He shrugged. “I feel horrible.”
Eric smiled. “Good. It means you’re not a monster.”
They finished loading the last body in the van, then Martin handed a cell phone to Eric. “We found this burner in Fletcher’s car. The rest of the men were clean.”
Eric pulled his cell phone from the pocket of his jacket, and held it next to Fletcher’s until Fletcher’s phone beeped. “Clark, did you get that?”
Clark replied over the ear-piece. “We got it. Karen’s running the backtrack. There was nothing else in the storage unit?”
“It’s a dead end,” Eric said, “but if we track where that phone’s been, we know where Fletcher’s been.”
John was listening over his ear-piece, but it suddenly went quiet. He tapped it, thinking perhaps it was dislodged, but Eric shook his head.
“That’s right,” Eric said. “It was just like that.” He paused, then continued, “That is correct. Everything is under control. We’ll continue with the mission.”
John wondered what Clark was saying and why he was cut from the conversation. Was it about him mistakenly killing Fletcher? He replayed the events in his mind, how Eric struck Fletcher, how he came to help defend Eric, the blur of the fight.
It happened so fast, his body on autopilot. He punched the first man in the kidneys, because he knew that a blow to the kidneys — if hard enough — would incapacitate most men.
When he struck, he knew something was wrong. His arm was a piece of iron, driven by the power of a freight train. The man collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. Then, the sickening crunch traveling up his arm as he hit the second man in the solar plexus, and the split second where he knew he had collapsed the guy’s sternum.
He was so strong, so fast. He knew as he struck that it was a killing blow, the heart destroyed as the bone shards lancing through it, only seconds before it would start spasming, blood leaking into the body cavities, blood pressure dropping.
It was the eyes that haunted him. They went wide, the pupils dilating, but he had no time to waste as he saw. He saw Fletcher struggling to pull a gun. Eric was still on the ground, dazed. Everything slowed and he knew that Fletcher was going to kill Eric.
He couldn’t allow that.
He pulled his M11 and fired, two quick shots that left his ears ringing as he hit Fletcher center mass, just like in the shooting house.
Time sped up and he realized his mistake. He had killed Fletcher, their target, the man with the caesium.
Oh no.
He turned and saw the man Eric killed, a wet spot spreading across his pants as his bladder loosened.
He turned back to the first man, the one he kidney punched, dead on the dusty white rock. The second man he killed lay there as well, glassy eyes staring emptily. Eric scrambled up, grabbing Fletcher, searching his jacket and his pockets.
He couldn’t take it. He lurched forward and heaved, his body convulsing as he emptied his stomach of breakfast, the bitter taste of coffee and bile burning his throat. He watched Eric open the door to the storage unit, enter, then storm out, yelling in frustration. The rock crunched as Martin, Kelly and Johnson roared up in the second van.
The mission had come up empty. There was no caesium in the unit, and he just killed the man who could have told them where it was.
His ear-piece crackled to life, jolting him back to the present, and he heard Clark’s voice. “It’s a burner all right, purchased two days ago at Walmart. The backtrack is triangulating his position from the cell phone towers. We also have his incoming and outgoing phone calls. There’s only one number, and it tracks back to another burner cell, purchased at the same Walmart. We’re running a backtrack on that phone, too.”
Mark Kelly picked up the spent shell casings from John’s M11 and handed them to him. He shook his head and Kelly shrugged, pocketing the spent brass. Roger Johnson handed him two new bullets and said quietly, “Don’t forget to reload.”
Numb, John thumbed the decocking lever and removed the magazine from his M11, added the two bullets, and reinserted it. His hands moved of their own accord, muscle memory ingrained from countless hours on the gun range.
“We’ve got something,” Clark finally said. “The other phone has gone off-air, but we have a day’s worth of data and a physical convergence at a bar named the Rusty Bucket not far from your current location.”
“Roger that,” Eric said. “The caesium has been moved, we’ve probably only got a few hours before they notice these four missing and everyone bolts. Can you ping the cell phones in the bar and start a backtrack on each of them?”
“Already in progress.”
Eric addressed John and the men. “We’re going in. If the caesium is on the move, it could be out of town or out of state before we can stop it. We’ve got a limited window. Someone in the APR knows where it is. We’ll level that place if we have to, but we will find that caesium.”
The market buzzed with activity as people tried to finish their shopping before evening prayers. As Deion and the others threaded their Toyota down the dirt road, the Afghani men looked askew at the Americans, then quickly looked away.
Another truck pulled up behind them and four men in camos exited, each holding an HK416. They took up defensive positions while managing to look causally bored. Their leader, a big raw-boned man named Joshua Morse, gave Deion a nod.
The blistering heat was finally lifting, but he still felt the trickle of sweat down his back. The air was full of smells, from trash piles near the edge of the market, to the lingering smoke from outside cooking. The market was lined with stalls selling bicycle parts, sandals, and vegetables. Although he had been gone for over a year, it felt like he had never left. He sighed as his radio crackled to life.
“We have eyes on you, Freeman. It’s clear.” The voice belonged to Bill Burton, a Delta Operator everyone called Redman for the constant wad of chew in his mouth. His men were staked out in positions on the roof tops, waiting for Deion’s team to arrive.
Deion keyed the PRC-148. “Keep an eye out, Redman. We can trust this guy for the meet, but that’s it.”
“Roger that, Freeman.”
Neil led them to a room in the back of a building to meet General Azim’s representative. The room was dingy white, the rug on the floor tattered and threadbare. The man waiting for them couldn’t have been older than seventeen, with barest trace of a black beard, but he was old enough to carry the AK-47 over his shoulder. Deion noted his robe, the sandals, the dead eyes. Physically he was a kid, but his dead eyes proved he’d stopped being a kid a long time before. Outside the sky was darkening, and the room was meagerly lit by a single bulb on the ceiling. “What’s your name?” Deion asked in fluent Pashto.
The young man registered shock and answered back in Pashto. “You speak well for an infidel.”
“Thank you. I’m Deion.”
“I am Jaabir. General Azim would like you to know the Taliban had nothing to do with the attack on your base.”
Deion raised an eyebrow. “Really? Why should I trust General Azim?”
“The Taliban would not attack a small outpost in the desert. We would only attack the foreign occupiers who were brandishing their weapons against the brave and honorable Afghans who wished only to repel the invading army.”
Nancy tapped him on the shoulder. “What’s he saying?”
Jaabir drew back, glaring at her, but spoke in broken English. “I do not speak to women. Their presence here is an affront to Allah.”
“Settle down, Jaabir.” He turned to Nancy. “Relax. Take Val and Neil and go outside. I want to talk to him alone.”