Page 93 of Lash

I don't know what to say to that other than thank you, but I'm saved from having to reply when the pilot sticks his head out the cockpit door. "We will be landing in a moment, my friends. Hold on to something, please."

We all brace ourselves against crates and pallets and find handholds. Without windows, however, there is no way to know when we will touch down, none of that increasing sense of speed as you approach the ground. There is only the faint sense of movement, a gentle side-to-side rocking as the pilot feathers the controls, and then a sudden jarring bounce and a loud bark of rubber tires on the tarmac, another smaller and gentler bounce, a third touchdown without a bounce, and then we're flung forward as the pilot brings the aircraft's speed down.

Several minutes of taxiing and waiting, and then we're greeted by the hydraulic whine of the ramp lowering, and brilliant Brazilian sunlight slices through the relative gloom of the cargo plane's interior.

We all file out of the cargo bay and into the blazing heat, stretching and flexing. Once the pilot has finished his post-flight duties, he joins us on the tarmac in front of a massive Quonset hut hangar, from which streams a gaggle of workers with forklifts and dollies and such, ready to unload the cargo.

The pilot holds up his clipboard. "I have to oversee the unloading so I must stay here, but Lorenzo arranged for a vehicle for you." He grins sheepishly. “It is…well, you will see. But it is the best that could be done on short notice. Once you have finished with it, just leave it anywhere. If it finds its way back to me, then good. If not?" He shrugs. "Oh well."

We all shake his hand and thank him, and then follow his verbal directions to where the vehicle is parked in an out-of-the-way alley behind a dusty, forgotten old hangar on the edge of the airfield.

It's a battered, rusty old passenger van, the kind with several rows of benches and a sliding door on the righthand side. Once white, it is filthy, covered in dirt and rust, and, somewhat concerningly, bullet holes.

Rev whoops when he sees it, bizarrely excited. "Chance, what does this piece of shit remind you of?"

Chance frowns, and then his face clears into laughter. "Fuck me, I'd almost forgotten about that op. Jesus, what a hysterical clusterfuck that was."

Solomon arches an eyebrow. "Care to share with the rest of the class?"

"I'm driving," Rev says, slinging himself behind the wheel. "Chance, you got shotty, just like old times."

"Fucking church vans," Chance mutters. "Rev, bro, you are way too fuckin' excited about this."

We all pile in, with Solomon in the middle of the second row so he can direct Rev. Once we're away from the airfield and on a two-lane highway, Rev tells the story.

"So, a couple years after we made Recon, we were sent on this op in the Congo. The actual details of the op are classified, obviously, but suffice it to say the whole thing was a goddamn shitshow from the jump."

I lean closer to Nico. "I do not know what many of these words mean. Recon, classified shitshow, from the jump."

"Recons are a special forces group in the Marine Corps," Nico answers in a murmur. "Classified means only certain people are allowed to know about it. Shitshow just means a messed up situation. From the jump means right from the start."

I nod my understanding and tune back into Rev's story.

"…So we were supposed to be protecting a CIA asset. Intel was that it was gonna be a nice, easy, boring op. The asset was supposed to meet us at a certain place and time, and we were gonna escort him to some other location. Even we didn't know too many details, just 'get this person from point A to point B and don't let 'em get fuckin' killed.'"

Chance cackles bitterly. "Man, that shit was FUBAR'd the second we were boots down."

Nico mutters to me, "FUBAR means 'fucked up beyond all recognition.'"

"So worse than a shitshow," I say.

Rev hears me and glances at me over his shoulder. "Yeah, babe. We got a whole system of describing the levels of fucked-up-ness in the military. It started out a shitshow and went FUBAR real goddamn fast."

"It was not a simple escort mission, I assume," I say.

Chance belly laughs. "No ma'am, it most certainly was not."

Rev picks up the thread. "The second we got off the plane, I knew shit was gonna get hairy. We were supposed to have a real fuckin' ride. A HUMVEE or a Jeep, a Suburban, fuckin'anythingthat wasn't a rusted-out bucket of bolts. But some pencil-pusherdecided to save a few bucks and put us in a church van like this one, only way older and way shittier."

"Why do you call it a church van, please?" I ask.

Chance answers. "Oh, well, in the States, vans like this are often used by churches to transport kids or whoever from the church to some activity or something I dunno, I never went to church. " He laughs. "Honestly, I just know they're called church vans."

“Oh."

Rev thumps the dashboard with a huge fist. "Man, that van was the sorriest fuckin' piece of shit I've ever seen. It was literally held together by duct tape in some places. It had no A-C, and this was fucking Africa. Windows didn't roll down either. The engine had been replaced by some tiny little four-banger that was barely able to get the goddamn thing moving. Floorboards were so shot I coulda Flintstoned that fuckin' thing.” I don’t bother asking what a four-banger is, or what Flintstoning means—the point is that it was a terrible automobile.

"The squeal of that engine," Chance groans, laughing. “You could hear it from a mile away."