “giant airplanes without wings,” “long cigar-shaped ships,” and “constantly rotating cylinders.” The strange warplanes hovered over the town for nearly an hour, unmoved, before disappearing at “impossible speeds,” according to the reports.

  After the witness reports was a write-up by a high-ranking government official, a Colonel Leer. It was addressed to a General Chesney.

  There were seventeen confirmed sightings of the Black Knight craft on 02/17/2009, in the town of Al-Nukhib. Reports were made to local police, who subsequently informed the nearby airbase, Al-Nukhib Brandhar Air Base. Al-Nukhib Brandhar Air Base informed US officials immediately.

  This morning of 02/18/2009, I have ordered six agents to collect eye-witness reports and assess the scale of the sightings.

  We believe the incident is contained to Al-Nukhib, and we have taken steps to ensure information does not leak to other government agencies.

  By the way, how did your wife like Everybody Loves Raymond? Isn’t that show was hilarious?

  Sincerely,

  Colonel Leer.

  The next page in the document was a similar letter.

  On the evening of 02/18/2009, our agents arrived in Al-Nukhib to assess the scale of the Black Knight sighting of 02/17/2009. Agents were unable to determine of the total number of witnesses. The incident has been labelled a Code-Green.

  If I have your permission, I would like to deal with the situation via Special Operations. If possible, get back to me within the hour. I have a dinner reservation at Antoine’s for seven.

  Leer.

  There was one final transmission in the collection.

  Special Forces arrived in Al-Nukhib on the morning of 02/19/2009. Witnesses of the 02/17/2009 Black Knight malfunction have been neutralized. Please approve of the attached press-release that will go out later today. The part about one of the terrorists being a radicalized Chinaman was my idea. Pretty funny, right?

  Engineers on the Black Knight program have addressed the malfunction in the Black Knight’s secondary engine core. The craft was deemed fully operational last night. It’s already back in the skies, doing its thing.

  Colonel Leer.

  The final few pages in the stack were news transcriptions.

  American Forces discover terrorist hideout in Iraqi town of Al-Nukhib.

  It was the secret I’d been looking for, the final piece of the puzzle, and the key to Hunter’s prison cell.

  Matthew wasn’t asking me to take any ordinary controversial documents to the press. He was asking me to take full-blown, tin-foil hat conspiracy theory nonsense to the press. The Black Knight in the documents sounded like a freaking alien ship, for crying out loud—not to mention people would think I was humiliating the families of all the soldiers who were killed, and the families of the poor innocent people killed in that village. I thought, if I go through with this, I won’t just be the Witch of Nintipi; I’ll be the terrorist sympathising, house wrecking, conspiracy wacko Witch of Nintipi.

  The Black Knight…

  Who was going to believe that? It sounded like bad science fiction to me. But I guess that was the idea, that no one would believe it as long as they released Hunter, to prove that they had nothing to hide.

  By the time I finished reading and packing up the documents, the sun had begun to dip below the horizon. The temperature in the cabin was quickly dropping. It was too dangerous to hike back to the highway and wait for a ride. I was going to have to stay the night.

  I started a fire and used a chair to hold the broken door closed while I dozed off on the couch.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  There was one benefit to choosing Poland as my inevitable destination that I never considered before. My father was Polish. Born in the United States, but his parents were both born in Poland. Growing up, everyone would tell me that I looked exactly like my father. My father would laugh and say, “that’s what everyone told me growing up, too.” I guess the Polish was the dominant side.

  When my Polish instructor showed up, it didn’t take long for me to realize he was going to be my out. As luck would have it, we looked a lot alike. There were a few major differences. He was much skinnier than me, and he had a beard. But other than that, we could have been cousins, at least.

  He said it would take about four weeks of constant lessons before I was conversational. Chesney wasn’t too excited about that estimate. “Can’t you cut corners and have it done sooner?”

  “That is me cutting every corner I can think of.”

  Chesney grumbled and receded back into his office. I had four weeks to lose about forty pounds and grow as much beard as I could. So I stopped eating. Every morning, I took the multi-vitamin they gave me, and I dumped my food down the toilet. By the third day, I felt weak, but I had to act strong so that Chesney didn’t catch on to my plan.

  But by the end of the first week, he started to notice something was off. “You look like shit, Sykes. What’s wrong with you?”

  “I think I’ve got a bad flu or something.”

