Not Adrian. Fred. Fréderic had been with her in the jeep — no, not the jeep, the car — next to her, blood spreading from the wound in his stomach, Adrian’s useless hands red and slick — no, Fred’s hands — fading in and out as they drove through the night, no, the day, not the desert, not Syria…
Bridge doubled over and vomited into the gutter. She gasped for breath and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her mind clear for the first time in years. She remembered.
She remembered.
She vomited again.
64
Adrian’s back was turned when the second guard ran in.
Bridge saw him, but she couldn’t move. Like a nightmare where her body wouldn’t respond, she wanted to draw her gun, eliminate the threat, sweep for follow-up, as all her training had conditioned her to do. But she couldn’t open her mouth to shout a warning, much less fire a gun. Less than a minute ago she’d witnessed her first live kill, and now her body was shutting down, trying to make sense of it all. She pushed against it, summoning every ounce of will she could dig out from the depths of her consciousness, struggling to move, to act, to save her partner’s life.
The guard looked past her — just a woman — to Adrian, the big man he’d heard shouting in English, and raised his rifle. Perhaps the guard made a sound, something in the air that was imperceptible to Bridge, but that Adrian’s experience allowed him to hear. Or maybe he was just turning to shout at her again.
Whatever the reason, turning saved his life. The guard’s bullet — single shot fire, not spray, not here in a room full of computers — hit Adrian in his lower side, rather than full in the chest where he’d been aiming. Classic gut shot, Bridge immediately thought. He’ll live.
And now her body was working again. The Zastava CZ 99 was in her hands, muzzle raised, sighted at the second guard, who was turning his rifle on her as a third Russian ran in behind him. She squeezed, felt the pistol kick, squeezed again without re-sighting. She could almost see Hard Man watching over her shoulder, nodding approval as the guard dropped to the ground, double tap in the chest and shoulder. The third guard fumbled for his own rifle, but Bridge had the advantage, with her pistol already raised and ready to fire. She adjusted, re-sighted, fired. Missed, but stone chips ricocheted off the wall by the guard’s head, and he flinched, and then a single shot from behind Bridge made the guard’s nose explode.
She turned to see Adrian on the floor, propped against the base of a server rack, gun in one hand, the other pressed against his body. Blood spread through the fingers. “Fucked that up, didn’t we?” he grunted, using the barrel of his CZ 99 as leverage against the ground, forcing himself to stand. Bridge holstered her own pistol and helped him up, dropping his arm across her shoulders. Except for a short pre-teen phase when she first shot past her friends, Bridge had never been self-conscious about being tall. Now she was positively thankful she didn’t collapse under Adrian’s weight. “Wait,” he said, “in case of emergency…”
She reached inside his jacket, found Adrian’s backup grenades, their carbon surfaces slick with his blood. “Two for now; keep one back,” she said, and took them out. She threw one to the far side of the room with the pin still inside, to cover a wide zone, then pulled the pin of the other and prepared to drop it. She took Adrian by the hand and looked him in the eye. “You’re sure you can run.”
“It’s only a flesh wound,” he said, and winked.
Bridge tossed the grenade on the floor and ran, back through the stale air of the stone corridors, pulling Adrian behind her, ignoring his grunts of pain and not thinking about the blood pouring out of his abdomen.
She shot the jeep guard while Adrian followed, using all his energy to stay silent.
They drove the stolen jeep into the desert night together.
The windscreen exploded, showering them both with glass.
Adrian passed her his last ICE grenade in the settlement, and she used it to take out the Russians chasing them.
Bridge laughed. “We’re going to make it. We’re bloody well going to make it! I mean, Giles is going to bollock us for blowing up the server farm, but we had no choice, right? It was better guarded than we were expecting, and then once reinforcements showed up the job was a bust anyway, so we had to get out of there.”
Adrian said nothing.
“Look, don’t get shirty with me. I told you they probably had cameras in there, but you wouldn’t listen. Now you’re going to have a month in hospital to think about that, and maybe if you apologise I’ll bring you a bunch of grapes.”
Adrian said nothing.
Bridge had done enough club all-nighters on speed to recognise she was hyped, that the adrenaline coursing through her body was making her a blabbermouth. That was fine. It didn’t matter. It was good to be alive. They’d got out, and they were going to make it.
Adrian said nothing.
Bridge howled at the night, drowned out by the sound of the jeep, crying for the dead man beside her.
When the fuel gauge hit rock bottom and the jeep sputtered its last, she had no tears left to cry. The Russians hadn’t just shot out the jeep’s rear fender, they’d hit the fuel tank as well, and Bridge had never been so alone in her life. Just her, the cold black desert, and a Serbian pistol with half a dozen bullets left in the
