And to kill as many of the rebel Macedonians as they could in the process.
A sense of peace descended on her, coupled with not a little sadness. The comfort of righteousness, the strength one found fighting for a cause would forever be denied to her. She thought of Xerxes’s charge that she would never know what it was to lose friends in battle because she chose no sides.
But he’d gotten it wrong. It wasn’t that she had no side — it was that they were all hers. The Macedonians, the Greeks, the Americans…despite her nationality, each death was one that mattered to her as a person, as the story of how the war affected that individual. She was denied the luxury of seeing the other side as inhuman, faceless creatures. To her, and to the other men and women who brought the rest of the world to each conflict, each warring faction was composed of human beings. They mattered. They had to. Because only when she could show that side of war to the rest of the world would the civilized nations bring enough pressure to bear on the combatants to stop the bloodshed.
That was her role as a reporter. To bring the facts to the world, to force the international community to intervene. And if she had to have a side to claim as her own, then let it be that one — the side of peace.
Xerxes must have seen something odd in her expression. He stepped away from her to the door of the hut and barked out an order, his voice harsher than she’d heard before. Running footsteps answered him, then a sound like early summer thunder far away.
Thor dipped the nose of the Hornet down slightly for the barest moment, exposing more of the ground under him to view. Not that he really needed a visual, not following in the path of the Tomcats, not with his own HUD indicating he was on course, on time. And especially not with the streamer of smoke and fire billowing up to his left, evidence of the deadly accuracy of the Tomahawk attack on a fuel and weapons dump. No, visual contact with the ground was simply a final confirmation of what he already knew — that they were dead on in their ingress run.
“Five seconds,” Tomcat Lead warned. “Hold your positions and don’t screw up the egress. Break left if you get hit. SAR and Special Forces are only one mike out.”
Thor waited for Two to acknowledge, then said, “Three.” His wingman followed with, “Four.”
“Alright. Let’s give them hell.” Tomcat Lead began his descent, falling away in a graceful arc, his wingman dropping in slightly to the left and behind him. Thor counted off three seconds, then followed them down.
Closer to the ground now, with trees rushing by underneath him he could truly feel the effect of the Hornet’s speed. Individual trees whipped by, barely visible long enough for him to take note of them before they flashed out of view. Three small buildings spaced perhaps a mile apart, a herd of something — goats, perhaps? — between them. An older burnt-out house, all details he recognized from the satellite photos.
There, just ahead and to the left. An odd patch in the undergrowth, natural enough from a distance but with hard glinty highlights in it as they approached. Could have been quartz formations or rocks if they’d been in a different part of the world, but not here. He’d seen the blowups of the area, taken note of the carefully outlined trucks and encampments the photo intelligence technicians had picked out. It would have been clear enough even without the infrared shots that showed warm engines, campfires, and people moving about underneath what was trying to appear as a simple forest. Smoke from the Tomahawk attack was blowing across the area now, further obscuring the picture.
The camp. Human intelligence sources had confirmed with the locals what the intelligence specialists already knew. And what the people on the ground, in a few short seconds, would know beyond all hope of redemption.
Xerxes shoved Pamela to the ground then rolled her under the cot. “Take cover!” He followed her in under the scant shelter of the flimsy wooden frame. It bent then flexed upward. Although her vision was partly blocked by Xerxes body, she caught a glimpse of a darkly tanned foot flashing toward the door.
“No!” She tried to shove him out of the way so that she could escape the illusion of the safety of the cot. Better to take her chances in the open away from the structures.
Xerxes shoved her back against the wall of the hut as though determined to hold her in the death trap that she knew this building surely was. She started to fight back by reflex, her hands clawing at his face, then realized that there was only one way out. Instead of reaching toward him, she flattened her hands and jammed them straight up.
The cot bucked up. It started to settle back down on them, one aluminum leg headed straight for her face, but she got her feet up and kicked. It rose again, rolling now, and clattered over on its side. The noise was lost in the all encompassing thunder of aircraft directly overhead.
Pamela bolted to her feet, narrowly eluding Xerxes’s frantic grab for her ankle. Let him die here if he wished, but she wasn’t going to. Not now. Not this time. She ran for the door, snagging her camera bag strap with one hand as she went. As soon as she hit the door, she cut hard to the right and started running.
The feet — Murphy’d left without his boots. For a split second, she almost thought about running back in to the shelter to look for them, but dismissed it almost instantly. There was no time, none at all. She’d be lucky if she made it out of range before the first—
Her world exploded. The ground under her feet heaved up as though trying to rid itself of a flea, bucking and jolting harder than the worst earthquake she’d ever imagined.
The first blow catapulted her forward, and the ground that rose up to meet her seemed far closer than it had any right to be. She hit hard, landing on her right shoulder and rolling immediately over to smash her face into the hard-beaten ground.
Then the second explosion, harder and more violent than the first, but almost inaudible. She shook her head as it tossed her into the air, gravity slamming her back down a second later into the still-reeling earth. It was oddly disorienting, the earth reeling underneath her, dust and flames and debris rising up from the remains of the camp, complete chaos in utter silence.
She lay facedown on the ground, her arms crossed over the back of her head. She waited.
More explosions, or perhaps aftershocks — she couldn’t tell exactly which with no sound involved. It seemed as though she were alone in the midst of devastation, cupped in a giant hand that repeatedly picked her up and then threw her at the ground.
She felt something give in her shoulder, and the pain started then. At first it was indistinguishable from the noise and the violence that seemed to have taken root in the earth.
The shaking stopped. She lay on the ground, scarcely able to breathe with the fear pounding through her veins. Finally she tried, drawing in a deep shuddering breath as though her lungs had forgotten how to breathe. She coughed, started hacking hard. The air was almost solid with dust, debris and smoke.
She rolled over, still hacking and coughing, then rolled again as she realized she was now on her back, staring up into black smoke and bits of burning wood. She made it to her hands and knees, then tried to push herself upright.
The pain now, hard and demanding, threatening to consume her just as the early fury in the earth had. She felt herself scream but heard no sound — and kept moving. If she couldn’t stand, at least she could crawl.
She quickly discovered that her right shoulder would take no weight at all. Even trying to use it to push
