Suicide Highway

“Let’s get the next one in here,” Gibson muttered, the harshness in his voice sounding like a body dragged across gravel. He was tearing off his blood-splattered gloves and pulling on fresh, sterile latex to keep infections from passing along.

Sofia looked down at the innocent face, gone from a healthy olive tone to almost bone-white from blood loss. The dead girl resembled an angel.

Les innocentes, the name for children who died with no spot of sin on their souls, going immediately to heaven, whatever heaven they believed in, if they knew that much at their age. Sofia wondered if heaven really existed, then dismissed the thought as she wheeled the body away to make room for a fresh victim.

Certainly a heaven had to exist.

Because this was hell.

She stopped as she reached the improvised morgue, leaving the table parked against a half-dozen others, lined up tightly to make the most of the space available until they could arrange burials. Their job was to make sure that the living survived. Respect for the dead would have to wait a few minutes, a few hours, until those who needed help got it.

The cart rolled as she let go of it, metal clanking dully against other metal, the tabletops covered with the wrapped-up remains of those who couldn’t be saved. Seven lost so far. That was just this day.

Sofia closed her eyes.

Seven added to the hundreds she had already seen.

Seven added to the mountain of dead she’d watched either die in the care of the medical mission, or gunned down directly by madmen on a crusade. Her jaw clenched as she tried to suppress her rage, her impotence at a world where juggernauts rolled over the helpless, smashing them to a pulp in the street, leaving dead and maimed in their wake.

She considered it a perversion of the concept of a trinity. Man fathered the gun. The gun sought to please its creator, so the gun gave man power. Man lusted after the power. Gun slew man’s children.

The unholy trinity continued to rampage across the face of the earth like a cancer. All she could do was help pick up the pieces, try to keep the wounded from being the dead and to reassemble the maimed.

It was a Band-Aid trying to cover an amputation. The stump was gushing blood, and the United Nations was holding up one sandbag in the middle, watching in despair, maybe in disbelief as currents slushed around on either side. A wave of sickness hammered into Sofia as she whispered a torrent of “damns” under her breath, pounding her hand against the trolley’s handlebars, until she realized that people in the hall were staring at her.

Her voice was hoarse, and her hand felt like someone had taken a maul to it. She’d be lucky if she hadn’t broken bones. Her eyes burned, face raw from tears.

The two staff members outside the door looked at her, a combination of fear and sympathy fighting for control of their features, and Sofia wished she were dead right then, shame and guilt boiling up into her throat, a new wave of tears ready to rise.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

One of her fellow aid workers, Charles, took a tentative step forward. “It’ll be okay, Sofia. You just need some rest—”

He never finished the sentence. His chest and head were suddenly obscured by a cloud of blood and gore, gunfire shattering the uncomfortable silence, plowing through the hallway like a rampaging rhinoceros.

Sofia stumbled back into the stretchers, screaming as her coworker smashed into the doorjamb, half his head caved in by the savage sledgehammer impacts of assault rifle fire. She lunged forward, trying to catch him, as if there were possibly some hope that a human being could take so much damage and still somehow be alive. She couldn’t hold him up. He was a heavy, limp thing, a formless blob spilling and pouring over her arms and tumbling to the floor no matter how much she tried to grab on.

Sofia looked up and saw Gerda, still out in the hall, her eyes staring up at the ceiling, her chest peppered with apple-sized splotches of red on her scrubs. But Gerda’s green eyes were bulging, her forehead literally dented an inch deep, a tiny red hole in the bottom of the crater in her face.

It was the camp all over again.

Sofia looked for another exit, knowing that if she went out into the hall, she’d end up as shredded meat. Charles and Gerda had granted her a reprieve with their deaths, and she had to get out, to warn people.

It was them.

Sofia wasn’t fighting her fears, her paranoia anymore. If it was the dark men who came to slaughter the families of suspected terrorists, then they were coming after her because they knew she would willingly testify.

