Chosen. God almighty.
“Fuck this,” I murmured and stepped into the cave. Bunny was right beside me. I held my .22 in a two-hand shooters grip; he had his M4. Our night-vision was off but we wore black balaclava’s that showed only our eyes.
“United States Army,” I bellowed. “Stand down, stand down!”
The sergeant whirled toward me, his right hand going for his sidearm. I put the laser sight on him.
“Stand down or I will kill you!”
He believed me, and he froze.
The other Marines froze.
The man in the chair froze.
Amirah, however, did not.
With a snarl of hunger, the mad witch twisted so suddenly and violently that she tore the ropes from the hands of the startled Marines. She tore her hands free from the plastic cuffs. She screamed like some desert demon from legend, leapt into the air and slammed into the sergeant, driving him against the torture victim. They crashed to the ground amid shrieks and blood and biting teeth.
The two Marines began to move toward the sergeant, but Bunny shifted to cover them with his M4. That left me.
I stepped in and kicked Amirah in the side of the head. The blow knocked her off of the sergeant, but she had his hand clamped between her jaws. And the bound man was screaming and beating his forehead against the side of the sergeant’s head, mashing his ear.
“Holy shit, boss—on your six!”
It was Bunny. I pivoted in place in time to catch the rush as something came out of the shadows and tackled me. It was one of the other Afghanis. One of the dead Afghanis.
His teeth were bared and spit flew from cracked lips as he lunged for my throat.
I braced my forearm under his chin as I fell backward, and then clenched my abs so that my flat back fall turned into a curled back roll. The Afghani went into the tumble with me and instead of him pinning me down we ended the roll with me straddling his chest. I jammed the barrel of the .22 into his left eye-socket and fired. The bullet tore all his wiring loose and he transformed from murderously vicious to sagging dead weight in a microsecond.
There were shouts all around and I had to shove at the body to get free. As I came up, I saw that the second Afghani had clamped his teeth around the windpipe of one of the Marines. Bunny put six rounds into the Afghani: the first one knocked him loose from his victim, the second punched him in the chest to stall him, and the last four grouped like knuckles in a lead fist to strike him above the eyebrows. The man’s head exploded and his body spun backward in a sloppy pirouette. The Marine dropped to his knees, trying to staunch an arterial spray with fingers that shook with the palsy of sudden understanding. His companion crouched over him, pressing the wound with his hands, but the Marine drowned in his own blood in seconds.
Slim was in the cave mouth, his weapon sweeping quickly back and forth from target to target, not knowing whether to take a shot or not.
I dove at Amirah, who had crawled back atop the sergeant. For his part, the Marine was putting up a good fight, but it was clear that terror of the woman he had been using as a tool of interrogation was off the scale, too much for him to handle. He shot me a single, despairing glance, and I saw the moment when he gave up. It must have been one of those instantaneous moments of clarity that can either save you or kill you. His interrogation had failed. His method of interrogation was indefensible, a fact that would never have mattered if we hadn’t shown up. But we were here, and he was caught. His world had just crashed, and he knew it.
I locked my arm around Amirah’s throat and squeezed, bulging my bicep on one side to cut off her left carotid and my forearm to cut off her right. In jujutsu that puts someone out.
It didn’t do a fucking thing to her.
She bucked and writhed with more force than I would have thought possible for a woman of her size, alive or dead.
I shoved the hot barrel of the .22 against the back of her head, bent close, and whispered in her ear, speaking in Farsi.
“There is no shame to die in the service of Allah.”
Her muscles locked into sudden rigidity. The cave was instantly still. Even the Afghani and the sergeant had stopped screaming. I held her tight against my chest and my back was to the cold stone wall. She smelled of rotting meat and death, but in her dark hair there was the faintest scent of perfume. Jasmine.
“Amirah,” I said. “Listen to me.”
I whispered six more words.
“Your choice, Princess,” I said. “This…or paradise?”