  “Well, get over it. You can get sick all you want in the Ukraine.”

  “Poland,” I said.

  “Whatever. Same shit.”

  By the end of the second weak, I was struggling to resist urges to eat my Polish homework. Flushing good food down the toilet was hard enough. I started getting headaches, stomach aches, fevers, and every day they got worse. I had my multi-vitamin though, and I knew that was enough to survive. I remembered that much from biology class in high-school—or I should say, from copying Kyla’s biology homework in high-school.

  The human body needs nutrients to work, that’s what the multi-vitamin was for. It also needs calories, to create energy. When you don’t give it any calories, it starts to look for other sources of energy. There’s no energy in a multi-vitamin, luckily. That’s where fat comes in—the whole point of fat is the body’s way of storing energy. And the body is pretty clever; it goes into a sort of crisis mode when there’s no fat to burn, so it turns muscle into fat. That’s about as much as I remember from Kyla’s biology homework, but it was enough to know I shouldn’t die if I didn’t eat for a month.

  But there were days when I wasn’t so sure, and those days became more and more frequent closer to my date of departure. With a week to go, and a near-conversational Polish tongue, I looked in the mirror. Jesus, I looked like shit. I was still a good deal larger than my Polish instructor, and
my beard was still much shorter, but after I squinted and tilted my head, I thought I’d done a pretty good job. Now I just had to hope the guards on the compound would all be squinting and tilting their heads.

  I tried to buy more time by pretending to know less Polish than I did. My instructor was ready to pull his hair out, thinking I was mentally slow or something. Thankfully, he wasn’t the brightest Polack and he never caught on. He went to Chesney and asked for more time, which did not end in my instructor’s favour—but it did end in mine. I got a few extra days.

  After being screamed at for a good fifteen minutes, my instructor was told to increase the frequency of my sessions. “I don’t care if you have to work through the fucking night!” I could hear Chesney scream from halfway across the military compound. So that’s what ended up happening. We worked around the clock, only sleeping for a few hours in the early morning before starting again. The better my Polish got, the harder it was to hide it and pretend like I had no idea what he was saying.

  Finally, the night came—the night before my flight to Poland—the night I would make my escape. My instructor was so tired and stressed out; he almost looked as sick as me. He’d come down with a nasty flu. Even the guards outside my door were worried about him. “Hey Polack, want us to get you some pills or something?” I heard outside my door, just before my final lesson.

  He muttered something in Polish, which translated to, “How’s about a gun so I can shoot this retard in the face?”

  “What?” the guard replied.

  “I’ve already taken plenty, thanks,” my instructor said before coming into the room.

  He was bundled up tight with the hood of his parka over his head. Perfect, I thought. The bitter little Pole just made my escape even easier.

  When lunch came, I didn’t hesitate in devouring it. My instructor looked at me with wide-eyes. “Feeling better finally?”

  “I guess so.” I ate his lunch, too. The smell of it made him want to throw up. I felt like a goddamned superhero after eating for the first time all month, like someone administered a shot of adrenaline straight into my heart. I’d even forgotten what food tasted like.

  Ten minutes before the nightly caravan fired up, I decided to give my Polish a good, unrestricted test. In Polish, I said, “Thank you so much for teaching me, friend. I’m sorry I was such a pain in the ass.”

  His pale face perked up and then his eyes slowly narrowed. He was silent and still, as if he’d just witnessed some grizzly murder. He was probably trying to convince himself he’d slipped into a fever dream, that the near-fluent Polish that just rolled off my tongue was just a sleep-deprived hallucination.

  “You shouldn’t take shit like that from Chesney,” I continued. “And I’m really sorry I have to do this.”

  He remained frozen, not flinching until I had one hand over his mouth and the other around his throat. His eyes were so wide, they nearly popped out of his skull. “Don’t fight it,” I said in his language, trying to keep my voice low and calm, so the guards outside would assume it was just part of the lesson.

  I lowered him to the ground with ease. He was light and didn’t put up much of a fight. He was too weak, and I honestly don’t think he gave a fuck. “I’m going to remove my hand from your mouth. Don’t try to scream or anything, or I’ll kill you,” I said. “Understand?”

  He nodded, so I removed my hand and began to tie him up. “You’re clever for an American, you know,” he said in Polish. “As soon as they find you, they’re going to kill you. You know this, correct?”

