Dark Light--Dawn

by Jon Land

  The main embassy building might as well have been a mile away instead of a hundred feet through a landscape congested with smoke, fire, char, and rubble. With no clear path, Max led the other two SEALs on a zigzagging route that used the smoke and rubble for cover. The fragments of the mob that had managed to penetrate the complex rushed about with no discernible purpose other than wanton destruction. The constant din of gunfire mixed with explosions had dimmed Max’s hearing to the point where the scene felt surreal and dreamlike, oddly beautiful and horrible at the same time. The smoke and flame lent the night a visceral clarity, sharply intense in focus. Enter that, embrace it, and the night was his; try to skirt its edges and he’d risk succumbing to the chaos.

  Max ducked against a building to reload, reaching for a fresh magazine when a pair of hands burst from a shrapnel-ravaged window and grabbed hold of his shoulders, trying to jerk him backward. Max slammed the M4’s butt backward, hammering a soft midsection, then jerked forward again. The fighter flew out the window with knife in hand. Going for Max’s machine gun, instead of trying for him with the knife. He never even got close to wrenching the weapon free, before Max twisted the knife around and jammed it under the fighter’s thorax, digging deep, feeling the warm gush of the fighter’s blood spilling onto him.

  “Take that, you fucker!”

  Did he say that or only think it? Impossible to discern amid the firestorm raging around him. But he did know he felt buoyant, even joyful, strangely at home in this conflagration of violence he found himself embracing. The blood soaking him smelled sweet and coppery, suddenly not altogether unpleasant, even welcome, as he twisted away from the fighter’s still convulsing form, finally slamming another fresh magazine home.

  He watched the fighter die. He never should’ve remained stationary for even those few seconds, but he wanted, needed, to watch the man wheeze and twitch toward death.

  And when he finally did, the M4 began dancing in Max’s grasp again, bringing more death with it and leaving him only wishing he could watch more fighters die similarly up close and personal. Reveling in their agony and the terror stretched over their faces, as death came to claim them.

  What’s happening to me?

  “You all right, Pope?” Grif asked him, suddenly by his side.

  Max wanted to say he wasn’t, not at all.

  “Never better,” he said instead, the pain in his hand feeling like his skin was peeling off. So he shed his glove, the blood leaking from the mark on his palm spraying outward when he tossed it aside. “Snow White’s trapped in the bunker. Cover me.”

  A cluster of fighters had just breeched the entrance to the main building, when Max and Griffon poured fire into them, leaving their bodies in a clump Max leaped over en route to a heavy steel door that had been blasted open. Max felt the heat of fresh enemy fire blistering the air around him, digging chunks from the walls as his men dove for cover to return it.

  Max continued steering for the breached entrance to and then down the winding, catwalk-like stairs to the bunker. He felt he was gliding, floating more than running. He should’ve been heaving for breath, but he felt no burning in his lungs or sledgehammering of his heart against his chest wall.

  He drained his magazine on two fighters who spun out at the foot of the stairs, was snapping a fresh one home when two more lunged at him when he leaped the final stretch to the floor. No way he could complete the process in time to fire at them, so he hammered the butt of his M4 into the forehead of the nearest with one hand, while yanking his knife from its sheath with the other. His original intention had been to stab the second fighter with the blade, but the man’s boots ground to a halt as his rifle steadied, so Max sent the knife whizzing through the air with a flick of his wrist instead. It lodged in the man’s throat, a fountain of blood erupting, while Max split the rest of the first fighter’s skull with two more thrusts of the butt of his M4, enjoying the sound and feel of it cracking so much he struck the man a third time, square in the face.

  What am I …

  Max was in motion again before he could complete the thought, gliding forward with his final magazine rammed home and ready. His next clear sight through an open doorway, in crystal-sharp focus, was of four uniformed fighters stamping at a dead marine’s body, while two more hovered over a pair of kneeling hostages. Max shot the stampers first, his peripheral vision following the other two fighters jerking the hostages to their feet, knives held at their throats.

