Okay? Cole wondered. Am I okay?
He shook his head; he could still see the blood, and shook it harder to dislodge the image.
‘I’m returning to base, sir,’ the voice said in an authoritative tone, and in a fraction of a second everything was clear to Cole, the threat of returning to Riyadh crystalizing everything in exquisite detail. He had passed out, he remembered now, the thoughts of his family too much to bear; and it was the pilot’s voice speaking to him in those frantic tones, informing him of their return.
‘No!’ Cole screamed back through the mask. ‘No!’ he ordered again. ‘Don’t go back. Please, I’m fine,’ he continued in as reasonable a tone as he could muster.
‘Are you sure, sir?’ the pilot asked over the intercom. ‘I have a responsibility for you, and sometimes people are badly affected by these flights if they’re not used to it. Perhaps you need medical attention?’
‘I sure as hell do not,’ Cole said gruffly, remembering his assumed identity as a US congressman, ‘and I demand that you fly on towards Mecca.’
‘But sir,’ the voice came back, ‘it’s like I’ve been trying to tell you — we’re over Mecca now.’
In wild-eyed panic, Cole looked out of the cockpit windows, straining his neck to peer down at the sprawling city below. It was true, he saw immediately; they had already reached Mecca. How long had he been out of it?
But it didn’t matter now; all that mattered was action. And with a colossal force of will, Cole drove out the thoughts of his family, of how he had failed them, of the blood; in the moment he realized he was above his target, had almost missed it, he achieved a feeling of clarity, of unified purpose.
The past was the past; there was nothing he could do to change it.
But millions of lives depended upon the actions he would perform now.
And with that pure clarity, his hand went to the lever next to his chair and pulled hard.
The canopy instantaneously flew off into the skies above Mecca, followed just fractions of a second later by Cole’s chair, which was launched explosively upwards from the airplane cockpit.
Cole struggled against the G-force of the ejection, and saw the pilot struggling to control the aircraft beneath him.
Then he felt a jerk and looked upwards, pleased to see that the parachute had opened correctly and he was decelerating rapidly, descending slowly now to the streets of Mecca below.
As the ejected chair swayed in the slight breeze, Cole took a deep breath, composing himself; as the dusty streets rose to greet him, he knew he would need all of his abilities for the battle to come.
‘Target acquired,’ Lt. Colonel Gleason advised Major Harris. ‘Keep this course and we’ll drop the payload.’
Harris looked at his own instruments for confirmation. ‘Affirmative,’ he replied, ‘we will be over target in six minutes.’
‘Roger that,’ Gleason agreed. ‘Time to weapons drop six minutes.’
As Harris confirmed positions and times with the second aircraft, Gleason checked and rechecked the target coordinates and their GPS location, and readied the controls.
A part of Gleason wondered what the target was; if it was populated, and if so, by how many people, what sort of people. But — as always — he censored his own thoughts, cutting them off before they began to trouble him. He had received his orders, and that was sufficient.
He knew the target was in North Korea, and that would have to be enough; it wasn’t likely he’d be dropping a thirty thousand pound bomb on a holiday camp. The target was far more likely to be a weapons factory of some kind, probably dealing in nuclear material; and Gleason had no problem at all with obliterating such a place.
It was close now, and getting closer by the second; Gleason placed his hands on the release controls, telling himself that — whatever the place was — it would soon be wiped off the face of the earth.
Navarone knelt in the mud of the parade ground, rain beating hard around him as he aimed his assault rifle at the approaching soldiers.
He squeezed the trigger in bursts, watched as the men dropped in front of him, blood spraying from their falling bodies and mixing with the dark rain as it hit the floor.
Xie was next to him, firing his own weapon at the approaching soldiers; Navarone couldn’t see him, but he knew he was there anyway. He heard the pop of the 5.56mm rounds, saw the soldiers falling from the man’s shots.
‘Go!’ Navarone shouted above the roar of gunfire and thunder; and he didn’t have to look to know that Xie would be racing back towards the far gates, which the children had already reopened and fled through.
Navarone kept on firing as Xie ran; then he heard the man shouting back to him — ‘Go!’ — and then Navarone was up and running as Xie provided the covering fire, ejecting his used magazine and slotting in a new one as he went.
Navarone passed Xie’s kneeling form as he racked back the slide of the M4, raced further towards the gates, then stopped, turned, knelt and shouted, starting to fire as Xie got up and started running.
Their retreat continued in this fashion for what seemed like hours — although it was merely minutes — and their effective tactics kept the soldiers in front of them pinned down.
But there were so many, racing into the camp from the forest beyond, the dead always replaced by more, that Navarone and Xie’s escape seemed impossible. But Navarone had seen the last of the children pass through the gates, continuing on towards the safety of the western forest beyond; and he knew that it had been worth it.
The cold rain increased in its intensity, falling hard on Navarone as he heard Xie’s call and he turned and ran again towards the gates — so close now, so agonizingly close.
He sped past Xie, knelt and firing from the shoulder, but then he heard a guttural cry, a muffled scream.
He turned, saw that Xie was hit, rolling on his back in a deep puddle of rainwater and blood, and stopped in his tracks.
The decision was made in an instant by his subconscious, no time to think things through logically; he merely reacted the way he had been trained, the way he had been brought up.
You never left a man behind.
Navarone pulled a fragmentation grenade from his combat vest and hurled it through the air, dodging the bullets which seemed to come at him in slow motion, time distorted now by the adrenalin which surged through him.
The grenade hit and exploded, and Navarone could see body parts flying through the wet air even as he threw another, and another.
The explosions rocked him as he raced forward, but he no longer noticed; all he could see was Xie, bleeding on the wet ground.
And then he was there beside him, hauling the injured man up and across his shoulders, his rifle too. With an M4 in each hand, he fired back at the soldiers through the flames; his aim useless now with two guns, hoping only to pin them down, keep them busy while he escaped.
He turned and ran, legs pumping harder than they ever had before, zigzagging through the camp to avoid the enemy fire which followed him. He felt the passage of hot air all around him as bullets whizzed past, missing him by inches, perhaps even less.
He could see the gate right in front of him, still open after the children had passed through; he heard bullets ricocheting off the metal, splashing into the puddles around him.
And then he was through, dropping a rifle to swing the gate shut behind him, even more rounds hitting it as it closed.