Corsair

A few of the emaciated prisoners stared back at him uncertainly. “Go. That is an order.”

Like a breached levee, the few heading toward the railcar that Linda held open turned into a flood. Cabrillo stood at the corner, sweeping the compound for any interested guards. If any looked their way, he put them down, while next to him Fodl waved in more of his people. A group of women appeared from under the overturned serving tables and raced for the building, only to have someone open fire at them from their flank. One of the women went down before Juan could counterfire, hammering home a steady burst into a pyramid of crates from where the shots had originated.

The other women helped the injured girl to her feet, supporting her under her arms and making her almost hopscotch to safety.

“Bless you,” one of them said to Juan as they passed around the building and into protective cover.

Another prisoner paused at Juan’s side. He gave the man a passing glance and then returned to scanning the compound. The prisoner touched Juan’s sleeve, and he looked at him more carefully. He wasn’t an Arab like all the others. His hair and face were pale, although his skin was burned raw by the sun.

“You Chaffee?” Juan asked.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“You’ve got Alana Shepard to thank for your rescue.”

Chaffee sagged with relief. “Thank God. We were told last night she was shot for trying to escape.”

“Are you in any condition to fight?”

The CIA agent tried to pull himself erect. “Give me a gun and watch me.”

Juan pointed to where Mark Murphy was securing the old boxcar to the Pig’s rear tow hooks. From this distance, the train car looked massive and the chain as thin as a silver necklace, but there was nothing he could do about it. “Report to that guy over there. He’ll take care of you.”

“Thank you.”

Cabrillo looked at his watch. Eight minutes since the first shot fired. They had less than ten more before a horde of gunmen arrived from the training camp, and just an hour until the Libyan military arrived and opened fire on anything that moved.

Prisoners continued to stream toward the railcar, and no matter how Juan tried to urge them to hurry they just couldn’t. They were so far gone from their ordeal that even the offer of freedom couldn’t make their bodies move faster than a painful shuffle. He could almost hear his watch ticking.

Glancing over his shoulder, Juan watched them climb into the train, each one pausing when he or she was inside to help the next in line.

It wasn’t his watch Juan thought he heard. It was the rhythmic whomp-whomp-whomp of an approaching helicopter. George Adams was still twenty minutes out. It had to be the terrorists’ Mi-8.

It didn’t matter that the train car was full anyway, and only one old woman was struggling to make it to the railhead from across the compound, while behind her tents and equipment burned, sending columns of smoke into the pinking sky.

Time had run out.

TWENTY-THREE

WHEN BULLETS PEPPERED THE GROUND IN THE OLD WOMAN’S wake, Cabrillo was slapping home a fresh magazine into the underside of his assault rifle. He hadn’t expended the first, so there was no need to cock the weapon.

To Juan, at this moment, the more than one hundred people crowded into the boxcar didn’t matter. Only the old woman.

It was perhaps a fault in his logic, a synapse that fired a little off. He made no distinction between the needs of the many versus the needs of the few. At that moment, her life meant as much to him as all the others.

He broke cover and fired from the hip, laying down a blistering barrage that silenced the terrorist’s gun. The woman had frozen in place. Deer caught in headlights, flashed through Juan’s mind.

He reached her in a dozen long strides, ducking as he approached so he could scoop her up over his left shoulder without pausing. She was a solid one hundred and eighty pounds, despite the starvation diet, and must have tipped the scales at two-fifty before her ordeal. Juan staggered under the weight, his wounded leg almost buckling. The woman gave a startled yelp but didn’t struggle, as Cabrillo started back for the building, running awkwardly, half turning to watch their rear, his rifle held one-handed.

The woman suddenly screamed. Juan twisted back. A guard had appeared out of nowhere. He was armed only with a club, a suicide charge, but Cabrillo’s rifle was still pointed in the wrong direction. As he spun, the old woman’s feet missed the guard’s head by inches, and when Juan came around to get his REC7 aimed the woman used his momentum to fire a solid punch to the guard’s chin an instant before the club crashed down on her exposed neck.

The terrorist staggered back and was starting forward again when a round from Linc in the loading tower drilled him to the ground.

“Lady,” Juan panted in Arabic, “you’ve got a right cross like Muhammad Ali.”

“I always thought George Foreman had a better punch,” she replied.