The dry desert wind wiped away her tears, but couldn’t blow away the pain. Camille bowed her head and averted her eyes as she felt the hollowness that always follows a kill. She scooped up a handful of sand and let it flow out of her fist onto the body. She knew she had to hurry back with the IV solution, but she stood there, paralyzed by memories of the flesh giving way as she pulled the knife through Pete’s trachea.
At first, Camille thought her guilt was haunting her when she felt a steel blade pressing against her throat.
“Don’t move,” a man said in Arabic.
Camille held her breath, hoping that Iggy was watching through his scope and could get a clear shot. The man’s hand pressed against the back of her head and she couldn’t move without slitting her throat.
The Arab slid her Makarov from the thigh holster, then the knife from her ankle holster. She looked around, searching for an opening. Pete’s Makarov was less than two feet from her, but they couldn’t help her. The tip of the blade pierced the skin under her chin and she could feel blood drip down her neck.
Come on, Iggy.
Then she saw the Gulfstream banking to align itself with the runway and she knew Iggy was distracted.
Chapter Seventy-Two
Gora Muruntau, Kyzyl Kum Desert, Uzbekistan
The Gulfstream’s airstairs couldn’t go down fast enough for Hunter. He couldn’t wait another moment to see Stella. When they were low enough for him to get a good look outside, he spotted two men in the shadow of a nearby dune and a pile of bodies on the runway, but no Stella.
Oh god. I hit her on takeoff.
As the stairs were being lowered to the ground, Hunter bounded down them, then dashed across the runway to the men. Thanks to the Day-Glo prison coveralls, he immediately recognized Ashland and GENGHIS. As he approached them, he could hear a voice coming over an oversized walkie-talkie.
“LIGHTNING SIX, come in. Report.,”
“Where is she?” Hunter shouted. “LIGHTNING SIX, where is she?”
“LIGHTNING SIX, come in.”
“We just lost contact,” GENGHIS said and pointed. “She went up there, Twelve o’clock, five hundred meters.”
“Radio your overwatch and tell him I’m going there and not to shoot me.” Hunter said as he scooped up an AK and checked it for ammo. “Get into the aircraft. Take what gear you can and make sure you load the body of the other prisoner. He’s a Bushman. We don’t leave men behind.”
“Neither does Delta,” GENGHIS said.
As Hunter ran up the dune, he could see a contorted lifeless body lying in the sand. Everything in him screamed. She couldn’t be dead. Not when he was this close. The sand crumbled away under his feet and he could hardly get any traction, as if the desert itself were struggling against him, trying to keep him from seeing her.
His feet finally found some packed sand and he was able to make some progress. He got close enough to see the body and forced himself to look.
Stella’s alive!
Or at least the corpse wasn’t hers.
“Looks like it happened a while ago,” Hunter said as an operator with an artificial hand walked up. He knew him by reputation as Iggy, Stella’s chief ops officer.
“Camille’s work. I’ll fill you in later.” Iggy was breathing hard. He scanned the horizon with his binoculars, then lowered them. “She came back to grab the med kit to help that worthless son of a bitch GENGHIS.”
The heavy wind had wiped away traces of any footprints, but they could see indentures in the sand where someone had climbed down the back side of the dune. The trail stopped on the flat desert floor where the wind had erased it.
“Look at this,” Hunter motioned for Iggy as he pointed to the ground beside Pete. “The blood preserved a footprint.”
“Camille was wearing Merrell hikers,” Iggy said as he squatted by the fly-covered body and studied the print. “That’s from some kind of a sandal. No tread.” Iggy stood. “We’ve got to get out of here. Keep an eye out for anything else unusual while you help me grab the stuff.”
“We can’t leave her,” Hunter said as he wrestled the Makarov from Pete. The bones of the fingers snapped. His Day-Glo prison coveralls had no pockets for him to stick the gun in, so he held onto it.
Iggy reached for the rucksack and saw something that had blown against it. As he leaned over to pick up a small green booklet written in Arabic script, a bullet crackled nearby.
“Hit the deck!”
Both men dug into the sand and pointed their AKs in the direction the bullet had come from-the same direction someone had taken Stella.
“See a target?” Hunter said.
“Negative. So wherever they are, they’re at an angle where they can’t get a shot unless we stand up.” Iggy slipped his arms into the pack’s straps. “We’re going to creep over there, then run down the dune and pray they can’t get into a good firing position in time.”
Several rounds flew over them. Hunter couldn’t see anyone, but fired a burst anyway to discourage the shooter from moving to a better location.
Iggy reached for the walkie-talkie. “GENGHIS, this is TIN MAN. We’re taking fire. Do what you can to cover us. We’re coming in.”
“Understood,” Ashland’s voice crackled through the radio.
“We’ll be vulnerable most of the way,” Hunter said.
“You have any better ideas?”
“No, sir.” Hunter fired more rounds, then began crawling as fast as he could.
The sun scorched Camille’s skin and she regretted peeling down to shorts and a T-shirt, but she was sure she would be more modestly clothed soon enough, if the tangos didn’t kill her first. She sat upright in the back of a pickup truck, surrounded by four young men with AKs. They all wore the telltale beards of the Muslim fundamentalists and spoke Arabic with one another. A cross-eyed one wore a T-shirt silk-screened with a picture she recognized from the wall of Omar’s Electronics in Ramadi. Her translator had told her which one he was, but she couldn’t remember now if he was Abdullah or al-Zahrani. Not that it really mattered which faction of al Qaeda had kidnapped her.
She could pick up only a word here and there, but pretended to understand nothing and wished she hadn’t heard the mention of jihad so frequently. Her arms and feet were bound with a heavy, scratchy rope and she saw no immediate options for escape, but she kept reassessing.
A white Toyota truck passed them going the opposite way, toward the airstrip. She coughed from the dust that blew in its wake. It honked and some of the men in the back waved their AKs at them while others fired joy shots into the air. Well over a dozen tangos were squeezed into the truck bed and four or five more into the cab. This was the third pickup they had met and she hoped to god Hunter was getting them out of there and not coming after her. But she knew he would come. And she had little doubt that he would be too late.
She watched the sky for the Gulfstream.
Carrying his IV bag, GENGHIS wobbled toward the body of the dead Bushman. He grabbed the corpse by the arm and tugged. It barely moved. He plopped to the ground, light-headed, breathing hard. He raised his head toward Ashland. “Get your ass over here.”
“I’m no harm to you. And none of us can get out of here alone, except Stone. Free me. You need me.” He held out his bound hands.
“They didn’t leave me with a knife. It’d be my pleasure to shoot the zip-cuff off you. Hold out your wrists.” GENGHIS aimed his sidearm at Ashland’s wrists.
“No, no, no. I saw Black using shears from the medic’s bag. I’ll retrieve them. And we might need every bullet.”
“Suit yourself.”
A few minutes later GENGHIS was lying in the aisle of the Gulfstream hooked up to a second IV bag that Ashland had found onboard, when he heard Iggy call for backup. The bleeding was under control, but he was feeling light-headed. Ashland set down the walkie-talkie and picked up an AK-102.