Storm Rising

by Ronie Kendig

  The shorter man jutted his jaw. “You think you big man?” he said in stilted English. “Leave and others like you come, destroy our lands. This—this is what you do?”

  Leif kept his hands raised. “I didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  They knew each other, but the association was an uneasy one.

  “Come.” The man motioned to the truck. “Chibale will deal with you.”

  Leif started. “Where is Ausar?”

  The man curled a lip, then shouted to his men, waving them back to the vehicles.

  Blunt force pitched Iskra forward. She stumbled, startled. Spun around.

  Leif appeared between her and the tall lanky man, who drew back in surprise. The presence of two more people created a buffer around Iskra as Culver and Lawe herded Peyton and Mercy into protective custody as well.

  “Easy, easy,” Leif murmured, motioning with his hands.

  The leader shouted something, and the man who’d started the confrontation trudged away, his attention leaving them only when distance forced it.

  “Thought you knew these people,” Mercy said as they returned to their vehicle, an escort of armed locals encircling the old van.

  “I do.” Leif glanced in the rearview mirror as they took an extremely leisurely pace into the village.

  “Guess you forgot to mention they don’t like you,” Saito added.

  Leif scanned their escort, weapons propped casually on their shoulders. “Not all of them.”

  * * *

  On edge after the encounter by the dried lake, Leif slowly made his way up the road to the dozen or so mud homes circling a great pit. Dealing with Bes warned him things were worse than he’d expected. With the loss of a water source, he’d anticipated bad, but this—if Ausar wasn’t the village chief anymore, then this was about to get interesting.

  Thick-bellied Chibale sauntered out of the larger, more central hut, surrounded by a half dozen men and as many women. Children were shooed off to the fields.

  Leif met each gaze, searching for not just familiarity but acceptance. Finding none, he focused on the apparent leader. He extended his hand in the customary greeting reserved for those not family or friends. Because he was definitely no longer a friend here. “Salaam aleikum, Chibale.” He broke protocol by using the leader’s first name, but he wasn’t a stranger.

  It would look poorly on Chibale if he did not return the greeting. Through tight lips, he said, “Wa-aleikum salaam.” He gave the team a lengthy visual assessment, clearly denoting his displeasure. “You come without gifts,” he continued in Arabic.

  That was all leadership meant to Chibale—money, power—even when Ausar had been alive. “My gift,” Leif countered, not cowed by this man, “is my presence. To find out what happened here.”

  “What happened is, men like you came. Made promises to Ausar.”

  “What about your brother?” Leif asked, noticing Baddar quietly translating for the team.

  “Do you question me?” Chibale asked, squaring his shoulders and narrowing his eyes. He took a menacing step forward. “I am the one you deal with now. I—”

  “Yes.” Leif inclined his head, offering deference he did not feel. “I asked after Ausar because he was my friend.”

  “Where were you when these men come?” Chibale demanded, motioning wildly with his arms. “When they say they have miracle for the soil? When they put this thing in the ground that drained our water?”

  Heart thudding at the words, the intelligence Chibale unwittingly divulged, Leif let him finish. Let him speak his mind while Leif formulated his thoughts. He sensed the team’s restlessness as they picked up on the information, too, and what it meant.

  “. . . Ausar is ill, and now you come back.” Chibale stomped, snapping out his hands. “For what? What good are you now?”

  Leif started. “Ausar’s ill?” The words jarred him forward. “Is he ill because of what these men did?”

  Chibale stared down his long, broad nose at him. “I will not speak—”

  “Leif.” Iskra’s voice was soft, nearly a whisper on the wind that came louder than the accusations and assertions flooding the air.

  He met her hazel-green gaze and was surprised when she nodded toward a hut. There stood a wraith-thin woman in faded cotton that hung to her ankles.

  “Habiba.” But even as Leif moved forward, he knew his mistake.

  Chibale leapt in front of him. Shoved Leif backward. “This is not your home! You have no place here. Go, leave—”

  “He asks for him,” Habiba called over the shouting.

  He? Leif’s hope surged. “Ausar?”

