Ethan crashed down alongside her and they both dashed up the beach as staccato bursts of gunfire raked the sand around them, returning fire from the SEAL’s M–16 rifles clattering up into a tightly bunched gathering of low buildings perched on the edge of the beach.
‘There’s too many of them!’ Lopez yelled above the gunfire.
Ethan could see multiple flickering fires amid the buildings and among them at least twenty rifles firing back at the SEALs storming up the beach. To his right two of the SEALS switched their firing mechanisms to the M–16’s underslung grenade launchers. Two grenades popped in graceful arcs over the rifle fire of their comrades and thumped down amid the enemy.
Ethan shielded his ears as the grenades detonated with bright flashes of light, clouds of lethal shrapnel scything through the armed militants defending the buildings as screams competed with the gunfire. The SEALs immediately began charging into the hail of uncoordinated fire, advancing by sections with each man covering his buddy and presenting a continuous and withering field of fire to their enemy.
The Seahawk had pulled back from its vulnerable hovering position, climbing rapidly as it turned away and moved to cut off any escape route to the north.
‘Come on!’ Ethan snapped.
He jumped up and began running south down the beach, keen to cut off anybody who might make a dash from the cover of the village. The damp sand slowed his sprint as though he were in a childhood dream and fleeing from some unthinkable monster from the depths of his imagination. He struggled up the bluff, Lopez alongside him as they crashed through dense fields of long grass clogging the bluff.
‘Enemy.’
Lopez’s harsh whisper slowed Ethan and he crouched down, his chest heaving for air as he heard the clatter of machine gun fire nearby. Above it, faint but audible, he could hear the sound of running feet beating a hasty retreat toward their position. Ethan looked at Lopez and saw that she already had her pistol gripped firmly in both hands.
Ethan checked his own weapon and then he leaped out into plain view and aimed into the dim light to see a crowd of women and children rushing toward him, panic in their eyes as they staggered to a halt and threw their arms in the air with a crescendo of cries and pleas for mercy. All were dressed in long, black burqas, only their eyes visible as they held their arms aloft and shielded their children with their bodies.
Ethan lowered his pistol as Lopez moved out of cover alongside him, lowering her own weapon as she surveyed the terrified villagers.
‘Abrahem Nassir,’ Ethan snapped, keen to entrap the villagers while they were still in fear for their lives and perhaps figure out where their target had gone. ‘Abrahem Nassir?!’
One of the women turned and pointed over Ethan’s left shoulder, toward the south, and Ethan instinctively glanced in that direction.
‘Ethan!’
Lopez’s startled voice alerted him, but it was too late. Ethan turned back in time to feel something club him across the side of his head and the gloomy beach reeled as he was hurled to the ground. He saw Lopez being overpowered, realized with the last of his consciousness that many of the women concealed in the burqas were in fact men, and then everything went black.
XXII
‘Warner!’
Ethan heard the voice from the distant periphery of his awareness, pulling him in along with the unwelcome embrace of a throbbing ache that permeated his skull. Something jabbed him in the chest and he sucked in a lung full of air as he bolted upright and bright pain lanced behind his eyes.
‘Take it easy.’
The voice soothed him and he felt the gloved hands of two Navy SEALS supporting him, one with a rifle guarding them and the other with a water canteen that was offered to Ethan. He drank from it gratefully and suddenly the pieces of his memory reconnected themselves and he looked at the SEALs in shock.
‘Lopez?!’
‘We haven’t found her yet,’ the soldier replied, ‘but we have prisoners and we don’t think Nassir can have got far. You’re lucky his people didn’t shoot you in the head where you lay.’
Ethan nodded. ‘Gunfire would have exposed them, and they probably didn’t have time to hang around.’
‘Neither do we,’ the SEAL replied. ‘We’ve wasted enough time looking for you so get off your ass and get moving. We’ve got work to do.’
The canteen was snatched away and the SEALs marched off. Ethan hauled himself to his feet and followed them at a jog back toward the village where the Seahawk helicopter was now landed on the beach, its rotors spinning slowly as the pilots awaited the SEALs gathered on the beach before them.
Ethan could see that in the soldier’s midst, on their knees and with their hands behind their heads, were a small knot of ragged looking Somalians surrounded by a captured cache of weapons. Nearby, four more prisoners were hauling bodies down onto the beach. It took only a few moments for Ethan to realize that the SEALs had suffered no losses during the assault, but that there were at least a dozen Somalian dead lying on the cold sand as the dawn glowed weakly across the sky.
‘Any injured?’ Ethan asked the team leader as he held the back of his head in one hand and winced at the pain.
The SEAL’s commanding officer shook his head.
‘No casualties in our team. Twelve hostiles eliminated but our main target remains at large.’
Ethan looked down at the captured militants, all of them staring at the sand with their hands behind their heads. He looked up along the bluff, beyond the village to the deserts that stretched away into the empty wilderness. Abrahem Nassir, if he had been present in the village, could have travelled no more than a few miles at best, assuming he had a vehicle.
‘Can we track them?’
The commander shook his head.
‘We can’t be seen over this country in broad daylight,’ he replied. ‘Even ignoring the international implications, the threat from shoulder — launched rocket propelled grenades to our helo is too great.’
Ethan knew that such basic weapons could be lethal to low flying helicopters no matter how advanced they may be, and the Somalians likely possessed them in spades.
‘I want Lopez back,’ Ethan said. ‘If Abrahem escapes I can pick his trail up later but I’m not leaving my partner here.’
‘We’re not here to babysit the two of you,’ the commander snapped back. ‘She knew the risks. It’s her problem now.’
‘Would you leave one of your men out here?!’
‘My men know the risks also and would take care of themselves.’
‘And if an American woman turns up on the Internet, held captive by Islamist militants who claim she was abandoned here by American soldiers? How do you think that will go down with the folks back home?’
The commander sneered at Ethan. ‘I’ll let Congress deal with that.’
‘Give her a chance. If we can’t locate her in the next ten minutes, I’ll stay behind and find her myself.’
The SEAL offered Ethan a grim smile.
‘Your funeral, pal,’ he said and then glanced at the prisoners. ‘I’ve got an idea.’
Ethan waited as the SEALs ordered the captives to their feet. The SEAL commander seemed to scan each and every one of the men before him, assessing them with a practised eye, before he picked three of them out.
‘Cut the rest loose.’
‘You’re letting them go?’ Ethan asked.
‘Kind of,’ the commander replied.
To Ethan’s surprise, many of the toughest looking men were freed and left standing on the beach as the SEALs dragged the three prisoners chosen by their commander back toward the Seahawk. The helicopter’s engines began running up again as one by one the SEALs filed back inside, the Somalians forced to lay on the helicopter’s deck as it lifted off.