  He recognized the female hostage as Ambassador Clare Travis. Her face was bloodied and bruised, her blouse torn to reveal her bra beneath it. She looked as if she were fighting to stay strong and resilient, in the grasp of a fighter with an eye socket crusted over with scar tissue. That fighter struggled to steady a pistol on Max in a trembling hand, while his other held the knife’s edge against the ambassador’s throat.

  “Drop the gun!” he wailed in Arabic. “Drop the gun!”

  The moment froze, as Max held his ground and his M4, no clear shot through the smoke and flame glow lighting the scene.

  “Drop the gun!”

  Max felt a strange, eerie, almost preternatural calm grip him.

  “Drop the gun!” the fighter wailed again.

  And Max did, because it was his only move. Standing there weaponless now with no fear, regret, or even concern, his heart rate slowing to a soft tick in his chest.

  The fighter holding the ambassador at knifepoint extended his pistol further forward, his finger starting to curl round the trigger.

  “Khalass!” Max called out in Arabic, holding up his bare right hand, with blood still leaking from the birthmark burned into his palm. “Stop!”

  The fighter’s eyes locked on that hand, then with Max’s gaze. The fighter tried to break the stare but couldn’t. Fear filled his eyes, and he jerked his pistol to the right. Aimed now for the second fighter, even as he struggled desperately, and futilely, to stop his own motion, as if he was no longer in control of his motor functions.

  “What, what are you doing?” the second man, holding a young man who looked like a college-age intern, at knifepoint as well, screeched.

  “Aasef! Aasef!” the first fighter wailed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  Then he fired twice into the other fighter’s face, the young embassy worker left to stumble aside.

  The fighter still holding Ambassador Travis at knifepoint finally dropped the pistol and jerked his knife from the ambassador’s throat toward his own.

  “Allah Asharim! Allah Asharim!”

  And then he drew the blade sideways, a geyser of blood bursting from his slit throat, spraying Ambassador Travis as Max moved to grab hold of her.

  “Come on!” he cried out, helping the intern to his feet and then scooping up his M4. “Time to get you home, Ambassador.”

  * * *

  The ambassador’s knees buckled, Max catching her just before she hit the floor. He scooped her up over his shoulder, her weight slowing him not in the slightest as he mounted the stairs and burst outside, the intern shielded behind him, amid a courtyard swarming with fighters.

  “Want me to take her, Pope?” Griffon said, rushing to his side.

  “I got this,” Max told him, barely breaking stride to level his M4 in his other hand.

  Griffon and Bates fell into step behind him, skirting their way back to the choppers. The trip home would be a tight squeeze, weight more a problem than numbers. But, as one of Max’s commanding officers had once said, Sometimes you just have to go the fuck with it.

  Tonight was going to be one of those times. And not all the SEALs would be making the trip, not alive anyway. Max had lost men before, but this was different. This was all on him because he was the one who’d violated orders by refusing to shit-can the mission and dropped straight into a firestorm instead.

  Max didn’t have time to doubt or question himself, his final magazine almost drained, when he hoisted Ambassador Travis into the evac chopper. A final wave of fighters had just breached the ga
te in an insect-like swarm, when Max felt his trigger click empty. Then the smoke and haze vanished in a curtain of fire that was everywhere and nowhere at once. Max knew something was wrong, because he felt no heat, the blistering radiance not even making him squint, as if the flames that weren’t there had frozen the world around him. He felt nothing at all, not even any pain.

  Except the pain radiating from his silver dollar–sized birthmark again. But it was different now, more biting than hot, as if razor-sharp teeth were tearing into his palm, shredding the skin.

  That pain was the only thing he could feel, when the next moment found Max a spectator shielded by the fanning flames. Watching an endless flood of fighters converge on his men and the embassy personnel they’d rescued, seeming to swallow them before the bodies started falling to an endless ribbon of gunfire Max followed in slow motion, his own team being slaughtered before his eyes. He tried to move, do something, anything, but the cold-hot flames held him captive, time slowing to a crawl before starting to move like the picture was skipping. Then the world picked up speed again in time to capture one of the remaining choppers bursting into flames under the torrent of enemy fire, a moment before a trio of rebels wielding grenade launchers took out the other with RPGs. He saw fighters reduced to charred, smoking skeletons, seeming to grin as they advanced, their bones clacking with each step.

