Face was furious.
Pacing the tiny, shit-strewn cage, he was contemplating the most bloody murder he could imagine.
God damned, head fucking, slant-eyed bastards.
Murdock wasn't dead, the eyeball they had given the colonel wasn't his. It had belonged to some poor Vietnamese civilian who was now dead, all for the sake of a sick V.C. mind game.
The severely malnourished, severely beaten, severely broken pilot had been returned to them with both eyes firmly in his head later the following day. He had immediately crawled for the nearest corner and huddled there for the remainder of the day. No matter how hard Face tried he couldn't get close enough to him to help clean his wounds, so he had continued to bleed from a fresh gash in his back, murmuring his nonsense code to himself the whole while and thrashing out viciously at anyone who tried to approach.
Much later in the day, after three straight hours of trying to approach Murdock, Face and the colonel sat deceptively casually at the far side of the cage.
"It has to be tonight. He won't last another round of this."
Colonel Smith nodded, his jaw clenching and unclenching around a cigar that wasn't there; the unconscious motion always helped him to think, whether or not he was smoking at the time. "Alright. We move at sundown."
The escape plan was disappointingly simple, the resulting escape something of an anticlimax. The team had gotten themselves so worked up about it, running the planned route hundreds of times in their heads; they were so nervous, so terrified that something would go fatally wrong that they had forgotten that they were a team of crack commandos.
They did what they had been trained to do.
They escaped from their cages and killed every God damned V.C. soldier in that God forsaken camp.
Save one.
The one that Murdock - only half aware of what was going on - threw himself in front of so the others could get away. Murdock was too weak to fight, his wasting muscles of no use to him against the physically superior, and more importantly, armed, V.C. soldier. And so he ran one, final distraction, exactly as he had intended, so the others could get away.
Face had to be dragged away by Ray and B.A., each toting a stolen AK-47 as Murdock was battered to the ground, and the V.C., unwilling to leave the relatively safe boundaries of the camp, sprayed the undergrowth with automatic gunfire while yelling frantically into his radio for reinforcements.
Lin Duk Coo met the escapees half a mile outside of the camp and handed over the hearty pack of food he had prepared for them. He then beat his own retreat, thankful that the General was off site and unaware that his prisoners were free.
"Colonel, we have to go back."
Smith pressed his lips into a thin, unhappy line and grasped his number 2 by the shoulder, to still his distressed pacing and so he could look into his distraught eyes. "Face, we can't. We have a handful of nearly empty weapons, no position and no backup. For God's sake, we can barely walk."
"We can't just leave him!" Face expression was, for once, completely open and the colonel tensed his jaws in frustration, feeling the teeth - loosened by the slow and steady receding of his malnourished gums - creaking far too easily against one another. It was moments like these that he hated being in command, moments where he had to decide between the greater good or his own emotions.
He did what he had been forced to do dozens of times in his military career; he hardened his heart and made the painful choice. "What would you have me do, Face? March back in there and seize him? With what? Look at your team." He took in the other men leaning unsteadily against each other for support, with a sweep of his arm, "We're just not strong enough."
Face stared at his commander, disbelief colouring his features as the valiant Colonel John Smith seemingly admitted defeat.
"I don't believe I'm hearing this."
Ray laid a hand on his arm, "Faceman..."
Face shook him off and roared, "I DON'T BELIEVE I'M HEARING THIS! Did he leave you, Colonel? When we were almost certain that to take you with us would mean our capture?"
The Colonel grumbled under his breath, "Should have left me... Bunch of damn fool heroes..."
"And now we're going to leave him, just like that? Do you know what they did to him in that shed, Colonel? Do you know what they're going to do to him again if we don't get him out?"
"YES I DO!" Smith abruptly coloured in rage, "I was there too, remember? We all experienced what they do to U.S. soldiers!" He sighed heavily, the sigh of a man who has the weight of the entire world on his shoulders. "I'm sorry, Face, there's nothing we can do right now; I can't risk the entire team for one man."
"One V.C. soldier is left, one!"
"One that has a gun, Faceman," Ray chimed in, "and a radio, and a whole swarm of V.C. troops on the way to back him up. I hate to leave Murdock too, but what have we got? By the time we get back there the backups will have arrived and then we'd just be caught again."