  “Let him come.” Habiba lifted an achingly thin child into her arms.

  Leif’s brain lagged, realizing the little one she now held was the baby she’d been pregnant with when he’d left.

  When hands and objections fell away, Leif crossed the path and climbed the wooden stairs of the hut. Each step, however, pounded into him a dread that whatever the condition of his friend, it wasn’t good. What would he find?

  Black-as-obsidian eyes met his as he reached Habiba.

  “He’s alive?” he repeated in Arabic.

  Her shift in expression warned him that his friend was alive, but not well.

  He touched the child’s back, smiling at Habiba. “You carried her in your belly when I was last here. What is her name?”

  “Farid,” Habiba said. “Ausar is very happy about her.”

  Leif smiled, but it faded as he angled toward the darkened interior of the one-room hut. A mattress hugged the far wall, away from the window. On it lay a stick-figure of a man, drawn, broken. Shriveled amid a sheet of white.

  “You are jealous,” came a raspy, dry voice from the shadows. It had aged, grown weaker, but the voice of his friend was undeniable and forced Leif closer as his vision adjusted to the dimness.

  “You were always the better-looking one.” Leif went to a knee. Light left a scant impression of his friend that shocked him. Leif ordered himself not to react, not to convey that Ausar was a ghost of the man he once knew. “You need to get up.” He heard the grief in his voice and neutralized it. “Your brother is anxious to seize power.”

  “I fear,” Ausar mumbled, his breath snatched by the effort of those two words, “he will get his wish . . . soon.”

  Silence padded the emptiness between them. Though it had been years since he’d left, there was no distance in their friendship. And it angered Leif that he hadn’t been here. That he’d had no idea what was happening. That he had not protected them. “What happened, Ausar? Who came?”

  “They come—” He seized, hunching his shoulders as he grabbed his side. A spot there glittered.

  Glittered? Leif angled for more light. Not glittered—wet. Blood! A bloody wound caught the light of the lamp. He pitched forward and yanked back the blanket. “What happened?” he demanded as his friend let his hand fall away, revealing clothes soaked with blood. And merciful God—the stench! “Saito! Now!” he hollered over his shoulder to the team medic. He glanced at Habiba. “Who shot him?”

  “No,” Ausar breathed. “Leave her . . .”

  Leif knelt again. “Tell me—is this from a gunshot?”

  “They come. Insist we let them test our water.” A sheen coated his face in the struggling light.

  “Chief?” Saito asked cautiously.

  Swiveling, Leif nodded to the injury, his hand resting on Ausar’s arm. “Gunshot—infected. Possibly septic.”

  Saito shouldered out of his ruck, lowered to the ground, and went to work.

  “We’ll get you fixed up.” Leif inched closer to the head of the cot. “Who was it, Ausar? Who were they?”

  His friend grunted. Drew up his chin, arching away from Saito’s initial prodding. “Soldiers. American.”

  The pronouncement was a sucker punch. “American,” Leif repeated in disbelief. “You’re sure? Did they give names?”

  “The leader call himself—augh!” He jolted against Sa
ito’s ministrations, then fell limp.

  Saito growled. “I need more light—the torch in my ruck.”

  After retrieving the small lamp, Leif twisted and pulled it. Light bloomed through the room and elicited a curse from Saito. The smell of antiseptic hit the air.

  “He needs an evac.”

  Leif keyed his comms.

  “Chief, I’ll be honest . . .” Saito went quiet, shaking his head. “This is bad. Not sure I can—”

  “Just do it. Make him better.”

  “Best thing we can do is pack the wound and get him to a hospital.”

  “Then do it. I’m not letting him—”

  “Runt,” Ausar muttered, his face sagging under the oppressive pain and infection. “Save them . . . children. Make . . . leave . . .” He went still, and Leif tensed.

  “He’s out,” Saito said, packing the wound.

  “Mercy,” Leif called, moving to join Habiba outside the thin curtain that served as a door.

  She sidled up.

  “Call Iliescu. We need to get Ausar to a hospital and relocate this village.”

