by Ilsa J. Bick
Interesting, that she ran. That wasn’t usually a person’s first reaction. Most folks froze or tried to take cover. Why had no one seen her go? Aloud, he said, “So, ah, I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name.”
“Jean.” She gulped back a sob. “My name’s Jean.”
“Jean, besides the girls, did you see another person? A woman?”
“Woman?” Jean’s face wore a perplexed expression. “No, just me and the girls. Oh, and that horrible mercenary, that Wynn. Thank God, your people shot him. I don’t know who those other men were, and I don’t want to know. I just…” Her shoulders hitched. Big fat tears squeezed from her eyes. “I just want to go home!” she wailed.
“Sure, sure.” She was making his teeth hurt. The sooner he turned her over to Boone and company, the sooner he could get back to looking for McEvoy. He thought that wolf would wait for her until hell froze over if it had to. Funny, he was even thinking that way as if the wolf was McEvoy’s pet. More like a familiar. He aimed a tight smile at Jean. “Let’s head back this way and—”
Six let out a small sound, high and short, a cross between a bark and a yip of surprise.
“What is it, boy?” The dog was practically vibrating with tension. He broke his stance, took a tentative step then stopped and looked back at Kujo, his expression clear: Buddy, can I?
Must be the wolf upsetting him. Likely, the animal was on the move. If so, he’d have to get back with the drone guy in Nevada, tell him to stay on its tail while he escorted Jean to Boone. He had a sense McEvoy was close, if he could just get free and clear. “Hang on, Six,” he said, darting a quick look over a shoulder and then toward the stream. “We’ll get going in—”
At first, he thought he was seeing things. He blinked, but what he saw did not change or disappear, and at that, a jolt of surprise rippled through his body. The hell?
She was half-in, half-out of the stream, sopping wet, and naked or nearly so, clad only in the tatters of a shirt, a pair of underpants. Her hair, which he thought was probably red, dragged around her face in lank strands like seaweed. Her body was covered in blood from scores of cuts and gashes and rips on her face, her chest, torso—and yet not a mark on her right arm. He thought this was strange because her left, especially the hand, was pulped as if she’d tried digging through solid rock. He was reminded of that old horror flick with Sissy Spacek and the prom scene and thought this woman could’ve been Spacek’s stunt double, if she’d had legs.
Six knew her. Kujo saw that at once. Although he’d never laid eyes on the woman until this moment, he knew her, too. He’d been right to follow the wolf, he’d been right.
“McEvoy,” he said and then louder, “Jesus. McEvoy?”
Chapter 23
Afghanistan
What happened next, happened fast.
The scream hadn’t yet died in her throat as, over the combined thunder of the Black Hawk and the roar of her heart, she heard a telltale rush of air high overhead, looked up to see a streak of red, and then an RPG slammed into the hovering Black Hawk. The chopper did a hard jerk to the right as the RPG exploded.
The Black Hawk didn’t. That only happens in movies. What it did do, though, was fall out of the sky. The engine was gone and the chopper was bucking, turning in a crazy spiral, and that gave whomever was firing, one more shot.
From just off the plateau, a second RPG sped for its target, smacking into the Black Hawk’s tail. This time, the fireball was immense as the helicopter’s tail section snapped in two, raining debris and hurling shrapnel in a wide, blossoming starburst like a firecracker. The remnants of the tail section hurtled for the mountain as the Black Hawk, now widely out of control, plunged nose-first into solid rock with a metallic scream and bellow. The force of the impact was tremendous, as if a giant had suddenly brought down his boot, and so massive she felt the vibrations ripple into her bones.
All this happened in less than ten seconds. By the eleventh, she’d scrambled onto the stone table and dropped to her knees beside Jack’s body. Lowry was crouching low. Pederson was swarming over the rock toward her and Jack. Tompkins was struggling to raise himself on an elbow. Prancing, uncertain, Six kept nudging and nosing and trying to lick her face, and only then did she realize she was wailing her grief in a long and keening cry.
