Ana shook her head. She had never had a reason to look into it.
“De Oppresso Liber. It’s Latin for—”
“To free the oppressed,” Ana finished the sentence. Tim looked at her in surprise, and she shrugged. “I took Latin during my undergrad.”
“Well alright then,” Tim said. “So you understand the sentiment. We do bad things to bad people before they get the chance to do worse things to good people. And that’s why someone like Nate comes into this job. Not to kill, but to help people. And that’s it. It’s not any more complicated than that.”
Ana didn’t know what to say. Tim had taken something so complex that she couldn’t wrap her head around it and translated it into a very simple concept. She remembered what Nate had told her on the boat about the obligation he felt to serve simply because he’d had the abilityto, and she suddenly felt very sheepish. She had essentially accused Nate of being a heartless murderer, when in fact the opposite was true. He had a big heart, and he had spent a decade putting his own life on the line to fight for people who had no one else to champion them. She smiled. That was the man she thought she had gotten to know over the last week. Agoodman.
“Don’t you ever get tired of it?” she asked Tim.
“Oh, of course,” he said. “You like doing it, the same way an Olympic gymnast likes to compete in the games. You train your whole life for something, and you’re one of the best in the world at it. So you enjoy doing what you’re good at. Only, instead of gymnastics, our game is war. But you can only do it for so long. Eventually the pressure catches up to you.”
“Is that what happened to you?” she asked gingerly.
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging it off. “Maybe… I lost a lot of friends in these same sands. Same with the other guys. But it wasn’t for a purpose. They never really wanted us to win this one. And for guys like Nate, there were people to help, but he couldn’t do anything for them. To lose so many friends over something like that… it was crushing. For all of us.”
Ana felt her eyes misting and she looked away, blinking rapidly to make the moisture dissipate. She wished Nate had told her this. It changed everything. But she knew why he hadn’t. It wasn’t in his character.
“Thank you, Tim,” she said, leaning over and kissing him on the cheek. He winked at her.
“Keep that up, sister, and I’ll tell you whatever you want.” She laughed.
Looking down, she could see that three pickup trucks had pulledup and watched several armed men pile out. Shane was talking to them with Nate nearby. She noticed Nate’s hand was hanging around his belt line and she prayed he wouldn’t need to draw the pistol she knew was stashed there. Her prayers were answered when the Arab men shook hands with the two Americans and then all crammed into one truck and drove off, leaving two loaded vehicles behind. When they disappeared, Nate waved the rest of them down.
Ana got to her feet and moved toward the rock face. She climbed down between Tim and Wally, both men being overly cautious to ensure she didn’t fall. Her talk with Tim had been extremely enlightening and had given her a different view not only of Nate, but of all of them. She was beginning to notice little things she had missed before, like how they went out of their way to keep her from slipping down the rock face, or how they had given her extra room in the cramped fish truck. Or how they fed her water to keep her hydrated. There was no doubt these were very rough men, but they were also gentlemen.
“Well, we’ve got two Toyota Hiluxes, enough fuel to travel maybe seven hundred and fifty miles, and food and water to match. And the best part…” Shane walked over to the back of one truck and held a rifle in the air.
“Holy shit,” Tim yelled. “Is that a fucking Mosin-Nagant?”
“It is,” Shane said. “Deadliest sniper rifle in history, used by Simo Hayha, a Finnish soldier in WWII who had over five hundred kills using a variant of it. And we’ve got four of them.”
“It’s not top of the line, and we don’t have any glass,” he continued, “but it should give us some standoff. We’ve also got some ancient AKs and enough ammo to start a small war.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Nate said. “We’ve still got half aday left, so let’s load up and try to make up some ground. It’s a hundred miles to the border, and I’d like to be in Saudi by nightfall.”
Ana walked up to Nate, stood on her toes, and gave him a quick peck on the lips. He looked down at her confused, then smiled.
“What was that for?”
“I’ll tell you later,” she said, returning the smile.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Al Ghaydah, Yemen
Omar did not like what he was hearing, and it made his blood boil with rage. He attempted to calm down, telling himself that he needed to ensure that the information was true before he acted. There were few in the village who would dare challenge him, but if he pushed things too far the people might band together, and that would be a significant problem.
His brother gave him the news, having heard it from his son, who was friends with the son of a local fisherman named Mohammad. The boy said he overheard his father talking to his mother about a boat he had seen come ashore that morning. Several white men got off the boat with backpacks and were driven away in a van. The van, he said, belonged to another fisherman in the village named Amir.
Both men were known to Omar, though he couldn’t for the life of him imagine why Amir would help outsiders intrude upon his territory.And why hadn’t Mohammad come to him with the information?Omar was the local Al Qaeda cell leader. He maintained the network in Al Ghaydah, helping to coordinate attacks in the region and ferry suppliesout west to Sana’a for the big fight. But he had always been fair to the people of the city. He was born here and grew up here. These people were like a big family to him, and it hurt that they didn’t trust him enough to come to him with information like this.
Had they forgotten what had happened the last time the Americans had come with the Arab apostates?It had been terrible for the city. Omar lost many friends to their operations out in the desert, and worse, he had lost family. His younger brother had died in the assault on the American base, and Omar himself had barely made it out alive. The Americans couldn’t be allowed to return. If they had, it was surely to target him or his operations.
There was a knock on the door and then Mohammad shuffled in, one of Omar’s men behind him with a rifle in the man’s back. Mohammad looked scared and his eyes shifted back and forth across the room as if searching for some evidence as to why he was brought here at gunpoint.
“Mohammad,as-salamu alaykum.”
