by Mel Odom
Local Time 2108 Hours
Goose moved slowly. In the dark, he knew he could remain almost invisible as long as he stayed low and didn’t move quickly. He took a fresh grip on the knife in his hand. The rain turned the handle slick.
Almost twenty feet away, moving parallel to him, Icarus remained hunkered down. Goose thought about how easily the man had taken on the role of assassin. There hadn’t been any time to think about it. Icarus had just shifted into killer mode without a second thought.
That was enough to give Goose pause. Then again, he realized he’d done the same thing. When it came to survival, people made choices quickly about living and dying.
The three Syrians carried backpacks. Goose figured they were loaded with plastic explosives. Something to provide a quick punch back at their enemies. The three men concentrated on watching in front of them, obviously expecting any trouble they might experience to come from the direction of the city.
Icarus waved his free hand to get Goose’s attention. Goose nodded at him. Icarus pointed to the man at the end of the Syrians, then at himself. The meaning was clear. Goose nodded again.
Without another gesture or word, Icarus rushed toward the Syrians. Goose did the same. When he reached the man he’d set his sights on, Icarus wrapped a hand around the man’s mouth to stifle any outcry, then slipped his knife between the man’s ribs. The Syrian soldier shuddered and died.
By then Goose had reached the man he had chosen. He clapped a hand over the man’s mouth as well, then drove the knife point into the back of the man’s neck at the base of the skull. It was a clean, immediate kill when the blade separated the spinal cord. The body sprawled in the mud.
After yanking his knife free, Goose moved forward with long strides. His knee quaked and throbbed, pain hammering at the inside of his head. He came up behind the third man, then saw the man’s head jerk backward.
Something warm and wet splashed across Goose’s face. As the Syrian suddenly went limp and fell, Goose knew the man had been shot.
“Down!” Goose told Icarus.
The younger man went to ground at once, barely beating Goose. Something zipped through the air over his head, and another bullet pocked the mud only inches from his hand.
None of the shots made a sound.
“Sniper,” Goose whispered to Icarus. “He’s using a silenced weapon. Move.”
Together, they headed back the way they’d come.
Local Time 2113 Hours
Miller was still in position where they’d left him. He gazed at them anxiously.
The pain in Goose’s knee felt like shark’s teeth grinding into his flesh and bone.
“Why aren’t we going on?” Miller whispered. “We’re practically to the city.”
“Because there are men hunting us out there,” Icarus said. Both men locked their gaze on Goose.
“That’s the way it is,” Goose said. He quickly recounted what had happened.
“Syrians?” Miller asked.
“Not with silenced rifles cycling subsonic rounds. They’re more like those men hunting us earlier,” Goose replied.
Miller sat down with his back to a tree. The fifteen-mile trek that had taken place throughout the day had almost done him in. He stayed active, but it was different when adrenaline spiked in a man’s system all day from being surrounded by enemies.
“Who’s sending those men?” Miller asked.
Goose didn’t answer. He didn’t want to lie, and he didn’t want Miller to know everything he knew.
“It doesn’t matter,” Icarus said. “We have to get around them if we’re going to survive.” He glanced at Goose. “And waiting isn’t going to make it any easier.”
Goose nodded. He took a sip of water, tasted the earthy flavor that came from refilling the LCE bladder in pools of rain, and got into motion. “We gotta get help if we’re going to get inside,” Goose said.
“How do you plan on doing that?” Icarus demanded.
“By letting Captain Remington know we’re out here.”
Icarus shook his head. “You’re a fool, Goose. Remington’s as much a part of this as those men out there hunting us.”
“I don’t believe that.” Goose knew he was being stubborn, and he knew that Cal Remington was following his own goals at the moment. Those goals, Goose was painfully aware, were different from his own. “The captain wouldn’t leave us out here to die.”
“He’s been sending you to the hot spots,” Icarus said. “He’s been expecting you to die. He had you under lockdown only a few hours ago. I’d say that Remington isn’t your greatest fan.”
Goose knew that was true. But he knew something else too. “Those men inside that city, they’re Rangers. We don’t leave a man behind. If they know we’re here, they’ll tell the captain. The captain won’t have any choice but to try to save us.”
Rain dappled Icarus’s tight features. “You put a lot of stock in this captain of yours.”
“Yes, sir. I do. I’ve worked with him for a long time.” Goose knew that if pressed, he wouldn’t have been able to say exactly when his and Remington’s paths had started to diverge. “It’s not just the captain I’m putting my faith in. It’s those Rangers inside as well.”
Icarus shook his head. Jagged lightning traced a white-hot vein across the sky.
“If you see another way of doing this,” Goose said, “I’m all ears.”
Miller looked from Goose to Icarus a few times. “Staying out here isn’t an answer. When morning comes, the Syrians are going to start moving again.”
“Once they do that,” Goose said, “they’ll flush us out of hiding. Come dawn, we’re not going to have a chance at all.”
Icarus gazed at the city.
Goose knew how the man felt. Safety was so close, but it was still a world away.
