Rook took several steps backward. The people were getting too close. The fierce breeze in the early morning gloom would drive the flames on the barn harder. He had to ensure Peder and as many of the man’s horses as possible made it out of the flames in time. But the villagers were giving him no respite. It was as if the sight of the rising flames in the barn and Rook’s slight retreat had energized them. Where previously they were each taking pokes at Rook with their respective weapons, now they all simply ran at him.
“Hot friggin’ pancakes, you morons won’t give up, will you?”
And then the fight began. Rook started moving his feet and whirling his arms with the metal pitchfork fragment in one hand and the improvised Escrima stick in the other. Instead of waiting for the crowd to get to him, Rook headed into them and to the left. He smashed two men to the ground with his forearms, backhanded a woman with the stick on the follow-through of another strike and launched a kick at the midsection of a portly man in his fifties. Rook spun and struck with the weapons, taking down woman and man alike. When Anni’s kids made it to the forefront of the fray, he simply booted them away with low kicks, not putting his full strength into it at all. They flew away and their screwdrivers were lost in the short grass.
Even as hard and fast as he fought though, Rook was getting tired. His fingers were getting numb in the cold morning air, and the size of the mob wasn’t diminishing rapidly enough. Some of the men he’d put down at the start of the fight were getting back into it. Then he heard a shotgun blast from behind him in the raging flames. He glanced back just in time to see the man that had become his friend in the last weeks, Peder, fall down onto the ground, a villager standing over him with a large stick, and the shotgun falling away to the side.
Rook turned to sprint to Peder’s aid when he saw the man bring the stick down hard, end first, into Peder’s face.
“No!” Rook started pumping his legs but something tripped him up, and he went sprawling to the ground. His mouth filled with dirt when he hit. Then something whacked his leg hard. He rolled away from the impact and spit the dirt out of his mouth. He pulled his legs up over his head into a backward somersault, landing crouched on his feet. He had dropped the metal pitchfork stick and now had only his two-foot length of splintered wood. As his body came to a stop from the roll, he spotted what had tripped him up. It was one of Anni’s kids. A little boy no taller than three feet, his long blonde hair tangled and streaming behind him, his short sharp breaths huffing, making him look like some feral jungle boy. He had the screwdriver clutched in his hand again and was driving it forward right at Rook’s face. Rook swatted at the hand that held the tool’s handle, knocking the thing from the boy’s grip, but the kid kept coming on. Rook balled his empty hand into a fist and conked the brat on the top of his head, this time sending the little beast into unconsciousness.
Rook slowly stood, seeing perhaps twenty bodies on the ground, most of whom were writhing in agony, but a few of whom were still out after the damage he had inflicted. The problem was, there were thirty or so people still standing, and they were all coming straight at him like a tide of screaming soldiers in some sword-and-sandal epic. Rook took a deep breath. His face darted back to Peder and saw that the man’s body lay unmolested in the grass. His attackers were coming right at Rook.
And one of them now held Peder’s shotgun.
THREE
Mount Kadam, Uganda
3 November, 0600 Hrs
Shin dae-jung, callsign: Knight, lay perfectly still in the long, yellowed grass, with the black combat boot-clad foot of a soldier standing on his hand.
He was invisible in the long grass, with his ghillie suit covered in more of it, but if the soldier were to glance down, Knight might still be spotted. His trigger hand throbbed from the weight of the soldier’s foot, but he didn’t dare to flex it even slightly. Knight’s left hand was clenched firmly on the handle of his KA-BAR knife, still sheathed on his chest. If the soldier made him, or worse-tripped over the camouflaged experimental EXACTO sniper rifle on the ground in front of him-Knight would launch upward and thrust the blade of the Marine Corps knife deep into the Ugandan soldier’s chest. But right now, Knight’s cover was more important, so he remained still, barely breathing, in tiny increments.
If it hadn’t been for the damn shooting, I would have heard this bastard before he was on me. The group of soldiers he had been watching fired their weapons in the dawn sky like idiots after a rousing speech from their leader.
Knight had been deployed to Uganda to perform surveillance on a small offshoot guerilla faction. Led by Romeo Kigongo, the United Faithful Army was a militant and unruly branch of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA had recently come to the attention of the world for the atrocities they perpetrated on the weak and poor of rural Uganda, as well as for their incursions into neighboring African states using child soldiers as cannon fodder. The Ugandan military had been hopeless in tracking down the LRA, but eventually the world media began focusing on the group and its leader, Joseph Kony. When the world finally started clamoring for Kony’s head in 2012 (the United States and other nations had labeled him as a terrorist of special interest years earlier), many of Kony’s lieutenants-Romeo Kigongo included-simply formed their own splinter groups and returned to the life of pri-vacy their smaller fiefdoms had previously provided them. Kigongo’s group, the UFA, would probably have gone unnoticed for years if they hadn’t made an incursion into Tanzania to steal eight hundred million dollars worth of uncut diamonds. Now funded properly, they were taking the next step in the Interna-tional Bad Boy game. They were seeking a portable nuclear device.
Knight and a teammate had been sent to the grassy plateau near Mount Kadam to watch the early morning deal go down, mark the players and then, if possible, kill the UFA members with knowledge of the deal and deactivate the device. Knight and his teammate would then be extracted with the nuclear material.
The only problem was the timing. As a part of the former Delta group known as Chess Team, which was now part of a larger black ops organization known as Endgame, Knight was privy to all kinds of intelligence, but in this case, his headquarters-based handler, callsign: Deep Blue, named after the chess-playing supercomputer, had only been able to provide him with a location and a general timeframe.
No exact date.
No exact time.
Knight had been lying in the grass for three days now.
It’s a wonder he can’t smell me.
The soldier hadn’t moved from Knight’s hand in twenty minutes. Deep Blue had been tracking the operation through an NSA satellite and communicating with Knight through a tactical earplug, but Deep Blue hadn’t said anything in hours and Knight guessed that was just plain bad luck. If Deep Blue had been watching, he would have warned Knight of the soldier’s arrival long before Knight’s digits got mashed into the soil. All he could do now was wait. If the solider moved on, fine. But if he stayed put much longer, Knight would have to break cover and risk the noise of killing the man-his hand simply couldn’t take too much more.
“Please tell me that tango isn’t standing near you.” Knight’s partner, Erik Sommers, callsign: Bishop, spoke so softly and calmly in Knight’s earphone that the man could have been resting in an easy chair. Bishop was somewhere off to Knight’s left across the huge field. Knight didn’t know exactly where Bishop was, but he knew that the man probably would have had a great view of the guerillas down the slope of the field. He wouldn’t have been keeping an eye on Knight’s position for the most part. Deep Blue was supposed to do that.
Unable to respond verbally, Knight slipped his tongue out of his mouth and touched the sensitive lip-microphone he wore. The resulting sound would be an audible click in Bishop’s earpiece. A yes.