  Max squeezed his eyes closed, his face still stained with the blood of the fallen enemy fighters. Opened them again to find the battle exactly where he’d left it without flames or skeletons, the last of his men squeezing aboard the two choppers.

  What the fuck, what the fuck was—

  A vision, Max realized, that’s what it must’ve been, a vision. Or a premonition maybe, something like that.

  Either way, the fighters flooded through the toppled gate wielding a combination of ancient carbines and AK-47s, while a trio of them mounted the retaining wall steadying grenade launchers.

  Max knew what was going to happen. He knew what was coming.

  Because he’d seen it. In his vision.

  Max thought he heard Grif screaming his name, as he shed his empty M4 assault rifle and stooped over the M60D heavy machine gun still fixed to the pod of the downed Black Hawk. In what felt like an extension of his vision, he saw himself reaching for an M60D and tearing it from its mounts—loosened by the crash, of course, because how else could he have torn steel from steel?

  In the back of his mind somewhere, Max registered how much the thing weighed, with still half an ammo belt, no less. But that didn’t matter because it felt featherlight in his grasp, as he opened up on the fighters surging through the embassy gates with the choppers in their sights. He fired and kept firing, wave after wave of the bloodthirsty horde downed by a barrage he swept from left to right and back again. Never easing up on the trigger, even as the heat blowing from the barrel blew back into him like a desert wind.

  The horde kept coming in an endless stream, mirroring almost precisely what he’d seen in the crazed vision that had seized him. The spacing and weapons were the same, right down to the heavy machine guns and grenade launchers being steadied atop the embassy’s perimeter security wall, laid waste to by his M60D’s armor-piercing shells before they could begin firing.

  Otherwise …

  Max could only hope he had enough bullets to provide cover for the choppers’ liftoff and escape, expecting the hollow click to sound any moment in all its finality. But the belt kept feeding and the bullets kept coming, as if this particular ammo pack was rigged to infinity. His hands cried out from the weight and the heat that felt as if it were peeling back his flesh. But this was no vision; it was undeniably, and terrifyingly, real, cast in the sharp focus combat always left in its aftermath.

  Through the smoky haze before him, Max saw the onslaught ending, the attack wave receding as the fighters turned and fled back out through the gate, before they joined the wave of fallen bodies.

  “Pope,” Max thought he heard, his finger cramping on a trigger producing only hollow clacks now. “Pope…”

  Then a hand jarred his shoulder, Max swinging to find Griffon painted in blood and sweat yanking him away. Max felt the heat rising off the M60D’s barrel, bleeding smoke-like steam that stained the air between them.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here, man,” Griffon said in a scratchy voice laced with disbelief over what he’d just seen. “Let’s go home.”

  EIGHT

  Atlanta, Georgia

  The last thing Victoria Tanoury remembered before the crash was fitting the Apple Watch her fiancé had just given her around her wrist.

  “So wherever the World Health Organization sends you, I’ll always be as close as your wrist,” Thomas had told her, smiling.

  He watched Vicky pawing over his gift to her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for the OFF switch,” she said, smiling back at him.

  She watched Thomas return his attention to the road, saw his eyes bulge in the same moment his forearms tensed wildly on the wheel.

  “Jesus Christ! What’s she doing there?”

  Vicky felt him slam on the brakes, swinging back to the front in time to glimpse a little girl standing in the middle of the road, before Thomas veered sharply to avoid her. Their car spun out of control, careening across the roadway, slammed in one direction and then another until it was launched airborne. It seemed to hover for a very long time before crashing down in a sloped patch of ground beneath the overpass. It landed on its roof with a crunching impact that stole what little was left of Vicky’s breath, then rolled back upright.

  Her disorientation was instantly deepened by the smell of gasoline flooding the SUV’s cab. She turned to Thomas to see blood frothing from his mouth, a look of terror and puzzlement frozen on his features.

