Echo Six: Black Ops 5 - Strikeforce Syria (15 page)

“Complete? You mean you’ve already started?”

“Why, yes. Rabbi Gold is a trained surgeon, and he’s been guiding me with my studies. I work on medical theory on the Internet using our satellite connection, and spend my spare time helping our people when they are ill. It is a good way to learn. But I think perhaps you have underestimated what our village has to offer, Commander.”

“I think so, too. Please, call me Abe.”

“Yes, I will. Abe, why are those people watching us?”

He whirled. A steep, narrow track led up into a distant rocky hillside. At the top, two men were sitting in a jeep-type vehicle, a Russian built UAZ, watching them closely. Syrian regulars. Then they started the engine and headed toward them. He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her to him. She stiffened, but he ignored her protests.

“Kiss me.”

“What? Uhh.”

She struggled at first, but he gripped her hard. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the vehicle getting close. Despite the danger, the proximity of the girl almost blew his mind. She smelt faintly of clean desert, the deep desert, a fresh odor of spices and herbs. There was a faint, arousing tang of musk beneath her natural scent, and incredibly, he found himself becoming excited. With a huge effort, he killed the impulse and broke off the kiss to watch the soldiers.

“What the hell? What are you…”

“Schh. We have to make them believe we’re here for a passionate session of hot lovemaking.
 
Anything less, and they’ll be even more suspicious.”

She understood immediately, and before he said anything more, pulled him back to her and fastened her lips around his. For almost a minute she kissed him passionately, and then she relaxed as the jeep came to a stop, ten meters from where they sat.

“What do they want?” she whispered.

Probably to rape you and rob and murder me, but there’s no need for you to know, not just yet.

“Maybe nothing. Try and get rid of them.”

The soldiers walked over to them, both men relaxed, their assault rifles slung. The first man stopped a meter away and barked something at Talley in Arabic. Nava answered him, but the man angrily ignored her and shouted again. There was no way he could answer, not without giving himself away.

Nava frantically tried to ease the soldier’s suspicions, but to no avail. The other man came up to Talley and gripped his shirt, shouting at him, only inches from his face. He could smell the garlic on the soldier’s breath and the stench of his body odor. Flecks of spittle sprayed over him, and he decided the guy was close enough. He used one hand to grip the soldier around the neck as if in an embrace. With the other, he snatched out his pistol from under his shirt, the Makarov taken from the rebel back in Aleppo, and shot the man in the belly. The gunshot was muffled by the proximity to the man’s uniform, but it was still shockingly loud in the quiet of the deep desert.

The other soldier froze, and then reached to unsling his rifle. He was a second too late. Talley shifted his aim and put two rounds into the man’s chest. He staggered back as the 9mm bullets hammered into him, and he fell, blood oozing out of his body. He looked at Talley in mute appeal, astonished that this simple civilian had retaliated. Then his mouth opened, he dribbled blood down his shirt, and he slumped to the sand.

Talley looked at Nava.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so, but it is not over."

He gave her a reassuring smile. She wasn't used to this.

"There are no more of them. We’re in the clear."

"No, that’s not what I meant. Look!"

She pointed at a black, roiling mass moving swiftly across the sky several kilometers away.

"What is it?"

"A storm."

"Bad?"

She nodded emphatically. "It will be very bad. We need to take shelter."

He became aware of something new. Sand, swirling in the air. Then the storm struck with furious intensity. One moment the sky was clear blue, then the heavy clouds came scudding in, and the sun was no longer there. The wind was screaming across the dunes at more than sixty kilometers per hour, lashing them with stinging grains of sand. Yet still the wind speed increased, and the sand undulated across the desert, almost like waves on a vast, storm-ridden sea. The only shelter was the Syrian Jeep, and he dragged her into its lee, but she wasn't satisfied.

"It's no good. We could be trapped here, buried in sand. The storm could last for hours, perhaps days."

"What do you suggest we do?"

"We have to take the vehicle to the top of the hill and shelter over the other side. If we stay in the open desert, well, I’ve seen entire trucks just disappear."

"Okay, we’ll put your scooter on the jeep and take it with us. Otherwise, it'll disappear."

She stared at him. "And the bodies of those men you killed?"

"Leave them where they are. The desert will dig their graves."

She nodded and helped him lift the scooter onto the rear of the vehicle. He drove up the hill where the soldiers had first emerged. It had almost disappeared in the fog of the sand swirling around them. The track was now just a faint line of tire tracks, and it was obvious they’d disappear completely when the storm reached its peak. As would the track leading back to Salmeh, but that was the least of their problems.

The wind was stronger, and Nava told him this was just the preliminary. The main storm was about to hit. The first task was to get them under cover. He ripped the canvas shelter from the jeep and secured it to the bodywork, away from the direct line of the storm. The wind speed increased still more, and she helped him wrestle with the heavy, wayward canvas as the storm tried to tear it out of their hands. Their world was a nightmare of sand, forcing its way into their clothes and abrading their skin, scouring it as if by sandpaper.

