My target wasn’t even of legal drinking age in the US, I thought with a sense of embarrassment that was exceeded only by the fact that I didn’t kill him outright.
Instead he screamed, his shrill cry reaching me as he staggered forward, as uncomprehending as I would have been if suddenly shot after two or three stiff doubles of bourbon—what substance exactly, I wondered, was this person using? Before I could squeeze a follow-up shot, I saw a fatal bullet impact his chest with a puff of blood that caused him to fall at last. It was fired by Ian at my flank, adding another embarrassment to my growing list in the course of this emergency assault.
I was about to transmit that Cancer’s message was received at the exact moment when it was no longer feasible to do so. Men appeared in a racing scramble between the buildings, one hauling an RPG loaded with a fragmentation rocket, and they were feverishly trying to mount their motorcycles as Ian and I engaged in our pre-ordained sequence, me from left to right and him in the opposite direction.
That wasn’t to say things proceeded as planned; my next target wasn’t running away, but directly toward me down the dirt road. He didn’t bother clutching his rifle, now bouncing on its sling as he ran, desperate to flee the sights of unseen shooters as I nailed him with two shots to the chest, his body falling out of sight.
Good riddance, I thought with a grim sense of validation as I searched for another target.
I heard the thudding footsteps of someone emerging from the building behind me, and I spun in place too late to survive the threat. A wiry thirty-something man with bloodshot eyes was already taking aim at me, not with a battered AK-47 but a pristine Heckler & Koch G3 rifle that must have been stripped from a dead Nigerian soldier at some point in the not-too-distant past.
He’d already beaten me to the draw, and time ground to an impossible slowness as his forearms tensed for the trigger pull.
My weapon was only half-raised by that point, and I instinctively fell backward as the swath of flame emerged from his barrel along with a deafening roar of automatic fire. I squeezed the trigger as I fell, saw my rounds ticking in the dirt road between us as the hissing snaps of his rounds whipped through the air around me. I felt an odd tugging sensation on my left thigh a moment before I hit the dirt, landing hard on my back as my surroundings vanished in puffs of dirt from the incoming bullet impacts.
At this range, his automatic burst should have turned me into a cheese grater. I was certain I’d been hit a half dozen times and simply not registered it, and I aligned my rifle before squeezing the first semi-accurate shot of this close-range engagement.
Before I could pull the trigger, his gunfire went silent, though whether from a malfunction or because he had reached the end of his magazine, I had no idea. The clouds of dust cleared to reveal an answer I hadn’t considered: the terrorist lowered his barrel, pirouetting gracefully forward with a tight cluster of three bullet wounds marring his shirtfront as a fourth round clipped the side of his head and sent a spray of pinkish-orange mist flying.
The mist hovered for a moment as he fell, then vanished by the time his body struck the ground and shuddered violently with some postmortem reflex.
I was panting hard as I remained on my back, sweeping the buildings for other threats, unaware of any emotion beyond a blinding fear of imminent death and unable to comprehend what had just happened. I knew beyond a doubt that I hadn’t shot the man, but had no explanation for his death until a euphoric voice cried out beside me.
“Man, that was some real Pulp Fiction shit right there!”
It was Ian, racing up to appraise me before spinning away to pull security. As he did so, he gave a short, high-pitched laugh.
“Your leg, David. Look at your leg.”
Ian sounded far too bemused to be indicating a wound, unless he too was in shock. I looked to my right leg and found no blood, then scanned my left to see the source of his comment.
There was no blood there, either, though my left cargo pocket bore a neat bullet hole. I pressed my finger into the space, probing for an injury and instead finding a gap in the fabric on the opposite side. It was the shooter’s lone hit, a bullet so close to my thigh that it passed through the side of my cargo pocket without breaking skin.
Cancer transmitted over my earpiece, “Soccer field is clear. If anyone’s left alive, I haven’t seen them.”
I pushed myself into a sitting position, then shakily rose to scan for additional targets and concluded there were none. Raising a hand to my transmit switch, I tried to key my radio but failed—my fingertips were trembling, and it took me a second attempt to mash the button before I spoke.
“Looks like we’re done at the isolation position.” My voice cracked on the last word, and I swallowed before continuing. “All elements, strongpoint around the mosque to establish CCP—I’m calling in Tolu.”
Reilly ran between the village buildings with Worthy behind him, both men feverishly trying to make their way to the casualty collection point.
They passed the woman who’d warned them of the attack—she was moving in the opposite direction, crying out in the local dialect, directing wounded toward the mosque. Reilly picked up his pace, fearing that he’d be late for his own party as he heard David transmit.
“Doc, hit the road, then cut left. Van is parked directly in front of the mosque; me and Angel have already cleared the building.”
“Got it,” he replied.
He reached the road a moment later, hooking left past a row of motorcycles and trucks until he spotted the team’s van. Ian was climbing out of the back, shouldering Reilly’s two aid bags—his primary and a spare—and running them into a low, squat building of mud brick on the north side of the road. David was pulling security at the door, his oddly fearful gaze falling on Reilly and Worthy as he waved them in.
Reilly charged toward the building, arriving to hear David ask, “What do you need?”
“Everyone,” the medic answered, cutting left into the doorway to examine his treatment area.
For a moment Reilly thought he’d entered the wrong building. This was a place of worship by designation only—other than a floorspace covered in pillows and prayer mats, there was precious little in the large room to designate it as a mosque.
Ian deposited the two aid bags in the center of the room, and Reilly descended on his primary pack to recover three colored placards.
Handing them to Ian, he said, “Door is the chokepoint, you’re on Urgent,” and then pointed in a separate direction as he spoke each color.
“Green...yellow...red.”