“So there was no timeline on the report that you received,” Jules clarified, because he knew that Alyssa was thinking the same thing he was:
Please God, let them have left the airport before the bloodshed started
. She was reaching for her phone, no doubt to check what time it had been when Sam had sent his text.
“No, sir,” Jenk said. “I’m sorry, sir.”
If they could verify that Sam sent his message
after
the devastating attack … But in order to prove that, they needed to know when the gunfire had erupted.
Jenk continued, “But surely someone has that information by now.”
“They’re okay,” Jules said, trying to convince himself as well as Alyssa and Max. “You saw the bathrooms in the terminal. If Gina was sick, no way would they spend the night there.”
“Sam would want to,” Alyssa said.
“But Robin would insist,” Jules told her. “And trust
me, sweetie, when he wants to get his way? He gets his way. Sam didn’t stand a chance. They’re in a hotel. I know it.” He looked from Alyssa to Max, trying to impale them with the power of his certainty.
But it was then that Alec MacInnough came rushing back into the shelter, shaking snow and ice off his thick brownish red hair. “Kill the lights,” he shouted, and what little light there was was doused, leaving them in pitch darkness.
That
couldn’t be good. Jules leaned close to Alyssa to mutter, “Chewy, I got a bad feeling about this,” just as Alec found them and announced, “Sorry, Internet’s down.”
Of course it was.
“I need you to bundle up,” the SEAL added. “Quickly please.”
“Can we send a message via radio? Contact Sam that way?” Alyssa asked, even as she slipped on her newly issued winter-white jacket and pulled on a white wool hat, tucking her dark hair inside.
“Radio’s also out—with the wind and the cold and …”
Even better.
“Well, it’s also probably being jammed, although we haven’t verified that,” Alec informed them as he led them to the door, but then held out a hand, signaling for them to wait.
“Probably?” Jules repeated, zipping up, while Alec opened the door a crack, peering out.
“We’re kind of under attack,” the SEAL said.
And …
there
it was. The only way this situation could have gone from mere shit creek to full-on paddle-free.
“Kind of.” It was Max’s turn to be the parrot as he pulled up his hood and tightened it around his unhappy face.
“Definitely,” Alec clarified cheerfully. “So far it appears to be somewhere between two and four shooters—snipers. They took out the generator for the other building.”
“So we’re leaving the shelter and playing the part of the ducks in a row because …?” Jules let his voice trail off.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Alec said. “Not yet. But we need to be ready.”
“Snipers, in this weather?” Crouched next to Jules, Alyssa was incredulous. “With no visibility? Why is anyone going anywhere when we can just hunker down and freeze them out?” She paused. “Unless they’re in place to take out squirters.”
A squirter was someone who fled from an attack, particularly after the attack objective was bombed and on fire.
“Oh, good,” Jules said as he realized this was why MacInnough had them here, by the door. The SEAL was no doubt in charge of keeping the visiting VIPs alive in the coming
mortar attack
.
As Jules looked back into the gloom of the building, he realized that the soldiers who’d been hanging out had put on winter cammie, and were slipping out, locked and loaded, into the night, through various back doors.
“Local command has insisted that the insurgents in this area don’t have mortars or even grenades,” Max reported tersely. “They claim that they barely have ammunition.”
“Clearly they have enough ammunition to take out the generator,” Alyssa countered.
“Yeah, and then there’s the recent intel about an arms dealer moving into the neighborhood. Along with the info that a local warlord allegedly just traded his three favorite wives for a rocket launcher,” the SEAL said. He
smiled happily. “Said info is no longer alleged. And—lucky us—we didn’t have to go traipsing through the mountains in a blizzard to find the damn thing. He brought it right here, to us. Considerate bastard.”
Considerate bastard
, indeed.
“How can we help?” Jules said it at the exact same time as Alyssa and Max, but he was the only one who added, “Owe me a Coke.”
C
HAPTER
S
EVEN
Tarafashir
Robin came back almost immediately.
“It’s just me,” he said, and it was good that he did, because when Sam heard the key in the lock, he’d immediately ratcheted up his personal defcon level.
