movement and soft-voiced, and he was the best hand-to-hand fighter of the three, with black belts in jujitsu, tae kwon do, and Krav Maga. This would almost certainly be his last mission, though. At thirty-six he was pushing the far edge of the envelope for work like this, and knew it. Old and slow got you killed doing these things, and it was they who were supposed to be doing the killing. He moved along fifteen feet behind Dempsey, making sure to maintain visual contact. This was no place to be wandering around alone.
Nor was it any place to be letting thoughts wander, but he could not keep himself from picturing Keyana. They had met six months earlier in San Diego after connecting on Facebook. They made a stunning couple, everybody said. She was a model and every bit as beautiful as the pictures he could see after she friended him. Almost six feet tall, slim in the right places and full where it counted, almond-eyed, with skin as flawless and smooth as porcelain.
Right away she had wanted to know what he did for a living, of course, and over dinner at a wharfside seafood restaurant, he’d said, “I do high-end security work.”
“You mean like guarding CEOs and movie stars, that kind of thing?” she had asked.
“Yeah, that kind of thing.” Keeping his voice a little vague, mysterious, but holding her gaze.
“It must be exciting.” She had sounded impressed. But what had impressed
“It can be, at times.” Stikes had let her go on believing that he guarded CEOs and movie stars and that kind of thing, telling himself it was not a complete and deliberate lie. Once in a while Gray did have an executive- protection assignment to offer. For every one of those, there were half a dozen like this one, but that didn’t cancel out the others.
At any rate, it would be different from now on, because he was getting out. They were being paid handsomely for this run, as they called the things they did, $100,000 apiece, $20,000 for each of the five removals, $300,000 altogether. That was getting-out money for sure. You could marry, start a little business, maybe even have some kids, and stop dipping your hands in blood. It wasn’t that he minded the killing now. War and the SEALs had taken care of that, had taught him to shave away all the moral tangles and leave just the hard, clean fact of his craft. He knew how dangerous and difficult the jobs he did were, and he knew how well he did them, and satisfaction flowed from such awareness. So at this point, it wasn’t so much the killing as it was Stikes’s sense that every bullet and RPG he dodged brought him that much closer to the next one, and at some point there would not be enough room or time to dodge.
They kept moving for another two hours and Kathan held up a closed fist, time for the prescribed five-minute break. Dempsey came up and knelt near Kathan, and then Stikes joined them. On one knee, they drank electrolyte- replacement fluid from plastic tubes connected to hydration packs. They had added powdered coca leaves and ginseng to their ERF, providing a stimulant solution that could keep them moving for several days without rest, if the need arose. It was the same ancient pharmaceutical mix that had allowed Inca messengers to run a hundred miles a day.
Nobody spoke. They had about two minutes remaining, and Stikes was beginning to think they might make it through another stop without breaking noise discipline. No such luck.
“The blonde is a hot little puss.” Kathan was referring to pictures of Hallie Leland and the others they had viewed as part of their pre-mission briefing.
“Not so little, from what I could see,” Dempsey said, appraisingly. “You can’t really tell from a picture, though. The camera do lie. I had this girl in Anbar, like a beauty queen in person. But she couldn’t take a picture. Looked like a truck ran over her face.”
“Yeah.” Kathan reflected for a moment. “But some ugly girls are great in the sack. Butterfaces. They’re so grateful, I think is what it is.”
“They should be grateful. It’s not like dudes are lining up to do them.”
“Nah.” Kathan giggled softly, the childlike sound eerie coming from such a huge man. “They did for that little haji in Nasiriyah, though? You remember her, Demp?”
“Roger that. The whole team had a taste.”
“Those were good days.” Kathan’s voice went bitter.
“Finest kind.” So did Dempsey’s.
Stikes had come to suspect that their good old days consisted mostly of violating prisoners and women. Kathan, in particular, reminded him of certain SEAL trainees, crackers from Alabama and Georgia who’d talked about the Civil War, their voices going all soft and stupid over the Lost Cause, moaning in prayerful tones about Robert E. Lee like he was some kind of saint instead of a slave-owning, butchering old bastard. For Stikes, a black man, such things did not sit well at all. He said, “Hey, my men, you want to stay focused here. Can’t let anything derail this mission.”
“Be cool, Stikes,” Kathan said. “This a mission with benefits. What the contract said, recall, bro?” “With benefits” meant that they were free to take whatever ancillary proceeds the mission might deliver: money, jewels, precious metal, drugs—or women.
Stikes hated being called “bro” by someone like Kathan. “I can read contracts as well as you. But we don’t want to be in here one minute longer than we have to. With what you’re getting paid, you can buy yourself Pamela Anderson.”
“She’s old, man. I
“Yeah. Say they can’t find your tiny little peckers.”
Kathan blinked, as though he could not believe Stikes had spoken to him like that. Stikes stared back, and the longer the moment lasted, the calmer he became.
But Stikes couldn’t quite let it go. He said to Kathan, “Hey, man.”
“What?”
“You got good waypoints? Feels to me like we might have lost the track.”
“You think I started doing this yesterday? Course the waypoints are good. Gray’s intel is always A-grade, man.”
TWENTY-FOUR
LENORA STILWELL STOOD TO ONE SIDE, HER UNIFORM SPOTTED with dried blood, shivering in the chill. Two biosuited nurses slid the long, stainless steel platform bearing Sergeant Marshell Dillon’s body into a refrigerated locker and closed the door. Dillon had died several hours earlier, but they had not autopsied the body; the cause of death had been all too obvious. Dillon had died like all the others: a mass of oozing red tissue, his face a bloody horror, screaming in pain that, near the end, massive doses of morphine did nothing to blunt.
Stilwell said a silent prayer for the young soldier, then turned to walk back to the wards. In the morgue’s doorway she had to stop and steady herself, placing one hand on the wall.
“Major? Are you okay?” One of the nurses, concerned, watching.
She straightened up. “All good here. Good to go.” She walked out into the hall, followed by the nurses, who closed the morgue door behind them. Out here, Stilwell was once again struck by the smell. She had been a physician for two decades and had smelled just about every awful stench sickness and death could produce. But even all that experience had not included anything like the smell produced by ACE eating the flesh of living bodies. It was a sharp, nauseating stink, with elements of blood and decaying meat and fecal matter, as the bacterium ate through intestinal walls and abdominal muscles. That