  “See what you have done?” Chibale yelled. “What you—”

  Leif leapt off the stairs and charged toward Chibale. “Why did you not get him help?” he asked in Arabic. “Why are you letting him die? Is that how you care for your people? Is that how you take care of those who depend on you?”

  Chibale skidded a nervous glance around. “He would not leave. He refused.”

  “If you want to be a leader, then you make those depending on you understand why it’s to their benefit that they leave. If you don’t get them out of here, Chibale, they will die of starvation.”

  “Other villages will not take us. To them, we are cursed because we let Colonel Nesto do this.” Chibale looked very much like the little brother to the real leader of this village.

  “Nesto.” Leif let his brain catch up. “Is that who came?”

  “Not him,” Chibale said, “but the soldiers, the colonel send them.”

  “Runt.” Lawe touched his mic. “Water and supplies from El Gorah are en route.”

  Glad Lawe had taken care of that without being ordered to, Leif nodded. “Good. Thanks.” Overwhelmed, he turned to Chibale.

  “They promised to make our water more clean.” Chibale’s attitude was different from their initial confrontation. “We give them our trust. The rains stopped a week after the machine. In a month, the lake is dry. They come to take the machine, but Ausar argued with them. Told them to leave. Go away. We fight and they leave. But Ausar was shot.” The whites of the man’s eyes went red. “He would not leave. Said they would come back and he must be here to protect us.”

  Leif clamped a hand on Chibale’s shoulder, speaking volumes without a word. Then he stilled. “Wait. The machine—it’s still here?”

  “In the field. By the well.”

  “Show me.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWO HOURS SOUTH OF EL GORAH, EGYPT

  Heading down the path that led away from the homes to the long fields, Leif thrummed. If they could find—

  “Chief!”

  He turned, searching for Lawe among those who had followed him down the dusty path that circled the parched fields.

  The big guy stood to the side, pointing to Chibale, who had a cell phone to his ear. Not just a cell phone, but a satellite phone.

  “What is that?” Leif growled, storming toward him, facts rolling in on top of one another.

  Chibale’s face fell. He shook his head. Lowered the phone. “They say they come.”

  Leif frowned. They? Who?

  “Now.”

  As if on cue, a repetitive thwump sailed through the air, rattling eardrums and the ground. Leif checked the sky and found the black dot.

  “Medical?” Culver asked.

  “Not enough time to scramble, get airborne, and be this close.”

  “Then—”

  “Go!” Leif threw himself down the path, sprinting for all he was worth to get that machine before the chopper did. Chibale was with him, hoofing it to the well. They broke off the path and shoved through the dried-up husks in the fields.

  “There! There!” Chibale shouted, stabbing a dark finger at Leif’s two-o’clock position. Leif diverted in that direction, leaping and sailing over as many of the waist-high stalks as he could. It was tougher than one might think, trying to barrel through a dried-up wheat or corn field. He couldn’t remember which had been planted here, and he wasn’t a farmer who could tell from the brown shafts.

  He leapt over a depression and landed near the stone encasement of the well, once fed by a natural spring. At the same moment, he registered the sign jutting up from the cracked earth. LAND MINE. In the very middle of the field lay a metal orb the size of a football, its sides a network of octagon panels. Dust caked it.

  A curse fought Leif’s restraint even as he heard the frantic approach of Chibale. The leader skidded to a halt, and their gazes met, revealing guilt in Chibale’s eyes. Or was it disappointment that Leif hadn’t been blown apart?

  “You knew about this,” he said.

  Chibale faltered.

  “Do you know a safe path in?”

  “I-I do not.”

  Leif swiped a hand over his face. When the others appeared, he threw out a hand. “Land mines!”

  Devine didn’t flinch, shrugging out of her pack. She swung her weapon around and detached the scope. “Thermal.” She motioned like she was going to toss it. “Mines warm the sand around them.”

  She’d better know how to throw well. He nodded, and the scope went airborne. He caught it and put it to his eye. The field altered before him into a multicolored schematic, revealing not two inches from his right boot a bloom of red. He muttered a curse, realizing how close he’d come to losing a leg, if not his life.

