The Soldier

“Do you see him?”

Caitlin, who had come up with Willie from the main camp when word came down that Logan had “freaked out,” as the Americans called, nodded.

“Over there, by that fallen pine, next to the saw grass. But be careful, when he has his flashbacks he believes he’s back in the war zone.”

“Understood,” Chuck said. “What causes him to go loony?”

“Different things,” Caitlin said. “A smell, a sound. Sometimes it doesn’t seem that anything in particular causes them, they just seem to happen.”

Chuck looked at her.

“You sweet on him?”

Caitlin at first looked puzzled, then caught on to the American slang and laughed.

“Sweet on? Oh, no, absolutely not. I mean he’s, well, an employer, a friend maybe.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to pry.”

Caitlin laughed. “Oh, please, don’t worry about it at all. Anyway, we’ve got to bring him down. We’ve got things to do.”

Chuck nodded. Then without another word, he began to approach Logan.

“All right, son, we’re going to take it nice and easy. Your friend Caitlin is here and we just want to help you.”

Logan saw a tall man walking toward him. The Keifa wrapped around his head muffled his voice, not that Logan was what anyone would call fluent in Farsi, which most of the enemy in this region spoke. He usually left talking with the locals to others in his unit.

“To hell with you! I’m not going to swallow any of your garbage, we know what you do with to your prisoners, and I’m not going to become one of them!”

Chuck listened to Logan’s screams and realized taking him down wasn’t going to be easy. He stopped where he was and looked back over his shoulder towards Caitlin, who just shrugged her shoulders and motioned him back. Chuck carefully moved away from Logan, backing up every step so he could keep an eye on the hallucinating Briton.

“He thinks I’m trying to take him prisoner, doesn’t he?”

“Most likely,” Caitlin said. “Like I said the hallucination is complete. From what he’s told me, he hears, feels, smells and sees everything like it was back then. He once put a knife to my throat. If he hadn’t come out of it on his own, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”

“Any suggestions?”

Chuck thought. “Well, I’m pretty sure I could handle him, physically, but I’d be worried about somebody getting hurt – is he armed?”

Caitlin nodded. “Sidearm and knife at least.”

“Well then, we could try this.”

He held up a crossbow.

“Don’t worry,” he said when he saw Caitlin’s shocked expression. “The darts are loaded with a powerful tranquilizing agent. It’ll take down most people in under 5 seconds.”

Logan watched the enemy soldier return to the cover of one of the bombed out houses. He was somewhat surprised that the man retreated, in fact he was even more surprised that he came out of hiding at all, and didn’t just fire an RPG in his direction.

While he was thinking he resumed his search for a way through the mysterious wall. As he moved slowly, the voices return “Give it up, Marcus, you’re as good as bloody dead. Just like the rest of your unit. Where are they, Marcus?”

“Shut up, just shut up, already,” Logan whispered, trying to silence the voices. “My team is . . ”

His voice cut off when he felt a sharp pain in his back. He reached over with one hand and felt a feathered dart lodged between his shoulder blades.

“Damn it,” he said as he savagely pulled it out. As he looked at it, he grew more confused. He had never heard of the enemy using poisoned darts. His head began to spin and his vision blurred. The thought that his number had finally come up was the last thing he remembered before pitching forward as blackness overcame him.

“Good shooting, mate,” Willie said as they ran up to where Logan had fallen into a pile of soft grass. “It’s best not to get to close to old Logan when he’s having one of his spells.”

Willie got to Logan, rolled him over on his back and checked his pulse and breathing. “Seems none the worse for the wear, what’s in that thing, anyway?”

Chuck grinned. “Secret recipe. Been in the family for generations. Guaranteed to knock ’em down fast and keep them out for hours. And it’s perfectly safe, never had anyone die on me.”

Willie grunted as he hefted Logan onto his shoulders.

“When he comes to I’m tellin’ him he needs to go on a bloody diet.”

Willie walked off in the direction of the American’s village, with Caitlin and Chuck at his side.

“Weren’t you supposed to be making sure he took his meds?” Willie asked.

Caitlin glared at him. “Listen, I’m the resident computer nerd, I’m not a damned nurse. You want to baby sit him and make sure he takes his pills on schedule you do it. I’ve got enough to worry about trying to get us into their damned computer system, assuming we ever find an access point where I can tap into their network.”

Caitlin snorted and fell behind, clearly indicating the conversation was concluded.

Chuck fell in step with her. “So, what’s up with Logan, why’d he go bonkers on us?”

“Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. He fought in the third Gulf War for England and never got over it. As you no doubt surmised, he’s on medication for it but it doesn’t always work 100 percent.”

Chuck nodded. “Understandable.”

Caitlin looked at the crossbow Chuck had used to tranq Logan.

“So, tell me, why do you have that thing? I would think you would just do them in when you had the chance.”

“Sometimes, stealth is called for,” Chuck said. “When infiltrating a base, it helps to be able to take someone out quickly and quietly. And sometimes, we want to have someone for questioning.

“Try and find out what the Feds are up to, what’s not in the official news broadcasts. That stuff’s all propaganda bull shit.”

Once back at the minuteman enclave, Chuck took Caitlin and the others back to his personal quarters. “Don’t know whether you’d call it a house, a hut or a shack, but to me it’s home.”

Chuck smiled. “Home is where you hang your hat, as the saying goes. We appreciate your letting us use it.”

“No problem,” the minute man said as he laid Logan gently on a couch in the front area. He then went a got a blanket, which he placed over Logan, who was beginning to moan softly. Chuck laid a hand on Logan’s forehead.

“He wasn’t sick before all this started, was he?”

Caitlin thought “Not that I know of, why?”

“Because he’s feeling a tad feverish.”

She walked over to Logan. “Anyone ever have a reaction to your darts before?”

Chuck shook his head.

“Well, looks like you’ve got your first. I have no idea how this is going to play out on top of his flashback.”

“Do you think it’ll make it worse?”

Caitlin looked at Willie. “No idea. It certainly won’t make it any better.”

She crossed her arms as she considered their options.

“As long as he’s out, he’ll be OK. But what worries me is if he hasn’t come out of his hallucination and starts to come around. Maybe we ought to secure him a bit, for his own safety as well as ours.”

Chuck stood and reached behind a counter. He pulled out several lengths of rawhide belts. ”

Will this do?”

Surprise showed plainly on Caitlin’s face. “Do I want to know why you have restraining straps handy?”

“Probably not,” Chuck said as he handed them over.

Caitlin took the straps and attached them loosely to Logan’s arms and legs.

“That should give him some freedom of movement. If he feels physically restrained, it might exacerbate what’s going on in his mind. If he starts to wake up and we need to, a couple of tugs should tighten them up sufficiently.

Logan awoke on a metal table, under a spotlight. He couldn’t tell where, but he had a hunch it wasn’t in the village he was trying to escape from when the dart hit him. He tried to sit up, but couldn’t, a fact that didn’t surprise him too much. He looked around and couldn’t see anyone.

“Hello! What the hell is going on here?”

His voice echoed, as if he were in a large warehouse of some sort. He couldn’t see walls, which were outside the light from the spotlight. He couldn’t hear anything other than the echoes of his own voice. A small knot of fear began to grow in the pit of his stomach.

And the voices were back.

“You’re all alone, Logan, your team has abandoned you. You are going to die here and there isn’t a damned thing you can to prevent it. They aren’t going to do anything to you, they aren’t going to question you. They are just waiting, just going to watch you die from the poison that was in that dart. They are just going to watch you like a lab rat.”

“Shut up!” Logan yelled, straining against the restraints. He fell back onto the table, tears forming at his eyes as he listened to his yell reverberate from the unseen walls.

When Logan strained against the restraints in his hallucination, he also attempted to sit up in the real world. But Caitlin was right there with him and tugged the leather restraining straps tight. She then took a damp wash cloth and dabbed it on his forehead.

“He’s burning up,” she said. “Are you sure no one’s ever reacted this way before?”

Chuck walked over to where Logan lay.

“Well, what I said was no one’s ever died from it. There have been a time or two where people have gotten an upset stomach or a headache, but nothing like this.”

Caitlin touched Logan’s cheek. “Well, it’s happening now. Does this little village or whatever you call it have any type of medical personnel that might be able to help?”

Chuck stiffened visibly for a moment, before realizing that Caitlin spoke out of concern, and perhaps out of an affection that she herself was not quite ready to admit.

“A doctor, no, they’re few and far between. But we’ve got a medic, of sorts.”

“Of sorts?”

Caitlin did not like the sound of that.

“One of our boys worked for just shy of a year with the medic of the North Georgia unit before joining up with us, sort of an apprenticeship.”

Chuck looked over at Phil and indicated with a jerk of his head that he should go and fetch the unit’s medic. Phil nodded in return and quietly slipped out of the cabin.

