“Die, you son of a bitch!” she screamed at the top of her lungs and pulled the trigger.
Eddie’s reactions were lightning fast despite the irrationality of the situation. But even as his body reacted he thought through what had happened. Susan Donleavy wasn’t a victim at all. She was in league with the kidnappers and that was no rape in the other cell block but two lovers who’d gone to find a place to be alone.
He swung his hand upward, hitting Susan’s wrist an instant before the Beretta discharged. The recoil and the strike sent the gun clattering into the dim hallway and left her throat unprotected. Eddie whipped his hand around and slashed the edge into her neck, pulling the blow at the last second so he didn’t crush her carotid artery and kill her. He turned quickly.
Geoffrey Merrick was on the floor, Ski and Trono hunched over him. The blood splattered on the wall behind them looked like a Rorschach test.
“Is he alive?”
“Yes, but she got him high in the chest,” Ski said pulling a sterile dressing from a medical kit. Merrick’s face was bone white and he took choppy sips of air as he struggled against the pain. His chest was sodden and more blood leaked from the wound. “I don’t know if any major organs were hit, but for now you’ve saved his life.”
“Not yet I haven’t,” Eddie said as he plucked the dressing from Ski’s hand. “We don’t have time for that. She’s one of them and no doubt lied about the number of guards. This place is going to be crawling in about ten seconds. Pick him up and let’s go.”
“What’s happening?” Linc asked over the tactical radio.
“Donleavy shot Merrick. I think she’s working with the kidnappers.”
Ski hunched over so Mike and Eddie could drape Merrick over his broad shoulder. To his credit Merrick whimpered but didn’t cry out. The blood spreading down the back of Ski’s camouflage resembled ink and smelled like old pennies.
Linc asked, “What’s your play?”
“Stick with the plan and hope we don’t run out of time. Be prepared to lower Merrick down to the bikes. He’s hit pretty bad.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
“What about her?” Mike asked, pointing to where Susan Donleavy lay unconscious against a wall, looking like a rag doll missing most of its stuffing.
“Leave her,” Eddie said with ill-suppressed anger. He should have seen this coming, but his own feeling about what had happened to his big sister all those years ago had clouded his thinking. For such a critical lapse of judgment he fully expected Juan to fire him if they got out of this mess alive.
They took off at a trot with Eddie at point and Mike covering their rear. Lights strung along the ceiling by wires suddenly flashed brightly then dimmed before settling to a naked glow as a generator someplace within the fortress was cranked to life. Around a distant bend came the crash of a door slamming open and the rush of feet against the gritty floor. It was a race to the cell where the ropes waited, and the men instinctively picked up their pace until they were running flat-out—all attempts at silence abandoned.
It didn’t matter that Merrick grunted each time his weight shifted and the torn flesh around the wound ripped a bit more.
The cell block door was fifteen feet away when a solid wall of men rounded the far corner. Many of them just wore boxer shorts, having been woken by the sound of the pistol, but every one of them had had the presence of mind to grab a weapon. The Corporation team faced at least ten armed African guards in a hallway that now resembled a shooting gallery.
Eddie had a fraction of a second before the guards realized they’d found their quarry and opened up with everything they had. He tossed aside his machine pistol and raised his hands, playing the longest odd he’d ever gambled. None of the guards lowered their weapons and one second became two with no shots fired. Behind him, Eddie could hear Ski’s and Mike’s guns clatter to the stone floor and then the sound of more men arriving behind them. He chanced looking over his shoulder. There were a dozen more soldiers, each glaring at them over the sites of their AK-47s.
“We’re blown,” he whispered into his mike for Linc’s benefit. “Call the Oregon.”
Another man arrived a moment later and, although he wore just a pair of fatigue pants and unlaced boots, he had the carriage and bearing of an officer. His face was lean, with a beaky nose and hollow cheeks.
“I had reports that there was a small army coming to rescue Moses Ndebele,” he said in perfect English. “Not a handful of white mercenaries. Still, your execution at dawn will be most gratifying.”
“How would you feel if I told you we were hired to rescue Dr. Merrick and have never heard of Moses Ndebele?” Mike Trono asked, just to be sarcastic.
“In that case your execution won’t be gratifying at all.”
20
JUAN Cabrillo had never known such pain. It wasn’t the sharp agony of having his leg shot off by a Chinese gunboat, but an overall ache that cramped all his muscles until he was certain he couldn’t go on. His thighs and back took the brunt of the strain of para-skiing and they felt like they were burning from within. His hands were formed into claws that gripped the chute’s toggles and there was no way to rest them. There was no way to rest any part of his body unless he quit.
And that wasn’t an option.
So long as the wind continued to blow across the desert, Cabrillo grimly hung on to his chute and raced over the sand. His turns were no longer crisp, and when he fell it took him longer and longer to get to his feet. He hadn’t taken a single break since his sat phone had chimed and Max Hanley had told him Eddie, Mike, and Ski had been captured.
From what Linc could hear over the radio when his teammates had been discovered, there was a contingent of troops from Zimbabwe at the Devil’s Oasis guarding that country’s opposition leader, Moses Ndebele. Linda had done some quick research and learned that Ndebele was to be tried for crimes against the state in a couple of days and would most likely be executed. The UN’s formal complaint against Zimbabwe had done nothing except cause the government to further restrict freedoms within their borders. The entire country was under martial law and a dusk-to-dawn curfew was in effect in Harare, the capital.
Linda learned that Ndebele had a large following that crossed tribal lines. His was the first opposition movement that had the slightest chance of overthrowing Zimbabwe’s corrupt government and establishing a democracy in what had once been one of Africa’s wealthiest countries, but was now ravaged by famine and disease. Though once a fierce guerilla leader when Zimbabwe was known as Rhodesia and was governed with an apartheid-like system by its white minority government, Moses Ndebele advocated a nonviolent approach to toppling the current regime and Linda found numerous comparisons to Gandhi.