No guns allowed, thought Jonah. That was fair enough, they’d only just met. Jonah smiled and raised his hands.
“You got me,” he said to the glint in the far distance, knowing he wouldn’t be heard. “Your rescue, your rules. I’m going to go ahead and find my own way from here, if that’s alright with you.”
Seeing no movement, Jonah slowly leaned down to snag a half-filled canteen from One-Eye’s corpse and took no more than two steps away from the encampment and towards the open desert.
ZZZZZZZip. ZZZZZZZip. ZZZZZZZip.
Jonah stopped cold as three puffs of sand and dust kicked up inches in front of his feet.
“You son of a bitch!” Jonah swore, impotently kicking sand towards the distant glint. Walking into the desert apparently wasn’t allowed either, and the sniper hadn’t made a move to establish contact. The chances of this being a rescue were diminishing rapidly. By all appearances Mr. Sniper had something else entirely in mind. And then it hit him: Jonah was to walk back into the encampment as bait.
Not only was he being set up — probably by the same man who’d called Bettencorps forces on his location in the fishing village — he suspected that the sniper’s plan probably did not require his long-term survival.
Begrudgingly, Jonah realized he admired the plan. The goal must be to draw Bettencourt or Westmoreland out into the open. The sniper was certainly good enough to eliminate both men before anyone could figure out what’d happened.
Approaching the rim of the sand berm, a shirtless Jonah raised his hands and grimaced as he stepped down the hill and into the midst of the encampment. Mercenaries rushed towards him, aiming rifles, shouting conflicting orders. Jonah ignored them and sauntered towards the command tent, just knowing the unknown sniper would put a bullet in him the moment he stopped.
Colonel Westmoreland burst from the tent, eyes wide, nostrils flaring, Bettencourt following close behind.
“What in the mother-fucking-fuck does it take to kill you?” demanded Westmoreland.
“Why is he back?” shouted Bettencourt, gesturing futility around for anyone to answer him. “What is he doing back here?”
“Don’t ask me,” responded Jonah. “Ask your friendly neighborhood sni—”
Westmoreland leapt to the side and tackled his boss to the ground before Jonah could get the entire word sniper out of his mouth, throwing the executive out of the way milliseconds before the zzzzip of a silenced bullet sliced through the empty space and buried itself into the thick dry mud of the empty lake bed.
Bullets rained down on the company as the mercenaries scattered. With two more zips, two men were down, bleeding and rolling and screaming as the sniper attack continued.
The nearest soldier grabbed Jonah by the collar. “Where is the shooter?!” he screamed, shaking Jonah and waving an ugly, squared-off pistol. The man suddenly winced, dropping to the ground with a bullet in his back. Bettencourt’s white helicopter rose from the lakebed with a roar, gaining altitude with every second.
One enterprising fighter threw open the door to the Ford Raptor and dove behind the wheel, using the bulk of the engine block as cover as he started the engine and advanced the massive truck towards the berm and the sniper’s nest. Four mercenaries huddled behind the tailgate, following the truck as it clawed its way up the berm, sand spitting out in a rooster-tail from behind the oversize tires. Sniper shots rang out against the truck, and one sliced through the shin of a soldier, who tumbled from formation to writhe on the ground, screaming.
Jonah felt like the eye of a hurricane, the spindle on a record-player — calm as the chaos of the universe spun around him. And then he slipped the squat, ugly pistol from the still-twitching grasp of the paralyzed mercenary.
Jonah began walking, calm and deliberate at first, slowly picking up the pace to a sprint as he ran up the side of the sand berm towards the hunched mercenaries. The attackers broke off from the truck, spreading out and flanking the sniper’s position, mercilessly pouring fire into the bushes. Jonah caught up with a straggler and fired a single shot into his knee from behind, felling him amidst the din of automatic weapons.
The sniper risked one final shot, catching the leader squarely through the eye but betraying his position in the process. The final soldier drew a bead, only interrupted when Jonah shot him three times through the back. Shocked, the driver of the truck turned to see Jonah just in time to get a pistol butt against the side of his hand and his limp body thrown out of the truck.
Jonah stuck the pistol in his waistband, put his hands up and walked towards the sniper’s nest, pushing aside bushes. Disarming himself had been a useless gesture — the sniper lay shaking under white robes, trying to stanch a neck wound with his turban and slippery, blood-soaked fingers, his Russian Dragunov sniper rifle lying inert beside him.
The white robe fell away, revealing a dark, handsome face and a glinting white smile.
“’Sup?” asked Jonah. The sniper didn’t answer. It’d be a pity to let such a devious bastard bleed out on the sand. Gunshots echoed from the dry lake bed — the mercenaries were regrouping. Jonah grabbed the sniper by his bloody hand and dragged him into the truck, practically throwing the man’s massive body into the passenger seat. He turned the ignition and the engine roared back to life.
I can flee across the desert, thought Jonah through redtinted vision. But the adrenaline in his system had crested the levies that held back the tidal force of nature and Jonah became the God of War, the Lord of Chaos, an invincible force of nature, enslaved to the power of destruction.
He slammed the vehicle into gear and floored the accelerator. The Raptor responded instantly, throwing the truck forward like a cannon, all four wheels off the ground as it did a tight U-turn and launched off the sand berm. Landing in the dry lake bed, the massive shocks absorbed the violent impact. As hiding soldiers fired potshots at the truck, Jonah aimed at the tent, hoping Bettencourt might still be inside.
The lawyer stepped out of the tent, dumbfounded at the chaos. Jonah stared him down and yanked the wheel of the truck towards him, the accelerator pegged against the rubberized floor. The lawyer froze, took one awkward step to his right as the truck hit him square on, his flinching body disappearing underneath the tires with a sickening sound of bone against the metal suspension. The truck bounced, the steering wheel yanking to one side.
“No way I should still be alive,” said Jonah, staring at the eye-level bullet-craters in the glass windshield. No way the truck should have been able to absorb that much fucking gunfire and keep running.
“Armored,” gurgled the sniper dying in the passenger seat. “Hennessy Motors of Texas. Very satisfactory for Somalia.”
“In that case…” Jonah yanked the wheel to the side, throwing the truck into a massive slide back into the heart of the lake bed, nearly up against the command tent. He threw open the door, jumped out, and ran into the tent looking for the radio transmitter. He spied it still sitting on the folding desk, grabbed it, and ran back towards the Raptor.
Jonah threw the massive truck in gear just as two mercenaries appeared, weapons drawn and trained on the vehicle. They paused just long enough for Jonah to speed off, two massive rooster tails of dirt behind him. The Raptor impacted the berm at the far side of the dry lake and jumped again, all four wheels off the ground, again landing with a massive whump absorbed by the beefed-up suspension. Rifle fire pounded against the truck, rattling the interior like a vicious hailstorm.