Jack was lying, face-up, not that there was much of his head left for a face. Most was pulp, a mucky crater from which brains and blood spilled in a spongy mess. Though he did still have an eye, but this was already glazing and stared into a faraway nothing.
Amir. He’d known someone would take a shot just as he’d known about the RPGs. But where was the Apache, the gunship assigned to protect the medevac? But where was Amir? He wasn’t on the plateau anymore. He should be visible through NVGs, but there was no one else on the summit. Where could he have gone?
“Jesus!” Stoppering his mouth with a fist, Lowry staggered and nearly tripped over his own feet. “Where did that come from? Who shot him?”
“Amir,” she croaked. But that wasn’t the whole story. Amir had known, but he’d fired neither a weapon nor an RPG. She couldn’t think. It was as if someone had taken a blowtorch and burnt her brain to ash. Jack was dead, Jack was dead, he was dead and he wasn’t coming back and if only she had gotten to him sooner, figured it out, if she’d never gotten involved in the first—
“Kate!”
The voice was distant but one she knew. Turning back, she looked down the road she’d just run.
Bibi and the kids leapt from the darkness, and she could tell from their gait, that shout, they didn’t yet know what had just happened. In the nacreous emerald glow of Kate’s NV and with her long, glossy hair swirling, Bibi looked like an avenging angel from a high-fever dream. The four teens, rifles in hand, were a step behind, and from the greenish gleam, she knew they were all grinning. Although, stumbling along beside Bibi, his uniform in disarray and hands still in zip ties, Gholam was not.
“Kate?” She was too far away to really read facial expressions, but she heard the sudden alarm in Bibi’s voice, spotted the quick flick of Bibi’s head as she realized what she saw in the distance was a helicopter, on fire.
“Kate?” Bibi stopped, and all the kids stopped with her, just as the air thumped with the beat of another chopper. “Kate, what—”
Later, when she had time to think it all through, Kate understood that for the gunner in the Apache holding station high above the mountain, Bibi and the kids looked like the enemy. That gunner had just watched Jack get his head blown off and the Black Hawk crash into the mountain—and there were still American troops down there. So, for the gunner, it really was a no-brainer. But that came to Kate only later.
Somewhere high above and out of the black came the pop-pop-pop-pop of a chain gun.
Blood is strange when seen through night vision because while blood, when it’s cool, is black, fresh blood is white-hot. As the bullets hit, startling flashes of white jumped from their bodies, from Bibi and the kids, and they were all hit, each and every one. Gholam, too. Bullets slammed into them, death raining down, and many times, even once they were down—and the movies got that one right, too. Pepper a body with enough high-velocity bullets, and a person jerks around like a marionette in the hands of a drunken puppeteer. A person can flail around so much, you could be forgiven for thinking they still might be alive.
“No!” Kate screeched. “Lowry, Pederson, get on the radio, tell them to stop, tell them to stop!” Breaking free from her paralysis, she sprinted toward Bibi, Six hot on her heels. “Lowry, get them to stop!”
Bibi, Bibi, Bibi! Over the loud timpani of her heart, she heard Lowry screaming into the radio to cease fire, cease fire, friendlies, friendlies, damn it! She felt the harsh rasp of her breath tearing in and out of her throat, heard the thud of her boots and Six’s hard pants. Skidding to a halt, she dropped to her knees beside Bibi, flipped off her NV, and clicked on her Mag, the better to see.
Bibi’s chest and back were a ruin, awash in
blood, though, unlike Jack, she still had some of her face left. Her nose was gone and so was most of her jaw. But her eyes were still there, staring at the hard stars with blank, wide wonder.
“Jesus.” Lowry’s voice was watery and then he was weeping as Kate shone her light on Gholam, the boys, and finally came to rest on Fatimah’s once-pretty face. Hers was worse. At least Bibi still had her eyes. “They were kids, they were just goddamned kids!” he shouted.
“With rifles, moving toward American troops who’ve just been through the ringer and lost their captain.” Pederson’s tone had an odd, almost-detached quality. “I understand they couldn’t know, but—” He broke off at a burp from Lowry’s radio then craned over a shoulder as a second Black Hawk rose above the mountain and headed for the wrecked helicopter. “The cavalry,” he said, every word dripping with irony.
