Desert Fallout

Her rapist was still in the tent, lying not far from her, his pants open and his genitals exposed. Metit was tempted to jam her thumbs into his closed eyes, gouging them out and blinding him for the horrors he’d inflicted on her, but as she had trouble even tugging her shorts over her hips, such aggression wasn’t in the cards for now.

Something was wrong. The way the terrorist lay was unusual. Her pain and nausea had been so distracting that she had missed the fact that he wasn’t breathing. A closer examination in the dim light of the rape tent showed that his throat had been slashed from ear to ear. Metit bit her lower lip and she crawled away from the corpse of her tormentor.

Emotions conflicted in her. She felt nothing but disappointment that she didn’t get to see the actual execution of her rapist, but if she had been rescued, then why were there no medics around to tend to her injuries? She closed her eyes in an effort to focus on her hearing. Even with the normal day-to-day routine of the Sinai archaeological dig disrupted by the presence of hostile riflemen, there had been sound, from chatting guards to sobbing hostages, as well as the smell of cigarettes and coffee percolating on the fire.

Silence and old, stale odors were all that answered her reaching senses. Metit’s stomach turned, but there was nothing down there to come up. Filled with a bottomless well of dread, she struggled to her feet and took a tentative step to the flap of the rape tent. Peering through the slit, she couldn’t see anyone, and the silence was thick and ominous. Her rapist had dragged her to the tent around noon, and she could see that the sun had dropped considerably in the sky. Since the terrorists had taken her watch, and she didn’t know the exact time of sunset by memory, all she could guess was that she’d been out for at least half the afternoon.

Metit was hesitant to leave the tent alone and unarmed. She also didn’t want to make a lot of racket smashing open the trunk that the hostage-taker had stashed his weapons in. The eerie silence may have sounded empty, but it all could have been a trick.

Maybe, she thought, the rapist had his throat slashed because the other terrorists thought he’d killed her, ruining the fun for the rest of the group. It was a grim, morbid thought, and she was acutely aware of the foul taste of her bile still in her mouth, as if it was punctuating the realization that she had been counted among the dead.

It would probably explain the inactivity of the camp. With one of their own having killed off a valuable hostage, there would have been enough of a panic to evacuate the dig site, moving to another area so as not to be associated with her murder. Metit rubbed her cheek, and looked at her hand, watching the dried flakes of blood and vomit tumble like dust off her skin. She didn’t have a mirror available, but she could easily imagine that she appeared like death warmed over.

The belt had been discarded by her rapist, tossed casually aside after Metit had been battered into unconsciousness. She picked it up and wrapped the strap around her fist just as her rapist had. She could only get half the belt around her hand, as it was smaller than his, and the buckle dangled like the ball of a flail. Metit nodded. It was a better weapon than a glorified fist load. She weighed a little over a hundred pounds, so her punches wouldn’t have the same benefit as a full-grown man’s fist and body mass. However, centripetal force would amplify the strength of her swing, enabling her to cave in a cheek or gash an eyeball from a socket easily. She felt a moment of uncertainty, shocked by how swiftly she had descended into a kill-or-be-killed state of mind, determining the lethality of one form of weapon over the other.

She remembered what an anthropologist once told her. The will to survive was universal human nature, but what needed to be done to achieve that survival often seemed to go beyond what most people called civilization. Every animal engaged in brutal conflict to survive, and combat was hardwired into each and every human. Going into a murderous state of mind was natural.

Metit pushed the tent flap aside and stepped into the open, the buckle of the belt dangling heavily from the end of its leather strap. She couldn’t decide if the wobbly tremors of her knees were weakness and pain from the abuse she’d suffered at the rapist’s hands, or if it was from the adrenaline overdrive of fear. It helped to concentrate on walking, every movement of her battered right leg sending a spike up the length of her side as she took a step.

“Keep going,” she whispered to herself. She closed the prison tent, a breeze whipping across the camp. The rush of air flipped up the unfastened opening, and she saw glimpses of shadows within, just enough to see bodies strewed across the floor. Metit froze, her heart hammering inside her ribs.

More slow, tortuous steps, a few more yards before she could hook the tent flap with her free hand and tug it aside. As she did so, the light spilled over her shoulder, illuminating the scene she’d only briefly glimpsed moments before. Hostage and terrorist alike lay in crumpled heaps on the floor, bodies twisted and mutilated by bullets. Flies buzzed around the open, sticky wounds on the corpses, crawling over faces stretched out in fear and surprise. Her best friend, Rani, had died with her eyes open, and the sight of insects walking across the white surface of her orbs would have brought up a torrent of sickness had Metit not emptied her stomach earlier.

Her knees gave out at the sight of Rani. Metit curled forward, her forearms crossed in front of her face, trying to block out the sight. Her heart felt as if it wanted to explode with the horror of the atrocity before her. Unarmed, bound women, all of them shot to death. Metit could understand if someone had just killed the thugs holding them all hostage, but there was no reason to kill a bunch of archaeology students on a field study.

