Damage Control

fewer terrorist to worry about.

Then there was silence. Even as Boxers hammered away at whatever targets he could find outside, nothing moved in the interior of the vehicle. This was where there should have been unbridled panic, punctuated with screams of terror and cries for help. Instead, he heard only the pounding of his own heart.

He stood cautiously, his weapon at the ready. The metal floorboards were slick with blood. Windows and seats had been shredded by bullets, their occupants contorted into postures that were only possible in death. At first glance, Jonathan counted seven bodies, five teens and two terrorists. He neither knew nor cared what the numbers outside tallied up to.

Jonathan pressed the transmit button in the center of his vest. “Big Guy, I need you in here now.” They usually tried to keep emotion out of their voices on the radio, but he heard the leaden dread in his own.

“Listen up!” he yelled. “I am an American and I am here to take you home. Can anybody hear me?”

He moved methodically down the center aisle, weapon ready but his finger out of the trigger guard. He moved seat by seat, scanning the carnage, observing the way the terrorists had bound them together. In the very back, two of the hostages-both boys-sat bolt upright in their seats, one with part of his brain exposed, and the other with two holes in his chest.

The entire bus shifted as Boxers mounted the steps. “Holy shit.”

Jonathan turned to the man he’d served with for so many years. It was time to say something, to give an order. But he felt frozen. He’d had ops go bad in the past, but nothing like this. “What the hell happened? Who opened fire?”

“Are they all dead?” Boxers asked.

“I’ve only done a primary,” Jonathan replied. In a primary assessment, you look for the obvious-weapons and people who are wounded. The secondary assessment looks for more detailed signs of life. Here, today, that seemed like a waste of time. “How secure is our perimeter?”

“I saw them running,” Boxers said. He grabbed the dead driver by his collar, pulled him onto the floor, and slipped into his seat. “We’re getting out of this clearing,” he said. “We’re too good a target.” He restarted the engine, threw the transmission into gear, and popped the clutch.

As they lurched forward, Jonathan sat heavily on the edge of a seat. “Where are you going?” he yelled. If they were getting away, he expected them to be going backward.

“The money,” Boxers said. “Ain’t no way I’m leaving that much cash for the bad guys.”

He raced forward for thirty yards and jammed the vehicle to a stop. For a guy of his size, he moved with impressive speed, slapping the transmission into neutral and then heaving himself out of the seat, down the steps, and out the door. By the time Jonathan could gain his balance to provide cover, the Big Guy was already back at the foot of the stairs, the green-and-blue backpack dangling from his hand. Within ten seconds, they were moving again.

He jammed the stick shift into reverse and popped the clutch. As they lurched backward, he yanked the wheel hard to get them turned around, and then he shifted into second gear and gunned it. They tore down the road that the bus had come in on, and after they turned the corner and disappeared from the established shooting lanes, Jonathan surveyed the carnage. Wherever he looked, all he saw were corpses. He’d let all of them down.

“You okay, Boss?”

Jonathan looked up to see Boxers’ eyes in the mirror.

No, he was not okay. Okay wasn’t even within the same emotional solar system as where he was. Someone somewhere had deliberately sabotaged this mission, and whoever it was, was going to pay dearly, so help-

Somebody moaned. At first, it was barely audible-so low that Jonathan thought maybe he’d imagined it. But Boxers clearly had heard it, too. Then it became louder, before it became a scream: “Get it off me!”

The bodies on the floor in the seat behind him moved.

“Box!” Jonathan yelled. “Stop the bus!”

Tristan couldn’t breathe. He felt as if he was trying to climb out of a hole in his mind, but something was holding him down. Someone was holding him down. Trying to crush his head, pressing it into something hard and lumpy.

And wet.

He tasted blood.

As consciousness returned, so did awareness. Memory of what had happened. The shooting. The brains and the blood.

Like the blood he could taste.

He opened his eyes, and there was Allison, staring at him. Unblinking. Dead.

He heard himself screaming before he knew that the voice was his. But once he did know, he wanted to make sure that it could be heard. Allison was dead and she was bleeding into his mouth.

Horror flooded his veins. He needed to get her off him. He tried to push, but his hands wouldn’t work. They couldn’t be separated anyway, he remembered because they were tied together with a steel chain. Screaming seemed to be the only thing he was capable of.

Then she moved. Dead Allison moved. Her eyes never blinked, but she somehow heard him, and she was levitating away, pulling him with her by his wrist.

An instant later, in a transition he never saw, a man’s face appeared where hers had been. It was a hard face, but the blue eyes looked friendly-serious, but friendly. Another man stood behind him, but Tristan wondered if he was hallucinating. The second man was huge.

The face up close was saying something to him. His hands were on Tristan’s shoulders and they were shaking him. “Easy now,” the man said. “You’re safe. It’s over. You’re going to be okay.”

He spoke English. Tristan felt as if he hadn’t heard English in months. As his eyes focused, he saw that the man wore a uniform and that he dripped weapons. Another jolt of panic shot thought him and he tried to pull away.

Damned handcuffs.

“Tristan,” the man said. “Tristan, listen to me. Come on, son, pull it together. You’re okay. You’re going to be just fine. We’re here to take you home. We’re the good guys, okay? The bad guys are all dead. You’re safe.”

Was that possible? Who was this man? Nothing made sense.

But he felt himself gaining some control. He spit to get the blood out of his mouth.

The man with the blue eyes said, “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

Didn’t he just say that I was fine?

“I don’t think this blood is yours,” the man said. He started to lift Tristan’s T-shirt, and Tristan pulled away.

“No,” he said. What the hell was going on here?

“Son, settle down. I’m only checking to see if you’ve been shot.”

Really? Wouldn’t I be the first to know if I’d been shot?

“His color’s good,” the big man said. “He moves good. I think he’s fine. I’m getting us out of here.” As he spoke the words, the bus’s engine started to make a screeching sound, and the big man yelled, “Shit! The engine’s been drilled, Boss.”

Blue Eyes lifted the T-shirt again, and this time Tristan let him. “Did you kill the follow vehicle?” he called over his shoulder.

The driver said something that Tristan couldn’t understand, and then the bus stopped again.

“I don’t see anything,” Blue Eyes said. He let Tristan’s shirt fall back into place. Blue Eyes reached into one of his many pockets and pulled out a tiny key.

“Tristan, I want you to listen to me.”

“How do you know my name?”

“I know all your names,” the man said. “My partner and I are here to rescue you, to take you home.”

“What home?” Tristan asked. “Like, home home? In Scottsdale?”

The man smiled. “That’s the one.” As he spoke, he slipped the key into the handcuff on Tristan’s wrist. As the bracelet fell away, his wrist started to throb. “One more.”

The driver yelled, “Boss, we gotta go!”

As Tristan’s eyes followed his rescuer’s hand and the key down the shackle on his ankle, he noticed for the first