And yet when it did happen, Cancer felt completely unprepared.
The woman was running straight down the road toward them, bare feet slapping the dirt path. She was waving her arms over her head at the sight of their vehicle, of any vehicle, so terror-stricken that she was willing to take her chances with anything and everything except, presumably, whatever occurred where she’d just come from.
Cancer’s experience told him to look for the true intent of this obvious distraction—the machinegun team lying in wait, the lone sniper watching from the trees.
And while the twenty-something woman was empty-handed, seemingly unarmed, so too did she wear a long patterned shawl over her clothes, which concealed her hair and descended to mid-thigh, trailing behind her as she ran.
This told Cancer the woman had been called in from some unseen observation post, moving to detonate her explosive load against the van’s occupants. His fear wasn’t grounded in some anti-Muslim paranoia; he’d previously lost three teammates, one of them a close friend, to a pregnant woman in a burka who raced toward their position, crying for help. Not faking pregnancy, he later learned, but actually seven months pregnant with an unborn child, a life she was willing to extinguish to kill Americans in the process.
In that split second, Cancer knew he couldn’t risk explaining all that to David and the others. So, in one climactic moment, he cashed in every ounce of credibility he’d established over God-knew-how-many missions on God-knew-how-many continents, shouting, “Stop the van!”
Tolu screeched to a halt, and by the time David looked over to ask Cancer for some explanation, it was too late—the sniper was pushing past Worthy, Ian, and Reilly on his way to the rear cargo doors, which he flung open before readying the suppressed G28 in his grasp.
He cut right, instinctively flanking the driver’s side; if anyone provided immediate support, it would be David stepping out of the passenger door. Whether or not that was about to occur didn’t matter much at present; Cancer moved toward the woman with his sniper rifle at the ready, shouting, “Pull up your shirt!”
She didn’t respond, and Cancer used his non-firing hand to pull his own shirttail upward as he closed the distance. When she didn’t instantly do the same, he dipped his suppressor and ripped a subsonic bullet into the dirt ten feet to her front. If he had to pull the trigger again, she’d be dead or bleeding out.
This wasn’t about her religious sensitivities, which meant nothing to him; it wasn’t that he was woke or enlightened to the human condition. Instead, it was the fact that he literally didn’t give a shit, his only concern at present residing in the lives of the men in the van behind him and, as a distant afterthought, the families they’d be leaving behind. He’d seen that all play out before, had held in his arms the weeping widows and children of men who perished while trying to provide some semblance of human kindness in a region that warranted anything but.
The warning shot succeeded in causing her to abandon any inhibitions of modesty or religious commitment, and she yanked up her shawl to uncover her bare abdomen.
Cancer advanced regardless, his weapon poised to drive a bullet through her heart at the slightest indication of noncompliance, every instinct of his experience in more countries than he cared to count telling him that things were never this easy, that there was never a literal or figurative damsel in distress crying for help in any of these third-world shitholes where foreign military presence was required, much less welcomed. That shit all played out well and fine in a Disney cartoon, he thought, but never, ever in the real world, where so much as a half-second’s delay had caused the loss of lives of far better men than himself.
She hesitated before dropping to her knees in the dirt road, keeping her hands raised, tears streaming down both cheeks. Even then, Cancer watched her fingertips—extremist fighters in far-flung lands had long since learned to build handheld initiation devices, and gone so far as to route exposed wires across their palms, which upon connection would detonate an explosive payload.
But he saw no warning signs, the sole reason that he converged on her while possessing the restraint to mash a palm against her face, flinging her backward into the sand before tossing her sideways onto her stomach. Cancer pushed his weapon aside on its sling to straddle her backside, groping her body from top to bottom with gloved palms to check her for explosives. She was sobbing, chattering incoherently in a local dialect that Cancer couldn’t begin to understand. He ignored her cries, continuing his pat-down until he’d reached her ankles and satisfied himself that she didn’t pose a threat—at least, not an immediate one.
Keying his mic, he transmitted, “I need Tolu to translate.”
34
Ian steadied himself as the van lurched forward and David spoke quickly to Tolu.
“Pull right behind them,” he said, then turned to address the men in the back. “Tight perimeter around the woman until we figure out what the fuck is going on.”
Behind Ian, Reilly and Worthy had kept the cargo doors open since Cancer’s departure. As the van braked to a full halt, both men leapt out with rifles raised, and Ian followed behind them, scrambling around the side of the van.
He didn’t need David to tell him what to do—the team leader would expect Ian to be present alongside him for any interrogation, sifting the translated words through a mental database of the extensive regional research he’d conducted prior to departing for Nigeria. Ian rounded the front bumper to find Cancer climbing off the prostrate woman, who was now crying hysterically as Tolu knelt beside her, helping her to sit up.
The driver spoke quickly, trying greetings in various dialects until one caused the woman to respond in kind.
Once she did, Tolu launched into a brief diatribe, to which the woman responded at length.
“The rebels have raided her village,” Tolu said, “less than half a kilometer up the road. She escaped and ran for help.”
David looked not to Ian but Cancer, and then asked, “What do you think?”
It was a valid question, Ian thought, given there was some possibility of this being a pre-staged ambush.
Even if that wasn’t the case, they were, above all, a CIA paramilitary element officially tasked with locating US hostages. Unofficially, however, their greatest purpose was hunting an emerging international terror threat that had already struck at the US with devastating effectiveness, and surely would again. Every diversion from one or both missions increased the likelihood that someone in their ranks would be grievously injured or killed, taking their small force out of the fight that mattered most in the early days of Project Longwing, when there was no alternate team to take their place.