by Mack Maloney
More bullets went by him now, but Ryder didn’t care. He was in among the camera crew in an instant. He shot four of the five men standing over Li; they were all armed, but in posing for the camera they’d had no time to take their weapons over their shoulders and fire back at him.
Then Ryder turned and put two bullets into the camera itself. It exploded in a thousand pieces. One more bullet for each of the huge klieg lamps. He destroyed two but only wounded the third. It stayed on and started swinging wildly, causing weird shadows to dance around the room. This made things even more eerie.
Only a handful of men now stood between Ryder and Li; she was now on the floor, hands over her head.
Ryder shot the man closest to her, catching him once in the chest. He fell over, dead before he hit the floor. Then Ryder dispatched the man behind the camera, this bullet going to the stomach. He went over with a scream.
Two more fighters appeared out of the dark. Ryder put two bullets into the first man’s groin. The second man fired at the crazed pilot — and missed. Ryder turned his M16 toward the man and pulled the trigger.
But nothing happened.
Ryder was out of ammunition.
He fell forward in an instant, his bayonet catching the man in his ribs. The man fell over but grabbed onto the razorlike weapon, slicing off three of his fingers. The scream that came out of him was bloodcurdling. Ryder finally yanked the blade from his rib cage and quickly stabbed him again, this time the bayonet going right into the man’s open, screaming mouth. There was another sickening crackling noise, and the man finally died. But in killing him Ryder discovered he’d snapped his bayonet in two, leaving half of it in the man’s skull and rendering the other half useless.
That’s when Ryder saw one more shadow rise up from the floor. The last man, with the machete in his hand. He’d pulled the mask over his head and now Ryder was face-to-face with him. He looked like something from a horror movie. His hands and body were, for some reason, covered with blood. But it was his face. Gnarled and bloody, too. And he was wearing a patch.
He raised the hatchet — Ryder had no defense. No gun, no knife. Nothing. Everything froze — now he awaited the blow, supremely pissed that he’d made it this close to rescuing Li, only to be dispatched by this monster.
Ryder looked up at his executioner. The man was literally foaming at the mouth. He started to swing down with the gleaming hatchet…
When suddenly he stopped. Just for a moment. His eyes looked to the right — it was almost as if someone was calling his name. At the exact same moment, the unmistakable rumbling of the Psyclops plane going over filled the empty warehouse. In all this took maybe two seconds, but it was all the time Ryder needed.
He hit the Patch with a rolling block. They both fell over; suddenly Ryder was on top of the terrorist. And suddenly the hatchet was in Ryder’s hand.
He put it right to the terrorist’s throat.
“Ryder Long,” he spit at the man. “Colonel. United States of America. This is for all the people you killed on September 11th.”
The Patch went white. He tried to say the Arabic word for “mercy”—but it never came out. Ryder pushed the hatchet into the Patch’s throat, severing his jugular, his windpipe, and his vocal cords all at once.
The look of horror froze on his face. His one good eye went to his right — almost as if he was looking at Li. Than he mouthed his final words: All for that American bitch….
Then he died.
Ryder somehow got to his feet. He staggered over to Li, pushing debris and bodies out of the way. She heard the footsteps but did not look up. He stood over her, not really believing this was happening. He reached down and lifted her blindfold, then rubbed his fingers lightly across her cheek. Only then did she look up and open her eyes.
It was clear to him that she thought she was dead — and was experiencing something in the Afterlife. Because when their eyes met, she almost laughed at the absurdity of it all.
Ryder knew he had to say something to convince her this was all real. So he smiled and then whispered: “Time to go home.”
That’s when she leaped to her feet, threw her arms around him with such enthusiasm they both toppled to the floor. He felt his whole body turn to pins and needles. He went numb. She squeezed him so tight he thought his ribs would crack. She pulled him down to her and kissed him once, twice, three times, all over his face — finally on the lips, and that’s when they both just fell into each other’s arms. Laughing and crying at the same time.
“I can’t believe it,” she kept saying over and over. “I can’t believe you came for me.”
She never stopped hugging him. They kissed deeply — their first. Outside, the artillery shells were still exploding. The ground beneath them was shaking — or at least that’s what Ryder thought it was. He couldn’t quite believe it himself — that this quest, first for revenge and then as a rescue of this precious girl — he couldn’t believe he’d actually done it.
He would learn later that two of the Superhawk copters were outside firing on groups of mooks who were trying to get to the warehouse. The building itself started to collapse all around them, but no matter. Ryder and Li remained there for the longest time, just holding on to each other.
That’s when one strange thought went through Ryder’s head. He’d done the impossible. Li was alive. He’d saved her. And now he knew that she was into him, in a very big way.
And as he added all this up in his head, just two words came to mind: “Now what?”
One mile away
Ozzi was having trouble walking now. He’d lost a lot of blood. He was disoriented. He was cold yet sweating profusely. Still stunned over seeing his Zabul allies blown away, he felt his own life start to drip out of him.
He’d stumbled into yet another alley somewhere in the middle of the city. The blood was pouring out of his leg and he had nothing with which to tie off the wound. He was too weak to rip some material off his own uniform, too weak to look for tourniquet material among the ruins all around him. If he didn’t do something about the wound soon, though, he knew he would die here, in this dirty little city.
