Bayliss lay on his back, looking up at the scorching noontime sun. He felt the vehicle slow and stop, heard the shouting from the driver, the impossibly rapid gunshots, and watched the masked man above him fall straight down dead.
He heard another volley of pistol rounds cracking around him, heard glass shatter, a brief cry in Arabic, and then all was still.
Ricky thrashed and shrieked, frantic to get the bloody corpse off of him. His struggle ended when the dead terrorist was lifted away, out of the truck bed, and dumped onto the street. A bearded man dressed in a gray dishdasha grabbed Ricky by his body armor and pulled him up and into a seated position.
The brutal sun blurred Bayliss’s view of the stranger’s face.
“Can you walk?”
Ricky thought it some sort of shock-induced vision. The man had spoken English with an American accent. The stranger repeated himself in a shout. “Hey! Kid! You with me? Can you walk?”
Slowly Bayliss spoke back to the vision. “My... my leg’s broken, and this dude is hurt bad.”
The stranger examined Ricky’s injured leg and diagnosed, “Tib-fib fracture. You’ll live.” Then he put his hand on the unconscious man’s neck and delivered a grim prognosis. “Not a chance.”
He looked around quickly. Still, the young Mississippian could not see the man’s face.
The stranger said, “Leave him back here. We’ll do what we can for him, but I need you to get up in the passenger seat. Wrap this around your face.”
The bearded man pulled the keffiyeh head wrap from the neck of the dead terrorist and handed it to Bayliss.
“I can’t walk on this leg—”
“Suck it up. We’ve got to go. I’ll grab my gear. Move!” The stranger turned and ran down into a shaded alleyway. Bayliss dropped his Kevlar helmet in the cab, wrapped the headdress into place, climbed out of the bed and onto his good leg.Excruciating pain jolted from his right shin to his brain. The street was filling with civilians of all ages, keeping their distance, watching as if an audience to a violent play.
Bayliss hopped to the passenger door, opened it, and a masked Arab in a black dress shirt fell out into the street. There was a single bullet wound above his left eye. A second terrorist lay slumped over the steering wheel. Bloody foam dripped from his lips with his soft wheezes. Ricky had just shut his door when the American stranger opened the driver’s side, pulled the man out, and let him drop to the asphalt. He drew his pistol again and, without so much as a glance, fired one round into the man in the street. He then turned his attention to the pickup, tossed in a brown gear bag, an AK-47, and an M4 rifle. He climbed behind the wheel, and the truck lurched forward and over the lowered chain of the roadblock.
Ricky spoke softly, his brain still trying to catch up with the action around him. “We’ve got to go back. There might be others alive.”
“There aren’t. You’re it.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
Ricky hesitated, then said, “Because you were with the sniper team that fragged those dudes at the crash site?”
“Maybe.”
For nearly a minute they drove in silence. Bayliss looked ahead through the windshield at the mountains, then down at his shaking hands. Soon the young soldier turned his attention to the driver.
Immediately the stranger barked, “Don’t look at my face.”
Bayliss obeyed, turning back to the road ahead. He asked, “You’re American?”
“That’s right.”
“Special Forces?”
“No.”
“Navy? You’re a SEAL?”
“No.”
“Force Recon?”
“Nope.”