They finally got it in position and slumped under the dark canvas to wait out the storm. For hours, they battled the wind and the sand. Every few seconds they had to hold down the canvas and refasten it as the storm smashed at it with all the fury the desert could muster. They had to exert every last ounce of their energy to keep the shelter intact, knowing that if the hurricane force winds managed to find a weakness and get underneath, they’d lose their only chance of surviving the desert's fury. He checked his wristwatch. The storm had already raged for over an hour.

"How long do we have to wait before it blows over?"

It was almost dark inside the shelter, but he saw her face, wreathed with concern. "There's no way of knowing. It could last an hour, even a day or two. We just have to be patient."
           

Outside, the storm continued to scream with demonic fury, and even the sand beneath their feet seemed to tremble. He felt her hand find his and was comforted that she felt able to trust him enough for the contact. She needed the reassurance of human touch, of his strength, as a talisman against the violence of the hurricane blasting at them just the other side of the canvas.

Or maybe she remembers that kiss?

He could still taste her lips, the spicy sweetness of her, and her eager warmth. He grinned to himself; he was letting his imagination carry him away.

But it sure felt good.

Their canvas shelter creaked and strained as the elements fought to find a way through to them, to tear away their flimsy protection and expose them to the outside. To abrade their bodies with sand until they were just bleached skeletons, perhaps to be found decades later by some wandering Arab. And then the storm did find a way through. A corner of the canvas split, and the wind tore at them like a brute, a creature from hell pulling at the material, trying to suck them outside to their doom. He fought to repair the split, but the sand whistled through and struck him with such force that at first he cried aloud as the skin was flayed from his hand. He could barely see. The dark interior swirled with the insane soup of sand that was doing its best to destroy them.

Another split opened in the canvas, and he knew they were finished. There was only one chance to survive, and he retied the ropes to fasten their bodies to the jeep, so when the shelter disappeared, at least they would be anchored from the force of the storm. He could see the canvas was about to disappear, and he turned to her.

"We’ll be exposed to the storm. It’ll be bad?"

She didn't reply, and he took hold of her, pulling her to him. He could feel the shivering in her body as the fear overwhelmed her. He gripped her tightly, doing his best to give her the protection of his own body. To his astonishment, her mouth came up to his lips, and at the moment the canvas finally tore away, they were still gripping each other, locked together with a kiss and an embrace that had all the intensity of the storm that was trying to kill them.

The canvas went completely, and they were exposed to the full force of the sand. He pulled away from her and pushed her down as close to the front wheel of the jeep as possible, protecting her with his own body. He leaned his head close to hers.

"Hold tight. We'll get through this."

He heard her reply, faint under the ferocity of the storm. "Don't leave me, Abe."

"I won’t."

He held her for what seemed like an eternity. The wind and sand hammered at him, but when he checked his wristwatch, it had only been an hour and a half. And then the wind died.

Slowly, he released her and stood up. The other side of the jeep, the side that faced the storm, was almost covered in sand. Without the vehicle, he knew they would have been buried. The sand would have been their grave. He looked down the hillside where they'd left the dead soldiers, but all that remained was a smooth surface of new sand. He heard her climb to her feet and brush herself off.

"Abe."

He turned, and her hands went around him, her lips clamped to his mouth, and almost before he was aware of it, she was pulling off his clothes. He did the same for her. They fell to the ground, the gritty surface of new sand, but she didn't care. Not for anything, only the urgency of their need. They made love desperately, both aware of how close they'd just come to death.

She told him she knew he’d protected her with his body, all he had to defend her from the storm. Her didn’t reply. What else could he do? Maybe she was more used to the local Muslim men, who may have demanded she sacrifice her body to protect them. He smiled to himself, wondering if it was true. Afterward, they held each other, enjoying the silence and peace of two people who’d triumphed over everything nature's fury could throw at them. And in that triumph had found each other.

Finally, she stared up at him.

"Those men you killed, have their bodies disappeared?"

"I checked. There's no sign of them. The desert swallowed them up."

" It was terrible, so…so quick.”

“You’ve never seen a man die before?”

“No, not like that.”

She was silent again, and he knew she was remembering the brief savagery of the attack. Finally, she nodded to herself, as if she'd put it into a compartment in her mind and was ready to move on. She didn’t mention their lovemaking.

"Abe, we need to dig ourselves out. "

"Yeah, they'll wonder where we got to."

"No, they will have seen the storm, and they’ll know we would have taken cover. It is the only thing to do in the deep desert. But we need the vehicle to get back. The scooter won’t make it. The surface of the desert is too soft and new.”

They worked for over an hour, ripping sand away from around the vehicle with their bare hands, until there was a path sufficient to drive out. He was astonished by her strength, and her calm as she worked with him to escape the grasp of the sand. They climbed aboard and drove away. He was thinking of how to make the jeep disappear when they got back, but then it occurred to him it could be useful.