“We’ve got a problem,” Robin then said, going over to the carry-on bag and pulling out Alyssa’s baby-carrying frontpack. He tossed Sam’s larger model over, too, then adjusted the straps of Lys’s to make it big enough to fit him, no doubt so that he could carry Mikey hands-free. “We’ve got to get out of here. Those sirens were a warning about a terrorist attack at the airport. And over at the American Embassy. There’s a hostage situation there, too.”
Sam curbed the urge to vomit at Robin’s news as he slipped on the baby-pack, and picked up his phone. Still no bars.
“Cell towers are down,” Robin reported. “At least in this part of town. And this hotel doesn’t have a landline.”
“Gina, wake up.” Sam went into the other bedroom, where Max’s wife was curled around Emma.
The little girl’s eyes opened first, so Sam held his hand out to her, his mind racing. They had to leave, but where
would they go? He didn’t know this part of the city, his GPS wouldn’t work with the towers down, he didn’t have a weapon, he needed a weapon, there were men with weapons no doubt standing guard outside the airport, which wasn’t that far from here. Whatever they had was his for the taking. All he had to do was find a guard or a pair of guards who were isolated from the others. Disarming them and arming himself would be as easy as plucking Uzis from the idiot tree.
Except, Jesus he felt sick.
Sam forced himself to focus on the task at hand. “Em. Come on, hon, I need you to get up and use the bathroom, then I’m going to help you put on your clothes, okay, sweetheart?”
Emma looked down at Gina, who was still sound asleep, then up at Sam again before she nodded and solemnly took Sam’s hand.
“Good girl,” Sam said as he helped her up. “Need help in there?”
Emma shook her head no, pushing the bathroom door closed behind her.
Gina stirred then, looking up first at him and then over at Robin, who’d come to the doorway, packing a sleepy Mikey into the baby carrier he was now wearing.
“What …?” she said.
“There’s been a terrorist attack,” Robin said again. He turned to Sam, even as he found several bottles of water. He handed one to Gina before giving the baby a sip from the other. “I was asking the desk clerk about the sirens, and at first he said it was nothing, but there was a TV on, and the news came on and even though it wasn’t in English, I could see that there was a problem at the airport, so he told me about it and about the hostage situation at the Embassy, too, but I knew that if I hadn’t seen it on TV, he wouldn’t’ve told me. And I also knew—I just
knew
—that if I hadn’t played it cool and
just been like,
Wow, thanks for the info, I guess we
won’t
go to the airport tomorrow after all, we’ll just sleep in and wait for the problem to be resolved
, the entire gang of ’em would’ve jumped me and tied me up and …” He took a deep breath. “We’ve got to leave—now—and not through that lobby. Because when I turned back to the stairs, one of the women said,
Have a good evening, Mr. Robin, sir
.”
“Shhh-yoot,” Sam said, as Gina scrambled into the bathroom, pushing past Emma, who was listening, of course, her eyes wide.
“Yeah,” Robin agreed as he handed Emma’s still-damp jeans to Sam. “They recognized me. Hey, bunny-girl, let Sam help you get these on, okay?”
“Come here, Em.” Sam crouched down next to the little girl. Her life was in his still-trembling hands, and she was looking at him as if she knew it. “We’re going to be okay,” he told her, told Robin, too. “There’s a back stairway, out into the alley.” It was possible that it was being guarded, but even if it was, Sam could handle the guards.
Even sick as a dog, he could do this with his eyes closed.
Meanwhile Robin continued, “The people who own this hotel probably have no connection to the terrorists, not politically or religiously, but a guy who pimps out children is gonna see this—me being here—as just another way to make a quick buck. I’m pretty sure he already sent someone over to the airport to try to sell me to the bad guys as the most recognizable hostage in all of Tarafashir. Most recognizable on CNN, that is. Of course, once they realize they have Max Bhagat’s wife and kids …”
That
was going to be a goatfuck of a whole different color.
“That’s not going to happen,” Sam said. Once out of
this building, they were going to have to get out of the city, too. There were caves in the nearby mountains where they could hide indefinitely. Except, forty miles was “nearby” only to a former SEAL. There was no way Gina was going to manage a four-mile hike, let alone forty miles on foot.
Sam mentally moved on to Plan B: Find a place to hide here in town.
Step one: Find someplace with a working landline, so he could call Lawrence Decker over at Troubleshooters Incorporated. Deck would call in backup, as well as an extraction team. It would be expensive, but Sam didn’t give a shit.