But then Pederson did a very un-Pederson-like thing.
“Come away, Kate.” He cupped the back of her neck with his good hand. It was almost something a friend might do. His skin was dry and his touch firm. “Come be with the living. We need to get Tompkins off this rock. There’ll be a retrieval crew. You can’t do any more—”
Three things happened at once.
Six growled.
And then Pederson’s head snapped back at the same moment Kate heard a flat, hard bap. Those two events were nearly instantaneous because the shooter was so close and Pederson’s mouth such an easy target, black as a bull’s eye in the glare of Kate’s Maglite.
“The hell—” Lowry reacted but still a fraction of an instant too late. The next bullet smashed through the bridge of Lowry’s nose, and he was gone.
Two dead in less than four seconds. She was next. Still on her knees beside Bibi’s body, Kate executed an awkward, fast pivot and nearly fell on her face. Catching herself, she crouched on all fours, Six still growling by her side. Her light speared the dark. She had a handgun. If she could blind the guy—
“Nice try. If you were trying to blind me.” Rifle in hand, Amir stood alongside a large boulder. “But I see you fine.”
Dead Man
She sensed the wolf somewhere over her shoulder and that hurt her heart because she wanted to go to the animal, to race the wind and run wild. But her run was over. She was caught now, good and truly, finally. Had there ever been any question she would have to go back? Not really. She’d been kidding herself. She was also exhausted and cold, so cold. It was like waking up in Germany all over again—shivering because they’d put her on a cooling blanket to cut down on the swelling in her brain and she not realizing just yet everything she’d lost.
Six. Her eyes sprang hot. She could tell Six wanted to break and come to her, but the animal kept throwing glances back at a man, lean but muscled with keen blue eyes and hair black as a raven’s wing. He must be Six’s new owner. Or his handler? She didn’t know. He looked nothing like Tompkins, and the realization also hurt because it should’ve been Tompkins here, not this stranger. Vance must’ve sent him, too, figuring she might go more quietly if Six were there. Smart move. She would never do anything to endanger that dog, and Vance knew it.
But the person she fixed on was Jean. What was she doing here? How had she gotten out? Did he or Vance even know about the girls, that Jean was in on the whole thing? She wouldn’t put it past Vance, if he did know, not to care. Not his department. Vance would be focused only on reclaiming her.
Peering around the handler, Jean recognized her, instantly. Kate saw the woman’s expression of bewildered astonishment give way to one of cold stone. Jean knew the score.
That was when Jean’s hand came up—
And with it, a pistol.
Covered in the blood of her friends, her lover, she stared at Amir—and at the two men now rising from the shelter of boulders to flank him.
She would never know what the deal was. Whether Gholam and Amir had been partners but then fell out, or if Amir simply wanted to move in and take his uncle’s place. She did understand why Amir’s wound looked so strange, possessed stippling and powder burns—because he’d shot himself at close range to sell that he was the good guy here. And it had worked. Hell, he’d gotten her to actually like and even trust him, to a point.
She bet good money that, behind those rocks, there was a grenade launcher and at least three large pieces of polyethylene plastic because even good NV can be defeated. Ten to one, Amir’s men had been here for at least an hour, even since Amir left to go take his little potty break and let his confederates know where they were headed. All they had to do was wait. But this was why Amir had dropped and then seemingly disappeared. He’d rolled off the lip of that big flat table rock because he’d known the shot was coming. Likely, his job had been to stay close so the shooter would know which of the Americans was the CO. And worse—Lowry had just helpfully told people to stop shooting up their friends.
Lowry was closest, kissing close, and what she wanted was clipped to his vest because Lowry kept his weapons exactly where Jack had. It was mainly a question of Six. Lowry was to her right, but Six was by her left. She would have to be fluid, she would have to be accurate, and she would have to be viper-quick.
“You’re dead,” she said hoarsely.
Aram leveled his weapon; the other men did likewise. “So are you,” he said.
