Goose flicked the headset to channel 21 and looked at Arnaud as the Hummer rolled to a stop in the middle of the street. “Which way?”
Arnaud looked around for a moment. His face was pale and anxious. Indecision weighed heavily on him. “There.” He pointed to the right. “Giselle and I were in a little café. They ambushed us in the alley. They robbed us and took Giselle. I thought they were going to kill me.”
Maybe they thought they had, Goose told himself, looking at the damage that Arnaud suffered. He put the Hummer into forward gear and let off the clutch, feeling another twinge of agony from his knee.
For the past few years he’d been careful with his left knee. He’d been wounded during a firefight in the first Iraq War, barely getting by on medical reports after extensive surgical repairs, because the doctors had known he was a dedicated soldier and wanted to muster out with a full pension, and because he’d always been able to handle the load. The crisis in Turkey was slowly eroding his physical ability to function. He needed rest but he wasn’t getting it. The cortisone shots he’d used in the past to block the pain weren’t working as effectively here, thanks to the continual stress and strain of constant use; even though the shots provided some relief, they didn’t help the knee heal.
“Who took your wife?” Goose asked.
Arnaud shook his head miserably. “I do not know.” He continued on in French.
“Sir, I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Goose interrupted. He spoke just enough French to order a meal from a restaurant, and the man’s rapid pace made comprehending him impossible. Goose’s mind was still whirling from all the secrets that Icarus had revealed during the past few minutes.
“I was drawn to you, First Sergeant,” Icarus had said. “By something greater than myself. I know that now. There’s a reason we’ve been put in each other’s path.”
Goose gripped the Hummer’s steering wheel harder. He knew how Arnaud felt, how the panic and helplessness slammed through the man. He forced himself to focus.
Shaking, Arnaud made a visible attempt to control himself. “The men, First Sergeant, they were not known to me. They are Bedouin, oui? Very probably traders. Scavengers.” He glanced around, half out of his seat as he craned his neck to peer into buildings and down alleys. “You can see any number of them in the city. They come. They go. Some of them take what they can from the wreckage of the city. Others bring supplies into Sanliurfa. By any other name, most of them are still looters, taking profit from the hardships the rest of us have gone through. Now they have taken my wife.”
Goose knew about the Bedouin. With the military satellite reconnaissance systems presently off-line in the Middle East, the nomadic people were a major conduit of information for the military forces currently hunkered down in Sanliurfa. The Bedouins existed as they always had, by trading and scavenging and taking whatever they could find. The Syrian assault on Turkey had proven a boon to the Bedouins, allowing them to capture prizes to own and to trade that they might never have gotten legally. According to news reports Goose had seen, several of the Bedouin tribes had started caches of war booty in the caves in the surrounding mountains.
“When was your wife taken?” Goose felt compassion run through him for this man. He hadn’t seen his own wife in months, but if anyone ever tried to harm Megan, ever tried to take her away against her will—
God took Chris.
The thought rattled through Goose’s mind, making him feel hollow and helpless, stripping away his confidence. The fact that God had taken Chris during the Rapture had been part of the message Icarus had delivered. “Your son,” Icarus had said in a quiet voice, “is safe. God came and took your son up as He took all the other children.”
Goose couldn’t allow himself to believe everything Icarus had stated. If he did, he had to give up on ever seeing his five-year-old son again.
In this life.
That possibility ripped at Goose’s mind. He didn’t have a faith strong enough to allow him to accept that. He’d tried, but he couldn’t believe God would do that. Not to the point that he could give everything—his hopes and his fears—over to Him. Goose didn’t know how a person did that.
Bill Townsend, his good friend and a devout Christian who had always talked about the end times and the fact that the Rapture might happen any day, had disappeared during the anomaly. If Bill were here, Goose was certain his friend would tell him that he’d see Chris again. At the end of the seven years of Tribulation. If he wasn’t one of those who would die long before the end of that time.
But Goose couldn’t help hanging on to the possibility that all those disappearances had been man-made—or even, though the concept strained his credulity, of extraterrestrial origins—and that he could somehow find a way to reverse those disappearances and bring those people—bring Chris—back. God wouldn’t take his son away from him. The God Goose wanted to believe in couldn’t be capable of that kind of cruelty.
“Over there.” Arnaud pointed toward a small café and brought Goose’s focus back to the present op. “I asked the people inside the café for help, but no one would help me.”
That didn’t surprise Goose. Most people who had remained in Sanliurfa after the mass exodus that came on the heels of the SCUD missile launch had stayed because they believed they would prosper, that Turkish reinforcements would arrive at any moment—which wasn’t going to happen—and push the Syrians back. Or they simply didn’t have anywhere else to go. The ragged crowds at any local café were probably a lot more interested in avoiding trouble than in looking for it.
“Were you dealing with
