He felt vibrations through the post he’d been tied to. Adebowale opened his eyes. The light was improving, but only just. The sun was opening again, as though it had been eclipsed by something. And that something was moving toward him.
The vibrations turned into a sound he recognized. The blades of a large helicopter thumped overhead and the light returned, as the aircraft banked to its left.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Elise sat in the front passenger seat of the Sikorsky’s cockpit as Genevieve banked the helicopter for a better view of the ruined camp. It looked like more than a couple hundred laborers had been employed to work the excavation site. The tents, belongings and equipment were all burnt. Their embers had died days earlier.
It wasn’t until their second pass that Elise noticed them.
They had been dumped into a large opening in the sand, presumably where the main excavation site had been until recently. The entire ground below appeared to be moving. A sea of black ebbed backwards and then crept forward eerily as though driven by the monotony of the ocean’s tide. It took Elise a few seconds to realize what she was looking at. Her eyes and mind unable to accept the facts.
The men had been dumped inside the main dig and burned, along with their simple possessions. Their bodies had been exposed to intense heat and molded to the sand to form a mangled composition of blackened glass and human remains. Above this, flies, driven by the horrific smell, had nested. From the cockpit of the Sikorsky, high above, it gave the appearance of a moving, living, blackened sea. The type that formed on a stormy night.
Genevieve swung the helicopter around, intentionally, leaving the mass of death. They’d seen enough. There was nothing but nightmares to be gained by looking upon it any further. An atrocity had occurred here. But there was nothing they could do for them now.
At the northern end of the camp three men had been bound to wooden posts. Their arms had been stretched outward as though they had been crucified in the extreme heat. Elise stared as they went past. It looked like they had been tortured before being executed by firing squad. Their faces were permanently fixed in a contorted vision of abject horror and unimaginable pain.
One of the faces still looked like it was screaming in perpetual horror. The helicopter banked around the terrible vision and Elise was about to tell Genevieve to keep going to the waterhole — their problem wasn’t about a local tribal war. But then the face appeared to follow her, haunting her to find the truth about whatever great atrocity had occurred.
Only it didn’t just appear to be moving. It had followed her. “Jesus Christ! That man’s alive.”
“You sure?” Genevieve asked.
“Certain,” Elise confirmed. “Take us around for another look to make sure we don’t have any other living company and then put us on the ground.”
“You really want to get involved?” Genevieve said, ruthlessly pointing out their mission wasn’t for humanitarian needs.
“Are you suggesting we leave that man to die?”
“I’m suggesting he’ll be dead pretty soon regardless of what we do for him. According to your friends in Bilma this raid happened three days ago. No way could someone have survived strung out in the sun without water for that long.”
“He might know what happened to Sam and Tom.”
“There’s no way he’s going to be conscious enough to tell us.”
“Even so, I want to try. If he’s too far gone, I’ll give him some morphine and we’ll put him out of his misery.”
Veyron gripped the firing mount of the Browning heavy machine gun at the open starboard-side door as Genevieve landed. Genevieve kept the engines running and looked at Elise.
“You’ve got five minutes,” Genevieve said. “After that, I’ll shoot him myself.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
The Sikorsky landed approximately thirty feet away from the three men tied to pikes. Elise was certain one of them was still alive, but now that she was on the ground, she couldn’t see any obvious sign of life from any of them. Veyron brought the mounted Browning heavy machine gun around to cover her. Elise climbed out of the Sikorsky, keeping her head down as blades above continued to whir at speed in case they needed to leave in a hurry. Her right finger gently paused on the trigger of her Uzi as she scanned the area. Her eyes darted from the excavation site with the burial ground, to the remains of the burned tarpaulin canopies and back to the three men tied to pikes.
Even three days old, the acrid smell of charred bodies wafted through the air. She involuntarily felt bile rising in her throat. Death was never more pervasive than when it was sensed by your nose. Ahead of her, the sound of an incomprehensible amount of flies competed with the noise of the rotating helicopter blades.
Elise fought the urge to vomit. Her self-preservation instincts kicked in, telling her to run. Not to wait for an ambush. So she ran to meet the man who appeared alive from the air. At her far right, he was the largest of the three men by nearly a foot in height and fifty pounds of muscle. The first two men were clearly dead. Maggots had already formed in their head and chest bullet wounds.
The third person, the one whom she’d thought she saw move from the air, appeared almost just as lifeless. He was tied by his neck to the vertical spike, while his wrists were bound at the ends of the horizontal beam. It looked like a makeshift and cheap version of a crucifixion had taken place, before he’d been shot. His breathing, if he still breathed at all, was shallow and barely evident. He had three large bullet wounds to the left-side of his chest. On his forehead, a single bullet hole was visible. She stepped up close to the man. There was no exit wound. Sometimes a stray bullet will lose velocity, so that it only has enough power to enter, but not enough to exit the human flesh. Even so, there’s only one place a bullet to the head can travel, and the brain isn’t very forgiving. A fly crawled out of the open wound and the man’s face didn’t flinch.
Elise felt the bile rising in her stomach again. This time, she couldn’t control the involuntary response and vomited. She pulled her hair out of her face, and turned around. She’d seen enough. If this man was alive, he wouldn’t be for long. Her eyes followed the smell of burned bodies around the camp. She was all alone. Everyone was dead. She wasn’t going to find another living person down here. Elise looked back at the helicopter and began walking in that direction.
“Water!” a deep voice, no louder than a whisper, spoke.
She turned to face a dead man. More ghoul than alive, his open grayish-blue eyes stared vacantly at her without seeing. Flies still crawled out of the grotesque wounds in his chest. The man was going to be dead soon. There was clearly nothing she could do for him.
Had he really spoken?
“Please!” the man begged.
Elise stared at the man’s face. He looked straight through her as though he were blind. There was nothing she could do to save his life. But she couldn’t leave him to suffer as he was, either. She gripped her Uzi and raised it up toward the man’s face. It might be the most humane thing she could do for him.
Elise, the savior — she recalled the words Nayram had said to her, and lowered her weapon.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have morphine. Would you like me to give you some? You must know I can’t save you, but I can take away your pain.”
He made no response.
Instead his head slumped downwards, as though he’d given up the will to fight off death any longer. She lowered her weapon. Perhaps all he wanted was to hear someone tell him it was okay to die? He took several slow, deep breaths. Known as Cheyne-Stokes, they were often the last breaths a person takes before they die.