SynopsisA veteran with a guilty secret plans to spend some time with his family at a plush mountain resort tucked away in the splendid beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It will be great, Nathan Henderson thinks. But this is before they run into the detour that directs them into the heart of a human wilderness that’s more savage than the forest and darker than the falling night. Nathan alone stands between death and his loved ones, but, for a man like him, one chance in hell may be all he needs!
SampleFor more, visit Blue Mountain DetourPrologue
Nathan Henderson was sweating profusely, despite the chill autumn air that drifted in through the open bedroom window, fluttering the curtains. He tossed and turned, thrashing about beside his wife, Naomi. She muttered, turning away from him.
The enemy was a young man, hardly out of his teens.
He wore the black pajamas and the flip-flop sandals of the Viet Cong.
He had ambushed them from their hiding place in the bamboo hut on stilts with the thatched roof that stood at the end of the muddy road that led through the village, wounding two of their number before fleeing.
Troops on the periphery of the area of operations had captured him, along with several of his comrades. They were to be sent to the rear for interrogation, but Nathan’s commanding officer, Captain Preston, had intervened, and now they were Captain Preston’s prisoners. He had separated this young man from the others.
The enemy soldier squatted on the ground, surrounded by a trio of guards who kept their M16’s trained on him. They had tied his hands behind his back and blindfolded him with his own shirt. Now, on Captain Preston’s orders, a rope was placed around the young man’s neck.
It was a long rope.
The airplanes that were spraying Agent Orange had not reached this location yet, and the jungle that surrounded this isolated village was impenetrably thick on every hand. A single, narrow trail meandered through the dense undergrowth. Tree limbs and heavy foliage obscured one’s vision.
They had called in air support upon encountering the enemy, but it was entirely possible that Viet Cong soldiers remained hidden along this trail, awaiting their opportunity to ambush the company as it resumed its march to its objective. It was also likely that the trail itself was mined or booby-trapped.
Some of the men in Nathan’s outfit were setting fire to the village’s huts. The heavy, dry grass of the roofs caught fire easily, and in minutes the huts on either side of the muddy road were blazing. Nathan could feel the heat on his face as the flames danced in his peripheral vision.
They had brought the bodies of the dead villagers outside, laying them in the mud along the side of the road to be collected for burial later, after the area had been captured and secured.
As usual, it was a sultry day, and Nathan sweated profusely.
“All right,” Captain Preston said, “get the bastard up on his feet.”
A guard reached below each of the enemy’s armpits and lifted him to his feet.
“Start him walking,” Captain Preston ordered.
One of the guards placed the sole of his heavy boot in the prisoner’s back and shoved his foot forward.
The Viet Cong soldier stumbled forward, tripped over his own feet, and sprawled onto the ground.
Captain Preston, the guards, and the other soldiers watching the incident laughed, some of them, like Nathan, nervously. The other Viet Cong prisoners also wore their shirts as blindfolds, but they had no doubt heard their captors’ dialogue and some, at least, understood English well enough to know what had just occurred. They were very still, very quiet.
Sweat trickled into Nathan’s eyes, stinging him. Sure, Nathan told himself, the boy had killed two American soldiers, but what Captain Preston and the rest of them were doing wasn’t right. The Geneva Conventions, as well as common human decency, censored this sort of behavior. Nathan thought, I should intervene; I should say something.
“Get him on his feet,” Captain Preston commanded. The guards bent forward, each gripping an arm, and lifted the Viet Cong soldier. Captain Preston reached up behind the prisoner’s head, and unknotted the makeshift blindfold, pulling the shirt away.
The enemy soldier blinked at the bright sunlight. Like Nathan, he was also sweating profusely.
“Let’s move out, ladies,” Captain Preston ordered.
One of the guards poked the muzzle of his rifle into the prisoner’s back, and the young man marched forward.
The others stood watching, waiting until he reached the end of the rope. Then, they followed their point man.
