Clean Kill

by Jack Coughlin

  “Hello, you son of a bitch,” Kyle growled. “You’re hard to kill.” He wasted no time on sympathy. “No painkiller!” he snapped at the medic. “Not yet.”

  Kyle ordered the soldiers out of the hut. They hesitated for a moment, then backed away to rejoin their unit because they did not worry about the care of a foreign prisoner. There was a lot of junk yet to search for terrorist hiding places.

  Kyle knelt beside Juba and yanked an IV tube out of the man’s arm. “Your death is overdue, Jeremy. You are not getting another chance.”

  As he bent over, Swanson felt a stab of pain from his wound, more potent than before. He had to hurry while he still had strength. He grabbed the moaning Juba by both arms and dragged him out of the hut and into the sunshine. The man weighed almost nothing and blood gurgled from a half-dozen new, gaping wounds.

  A rusting old Mercedes sedan rested on its wheel rims nearby, with its big trunk yawning open like an empty mouth. Summoning his strength, Swanson picked Juba up and stuffed him into the car. He slammed the trunk lid down hard and the lock snapped shut.

  As he turned away, he could hear Juba screaming, somehow finding enough strength to scream and claw and kick in the hot and suffocating darkness. It sounded like he was saying, “Don’t leave me!”

  To his right, Kyle could make out the figures of Mishaal and Major Tsang over at the destroyed launch vehicle. They were shaking hands beside the immobile warhead. Almost over.

  The M60A3 tank was still beside the command team when Kyle limped up beside it. He shouted in Arabic to the commander who was in the turret. “See that old yellow Mercedes sedan over by that hut? Put a high-explosive round right in the rear of the car, in the trunk. Just one shot.” The Saudis may have seen what he had done, but Kyle didn’t care.

  He moved away while the tank gunner bore-sighted his big weapon and the red laser painted the target.

  Kyle slumped into a sitting position on the ground nearby, his eyes locked on the Mercedes. The pain was surging deep into him. Something’s wrong down there. Hold on for just another minute. Even as he covered his ears, Kyle Swanson could still hear faint screams coming from the man trapped in the dark, tight trunk of the old car.

  “No loose ends,” he whispered, and the big 105 mm cannon thundered.

  EPILOGUE

  P LINK! THE YOUNG SURGEON working with long forceps picked another sliver of steel, a small fragment no bigger than a pencil point, from the left thigh of Kyle Swanson and dropped it into an aluminum pan. With a local anesthetic deadening the area, Swanson felt only a slight pull. “That’s seven,” the doctor said. “The X-rays show three more small pieces lodged down a little deeper but they will be harder to reach. Since they are not bothering anything right now, we’ll leave them alone and just watch them closely.” After patching the leg wounds with a fresh sterile bandage, the doctor rolled Kyle over, tugged down the hospital gown, and removed the gauze on the abdomen.

  “That smarts,” Swanson growled. Sometimes it hurt just to breathe.

  “Two broken ribs will do that,” the doctor replied. “Not much we can do but let them heal for a couple of months. The wound itself is coming along well. You have an almost perfectly shaped “C” carved in your abs, Gunny, from whatever punched you there. It hit hard, then bounced off the ribcage as if it hit a helmet, so it didn’t get into your vital plumbing. My stitching is perfect and the infection is almost gone.” He smeared some new ointment onto the dark incision and covered it up. Purple and yellow and blue bruises.

  Kyle blinked when the doctor shone the light into his eyes. The headache was still there, a persistent dull throb that was better today than yesterday, aggravated by intermittent nausea. “The concussion will cause no permanent damage. It was a good knock on the head and should have put you out cold on the spot.”

  “I still can’t remember everything that happened after the explosion,” Swanson responded in a soft, weak voice. “Just bits and pieces, like pages of photographs.”

  “You sustained a mild traumatic brain injury, Gunny. Not fatal and not permanent, but a hell of a shock to your system. With enough time and some therapy, it will all come back to you eventually. You walked through a tornado and got little hurts in lots of places, but nothing permanent. Lucky guy. Take the pills and rest. I’ll see you at dinner.”

  A husky male medical orderly rearranged the patient and the bedclothes. “Would you like to go outside for a while? See if we can find some sunshine?”

  “Yeah. That would be good,” Kyle said, struggling against the strong pain pill in order to stay awake. He wanted to see the others. The orderly helped him into a wheelchair and pushed it easily across the deck.

  T HE ORDERLY EASED THE rolling chair into place beside a small table and locked the wheels. “Thanks, John,” Kyle said. The big man nodded and went back below deck. Swanson fished a pair of sunglasses from a pocket on the chair and put them on.

  “What’s the verdict?” asked Sir Jeff Cornwell, who was sprawled on a mat as a physical therapist massaged his legs.

  “I’m better off than you, old man. My brain is fried.”

  “Mine, too.” Cornwell gritted his teeth when the therapist lifted his left foot straight up until it could go no higher. “Lucky that we have beautiful women, good cigars, and whisky on board.” The Englishman laughed. The pallor of the stay in the hospital was gone, having evaporated with the daily doses of sun.

  They were aboard Jeff’s big yacht, the Vagabond, riding easily in gentle swells about two hundred miles east of Jamaica. The normal small dispensary had been upgraded on an emergency basis to a first-class medical suite. The long vessel could both serve to bring Sir Jeff back to health and simultaneously keep him in a safe and unknown location.

  Kyle and Jamal both had received first aid treatment on the battlefield in Saudi Arabia, then were transported to a Saudi military hospital for a day until U.S. authorities could arrange new lodgings. Since both men were undercover operators, they were spirited out of the country, Jamal going back to the States while Kyle was transferred to a British base and then onward to the Vagabond. He didn’t remember much of the trip because of the heavy sedation.

  He wanted to remember. He knew that Juba was dead, but did not recall exactly how. And the missile, and Henry and the Chinese invasion. His memory circuits were sparking like a piece of silver in a microwave oven. The whole episode was there, but it just did not make sense. He closed his eyes. Tired.

  Lady Pat was nearby, reading from a weekly newsmagazine. A story about how the Saudi royal family had crushed the militant uprising and apparently intended to use the victory to springboard into some overdue reforms in politics and human rights. She cleared her throat and resumed reading aloud, now assuming the serious voice of a television news reader. “In Washington, the president and the Pentagon strongly denied reports that American troops were involved in any way with the military effort to defeat the rebellion and secure the nuclear weapons. All U.S. troops and training personnel were confined to their bases throughout the brief conflict. American civilians stayed in their homes, said a Pentagon spokesman. This was a magnificent achievement by the Saudi military forces loyal to their government. They neither needed nor requested our help.” ’

  She turned some pages. “Toward the back of the magazine is a brief article on China conducting a massive military exercise that was carried out in full view of the press. A spokesman in Beijing said the exercise was normal and successful and all troops had returned to their bases.”

  Swanson sighed, drifting off. A hand found his and gently squeezed, and Kyle felt a warm kiss on his cheek. Delara. “Sleep for a while,” she whispered. “You’re home.”

  Jack Coughlin

  ***

  Donald A. Davis

  ***

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