He fell facedown in the alley, and for the first time in his life he didn’t want to get up. What was the point? He could stumble just a few more steps, for what? Only to fall again?
So he stayed down and closed his eyes and saw bits and pieces of his life flash before him. It was just like they said: a movie reel, from his first day in school to his first bicycle, his first girlfriend, his first cool car. High school, college, Annapolis. His tiny office in the Pentagon. An OK life. An ordinary life. No wife. No kids. Nothing to leave anybody, except some misery for his parents once they found out he was KIA.
There the movie reel stopped…
But only for a moment. When it started again, he began seeing flashes of his life since joining the Ghosts. The mooks he’d taken out. The lives he’d saved. The way that he’d made his country just a little bit safer, a little bit better. It was corny, but it was also true. He might have been an ordinary guy, but the Ghosts were certainly not an ordinary bunch. It was a very exclusive club. And suddenly it seemed very important that he stay a member of it.
So, with all his strength, he started crawling. Over broken glass and burning pieces of metal. Through garbage and muck and whatever other crap could be found lying around in this dirty Muslim city. And somehow the crawling got him to the end of the alley. And it was here that he looked up, into waning night sky — and saw an American flag flying atop the building right next to him. His heart started beating right out of his chest.
But then he collapsed and went facedown again. And this time he was sure he could not move. It had been a joke after all. God had given him the strength not to live but just to see the flag one more time.
But he laughed about it.
At least I can die happy, he thought.
That’s when he heard the sound of someone walking toward him. He could barely open his eyes, but when h
e did he saw two boots not two inches away from his nose. They were American boots. Schwarzkopf boots. That meant American Airborne. Or someone damn close.
Two hands came down and gently rolled him over. Ozzi found himself looking up at the blackest yet sunniest face he’d ever seen.
“Hey, brother,” the member of Delta Thunder said to him. “Looks like you need a friend.”
* * *
No one really knew how Saheeb the Syrian survived the battle for Khrash. He wasn’t so sure himself.
Being the Patch’s bodyguard was supposed to be a 24-7 job, and for Saheeb it had been, until the bombs started falling for real. That’s when his contract ended. When the bombardment of the south end of the city began, Saheeb simply deserted the Patch in the TV studio and tried to head back for the center of town. All of Saheeb’s personal belongings were there; he had to get them — and then get the hell out of Khrash before it all came crashing down on him.
But getting back to the Holy Towers proved a lot harder than he’d hoped. At first he found himself running at top speed, not easy for such a large man as he, trying to avoid the rain of artillery shells falling all around him. He was wounded several times in this dash for freedom but somehow made it out of the impact zone. Once clear of the south end, he found himself battered and bleeding and wandering through Hasha, the neighborhood of junkyards and old factories that had also just been leveled by the fierce artillery barrage.
There were many fires still raging here, but among the junk and wreckage Saheeb also saw many bodies. Al Qaeda fighters, who to him appeared to have been in some kind of retreat when the artillery came down on them. Many had packed bags by their sides. Others had died with explosive devices — booby-trap material — still strapped on their persons. Saheeb thought about robbing some of the corpses he saw but decided against it because his hands had been cut up and it would have been too painful for him to steal.
When he finally did reach the city square he found the place crowded with Americans and Zabul fighters. Thinking he was just another bloodied citizen, the Zabul let him through the lines. He walked to his apartment next to the Holy Towers and discovered it was in shambles. All of his possessions had been either looted or destroyed. This was not the work of the Americans. They were too busy to bother with his meager collection of junk. He was sure that members of the religious police had been the actual culprits, leaving him with absolutely nothing at this point in his miserable life.
Suddenly enraged, he wanted revenge — again not on the Americans but on the religious police. They’d stolen his stuff. There certainly weren’t any hanging around the city square at the moment, so Saheeb headed for the only other place he thought he could find them: the Chief’s blockhouse on the edge of the Old Quarter. Saheeb vowed to kill anyone he encountered there.
Saheeb had to hide a few times along the way because there were still some Americans and Zabul moving about and they might not mistake him this time. Somehow he made it to the blockhouse, but only to get another surprise. This place that everyone had always thought was invulnerable to attack had proved otherwise. Most of it was in ruins, the victim of a direct hit by a five-hundred-pound aerial bomb.
But one attachment had survived the bombing, more or less. This was the building’s garage, a place where any bodies leftover from the rape and torture sessions held inside the blockhouse were dumped for pickup later.
It was also one of the places where the religious police sometimes kept their most precious weapon: the huge SA-6 SAM.
Saheeb broke into the garage and indeed found within no bodies but the famous SAM itself, covered with dust and debris. He also discovered that the garage roof had been blown away in the bombing. When he looked up, he saw nothing but the clearing sky above.
He also stumbled upon something that in some ways was more valuable than the big missile: the late Chief’s hidden supply of the hallucinogenic qat. Weary, hurt, and at the end of his rope, Saheeb plunked himself down beside the stash and started chewing it by the handful. He was high as a kite five minutes later.
