“Jacques?”
There was silence, then the man’s voice again.
“Might be Special Forces coming to rescue me. Then again, it might be the wind. One in the same, really.”
Now it was clear. Though the male voice was speaking in a different room on a different floor of a house in which Matt had never been, it was unmistakably his brother’s voice. He stared open-eyed at the sliding glass door through which he had just entered, trying to hold back a wave of emotions. Was it really Zachary, or was he just hearing what he wanted to hear?
A movement reflected in the glass door caught his eye and brought his mind circling quickly back to reality. He gripped his M4, waiting as he watched a woman’s reflection ascend the final stair. She took two steps into the center of the room, clearly focused for the moment on the fact that the sliding glass door was ajar by about three feet.
Matt studied the woman in the dim light. She had sharp, stunning features. Her eyes were wide, cat-like ovals. She was a dark-skinned woman, perhaps African or from the Indies. She moved with the grace of a mountain lion, taking another step toward the door, then pausing.
“Jacques?”
Matt sprang forward from his hideout, catching the woman as she brandished a pistol. He tackled her before she could aim the pistol at him, but that didn’t prevent her from pulling the trigger. The shot flew wide, into the center of the television screen, shattering glass all over the room.
Matt raised his weapon and smashed it into the skull of the woman. She went immediately limp in his arms, a slight gasp escaping from her mouth. He grabbed the pistol from her hand, stuffing it in his trousers as he quickly moved toward the stairway.
He scrambled down the stairs, trying to keep his body moving ahead of the myriad thoughts that threatened to crash down upon him like boulders blocking a mountain pass. Keep going, Matt. Keep going.
At the bottom of the wooden steps, he spun to his left, keeping the front door to his right. The downstairs was as bare as the upstairs. In the distant corner, across the dingy throw rug and dusty, gray wooden floorboards, Matt saw a darkened figure, huddled and bound in a wooden chair. A shadow cut across the figure’s body, making it difficult to truly determine who was in the chair. But his instincts began to clatter as loudly as a fire truck speeding down the highway to an apartment-building blaze. His slow, careful walk developed into a gait. The desire to see who the man he prayed was his brother collided with the realization that he had a very small window of opportunity to get back to the drop zone and safety.
Approaching the bound man from behind, Matt grabbed the back of the chair and spun it around until he was staring into the wide eyes of his brother.
No question. It was Zach.
Matt pulled a small knife from his belt and cut through the ropes and plastic zip-ties, trying to stay ahead of those thoughts. Those emotions he had been bottling up for months could burst free at any moment.
For a brief moment, Zachary Garrett was speechless, looking into the focused eyes of his brother. But it was unmistakable. He recognized his younger brother’s smattering of fading freckles and sea-green eyes.
“Yes, Zachary. It’s me, Matt,” he said, quickly removing the rope from Zachary’s hands and ankles.
His brother stuttered a moment, then said, “I think I remember you.”
Matt paused, understanding what Zachary was saying. “Come on, we need to move out. Here, I’m sure you remember how to use this,” he said, handing him the woman’s pistol.
Zachary looked at him with a thin smile and said, “Naturally.” That was the signature Zachary Garrett smile and comment, which almost caused Matt to lose it. But the bullet from Ballantine’s gun that came crashing through the rear window and smacked directly into Zachary’s back got his attention focused again. His brother slumped forward into Matt’s arms, dropping the pistol on the floor. Matt quickly returned fire through the window.
A rocket-propelled grenade blasted through the window, knocking Matt fifteen feet toward the front door. Through the smoke and haze, he could see his older brother lying on the floor, blood oozing from his back. And he was sliding.
Away.
Sliding backward, as if pulled, Zachary looked at Matt like a wounded deer being hauled away from his den by a hunter, eyes wide and doubting. Matt was trying to move, pushing his arms to grab a weapon; but nothing was working; nothing was happening.
He could hear more firing from outside the cottage toward the wood line.
“Zachary!”
“Matt,” came Zachary’s weakening voice. Matt watched as his brother slid through the enveloping smoke from the fire that was beginning to build. In an instant, Zachary’s face had vanished, and all Matt could see was smoke.
Through the background noise of machine-gun fire, he heard the words, “The colonel… get the colonel.” Straining against the concussion that the rocket-propelled grenade had caused, Matt finally regained motor skills, thinking he had wasted a huge amount of time. It may only have been a minute or two, but it was too much. As he raced forward into the smoke and fire, he realized Zachary was gone.
Standing in the burning cottage, he stared out of the shattered window toward the lake and woods. He could see a limping figure carrying a body disappearing into the woods. Matt quickly found his weapon, the metal hot to his touch. He raced and leapt through the open window and tumbled to the ground as a hail of bullets chipped away the deck directly above him.
He performed a combat roll into the open and brought his carbine up, but there were no targets. The firing had ceased. He slowly elevated and began moving toward a shrub line to the west of Ballantine’s cottage.
More machine-gun fire shredded the hedge row directly above him, scattering branches and leaves over him as if he were in a blender. Again he rolled away from the concealment and found the tree line. He flipped down his night-vision goggles and could see the faint outline of two moving figures in the distance, about four hundred meters away.
A stupid quarter mile was between him and his brother. Another burst of energy shot through Matt as he began racing through the woods, leaping stumps like a running back through a defensive line.
After sprinting a considerable distance, he found himself galloping down a hill sufficiently steep to make him decide to stop and gain control. He scanned with his goggles a full three hundred and sixty degrees, picking up no movement.
Walking slowly forward, M4 in hand, he briefly flashed back to the Philippines, moments before he had been severely wounded. He remembered:
Jack Sturgeon and Johnny Barefoot had been laying down a suppressive base of fire against nearly a hundred Japanese soldiers who were charging their positions. It was a math problem. They had three weapons with about thirty rounds of ammunition per weapon. The enemy had a hundred weapons with probably significantly more ammunition per weapon. Even if they hit them all, there would still be about ten enemy survivors.
And that’s about what happened, Matt recalled.
The remaining few had broken through when he was down to only a few rounds of ammunition. An enemy soldier had approached him from the rear, causing him to spin as the man’s bayonet moved toward him. It had thrust into his stomach, and the soldier pulled the trigger, blowing a hole out his back. It was only later that he learned Zachary and his infantry company had arrived in the nick of time to ward off the remaining terrorists and get Matt onto a medical evacuation helicopter.
His memory was interrupted by the sound of a small engine. For a moment, he had the curious notion that he was listening to a lawnmower or even a model airplane.