“Hell, no, we don’t have time for that. Now do it right.”
Vomit rose in Harry’s throat, a bitter acidic taste mixed with cheese and lunch meat from last night’s dinner. He swallowed furiously, his eyes watering as the acid hit his nose. An image of Brenda, broken and lifeless, innocence taken, no more future, seared his mind. He caught the image and held it, provoking a flood of cool, cleansing anger.
His fingers wanted to crawl across the ground, searching for a rock or a stout stick. He clenched his fingers into fists to restrain himself—he might make a sound, and surprise was his best weapon. The men were maybe forty feet away.
“I’m going around to come in from the back. Don’t accidentally shoot me.”
“Fine by me,” the Boston voice agreed.
“Don’t shoot me on purpose either.”
The Boston man snorted.
Harry cursed silently. He wanted to take them together and keep the element of surprise, even if he was outnumbered. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on the sound of the other man moving away, a noisy clamor of stones. The tactic of coming into the camp from two sides was sound, perhaps even overcautious since they expected Harry and Brenda to be asleep.
The sounds of the other man grew more distant, but the Boston man sounded much closer now. Harry opened his eyes, straining to see in the darkness. Twenty-two years ago, when he had first gone into combat, he had pissed himself. With soggy pants he had rushed across the airfield runway in Panama, firing back at the gun flashes of National Guardsmen firing blindly at the American Rangers. It had been the dark before dawn then, just as now, and he had been glad that none of his squad mates could see his shame. Of course, perhaps they had done the same thing. He knew one tough sergeant in Delta, respected by everyone, who readily admitted that he stained his shorts during every firefight.
The Boston man walked noisily past, with no field craft, only about six feet away. Harry silently drew a deep breath and launched himself. He clamped his left hand over the man’s mouth and drove his right fist into his kidney, knowing the explosion of pain that came from such a blow. They tumbled to the ground and he heard the sharp exhalation. The man would not be able to cry out until he sucked in more air, and Harry intended for that to never happen.
Scrambling in the dark, Harry kept his left hand on the man’s mouth and searched with the fingers of his right hand. They found that man’s eyes, wide open, then quickly clenched tightly shut at Harry’s touch. The soldier-turned-archaeologist drove his middle finger past the eyeball and into the brain, pushing in as far as he could. He kept his hand there, growing sticky with blood.
The man thrashed wildly, banging Harry’s outstretched left elbow against a small rock protruding from the ground. Pain shot up Harry’s arm and down his side to his groin and he gasped. Why did they call that the funny bone? What a ridiculous name. Harry fell back, clenching his right fist as he did so, feeling the eye of the man come loose in his hand. His left arm was useless for the moment, and he heard the man inhale. Silence was absolutely necessary. Harry dropped the eye, grabbed a rock, no bigger than a small book, and brought it down.
He could not see well enough in the darkness to deliver more than a glancing blow and was not sure if he landed it on the man’s head or neck. He struck again and heard the crunch of skull. Sure now of his aim, he struck again with all the force that he could muster and this time he was sure that the man with the Boston accent would move no more.
Harry held his breath, listening intently. He could not hear the other man returning. Running his hands over the dead man, he found a pistol jammed in the man’s belt. The man from Boston had never gone for his weapon, instinctively protecting his eyes instead. Even though the sun had not yet peeked over the western ridge, the sky was getting lighter; only Venus, the morning star, was still visible.
Harry ran his hands over the gun. A small semi-automatic, with a silencer on the end. He rubbed his finger on the end of the silencer, gauging the opening to belong to a .22 or .25 caliber.
He hurried back to the camp, feeling more terrified than he ever had at any time in his life.
* * * *
Brenda came awake with a start. Wisps of a dream, of a desert tomb and a handsome stranger, jostled in her head. Why had she awakened?
She heard a rustling outside her tent.
“Harry, is that you?”
* * * *
Harry reached the camp, coming up the draw just in time to see the other man, standing only five or six feet from the front of Brenda’s tent, point his pistol down. Harry didn’t hear the shots, but saw the pistol jerk twice. Harry screamed, all his terror at the prospect of that young angel dying ripped from his throat. He dropped to one knee, braced his arm, aimed, and fired three quick shots, then burst to his feet and ran to his left, moving closer.
The assassin staggered back and dropped to the ground. Harry fired three more times as he rushed forward, cursing his unfamiliarity with the weapon, knowing that if somehow he had been given time to practice, he would have hit with every shot.
The assassin was twisting away, having lost his pistol, when Harry reached him. The archaeologist finished the bastard with a shot to the head, an unthinking act ingrained in him from hundreds of hours of hostage rescue drills. Always do the head in case the bad guy was a suicide bomber.
CHAPTER SIX
Harry ripped at the tent zipper, cursing his shaking fingers. Pulling the flap aside, he reached in to touch her. It was dark in the tent; all could see was a shape in a sleeping bag.
“Brenda?” he asked ever so tentatively.
His fingers touched wetness and she gasped, words quickly spilling from her. “Harry, is that you? What happened? It hurts so much....”
“One minute—I’ll be right back.”
He ran for a battery-powered lantern and the first-aid kit that they kept in the big canvas tent. His mind raced as if filled with amphetamines, random thoughts and memories flitting about the stage of his mind, at the same time that the task at hand received focused attention. He knew the effects of those drugs, having popped the pills the Army gave him on long missions and in surveillance jobs that required a soldier to stay awake and alert. Seedy drug pushers who pushed speed and uppers on the street went to prison, but not the Army.
As he grabbed the first-aid kit, he felt an awful sense of déjà-vu from a time over a decade past, though that other first-aid kit had been wrapped in brown, desert camouflage, with a red cross on it. One of the men of his team, a sergeant from Michigan, had sprayed too widely with his SAW and the bullets hit a little girl as well as a Taliban fighter. The fighter’s AK-47 assault rifle had slipped from lifeless fingers as the girl dropped beside him, her long dark hair sweeping across her face.
Harry pounded back to Brenda’s tent. Dawn was only minutes away. Setting up the lantern, he pointed it inside. Blood stained her right forearm. The tissue around the wound looked torn and he was alarmed to see blood pumping out. An artery had been nicked. Harry popped the kit open. It was a complete kit, with bandages, scissors, two splints, a variety of small tubes of medicine, and a manual that he had no time to read.
He ripped open a bandage with his teeth, pressed it down on her wound, then wrapped the bandage around her arm and pushed the tape together. His hands were slippery with blood; it had already saturated the bandage. He needed to make a pressure bandage. Rooting through the kit, he found two more bandages. Leaving one bandage rolled up, he pressed it over the wound and wrapped it tightly in place with the second bandage. If the artery did not stop flowing, he would have to resort to a tourniquet, and Brenda would probably lose her forearm.
“Harry, what are you doing?”
For a moment he considered lying—for her own good, of course. But she was too smart; even in shock she would realize what had happened, so he went for honesty. Mostly.