  “Did I hit her?” he managed, gagging at the end.

  Vicky tried to sound reassuring. “Don’t try to talk.”

  But he latched a shuddering hand onto her wrist. “The little girl in the middle of the road … Please tell me I didn’t hit her.”

  Vicky eased his hand off her. “You didn’t hit her,” she said, wondering how the little girl had strayed into the middle of the freeway and what happened to her, after Thomas just managed to avoid her.

  She felt suddenly hot, the stench of gasoline replaced by oil smoke. And then she was retching, the hot tongues of sprouting flames reaching for her, even as Thomas’s eyes locked open and blood oozed from his mouth in thick wads.

  She didn’t want to leave him, but instinct drove her to reach for the release on her shoulder harness.

  Click.

  But nothing happened, the harness didn’t release, keeping her pinned in place, trapped in the car.

  “Help! Help!”

  Her screams hurt her own ears. It hurt to breathe now too, her throat feeling as if she’d swallowed acid, and she tried not to inhale. Then the next time she let herself, there was no air left, only heat, until something that felt like ice crystals showered her.

  Air flooded her lungs and Vicky felt herself being carried away, toward the next life, Vicky thought, until she glimpsed the sun-drenched silhouette of a uniformed policeman dragging her away. The stench of gasoline dissipated, and she was vaguely conscious of the rock-laden shoulder of the access road that ran beneath the freeway.

  “Ma’am, can you hear me? Ma’am, look at me!”

  An explosion sent flames climbing toward the sun over his shoulder, Vicky recovering enough of her senses to think about Thomas stolen from her a second time, all trace of him lost, along with the love they’d shared.

  “Let me sit you up, ma’am.”

  Vicky realized she was retching horribly, as if to cough all the accumulated smoke from her lungs. Sirens were wailing by the time she could breathe again, as the officer continued to comfort her.

  “I was on my way home,” he told her. “Funny how I never take this route, never. But there was a detour. That’s what saved your lif
e. I only wish I could have saved…”

  “My fiancé,” Vicky completed, when the officer’s voice tailed off. “He swerved to avoid a little girl in the middle of the road. Please tell me she’s all right. Please tell me she wasn’t hurt.”

  The officer scratched at his scalp, looking puzzled. “I can’t, ma’am, because I didn’t notice any little girl. And I didn’t see the angel who set up that detour either, but I know you must have one watching over you.”

  * * *

  Vicky had spent the funeral reliving the accident in her mind, trying to fill in the empty spaces that began with the sickening crunch of metal and ended with her strapped to a headboard. The whole morning had passed in a fog of empty gestures and solemn condolences that left her feeling numb. Numb to the cold hands pressed into hers, the tight embraces that left her soaking in the scents of stale cigarettes, dry-cleaning chemicals, hairspray, and too much perfume or cologne. She’d always been sensitive to smells; her first paper in a biochemical medicine class was a study in how to use scents to help diagnose disease. Back then, she’d never imagined the career path that would end up taking her into virology and epidemiology where stints with the Centers for Disease Control and, more recently, the World Health Organization had branded her a prodigy.

  But Vicky didn’t care much about that now; she didn’t care much about anything beyond burying the fiancé she truly loved on the very day they were supposed to be married.

  So you won’t ever be able to hide from me …

  It was Thomas, though, who would now be hiding from her. Forever. Somewhere no Apple Watch could reach him, Vicky thought, watching the minute change on it. The reception was in full swing, the house they’d shared in the year since they’d gotten engaged packed to the brim with milling, somber souls searching for the right words to say when none existed. It would’ve been easier for all, herself included, if they didn’t bother. If they just remained silent. But none did, and each genuine show of condolence left Vicky gazing at her watch to keep Thomas alive in her mind, at the very least.

  She felt a lot of things, but mostly she felt alone. Her mother had died in childbirth and she hadn’t spoken to her father in years now, their estrangement dating back even beyond that. Vicky searched her mind for a time she felt different, anything other than hatred for her father, but was denied it save for snippets of memory so long in the past, she couldn’t even be sure they were real.