  He swept around to be sure there weren’t more near his feet, then stepped into the field, keeping to the darker colors, until he reached the orb. Squatting, he eyed the orb to determine if it was rigged with a pressure plate underneath.

  “What’re you waiting for?” Lawe growled.

  “I can’t tell if it’s on a plate.”

  “One way to find out.”

  Right. He checked one more time with the scope before pocketing it. He reached for the orb, surprised at the way it vibrated and hummed. What was that thrumming? Electricity?

  “Uh, Runt?” Mercy was watching the sky.

  No. Not the sky. The chopper marring the blue expanse. From its belly birthed a plume of smoke.

  “Missile!” Lawe shouted, waving everyone to the village. “Go!”

  Resisting the urge to run, Leif placed the scope against his eye again. Picked his way through the field with careful but hurried steps. Death by mine and death by missile weren’t in his plans for the day.

  Searing heat rushed over him as the missile screamed toward its target. He sprinted, using his toes to sprint faster and faster.

  The missile impacted with a heavy thump. A shockwave punched his back. It violently smacked his ears, making them ring. Heat seared his spine. His legs lifted, carried him up and over. He thudded into the ground, knocking the air from his lungs. Leif arched his back, groaning. Turned onto all fours.

  Warbling sounds reached him through the ringing in his ears. Adrenaline shoved him up. Safety—get to cover. A split-second recon told him he was alone. He couldn’t see the others. Couldn’t see . . . anyone. Being in the open field made him a sitting duck. He spun back toward the village, only to see the huge black hull of the gunship bearing down on him.

  The orb! Where was the orb?

  He glanced around, his hearing hollow. Disoriented, he tried to shake it off. Blinked against the cloud of dirt. Searched the ground. Light flashed on the orb to his three. He dove for it.

  Ground spit and chewed at him as he hooked it into an arm hold. Bullets!

  He low-crawled, hugging the orb and hoping against reality that the chopper couldn’t see him. T
hey had the advantage in the air. He had the disadvantage of his ears still being plugged. He shimmied through the stalks, trying to avoid as many as possible so he didn’t create a swaying pattern that would give him away. The ground didn’t seem to be vibrating as hard. Peering up revealed nothing but tan stalks and blue sky. Staying eyes out, he dragged his ruck around. Retrieved his gun and set the orb inside.

  Weapon ready, he eased up, scanning. Where was the helo? It’d either swung around for another run or left. Maybe they were convinced they’d destroyed the orb. Job done. Head home.

  A guy could hope.

  He pushed up to a knee. The chopper careened over a hill, heading straight for him.

  Leif shoved himself down, feeling the weight of the orb against his back. Weapon across his forearms, he scrambled in a low-crawl away from that position. Dirt and stalks spit at him. Bullets chewed up the land.

  A trail seared his arm, narrowly missing his weapon, not to mention his elbow and main artery. As soon as the vibrating thunder dissipated, Leif punched to his feet and sprinted toward his only chance for cover and survival—the village.

  Each step felt like kneading dough. He dug in. Shoved off. But the adrenaline made his legs rubbery. His heart rate amped. The Black Hawk arced around, and the gunner in the jump seat was ready.

  Leif dove into the field. The stalks jerked violently beneath the spray of cannon fire.

  Knowing his ruck would be a dead giveaway, he shifted onto his side. Used his feet to push him through the rows, keeping his gaze and muzzle skyward. As the belly of the beast buzzed the ground, he took aim, waiting . . . waiting . . . until he saw the gunner. And fired a short burst.

  The shooting stopped. Had he actually hit the gunner?

  The chopper veered up, then dove straight back down.

  Great. Tick ’em off. Make ’em really want to kill you. Nothing like a little added pressure.

  He threw himself backward. Smacked his head against something hard—and his eardrums popped. Blinding pain exploded in his skull. He buried his face, hunching his shoulders against the searing. When he could think through it, his vision snagged on a dark blur. He squinted through the dust and stalks. Something moved. Was it the orb? No, he still felt it against his spine. What was out there, then? It was small. Moving away or closer?