by Chris Lowry
He was going to have to leave Rain behind and move her up in the mountains if they were going to stand a chance of making it. He just had to convince her first.
"Amanda," he started.
"No," she said in a firm strong voice. "We are not leaving him behind."
She was sharp, he shook his head. She knew how the odds were stacked, and knew she was the primary objective. Her cameraman was collateral damage and could be jettisoned to save her.
"My job is you," Brill said and took a step toward her.
She drifted the barrel of the rifle toward him, not aiming at him, but enough in his direction to make him pause.
"Your job is to get both of us out of here."
"Not in the contract," he took another step.
She dropped to both knees beside Rain.
"You're wasting time," she told him. "Take him further up, I'll hold them off until you get him hidden, and then I'll follow. You can come back and get me."
"We can't," said Brill softly.
They didn't have time to debate. The trucks were less than five minutes out. Enough time for the two of them to make it up the hill and slip away in a gorge maybe. It would still come to a firefight, but he was confident that with the right cover, he could convince the rebels that chasing them was too costly.
She sobbed, grabbed Rain by the shirt and struggled to lift him over her shoulder.
"I'll do it," she cried. "Cover me."
She made it to her feet and several steps uphill before she fell, the weight too much for her in her starved state. Brill respected the effort.
"Please," she sobbed softly, her tear choked voice reaching back into his memories.
She sounded like Laurette, and the way she begged Brill to save her from the rebels that kidnapped them both.
He clamped down on that memory like a bear trap as red blossomed behind his eyes and the eternal rage he kept bottled up boiled over. He would kill the rebels, kill them all, just to save this girl.
Two quick breaths brought a semblance of control and he grabbed Rain again.
"Move," he said and Amanda flinched from his stare.
"Your eyes," she said, but he ignored her as he double timed up the hill.
She fell in behind him, no complaints, no excuses, just the sound of labored breathing as she fought to keep up.
They made it to a ridge with a shallow gorge that cut through the ground like a gash. It was only twenty yards long, but close to the top of the hill that led to the next mountain.
"Here," she called out.
Brill stopped and turned around, breathing heavy.
"I can't keep up," she told him. "I'll hold them off from here. Get him someplace safe and find me."
"That's a dumb idea," he told her.
A bullet shot up geysers of ground next to her and she rolled into the gorge and brought her rifle to bear.
"Get him safe," she shouted. "Come get me."
She aimed the rifle and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
Brill marched over to her and flicked off the safety.
"Conserve your ammunition," he told her. "Keep them down there. I'll be back in five minutes."
Below them the two trucks met and the rebels spilled out of the back. They sent scattered shots up the hillside into the ground. Amanda fired hitting the windshield of the truck and caused the men to scatter. They ducked behind the vehicles for protection and sent random fire back.
Brill jogged as fast as he could stumble further up the hill. He made the next rise and round another gorge, that lead further up and in. It was a good place to hide somebody. He dropped Rain and the gear under the edge of an escarpment, made sure the man was propped up and double timed it back to Amanda.
The rebels were bravely making their way up the hill.
If they were smart, they would lay down suppressing cross fire and rush her position. But her shots had scared them or they were less organized than rabble.
Brill slid down into the gorge beside her and began firing.
It was a slaughter.
He held the high ground and had cover while the rebel group was exposed on the hillside. He was a trained sharpshooter, a sniper unparalleled and even with an unfamiliar and unreliable short range weapon like the Kalashnikov, there was no contest.
He dropped eight rebels in the span of thirty seconds before the others scurried down the hillside and back to their trucks. Four more fell in the chaos of dust and screams and shouting as the trucks backed away. When they turned around, he hit two more men with head shots before they were out of range.
Amanda gave him a satisfied pat on the arm.
"That'll do pig," she sighed. "That'll do."
He quirked up an eyebrow at her, but she shoved herself off the ground and began moving uphill.
"Take me to my boyfriend," she said.
Brill checked the magazine on his weapon. He had two shots left, plus hers and his pistol. If the rebels came back in force before nightfall, he was going to have to think of something else to fight with.
There were plenty of rocks on the hillside. Maybe he could make a sling he pondered as he pushed himself to catch up with the girl.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
He didn't need a sling. There would be no waiting for dark. Brill and Amanda slipped down into the gorge where Rain was hidden and found him surrounded by a group of robed men with AK's. Brill did a quick calculation in his head and practiced the sweep in his mind's eye.
If he were alone, he had enough bullets to take them all down. He could drop two with the rifle, drift left as he panned right with the pistol and take out the rest.
They would return fire, but his speed and aggression would slow them down enough that he could get most of them before the rest thought their next step through. In a firefight at this close range, seconds counted. But seconds was all he needed.