They all knew that, at any moment, rifle fire might erupt from the bush, and they were on their guard. They were tense, and their eyes moved continuously as they scanned the thick underbrush, eyeing the gaps between the dense thickets and close-standing trees. The only sound was their own footsteps. Like everyone else, Nathan was frightened, and his fear was a lump in his throat he couldn’t swallow. His jaw was clenched, and his finger was taut on the trigger. He was prepared, at any moment, to dive for cover and fire at any enemy, seen or unseen, that might ambush them.
Nathan had given no more thought to the Viet Cong soldier ahead of them on the trail. The morality of using him in this manner nagged at Nathan’s conscience, gnawed at it like a dog worrying a bone, but staying alive was all that mattered to him at the moment. If he got out of this jungle alive, he could occupy himself with the luxury of contemplating good and evil, right and wrong.
The explosion was a terrible shock, even though they had been expecting it--or something like it.
Their prisoner screamed and fell to the ground.
A column of dust, like smoke, wound into the sky.
Their human minesweeper had found a mine.
“You!” Captain Preston said, nodding toward Nathan and grinning, “go get that rope off him!”
Nathan swallowed.
“Now!” Captain Preston ordered.
I should refuse, Nathan thought. There’s no way I should be part of this. He glanced nervously at his fellow soldiers. Their faces were hard and inexpressive. Their eyes showed nothing.
Nathan ran toward the fallen enemy.
This is wrong! he told himself. Don’t do it!
The young man’s face was flushed. His body was awash in sweat. His lower right leg was gone, and the broken-off bone showed through the mangled flesh of the stump. His blood was a red pool in the dry, scorched soil of the narrow path. He moved from side to side, moaning and groaning through clenched teeth.
Nathan reached out, untying the rope.
He hurried back to his own men.
“Tie it around the next one,” Captain Preston commanded.
A replacement for the wounded minesweeper had already been shoved forward. He was another terrified, thin, young man. His blindfold had been removed, and the prisoner stared in horror at his fallen comrade. He struggled between the guards on either side of him.
“Hold him still, damn it!” Captain Preston barked.
Nathan slipped the noose over the prisoner’s head. Let it drop around his neck, and tightened it.
“Move out!” Captain Preston ordered the terrified youth.
The prisoner refused to budge.
One of the guards hit him between the shoulder blades with the stock of his rifle, and the enemy soldier staggered forward.
The guard hit him again.
The prisoner stumbled forward, taking one slow step after another, scanning the ground before him for tripwires, disturbed earth, or any other sign of a booby trap or a land mine.
“No,” Nathan moaned, “no, no, no! It’s not right!”
“Nathan,” his wife called, awakened by her husband’s plaintive objections to whatever nightmare was unfolding for him this time.
“It’s wrong!” Nathan wailed.
Naomi shook his shoulder, and his eyes snapped open as he reared up in bed beside her. His face was a mask of horror.
“Nate?” she cooed. “You were having a nightmare.”
His eyes darted about the room, seeing a chair against a thicket of brush, a lamp on a dresser in front of a stand of trees, a wall beside the bloody, legless man on the forest trail. One of them had shot him, Nathan remembered, as they filed past the wounded prisoner.
“It’s all right,” Naomi said. “It was just a dream.”
The nightmarish figure writhing on the ground dissolved. The jungle disappeared. Vietnam vanished again--for the moment, at least.
He breathed deeply, wiping the sweat from his brow.
“You okay?” she asked.
He nodded. “Sorry I woke you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she answered. “Go back to sleep.”
He almost chuckled at the suggestion; it was so absurd.
“I think I’ll have a nightcap,” he said.
“A drink?”
Her tone, disappointed and concerned, touched him. It also irritated him. He had lived through hell, and sometimes, when the demons revisited him, he needed a drink. Why couldn’t she understand that? Why did she have to be so disapproving of him for wanting to drown the memory of that bloody young man whose leg had been blown off when they’d used him as a human minesweeper? For a moment, Nathan saw the enemy soldier again, writhing on the ground, wailing through clenched teeth.
