He turned and stepped on the side of Marie’s face. “Your murdering husband’s brains are in the dirt, and his soul is burning in hell!” He ejected the spent casing and rammed another round into the battery. “Allah is indeed merciful! His greatness cannot be questioned!”
Marie felt the life running out of her, her will to fight slipping away. How could Gil be dead? It didn’t seem possible.
With what felt like the strength of ten men, Akram snatched her up by the hair again, putting his face close enough to hers that she could smell the stink of his coffee breath. “I have defeated your husband.” He shoved her forward contemptuously. “When we reach the truck, I will take you as a man takes the woman of his enemy, and my victory will be complete. If we were in my homeland, you would become one of my wives, and you would bear my children to the glory of God.”
She struggled to breathe with her panties stuffed in her mouth, stumbling numbly forward through the dark, her wrists bound so tightly behind her back that she no longer had feeling in her hands.
Akram chuckled, unable to suppress his overwhelming happiness. To be victorious — to enslave the women of your enemies — was a glorious prize granted by Allah in exchange for doing his will on earth. He had read of such glory and had dreamt of it many times as a boy, but he had never truly believed it possible. The West had kept the East in a stranglehold for centuries with its superior technologies, but now times were rapidly changing — for the everlasting glory of Allah.
“I would take you here and now,” he said, feeling his ardor beginning to build, “but it’s too dark to see what I’m doing.” He chuckled again, obnoxiously.
Marie whipped around and kicked him, burying the toe of her cowboy boot firmly in his groin.
Every star in the universe seemed to explode before Akram’s eyes. He dropped the TAC-50 to grab himself between the legs with both hands, letting out a veritable squeal of pain as he collapsed to the ground.
Unable to see how badly he was hurt, Marie turned and ran as fast as she could through the fog, her cracked rib making it impossible to draw more than the shallowest of breaths through her nose as she careened down the dark slope, her feet quickly getting away from her. She tripped over a nub of granite in the narrow trail, pitching forward off her feet with no way to break her fall and struck the side of her head against a rock, knocking herself unconscious.
Back up the trail, Akram lay writhing on the ground, crying like a child, never having known such pain in his whole life. His entire essence was consumed by the throbbing agony, every labored breath felt like a desperate gasp for life. He vomited and shivered, sucking the vomitus back into his throat, choking and gagging as he attempted to expel the burning bile from his chest.
After what felt like an eternity, the pain at last began to subside, and he gathered his knees beneath him, hacking up the phlegm and bile lodged at the back of his throat. As his mind began to clear, he realized with much shame that this agonizing, humiliating experience was entirely his own fault. Allah had found him prideful in his victory and seen fit to punish him for indulging in physical arousal over the infidel woman at a time when he should have been focused on completing the mission. There would be time enough for earthly pleasures, but for now the enemy was almost certainly still searching for him, and his first responsibility was to escape and to evade, to ensure his further service to Allah.
Groping about, he found the rifle and used it to steady himself as he got back to his feet, the lingering ache in his testicles a grim reminder that he had been dealt more than a glancing blow. He slipped the infrared monocular back on over his head and hobbled off down the trail in search of the woman. He found her about fifty yards down the slope, sprawled pathetically among the brambles with her hair a tangled mess of twigs and leaves, the side of her face split and bleeding.
He smacked her awake, and then grabbed yet another handful of her hair and pulled her to her feet, shoving her forward down the trail and giving her a kick in the rump to get her going. She had made her obligatory play at freedom, and he could respect that. But she had failed — and failure was stupid.
72
Oso kept his nose to the ground as he led Gil quickly away from the burning house to the northwest, and Gil soon realized that Marie had gone up the rocky slope west of the ridgeline overlooking the ranch. There were more than four hundred yards of open terrain between the house and the base of the foothills, and he couldn’t see anyone in his infrared NVGs. He didn’t entertain any fantasies that she had let out on her own; she never would have abandoned her mother by choice, not even to save her own skin. This meant she’d been taken as a hostage, or worse, and he didn’t kid himself about his chances of getting her back alive. The men who had taken her would be more than willing to give their own lives in exchange for hers, and quick, painless death wasn’t exactly part of their creed. They specialized in revenge, and quality vengeance called for the infliction of as much human suffering as possible.
Gil felt like a man riding out to meet the end of the world, and the Remington gave him little comfort. He’d have sooner faced down an atomic explosion with a squirt gun than what he was expecting to face up in the foothills, and for the first time in his life, he understood what true fear really was: true fear was not being able to protect those you loved. He didn’t dare pray or to even hope for the best. He’d dealt out enough death and misery in his time to know better. Eventually the bell tolled for everyone, and to ask for an exception in your own case was cowardly and pointless.
He did chance to make himself one promise: no matter what else happened up there in the dark, he was going to kill every last son of a bitch on the mountain who had so much as looked cross-eyed at his wife, and if that meant God got his ass whipped in the process, so be it. He wasn’t asking any quarter, and he sure as hell wasn’t giving any.
He followed Oso up the slope with the Remington resting butt down on his thigh, finger on the trigger, and the reins in his left hand. He was putting a lot of faith in his body armor giving him an edge, but what the hell, he was up on a horse, practically daring the enemy to pick him off. What else was he going to put faith in?
About halfway up, Oso began to whine, smelling the excess adrenaline in the microdroplets of Marie’s perspiration and knowing that she was in danger. Gil knew by the dog’s rising anxiety that the scent was getting stronger and decided to dismount, knowing it would be safer to continue the pursuit on foot.
The Remington exploded in his hand, shot completely in half. A piece of the synthetic stock embedded itself deep in the side of his neck. The stallion started and reared up. Gil fought to stay in the saddle, knowing that a second shot would be on the way any second. Then the stallion dropped like a dead buffalo, its heart blown apart by a .50 caliber round. The shot echoed through the valley as Gil rolled clear of the dead horse. A third shot penetrated his Kevlar IBH helmet at an oblique angle on the left side of his head, tearing a half-inch furrow along his scalp front to back an inch above his ear. It grazed his skull, scorching the bone and knocking him cold.
He came to a minute later, with Oso licking and pawing at his bloody face. Gil stood up and tore the fractured helmet from his head. The NVGs were totaled, and one look at the Remington told him that the nightscope was equally fucked. He took a step, and the world began to spin. He lost his balance and toppled over. Clawing back to his feet, he forced himself to take another couple of steps, but he toppled over once more.
He groped to his knees. Fighting to stay conscious, Gil grabbed Oso and unbuckled his collar, tossing it aside so the enemy above would have nothing to grab onto.