Bo moved closer to Aleksandra, touching her on the shoulder to get her attention. He nodded toward a large woodpile three feet high and a good fifteen feet long.
“Stay with me,” he said in a show of bravado that melted Aleksandra’s heart.
A sudden movement to her right caught her eye. Through the dense tangle of vines and undergrowth she saw a flash of curly black hair and the unmistakably flat profile of Julian Monagas. An electric current seemed to jolt her body and she raised half up off her belly as if doing a pushup. Locked on, she shook her head. “No, my dear,” she said a moment before she sprinted into the jungle. “You go with your brother. I have business with someone.”
“Well, I’ll be!” Thibodaux whistled under his breath. “Would you look at that?”
Quinn watched as Aleksandra ran amid a hail of bullets to disappear into the undergrowth. In the middle of the compound, a tall man with a coal-black beard sat beside an overturned table of heavy timber. Dressed like someone out of an REI advertisement, he appeared to be unarmed. Instead of using the table for cover, he sat cross-legged in the open, cradling a wounded girl in his lap, stroking her long black hair. She wore woodland camouflage fatigues and was presumably one of Zamora’s.
“Why isn’t anyone shooting at him?” Thibodaux grunted.
“Let’s go ask him.” Quinn ran the five paces to the long stack of firewood, crouching behind it. So far, he’d not fired a shot. Bo slid in next to him while Thibodaux, chased by a string of automatic gunfire, dove behind the rusted hulk of a diesel generator ten feet away.
Bullets thwacked against the logs and zinged off the generator as both Zamora’s men and the Chechens focused on this new threat.
Quinn pulled Bo down beside him and assessed the situation. He’d yet to find the bomb, but judging from the fighting, possession of it was still a matter of contention. Less than six feet to his left, the man with the beard sat weeping over the girl, oblivious to all the lead in the air. To his right, Thibodaux engaged one of Daudov’s men, who crept through the jungle trying to flank them.
Quinn tossed a piece of wood at the sobbing man.
“Who are you?” he asked.
The man looked up; his reactions were dull, shell-shocked. “Who are you?”
Quinn tried a different tack. The guy was sitting in the cross fire. He obviously was beyond succumbing to threats. “Is she still alive?”
“What do you care?”
Quinn took a deep breath. “Listen,” he said. “I’m not one of these guys. I can help.”
The man blinked his eyes. “She’s already dead,” he said.
“No, she’s not,” Quinn said. “Look at her chest. It’s still moving. As long as she’s breathing there’s a chance.”
“Not her,” the man said. “I mean my wife. Zamora will kill her no matter what I do.”
“I told you I can help,” Quinn said. “What’s your name?”
The man brightened. “Matt Pollard. I’m a professor at Idaho State.”
“And the bomb?”
“They have it,” the man said, nodding toward Borregos and his men. He hung his head. “Zamora threatened to kill my wife and son if I didn’t bypass the locking system.”
“Do you know where they’re going with it?”
“No idea,” the man said, studying Quinn through bloodshot eyes. “Can you really help my wife?”
“I can,” Quinn said. “Tell me where she is, and I’ll call some people to go check on her. But first we have to stop this bomb—”
Thibodaux loosed three rapid-fire shots, hitting Daudov’s man as he came in from the side. The Chechen staggered forward, firing blindly. Bo flinched, as one of the bullets clipped his left arm.
He looked up at Jericho with an embarrassed grin. “Sorry, bro—” A fountain of blood gushed from the wound between his elbow and armpit. Pulsing in time with his heart, it arced into the air, painting the wood behind him.
CHAPTER 59
“I’ll cover,” Thibodaux barked from behind the generator. He began to lay down steady fire, a shot at the Borregos crew, then another at the Chechens. “You see to him.” He’d run out of ammo in a matter of seconds.
Quinn tucked his 1911 back in the holster and lowered Bo to the ground. He had to stop the bleeding, but he couldn’t do that if he got himself killed. With shots cracking and whirring overhead, his training kicked into high gear.
Flat on his back, he grabbed Bo by the shoulders and dragged him backward to the more protected center of the woodpile, scissoring his body in a motion called shrimping to help him move but stay low at the same time. Blood pumped from the wound in great spurts with each beat of Bo’s heart, and by the time Quinn stopped they were both covered. He kicked a large log loose and slid it under Bo’s boots, elevating his legs.
“Jeez, brother,” Bo groaned. “I screwed up. Go after the bomb. I’ll be fine.”
“Shut up, Boaz,” Quinn said through clenched teeth. He jammed a fist high under Bo’s armpit in an attempt to slow the bleeding while he assessed. “I told you what Mom would do if I let anything happen to you.”
It was the nature of war. Some died no matter what. Some lived no matter what. Some would die unless something was done to save them. KIA — killed in action — couldn’t be helped. DOW was a different thing entirely. Dying of wounds would not be an option for Bo.
Above all else, Quinn knew he had to stop the bleeding. Two minutes was enough to bleed out completely if the wound was bad enough. The human body was extremely resilient at mending itself, but it needed blood to feed the brain. He had to treat Bo for shock, and the best way to do that was to keep him in the fight — give him a job to do and keep him focused.
Reaching into the channel left by the bullet, Quinn searched behind the bicep and connective tissues to find the bleeder. As he’d suspected, the brachial artery had been clipped. Slick with the warmth of his baby brother’s blood, he used his thumb and forefinger to squeeze the offending vessel shut. Just smaller than a soda straw, it was snot slick and wriggled as if it had a mind of its own. His fingers slipped free and a fresh crimson arc sprayed Quinn’s face. He used his shoulder to clear his eyes, methodically probing to find the artery again and get a better grip.
“Bo,” he said through clenched teeth. “How we doing?”
“I’m good.” Bo grimaced. “You done this sort of thing before?”
“A time or two,” Quinn said.
“Ever lost anyone?” Bo looked him dead in the eye.
“A couple of the pigs and one goat,” Quinn said. “But they were way worse than you. This is just a flesh wound.”
“Pigs,” Bo sighed. “That makes me feel better.”
Quinn could feel his brother’s pulse throbbing quickly beneath his fingertips, working to push the life’s blood from his body. The heart pumped faster as it lost blood, working extra hard to get what was left to vital areas like the brain. It was an odd sensation and he found himself thankful he’d experienced it before.
No matter what animal rights activists felt about the practice of “pig lab” training for military corpsmen and combat rescue officers, there was no mannequin or “lifelike” device that came close to working on something that was actually alive. Quivering flesh, the copper scent, and even the slickness of warm blood could be duplicated. But life, that vital essence that made animals different from sugar beets or ears of corn, was inimitable, no matter how sophisticated the tech.
As cruel as it was, cutting a few sedated pigs was a small price to pay for the training that Quinn now used in an attempt to save his kid brother’s life.
“Listen to me,” he said, ducking a spray of woodchips from a fresh string of gunfire. “We need to get a tourniquet on this A-SAP. You understand?”