Dead Six

from?”

The stairs were exposed to the open air. Suddenly a chopper appeared through the rain, slowing to a hover thirty feet off the ground, rotating as the door gunners blasted the living hell out of Building One with belt-fed machine guns. Ropes spilled from the open doors, and blue-camouflaged Zubaran Special Forces started fast-roping down. These guys were everywhere.

Then there was a terrible bang, like a clap of thunder. The side of the helicopter seemed to collapse into itself, belching smoke and launching one of the soldiers out the open rear door. The chopper fell from the sky. The rotors hit, hammering the mud into a circular plume before fragmenting into thousands of lethal bits. Fire, blood, oil, and flesh sprayed in every direction. I ducked as a chunk of the broken rotor screamed past and hit the stairwell just over my head.

Looks like I’m not going that way. I ran back inside the dorms. I needed a way out. The weight of the money gave me an idea.

“Soldiers are in your building,” Carl insisted. “Whatever you’re gonna do. Do it quick!”

“Roger that.” I picked a west-facing room, whose door was unlocked, and hurried inside. It was a mirror image of Valentine’s room. I dumped all the cash on the bed and spread it around, trying to make the money look as tempting as possible. That was one expensive distraction. Walker’s gun was still in hand, a .45 Sig 220. I pulled the slide back slightly. There was already a round chambered.

There was a crash as another dorm door was kicked in, followed by automatic weapons fire and a scream. I entered the small bathroom, shoved the pistol in the back of my waistband, and stood on the toilet. I placed my hands on the opposite wall and slowly levered myself into position, “walking” with my hands until I was above the door frame. Every bit of pressure against my left hand caused unbelievable agony. Palms pushing out and boots pushing back against the opposite wall, holding myself there by muscle tension alone, I was now out of view of anybody looking through the bathroom door.

I knew how third-world armies cleared rooms and you did not want to be at ground level.

Drops of blood fell from my lacerated face and hit the floor. My arms began to vibrate from the strain of holding myself there. My swollen, broken fingers throbbed. More gunfire ripped through the dorm. They were spraying down each room as they kicked in the doors. Hurry up.

There were shouts in the hall, someone barking orders, and then they were here. The soldiers fired, bullets shredding through furniture. Dust erupted below as projectiles shot through the bathroom walls. I held my breath as a rifle barrel appeared through the doorway under me and shot the shower square into porcelain shards. The muzzle blast pounded upward. Flinching, I slipped a bit, biting my lip and praying for gravity to fail. I held on. The rifle disappeared.

Persian. “Look at all this money!”

“Praise be! It’s a fortune, Mohammed.”

Arabic. “What’s all this? You two, keep moving.”

“But, sir!”

“Move, dog. That is an order. And close the door.”

The stomping of boots. Wait for it. Gunfire in the next room. Give him a second. I drew the Sig in my blood-soaked right hand and cocked the hammer, only one handed on the wall now, injured and too weak to hold me, slipping. The others were still shooting.

Go.

I dropped, landing feet first in a crouch. One soldier, an officer in the desert camo of a Zubaran regular, was standing at the bed. He looked up, both hands filled with rubber-banded stacks of currency, surprise registering on his face just as the front sight covered it. Masked by the cracks of rifles in the next room, I fired.

The bullet hit him in the sinus. He went down with a spray of blood and snot painting the wall. I de-cocked the Sig and shoved it back in my waistband as I moved. This was my ticket out. I pulled off the ragged remains of my shirt as the gunfire continued and more explosions ripped through the compound.

The officer was dead, eyeball dangling on a bloody cord from the shattered orbital socket. That’s what he got for being greedy. He had a captain’s insignia on his collar. I unbuttoned the bloody uniform jacket, tore it from the twitching corpse and put it on. He was much shorter than me, and my wrists dangled naked from the sleeves. There was more stomping of combat boots outside the door now. This building was clear. I didn’t have much time. I tugged on the officer’s blue beret.