“He’ll be back in a few minutes,” Chuck said as Logan strained against the restraints, sweating profusely.

Logan fell back against the metal table. Obviously, the restraints were too well attached -- all of his struggling just served to cause them to become tighter.

“You really don’t want to do that.”

The voice came from nowhere, and everywhere. And it was in English.

“Who the hell are you and what do you want?”

The voice was as loud as he could muster, and it still came out as not much more than a hoarse whisper. All his exertion had him covered with sweat and he was beginning to feel chilled. His body was starting to shiver uncontrollably.

“You know what we want, all you have to do is give it to us.”

Logan felt he needed to stall for time.

“You know, your English is very good for a terrorist.”

The voice laughed.

“A terrorist? Is that what you think we are? Simple terrorists like the fools that are destroying this country you and the Yanks came to ‘liberate?’”

Logan’s head was beginning to spin. The voice did not have a trace of a British accent, in fact it sounded like it had a touch of a Southern Drawl. Yet it used the term “yanks” like someone from back home.

“You’ll forgive me if I seem a bit puzzled, but I have no clue what you are talking about.”

The voice laughed again.

“We want the PK-135 chip your firm is developing.”

“What are you bloody talking about? My name is Marcus Logan, British Special Forces, serial number L434444444XTY. I don’t work for any firm and the only type of chips I’m familiar with are served with my fish on Saturday nights.”

The voice started laughing and continued laughing. The laugh started low and began building in both volume and pitch. Logan’s head felt like it was about to explode from the pressure and the pain.

He screamed.

Caitlin had joined the others in the small cabin. They were seated around a table drinking coffee and talking in low tones so not to disturb Logan, who for the moment had been apparently resting comfortably.

Then he began screaming.

Caitlin immediately jumped up and rushed to his side. She grabbed the wash cloth and squeezed some water on his fore head.

“Where the hell is that medic of yours?”

Before Chuck could say anything, the door opened and a young, tall black man walked inside carrying a battered fishing tackle box.

“He seems to be here,” Chuck said. “Caitlin this is Corey Gagnon, our medic.”

“Nice to meet you,” Corey said as he knelt down next to Logan and opened the tackle box, which turned out to be his equivalent of a medical bag. “What’s the story?”

“Bad reaction to one of my tranq darts, apparently,” Chuck said. “Never seen a reaction this strong before. His people tell me he has a little PTSS, maybe that’s what’s making things so rough.”

Corey nodded and began to rummage in his “medical bag.”

“Wish he were conscious; I hate wasting needles. Ahh, there it is.”

He fished a vial out of his box. He then pulled a glass syringe and a needle packaged in clear plastic wrap. He opened the wrapping and fitted the needle to the syringe. He used a diaper wipe to clean the top of the vial, much to Caitlin’s amusement.

“As bad as things are here, you still have diaper wipes?”

“We’re still havin’ babies,” Corey said. “Although we don’t have to argue anymore about whether cloth or disposable diapers are better for the environment.”

Caitlin chuckled at the medic’s joke as he finished drawing the clear liquid into the syringe. He wiped a patch of skin on Logan’s forearm.

“Look, I don’t want to seem ungrateful or overly suspicious, but what exactly are you giving him?”

“Just a simple analgesic to try and bring down the fever,” Corey said.

“Don’t you have anything to counteract Chuck’s ‘secret family recipe?’”

Corey smiled as he injected the fever reducer into Logan’s arm.

“Never needed one before. Previous reactions were always mild.”

Caitlin said nothing, but a clearer picture of the reality of the United States was starting to come into focus. Massive shortages of most supplies, with mostly meaningless items like baby wipes distributed to make most of the population feel good about the totalitarian regime that now ran what at one time was the greatest democracy on the planet. She wondered just what happens to all the material that comes in on the freighters. No doubt there are a lot of government officials living in relative luxury somewhere -- probably in Washington.

Even deep in his nightmare, Logan began to feel better as Corey’s ministrations in the waking world began to reduce his fever. His mind began to focus and began to work on a way out. OK, if my movement causes these straps to tighten, all I need to do is relax. So lay back and relax, use those breathing techniques that shrink taught you back in London.

One convenient fact about the subconscious mind, is that when it begins to get its focus back, it can exert more control over a perceived reality than most people think. Logan wanted the straps to loosen when he relaxed so they did, cooperatively slipping off of his arms.

