Slowly, painstakingly, I circled behind him, and then gradually moved in. The rain muffled sound, but I didn’t need it. If there was one thing my body had learned and would never forget, it was how to move silently through the mud. Hilger had said his conflict had been in the desert. Too bad for him.
Twelve yards. Ten. It was easy to get overeager at the moment of the kill, and I forced myself to stay slow and steady.
“Don’t move,” I heard from behind me, in a commanding tone.
It was Hilger’s voice. I froze and didn’t try to turn. The person on the ground in front of me remained still.
“Very slowly, place the gun on the ground, far from your body. Then get your hands up high, fingers spread.”
I did as he had asked, then snuck a glance back. I couldn’t see much more than a silhouette holding a pistol, ten feet away. The muzzle was abnormally long, and I realized it was a suppressor. With the gun on me, it was too far to rush him. If he shot center mass, the Dragon Skin might carry the day. But if he aimed low or high, I’d be done.
“Who’s the guy on the ground?” I asked, wanting to engage him, see if I could create an opening.
“I have no idea.”
“You just shot someone to use as a decoy?”
I heard him laugh. “It worked, didn’t it?”
I couldn’t deny it.
“Are you going to give me a hard time about it?” I heard him say. “How many people did you kill this week?”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
He laughed again, and I felt a slow-burning rage ignite deep within me. He hadn’t moved to pat me down, probably because he was wary of getting too close after our run-in in Saigon. I had the knife Boaz gave me clipped to my front pocket. If I rushed him, I could probably open him up even as he was shooting me. I might die, but I’d take him with me to hell.
Do it. Do it now.
It was the iceman talking.
No. There’s a better way.
A distraction. That’s what I needed. Something to buy myself the extra second.
“Tell me where Dox is,” I heard him say, and I realized that was my opening. He didn’t know how messed up the big sniper was. He thought he was here.
“He’s with Boezeman,” I said. “Boezeman let him into the container. He disarmed the bomb.”
There was a second of silence while his mind grappled with his new understanding of just how much I knew. Boezeman, container, bomb, disarmed…it was a lot to process. It required thought, and made it hard to focus.
“You’re lying,” he said.
This time I was the one to laugh. “You’re right. You want to know where he is? Dox. Take him out.”
Hilger had spent enough time in the military, and was sufficiently acquainted with Dox’s deadly skills, for the words take him out to have an almost Pavlovian effect. Klaxons were going off in his mind now: Rain must be wearing commo gear, Dox is close by with a scoped rifle, where’s the line of sight, get off the X-
I spun and rushed him. I was five feet away when the first slug hit my chest. I felt like I’d run into a tree, and the air was driven out of my lungs. He got off two more, both to my torso, and then I had both hands wrapped around the gun. I twisted hard to the left, forcing the muzzle out to his right. He rotated his body to keep his wrist from breaking, and two more shots went off to the side. We struggled with the gun.
I couldn’t draw breath. It felt like I’d been kicked by a horse, by three horses. Hilger snapped a knee into my groin and pain rocketed through my abdomen. I got a hand around the long suppressor and shoved back and over, toward Hilger’s right shoulder. He couldn’t get out of the way, and he couldn’t let go. His wrist snapped. He howled and I tore the gun away from him.
I took a step back, and with my last strength blasted a desperate side kick into his knee. He yelled again and collapsed. I fell to my knees a few feet away, fumbling with the pistol, trying to breathe, breathe…
I bobbled the gun and dropped it in the mud. Hilger, his face a rictus of pain, was struggling with his belt buckle with his left hand. I remembered Saigon, and thought, belt knife.
Of course, no backup pistol. That’s what I’d seen in the dead guy’s hand.
Breathe, breathe…
I groped for the gun. I couldn’t find it. The outer edges of my vision were going dark.
Hilger twisted the buckle, and suddenly there was a blade in his hand.
I gritted my teeth, and with all my strength tried to suck air into my lungs. No go. Tiny red dots danced before my eyes. My phony command to Dox had unbalanced Hilger enough to deny him the time and the focus to shoot for my head or pelvic girdle, but the rounds had reverberated through the Dragon Skin to hammer my diaphragm into spasm. The knee to my groin had made it worse. My brain wasn’t getting oxygen, and it was beginning to shut down.
Hilger slid toward me, the knife in his left hand, his left forearm digging into the mud, pulling himself forward like an injured reptile.
I rubbed frantically at my diaphragm. A tiny whistle of air made its way into my lungs.
Hilger slashed with the knife. I fell away from him to my back, getting my feet between us, still rubbing, trying to coax my diaphragm out of spasm. Another snatch of air stole down my throat, like a prisoner dashing across a mine field.
Another slash. The blade hit my boot. I drew a tiny, hitching breath. Hilger screamed and slashed again. Again he hit a boot.
I put my hands down to shove away from him, and my right fingers touched cold metal. The gun. I grabbed it and kicked away to create a precious extra two feet, then got it out in front of me with my right hand, my left still massaging my abdomen. I drew an inch of breath. Then another. The red dots disappeared, and the darkness retreated.
Hilger saw the gun, saw that he couldn’t reach me. His body sagged and he dropped the knife in the mud.
We sat there like that, neither of us able to move. After a few moments, Hilger laughed and said, “I guess you are bulletproof, after all. Body armor, right?”
I didn’t answer. I was still working on getting my breath back.
We sat there like that for almost a minute, neither of us able to move. When I could finally speak, I sighted down the muzzle and said, “Tell me how to disarm it.”
He smiled. “Then you haven’t yet. You were lying.”
“I don’t know. Somebody’s been working on it. Tell me, and I’ll let you live.”
He laughed.
I thought about calling Boaz. But without Hilger’s cooperation, there was nothing I could do to help him. And a phone call could distract him at a delicate moment. I would have to wait.
“Who are you working for?” I asked. “AQ? Hamas? Hezbollah?”
He laughed again.
“What?” I said.
“I work for my country.”
“I don’t get it.”
He sighed. “Someone has to deny America’s enemies their funding, Rain. How can the country prevail against radical Islam while simultaneously underwriting it?”
“What does this have to do with Rotterdam?”
“It has everything to do with Rotterdam. America’s oil addiction is a sickness that’s killing the patient. Christ, Americans would rather send soldiers to war than carpool to work. And Congress is worse. The idiots actually proposed to offer taxpayers a hundred-dollar rebate to buy more gasoline-they want to give the addicts more money for a fix, more money to send to the mullahs and the al Saud, our enemies.”
“So Rotterdam is an inoculation.”
“Yes. That’s well put. You increase the price of oil enough to lower demand and create market incentives for alternatives, but not so much that the patient goes into the shock of economic depression. It’s a shame the patient doesn’t have the sense or the will to inoculate himself through a carbon tax, but denial is the nature of addiction, and doesn’t change the fact that the patient badly needs help.”