A young male assistant leaned in with something that looked like scissors. The stainless steel gleamed until the moment the blood pumped onto it when the surgeon released his hold.
Goose kept moving, listening to the chatter across the headset. Teams were shutting Sanliurfa down section by section, taking out Syrian soldiers trapped behind the lines. Many of the enemy soldiers fought to the death when cornered, but there were already a few prisoners in custody. There was a chance the intelligence teams could gather information about the Syrian army’s strength and movement.
An orderly hustled by Goose with an IV rig in his hands. Glucose and blood were in short supply. The surgical teams would struggle to get through the night.
And tomorrow’s still coming, Goose reminded himself.
Feeling useless and guilty for coming down into the main operating theater, Goose walked out of the room. He’d arrived only a few minutes ago and his thoughts had immediately turned to Icarus. The man had stated that he would make contact at the hospital.
Could have been a mix-up, Goose told himself. There are other triage areas in the city now. Maybe Icarus went there. He couldn’t get the man’s cryptic warning out of his head. Finding the CIA agent in the alley so near to where Icarus had confronted him had left Goose unsettled. The possibility existed that the CIA team had intercepted Icarus, and the man his squad had found in the alley was a casualty of that encounter.
But why leave a man behind? That didn’t make sense. Unless the other CIA agents had believed the man dead—or they’d been pressed for time by one of the teams Remington had in the field searching for Icarus. Few soldiers were aware of the tension between Remington’s covert teams and the CIA agents. Goose knew about them, but he also knew Remington deliberately kept him out of that action. The only time the captain had ever assigned Goose to a private mission like the search for Icarus was when Remington was certain Goose believed in what that mission’s goal was.
Icarus’s choice to make contact with Goose hadn’t set well with Remington from the outset. If the man was looking for a safe house from the CIA, he could have asked Remington. Goose had pointed out that Icarus had talked to him under duress, claiming that he was armed with an explosive device.
That hadn’t mattered to Remington. Goose knew the captain considered him tainted as a result. Goose also had a tendency to think for himself at times too, and Remington never assigned him to a mission that Remington totally wanted to control. Remington sometimes used information he got from unconventional sources to his own benefit. Goose had never been comfortable with that, though several times that information had provided key turning points in an engagement or op.
Goose was distracted from pursuing the line of logic concerning the man his squad had found by a squawk from the headset.
“Phoenix Leader,” Hershel Barnett called.
“Go.”
“The prince came by and kissed Sleeping Beauty. He’s about nine kinds of mad about being held for questioning. Throwing around his threats about us infringing on his constitutional rights and so forth.”
“Has he identified himself as an American citizen?”
“Says he is. Accent’s about right. But you know that the spies they turn out of spy school these days sound like Kansas City radio DJs.
Maybe he’s American and maybe he ain’t.”
Goose knew Barnett was deliberately baiting the man they’d brought to the hospital. Judging from the sheer torrent of verbal invective unleashed in the background, Barnett had succeeded.
“I’m on my way.”
Another series of artillery blasts reverberated through the building. The thunderous roars were partially muted so it was impossible to tell if they were made by howitzers firing or warheads landing within the city.
Goose navigated the long stairwell up to the main floor. He favored his injured knee by using the handrail and leaning part of his weight on it. What he most needed was rack time and a chance to get his knee elevated. Though they weren’t part of the original construction, the building had elevators. Getting stuck between floors in case of a power outage wasn’t an ideal situation, so he’d opted for the stairs.
Goose stepped into the service area and took a left. He passed by the arched doorway to the huge hotel lobby.
Trimmed in classic art deco, the hotel lobby stood out immediately as a fantasy landscape for tourists, a trip back in time to a foreign land where Lawrence of Arabia and The Ten Commandments had been set. Posters of both movies, as well as Cleopatra and Ben-Hur, held positions of prominence in the lobby. Palm trees in ornate pots reached for the main chandelier high above the floor.
It was a place, Goose knew, that he would like to have brought Megan to, the kind of place where normal life and all its problems evaporated at the door. They’d never had a real vacation since their honeymoon. Because money had always been tight, they had never felt comfortable with spending so extravagantly. Now, however, Goose wished he had taken Megan someplace like this. The chance might not ever occur again.
And Chris wouldn’t be there with them.
Goose’s heart ached at the thought. Desperately, he pushed the troubling thoughts away. He couldn’t afford to think about Chris’s absence now. He had to survive; then he’d see what he could do about seeing Chris again.
The allure of the hotel was conspicuously absent at the moment. Patients without life-or-death wounds lay on the marble floor on makeshift litters and mattresses culled from beds throughout the hotel. The living shared space with the dead, which were covered with sheets. Some of those sheets bore bloodstains that testified to terrible wounds and painful deaths.
A mix of Rangers, marines, Turkish military, and U.N. forces guarded the hotel’s doors. Rangers held command there at Captain Remington’s insistence. Heavy plywood
