Chapter Sixteen
A li woke thanks to the vibrating alarm on her watch. The room was dark, but her position hadn’t changed since she dropped off into sleep.
She and Max were still holding hands.
For a moment she’d been afraid she wouldn’t be able to sleep at all. The face of the man she’d killed with her hands was all too clear in her mind, but Max had held out his hand, his expression completely open...and accepting.
She’d placed her hand in his and he’d wrapped his fingers around hers like he planned to never let go.
She’d slept. He’d only said three words, but they’d been the right ones. Her unconscious brain had known how he felt, and that had taken her gut-deep wound and sewn it shut.
That scared her a lot more than anything else.
She was becoming emotionally connected to him. Bonded. If anything happened to him, she’d either lose her shit and go on a rampage, or shut down altogether.
Neither was a good thing.
It was a vulnerability she couldn’t afford.
She carefully pulled her hand away from his, then got up, grabbed her pack, and quietly moved up the stairs. The room was dark, silent, and empty. The ladder leading to the roof looked like shadowed shelves empty of knowledge. She opened the hatch and slipped out onto the flat surface.
Tom was a dark, unmoving mass.
She crouched next to him. “All quiet?”
“For the past thirty minutes. There has been some sporadic gunfire out past the tents, mostly to the north. A half-dozen times within the village and tents, someone has started wailing, so people are still dying.”
“Got any good news?”
“It’s not us dying yet.”
“Wow, so upbeat. I don’t know how I will contain my enthusiasm.”
Tom’s white teeth showed up better in the dark than the rest of his face. “So, you and Max seem cozy.”
“I’m his bodyguard. We’re supposed to be cozy.”
“Right,” he said, drawing out the word.
“Listen, asshole,” she said. “There’re a dozen ways to die on this mission, don’t make me number thirteen.”
“I’m just calling it like I see it, and if I can see it, everyone can.”
“What, exactly, can you see?”
“The guy has a near constant hard-on for you.”
The son of a bitch. “Why are you watching his crotch? Is there something you want to share?”
“Nope, but you’d better cool it off or it’s going to hurt you in a big way.”
She couldn’t be hearing this one from one of her military brothers, a man she’d trained and chosen for this mission. “What the fuck?”
“Who’s it going to damage worse if everyone knows you’re knocking boots with the colonel?”
It was a kick to the head. “You know what? Fuck you. Fuck you for thinking either one of us would be thinking about that shit right now. Fuck you for spending too much of your time and limited brain power looking for that shit. And, fuck you for jerking my chain with that shit.” She was so angry she could have choked him. She settled for squeezing her rifle hard enough to leave finger impressions. “Now get the fuck out of my face.”
He looked at her for a moment and didn’t say anything.
She ignored his stupid ass because she’d wasted enough energy on the moron as it was.
He wiped his face with one hand. “Ah shit, I’m sorry.”
“Like I said before,” Ali growled, “fuck off.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that.” He got up and went down the ladder.
Ali didn’t relax until she heard the hatch close behind him.
Asshole.
She’d thought him a decent guy until now. What the hell was wrong with him? She and Max hadn’t done anything even remotely improper since they left on this mission.
Improper. Listen to her, going all British.
His little observation had pulled her focus off the shitty situation they were in. Something none of them could afford to do.
It took conscious effort to settle in and use her scope to scan the village, tents, and surrounding area. Not a lot of movement inside the village. There were a few people moving around in the tents and she could hear the distant sound of many people coughing. Crying too.
No gunshots from beyond the tents, but it didn’t take long to see people moving around in the distance.
This was a shitty situation. Trapped in a village filled with sick and dying people, with armed men preventing anyone from leaving.
Fish in a barrel.
Max probably thought he was in exactly the right place to do the most good.
She really had to come up with a superhero name for him.
The hatch behind her opened again and she glanced back to see who it was.
Max. He should still be sleeping.
He crouched down and came over to where she was lying down, keeping watch. “We can’t stay here,” he said without preamble. “We need to find another place to set up my new lab that’s reasonably easy to defend.”
“We’ve got no friends here, but the man whose home we’re sitting on.”
“So, let’s ask him.”
“Just remember what happened to the last house we tried to use as a lab and hospital. The people who are trying to pick a fight with us enjoy setting things on fire.” She scanned the village through her scope. “And there are a lot more people trying to find a safe place to sleep than there are houses.”
“I’ll be back.” Max scrambled away and she shook her head. The guy had more energy than a damned bunny.
Max was back within a couple of minutes.
“That didn’t take long,” she said when he joined her at the edge of the roof.
“He says he has the best place to set up a hospital.”
“Oh yeah? Where?”
“The village hospital.”
She squinted at him. “Are you trying to be funny?”
“No. This village is old. It’s been inhabited for hundreds of years. There’s a place that they’ve used as a hospital and a school for most of that time. It’s built deep into the rock of the hills and the majority of the rooms haven’t been used since the owner of this house was a boy. This place wasn’t always a small village. At one time, it was a large town on a major trade route.”
“Is anyone using this building now?”
“Nope, there was a cave-in about six months ago. The locals are too afraid of more happening.”
“Are they right to be afraid of more?”
“I don’t know. What I do know is that our host knows a way in that goes around the cave-in.”
“Fabulous,” she muttered. “Sounds like the perfect place to hide out.” The militants weren’t going to have to shoot them—they were going to die of their own stupidity. And from rocks. Lots of heavy rocks.
Max moved away toward the hatch.