Before he’d signed on to be the Patch’s bodyguard, Saheeb had worked in the freak show of a traveling circus. Before that he’d been committed to a home for the insane. But before that he’d been in the Syrian military. In fact, he’d been assigned to the rocket defense forces. He’d worked around SA-6 SAMs for four long years and they all smelled the same. Grease and burned wires, combined with the stink of the rocket fuel.
He stuffed another handful of qat into his mouth and, getting even higher, started examining the controls to the missile’s launcher. He was surprised to see it was one of the newer models, a Russian export version that took all the brain work out of launching the damn thing, a must when selling exotic weaponry to Third World countries. With this model, all it took was to snap on the control panel, put the radar on search, and then just wait for a target to fall into the weapon’s electronic web. Once the fly was close to the net, with one push of a button the missile was off.
It was that simple.
Any idiot could do it.
Even him…
He sat back and chewed some more qat and contemplated just how penniless he now was. But then he looked back over at the missile and thought of something. It was like a lightbulb turning on in his head.
Is Al Qaeda still paying rewards to anyone who shoots down an American aircraft? he wondered.
Chapter 20
An hour passed.
More flares shot in the air called all of the Americans and their Zabul allies to the Al Sharim berm. The artificial hill next to the old soccer field had become the Ghosts’ regrouping point.
The Delta Thunder guys were among the first to arrive, accompanied by the SEALs and carrying Ozzi with them. The Thunder troopers told the others about leaving the Ocean Voyager and landing along the Farāh River just in time to prevent the Chief of the religious police from escaping. Eventually teaming up with the SEALs and after rescuing Ozzi, they came upon the one-sided battle in Khrash’s city square — and at just the right time. Only they and the SEALs had anything left in the way of ammunition. Still, it was a strange introduction to what had been happening in the formerly terrorist city this very strange night.
Most of Kennedy’s 2nd Delta and the rest of Hunn’s 1st were also on hand at the berm, as were most of their Zabul allies. Everyone got a drink of wine. Everyone got a chance to sleep. More than one member hoped they could wake up and find out the whole thing had been one big dream.
And still a few of the team were missing.
* * *
About 0930 hours, the morning quiet was broken by the sound of an aircraft approaching.
It came out of the south. A big Navy Chinook. It set down on the field not far from the burning Psyclops plane. Johnny Johnson, CO of Delta Thunder, called his men to him. This was their ride out.
Fox, Hunn, and the rest of the Ghost Team walked them down to the LZ. The Chinook crew looked out the aircraft windows, staring at the ragged, bearded, unkempt Ghosts like someone would look at visitors from another planet. The expressions on their faces said it all: Who the hell are these guys?
Just as this copter was settling down, a second Chinook flew overhead. The Ghosts looked up to see someone in it, looking down at them from the cockpit, giving them a bold salute. Then the aircraft increased speed and headed off in the direction of Mount Zabul.
The guys from Delta Thunder climbed aboard the waiting Chinook, this after shaking hands and embracing the Ghosts, now truly their brothers in arms.
Fox above all shook hands warmly with Johnson. “You know, usually after going through the wringer with us, people tend to join up,” the DSA officer said to him. “I mean — look at this crew. We got all the flavors of the rainbow.”
Johnson replied: “Your reputation is well-founded. And we could all do great things together. But we’ve got something else going on that at the moment is as important. We’ve got to get back to our place. A lot of problems back there
. We have to do our part in trying to fix them. You understand, I’m sure?”
Fox did — but he hated to see them go. They all did. The Delta Thunder guys would have been a perfect fit for the Ghost Team.
“I hear you,” Fox told him. “Maybe we’ll hook up again then.”
Johnson saluted him. “Count on it,” he said.
Then he climbed aboard the Chinook and closed the door. The big copter rose into the air, turned, and headed southwest.
That’s when Hunn came up beside Fox. “They have things ‘as important’ to do?” he asked the DSA officer. “Like what?”
Fox watched the copter disappear over the horizon. “Like trying to save an entire continent,” he finally said.
* * *
The huge helicopter circled Mount Zabul once before setting down in a maelstrom of dust and snow.
A squad of armed Zabul fighters met the big aircraft. It was painted gray, had two huge rotors and the words USS Ronald Reagan painted on the side of its fuselage. That name was well-known, even up here at the top of the world.
Tarik Aboo appeared from his round stone hut and walked to the landing site. The door to the helicopter slid open and two armed crewmen stepped out. They took a look around, eyed the armed Zabul, but lowered their weapons, as did the mountain fighters.
Then the Navy crewmen helped out the copter’s only passenger. He was wearing a borrowed flight deck winter suit, complete with hood and huge rubber boots. The outfit appeared to weigh more than the man did.
It was Bobby Murphy, here to thank an old friend for his help.
Tarik greeted him warmly, with much hugging and cheek kissing. Murphy took it all in good humor, then followed Tarik back to his hut.
They sat inside next to the small stove and Murphy accepted Tarik’s offer of one of the huge black cigarettes, not quite realizing it was stuffed with both tobacco and hashish.