“How do you propose to signal them without giving away our position to the Syrians or to the men out there hunting us?” Icarus asked finally.
“I’m working on that,” Goose replied.
40
Downtown Sanliurfa
Sanliurfa Province, Turkey
Local Time 2116 Hours
“We shouldn’t be up here,” Gary said softly.
Danielle ignored the cameraman as she swept the building on the other side of the street with a pair of night-vision binoculars she’d gotten from a black market dealer.
“They said being in the upper floors was dangerous.” Fear tightened Gary’s voice. “If a missile hits up here, or below, there’s a good chance we’ll get buried in the rubble.”
“I know. But we’re this close to a story. I can feel it.”
“That CIA guy isn’t the story OneWorld NewsNet wants. They want footage of the arrival of the UN troops.”
“We got that.” Danielle increased the magnification, trying desperately to find Cody within the room. She’d spotted him for a short time earlier. He’d been fearlessly—though she was more prone to think of him as drunkenly—staring out the window at the battlefield in front of the city. Cody made no effort to involve himself in the rescue of the city.
That’s because his agenda is somewhere else, Danielle told herself.
“They want more footage,” Gary said.
“We’ll get it.” Danielle started to wonder about the pressure her producer was putting on her. To her, adding footage to what they’d already gotten was just busywork. The world already knew that Nicolae Carpathia had been voted in as secretarygeneral and that he’d sent reinforcements to Sanliurfa.
As innocently as she could, Danielle had tried to send a question through channels as to why Carpathia had ordered that when so much of the rest of the world was just as chaotic. No answer had been forthcoming. None of the other news agencies speculated about that move either.
On the surface, Carpathia was doing a humane act by shoring up the defenses.
That’s on the surface, Danielle reminded herself. But she couldn’t help thinking of Lizuca Carutasu and the way she’d
been murdered in Romania for digging into the relationship between Carpathia and Alexander Cody. The surface isn’t the story. It never is. She studied the darkened window. So what are you protecting here, Carpathia?
“Look,” Gary said, “maybe you don’t care about your job, but I do. I think we should—”
Danielle cut him off. “Do you care more about your job than you do about getting back home in one piece?”
“No.”
“Then pay attention.”
“To what?”
“What’s going on around you.”
“We’re rescued,” Gary said belligerently. “All we gotta do is shoot some footage of the UN troops, and we’re home free.”
“Then OneWorld is sending you home?”
“I’ve asked to be sent back home.”
“Did they say yes?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Then they’re not going to send you home yet. They need a cameraman over here.”
“I told them I’ve had enough.”
“Have you stopped and wondered what this is about?” Danielle asked.
“What what’s about? The war? The Syrians have always—”
“No. The reinforcements. Why now?”
“Maybe this was as soon as Carpathia could make it happen.”
“Doesn’t reinforcing Sanliurfa seem like a lost cause to you? What do we need to hold here? There are no oil fields, no natural resources. Most of the civilians have cleared away, and the ones who have stayed can’t be viewed as our responsibility.”
Gary remained silent.
“And if reinforcing this city was a good idea, don’t you think the previous secretarygeneral would have thought of that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think he would have,” Danielle said.
“Maybe he had trouble selling it?”
“Then how was Carpathia able to sell it to the rest of the United Nations?”
“Don’t know. I’ve listened to the guy talk. He’s awfully convincing.”
Danielle silently agreed. “What if Carpathia wants Icarus?”
“Now you’re scaring me.”
“Why?”
“Conspiracy theories aren’t my thing.”
“They’re not mine either.”
“Then we should be out there on the street interviewing some of those UN soldiers.”
“I can’t do that.”
Gary sighed.
At that moment, across the street, Alexander Cody stepped back into the wan moonlight pouring down from the darkened sky.
“Bring your camera over here,” Danielle ordered.
Outside Sanliurfa
Local Time 2116 Hours
Goose inched across the muddy ground. In his mind, he was just another layer of mud. And he moved slow as molasses, oozing across the slippery ground rather than sliding. Mud caked his face. Half the time when he breathed, he sucked in dirty water from the ground.
His first objective lay eighty yards away. He felt certain the burned and blasted remnants of the tank provided sufficient cover.
Unless those guys gunning for you have moved around. Goose tried to keep from thinking about that. Likewise, he tried to keep from thinking that the unknown gunners were even now creeping up on Miller and Icarus. There was no way you could bring them with you. They’re not trained for this.
Goose dug his boot toes into the ground and started oozing forward again. A sharp stone dug into his face. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t make an adjustment. He just slid over the stone and kept going.
Long minutes later, he reached the tank. Smoke, diesel, and the distinct odor of burned flesh clung to the broken metal. Goose remained low and got his bearings. The muted moonlight splashed across bodies of the dead. The rain had washed the blood from the corpses, and the thirsty ground had drunk it in. But the horrible wounds remained visible. Torn flesh, limbs that had been ripped away, incomplete heads—all of them lay before him.