“We gonna go?” Emma asked him as she bravely put one chubby little leg and then another into her pants, wincing only slightly. “S’cold.”
“Yeah, I bet it feels good since it’s so hot in here, huh?” Sam said.
She looked at him, like,
That was stupid, it feels icky and you know it
, but instead asked, “Mama an’ Mikey an’ Ash an’ Unca Wobin gonna come, too?”
“Yes, they are,” Sam said as he adjusted the elastic band around her tiny waist. “We’re all gonna go together, but we have to be really quiet, okay?”
She nodded, looking up at her little brother, who was fussing in earnest now in Robin’s frontpack. “Mikey wants Mama.” She looked over toward the bathroom, where Gina had emerged. “Mama, Mikey wants you.”
“I should feed him,” Gina said staunchly, even though she needed to lean against the doorjamb. “I can feed him while we go.” She looked at Robin. “That way you can carry Emma.”
“I can carry both of them,” Robin said.
“But you can’t feed Mikey,” Gina argued.
“All we need is to get stopped by the police because
you’re breast-feeding in public,” Robin said. “Besides, you’re probably dehydrated—”
Sam let them duke it out as he went into the other room. He put all the water he could carry into the pockets of his cargo pants and made sure he took his phone charger, too. Still, what he wouldn’t give for a weapon, any weapon …
He scooped the power bars, powdered milk, and Cheerios from his bag into one of the pillowcases from the bed, making it all easier to carry. Everything else, they’d have to leave behind.
On second thought, he added several disposable diapers.
He then tied the pillowcase to his belt, and lifted a sleeping Ash from the bed. “Time to go.”
In the other room, Gina had wrapped one of the white sheets around herself, completely concealing Mikey. She’d draped part of it over her head as well, to cover her hair.
“Mama’s a monk,” Emma said as Sam stared.
“Yes, she is, isn’t she?” he said, and put Ash down on the bed.
“ ’Cept she don’ have a shiny head.”
“That’s okay, baby,” Robin called quietly from the bathroom. “I’m giving myself a shiny head.”
And indeed, Robin was in the bathroom, already a step ahead of Sam, using the ridiculous disposable razor from the hotel’s overnight-pack to shave the hair from his head.
“I cut my hair all the time to play a role,” Robin said to Sam as he looked into the mirror and attempted to manipulate the razor.
Sam reached to take it from him. “It’ll be easier and faster, if I …”
“Thanks.” Robin sat down on the closed toilet. “I’m
thinking this is probably the most important role of my life. It’ll grow back. It grows fast. I’d suggest you do it, too, and Gina, even, but I don’t think we have the time. But let’s definitely take the razors, in case we land somewhere with running water.”
“You’ll walk in front,” Sam instructed. “Hood back. We’ll keep ours up. Stay in the shadows. Like you said, it’s all illusion and this one will work.” It would have to.
Sweat dripped down Robin’s face. “Hurry, man.”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” Sam said. “I don’t want to cut you.”
“Should we try to seek sanctuary at a monastery?” Robin asked.
“That’s an option,” Sam told him. “But our main goal is to find someplace where we can hack into the phone line—the landline. And FYI, I’m going to need you to carry both Ash and—”
“
Fuck! Shit
, turn away, turn away!”
Sam stepped back as Robin stood up, turned around, lifted the toilet seat and, yes. Robin joined the ranks of the extremely ill.
It was too much, too close, too real, too awful, and Sam joined in for the chorus, leaning over the sink. But his contribution was little more than dry heaves, since there was nothing left for his body to expel.
Still, his eyes watered, and his hands shook, and his body strained.
Robin finally flushed. “Sorry. God, I’m so sorry.”
“We all knew it was just a matter of time.” Sam turned on the water for him.
Robin only briefly splashed his face before returning to sit. “Hurry. Please.”
“I’m going to need you to carry both Ash and Emma at first,” Sam said, as if there’d been no interruption as he swiftly finished the job and used a towel to wipe
the remaining hair from Robin’s head and shoulders. “While I make sure there’re no guards in the back alley, and dispatch them if there are. Can you—”
Robin didn’t hesitate despite his shaking hands and watering eyes. “I can. I will. Whatever you need.”