Читать книгу Desert Fallout - Don Pendleton - Страница 9

Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, two days later

Blunt fingers clamped around Rashida Metit’s upper arm as she was hauled out of the tent where the women of the archaeological expedition had been held hostage. She struggled to break free of the ham-handed grasp, but her captor slammed a handgun slide across her cheek. Metit could feel a trickle of blood dribble from the cut on her face.

When the man tugged again, she went along without further resistance. Metit recovered enough of her senses to do no more than put one foot in front of the other, and when her captor shoved her into another tent, she stumbled headfirst through the flaps, crashing to the sandy floor.

The structure she was in had become the official “rape tent.” It stunk of sweat, sex, blood and vomit. Metit and all the other female archaeological students on this dig had been on this floor at least twice in the past four days, dragged there by bored and angry terrorists who had grown tired of waiting for Ibrahim Mubarak’s return from Somalia.

Metit clawed at the sand and scurried a few feet deeper into the tent. Her tormentor chuckled at the sight of her desperate attempt at escape, and walked over to the trunk. The heavy lid and combination lock would prevent the hostages from getting to their captors’ weapons when the rapist dozed off in postcoital exhaustion. He spun the dial on the lock, rolling through the tumblers in order to open it, then dropped his AK-47 and Glock 17 into the trunk. The two simple guns and their ammunition would prove problematic if they fell into the hands of even a novice like the pretty twenty-three-year-old Rashida Metit. The Glock had no thumb safety, and was always ready to fire, while the AK-47 had been designed so that even untrained irregular militiamen from Angola to Zimbabwe could use them.

Her captor took one stride toward her, and Metit kicked out. Barefoot, she didn’t have much of a chance of causing him harm, even if he hadn’t danced lithely out of the path of her driving foot.

“Still have some fight, eh, bitch?” the rapist asked, chuckling as he unbuckled his belt.

“Get away from me,” she growled.

His chuckle turned into a deep guffaw as he slipped the belt out of its pant loops. He wound the leather around one fist, the cured hide creaking as it was drawn tight into an improvised fist weapon, the buckle hanging across the top of his knuckles once he was done. Metit knew what punches from that felt like. “Get undressed, girl. It’s fun time.”

Metit gritted her teeth, showing no intention of following his orders. He was going to have to work for what he wanted, and she lashed her foot out again. Only the rapist’s reflexes had protected his testicles from being smashed, her kick instead landing on his muscular thigh. The belt-wrapped fist came down hard on her shin and pain seared from ankle to hip, the leg gone numb from the brutal, jarring impact.

She grabbed at the side of the tent, her splintered fingernails clawing for a handhold, and her tormentor stepped in closer to her. Her fingers ached from the days of abuse as a prisoner, the nails cracked and worn down to the quick as she and the other women had scratched at the ground in order to dig an escape tunnel from their prison tent. It was when the terrorists had discovered their efforts that the rape tent had been initiated.

The wound belt bounced off Metit’s jaw, and her brain spun helplessly inside her skull. The impact hurled her against the canvas, which was taut enough to hold her hundred-and-five-pound weight without tearing. Then she crumpled to the ground.

Moments later, a rough hand squeezed her chin, holding her limply bobbing head still for a moment, and a second later, blessed unconsciousness descended upon her.

REALITY BROKE THROUGH her fever dreams of unconsciousness, and Metit managed to rise to her elbows before her stomach contracted violently. Bile coughed out between her blood-caked lips, and the acid in it burned the puckered wound on her inner cheek. Tears flowed down her cheeks as she rolled onto her side, instantly regretting the decision as she put her weight on her injured leg. Metit righted herself, lying on her back to alleviate her injuries.

Numbly, she reached down to take inventory of herself with her fingers. Her T-shirt was still intact, only having been shoved up and out of the way to bare her breasts. Her shorts and panties were gone from her hips, however. The sob she released transformed into a pained cough from a dry, blood- and bile-clotted throat and she turned her head to spit out the choking glob.

She took several deep breaths. Her leg ached badly, but gently flexing her foot and toes, she knew that no bones had been broken. It was a small mercy. Metit grimaced and saw that her shorts and underwear were still wrapped around one ankle. Stiffly, she slid her hurt leg through them, and pulled them up.

Getting dressed took on a new level of discomfort, every movement aggravating aching muscles, spearing her pain receptors mercilessly.

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.”

“Undercover agent?” Metit asked.

“I’m Ethiopian,” Kamau confessed. “Our country is not thrilled to have a bunch of radical fundamentalists controlling a large part of a neighboring nation.”

“And I’m not thrilled to see any terrorists trading diamonds for military weapons,” Bolan told her.

Metit shook her head numbly. The clarity she’d felt when she’d recognized Mubarak’s name was fading. “Is it all right for me to lie down? My name, by the way, is Rashida Metit.”

Bolan nodded in acknowledgment of her introduction.

“Kamau?” he said.

“I’ll check the perimeter again,” Kamau replied. “Whoever did this left to get into the catacombs your people were exploring. They could be on their way back any moment and they have guards at the cave entrance who could have heard you.”

Metit shuddered. “I’ll stay awake. And quiet.”

Kamau gave her a warm, reassuring smile, then stalked toward the entrance to the catacombs that had been built into the side of a mountain.

Bolan rested a calming hand on Metit’s shoulder. “I’ll see what medical attention I can provide, and you fill me in on this sorcerer.”

“Set Akhon,” Metit explained. “He was a master of death according to the few hieroglyphic references to him in the prepyramidal tombs.”

“Prepyramidal era?” Bolan asked. “It makes sense. More than a couple of ancient peoples had developed poison sprayers and chemical flame projectors around that time.”

“You know your ancient history,” Metit answered.

Bolan looked toward the catacombs, then to the bodies strewed around the camp and sighed. “Only because some people don’t see humankind’s greatest mistakes as anything other than inspiration for more madness and carnage.”

The Executioner tended to the young woman’s injuries. The psychotics who had wrought this destruction in the name of an ancient weapon were bound to return to camp sooner or later. Bolan needed Metit in peak health and able to fend for herself.

Then, Bolan would be free to deliver justice to a ruthless squad of murderers.