Metit tried to hold in the sobs, but she didn’t have the will or strength. Her body had been denied its impulse to vomit, so it took its solace elsewhere. Deep, ragged breaths were sucked in between the torrent of tears and wailing over the brutal murders. She called upon God, begged for all of this just to be a nightmare that she would awaken from. She wanted the hell she was stuck in to melt away, evaporate like spilled water on hot sands. Metit asked what she had done to warrant such torment. The rapes were survivable, even if they had left wounds on her heart and soul that would never heal. But Rani, her face spattered with the blood of another woman, her chest riddled with bullets, was something that she couldn’t bear.

She looked around the tent and saw that one of the terrorists had gotten his handgun out. It had fallen from his lifeless fingers before he could pull the trigger, his existence ended with as much violence as those of Metit’s friends. She reached for the pistol’s butt, fingertips running along the Glock’s plastic handle.

This is too much, she thought as she curled her grasp around the gun. Suicide may be a sin, but hell cannot be worse than this…

Metit tilted the muzzle up to her chin, and her thumbs felt for any levers on the weapon. She pressed a small tab she’d found, hoping it was the safety.

Rough hands suddenly grabbed her, prying the pistol out of her hands. Reflexively, Metit pulled the trigger and the 9 mm round exploded past her face, hot gases and powder burning her cheek, striking her deaf in one ear, but she was still alive.

Strong arms wrapped around her shoulders as tears flowed, and she clawed at the man who’d grabbed her. One squeeze and her arms were pinned against her chest, between them. Metit thrashed her head, her one good leg kicking at the ground in an effort to get leverage. That’s when she heard the whispered words in her good ear.

“Relax. Relax,” he said in English. “You’re safe now.”

“Safe,” she repeated. She let out an anguished shriek, and through tear-blotted eyes, she could see the tanned face of a white man, American by his accent. Cool blue eyes looked into hers, and her rage subsided.

This man wasn’t like the thugs who had taken to rape when they’d gotten bored. He held her not to dominate her, but to prevent her from hurting herself, to console her. Muscles in her shoulders bunched, trying to push away from him, but slowly, she was more aware that this was a helper, not a murderer. Metit also noticed that they had moved away from the carnage of the prison tent, both of them standing in the middle of the camp.

“I know it’s hard, but you’re safe,” he told her in a deep voice.

“Everyone’s dead,” she whispered.

Those blue eyes softened with empathic sadness. “I know.”

Metit let herself relax, resting her head against his broad, muscular chest. “Why?”

“That is what we’re here to find out,” Mack Bolan told her softly. He caressed her reddish-brown hair, a gentle touch that soothed her nerves. She wanted to sleep again, but Bolan cupped her chin and looked into her eyes.

“Sit down. You look like hell,” Bolan told her. “You might have a bad head injury.”

“I just want to sleep,” Metit replied.

“Not yet,” Bolan said. He pulled a pencil flashlight from a pouch on his belt and shone it in her eyes. He looked relieved as her pupils dilated under the glare. “No concussion.”

He ran his fingers through her hair, and Metit could tell that he was examining her scalp. When he reached the bruise that her rapist had inflicted on her to knock her out, she winced, shoulders trembling at the touch.

“The skin’s not broken, your eyes dilate and there’s no sign of blood from your ears or nose,” Bolan said.

“Does that mean no concussion?” Metit asked weakly.

Bolan nodded. He gave a low whistle and called, “Kamau!”

Metit noticed Bolan’s companion for the first time. He was a black African, well over six and a half feet tall, with powerful arms jutting from the sleeves of a khaki shirt that stretched tautly across a barrel of a chest. Kamau’s head was shaved bald, but he wore a bushy mustache and a scruff of chin growth. The African was laden with weaponry, much as her savior was, but she still hadn’t gotten a feeling of menace off either of the men.

“Not another living soul in sight,” Kamau reported as he reached into his pack for a medical kit. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s beat to hell and back,” Bolan replied, “but she doesn’t have a concussion or any other signs of a skull fracture.”

“Small mercies,” Kamau said grimly, looking around.

“Who are you?” Metit asked as Bolan put a wet compress to her forehead. He also slipped some painkillers between her dry lips and gave her a sip from the straw attached to the hydration bladder on his backpack. The straw kept her from gulping the water, but she suckled for a minute before her thirst was sated. Her stomach was no longer empty, but water and pain pills wouldn’t make her heave more. Metit’s nausea had dissipated.

“Matt Cooper,” Bolan answered.

“Kamau,” the big African added.

“Names don’t explain why you’re here,” Metit said.

“No, they don’t,” Bolan told her. “This looked like an archaeological dig. Who were the goons with the rifles?”

“Terrorists who hit us a few days ago,” Metit answered. “We were looking for the hidden tomb of a fabled Egyptian sorcerer.”

Kamau looked at her, then to Bolan. “That explains where Mubarak got the seeds.”

Metit blinked, her brain starting to clear. “They were waiting for Mubarak to come back.”

Bolan’s lips drew into a tight line. “He’s the reason we came here. Someone followed Mubarak to Somalia and tried to kill us.”

Metit wrinkled her brow. “Are you…”

She looked at some of the murdered riflemen.

“No,” Kamau said. “I’m an undercover agent. Cooper, he hasn’t said. But we are here with the support of people Mubarak wanted to sell the sorcerer’s seeds to.”