Their return fire would hit Amanda since she was next to him. He could knock her down, but that would take time, maybe a second or two that would count against him.
They might hit Rain too, and if both of his rescues were killed, then the mission would have been worthless. A waste of time.
The men stared at him as he did the calculations, unaware just how close they were to dying, and Brill raised his hands.
The shouting was muted this time, as if the men themselves were afraid of being overheard, that voices might carry in the mountains. But they aimed their rifles at Brill and Amanda and screamed in a language he didn't know.
He regretted raising his hands.
It was a sign of weakness, a sign of surrender and Brill knew he wasn't going to surrender. Never to rebels, never to anyone every again.
He dropped his right shoulder and prepared to grab his pistol. His mind never stopped working on the angles and he took two steps away from Amanda which earned him more shouts and more rifles aimed at him.
At him and not her.
He smiled and thought the men shrank back just a little when they saw his eyes.
Brill readied the draw and played it out in his head again.
A little boy's voice broke through the noise.
The goat herder stepped out from the back of the group, his shrill voice cutting through the others. The Kalashnikov looked too big in his little hands but the other men reacted to him with deference. He smiled at Brill and walked toward him, chattering excitedly.
The men let him.
"You understand this?" Brill held his left hand higher than his right, still ready to go for his weapon.
"He's the chief’s son," Amanda grinned through tears. "And he says you're his friend."
Brill dropped his hands and smiled back at the boy, earning just a slight flinch. The men shifted nervously behind the goat herder.
The boy came over and held up his fist. Brill bumped it. The boy clapped Brill on the arm and back.
"He's explaining to them that you gave him food and water, comfort on a night when he was late," Amanda said. "Custom dictates y
ou are their guest. Did you plan this?"
"Dumb luck," Brill told her.
The men shouldered their weapons and lifted up Rain. They grabbed the gear bags and led the small group toward the far side of the mountains.
EPILOGUE
The man was using chemical weapons on his people. He had scientists like that one from Africa that Brill had killed making weapons of mass destruction. There was no honor in killing, he knew that much. But at least a bullet was discriminate when fired from the right person. Chemicals and bombs were indiscriminate and the effect it had was to kill mostly women and children.
This Syrian President was targeting women and children in an effort to terrorize rebels and rebel sympathizers. Brill knew that terrorists should be stopped, and the best way to end any terrorist activity was to remove the perpetrator from this earth.
It was the best solution for a lot of reasons, the least of which was Brill himself. He was very good at killing people. He had thought about it often on downtime from missions with the Recce’s before and in training with Barraque private contractors most recently. There were men who were trained to soldier, and some of them were trained to kill. They were efficient skilled labor. It was different for him. He was not only skilled, he was an artisan.
Maybe it was because he considered himself dead inside, strapped on a table and gone with the girl he loved at the hands of rebel forces. Maybe it was something he had always had, this deadness and lack of empathy. He didn’t remember being a psychopath growing up, he didn’t torture animals or pull the wings off flies. But he did struggle in social situations, and preferred solitude over the company of others.
A head shrinker at Barraque told him once he was a high functioning sociopath, that if the elimination of another human was the most expedient path to solve a problem, he could do it and not give it a second thought.
I could have told you that he thought as she explained it to him.
He didn’t think it was from lack of caring though. He did care, and perhaps he cared too much.
He cared that there were bad men in the world who bullied and oppressed the people around them, that politicians and corporations killed and maimed without thought to the consequences for their actions. These bad men did worse things and no one stood up for the people, no one could stop them.
A world court had been established so that atrocities couldn’t occur, yet Pol Pot happened. The genocides in Africa occurred on such a regular basis it was like the annual Wildebeest stampede across the Serengeti. In South America, in North Korea, on every continent bad men were allowed to get away with murder without fear of the consequences of their action.
Brill hated it.
He hated that the UN was a powerless organization, that The Hague was toothless, that the US would do nothing except impose sanctions and rattle their saber, all the while innocent people died.
Children died.
He watched the Presidential palace for a week and noted a pattern.
After all it’s what he was trained to do.
A maid left a window open on the second floor in the hallway. It was pushed out three inches, probably to air out a privy he supposed.
Once he located the window he noted the President walking past it on a regular basis.
That’s all he needed.
He leaned past the billowing curtain and sighted down the scope of the barrel. It was over one thousand yards away and he adjusted for wind and the drop of the bullet as gravity would impact the trajectory.
It had taken him a week to find the right room posing as a backpacking photojournalist and another day to steal a car to drive to the desert and retrieve the rifle he’d cached there. He snuck it into the room under the cover of darkness, prepaid for two more days in cash and laid in with supplies to wait.
Then he watched.
Over the narrow sight of the scope he learned every inch of the window that observation showed him.
He waited past the first day just to be sure the routine was set.
It was.
