Eric Tucker looked up at Fordyce and shook his head. Les Johnson was keeping watch while Tang spoke soothingly to the boy in Korean. It was a total cluster. The sun would be up in an hour. They had some serious decisions to make.
Running away, the boy had stepped into a hole and had broken his right leg. That had been the pop Fordyce had heard.
“See how it’s all loose between the knee and ankle?” Tucker asked.
Fordyce looked down. Tuck had used his shears to cut up the length of the boy’s right pant leg. The little boy was scared to death and in a lot of pain. “How bad?” Fordyce asked
Tucker shook his head once more and unsealed one of the two-hundred-microgram Fentanyl lollipops the teams carried. “Bad,” he replied. “It looks like he’s got a tib/fib fracture.” He handed the lollipop to the boy and said to Tang, “Tell him to put this in his mouth and to suck on it slowly. Make sure he doesn’t bite it. Tell him it’ll help take away the pain.”
Tang nodded and translated the instructions as Fordyce continued to study the boy’s leg. He had played rugby at the Naval Academy and had seen some pretty bad bone breaks. And while he wasn’t a corpsman, he knew a tib/fib fracture was pretty serious. The kid wasn’t going to be able to walk on that leg.
Johnson shifted his eye from his rifle sight down to the boy. “What’s the plan?” he asked. “What are we going to do with him?”
“First we’re going to splint his leg,” stated Tuck.
“And then what?”
“And then,” Fordyce said, “we’re going to see where he’s from and what he knows.”
Johnson shook his head. “Bad idea. Sun’ll be up soon. People are going to come looking for him.”
Holding the boy’s hand, Billy Tang looked at Johnson. “So what are we supposed to do, bail? We’d be lucky to make the ridgeline by sunrise.”
“Hold on,” Fordyce interjected.
“We’d be exposed, in broad daylight,” Tang continued. “Not to mention the fact that our ride won’t be here until tomorrow night.”
Johnson hadn’t liked the CIA man from the get-go. Turning his attention back to his weapon sight, he repeated, “People are going to come looking for that boy.”
He was right. Fordyce knew it. They all knew it, including Billy. But Tang was also right. They were stuck. The sun would be up soon. Even if they wanted to pull the plug, they couldn’t. There was nowhere to go, not in broad daylight.
To make matters worse, the kid had probably left a trail behind him that even Helen Keller could follow. If someone did come looking for him, and they knew what they were doing, every broken twig and bent leaf of grass was going to lead them right to this spot.
The only way to prevent the team from being uncovered was to stop any search as soon as possible. To do that, they’d have to give up the boy. The drawback to that plan was that as soon as he began talking, the North Koreans would be after the SEALs and it would be Afghanistan 2005 and Operation Red Wings all over again. Fordyce wasn’t going to let that happen.
“Les is right,” Fordyce announced. “People are going to come looking for that kid.”
There was something about the way he said it that Tang didn’t like. “What are you suggesting?”
“His leg is already broken. We’ll make it look like he also hit his head.”
“We’re going to kill him?” Tang exclaimed. “Dude, I’ve got a boy almost his age.”
“And that’s exactly who you should be thinking about,” Fordyce ordered. “If this operation fails, your boy and millions of other children back home are going to get wiped out.”
Tang turned his attention back to the little boy with the broken leg and began asking him questions.
“Tang,” Fordyce insisted, but the CIA man ignored him. “Tang,” he repeated. “Quit talking to that kid. That’s an order. We’ve got to get this done and our trail scrubbed before the sun is up. Can you not fucking hear me?”
Johnson was closest to Tang, and pulling his foot back, he kicked him hard in the side.
Tang fell to the side, only to come up with his pistol. Leveling it at Johnson, he said, “You touch me again and I’ll kill you.”
Johnson was about to respond when Fordyce interrupted, “Tang, you’ve got