His skin crawled at the thought. They wouldn’t have stood a chance.
“Why the wire?” he asked at length, unsure as to whether it was simply a back-up mechanism, or something more sinister.
Having apparently wondered the same thing himself, Sirvan’s fingers were already tracing their way along the wire, careful not to touch the thin strand separating them from death.
“More explosives,” he hissed a moment later, pointing to the house on the other side of the street, pantomiming an explosion from its walls. “A trip-wire,” Sirvan announced, coming back to Thomas’s side. “Tension-sensitive.”
Thomas nodded, understanding what he meant perfectly. Trip wires were often activated by pressure against them, essentially pulling a trigger. This was a dead man switch at its most basic. Whether tension was applied or relieved, the end result was the same.
Annihilation.
“Can it be disarmed?” Thomas asked. He already knew the answer, so it didn’t surprise him when Sirvan shook his head “no”.
“We do not have the time,” the Kurd replied. “Given daylight, I could try. Now-no. I was ordered to bring you back in one piece, remember?”
Thomas laughed, the tension broken for a bare moment in time. “Then, we move on?”
Sirvan looked ahead, his eyes probing the dust of the street. “No. Look there-and there. Claymores.”
Something was wrong. Very wrong. Thomas could feel his skin crawl, and his eyes searched the darkness for an unseen enemy. This had been prepared-for them, for
He picked up his knife and thrust it back into its ankle sheath. “Then that leaves us with the child,” he said slowly.
Sirvan nodded with equal reluctance.
The two men moved cautiously back to where the little girl lay, their eyes on the ground now, watching ever so carefully for the telltale signs of disturbed earth.
Thomas knelt by the corpse, an unspoken question in his eyes as he glanced over at Sirvan. Was the child’s body mined?
Sirvan extracted a thin, wicked-looking knife from a sheath under his armpit and slid it under the girl’s body, probing gently.
“A grenade,” he announced a moment later, his voice curiously emotionless. “She’s lying on the spoon of a hand grenade. The pin’s gone.”
Thomas nodded, his mind running through their options, considering and rejecting each scenario in turn.
Finally he drew his combat knife and motioned to Sirvan. “Hold the body still.”
There was pain in the Kurd’s eyes as he took his place at the girl’s head, pinning her arms tight to hold the corpse completely still.
Thomas reached up with the knife in his hand, gently slicing away her garments until the thin, malnourished torso lay exposed in the moonlight, the flesh blackened by the spread of the plague.
A muffled curse broke from Sirvan’s lips and Thomas took a deep breath, the oppressive heat of the biosuit suddenly closing in upon him.
His fingers trembled as they closed once more on the hilt of the knife. He had never been a religious man, but his actions seemed suddenly obscene.
Thomas raised the knife above the corpse, looking down into the girl’s eyes, wide-open and staring with death. “God forgive me,” he whispered.
And the knife swung down…
There were only two men. Harun could hardly understand it. Their garb puzzled him even more. They were wearing what looked like Western-made biological warfare suits. It was as though they had been prepared.
It would not do to expose the full force of the men under his command to deal with these two. They needed to be taken out quickly.
He turned to the sniper at his side. “Can you take them?”
The soldier nodded. “I could make sure of it closer in.”
“Then do so.”
“Tubes,” Thomas ordered. Sirvan passed the sample tubes over from the bio-kit wordlessly.
Working carefully, Thomas squeezed the syringe in his right hand, filling the tubes with the black blood. The cassettes filled with tissue already lay in their tray of formalin at his feet.
He replaced the tubes in the bio-kit and closed the lid, his fingers trembling at the thought of the death that reposed inside.
“We’re done here,” he announced, his voice flat and void of elation. One glance at the gutted body of the girl-child at his feet robbed him of any joy he might have felt.
Sirvan nodded, touching the girl’s forehead with a gloved hand as he rose. “This is what they have done to my people,” he whispered, anger present in his tones.
Thomas started to speak, started to respond to his friend’s question, when suddenly the report of a rifle shot exploded from the heights to the east.
The young Kurd groaned in almost the same instant, pitching slightly forward and staggering against the side of the house.
He caught himself at the last moment, a hand clutched tightly to his left side. Blood seeped from between his fingers.
Things seemed to slow down. Thomas reached forward, shoving Sirvan to the ground just as the sniper fired again.
Two shots. Harun swore in frustration as he watched the men start to move. They had wounded one, but they were still mobile, running now toward the edge of the village.
All at once, the faint crack of a rifle smote his ears and the sniper beside him collapsed into his arms, the top of his head blown off.
Splattered with blood, the young colonel dove for the cover of the rocks, unslinging his AK-47 as he lay there. His marksman was dead. His fingers felt wooden, clumsy as he toggled his field radio on. They needed fire support…
They reached the edge of the village in a weird, halting run, Sirvan’s arm flung over Thomas’s shoulder as he struggled to support the Kurd.
No more shots followed their footsteps. “Estere,” Sirvan whispered. “She took them out.”
Thomas nodded, then pushed him on, his heart hammering against his chest as they moved across the rocky terrain. No time. Wherever the Iranians were right now, they would be on their heels soon.
The first
Thomas looked back in shock, watching the village go up in a fireball, the concealed explosives adding to the conflagration.
The Iranians had been waiting for them. He slipped an arm around Sirvan’s waist and pushed on, toward the mountain path. They could still make it, if only…
In the shadow of the mountain, Sirvan pulled away from him, standing there swaying weakly in the pale moonlight. “It’s done, my friend,” he whispered, coughing as he did so. Flecks of blood stained the visor of his bio- suit.
Thomas stared at him, unable to speak, though the protests rose to his lips.
Sirvan put a hand to his side, leaning back against the wall of rock. “Tell me the truth-when the suit is punctured-the bacteria…”