On the second day, he pulled the trigger.
THE END
Copyright 2016 by Lowry Publishing
Orlando FL
All Rights Reserved
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CHAPTER ONE
XALATAN -- SOUTHEAST MEXICO
Southeast Mexico is a weird place. The beaches are gorgeous and undiscovered, archaeological marvels dot the landscape and even more are hidden under the green canopy of verdant jungle that stretches down to the border with Central America.
The desert marches from Texas and New Mexico across the flat expanse to butt up against the edge of the jungle to bleed brown scrub and yellow sand into the green thick plant life.
Xalatan was a small city on what was generously called a highway that catered to the beach bound tourists. It was a jumping off point for tours into the jungle to see monuments of the past, a haven for surfers and wayfarers making an adventurous trip across the continent.
Juan's was a dive bar off of a back alley that was simple four walls and a tin roof.
The bar was made from an expensive looking jungle hardwood, probably harvested almost a hundred years ago with the smooth sweat stained top that comes from a lot of elbows and arms propped against the edge.
The walls were adorned with cheap beer promotions, the shelves behind the bar had an assortment of shot glasses, beer mugs and a couple of tequila tumblers. Almost all of them had small cracks or chips.
The door was propped open with a chair, the windows were folded up and chained to the roof in an effort to catch any breeze that might stir the fetid air inside. Two bamboo leaf ceiling fans were connected by a rubber belt, so that when one turned it caused the other to turn with it.
Old worn tables were scattered around the room in no apparent pattern, some with three chairs on the sides. Two men sat at one of the tables engrossed in a chessboard and an almost empty fifth of tequila that rested between them.
Brill Wingfield was five eleven and almost forgettable. His face was handsome in a plain fashion, what could be seen of it behind a thick beard. His hair was long and drawn in a ponytail that rested between muscular shoulder blades hidden under a loose white shirt.
A man almost his polar opposite sat across from him and glared under a thick brow with piggish eyes.
Where Brill was athletic and ripped, Johnson was a man who took his pleasure to excess. He topped the scales at three hundred pounds and stood almost six inches taller than Brill. He had a balding pate with a fringe of hair trimmed short and he was clean shaven. His baby face that made him look younger than he actually was, but the perpetual scowl was meant to keep people away.
“You're up,” said Brill.
Johnson took a shot glass full of amber tequila and slurped it down. He set it on the chessboard in a new position among the rest of the empty shot glasses.
“Check,” he slurred.
Brill lifted an almost empty bottle of tequila in a steady hand and tipped the last drops into a shot glass.
“That was a gutsy move.”
Johnson mopped his sweaty head with a frayed rag.
“I thought you might like it.”
Brill rolled the bottle across the floor. It clinked against the bar.
“Barkeep! Another.”
“Who calls them barkeep anymore? You think this is the wild wild west?”
“What would you call him? Bartender? Keeper of the bottle? Server of the tequila and whiskey and wine? He sets the bar high by keeping the bar to serve us until we're low. Hence, barkeep. Pour us another one, we're finished with the other one.”
“You're not gonna need it.”
“That's tough talk from a man in your position.”
“You can only make two moves. It's a cl
assic offense.”
Brill sat up and studied the table with bleary eyes. The grease stained Barkeep gently set a fresh bottle of tequila beside him.
“What do you think of this?”
The barkeep studied the dirty chessboard and shrugged. He walked back behind the bar and turned up the boom box. He pretended to wipe down the glasses with a grime covered rag.
“What's your name again?” Brill asked his opponent.
“Johnson. Cooper Johnson. My friends call me Digger.”
He stuck out a sweaty paw that Brill shook. It was limp in his hand.
“Not Coop?”
“Nope, Digger. That’s what they called my grandfather and after he died, they said I looked like him, so the family started calling me Digger.”
“You look like your dead grandfather, Coop? I don’t know if that’s a good thing.”
“Your mind games won’t work on me friend. I mean when he was alive.”
“I don’t know if that’s a marked improvement,” Brill smirked. “It could be the tequila though.”
“Let’s blame the tequila and save my pride.”
“I can agree to that. Do you know what I do in situations like this, Cooper Digger Coop?”
“Admit defeat and surrender gracefully?”
Brill smiled. He uncorked the bottle and took two long swallows before he pushed it across to Johnson.
”I'll be back.”
“Where you going?”
Brill grabbed his crotch.
“Digger, we just met and I'm not that easy on a first date.”
Johnson waved him off.
“Clock's ticking.
“I know.”
Johnson watched him stumble to the dark hallway that led to the back of the bar.
CHAPTER TWO
Brill nudged the bathroom door open with the toe of his hiking boots. The wood, caked from years of greasy beer soaked fingers, was three shades of black where patrons had touched it. It looked toxic.
