The Heart of War: Book Seven of the What's Left of My World Series

by C. A. Rudolph

  He hadn’t identified it initially, but August was now certain what it was. ‘A no-witnesses kind of thing’, as Gil Norris had earlier described it. This was Beatrice. She was purposely keeping him out here, away from the plantation, and that meant his team had to ride in the same boat. But why? So she could spend needed time alone with her new lover? August and his trollop of a wife rarely saw each other in the first place. If she wanted quality time with Dynamite Doug Bronson, the homewrecking whore hustler from hell, she could have it by means of simple deception alone and forgo the charade.

  Something else was taking place here, though, something prevailing. And he’d made a pact with himself to do whatever was required to bring the truth to light, beginning the moment he returned to base.

  “SA Carter?” Nadler prompted. “A question, sir.”

  August answered him casually, placing his contemplations on pause for the moment.

  “I don’t know why I’m bringing this up…but would it be okay to save some of this food and maybe offer some of it to those kids?”

  August leaned forward, resting his chin on his hands.

  The other agent added, “If not, that’s fine. It was just an idea. It doesn’t have to be a lot…just something to tide them over. They haven’t eaten in days.”

  “Yeah, let’s do that,” August concluded. “Thank you, gentlemen, for pointing it out. I think we’ve done enough to them, no sense in starving them. See to it they get plenty to drink, too.”

  The agents both nodded, smiled at each other, and went about their chores.

  August leaned back and stretched his legs toward the fire’s warmth; then he heard something zip past his ear. A lightning-fast object darted through the fire, splitting the flames as it did, and directly after, the agent beside Nadler rose, wheezing, with both hands clutching his chest, attempting to catch his breath. Blood poured from a gaping hole through his fingers and soon began drizzling from his lower lip. He tried to speak as he fell to the ground at Nadler’s feet.

  “Jesus Christ!” Agent Nadler screeched.

  “Get down! Take cover!” August dumped himself from his chair, flattened his body as best he could, belly to the sandy soil, in time for Nadler to receive a similar fate.

  Struck in the head by the same instantaneous, fast-moving mechanism that had done in his fellow agent, Nadler was silenced immediately. He fell lifeless atop his colleague’s legs, the back of his head now a cavernous void of bone fragments and chunks of crimson matter.

  August crawled frantically on his stomach to the far side of the fire ring to use the heated stones for cover just as another shot smacked the ground inches from his right hand, dispatching a cloud of dirt and sand into his eyes and mouth. He spit out what he could, coughed, and rubbed his eyes, then tried scanning the area for anything big enough close by to use for cover, the firepit appearing as his only refuge.

  He went motionless and tried calming the panic in his breathing. A sniper was taking his men out one at a time from an unknown location concealed by the forest, and there was no way for him to fight back. If he moved anywhere outside his position of cover, he’d get a bullet to the head in reward for the effort. August was now cornered and defenseless.

  He lay there a long time anticipating his fate, wondering when it would come, the destiny of Gil Norris and every one of the agents under his charge weighing on him. A great deal of time passed, and August didn’t know how much longer he would be able to stay here. He thought about distraction; throwing a stone into the woods might distract the shooter long enough for him to make a run for it, but even that decision could just as easily be the end of him. There didn’t seem to be any right answer to this. August began considering just giving himself up; then he heard a bloodcurdling cry from the woods.

  It hadn’t come from any of his men, though. It hadn’t been a man’s cry. It wasn’t Gil Norris, and it couldn’t have been either one of the agents keeping watch. The scream had come from a female, as would a girl bellowing in anguish. August reached for his service weapon, drew it, and pulled himself to his feet, then scanned and searched for what he’d heard.

  “Hey, guys! Over here! I got her!” Gil Norris shouted from not far away.

