Chapter Seventeen
A warm stir in the air raised the hairs on the back of her neck. A man stood right behind her. Adrenaline hit her system. She elbowed him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him, and had the heavy breather on the floor a second later, one of her knives at his throat.
“Ali,” hissed a male voice from several feet away.
“Max?” Relief released her from the battle high.
“Let him go,” he whispered. “That’s our host.”
The boy’s father.
Oops.
She released him and backed away. “I’m sorry,” she said in Arabic. “I didn’t mean to... I’m so sorry.”
“You are fierce,” Ferhat said, getting to his feet. “Do not apologize for protecting yourself or my son.”
She could make out the shapes of Max, the boy, and his father now. Somewhere deeper into the structure there was light.
“This way,” Max said, pointing in the direction of the light source.
Berez and his father led the way with Max and her bringing up the rear.
“He was going back outside to look for his son,” Max said to her quietly. “The kid slipped away when we were leaving their house.”
The little shit.
“He joined me on the roof, then showed me a rough trail to take to avoid the militants,” she said. “I had to kill another one, though this time I threw a knife.”
He glanced at her, but there was no censure in his gaze. “War is a crazy business.”
She grunted. “It’s a brisk business today.”
They walked down a hallway, turned, walked through a room, then down another hallway. The light got steadily brighter until the second hallway was lit up enough to make out the state of disrepair all around them.
There were tables set up in rows, most of them standing, though a few had been knocked over. Along the walls were counters covered in an odd fusion of school and medical bits and pieces. Chalk, syringes, a few books, a broken blood pressure cuff, and other odds and ends were scattered around.
Max walked into the next room, the one containing the light source. It was a flashlight that someone had stood on its end with the light hitting the relatively low ceiling.
This room wasn’t as messy and dirty as the rest. A long metal table was in the center of the room with a huge spotlight pointed toward it. Tom and Bull were moving what resembled an ancient computer from next to the metal table to the far wall.
“Was this an operating room?” she asked.
“I think so,” Max replied. “It’s certainly cleaner than all the other rooms. I want to set up my lab in here.” He turned to the man who’d sheltered them, risking his life and the lives of his sons. “My friend, do you have family you can stay with? This place may not be the safest if those gunmen find out we’re here.”
Ferhat’s expression was bleak and there were tears in his eyes. “There is no safe place. My wife is dead. Her parents died last night of the fever. Everyone else is sick.” He paused to take in a breath and wipe his face with the dirty edge of his shirt. “My sons need sleep. I will find another room where they can rest out of sight.” He shrugged. “We have nowhere else to go.”
Max nodded, then turned to her and Tom and Bull. “Does anyone have any food and water to share with them?”
“Yes,” Ali said, dropping her pack and opening it. She handed Ferhat three bottles of water and a handful of protein bars.
Ferhat nodded his thanks, then shepherded his kids out of the room.
Shit, now they had civilians to look after.
“Okay.” She checked her watch. “Dawn isn’t far off. How do you want to do this?” she asked Max.
“Bull and Tom will meet with the Special Forces team, while you set yourself up somewhere high and keep watch. If things go bad, you can provide cover fire to help them get away.”
She raised a brow. “What about you?”
“Preparing this room so I can set up my equipment as soon as it gets here.” He let out a breath. “I’m going to need samples from the sick.”
“I can get those,” she suggested. “Being small makes me less threatening to most people.”
“Only stupid people,” Bull muttered. “Smart people know you’re more dangerous than a tiger caught in a burlap sack.”
Ali opened her mouth to verbally smack him, but someone else beat her to it.
“Bull,” Max said, “shut your mouth before I put you in the sack with her.”
She blinked. Had he really said that ?
Bull started laughing.
Max frowned for a moment, then shook his head. “That’s not what I meant.”
Bull slid down the wall to sit on his butt, laughing as quietly as a man could.
She had better luck choking her chuckles back, but Bull looked like he couldn’t even breathe.
“You’re going to give yourself a hernia if you don’t stop,” Max warned him. “Pull your mind out of the...”
“Sack?” Ali offered, amused by the entire episode.
“Fine,” Max said with a brief glare at her. “Sack. Get yourself up on your feet and get out there to meet with our incoming team.”
“Yes, sir,” Bull said, still laughing as he and a grinning Tom left the room.
After they were gone, she said to Max, “You do realize they’re never going to let you forget you said that.”
“It won’t be the first time I’ve tried to eat my boots.” He shrugged. He attempted to move the large light fixture in the center of the room, but it was bolted to the floor. The metal table was on wheels and was easy enough to put up against a wall.
“How much room do you need?” she asked.
“This is more than enough. I’ve got plastic sheeting in with the portable lab, so I just have to throw that over the counter and I’ll be good to go.”
“How long until the team gets dropped?”
Max glanced at his watch. “Soon, about ten minutes. They’ll be dropped a couple of miles out to keep from alerting anyone in the village. The supply drops will happen about the same time as the team is ready to enter the village.”
“Do I have a few minutes to scout for the best spot to shoot from?”
“Yes, of course.” When she didn’t move, he asked, “What’s wrong?”
“I shouldn’t leave you alone. The first rule of bodyguarding is stay with the body.”
“Why do I suddenly feel like a walking, talking cadaver?”
His sideways approach to everything never ceased to be a source of amusement for her. “If you are, you look damned good for a dead guy.”
He snorted. “Go.”
“I think you might have to convince me.”
He put down the piece of junk he’d been moving and walked over to her. His hands came out to cup her shoulders and bring her closer to him. “There’s a grieving widower and his two small children here. No one else knows where we are. We’re as safe as we can be.” He ducked down to catch her gaze. “I promise to scream for help if someone happens to come into the building.”
