He could hardly believe he was alive.
This draw was smaller, perhaps four feet wide and twenty inches deep, and its soil had stayed moist longer. And inside the fence there’d been no grazing; thus, in the draw, the grass stood some thirty inches high, hiding him from ready notice by troops on the ground. But if they searched, they’d find him. From the air, the most casual instrument scan would find him.
Koskela didn’t think those things, he simply knew them. For the moment he lay gathering himself. Then he heard something that brought a muttered oath from him, the sound of a chopper approaching.
He hugged the ground more tightly, and for the first time he could remember, began to pray.
* * *
Koskela heard the little OH-6G land, heard the rotors stop, heard distant voices, and realized that if he had a chance at all, this was it. He began crawling down the shallow draw as rapidly as he could, which, given infantry and ranger training, was fast. Meanwhile the draw deepened a bit, and rising to a crouch, he began to trot.
A quarter mile later, his night goggles showed him possible salvation ahead, in the form of a windmill and a large round livestock tank. He arrived at about the time he heard the OH-6G in the air again. Peering into the tank, he saw a few inches of smelly water; not nearly enough to submerge in and hide his heat signature.
Anxiety gripped him, and he started around its perimeter. If he lay close against it on the side away from the chopper . . .
That’s when he found the burrow, apparently excavated by a coyote to shelter an expected litter. At this time of year, no one should be home. Taking off his gear, he pushed it into the hole, wriggled after it feetfirst, and pulled his M-16 in with him. Then he lay with his head inside the entrance, listening to the chopper fly a search pattern.
He prayed that the warmth of his body, where he’d lain sweating in the draw, had dissipated enough from the dry ground surface that the chopper wouldn’t spot the signature. If it did, they’d trail him sure as hell. It occurred to him to wonder if his prayer had helped, but he rejected the thought even as it arose. Things like that didn’t happen. In following the draw, he had inevitably come to the tank, and circling the tank, could hardly have missed finding the burrow.
His mind went to his buddies, and his abandonment of them. Rationalizing, he could have told them to surrender, but he couldn’t imagine Sarge doing that, any more than he would. The others conceivably, but not Sarge. With all the shooting, he had little doubt they’d been cut down. He could only hope they hadn’t all been killed.
* * *
About an hour after he’d heard the last of the chopper, Luther Koskela crawled from the burrow. He felt dangerously exposed, out in the open, and had no doubt at all he’d need to be well away from there before daylight. Meanwhile he was on foot, and a long way from safety.
24
Q: Well, suppose someone breaks into my house, and I’m afraid he’ll kill me. So I shoot him, and he dies. Am I guilty of karma?
A: You may or may not be guilty of manslaughter, but you’re never guilty of karma. Karma is a mechanism provided by the Tao to help learning take place. And when we choose certain actions, we create or extinguish karmic nexuses.
Let’s suppose you do kill him, and that prior to that moment, you shared no karmic nexus with him. Now you’ve created one, even though you may have felt compelled to it by a perceived danger to your life. And someday you’ll have to cancel that nexus with him, with both of you learning lessons in the process.
On the other hand, if you choose not to kill him, and he kills you, then he creates a karmic nexus. And if neither of you chooses to shoot—if he flees, or if you let him rob you—normally no karmic nexus is created. But lessons result nonetheless.