Chapter 9
It was before dawn. BMNT as we called it in my old world.
Begin Morning Nautical Twilight. I don’t know why us landlubbers were using something nautical, but I assumed it had something to do with being able to see ships’ sails in the distance or something like that.
It was also the time, according to Rogers Rules of Rangering, when attack was most likely, so you were supposed to ‘stand to’ and be prepared.
One can only change so much.
The Satphone beeped as it finally made contact. An incoming message. I brought it up. No random calls. The message was from Rose.
Poppy is great
Lian says hi
U have memories
Making new ones
What does it look like?
Love
I frowned. I should have asked about Poppy.
What does it look like? Not much different than the land around Rocky Start. The trees were leafless; it would be another couple of weeks before the green started budding. Forest. Mountain. Streams in between. And yeah, I had memories, but few good ones.
I’d have to think more before I sent her my next message.
I stuffed the Satphone in the Faraday bag, sealed it, then stowed it in the ruck. Shouldered it.
“Ready?” I asked Maggs.
She was born ready.
We headed out.
My first encounter of the day came after about four miles. Maggs alerted and then I heard someone cursing, slowly and steadily. Pretty good cuss words too. Someone with experience in the profane, who would do an old school drill sergeant proud.
We were climbing uphill and whoever was cursing was above us.
We soon came upon the source sitting off to the side of the trail on a log.
He was mid-to-late thirties, barrel chested, and in good shape.
What was left of him at least. He had the left leg of his pants trimmed off and the leg ended above his knee.
A prosthetic was in his hands and he was examining the socket with the intense focus of someone trying to fix a problem through sheer force of will. A look I was familiar with.
“You all right?” I asked, though clearly he was not.
He looked up, and I caught the flash of embarrassment before he shuttered it away with practiced ease. “Yeah, man. Just making some adjustments.” He had the look—short hair, steady gaze, the way he sized me up in about two seconds. Military, no question. If I had to guess, a Marine.
Maggs moved forward, tail wagging, because she had apparently decided that all humans needed her supervision now that we were going to be speaking to them. The guy's face softened immediately.
“She's beautiful. German Shepherd?”
Occasionally, someone mistook Maggs for a wolf, since she was all black and fierce looking.
“Yeah. Long-haired.” I unslung my pack, taking my time. “Mind if I take a break? My knees are filing a formal complaint.”
He smiled, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. “Whatever.”
I realized, belatedly that complaining about my knees probably wasn’t what someone would consider appropriate for the situation, but it was too late for that.
I sat down on my ruck across the trail, pulling out my water bottle.
I gave Maggs the signal to rest, and she settled beside me, though her attention stayed on the stranger. “I’m Max.”
“Tom.” He returned his attention to the prosthetic, twisting something, then trying to reattach it. His jaw was tight with concentration.
“Marines?” I asked.
“Always,” he said. He gave me the once over and frowned. “Army?”
“For a while.”
“Go to the sandbox?”
“A few times.”
He nodded at his leg. “Helmand Province.” He said it matter-of-factly, the way you'd give someone directions. “IED. Could've been worse.”
Could've been worse. The universal military understatement for ‘I almost died and only lost a leg in the process.’ And the leg was the obvious thing. Who knows what else had happened to his body. And his brain. I knew guys who’d seemed completely untouched by IEDs who’d gone downhill years later from the brain trauma. But Tom seemed all there.
He finally got the prosthetic attached and stood up, testing his weight. He winced, adjusted, tried again. “You thru-hiking?”
“That’s the plan. You?”
“Trying to.” He grabbed his trekking poles—heavily modified, I noticed, with extra grip tape and what looked like custom handles. “Haven’t gotten very far yet.”
“Far enough,” I said.
He laughed, a bit bitterly. “Let’s just say I'm not breaking any speed records.”
“However far you’ve done is far enough so far.”
He frowned at that and I also tried to make sense of what I’d just said. This talking shit was hard.
“Yeah, well, tell that to my stump.” He started to test his leg, and I could see immediately that something was wrong.
“How long has the socket been rubbing?” I asked.
“Was fine when I started,” he said. “And I did several multiple day hikes before coming here. Checking it. Was always fine. I prepared. But these hills.” He shook his head. He leaned heavily on his poles. “It’s fine. Just needs to break in. Get used to the up and down.”