She threw herself across a pair of tables, feeling the lumps of flesh under bloodied linens shift beneath her. On hands and knees she crawled frantically, charging toward the window on the far side of the storage room turned morgue. Sofia hated herself as she looked back, watching the dead girl she tried to help, half spilled off her gurney, brown eyes fallen open, staring with glassy indifference toward her.

Guilt wrapped around her throat with strangling strength, but she tore away from the eye contact with the dead, slamming her palm into the base of the window to force it open. It stopped her cold. Screams and gunfire ripped horribly through the building behind her. She slapped the window frame a second time, and it budged a quarter of an inch.

“Open, dammit,” she cursed.

The gunfire went silent as she punched the window frame again. It was the same hand she’d smashed over and over again into the gurney handle, and each strike sent fiery pain shooting up her arm. Blood was pouring freely from split skin, but Sofia finally got the window levered open wide enough to squeeze through.

Something crashed behind her and Sofia froze. She looked over her shoulder and saw a sad-faced man, overturning stretchers, dumping corpses to the floor. She recognized his face from the night of slaughter that had sent her halfway across a continent to escape retribution.

Her muscles were seemingly paralyzed, though some part of her mind recognized that she was actually moving—he was simply moving faster. Fear sent her adrenaline level skyrocketing, and time felt as if it were slowing down.

It gave her a chance to feel like she could live longer as the gun in the murderer’s hand rose slowly toward her. Sofia’s hand was through the window. She was in midfall to the ground outside.

A flash of light emitted from the barrel, though there was no loud crack of a gunshot.

Time suddenly snapped back to normal as her head was driven back, crashing into the half-opened window. Glass shattered and cleaved through her scalp, turning her blond locks to a ruddy crimson.

The next shot that Steiner pumped into Sofia DeLarroque’s face didn’t bounce obliquely along the curved bone of her skull. This .22 slug hit dead on, penetrating the fragile shell of her temple, tearing deep into the UN worker’s brain.

She was alive, technically, even as her brain cells were spun into a frothy soup by the bouncing bullet. Her heart still beat, and she still had reflexes that crashed her completely through the opened window. The frame snagged her, holding her as muscles flinched, making Sofia’s corpse twitch and twist.

Steiner walked up to the dying woman, looking her up and down. Blue eyes, the color of a tropical sea, glimmered, staring into a cloudless sky, lips moving wordlessly.

“Go to sleep, girl,” Steiner said, pulling the trigger on the Beretta twice more.

The Israeli unscrewed the sound suppressor from his pistol and stowed both pieces in his gear.

This wasn’t over, the assassin knew.

Where it would stop was anyone’s guess.

2

Hal Brognola chewed into his unlit cigar so hard he felt his teeth ache, as the voice on the other end of the phone line spoke.

“I’m going on a hunting trip, Hal.”

“Dammit, Striker,” Brognola spoke up. The handset was plugged into a hardline at Stony Man Farm, a top secret facility in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Even with the latest encryption hardware and software protecting the call, years of experience had taught him that nothing was one hundred percent secure, and even after all this time, he was not in the habit of talking openly on the phone with the man whose voice he knew intimately.

Experience had also taught Brognola something about the man he called Striker. Once he made up his mind to accomplish a goal, nothing would stop him.

“Dammit, Striker,” Brognola repeated, “I think I know what you’re looking at.”

“You think,” came the reply. There was no mockery or challenge in his tone. Brognola and Striker were friends who respected each other too much to play word games. “There’s a big wide world out there, Hal. A world that needs me to act between the jobs you have for me.”

Brognola grunted. He tasted the buds of tobacco squeezed from the crushed cigar between his teeth and set it down on an ash tray. Spitting residue from the tip of his tongue, he looked at the desktop full of news clippings and intelligence reports that made up the hell that was tearing through the world at that very moment.

It was the same crap, just different names. Terrorists. Mobsters. Drug dealers. Murderers. Conspiracies. Threats ranging from the schoolyard to the ivory towers of governments and corporations. This was the world that Brognola looked at every day, a wall of mourning and misery that he had to pick and choose from, and apply the powerful resources of America’s most elite covert action organization against.

To have Striker, one of Stony Man’s most important allies…