“Don’t scream. Speaking softly into the radio will work just fine and attract less attention.” She looked into his face and found a determination there she hadn’t seen before. “If you have to defend yourself or the kids, remember, you’re saving them, defending them. Not attacking someone else.”
“I will.”
Something about him was different. Harder.
“I’ll be back as soon as the new team is here.” She left the room and made her way back to the entrance. Once outside she headed for the house one level up and used it to gain access to the roof. The pre-dawn light revealed a dense cluster of brush clinging to the rock face rising above the building.
She wiggled her way inside it and managed to eke out enough room to assume a crouched firing position. The scope showed her a good view of the village as it spread out over the hill and valley to her right.
There were more people out and about, along with militants who seemed to be searching for something or someone. Probably them. Some of the villagers were performing ordinary tasks—feeding chickens, getting water from the well—others seemed disorientated or lost.
Coughing echoed through the village and down into the tents like the conversation of a room full of people she couldn’t quite understand. It came from everywhere and went nowhere.
The distant hum of airplane engines became audible, and got louder and louder by the second. People stopped to look for the source and there it was, a large military aircraft flying low over the village and the valley below it.
Shouts brought more people out, some in fear, some with hope on their faces.
Ali looked for the team of Special Forces soldiers that should be making their way to them over land from the west.
The first crate and parachute came out of the back of the airplane.
Another.
Another.
And another.
Six altogether.
The villagers and refugees poured out into the valley like someone had taken the plug out of a tub full of water. The few gunmen who weren’t racing toward a crate were overrun.
Ali smiled.
Off to the west, a group of men came out of the hills but weren’t heading toward the crates. They reached the edge of the tents and disappeared into the mob of people.
Seconds later she found them again, moving steadily toward the village proper at a fast walk. They didn’t maintain a formation, or specific order, more of a fluid movement of people. Most carried duffel bags, all had backpacks. They wore patched coats or ponchos, ratty looking hats, and their faces were obscured by a combination of facial hair and clothing.
A woman’s screams from closer by, inside the village, drew Ali’s attention.
She quickly located the source of the noise and found a couple of men wrestling with a woman. They hit her, threw her to the ground. One man fumbled with the front of his pants.
Not on her watch .
She didn’t think. She reacted. Found her target, waited for a clear shot and fired.
The man went down. The other man stared at his dead friend for a moment, then ran away.
The woman they had been assaulting scrambled to her feet and disappeared into a nearby house.
The whole thing had taken only a few seconds. A few seconds was all a catastrophe needed. She switched her attention back to the group of men working their way toward the old hospital building.
They were close enough now that she could see the expressions on their faces as they passed dead bodies left outside houses. Anger, fear, and horror.
It wasn’t until they were just twenty feet from the entrance to the old hospital that she noted anyone paying the team any attention. Maybe it was the number of men—fourteen was substantial—or perhaps it was the building they were headed to. Supposedly abandoned. Whatever the reason, two men watched the team from a few houses away. Watched them enter one by one.
The men followed and began yelling at the last couple of team members.
“Don’t go in there,” one man shouted in Arabic.
“You strangers must leave,” the other said.
One of the men turned and shouted back in the same language, “We’re all sick. Do you want us in your homes or here?” That was Tom’s voice.
The two men paused, engaged in an intense whispered conversation, then waved at Tom to go inside. They backed away, talking to each other before splitting up and going in different directions.
Great. The whole village was going to know a bunch of sick guys were in the old hospital. A bunch of guys who weren’t villagers.
Unfortunately, there was nothing she or they could do about it.
Off in the distance, there was the faint sound of gunfire. Rapid, repeating shots. The dropped supplies would have landed that way. The militants and anyone else in the vicinity must be fighting over them.
Had most of the militants gone after the supplies?
She looked over the village and found a knot of women at the well gathering water. Other people seemed to be taking advantage of the lack of armed men to do needed errands, as there were more people out and about than she’d seen since they’d arrived.
A head popped up over the edge of the roof. Bull. He looked around, but couldn’t see her, hidden as she was in the brush.
She slid out and he nodded in appreciation of her hiding spot.
“Taking over?” she asked when he got close.
“Yeah, Max wants you inside.”
“Got it, thanks. Most of the militants took off after the bait. The two guys who challenged you split up to spread the word. We’re going to have trouble.”
“Shit. Well, we’ll see how far we can stretch the I’m sick card.”
“Cough convincingly,” she urged as she left.
She was careful to look for any watchers as she got off the roof the same way she got on it, then went inside the building.
Daylight made it easier to see the dilapidated entranceway filled with leaves, dirt and other debris that must have been blown inside during the time it had been uninhabited.
Chairs were collected in an intricate knot of legs in one corner.
Chirping alerted her to a bird’s nest clinging to the wall and ceiling in another corner.
Movement deeper inside the building grabbed her focus. A man dressed like she was watched her, his rifle cradled in his arms, ready to fire.
“Stone?” he asked.
“Cold,” she said, making light of the name she was often called after a particularly hard training session.
“Colonel wants to see you.”
“You are?” All bundled up the way he was, he could have been twenty different men she knew in the Special Forces.
“Frank Jessup.”
“Demolitions,” she said, his face appearing in her mind’s eye.
“Gotta love the boom,” he replied. “You’ve got a guy on the roof?”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t have a line of sight to the front door.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said as she passed him. “Later.”
Ali walked toward the operating room Max had been trying to clean when she left, and found it full of men, duffel bags of medical and scientific equipment, and weapons. At first she couldn’t see Max at all, then he appeared from behind a group of four soldiers who’d found a way to get the big spotlight moved out of the way.
A small hand grabbed the back of her pants and she glanced down to find Berez standing behind her, peeking around her leg to see what was going on.
One of the soldiers saw the kid. “What’s he doing here?”
Everyone in the room stopped to look.