  “Her?” Unnerved and in disarray, August hustled over to find him standing above a young girl, his service pistol pointed at her head. The girl was on her knees with her head lowered, gripping her forearm where a deep laceration seeped fresh blood between her fingers through her jacket sleeve. “What is this?”

  “She had a rifle on you…gearing to take you out,” Gil began, panting heavily. “She crept by me, and I followed her in, stopped her just before she deaded you.”

  “She’s bleeding.”

  “I know, right? I got her good. My pants were down; couldn’t get to my gun fast enough. But my knife was right there.” He kicked the girl’s leg. “Worked pretty damn good, didn’t it? Sliced you right down to the bone, I bet.”

  Gil had evidently caught her by surprise from a blind spot while she’d had August dead to rights and was preparing to fire.

  “Where’s Travis and Ross?” Gil queried, turning to face his lead.

  “What?”

  “The two who were with you. Did she get them?”

  Though he’d yet to see her eyes or her expression, August watched the girl. He couldn’t take his eyes off her nor the damage done to her arm for some inexplicable reason. “Yeah. She got them.”

  His face reddening, Gil’s frown boiled over fully. He shoved his service weapon’s muzzle against the girl’s head. “You killed the others too, didn’t you? You had to; otherwise they would’ve seen you and cut you in half before you came in here to knock the rest of us off! But you fucked up trying that, didn’t you? Didn’t you?! You murdering little cunt!”

  “Gil—”

  “Chill out, August. Stand fast. Just let me handle this,” Gil said, his glower distorting into a wicked smile as he salivated. “The detention center’s at max capacity, we’re not taking any more prisoners, so this ends here for you. Bet you thought you had us, huh?” He locked the hammer back with his thumb, the sick smile on his face broadening. “You were dead wrong.”

  In that moment, a thousand sequences flashed before August Carter’s mind’s eye, a thousand faces of death, all those of whom he bore responsibility for killing, of families torn apart and lives senselessly ripped to shreds. His objections to the life he’d been living and to this mission in particular had been mounting for a long while. He was done with this—all of it.

  Acting without thinking, August started forward as if being drawn by a magnet. His gait became a sprint, and he yelled for his fellow agent to stop what he was doing, to lower the weapon while raising his own.

  Locked on target, Gil didn’t budge. His grin only grew wider as the malice in the words he spoke to the injured girl on her knees swelled to epic proportions.

  August focused on his fellow agent’s trigger finger. Time was almost up. Something had to be done. “Gil! Lower the weapon! Put it down, man! Don’t shoot her!”

  He was yards away before he knew it. August fired twice.

  The first shot struck Agent Gil Norris in the shoulder. It glanced off his shoulder blade, causing him to recoil, wince, and lose control of his weapon. Had it been the only round fired from August’s sidearm, Gil might have survived, but shot number two struck true in the agent’s neck, tearing away from it a chunk of unsalvageable flesh.

  His eyes wide and desperate, absolute outrage dawning on him, Gil dropped to his knees and tried to speak, but no words escaped. He fell sideways to the ground, gasping and squirming, his hands reaching to stop the flow of blood spurting from the void in his neck.

  August inched forward and kicked Gil’s relinquished pistol away, but couldn’t bear to look at the man, restrained now in an anesthetized state of disbelief over what he’d done. The dying man reached for him, emanating wretched gurgling noises, but August turned away, opting to check the welfare of the injur
ed female. “It’s okay now. I can hel—” But he was silenced instantly.

  In the minuscule span of time after taking his eyes from her to put down his fellow agent, the girl had unholstered a hidden Glock handgun and drawn down on him. She unloaded the weapon with her bloodied right hand, dispatching round after round after round directly into August’s center mass, into the level three polyethylene armor plate residing within the carrier protecting his chest.

  The bone-jarring impact of each successive round was excruciating and kept coming with seemingly no end, each one stealing lungfuls of life from him until, finally, he deflated. His skin tingled all over right before he lost consciousness and collapsed to the forest floor, thumping onto it like an uprooted redwood.

