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The space in front of the wheel well seemed to provide the smoothest ride, so Rapp and the Russian staring at him had commandeered one each. The body of the first gunner had been left to bounce around near the rear doors, where the blood still leaking from him could escape through a gap. Rapp finally averted his eyes, remembering thathis situation would be downright traumatizing for Matthieu Fournier. A little meekness was in order.
They’d abandoned the paved highway at least an hour ago, when an RPG had detonated close enough to rock them onto two wheels. Potentially an indicator that word was out about what had happened in Saraqib. Insurgents would be organizing to harass fleeing government forces and see if they could set the country alight again.
Rapp turned and gazed through the tiny windows in the vehicle’s rear doors. It was hard to see through the dust beyond, but sharp detail wasn’t necessary. He’d operated in wastelands like these for his entire career.
Escape was certainly doable at this point. Kill the man across from him, take the AK-9 he was holding, and go through the open hole in the roof used to access the machine gun. Unfortunately, that course of action created more problems than it solved. He wasn’t sure the 9x39mm rounds would penetrate the top of the cab and, even if they did, he had no water, no knowledge of the area, and apparently no gas.
Not ideal and not his mission. To the degree thatmissionwas the right word for this shit show. Patience wasn’t his strong suit, but for now exercising it seemed to be the best option. Claudia would say it was a good opportunity for a little self-improvement.
“We’re stopping!” the driver yelled through the grate at the back of the cab. Rapp pretended not to understand and didn’t react when the vehicle coasted to a halt. He heard the driver jump to the ground, and a moment later, the rear doors were pulled open.
They were parked about fifty feet from a single-story cinder-block building with an intact roof, empty window frames, and a front door with an improbable amount of red paint still clinging to it. About sixty yards to the south was a significantly larger building dominated by bay doors and a roof that had collapsed onto the second floor. Not from shelling, though. From neglect. The place looked like it had been abandoned for decades.
Rapp examined the fallow farmland around it, committingimportant details to memory. An irrigation ditch. A section of stone wall that looked like it had been raided for materials numerous times over the years. Clusters of dead trees with trunks too narrow to provide much in the way of cover.
As the man in the back with him jumped over his dead companion to the ground, Rapp realized that he’d been wrong about the place being abandoned. The red door in the house swung open and a moment later a malnourished family began walking hesitantly through it. The man in the lead had his hands out to demonstrate that he was unarmed and was saying something that Rapp couldn’t make out. The woman in second position wore a dark abaya and was struggling to keep a curious toddler behind her.
From his position in the truck, Rapp was helpless to prevent what he knew would come next. The driver, armed with a suppressed AK-9, had moved left and was now out of sight, while his similarly armed companion had gone right. There was no way to get to them in time.
A muffled shot hit the young man and he immediately crumpled. His wife reacted by spinning toward her son, but pitched forward when the back of her head exploded. The blood-spattered child began to scream and run awkwardly across the broken ground, unsure what had just happened or where he should go.
Rapp’s stomach clenched when the kid took a bullet between the shoulder blades. He landed face-first in the dirt, and then there was nothing. The sound of the breeze, the faint stench of gunpowder, and the creak of metal expanding in the sun.
The two men disappeared inside with one covering the other. They emerged a few moments later and jogged toward the other structure, clearing it in the same efficient, professional manner. The lack of gunfire suggested the young family had been the only people there—possibly having found it empty and deciding to take refuge there as they tried to survive what their country had become.
The soldiers motioned for Rapp to get out. It didn’t seem like Matthieu Fournier would be anxious to do so under the circumstances, soinstead he pressed himself up against the back of the cab, hiding his anger behind feigned fear. The driver jumped in, shouting angrily in Arabic before grabbing him by the hair and dragging him into the dirt.
Rapp assumed he’d be led into the house, but his luck wasn’t that good. Instead, the driver pointed to the three bodies and began barking orders in individual English words, each less intelligible than the last. With the addition of an elaborate pantomime, it was made clear that Rapp had been charged with the task of disposing of the bodies. He let his expression slowly evolve from confusion to comprehension to horror, but didn’t move until he was staring down the silencer of one of the AKs.
He made a point of huffing mightily as he dragged the woman’s body toward the barn. Despite the intensifying heat, the Syrian driver followed alongside, unleashing every insult he could come up with that even vaguely related to Rapp, his family, or his country. His diatribe suggested that he was afraid the incident in Saraqib would reignite the war and that he’d end up right back on the front line.
The family’s state of hunger made their corpses fairly light, and it wasn’t long before Rapp had both the man and woman lying neatly in the shade of the barn. Dragging the boy’s lifeless body would have been more in character for a Toronto lawyer, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he scooped him up and carried him through the heat to his parents.
Rapp’s next task turned out to be to pull the Tigr into the barn, which he did with the appropriate amount of gear grinding. They weren’t exactly in a high-traffic area, but his captors figured an abundance of caution was warranted. Support for government forces in this region would be spotty at best.
When Rapp finally was allowed to enter the relative cool of the house, he found the other man in the process of disconnecting a call on his satellite phone.
“The Russians are sending men in a civilian vehicle,” he said in Arabic.
“Are they going to bring us enough fuel to get back?” the driver asked.
“No. They say that’s our problem.”
“Our problem? How many men did we lose in Saraqib? And how many more will we lose when the jihadists get another taste of our blood? The city’s going to burn and do you know who’s going to have to go in there and put it out? Not those old women from Russia. Us.” He spat on the dirt floor. “If they wanted this Canadian bastard, they should have gotten him themselves.”
The other man just shrugged, unimpressed by his comrade’s outburst.
“So, we wait?”
“Yes. We wait. They say two hours.”
Both looked in Rapp’s direction, but he just stared blankly back at them.
“We should kill this piece of shit,” the driver said. “Tell the Russians that he got hit on the way out.”
The other man shook his head. “I just told General Khalaf that he’s unharmed.”
“Then we just sit here babysitting him for the next two hours and then walk home?”
