Mechanically swallowing the lump in his throat, Goose passed the information along. Just as he finished, Arnaud stood up in the seat and threw his arm out.
“There, Sergeant! She is back there! I saw them!” Arnaud shouted. “You must back up!”
Before Goose could say anything, Arnaud leaped from the Hummer. Goose made a frantic grab for the man but missed him. By the time Goose braked the Hummer, the worried husband was already rushing toward the last alley they had passed.
“Sergeant,” Goose spoke over the headset as he pushed himself from the Hummer and dropped into the street. The impact cracked through his injured knee, but he ignored the pain and kept moving.
“Here, Phoenix,” Clay responded.
“We’ve got a possible ID on the SAR target.” Goose checked the street signs and relayed his location.
“Acknowledged, Phoenix,” Clay said. “We’re only a few blocks away.”
Goose ran, favoring his left knee and feeling the pain lance all the way up his side to detonate in the left side of his brain. It was projected pain. He recognized the sensation from years of dealing with the injury. He held the M-4A1 in both hands, high across his chest to keep his lower body clear.
A car that had been following the Hummer honked impatiently. With all the debris in the street, there was little room to pass. The earthmovers had worked only to clear a vehicle-wide path, not two lanes. A few pedestrians, all of them civilians, stopped to stare at Goose as he ran.
At the mouth of the alley, Arnaud shouted, “Giselle! Giselle!” He started forward again. Before he’d taken his second step, he jerked and spun to his right. Pain etched his features, popping even his swollen eye slightly open with surprise.
The flat crack of the rifle report reached Goose’s ears just before Arnaud hit the ground. The echoes of the shot rumbled in the narrow alley between the three-story buildings. Chunks of rock jumped up from the street as three more rounds landed near the fallen man but miraculously did not touch him. Arnaud scrabbled weakly to right himself. Blood darkened his shirt on his upper chest.
Moving quickly, Goose slammed into position with his back against the building to the right of the alley mouth. He pushed his weapon vertical, then curled around to peer down the alley.
A group of Bedouin men, all dressed in flowing robes and burnooses, hurried along the alley nearly eighty yards away. Goose saw that three of the eleven Bedouin carried a woman whose appearance matched the picture Arnaud had shown him. The Bedouin closest to their position racked the slide back on the heavy-caliber rifle he carried, then took deliberate aim at Arnaud.
“I’ve got targets at my twenty. Shots fired.” Goose lifted the M-4A1 to his left shoulder, switching hands easily because he’d trained himself to be ambidextrous with the assault rifle, and got himself into a straight line with the weapon. He leaned his shoulder into the building, kept both eyes open to view the battle zone, looked through the scope with his left eye while his right took in everything, swapping fields of vision inside his head, and squeezed the trigger.
The 5.56mm round caught the Bedouin in the center of his chest just before he fired again. Driven back by the tumbling bullet, the Bedouin fired his weapon into the air, knocking stone chips from the second floor of the building.
Staying locked on his target, Goose drove a second and third round into the center of the Bedouin’s upper body, wanting to make sure his opponent was down. Switching to his right eye, he picked up his second target: a man turning to bring up his rifle.
Goose knew the sound of his weapon firing had alerted the other Bedouins to his position—and not just to his position, but also to his nationality—but there had been no way around that. The M-4A1’s sharp report was a lot different than the heavier detonation of the Russian SKS chambered in 7.62mm carried by the Syrians. Flicking his vision back to his left eye between heartbeats, Goose centered the crosshairs above the Bedouin’s rifle, almost looking down his opponent’s barrel, then squeezed the trigger.
The M-4A1 chugged against Goose’s shoulder almost recoil-free, but a spray of stone splinters and dust blinded him almost immediately as the Bedouin’s bullet struck the wall in front of him. Withdrawing, Goose kept himself from instinctively trying to wipe the stone grit from his eyes. Rubbing at them now might scratch one of his eyes, or even both of them. He looked down, letting the tears come naturally to wash the grit and dust from his eyes.
Footsteps pounded down the alley toward Goose.
Arnaud lifted his head, eyes big with fear. “They are coming,” he whispered in a hoarse, panicked croak. “Giselle.” He tried to crawl but couldn’t move.
His vision still partially blurred and his tears cool on his face, Goose swung around the corner again. He slid the fire selector to three-round-burst mode, then centered the rifle at the lead Bedouin’s waist and squeezed the trigger. He rode the slight recoil up and to the right, stitching the man from hip to shoulder in two three-round bursts and knocking him back.
The assault rifle rode naturally, carrying over to the second man in the alley. Goose squeezed the trigger again, holding the weapon steady and putting a three-round burst into the center of his chest.
As this target went down, Goose saw that his initial round at the second man in the alley had sprawled another man out. Four men were down. Seven were up and moving. Giselle Arnaud remained among them.
Moving quickly, Goose hooked the fingers of his left hand in the