  Chapter 37

  When August awoke, it felt as though his chest had swollen to three times its original size, and for a large man such as he was, that was no joke. He tested his mobility, feeling that his hands had been tightly bound behind him by some means. His body armor had been removed to expose his bruised, battered chest and rib cage. He didn’t know how many times he’d been shot, and wasn’t sure if any of the rounds had slipped through, but in view of the pain he was registering, they might as well have.

  He writhed a bit and groaned, stretching his eyes fully open to see his assailant seated yards away in one of the deceased agent’s chairs, meticulously treating a nasty wound on her forearm. A backpack he didn’t recognize leaned against a tree just behind her, beside an all-black, suppressed M4 of some variety.

  Noticing he’d come around, the girl diverted her attention to him and reached for a compact Glock handgun between her knees. “Don’t get any ideas. This is a fresh magazine.”

  August coughed a few times, feeling a sharp, guttural ache in his chest with each spasm. “I-I won’t. But…why…why am I—”

  “Still alive?” She chuckled slightly. “Good question. I’ve asked myself that about twenty times in the past five minutes. But that question is taking a backseat to a few others.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as why you chose to shoot a man wearing the same uniform as you instead of me.” She tilted her head to the side, eyebrows raised. “Think you can clue me in, Special Agent Carter?”

  August rubbed his lips together, opting not to respond. He glanced right to a pile of gear and found the maligned threads of his removed plate carrier with his name tape still attached.

  “It’s ironic how the thought of dying never really crosses your mind until death is breathing down your neck,” the girl mused. “You can inch your way through life without giving so much as a damn about anyone or anything, without any regard for the disvalues of your actions or the impacts of your deeds…how they’ll affect you or others down the line. But all that changes when you’re inches from death, like when a gun’s pointed at your head. Then it’s all you think about.” The zeal in her tone intensified. “Special Agent Carter, emptying that magazine of nine-millimeter hollow points into your chest plate and not your face wasn’t a mistake or a miscalculation, it was an eleventh-hour decision. Your actions earned you some consideration, but that vaporizes if you don’t cooperate or you choose to fuck with me. So, do you want to play ball?”

  August turned his head away shamefully and eventually nodded.

  The girl pointed in the direction of Agent Norris’s corpse. “Why him? And why not me?”

  “I-I don’t know,” August said, his voice hesitant, denoting his pain. “It was instinct…a reaction. You were hurt, down, bleeding, and he had you. He was seconds away from executing you in cold blood…with a damn, sick grin on his face. And that…didn’t need to happen.”

  “So you shot him.”

  “No…not at first. I called to him, tried to reason with him…he wouldn’t listen…he…” August trailed off, feeling the tightness constrict in his chest.

  “Ribs hurt?”

  “Yeah,” he gasped. “Broken, I’m guessing.”

  The girl pursed her lips. “It’s better than being dead.” She slowly lowered her weapon and returned it to the spot between her knees, her eyes never leaving him. She went back to putting the finishing touches on her wound dressing. “I found a folder last night, Special Agent Carter. On the outside was typewritten ‘Operation Solve for X’.” She glared at him. “I read all of it; then reread it before I stumbled on you and your buddies. I assume you have a copy?”

  “Before?” August probed, grasping that she must have paid a visit to the other encampment prior to coming here.

  “Answer the question, please.”

  He stared at the ground, a grave reality dawning on him. His other team of agents were extinct. Tucker, Simpson, and the other two—August couldn’t recall their names—were gone, blighted by the same young person who had nearly done him in. He was on his own. Folding his eyes closed, he nodded.

  “And have you read it? All of it? Including the direct-action addendum stapled to the back?”

  “I have.”

  “You’re involved, then,” she determined. “How long?”

  A sigh. “Since the inception.”

  She rose, relocating her Glock from between her thighs into a holster. She closed in on him while rubbing her arm. “So you know everything. Did you bait and poison the animals we hunted for food?”