One problem, he didn’t look anything like me at all. Shit. It was dark, but I couldn’t bank on that. I needed a distraction. They couldn’t see my face.

“Sir?” someone shouted through the door in Arabic. “The colonel says we need to fire from these windows at the Americans.” They started banging.

I saw the dangling eyeball and had an idea.

Falling into the hallway, I pressed the blood-soaked pillowcase against my face. “Aaaiiiii!” I screamed, my voice unnaturally high pitched, as I had no idea what this officer sounded like. “Booby trap! Booby trap!”

“Captain!” one of the soldiers shouted. “Are you all right?”

“My eye! My eye!” I held out my hand with the officer’s eyeball in it and showed it to him. “Aaaaiiii!”

“Merciful Allah!” the soldier screamed, recoiling. “Get him out of here! Medic!”

Hands grabbed me by the arm and pulled me along, I kept my head down and weaved, crying and sobbing. Then we were outside, the rain pelting us mercilessly. The black night was lit by hellish fires, and smoke obscured everything. Good for me, as I was only partially in the enemy’s uniform. The Zubarans were in the middle of a coup, most of these guys were Sabah’s irregulars, so hopefully there were a lot of new faces. We were heading for the breach in the wall.

I looked back over my shoulder as I was pushed past the burning APC and into the rift. A couple Dead Six were leapfrogging their way toward the gate, firing at this position, their only hope for escape. Desperate and stupid, they were cut down one by one. The soldiers passed me off to other waiting hands outside the wall and returned to the fight. I discreetly tossed the eyeball in a puddle.

“Hang on, Captain. I’ve got you,” someone shouted. I couldn’t see him, as I was still covering my face with the pillow. Strong hands shoved me down. There was a lot of screaming and crying around me. The army had taken an absurd number of casualties. “Ibe right back,” the medic said. All he saw on me was a head injury and it wasn’t squirting. He had more important things to worry about right now. Lifting the bloody rag, I saw the medic kneeling next to me, up to his wrists in another soldier’s pelvis, trying to clamp off a severed femoral artery. He was shouting for assistance.

Through the jagged breach in the old wall, I could see Dead Six, still fighting. There were fewer of them, and they were taking fire from multiple directions now. Most of the buildings were on fire, the rain pummeling giant clouds of steam into the air. Some Dead Six were fighting their way past the helicopter crash, using whatever cover was available. There was the kid, Valentine, and he was making a mad dash away from a bunch of pursuing soldiers. The girl, Sarah, was right behind him, as they headed for the back wall.

Seeing Sarah reminded me of what I’d noticed briefly in the brig, but that was impossible. That couldn’t have been the key. I’d gone through hell for this thing. I pulled Adar’s box out of my pocket and tried to work the puzzle, but it had been broken. The pieces had just been stuck back together. The box slid open, revealing . . . absolutely nothing.

Well, fuck me. I jerked my head up. Sarah was forty yards away, running for her life. Valentine’s leg was shot out from under him. Sarah turned, screaming, and went back for him. Then several bullets struck, and Sarah fell in a fog of blood.

I stood. I had to get that key. The medic was screaming at me to get down.

There was the kid. He got up, fell, got up again, got shot in the back, went down, but starting crawling to his girlfriend. He reached her, shell-shocked, looking for something that wasn’t there, oblivious to the inevitability of his death and the carnage around him. Several grenades exploded between us, temporarily hiding him from view. The gunpowder cloud was gradually crushed by the rain, revealing Valentine on his back.

“Cover me!” I bellowed in Arabic. Back through the breech, I sprinted through the rain, bullets screaming past in both directions as the last of Dead Six retreated, water geysering up as the newly formed puddles were struck. I slid in the mud, sprawling down next to Sarah.

Sarah was dead, eyes open, crimson stream trickling from her mouth, white shirt soaked by rain and blood.