One took Cameron down before Danny saw the lions and could warn anyone, and the other took Danny down before he could get his gun on it. Danny’s raised gun saved him though, along with the Kevlar suit under his white Soviet one. The lion bit into his gun, while slashing at his chest, as Danny lay on his back, holding his weapon above his face. Danny was able to keep the thrashing animal at bay just long enough for his sister to put an arrow through its neck.
Cameron wasn’t as fortunate. The Kevlar lining protected his chest, but the lion’s razor sharp claws slashed Cameron across the face and neck. Additionally, in trying to defend himself, Cameron’s hand was crushed inside the lion’s steel jaws. Danny helped him out as soon as Hayley freed him from his own attacker. Rolling the lion off himself, Danny rose up on one knee, adjusted his scope, and put a quick two bullets through the other lion’s skull.
The beast collapsed on Cameron in a silent heap. Cameron lay motionless as Hayley and Blake scrambled to help him. To her credit, Abbey didn’t scream once. She might have been too scared. Danny surveyed the surrounding area to make sure there were no more threats. Of all the predators they were trying to avoid, mountain lions had never crossed their minds tonight. Now his senses were on high alert for anything.
Blake took the scarf off Abbey and wrapped it tightly around Cameron’s neck—who was barely conscious—hoping the blood would clot and seal the wound. The cold would help. The left side of Cameron’s face was a shredded mess, and he could barely move his hand, but they packed snow inside a blanket, tied it around his arm, and secured that arm to his chest.
Danny pulled out two morphine shots from the first aid kit in his backpack and injected one of them into Cameron. The other he handed to Blake, who had given Abbey to Hayley again and was now going to help Cameron keep walking. “Only give it to him if he asks for it, or if someone finds us, to help him keep quiet. Got it?”
Blake understood. Cameron was in intense pain, but the morphine kicked in quickly, and his hand was already growing numb from the snow. Giving him the other shot probably would have made him feel better, but he wouldn’t have been able to move, and they were having enough trouble carrying a seventy-pound girl through the six feet of snow. No way they could have carried Cameron too. The first shot of morphine weakened his legs enough as it was, and he had to heavily lean on Blake to keep moving. This was really going to slow them down, and they had almost six more miles to go. A glance at his watch told Danny it was already 4:50 a.m. It was going to be daylight well before they returned. If they made it back at all.
FIFTY-NINE: “Too Many Questions”
Major Eddie was frustrated. Hopping out of the helicopter, he approached a group of men standing around an American body. Not only was the man not alive, but he had been shot in the head at point blank range. Why? What fool had been unable to defend himself against a fallen man with no weapon? That stupidity had wasted a significant intelligence opportunity.
Then he heard the radio call from the jeeps that had pursued the other Americans. They had cornered the other jeep on a dead-end road and exploded it with a rocket launcher. They claimed they were sure the girl was not in the jeep, but by blowing it up they had not only killed the two people who might know where she still was—if indeed she hadn’t been in the jeep—but made any evidence the Americans might have had on them worthless as well.
A fourth and final American body was found in the lower level of the hotel. He’d thrown himself on a grenade and was not going to be answering any questions either. An honorable death, no doubt, but a worthless one to the major. He needed a living being to get answers. Apparently he wasn’t going to get any.
It wasn’t altogether a wasted trip though. Not even close. As Eddie entered the storage room downstairs where three Qi Jia men lay, it was clear this was where they’d been keeping the girl. What didn’t make sense was how the men were positioned. They didn’t appear to have been moved either. How did they get this far into the room with four armed men and a little girl in it? How did two of them die from single shots to the head while the third took three to the chest? Why not shoot the other man in the head too?
He had an uneasy feeling he wasn’t getting the entire picture. He had Cabo radio the other vehicles to try to find someone who had been in contact with the dead soldiers downstairs. Two men were brought to Major Eddie. They both admitted to having been in conversation with the men who were killed prior to chasing the other Americans away in the jeep. Eddie wanted to know what they had said.
One of the soldiers gave a detailed account of what he’d heard on the radio. The men had followed a heat signal into the building and then heard voices. They came downstairs and entered the room but saw no one.
“Wait,” Major Eddie stopped them. “Saw no one?”
The man nodded. They had radioed that the room was completely dark and no one was in it. Then there was shooting, and they all died.
So the room was empty, but these men were killed in here and not moved? Major Eddie nodded to himself and cleared the room of everyone except his men. “What are these names on the lockers?” he asked Lazzo, tapping the steel doors and reading some of the names to himself. “Stephen King, John Grisham, Shel Silverstein…”
“Writers,” Lazzo replied. “American writers.”
That meant nothing to Eddie. He and his men searched the lockers but found nothing of real value, until they took the clothes out of the C. S. Lewis locker and found what seemed to be some kind of safe in the wall. It had an alphanumeric keypad. Eddie had a feeling the answers he was looking for were locked behind this door.
He had no clue what code might be needed to open the door, so he had the panel scanned for any explosive devices that may have been set on the other side. Showing none, Eddie had Cabo wire it with their own explosives. They cleared out of the room, in case the explosion caused the roof to cave in, and blew the door. Omar climbed down into the hole first, ready for anything. There was no resistance. He gave the “all clear,” and Eddie and Lazzo descended into the bunker while Cabo stood guard at the entrance.
Eddie took in the room with a panoramic turn. Impressive. There was a wall of monitors with only two screens on, one showing Cabo in the room above them. The other showed a few men hanging out in the hallway. So, from down here they’d seen the men coming, closed the door, and watched through the cameras as they’d searched the room. That’s how they’d gotten the jump on them. Made sense. He looked around at the rest of the room. There was a large control panel with tons of switches with stickers covering them. He read some of the stickers. “Room 217 — Turn chair… Room 217 — Whispers… Room 217 — Door creak… Room 217 — Cat Meow…” It meant nothing to him. There were more switches for the individual monitors, the heater, the generator, etc. The room also contained a refrigerator, a table and several chairs, and a bed in the corner with a generator humming beside it.
Eddie sat on the bed and looked at the pillow. Someone had been lying on the bed recently, and based on how far up the blankets remained tucked, it couldn’t have been a big person. A little girl perhaps? There was only one light in the room, and a tunnel leading to somewhere Lazzo said was welded shut from the inside. How many people had been down here? The four men and the girl? So where was the girl? He walked to the ladder and called up to Cabo, telling him to have the men do a room-by-room scan of every room they could get into in the hotel. There were thirty men here now—fourteen he’d brought with him and sixteen others who had been here before or arrived since. They should be able to cover everything.