Goose steeled himself against the sight. He’d seen worse, but there in the darkness, with only the whisper-soft voice of the rain all around him, he couldn’t remember the last time death had affected him so deeply.
He thought of Chris and the way his son had vanished. He thought of the young Rangers he’d seen die. They were just boys. Not much older than Joey.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. They weren’t supposed to be abandoned behind enemy lines. They weren’t supposed to be left here to die.
My son was not supposed to be taken from me. The anger that had nourished Goose since the beginning of the Syrian attack simmered inside him. His hurt and uncertainty dwindled, but he knew it would be back. As soon as his thoughts turned back to living past the moment, he’d regard the future with as much fear and hate as he had since he’d learned of Chris’s disappearance.
“God took your son,” Joseph Baker had said. “He took that little boy on up to heaven to watch over him till you get there.”
There aren’t any guarantees that I’m headed there, Goose thought. I got left behind.
“I’m going to heaven,” Baker had told him. “When I die, when my time comes, even if I last through these next seven years, I’m going to heaven.”
Did you? Goose thought. Is that where you ended up, Baker? He moved toward one of the bodies and searched the man’s assault rifle. It was an AK-47, standard issue. The rifles of the next three corpses were the same.
Lord, You’re gonna have to cut me some slack, Goose thought. Reason dictates that at least some of the men accompanying these tanks as they moved forward would be snipers. Gotta be a range-finding laser here somewhere.
He searched three more mutilated bodies before he found a Russian sniper weapon equipped with a range-finding laser.
Cautiously Goose used his Swiss Army knife to remove the range finder from the weapon. Then he started the laborious trip back to Miller and Icarus.
Downtown Sanliurfa
Local Time 2120 Hours
Excitement flowed through Danielle as she studied the CIA section chief. Her heart thudded.
Cody was barely visible in profile against the doorframe leading to the balcony. Moonlight made the man’s face look bone white. He smoked a cigar and drank straight from a bottle as he stared out through the rain.
For a moment Danielle thought he was staring at her; then she realized he was still focused on the battlefield. His lips moved. She increased the magnification.
She wasn’t an expert lip-reader, but the skill wasn’t as hard as many people believed, and she’d starting picking it up as a girl while spying on her older brothers. It just required concentration, visibility, and some experience. Most people could pick it up easily, which was one of the problems sports networks faced when they stayed in close on an upset player.
Cody’s lips moved again.
“Gary?” Danielle said.
“Yeah.”
“The camera?”
“I’m on him.”
“Tight on his face. I want to see what he’s saying.”
“’Kay.”
Danielle hoped the night lenses could filter in enough light to illuminate the scene.
Cody wasn’t alone. Another man, one Danielle hadn’t seen in the bar downstairs, stood beside Cody. She concentrated on the men’s lips.
“—out there,” the man said.
“You’re positive?” Cody asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“All of them?”
“Yes, sir.”
Cody said something else, but he turned his face away from Danielle.
“We haven’t given up, sir. We’ll find them.”
Cody nodded. “I want Hander”—no, that had to be Gander— “dead. I do not want him back in this city.”
“Yes, sir.”
Excitement rose in Danielle again. Goose was alive. The thought thrilled her. Tears burned her eyes. Then she concentrated on Cody again, mentally cursing him. There was no guarantee that Goose would stay
that way for long.
Across the street, Cody took another drink from the neck of the bottle. “Tell them to get to it.”
“Yes, sir.” The other man faded out of sight.
Danielle turned to Gary. “Did you get that?”
“Yeah, but without audio, all you got is one guy talking to another guy in a dark room.”
“Didn’t you read his lips?” Danielle opened her notebook computer on the room’s table.
“No. I’m not a lip-reader.”
“Hook the video feed into my computer. Download that piece.” Danielle stepped back and let the cameraman work. She tried to ignore the infrequent small-arms fire and missiles. The Syrians evidently used them as reminders, ensuring that no one in the city would get a good night’s sleep.
When Gary had the video uploaded to her computer, she played it back. This time she made notes of what she’d read.
Danielle was relieved to know Goose was still alive. She’d felt guilty ever since she saw him fall from the helicopter. She kept playing it back through her mind, realizing how she could have simply grabbed him and halted his fall.
“I want Gander dead.” That reverberated in Danielle’s head in Alexander Cody’s voice.
Danielle copied the video file to her flash drive and headed for the door. “C’mon. We’ve got to find Remington.”
41
Outside Sanliurfa
Sanliurfa Province, Turkey
Local Time 2148 Hours
Goose felt gun sights on him. He froze immediately. Even though he couldn’t see the weapon, he knew someone had a bead on him. He resisted the immediate impulse to move and forced himself to wait to see what happened. He had to trust in the body armor.
“Sergeant,” Icarus called softly, “come ahead.”
Goose let out a long breath, then slid forward again.
Icarus lowered the assault rifle he carried. Miller sat nearby.
“See anything?” Icarus asked.
“Syrians,” Goose replied. “But not the men stalking us.”
“They’re out there.”