New Directions

 After nearly high-centering her vehicle on the washed-out "road" (so called because it was slightly less terrible than just driving cross-country in the Congo), she made me pull out of the foot-deep ruts and up the steep bank through a break in the black-sandstone blocks and spiny brush. We rocked to a stop on a flat spot somewhat above the deep channel of the putative track.

"How much further?" she asked, yawning. "I don't know if you've noticed, but you ran out of road awhile back." We'd been on rapidly-deteriorating dirt roads for nearly a half hour.

"Oh, c'mon, it ain't THAT bad," I said, glancing at her to gauge her reaction. "Well, fine, I TOLD you we should have gotten the 4X4 package. It should be somewhere within a quarter-mile. GPS is bouncing like a handball and the battery is nearly dead. I can't get a real accurate read."

I consulted the 1:24000 map, and looked around.

"OK, we're right here," I said, pointing to the end of a dashed line labeled 'jeep', "and the target's coordinates are right there," stabbing at a symbol on the map.  "And as far as I can tell, we should be practically IN the lake. So, it must be right over that little rise right in front of us there."

"Yeah," she said, glancing at the map, "we're close. Which is good. 'Cause you're walking from here. My SUV isn't designed for this kind of bushwhacking."

I was about to argue the point, but decided it just wasn't worth a quarter-mile hike or not, even if it was through thick brush. We dismounted and walked up the small rise.

"And there," I said, pointing to the vast expanse in front of us, "is the lake." I did a quick survey of the shoreline. "But I don't see the damned target."

She shrugged non-committally and hobbled down to the shore, her brace-stiffened leg and ankle slowing her to clumsy single steps.

"Pretty lake," she called back to me, picking up a water-polished rock, "oh, look at this one!" She began surveying the shoreline looking for more. She'd be at it for hours if I left her to her own devices.

"Be careful," I said unnecessarily, "I'm gonna go find this thing. Be back in awhile." She smiled and waved and went back to her rock-collecting.

I stepped back to the car and dug around in my backpack and retrieved some items. I found a more-or-less level block of sandstone away from the SUV and, using skills rusty now for at least a couple of years, compass corrected for magnetic declination, oriented the map, and figured the azimuth from my current position to the target.

While GPS was being a battery-draining pain in the ass getting a crappy-unto-useless signal through trees with not enough "visible" satellites to compensate, old-school magnetic bearings which didn't rely on a bazillion dollars worth of relativistic-corrected electronics were doing just fine, thanks. I sighted through the lensatic compass and a sudden visceral memory emerged unbidden.

---

It was, as my hillbilly friend used to say, darker than the inside of a cow.

Sighting along the dimly glowing dots of the compass that indicated the direction I adjusted my line of travel, I picked up my pace from where I'd left off. It was literally the darkest outdoor place I'd ever been in my life, and I knew that with all the brush-busting and going around trees and who knows what for the better part of an hour, my pace count was going to be off. Normally, I averaged 68 paces to 100 meters, but I'd done enough detours through the suffocating blackness that I estimated I was going to have to boost the number to 75 or more. It was hard enough staying on base course, never mind trying to sort out how far I'd come.

I stopped, utterly disoriented.  My head swam like I was fresh off a carnival ride, and I turned and whipped my head like a man trying to see around the edges of a blindfold.

"This is bullshit," I mumbled to myself. "You've fucked around and gotten yourself lost. Dumbass." 

The moonless forest darkness was near-total, and I could see no landmarks, hear no audio clues. The panic began to rise in my chest. I grabbed it by the throat and forced it back down, then sat down. 

"Take a breath," I advised myself. I kept breathing till I could feel my chest release. "You're not in any real danger. It's only an exercise. And even if it weren't, you're OK. We'll just take a break here and get your shit together." The urge to take a quick peek at my surroundings with the flashlight was nearly overwhelming , but slowly abated as I calmly talked to myself.

No lights are allowed on the individual night LandNav exercise except for the soft glow of the tritium compass markings and the low-powered deep-red mini-flashlight and even then the flashlight was only to read the map, and never allowed when moving at all. Showing a light for a moment anywhere else for any other reason for even a second, resulted in cadre appearing out of the dark as if by magic to scrawl "DEAD" across the training card everyone carried.

Death by magic marker. This effectively drives the lesson home: The enemy kills lights seen in the darkness.

"OK, boy, you're OK. Get your head out of your ass. Trust the equipment. If you panic, you die."  

Frankly, truth be known, a cadre killing me with his magic pen was scarier than taking real enemy fire. I took another shaky breath.

"What's your training number?" The deep voice came from behind me and to my left. The cadre was standing calmly about 10 feet away from me. Sitting there in the forest detritus mumbling to myself, I hadn't heard him approach.

"HOLY SHIT!" I squeaked, my heart pounding.

"What's your training number?" the cadre asked again patiently, walking around in front of me.

"577" I replied.

"577," the cadre said, "give me your training card." I dug it out of my pocket and handed it up to him. He examined it closely, using probably the dimmest red-light flash that I'd ever seen. In the nearly-invisible backwash from the light, I could see he was wearing night-vision gear over one eye. He looked mechanically insectoid.

"577," said the cadre, "why are you sitting here? You've been here for over 5 minutes. A stationary target is a dead target."

"Just taking a break."

"Are you lost? Sleeping?"

"No, sir."

"Uh-huh." He didn't believe me.  "In that case, you have an azimuth set and locked?"

