Iggy’s voice came over their earpieces again. “Repeat, any survivors?”
Hunter stared at the man and knew what he had to do. He squatted down to pick him up. “Give me a hand with him.”
“Sure thing.” GENGHIS pulled out his sidearm and fired.
Hunter and GENGHIS returned to the Pave Hawk to see the flight engineer retracting the hose. The refueling was complete. “She airworthy?” Hunter said to Beach Dog, dreading the confrontation with Iggy if she wasn’t.
“Itching to go back up there and visit her tanker friend for more juice,” Beach Dog said. “She’s a go.”
As GENGHIS climbed into the helicopter, Iggy grabbed his arm. His face was stormy. “You pulled the same thing you did in Libya, didn’t you?”
GENGHIS stared at him for a few moments without saying anything, then twisted his body away from Iggy and climbed into the helicopter. Iggy gripped Hunter’s shoulder as he got in. “The truth, Stone. Any survivors?”
Hunter strapped himself into his seat before speaking. He despised GENGHIS for what he’d done, and at the same time felt enormously grateful to the son of a bitch. He looked straight ahead and said, “There are no survivors.”
“I thought so,” Iggy said with a grunt as he slid the door shut. “Beach Dog, get us the hell out of here. We’ve got to get to that tango camp before Camille kicks all their asses without us.”
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Shangri-la
Al-Zahrani was taller and thinner than Camille had expected; he had mysterious brown eyes, peaceful eyes which at the same time had glints of mercy and flashes of vengeance. A cleric in a white skullcap read from a Koran while two guards pointed AKs at her. Back home in the Ozarks, they called this a shotgun wedding, except she wasn’t pregnant and the groom wasn’t the one with the guns pointed at him.
Al-Zahrani held her gaze. For a moment she thought he was trying to tell her something.
The young man who had earlier brought her the water and clothes translated the cleric’s words, cheating whenever he could read the same verse from an English translation of the Koran. “And among His signs in this, that He created for you mates, from among yourselves, that ye may dwell…”
She didn’t have much tolerance for religious writings in any language and quit listening while she assessed the tactical situation. Two guards pointed AKs her. It was a poor choice of weapon for the circumstances and she considered baiting them to shoot her just as she maneuvered in front of al-Zahrani so they hit him as well. It wasn’t her best option since she couldn’t guarantee that he’d be killed, but it might be the best she could do.
Her wrists were tied in front of her, but her legs were now free since they intended for her to spread them soon. No one had bothered to search her since they’d thrown her into the shed. The long nail concealed in her sleeve was an awkward weapon, but it was the best she had found. She figured her best chance was to spike it into the soft spot behind his ear just before he tried to enter her. The thought was so disgusting. What a way to die, shot by bodyguards while being raped by the world’s most wanted terrorist. At least Muslims seemed to bathe a lot.
“The Holy Prophet, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, made the mut’a marriage halal.” The interpreter stumbled through the translation. She couldn’t figure out why the hell they were bothering, but she guessed it was part of their screwy ethics.
On the way over she had heard a generator, but al-Zahrani’s tent was lit by several oil lamps. They seemed to reserve the power to run their phones and communications and the few lights outside. She hoped al-Zahrani liked to do it in the dark. Like her Night Stalker buddies always said, “Death waits in the dark.”
She hoped the damn thing would get a move on. At least they had fed her before the ceremony and she guessed that was her dowry. They could at least have given her the whole goat. She made a mental note not to serve boiled goat if she survived this and ever married.
After stifling several mini-yawns she managed to get her eyes to tear up, then she caught al-Zahrani’s gaze and made herself smile at him.
He smiled back.
Dumb fuck.
Soon the peace and blessings of Camille Black would be upon him-god help his soul.
Chapter Eighty
41° 59' 40.88 N, 63° 07' 04.49 E (Uzbekistan)
Despite the snafu with the last air-to-air refueling, the next one didn’t make Beach Dog nearly as nervous as Iggy did, whipping out his laptop and revising the mission plan on the fly. He’d seen it happen many times and he had learned long ago that when things started sliding south the next thing he knew he was waking up in an alley in Tijuana with no wallet and no pants, smelling of booze and puke.
Beach Dog descended and began to hug the ground as closely as he could in case the tangos had some kind of radar warning system, even though he guessed it probably consisted of pie tins tied to a clothesline. He was using FLIR the entire mission, but only through the Afghan-Uzbek border region did he fly close enough to the ground to really need the navigational system. Now it was time to show off why Night Stalkers ruled the darkness. He flew five feet above the dunes, too fast to kick up a trail of sand.
“Five minutes to the LZ. Wax up them boards, dudes,” Beach Dog said as he passed over the south rim of the open pit mine, pointed the nose down and plunged two hundred and fifty feet in seconds. He pushed the speed to one hundred sixty knots and boomed through the man-made canyon, a few feet above the floor. “And hang on. We’re going to be flying the Pipeline.”
For the next several minutes the helicopter lurched sharp to port, then to starboard, up, down, sudden drops and immediate climbs. Man, this is flying.
Beach Dog saw a mound directly in front of them and threw the Hawk hard right, but the canyon wall was dead ahead. Beach Dog spun the Hawk in a Bat-turn, rotating one hundred eighty degrees. He slalomed around the hills, throwing the crew left, then tumbling their stomachs to the right.
“You know what Night Stalkers say,” Beach Dog yelled to anyone listening.
“‘Night Stalkers don’t quit,’” several men said in unison.
A vertical cliff popped up out of nowhere. Beach Dog yanked back on the cyclic and shot straight up and onward at warp speed. “NSDQ is so true, but I was thinking, ‘Death waits in the dark.’”
Chapter Eighty-One
Shangri-la
The cleric, interpreter and one of the two guards left the tent, extinguishing all the lights except a single candle. Al-Zahrani put his arm around Camille’s waist and pulled her close. His breath smelled, even from a few feet away. She met his lips and kissed him violently, channeling her anger into passion, seducing him into lowering his defenses. His mouth tasted like an old tennis shoe and his beard and moustache were steel wool, scratching her face. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she leaned her head back, inviting him to kiss her neck. She giggled, visualizing the soft sounds of bubbles rising to the surface in her witch’s cauldron.
Keeping her bound hands pressed together so he couldn’t see the nail, she touched his face with the sides of her little fingers and rippled her hands down his body as if she were a belly dancer. She stopped short of his hard-on.
Gross.
Al-Zahrani shouted something to the guard as he shoved her down onto his sleeping mat and tore off the 5.11s she had left on underneath the jilbab. The guard blew out the candle.
His vigilance was waning.
Good.
Just before the guard left the tent, al-Zahrani pinned her down. He groped at her breasts, shoving the jilbab up around her neck. Camille’s hate was acid burning in her belly. She wanted to fight back, but she knew she had to force herself to play it out until the opportune moment. As soon as he got bored with her breasts, she would work her hands up into position. She prayed he wasn’t a breast man who would linger forever. There was an artery in the stomach, but she doubted she could find it.