Eddie stepped forward to address Face, "What do we do when we get him out, L.T.? He barely knows who we are and where he is any more. Odds are he'd wander off into the jungle and be lost anyway, or worse, blunder into a booby trap and get skewered." A fire to match Face's fury leapt into Eddie's eyes and he sneered, "Let's get to the nearest base, rustle up a chopper and a bomber, snag Murdock from above, then napalm that fucking place."
Face looked into the eyes of every single man standing with him in the heart of the Vietnamese jungle and saw the same thing in every gaze he met.
Anger.
Loyalty.
Frustration.
Sighing in reluctant defeat, his head shaking in disgust and his lips twisting into a grimace, he shut his eyes for a moment and racked his photographic memory. After a second the image he had been searching for popped up and he pointed them West.
"The nearest base camp is this way. Let's go."
The A-Team set off towards the base camp, one man lighter than when they had left.
-A-
The decks weren't being swabbed. Why wasn't anyone swabbing the deck? Didn't they know the cap'n would be furious if his decks were dirty?
Something was wrong.
He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but Murdock knew that somehow, something was not quite right.
One-eyed Dave would see to it, he'd make sure there was enough rum and parrots for everyone; he was the best quartermaster on the seven seas.
Peering out at his surroundings from behind one swollen eyelid Murdock cradled his severely bruised ribs and tried to focus enough to work out what was off.
That morning, following the escape attempt, he'd been taken to the interrogation hut and given quite literally the worst beating of his life. The solo V.C. had clobbered him so badly around the head that he'd passed out. The next thing he knew he was coming around in a different cage, in a part of the camp he hadn't seen before, the sun looked kind of funny and the rest of the team was nowhere in sight.
Shiver me shiruken...
A guard walked past, toting a shiny M16. He paused by Murdock's cage, spat an insult at him in Vietnamese, then continued on his rounds.
Murdock frowned.
Vietnam, you idiot, you're in Vietnam.
What was going on?
-A-
Face winced as the M.A.S.H. nurse daubed iodine into a particularly nasty leg wound. Ordinarily he would be doing his best to charm the attractive nurse into submission, but right now his thoughts were very firmly elsewhere.
With Murdock
Murdock had saved them.
The conniving little spook had sacrificed himself so the others could escape, and escape they had; under Colonel Smith's command, every man had made it back to to the U.S. barracks just outside Ba Lien. Eddie, the nickname-giver-extraordinaire had taken to referring to their C.O. as 'Hannibal', after the Carthaginian general. During the forty kilometre hike through the jungle to safety, the team had encountered no less than six booby traps and two contacts, and Colonel Smith had repeatedly kept his men alive with his wits, keen eye and sheer force of will.
The boys had gradually begun to pick up on the nickname, and by the time they arrived at the field hospital they were all calling him Hannibal.
Face fidgeted.
"Something wrong, Lieutenant?" Colonel John 'Hannibal' Smith fixed him with an assessing eye from the bed next to his.
Face grimaced and looked to his C.O., "Yeah. I can't stand just sitting around here waiting to get shipped back home because the head shed think we're all shell shocked." His mouth hardened, "I need to get back out there."
Hannibal's gaze didn't waver, his steel blue eyes reading his exec like a book, "It won't do him any good to get captured again, Face."
Face surged to his feet - making the attending nurse jump - anger pulsing through him as the colonel seemed to brush Murdock off, "Are you kidding me?! He let himself get captured for us! If not for Murdock we'd probably be dead!"
Hannibal's unwavering gaze gained a hard edge, Face needed to calm down before he got put down. Hannibal had seen him seriously pissed several times before, and every time he was he ended up getting his ass handed to him because he didn't know when to stop. His anger had caused him to beat Murdock to a pulp back at the camp, and had he not been weakened by malnutrition Face could well have killed him.
"Sit down, Lieutenant. You're no good to anyone unless you get a hold of that rage."
Face's face twisted into an ugly snarl, and he pointed a furious finger in his C.O.'s face, "Look, you might have written him off but I haven't forgotten what he did for us. I'm going back out into the field as soon as I can and I'm going to find him, whether you're with me or not."
Unfortunately for Face, General Ludlow chose that moment to stride unannounced into the M.A.S.H., "Lieutenant Peck, unless you want to find yourself in the Brig I suggest you remove your finger from Colonel Smith's face and sit down."
Face immediately, instinctively bolted for his seat, his back ramrod straight and his eyes forward as the special branch general approached Hannibal. The nurse who had been daubing at his wound took full advantage of the distraction and got back to work.