  August looked sideways at her. “Wait—you’re from there? You live in that valley?”

  Her tone went ballistic. “What do you think? Now answer me.”

  August hesitated a long while. “I wasn’t the one who performed the tasks, but I led the team who did.”

  “Of course.” Her lower lip trembled. “How did you poison our water?”

  August hung his head, shaking it in disgrace. “Again, it wasn’t me personally…we were given capsules containing a concentrated bacteria with orders to distribute them in eight locations, all tributaries of the main waterway. The capsules were timed-release and dissolved slowly. Members of my task force placed the capsules.”

  “But you’re just as responsible as they are.”

  “I’m not refuting that; I take full responsibility for the actions of anyone under my command. This whole vile subterfuge has been just as much me as anyone else involved.”

  The girl seethed to the point of shaking. “A lot of people got sick because of what you did. Some of them almost died, including a four-year-old little boy and one of my closest friends. Your actions set off a cascade of events that could’ve killed every last one of us. A group had to leave to search for food and medical help and almost didn’t make it back. Some of them, myself included, were captured and imprisoned…some were tortured.” A pause. “Child abduction is unspeakable and heinous enough, but that attack…that drone strike…overstepped the mark by a fucking long shot.”

  “What drone strike?” August probed, his eyes becoming slits.

  The girl’s eyes went ablaze. “Really? There’s no sense in denying it. Those missiles or whatever that thing dropped on us killed eleven people, including a person I loved more than anyone in this world…and a righteous, kindhearted man who was like a father to me. One of my friends is fighting for his life right now from the burns he sustained…and my sister—my pregnant sister—could lose her baby because of it!”

  August’s head went in motion as his mind raced. “I’m sorry to hear all that, I am. But I don’t know anything about any drone strike…I swear to God I don’t.”

  “That’s bullshit, Special Agent Carter.”

  “It isn’t, though. I swear it isn’t,” August pled. “My teams and I…we’ve been stuck out here for weeks, barely getting by with very little information to go on. I’ve read the op script…an aerial assault was only cited as being an option, a last-ditch effort, to be used only in the event nothing else did.”

  “And yet, that isn’t what happened,” she snapped. “Have you ever taken a moment to mull over the unintended consequences of your actions? Have any of those possibilities ever once occurred to you, Special Agent
Carter? Have you ever proffered one single iota of consideration for the people to whom you were ordered to send all this hate?” She scoffed at him. “Were you born into this world devoid a human conscience? Are you an animal?”

  “All right, that’s enough! I am done being questioned by the likes of you!” August thundered, his chest screaming at the effort. “Why did you come here? Was it for retribution? To kill us because of what we did to you? Did you intend to wipe every one of us out? Then commence! Kill me and get it over with! Considerations or not, I’m through being an active participant in this interview, girl!”

  “Lauren.”

  “What?”

  “My name. It isn’t ‘girl’. It’s Lauren. Lauren Russell.”

  August shrank. His body underwent a brief spell of tremors as if warring against itself. “Dammit…judge all you like, but you don’t know me, and you don’t know how I feel about this. I feel bad enough already for what’s happened and how things have gone. I mean, look at what I did…I fucking shot my teammate—a fellow agent, one of my closest friends! And you dare pester me about regrets, considerations, and unintended consequences? Well, guess what? I regret it all! Everything! But I don’t answer to you! And I can’t go back, start over, and make things right. So stop wasting time, and tell me what you want or kill me already!”

  Lauren inspected the man for a beat. “What’s your name?”

  “August,” he huffed.

  “Okay, August. Before you shot your teammate, he alluded to taking prisoners and a detention center. Four girls went missing last week. Shall I infer from what was said that you have knowledge of their whereabouts?”

  August sighed and rolled his lips. “Yes. We have them. A teenager and three others…young enough to be in grade school.”