"Yes, sir."

"Show me."

I handed my compass up to him and he opened it, holding it on top of my training card. He sighted and read it and made a note on my training card with a pencil that appeared in his hand.

"Please don't kill me, please don't kill me, please don't kill me…" kept running through my mind. I bit my clamped lips to keep it from bleeding out between us.

"577, is this your objective?" he gestured at where I was sitting. He handed the card and my compass back to me.

"It is not," I replied.

"Then get off your ass and get moving," he said without rancor, and turned and walked back into the darkness, disappearing like smoke.

I stood trembling. I took a deep breath and checked my azimuth of travel, lining up the glowing dots with the inscribed direction indicator, and fingered the so-called "Ranger beads" I was using to keep track of my pace count, and strode out along the line. I almost instantly ran into brush. I forced my way through. It was so thick that I could barely push enough branches away to break a path that instantly sealed shut behind me. I didn't care. It would take more than a few scratches to convince me to head back toward the cadre and his death-dealing pencil.

I suddenly burst into a small clearing like a drowning man breaking the surface of black water. The fencepost driven into the ground and topped with the orange and white plaque that marked the target point loomed out of the darkness so suddenly I nearly walked into it. I'd been sitting within 30 meters of it.

I nearly shouted with adrenaline fueled joy.

"Got you, ya fucker," I growled in a happy whisper at the marker, nearly dancing around it. I calmed myself and took a look at my notes and laid out the map, and shot a new azimuth through the dark to where the next target was supposed to be. And the next. And the next after that. Got 'em all over the next four hours or so. And I never got around to reading whatever the cadre wrote on my card.

Everyone else hated them, but from that night I loved LandNav exercises. And I have never since been lost anywhere in the world for more than a half-hour.

---

That was doubtless the root of my otherwise pointless hobby.

The flash memory made me realize I was getting lazy using GPS all the time. It was dulling my skillset. As with all tightly-coupled technological complexity, GPS has made my life vastly simpler. When it's working, it provides navigation to within 5 meters and often much less, all spitting out of a machine in my hand with zero work involved by me. What's not to like? But where's the buzz there? Drive or walk to those GPS coordinates and you're done. 

It's about as challenging as an afternoon dozing in an easy-chair.

Raising the compass and aligning the sighting wire with the sighting slot, I carefully shot the azimuth and….there?….yeah, right there was the target, right where it was supposed to be. Its dull black metal camouflaged it against the background of the shadowed hill behind it. 

I was gently jolted by the faint echo of the adrenaline dump I got in those dark woods…. I chuckled at the fickle memories. That LandNav course would probably kill this ancient corpse these days. 

My sat tracker advised that if I waited about 20 minutes, another satellite would appear in my effective horizon above the tree line which would probably fix my GPS errors.

"Fuck that," I muttered to myself, annoyed at the intrusion of the foofarah. I turned the GPS unit off and tossed it into the center console of the SUV.

I set off hiking.

The target was supposedly somewhere around the end of an old destroyed bridge that had been abandoned for decades. You can see the bridge in the background of the picture of The Beneficiary overlooking the lake if you embiggen it a bit. Yeah, right there, just below the "255" and "W".

 

The Beneficiary, The Lake, and The Bridge
Taken After GPS Finally Pulled Its Shit Together

 

The original road that lead to it, never anything more than packed dirt, had gone back to nature so completely that it took aerial photography to see the track at all. When I got to the bridge, I searched all over the end of the "structure" and the footings without success. I considered making the dangerous crossing to see if the box was hidden on the bridge or maybe on the other end.

Some of the guys setting these things define "safe" in rather more slipshod fashion than might be expected, particularly on the higher-difficulty targets. 

I wasn't sure how the crossing would work as there was no roadbed, only the steel frame, the last section of which had collapsed into a pick-up-sticks pile of jutting metal on the shore on the arm of the lake. I mentally shrugged and started out onto the thing, then stopped.

"Dumbass," I whispered to myself. No compass shots since I got into the area. Damn, I WAS getting lazy. "Where's your fucking equipment, trainee? You trying to find it by sense of smell?"

I broke out the map and compass and did a quick resection to find my exact position and re-figured a new azimuth to the mapped target location. Through the compass sight, this made a line that was actually about 25 meters from the end of the bridge, and intersected a dark, oval-shaped cluster of mid-sized sandstone boulders piled about a meter deep along the side of the ancient roadbed. As soon as I walked over to the rocks, I saw that there was a flat piece of lighter sandstone shoved oddly into a gap between two of the boulders. Pulling on a pair of leather gloves in case a snake or scorpion was living in there, I moved the flat rock and instantly saw the end of the ammo box wedged into the gap.

"Got you, ya fucker," I growled in a happy whisper at the box. Then realized that no one was around that gave a shit whether I could be heard. "FUCK yeah!" I yelled, pumping my fist.

"So, had a good time, did you?" she asked as we crawled slowly back up the trashed road out of the lake bottoms.

"Yeah, I did," I said, realizing I'd been humming to myself.

"Good. Get any high-end treasure?"

"Yeah, I got a Rubik's Cube that's made by someone else, so they called it a 'Game Cube' to keep from being sued, still in the original packaging. Probably worth almost a dollar anywhere in the country. But I left a couple of small copper bracelets and a miniature ceramic bear, so we're probably even."

"Sounds fair," she said, settling back into her seat. In the center console, the GPS rattled as we bounced up the road.