by Julie Rowe
“A 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, pale blue 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, 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 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.
Alicia 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.
Alicia 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.
Alicia 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.
Alicia 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 weapon.
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 darkness of the interior was nearly complete, but the boy’s hand glomped onto 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.
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 th
ere 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.”
“There is no safe place. My wife is dead. Her parents died last night of the fever. Everyone else is sick. I will find another room where my sons can sleep. We have nowhere else to go.”
Damn, now they had civilians to look after.
“Okay.” She checked her watch. “Dawn isn’t far off. How do you want to do this?”
“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.”
Alicia 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 and 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 quietly.
She had better luck choking her chuckles back. 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?” Alicia 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 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 non-militants 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. 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 and headed for the valley below the village.
Shouts brought more people out, some in fear, some with hope on their faces.
Alicia looked for the team of Special Forces soldiers that should be approaching the village 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. The gunmen trying to keep people inside, the ones who weren’t racing toward a crate, were overrun.
Alicia smiled.
Off to the west, a group of men ran at an oblique angle toward the
crates, intersected with the edge of the tents, then 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.
No gunmen or militants seemed interested in them—most had hightailed it toward the dropped supplies.
A woman’s screams from closer by, inside the village, drew Alicia’s attention.
She quickly located the source of the noise and found a couple of armed 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, and a few of the sick who were drawn out of their homes by the supply drop.
The incoming soldiers had all adopted the camouflage Max had insisted on—a scarf tied over the face to obscure the medical mask underneath—but their eyes were visible and reflected horror at what they saw.
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, one of whom was Tom.
“Don’t go in there,” one man shouted.
“You strangers must leave,” the other said.
Tom turned and shouted back in Arabic, “We’re all sick. Do you want us in your homes or here?”