“I need something,” he explained, “to relax.”
She sighed, looked at him for a long moment. “All right, then, a drink, but just one. Please.”
He tossed back the blankets and rose, making his way around their bed.
When he reached the doorway, she said, “I love you.”
He swallowed. “I love you, too,” he replied softly.
Vietnam had come to symbolize the terrible incidents that had made up his life during the war. The country’s name or even a map of the land made him remember the cruelty of human beings toward one another and how, so many years ago, a young man himself, he had participated in such cruelty. For him, Vietnam had come to mean the worst that was within humanity and the worst that was within him.
For years after he had hung up the green beret forever, he’d drunk himself into a stupor every night.
Then, one evening, he’d met her, and she’d seen what she’d called the “goodness” in him. He had smiled ruefully at that. “There’s no goodness in me,” he’d replied, and he’d told her about Vietnam.
She had saved his life.
She had allowed him, if not to forgive himself, to go on, at least, and he had stopped drinking, mostly, and enrolled in college. Five years later, he’d earned a degree in engineering. Ever since, he’d helped to rebuild civilization rather than destroy it; he’d made sweet love to her, fathering two children; and he’d almost stopped drinking.
He went down the hallway and opened the first door on the right, looking in on his fourteen-year-old son, Henry.
The boy slept the sleep of the innocent, dead weight under the blankets. His eyes moved rapidly beneath their lids, signifying that he was in dreamland, and Nathan thanked God that his son was smiling instead of thrashing about, screaming.
“Sleep tight,” he whispered to his son, closing the bedroom door.
The next room on the left was Julie’s bedroom. He opened it, and saw his sixteen-year-old daughter slumbering soundly as well, dreaming, perhaps, of dancing in a long, formal gown with a handsome suitor under a full moon.
He hoped that neither of his children knew anything of his nightmares or of his cowardly behavior in Vietnam, but he knew that kids often knew more than their parents supposed. It was possible--hell, it was likely--that they had heard his screams in the night. They might even know about the human minesweeper. They might also know about the other incidents, his other nightmares. If so, it was another of the many sins he sorely regretted.
Downstairs, Nathan filled a glass with brandy, and he took a sip of the dark, bitter liquor. It burned its way down his throat and spread its warmth through his stomach.
Tomorrow, he and his family would leave their suburban sanctuary and, for two weeks, anyway, return to nature. They’d rented a cabin deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Nathan was determined that he, Naomi, Julie, and Henry were going to have a good time while strengthening the ties that bound them.
Too frequently of late, his daughter and son had argued. The family was beginning to drift apart, it seemed to Nathan. Their places at the dinner table were vacant more times than he liked, and neither Julie nor Henry ever seemed to be home much anymore. When they were home, they lived in their rooms, in front of television shows that depicted premarital sex and drug abuse as normal behavior or lay abed with headphones blaring obscenity-laden music into their heads.
Nathan hoped that getting back to nature, even if only for a couple of weeks would--
He shook his head.
Their two-week trip wouldn’t so a damned thing, he knew, except make his kids whine more than usual and his wife even more committed to the conveniences of suburban living.
Well, it would be a change of scenery, anyway. It would be a way to relax without alcohol. It would be a way to get away from it all, with just his family around him.
He lifted the glass to take another sip of the brandy, but decided against it, setting the glass aside, and crept up the stairs to the room he shared with his mate.
She was still awake.
As usual, she had waited up for him.
“You’re back sooner than I had expected,” she told him.
He climbed into bed beside her.
“Yes,” he answered, snuggling against her warmth.
She kissed him.
He smiled in the darkness, appreciative of his wife’s love and devotion, grateful for his children’s love and affection, thankful that, in Naomi, he had found a woman whose heart was bigger than Vietnam.
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