That worked even better than I expected. Logan sat up and was able to quickly undo the restraints on his legs. He then swung his legs over the side and jumped to the ground, having to grab the table as his legs nearly buckled underneath him. Guess I’m still a little woozy.

Logan rested a moment as he felt the strength return to his legs, then he began to walk. When he reached the previously unseen wall of his prison cell he was only moderately surprised to find a door right there where he needed one. He listened at the door, and hearing nothing cautiously opened it. Again, things went his way as the mechanism opened with a barely audible click and the door swung silently on its hinges.

As he looked out into the corridor, he felt the beginnings of a burning desire to be somewhere else. A need to find some people he was supposed to be with, and he knew that it wasn’t his military unit from his days in the Persian Gulf. It was confusing, but he knew that he was supposed to be with a different group of people, so Logan began to look for them, moving slowly down the dimly lit corridor of whatever base or building he had been taken to after being knocked out back in the village.

After what seemed like several hours, Logan was, as far as he could tell, no closer to an exit from the building. The corridors seemed to go on forever, reminding him of mazes he had enjoyed at county fairs as a child.

This is ridiculous, I’m no closer to getting out of here then when I was strapped to that damned table.

Then he heard it, a sound, the first he had heard since he made his escape from the lab, or whatever it was where he was first held prisoner. What the hell is that, I know I’ve heard it somewhere before.

Logan began to walk in the direction of the sound, at least he tried to find the source in the maze of corridors. Finally, he turned a corner and heard the sound distinctly from behind a closed door. And then it hit him, he knew what the sound was. It was static, it was a radio. Logan couldn’t quite make sense out of what was being said, as the words drifted in and out.

“Stingray, this is Blackbird, over.”

Damn it they’re monitoring our frequency!

“KD4MCM calling CQ, CQ.”

What in bloody blazes is that? That’s no military call that I’ve ever heard before. Where the hell am I?

He opened door after door, only to find each room long deserted, with dust and cobwebs covering shattered pieces of furniture.

Finally, one of the doors opened to the outside. The door led into a courtyard of some sort, and it was pouring rain. Across the open space he thought he could see two men hunched over a radio next to a portable satellite dish of some sort.

“Roger, KD4MCM, this is London, we copy you 5 by 9.”

Logan tried to make sense of the radio transmissions, he noticed the volume growing louder, and suddenly there was more static and the voices were less clear. As sound increased, his head began to pulse in time to the crashes of static and a pain began to build. When it reached a crescendo, Logan screamed.

Logan sat bold upright, panting heavily. One hand immediately went to his head.

“Wow, what hit me?”

Caitlin, who had been playing cards with Chuck and the others, went immediately to Logan’s side.

“You may not want to know. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I was in a field not too far away from here with. .”

He paused and looked at Mandy, who was standing right behind Caitlin.

“With Mandy, who was showing me around.”

Mandy shot Caitlin a look, not a mean look, just a knowing glance, with maybe a trace of a smile.

“Anyway, I heard the static from in here and she brought me inside to meet Chuck and the others, the next thing I know I’m waking up in this cot with a headache the size of that damned wall. Would someone care to fill me in?”

Logan looked over at Willie who shrugged.

“I guess that means I get to do it,” Caitlin said. She took a deep breath. “You had another flashback, a bad one. Chuck had to use a tranquilizer dart to bring you down and you had a bad reaction to it, worse reaction Chuck says he’s ever seen. What do you remember?”

Logan sighed. “Nothing, just like all the other times, absolutely. . ”

He stopped in mid-sentence and grabbed Caitlin’s hand.

“No, this time I do remember. I was in Afghanistan. In this village. We were on recon patrol and I got separated from the lads. And there was a wall around the village.”

“A Wall? Interesting,” Caitlin said.

“May I continue?”

Caitlin nodded.

“I was taken prisoner, taken to a lab where I escaped and found myself outside where some chaps were trying to contact London, and they were using a call sign like those Ham stations of yours.”

“Not possible,” Chuck said. “Even without the jamming, we couldn’t reach England with the power we can use.”

“Well, I know what I heard,” Logan said stubbornly.

“True, my friend, but what you heard was in a dream, a nightmare resulting from your PTSS and my knockout juice.”

“Maybe,” Logan said as he lay back down on the cot. “Maybe it was a nightmare, but there’s something . . .”

“What do you mean?” Caitlin asked.

“I’m not sure yet,” Logan said wearily as he closed his eyes. “Give me some time to sort it all out.”

Caitlin rose and went back to the table and the card game. By the time she sat down, Logan was snoring softly.