“Where are you going?”
“To wake the others. We need to see this place before the rest of our family gets here.”
“You go ahead. I’m going to keep watch from here.”
“Good idea.” Max grinned, then disappeared.
The rest of the village was so quiet, she could hear their host talking to Max inside the house. A couple of young voices threaded through the conversation.
Were they going to take the children with them to check out this place that sounded less than safe?
The roof hatch opened again, but this time it wasn’t an adult who came out to lie down next to her. It was Berez.
He stared at her with wide, brown eyes.
Or maybe it was her weapon he was staring at.
The door to the house opened and several figures slipped out. Four adults and one child.
She was going to snarl in Max’s face when she saw him next. Babysitting duty with a high-powered rifle was never a good thing. She’d already killed one man in front of Berez—he didn’t need to see more shit.
She’d probably stunted his growth already.
He inched a little closer, cuddling up to her like a baby chick.
She examined his clothes and realized he must be cold. She opened her poncho and he snuggled right in against her. She was able to partially cover him with her poncho and he sighed, put his head down, then seemed to drop off into sleep.
She stared at the child, uncertainty holding her in stasis. Breathing was difficult, her chest too tight.
He trusted her.
She forced her attention back to what she was supposed to be doing, keeping watch on a village balanced on a knife’s edge of horror. Fall one way and it would explode into violence. Fall the other and it would succumb to illness.
Movement along the edge of the permanent buildings had her watching that area closely. It wasn’t just one or two. There were a lot of people moving around. Coming closer.
A few seconds later, she was able to make out a dozen men walking quietly up the hill, around houses, straight for the house she was on.
She didn’t know why she felt certain they were zeroed in on the child’s house, but she’d learned a long time ago not to ignore her instincts.
One or three men she might try to shoot. A dozen, nope.
She shook the child awake, grabbed her pack, then crawled backward, bringing the kid with her. Once they were away from the edge and out of sight—if she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her—she got her backpack on, picked the boy up, and moved to the back edge of the house.
It backed onto the hill and there were other houses to either side of this one, but they were a few feet lower down the hill.
Which way?
The boy in her arms pointed and wiggled to be put down. She set him carefully on his feet, then put a finger over his mouth. If he wasn’t quiet, they were both dead.
He took her hand and pulled her to the very back edge of the house, then pointed down.
A trail.
Narrow, steep and completely unsafe, but a trail.
The boy hopped over the edge and in two seconds was gone from view. She followed and discovered the trick to staying on the trail wasn’t just putting your feet in the right places, but your hands too.
The kids around here must be part mountain goat.
Ali followed him until they were four or five houses away and about one hundred feet from the boy’s home. The trail continued on, but they’d be visible to the men approaching, so she gave the boy hand signals to stop and crouch down behind the wall of a house that hid them from view.
She listened hard, but the men didn’t speak. Judging by the footsteps, they were almost there.
A door slammed open and gunfire erupted.
Shouting now in Arabic, too many voices to make out individual words, and more gunfire. The voices grew heavy with anger, the weight of them pounding against her ears. The crackle of wood smashing against wood sounded five times too loud. The sounds of bullets never stopped.
Whoever lived in the house she and the child were hiding behind dashed out their front door. More than one person, probably the whole family.
Ali grabbed the kid, hugged him tight and hurried after the fleeing family.
The boy clung to her, his hands tight on her poncho, front and back, his legs around her waist.
Other people came outside to see what the commotion was about, then ducked back inside.
“Do you know where your father and brother are?” she asked the boy in a whisper.
He nodded and pushed at her to be let down.
She put him on the ground, he took her hand and trotted down the hill.
Ali kept checking for pursuit, but no one seemed too interested in her and the child. They reached the halfway mark on the hill then the child made a left-hand turn and led her away from the noise and confusion.
They rounded a corner and someone running knocked them down.
Ali scrambled to her feet, turned to see who they collided with and discovered a man with a rifle. A SCAR rifle. There were only two ways for anyone else to have one of those here.
One, he was a member of the team coming in to help.
Two, he was one of the militants who’d captured Bull and had taken his Special Forces combat assault rifle.
A single look at the man and she knew he hadn’t come through door number one. He had none of the lethal grace she was used to seeing in her fellow soldiers. This man didn’t know what he was doing.
Still, he knew enough to be dangerous.
He yelled at her and lifted the muzzle of the rifle in her direction.
If he fired, someone else might decide to investigate the noise.
She couldn’t let him fire.
Goddamn it this was going to suck.
Bending over to shield the little boy by turning him away from the man, she pulled a throwing knife out of the sheath inside her right boot and threw it hard.
The man with Bull’s weapon dropped in an awkward sprawl.
“Don’t look,” she told Berez in Arabic as she pulled her knife out of the militant’s eye and removed Bull’s rifle from around his neck. She wiped the blade on the dead man’s coat, put the knife into its sheath, then herded the boy away from the body. “Go, go.”
He ran ahead of her and she followed. They were a few houses away when shouts from behind her told her the dead man had been discovered.
Berez led her to what looked like just another house, though this one seemed unused. Broken furniture littered the ground around the front door and windows. He went through the empty maw that should have had a door guarding it and into the dark.
All it would take was one wrong step and that little boy would be injured.
She rushed after him.
The interior was almost completely dark. The boy's hand grabbed hers, and he tugged her deeper into the room. She ran into a couple of unidentifiable items before passing through an interior doorway.
Footsteps crunched on the debris-littered floor.
They weren’t alone.