Akram broke open a hay bale and spread it on the ground, getting to his knees and beckoning the youth to do the same beside him. “Now let us pray. This straw will serve as our musallah and protect us from the dung of these animals.”
A few feet away, Duke sat watching them in infrared as they knelt in the hay, bowing their foreheads to the ground. He felt nothing but contempt for them.
It’s too bad I don’t have all my money yet, he thought, because I’d waste every one of you crazy fuckers and be on my way.
53
Glen Ferguson came to in the rain, facedown in a patch of brambles beneath the weight of his brother Roger’s body, the sharp tip of a dead juniper branch jagging deep into the flesh below his left eye. He had never been so cold in his life, and for nearly a minute he was completely unable to move. At first he thought one of the bullets had nicked his spine and left him paralyzed, but then he realized he could still move his fingers and toes. He became conscious of the dead weight pressing down on his back, and drew his arms up beside him, pushing against the earth to roll himself over. The branch tore a chunk of flesh from his face as it pulled free, but he was cold enough that he hardly felt it.
He lay there a moment, feeling the icy rain beating on his face, and then groped inquiringly at Roger’s body. “Oh, no!” he gasped, suddenly lucid and struggling to sit up. He was aware that he’d been shot multiple times, and he was becoming cognizant of the damage to his skeleton and musculature.
He felt Roger’s carotid artery, but there was too much rain pelting down, his fingers too cold to detect a pulse. His thumb slipped into the exit wound at the back of the skull, and he jerked his hands back in horror, wiping them on his soaking Carhartt jacket.
The bastards had killed his little brother. At first he couldn’t believe it and simply sat there dumbly in the driving thunderstorm with Roger lying across his lap. Finally it dawned on him that the killers were still out there somewhere, trying to kill his father and older brother. He checked his watch, seeing that an hour had passed since he and Roger had decided to head down to the house.
He hefted Roger’s bulk aside, trying not to look at him, fearful of seeing his brother’s death mask. When he tried to stand, he grew so dizzy that he nearly pitched over into the brambles, so he sat back down, probing about in the dark for his AR-15. It didn’t seem to be anywhere around, so he began crawling back toward the trail. Lightning flashed, revealing the tent fifty feet away, and he crawled over to it, pulling himself in out of the rain.
Glen stripped his soaked cotton clothing, which was rapidly driving him into the advanced stages of hypothermia, feeling his body temperature rise as soon as he was naked. He checked himself over in the inky blackness to locate three exit wounds in his upper chest. The holes were small, about as big around as a pencil, and the bleeding was not profuse. He could feel the bone of both clavicles creaking as he moved his shoulders, and the fingers of his left hand didn’t respond with as much dexterity as they should have, but he could still use both arms and hands, and that was all that mattered.
His Gore-Tex boots had kept his socks dry, so he pulled the boots back on over them, and rolled up his three-layered ECW (extreme cold weather) sleeping bag. Then Glen took the scoped Mauser from beneath Roger’s bag and loaded in the five-round stripper clip by feel. He tucked the remaining four rounds into his brother’s CamelBak rucksack and rolled the ruck up inside the sleeping bag. Slipping from the tent a few moments later, he found that he still couldn’t stand.
He set off crawling toward the ridge naked and dragging the Mauser with his right arm and the sleeping bag with his left. The rain drove down on his back, and muddy droplets spattered his eyes, but he was only vaguely aware of the cold, which he knew must have slowed his bleeding so far. When he got to the ridge, he pulled himself into Kashkin’s sniper nest and unrolled the sleeping bag, zipping himself up inside its waterproof Gore-Tex shell.
The increase in body temperature would increase the bleeding, but he was dying of hypothermia even faster. Glen aimed the Mauser down the hill at the ranch and peered through the scope to see no signs of life. Three separate lightning flashes revealed nothing. He grew alarmed and unzipped the bag with the intention of crawling downhill to the ranch, but the instant the icy wind and rain hit his exposed flesh, his body was wracked with an intense pain ten times worse than any fever chill he had ever experienced. He jerked the zipper back up and decided to stay put.
Groping around inside the sleeping bag, he took a folding knife from the CamelBak and cut two armholes in the bag so he could operate the rifle without exposing his shoulders to the cold. Then he took Roger’s wool watch cap from the ruck and pulled that onto his head. After eating a Snickers bar and sucking down a quart of water, he felt a great deal better and settled in behind the rifle. There were no broken windows on the back side of the house (except for Marie’s boarded-up bedroom window), and that told him the fight down there was probably yet to begin.
“You’ve still got overwatch, Dad.”
Lighting flashed, and he saw a figure dart from the stable, running for cover behind a steel water trough.
Glen quickly worked the bolt and pulled the stock into his shoulder. “Lord God,” he whispered beneath the rolling thunder. “I beseech you in the name of all that’s holy… send me another flash of lightning and let me blow this motherfucker’s head off.”
54
Hal stood back from the upstairs window beside Marie, both of them studying the stable with every flash of lightning. They caught glimpses of men with AK-47s moving about inside, but for the most part, the enemy was keeping out of sight, so they had no idea how many they were up against.
Marie had taken Gil’s Browning from the gun safe and lain it across the guest bed for Hal to use. “Are we waiting for them to make the first move or what?”
“Right now we have the advantage,” he said. “Every minute closer to daylight works in our favor. If they move to surround the house, we’ve got trouble because we won’t be able to see them.”
“What do you think is going on with your brothers?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We underestimated the enemy, and I got a bad feeling the boys might have been taken by surprise up there.”
“God, I hope you’re wrong. Your father will never forgive — Look!” She pointed out the window. “Somebody just ran from the barn and ducked down beside the water trough.”
Hal wrapped a poncho liner around his upper body and head to reduce his heat signature, stealing a peak around the window frame. Lightning flashed, and he saw a perfect snapshot of Tahir crouching beside the corrugated water trough. “I didn’t see a weapon. Did you?”
“No, but he was clutching something in both hands. Like he was really afraid of dropping it.”
“A grenade, maybe?”
“I don’t know.”
Hal went to the top of the stairs. “Dad, be ready for a grenade!”
“He’s running toward the house!” Marie shouted.
Akram lay on his belly in the loft with the stock of the TAC-50 pulled into his shoulder, watching through the nightscope as Tahir jumped up from the water trough and took off in a headlong dash for the house, not bothering to maneuver from cover to cover as he’d been told. He cursed the youth for his stupidity and cowardice, for it was now obvious the boy’s heart was not in the mission; that he was merely going through the motions to get it over with as quickly as possible.
There was a flash of lighting, and a rifle shot rang out. The boy fell in the mud and lay there gripping his leg with his free hand, his mouth open in a scream of pain that was carried off on the wind.