Mason halfway stunned and halfway enraged that this man who was suddenly in their custody would be so brazen, howled, “What?”
To which the man coldly replied, “I’m an American.”
He then stared right down the barrel of Benton’s gun and added, “And I don’t appreciate having Rambo here pointing his gun in my face!”
Benton judging that there was no real immediate threat then slowly lowered his weapon as he muttered, “Rambo really?”
Benton then asked, “Who the hell are you kid? And what are you doing here?”
With Benton’s gun lowered, the man seemed to relax a bit as he sighed, “I was kidnapped.”
Raina starting to feel a bit of compassion for the man then inquired, “What? You were kidnapped?”
The man glanced at Raina before looking at the ground and answering, “Yeah—I was out on vacation this Spring Break, was on a trail with my friends, got lost, and the drug lords nabbed me.”
Mason wasn’t completely surprised to hear of such a thing, but at the same time, something struck him as suspicious about the account. Call it the product of a finely-honed intuition, but something just didn’t seem right. And he wasn’t going to just believe anything this guy was telling him.
For all he knew this was just some elaborate trick of the drug lords themselves. The very thought of which prompted Mason to ask, “You were kidnapped huh? Can you prove it?”
The young man laughed, “Prove it? Wow… I never thought I would have to prove that I was kidnapped.” He then started rifling around in his pockets as he play-acted, “Okay let’s see do I have any kidnap ID cards on me.”
This was a bad move however, because for all Benton knew he was reaching for a weapon, causing him to raise his gun in response as he shouted, “Freeze! Get your hands out of your pockets!”
It may seem a little harsh on Benton’s part to an outside observer, but this was the world in which they lived. If he had given the young man the benefit of the doubt and played along with him, and it turned out that the guy was pulling out a gun—realizing as much in light of a muzzle flash would invariably be realizing too late.
The young man was no doubt shell shocked enough already with what he had been through, and seeing Benton with gun raised and finger on the trigger, caused him to involuntarily raise his hands out of fear as he shouted, “Damn! Don’t shoot! What the hell man?!”
Raina wanting to diffuse the situation, stepped toward him and asked, “Okay…okay… there is an easy way for us to check out your story. Just tell us your name.”
The guy laughed in exasperation, “My name? Of course.…” He then let out a long sigh and informed them, “My name’s Brian Nelson.”
Upon hearing this Raina wasted no time, and jumped on the Comm link to ask Kyle, “Hey Kyle we found a man claiming to have been a hostage of the narcos—he says his name is Brian Nelson. Can you check on that for me?”
Without asking any questions, or missing a single beat, Kyle then piped back into the comm link, “Sure, just a second.”
It actually took probably all but 30 seconds, but sure enough Kyle came back on the line to inform them, “Yeah—it checks out. There is a guy by that name in the missing persons database right now. And this is fairly recent—as in within the past 48 hours—so the mainstream media wouldn’t have picked it up yet.”
Raina then looked to Benton and told him, “You see that? He checks out.”
Only then did Benton slowly lower his weapon as he grunted, “Alright.”
But the SEAL in him couldn’t let the man go so easily as he warned him, “But seriously, no sudden moves next time, okay?”
The man known as Brian Nelson nodded, “Yeah no problem.”
As rattled nerves began to settle, Mason thought to ask the guy, “So how in the world did you get away?”
It was after this that the group was stunned to hear someone else—someone with a thick Spanish accent shout back, “He didn’t!”
Mason was the first to see it, high up on a platform in a tree a short distance away, were a pair of snipers with guns aimed right at them. Mason cursed, “Damn it!” as he reached for his gun.
Seeing his movement, the sniper immediately shot at Mason’s right foot with the bullet actually grazing the side of his shoe, just short of piercing his flesh. A shot which was immediately followed by the sniper screaming, “Amigo!! Do you want to die?! Try that again and the next shot will be at your head!”
With the man’s rifle clearly aimed right at him and the other one swiveling his weapon back and forth between Raina and Benton, Mason knew that if he defied the gunman and didn’t stand down, they would be in for a vicious firefight. And the odds were good that at least one of them—either him or one of his teammates—would not survive the conflagration.
Glancing over to Benton the two’s steely gaze met and the look was one of sheer determination. SEALS don’t just surrender like this. As a SEAL they were trained to never surrender. Not just out of bravery, but out of the simple fact that once you relinquish control of yourself to someone else and become a prisoner, you basically lose your own right to self-determination.
How many people back in the 2010’s surrendered their arms to terrorist groups like ISIS only to have their head cut off the next day? What was the point of surrender if they were going to kill you anyway? Was he really going to lead himself and his compatriots like little lambs to the slaughter? There had to be another way.
But as Mason looked at Raina, something new was clouding