Probably. But she’d done a ton of exercises. She knew how to do this fast and with one hand. It was the five-second built-in delay that would get her killed faster. Whatever.
Quick as a whip, her right arm lashed out. Her fingers closed around the M67, and then she was yanking the grenade from Lowry’s vest, her thumb already dislodging the pin. Pivoting, fast, she flung the grenade in a low Frisbee throw, already knowing that two of her five seconds were gone as she dove to her left and barreled into the dog, knocking him flat, draping herself over the animal as Amir and his men fired. She thought Amir missed, principally because her head wasn’t in pieces, but bullets smashed into her arms, her legs. They ripped meat and broke bone and tore blood vessels, and she screamed as pain roared through her veins—
As the grenade went off.
The effective kill radius of a fragmentation grenade is about five meters or sixteen feet. By contrast, the casualty radius for an M67 is about forty-five feet. Amir and his men were twenty-five, maybe thirty feet from Kate, and she had a good arm. Which meant that when the grenade exploded, it did so a lot closer to them than her.
Still, she was a casualty, a benign word that only meant you didn’t die right off the bat. She might simply bleed out later or be so mangled that, despite a medevac, she would succumb to her injuries, another bit of innocuous military-speak that meant she could die pretty horribly in transit, in triage, in the hospital. Even if she lived, it wouldn’t be pretty.
But Amir and his men? If she was lucky, they would be in hell before the devil knew they were dead.
The grenade’s housing ruptured into a thousand barbs, all of them whizzing through the air hideously fast. The concussive blast knocked the men flat, but pieces of steel sharper than razors did the rest, blazing over the men and whirring through their bodies like a million hot knives through butter to shred arteries, buzz-cut meat, pulverize bone. There’s a reason it’s called a fragmentation grenade.
What got them also got her. One of the surgeons later said she was more meat than skin, like a side of beef tied to the bumper of a racecar and dragged around the Indy 500.
There was a space where there was nothing and then she was suddenly conscious, but just barely. Beneath her, Six squirmed, and then the dog was wriggling out from under, whining with worry. She wanted to tell Six it would be okay. She wanted to reassure the dog that Tompkins was alive. But she didn’t know if either was true and, anyway, she had no more strength. What she hoped was that someone, some eye in the sky, had just seen that.
Then Six’s whine deepened and roughened—and became a growl.
No. What blood was left in her veins turned to sludge. It took an enormous effort to
raise her head and when she did, she peered through a bloody veil.
Amir’s two men were out of sight. Probably down. Probably only so much dog food. A girl could dream.
Amir was down, too, but not gone. For a second, she thought he was suddenly bald, but then realized she was looking at the smeary dome of his skull. He’d been effectively scalped; what was left hung a bloody flap along his neck. He had no ears, just red holes. One eye was a bloody socket; the other glared from a mask of blood. His nose lay on a cheek. The rest of his body was probably just as torn up, but he was flat on the ground and she couldn’t tell.
And then, he moved. The wet, ruby-red muscles in Amir’s neck slid and slithered as he turned his head until his one good eye found her. His right hand, which still had skin and still worked, brought his weapon to bear.
He didn’t say anything. Maybe he couldn’t, seeing as how half his lower jaw was missing and what was left had no teeth and only a stub of tongue. It didn’t matter. He would kill her then kill the dog. Or maybe vice versa because he was a bastard and a dog meant nothing. Amir would die, but so would they.
Two words. Tompkins had said that only last night, and five thousand years ago. Two words that could save your life.
Her life was over. There was nothing to save. The words were also, in reality, three, but that was because they weren’t in English.
“Six,” she said...
The woman’s hand came up and there was the pistol, and in a flash Kate saw how it would all play out. First, the man then Six then her. Pop-pop-pop. No witnesses. No story to contradict hers, unless there was an eye in the sky.
It was Afghanistan all over again.
Anger flooded her chest, that rage she’d held in check so long coming to a boil because, hell, they had taken everything else. Six might listen, but that was a long shot. The dog was smart, but Cham Bacha had been a lifetime ago and she didn’t want to use him like that again. This was his new life, his new chance. She would not destroy that.
