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?”