  He was right, but I had to try anyway. I needed to get to Kyla. If I died trying, so be it. I’d rather die trying than not try at all.

  I raised a sock and a piece of tape towards his mouth. “Please don’t do that,” he said, keeping his voice low. “It’s not necessary. I will lay still, stay quiet, as if you knocked me out.”

  I had no reason to trust him, but I knew how much it sucked to be gagged for hours, how hard it is to breathe with a sock millimetres from your throat—knowing that with one sudden inhalation, you could suffocate to death. The poor guy was so stuffed up from his flu, he couldn’t even breathe out of his nose. I left him to his word, taking his jacket, pants and shoes with me.

  I knocked on my door for the guards to let me out. They did. “Lesson over so soon, Polack?”

  I muttered some Polish under my breath. “You two are a couple of brainless idiots.”

  “What’s he saying?” one guard said to the other. They both shrugged. “That’s the last of them, ain’t it?”

  “I think I’ve caught pneumonia,” I said in English, doing my best impression of my instructor. “I worry that I need to seek hospitalization.”

  “Shit. Pneumonia? Nearest hospital is a ways away. I’ll radio in Harry.”

  “Harry?” I said.

  “The medic.”

  “No medic.”

  “Well we can’t get you to a hospital. Not tonight.”

  I could hear the engines firing up outside. The caravan was about to leave. “Where do they go?”

  “That’s classified.” He looked at me with raised eyebrows, as if I should have known better than to ask. I ducked my head down, worried he would recognize me at any second.

  The other guard scratched his head and turned to his friend. “But they do go by Duckwater.”

  “Jerry, shut up.”

  “What? I didn’t tell them where the trucks go. I just said they go by Duckwater.”

  “You still can’t tell the Polack that.”

  “What’s he going to do? Tell the Polish CIA? What’s that, like two guys with a Facebook account?” Both the guards started laughing. “Is there even a hospital in Duckwater.”

  “I think so. Isn’t that where they took Johnston when he shot his toe off with that M4?”

  The two men went back and forth for a bit. I faked a heavy, deep cough, which turned into a real cough the moment I started. I’d almost forgotten that I’d only eaten once in the span of a month.

  “Jesus—okay, fine. Jerry, you want to get him on one of those trucks, tell em’ to drop the Polack off in Duckwater.”

  The guard named Jerry took me outside while his friend stayed by the door. My plan worked. None of the troops on the convoy recognized me, and I didn’t recognize any of them. But every time the two-way radio in the vehicle crackled, my heart jumped. I was waiting to hear those words, “Sergeant Sykes is missing.”

  That announcement never happened—at least it never happened between the base and Duckwater. It was inevitable they would find my instructor hogtied in my room sooner or later, and the announcement would go out. I knew they would check my room at 0900. The call would go out, and by 0930, every Reserve unit would be out looking for me. By noon, the state police would probably get a call with my description.

  I wondered what kind of horrible crime they would say I committed. They were big fans of terrorism, but that wouldn’t look good in terms of national security. They’d probably go with an American classic like, “a dangerous child abductor,” or “a disgraced-employee gunman.”

  Thanks to a long-haul trucker, I was over the Nevada border before 0600, and halfway to Colorado by 0900. For the rest of the trip, I planned to stay off the main roads, away from the big towns. I could train-hop for most of it.

  Otherwise, I was on foot.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Erin wasn’t wrong about how much attention her thesis would get. Even she didn’t expect the media reaction to be half as strong as it was. It only took a few days after she submitted her thesis to an academic journal before every news outlet in the United States aired the story.

  “Massive military cover-up, or just another crazy conspiracy theory?” one major news station’s anchor asked. “Government officials are refusing to comment on documents released by a resident in a little town in Kansas called Nintipi. Can you blame them? The released documents contain information about sightings of an experimental military craft in Iraq by Ira
qi locals. Kyla Rose, the woman who found and released the documents, claims the sighting happened just days before the town was targeted by the Special Operations Unit led by Lieutenant Frederick Meraux. You might remember that Lieutenant Meraux was killed in a roadside bombing just days later.

  “Though, according to Rose, Meraux was never killed. Rose claims Meraux fled to the Congo where he sought refuge with Congolese Rebels. Supposedly, the subsequent 2010 military operation in the Congo was, in reality, an operation to assassinate Meraux, disguised as a peace-keeping mission. Sound outrageous? We thought so, too. Until we dug deeper.