The entry wounds were big enough to stick a finger into, and the bullets had cut completely through the body, their sharp steel cores plowing through muscle and bone like a boat hull through water, no deflection. Thankfully, there was little fragmentation or shrapnel. Truly dangerous bullets hit flesh and tore themselves apart, spinning missiles off the main track of the wound path. As it was, the child she was working on was bleeding badly, and she was running short on gauze to apply pressure bandages.
Welcome to day 216, she reminded herself.
Two hundred sixteen days in Afghanistan.
The American government claimed to have decisively beaten the supporters of the Taliban. So why did Americans and Afghans and international relief workers still come under attack on a daily basis?
Sofia wiped her brow, aware of the smear of gore she left on her platinum blond hair and her smooth, porcelain-like forehead. She could have been a model if she’d chosen to stay in France. She was tall, leggy, with just enough fullness of figure to give her deadly curves in all the right places. Crystal blue eyes that people said were perfect for seducing the camera instead were busy trying to evaluate how to best keep a psychopath’s victim stable long enough to make it to a surgical table.
Same stuff. Different country.
Ethiopia.
Palestine.
Afghanistan.
All the lands she’d chosen held the same things in common. Thugs and violence causing pain and suffering to the weak and helpless.
The thought flashed across her mind like lightning, and she tried to put aside the mental image of other children, the same age as this one, screaming and twisting terribly as bullets ripped into them.
Shame crushed Sofia as she gripped the girl’s hand, looking into her big, watery brown eyes. Tears glistened on the girl’s olive cheeks as thin, weak lips moved noiselessly.
“It’s all right,” Sofia whispered. She stroked a few strands of thick, black hair from the girl’s forehead, fighting off the memories that had been dogging her heels for exactly two hundred thirty-eight days and nine hours.
Images of grim murderers dressed head-to-toe in black, sweeping automatic weapons across fleeing, unarmed refugees in a Palestinian camp. The sound of cloth tearing echoed the distant sounds of bullet-spitting slaying machines as bodies were swept off their feet and flung cruelly, mercilessly into bloody rags.
Her body tensed against the sound of the shredding fabric, trying to fight off the memories of the murders she’d witnessed.
Murders she’d witnessed while huddled under the wreckage of a tent, flames licking all around her, as she muffled the face of a child against her bosom. Around them, shadows charged and darted, backlit by flames.
There was no mistaking it.
The men were on a mission of retribution. Only days before, a restaurant had been blown to hell by a suicide bomber. One madman’s act taking almost two-dozen lives and injuring tens more. A temporary cease-fire ended with rock throwing and riots and an assault on the refugee camp at Shafeeq.
When asked later she claimed not to have seen any faces.
She hadn’t been convincing enough because a salvo of gunshots only barely missed her. The UN pulled her and the other workers out as quickly as they could, finding a new territory for them to work.
It was unlikely anti-Palestinian forces would find refuge and assistance in Afghanistan.
Sofia held the girl’s hand as the doctor checked on her anesthesia’s progress.
It was unlikely that the hard-faced men she saw in the shadowy camp would follow her halfway across a continent, but she still sweated with terror each day, more intensely in recent times.
“THIS IS THE FIRST ONE we’ve even gotten anything on,” Greb Steiner said softly as he threaded the sound suppressor onto the muzzle of his Beretta. Olsen Rhodin often wondered at the mannerisms of the hard-core soldier, a man whose face and hands betrayed the violence of his life in a road map of scar tissue. He never raised his voice and rarely expressed anger or hostility. At times, Rhodin wondered if Steiner lived in a constant state of sadness, his brow bent with guilt.
Then again, Rhodin had watched Steiner shoot weeping mothers point-blank in the face just to send a message to their husbands.
Maybe it was guilt that weighed on Steiner’s face and voice. But it never stopped him from doing the job of protecting their country.
“We’ll find the others. Don’t worry,” Rhodin said. “We have the whole team here. They’ll find the others.”
Steiner chambered a .22-caliber slug into the Beretta, then holstered the piece. He was to be the executioner, again.
It was a role that Steiner was suited for. This was a man who would die before he talked, if ever he could be captured alive. A brick of a man, square, hard and rough, he towered a couple of inches over six feet, and his dark eyes seemed reddish, as if swimming in the blood he’d spilled over the course of his career. He slipped out of the truck with an agility that belied his blocky form.
Rhodin dropped down. He didn’t dramatically check the chamber of his rifle like the men with them did. He was a professional, and had locked and loaded the weapon as soon as he’d received it back at their improvised headquarters. Rifle shells pinged from breeches as “veteran” Taliban soldiers made themselves feel good with a spit of macho masterbatory gun manipulation.
“A waste of ammo,” he said under his breath, in English so the Afghans wouldn’t understand.
Steiner heard him and shrugged. “What? The rounds on the ground, or them?”
Rhodin shook his head. “Both.”
Steiner sighed, as if a greater load was added to the world-sized weight on his shoulders. “Let’s go.”
SOFIA’S HEART SANK as Dr. Gibson hung his head. Green streaks smeared across the monitor’s brownish black surface, the telltale whine of a flatline speaking the grim reality of another life lost. It wasn’t new, this horrifying change from a vibrant, living child full of the desire to play, learn and love to a cooling lump of motionless meat on a cold, metal surgical table.
“Let’s get the next one in here,” Gibson muttered, the harshness in his voice sounding like a body dragged across gravel. He was tearing off his blood-splattered gloves and pulling on fresh, sterile latex to keep infections from passing along.
Sofia looked down at the innocent face, gone from a healthy olive tone to almost bone-white from blood loss. The dead girl resembled an angel.
Les innocentes, the name for children who died with no spot of sin on their souls, going immediately to heaven, whatever heaven they believed in, if they knew that much at their age. Sofia wondered if heaven really existed, then dismissed the thought as she wheeled the body away to make room for a fresh victim.
Certainly a heaven had to exist.
Because this was hell.
She stopped as she reached the improvised morgue, leaving the table parked against a half-dozen others, lined up tightly to make the most of the space available until they could arrange burials. Their job was to make sure that the living survived. Respect for the dead would have to wait a few minutes, a few hours, until those who needed help got it.
The cart rolled as she let go of it, metal clanking dully against other metal, the tabletops covered with the wrapped-up remains of those who couldn’t be saved. Seven lost so far. That was just this day.
Sofia closed her eyes.
Seven added to the hundreds she had already seen.
Seven added to the mountain of dead she’d watched