It was not fine. I’d seen enough injuries to recognize when someone was pushing through serious pain.
“You get it checked before you started the trail?”
He laughed. “The VA? Might as well ask a psychic. But yeah. The local VA has a room full of prosthetics. Imagine that. I think they all do. The price of freedom, right?”
“You have backup socks? Liners?”
“Yeah, I’ve got extras.” He was getting irritated at my questions. “Look, I appreciate the concern, but I’ve got this. I didn’t come out here for people to tell me what I can’t do. Had enough of that at the VA and at home.”
Maggs looked over her shoulder at me and I put my hand on her head.
Everything in me wanted to push, to point out that he was clearly in trouble, that pride wasn’t going to carry him up the next mountain.
But I recognized that look—the one that said he’d rather crawl the rest of the trail than admit he might need help. Plus, he was a Marine.
“Fair enough,” I said, standing and shouldering my pack. “Where you headed today?”
“There’s a shelter about three miles from here. Gooch Mountain. Figured I'd make it there by dark.” He tried to sound confident.
I nodded. “Good luck.”
“Yeah. You too.”
I could tell he wanted me gone. To take his pain alone. I waved to Maggs and we headed up hill.
I paused as Maggs and I crested another of the many ridgelines crossing north Georgia.
One positive of the trees being leafless was that the views were more open than when leafed out.
I looked northeast, in the direction the trail headed overall.
However, for most of the day, we’d been heading due east. The Trail went east in Georgia before turning northeast and sliding between North Carolina and Tennessee.
Frankly, one of the more frustrating things about the Appalachian Trail is that as the crow flies it’s only 1,300 miles from Springer Mountain to Katahdin in Maine.
But the AT is 2,200 miles. Lots of meandering and even doubling back, especially here on the southern end.
As we moved on, downhill, Maggs ears alerted to something on a trail that cut across the Appalachian.
It was somewhat overgrown and there was no sign indicating a name for it, no mark blazed on a tree, like the single white mark that lined the AT.
It ran north-south. I stopped and slowly scanned the area.
I spotted the first camouflaged soldier about fifty meters off the trail—prone in the underbrush, rifle at the ready, so still he almost disappeared into the terrain. Almost.
The camo was good. The position was decent.
But I'd been trained to see what other people missed. Maggs noticed too, her ears perking forward. I put my hand on her head, keeping her quiet. Two more Ranger students were twenty meters apart, forming the front end of an L-shaped ambush that ended farther up the overgrown trail. I could mentally position where the rest were and the heavy weapons, the machineguns They had that exhausted intensity that came from weeks of sleep deprivation, lack of food and constant evaluation. I’d seen a Ranger student trying to put pretend coins into a tree once thinking it was a vending machine and hallucinating.
The ones who saw me studiously avoided making eye contact.
I was a civilian. I didn’t exist in their training scenario.
I checked my map. This was the training area for the mountain phase of Ranger School.
There was a very faint line indicating this little used north-south trail.
I nodded. We were due north of Camp Merrill.
If they were setting an ambush, there’d be a ‘enemy’ patrol coming through probably after dark.
Right now there was an RI—Ranger Instructor—somewhere close by watching everything.
I should keep moving but I didn’t. I stayed in place, looking up the trail where the ambush was set.
The RI finally came out of the woods, perhaps wondering why I was stopped.
Ready to tell me to move on, nothing to see here.
He was an older guy, maybe late thirties.
I realize that calling someone in their later thirties an older guy is odd, but military life, especially in Special Operations ages the body and the mind.
Hard living. He had a combat patch on his right shoulder; the scroll of a Ranger Battalion.
I’d always thought an interesting aspect of the Army was how much you could learn about someone just from looking at what they wore.
There was a subdued Combat Infantry Badge on his chest and master parachutist wings.
He saw me see him. His expression didn't change, but he gave the smallest nod. Acknowledged. Then he walked over, probably bored with running an exercise he’d overseen a dozen times and also wanting me to keep moving.
“You made my guys,” he said. Not a question.
“Yep.”
“The dog alert?” he asked.
I nodded.
He shook his head. “Most hikers walk right past this spot. Don’t see a thing.”