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She rushed forward into his arms, wrapped hers around his neck, and held on tight. “Você voltou,” she squeaked out. “Obrigado.”
You came back.
Thank you.
Then she buried her face in his shoulder.
John tapped his shoulder, and he tried to hand the little girl over, but she was stronger than her tiny body appeared. Based on looks alone, she couldn’t be any older than five or six, but he had to use all his strength to pry her from his body.
John carried her out.
The little girl screamed and flailed, her shrieks the impetus for chaos as the sound of gunshots vibrated against his eardrum. On autopilot, he, Mike, and Dez left the hostage retrieval and rescue to the soldiers and headed toward the gunfire.
One mind, one heartbeat.
Joel’s heart pounded in his ears. His mind tried to split, as it usually did in these scenarios, but he shoved the images to the back of his head. One of these days, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop it from showing him a multitude of things—his niece smiling with her missing front teeth, his sister sending him a look when he was being his usual ridiculous self, his parents.
Sydney.
However, he didn’t want to do the “life flash before eyes” thing unless that moment, God forbid, truly came to pass.
They found Julien, Gage, and Giorgio standing over a lone gunman. Giorgio cradled a little boy who barely looked older than three while Gage’s rifle dangled in his right hand. It appeared the intel had been off about the age of the youngest hostage.
“This was the only one,” Gage said, without looking up. “He ran when he heard the intrusion and grabbed the little guy to use as a shield. What kind of person do you have to be to threaten to shoot a baby to save yourself?”
Joel looked around the room.
A metal arm extended down from the ceiling with wires spilling from its wide-open end. One wall was made up of two cabinets with a cut-out in the middle. Old piping peeked through the cut-out’s cracked tile wall, and above it, a mirror swung haphazardly, threatening to fall to bestow useless bad luck on the ghosts that roamed the hallways.
“Think this used to be a surgical suite,” he said.
John appeared in the room’s doorway. “The only one in the building, most likely,” he said. “We have the children.”
As if snapping out of a trance, Gage looked away from the man on the ground and over at John. “I don’t like that there was just one man with a gun in charge of all those kids.”
John shook his head. “Neither do I. But the rest of the building is clear. We can wrap this one up.”
On the way out, Joel heard Mike add a quiet, “For now.” It might have been the end for John and Benarld, but they knew from experience that something else was brewing. Something that would probably land them right back in Angola in under twelve months.
Joel, the last one in their procession, took one more visual sweep of the room before walking through the doorway.
When they reached the middle of the dark corridor, shattered glass resonated behind them. After dangling for over a decade, the mirror in the surgical suite had finally crashed to the ground.
CHAPTER7
They returned to the white building with the checkered floor and nonfunctioning A/C units. Benarld took a team of soldiers with him to escort the children to a church where the children’s families waited. Those who didn’t have families would be assigned to social aid workers who would assist Benarld with the children’s next steps.
Giorgio disappeared somewhere on the even more derelict second floor of the structure with a look that said he hadn’t caused enough bloodshed to satisfy his thirst. Mike always took time to decompress once they completed all their objectives, disappearing as well.
Dez and Gage debriefed with John.
Julien called Ari.
Joel found himself shirtless in a makeshift medical tent, sitting on a cot while Dr. Engela Nkosi, a South African physician who’d traveled with Recces, passed a needle through a wound in his arm. At some point, either upon entry or exit, he’d gotten slashed by a window shard. Because the building had looked like a bacterial infection breeding ground, Gage ordered him to get the cut looked at before they headed back.
Each time he hissed or sucked in a breath, Dr. Nkosi sent him a look, holding back a smile she hid from her face, though not from her eyes. Eventually, he reacted purely to tease her. Once they were stateside, his life would unravel, so he’d do whatever he could to distract himself until then. As long as he was here, he and Sydney were together.
“One more noise, and I will leave you here,” Dr. Nkosi warned.
