Marcus tried to open his eyes. The heavy lids would not respond to his thoughts. He felt himself being dragged across the ground for a long distance.
Muffled sounds tumbled into his hearing, and flashed of light sparked in his vision. He was unable to open his eyes or force his mouth to utter more than groans. Hands slid under his armpits and dragged him onto some kind of stretcher. Rough strands of rope tightened around his torso, lashing his arms to the hard wooden poles.
The sun was in his face. The deep voice continued to mumble incomprehensibly. At some point, Marcus lost consciousness again.
Fever broke over his body. He drifted along surreal lines between earthly consciousness and some other world. Lonnie appeared often. His mother and father, sometimes his grandparents, called to him to stay alive. “Don’t surrender, son!” They would say. “Never give up, Marine!”
Then darkness would overcome him again.
The deep voice spoke to him frequently, usually accompanied by someone or something tugging at his legs or wiping his brow. At times, surges of pain ripped through his body and he found himself shivering with an icy chill, then sweating as if he were on fire. The faces of the British Royal Marine Commandos of 2nd Troop gazed at him from across a crevasse. They waited for him, but did not call him to hurry.
Marcus awoke. Heat bore down on him like a heavy winter blanket on a summer’s day. He opened his eyes, blinking against the unfiltered sun light that attacked his senses through a nearby window. The ceiling of a small wooden hut came into focus.
“Ah, you are awake. Is it for real this time?”
Marcus forced sound through his larynx and out his lips. Speaking never hurt so much before. “Who are you?”
“I am Sambako Toniga, but it is more important to ask who are you, my friend.”
The man was short and thin, with very dark skin and thick lips that stretched in a friendly smile over a set of perfectly straight, brilliantly white teeth. His deep voice had made him sound both taller and heavier than what Marcus now saw before him.
“My name is Marcus.”
“Well, Marcus, do you have more than just a first name? I knew from your appearance that you were not African, and now can tell from your accent that you are American. Are you a mercenary?”
The man’s English, while accented, sounded as though he were well educated.
Marcus looked at him for a moment without answering. He tried to sit up on the cot. Excruciating streaks of pain shot up from the back of his legs. The skin across his calves and thighs felt as though it would tear open.
Sambako put his hands on Marcus’s shoulders and gently pressed him back down to the bed. “Don’t do things like that yet, my friend—your legs were very badly injured. Only now are you recovering from a terrible infection that nearly took your life from fever. I have had to open the injuries to cut away dead flesh several times in the past three weeks. You must not move them yet—for several days more, at least.”
Marcus eased back onto the cot, panting from the pain and exertion. “Three weeks? What happened to me?”
“I do not know the specifics, but you and your party were ambushed at the Burukana Orphanage Mission.”
Sambako handed Marcus a glass of water, and gently helped to prop his upper body up with a large duffel bag and some pillows.
“Ambushed.” The memory came back to him. He had been standing next to Sergeant Barclay, about to open the door to the big stone building. Someone had said they found a bunch of dead bodies, women and children, then hell exploded on them.
“An RPG,” Marcus said. “I remember now. I got the bastard, but he had already fired when my rounds hit. I was on the ground, on my belly. The rocket hit the wall behind me.”
Sambako scrunched up his face as he strained to see the events Marcus described.
“That would explain the leg injuries,” Sambako said. “You are lucky, then, that it didn’t kill you. The men on either side of you were not so lucky. As a matter of fact, none of your compatriots survived. I counted thirty-one of your men dead on the field. I was very surprised to find a breath in you when I found you. “
He paused and looked at Marcus. “I thought you were a ghost at first. I heard a quiet voice in a pile of bodies. You sounded French. Do you speak French?”
“Why? What was I saying?” Marcus could remember the dream as if it were still happening in his mind. Had he been dreaming in French?
“You kept saying ‘La nee’, which is ‘the birth’ in French. You have been repeating it off and on for most of the past three weeks.”
Marcus thought for a moment. Why would he say that? He repeated it over a few times, and then realized it was not ‘La nee’. “It was a person’s name. A woman named Lonnie.”
“I see. Well, perhaps whatever she said in your dreams gave you reason to live. You had lost a lot of blood. But here you are.”
Marcus’s gaze drifted away. He tried to visualize the faces of Smoot and Barclay, but he could not remember them. He could not draw up a memory of what they looked like.
“I am sorry about your friends,” Sambako said. “Which brings me back to my original question. By their uniforms, I could see that your friends were British. But yours looks different and has no identifying patches. So tell me, my lucky