Hannibal tried to stand up to attention but the Doctor who was working on him shoved him back down to the bed, "Colonel Smith, you're going to aggravate this wound if you don't lie still while I replace this dressing. I'm sure the General won't mind you not saluting him this one time."
General Ludlow smirked as Hannibal looked sheepishly up at him, "The good doctor is quite right, Smith. You stay right where you are until he's finished, I'd rather not get your guts all over my shoes."
He glanced over his shoulder to where Face was still sitting as if someone had rammed a steel rod down his spine before looking down at Hannibal again, "I couldn't help but overhear your 'discussion', in fact that's why I'm here. I got word this morning that your pilot has been retrieved from the P.O.W. camp he was being held in." Behind him, Face let out an audible exhalation of relief. "He's been flown back to the States for a thorough debrief."
Hannibal looked up sharply at the General, "Back to the States? But the rest of the squad are staying out here, we need our pilot."
The General's face was unreadable, "I'm assigning La Frois to you until further notice. Once you and your team have had a couple of weeks to recover I'll be deploying you again." He paused, as if weighing the pros and cons of telling the colonel more about what had happened to the pilot, finally deciding that a little information couldn't hurt.
"I doubt that Captain Murdock will be ready to fly again for some time."
A quick nod to follow that bombshell and he was gone.
Hannibal looked over to gauge Face's reaction to the news. The younger man's face had drained of colour and he gazed weakly at his C.O., "What did he mean 'he won't be ready to fly for a while'? What did they do to him?"
Hannibal's mouth pressed into a thin line, "I don't know, kid. But I intend to find out."
-A-
Murdock's head lolled limply on his shoulders, the ropes tying him tightly to the wooden chair the only thing keeping him upright. He struggled to focus the blurry shapes in front of him into solid people.
Sodium Pentathol.
He recognised his body's reaction to it. Where had they gotten sodium pentathol from?
They were asking him questions, but he was dosed so high on the truth serum that
it was reacting badly to his state of malnutrition. The drug made him delirious, his eyes rolled and his body fell limp and floppy as his captors evidently decided this method wasn't going to work and freed him from his bonds.
In his delirium, he thought he heard an English curse as two V.C.s lifted his deadweight form up and dragged him out of the interrogation hut.
Murdock, Captain, 11479825, November 24th 1947.
-A-
"The bank of Hanoi? Are you kidding? Hannibal, that's insane, we're soldiers not robbers!"
Hannibal twisted his cigar in his mouth as he shrugged, "I'm as mystified as you, Face, but these orders have come from Morrison himself, and I know better than to ask questions of him; remember what happened to Chuck?"
Face did remember. Captain Chuck Harrison had taken issue with an order from Morrison and had decided to go against it while out in the field with his own A-Team. It turned out that Morrison had been in receivership of some extremely sensitive intel that he couldn't share with his Captain; that intelligence would have ensured the team's safety had Harrison not disobeyed him. As it went, the whole of Harrison's team had been killed or captured, Harrison himself had gotten his leg blown off and suffered a concussion so severe that he had fallen into a coma.
The colonel knew that Morrison had contacts in very high places and access to ridiculously accurate intel, and he was not willing to gamble the lives of his men the way Harrison had.
"Alright, Colonel; it's your call. But I think it's a mistake, since when does the U.S. military rob banks?"
-A-
He had it.
He had finally worked out what wasn't playing quite right.
We pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot
Drink up me hearties, yo ho...
Ever since he had woken up in this new area of the P.O.W. camp, Murdock had been hearing something different to what he had heard before.
We kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot
Drink up me hearties, yo ho...
It was the accents.
Subtle differences in emphasis, elongation, mouth tension, differences that would not be apparent to the average ear, but Murdock's ear was far from average. After all, that was why The Company had picked him out of selection in the first place.
We kindle and char, inflame and ignite...
Racking his drug-addled brain he struggled to think up some bastardised Vietnamese dialect that only the guards from Thon Dai La would understand, and yelled it at the nearest V.C. guard.
"Tôi có những thứ để nói! I have information"
The guard turned, sneered at him and turned away again.
Murdock stared at the back of the guard's head in disbelief, the pirate code that had been cyphering and de-cyphering in his head finally falling silent.
He wasn't in Kansas anymore...