Allah's Scorpion Read Online Free Page B

suddenly cried out and went down. But there was no time to help him. This was her fault, because she had been stupid; she hadn’t counted on them being so heavily armed. She ejected the spent magazine, pulled the spare from her back pocket, and rammed it home. The returning fire was starting to concentrate on her now, rock chips flying all over the place from near misses.
    She rolled left as she continued to fire.
    A helicopter swooped down from the crest of the Camp Delta hill with a deep-throated clatter of its rotors, its spotlight cutting a broad swath down the slope, across the fence, and along the no-man’s zone. Gloria and Talarico were briefly illuminated, but then the knot of black-clad shooters and prisoners dressed in orange was lit like day.
    Spotlights in the guard towers all along the perimeter fence came on and a lot of sirens started blaring up and down the line.
    The Boeing MH-6J chopper peeled off to the east, firing a spray of 7.62mm rounds from both of its miniguns, bracketing the escaping prisoners.
    At least one of them raised his weapon and fired at the helicopter, but the rest of them concentrated their fire on Gloria.
    Something blunt hit her hard, like a baseball bat, in the left hip, and her leg went instantly numb. She squeezed off two more shots, and one of the POWs in orange went down.
    The chopper was coming around for a second pass when two of the black-clad figures suddenly turned and started shooting the POWs.
    Gloria propped herself up with her good leg so she could get a better look. It made no sense that they would kill one another.
    The helicopter pulled up short in a hover twenty or thirty meters away, its spotlight illuminating the scene like day. All of the POWs were down. One of the black-clad figures looked up, shook his fist at the chopper, and suddenly disappeared in a bright flash-bang, the noise hammering off the side of the hill.
    Gloria’s mouth dropped open. He’d killed the POWs he’d come to rescue, rather than let them be recaptured, and then had committed suicide.
    She pulled out her walkie-talkie to warn the chopper pilot to stay back, when the other three black-clad figures disappeared like the first in flash-bangs, blowing themselves up.
    Moments later the chopper came back and set down hard ten meters from where Gloria was up on one knee. Two armed men in Marine Corps BDUs sitting in the starboard doorway jumped out and raced back to her.
    “We’re going to have company real soon, ma’am,” one of them said, hauling Gloria to her feet. His sewn name tag read JONES.
    The other marine had dropped beside Talarico, who lay facedown in the sand. He looked up and shook his head.
    “Okay, we’re outta here—now,” Jones said urgently.
    “We’re not leaving Bob,” Gloria said, pulling away.
    “We’ve got a Frontier Brigade patrol just about on top of us, and we’re not allowed to shoot at them—”
    “We’re not leaving my partner!” Gloria shouted.
    Jones slung his weapon, hustled Gloria over to where Talarico lay, and between him and his partner dragged the body back to the chopper. They stuffed it unceremoniously inside, then helped Gloria up onto the sill.
    The instant the marines were aboard, the chopper pilot hauled the machine airborne and immediately peeled to the west, just clearing the razor wire atop the perimeter fence, before climbing steeply to the crest of the Delta hill.
    Gloria held tightly to Talarico’s lifeless body, his half-open eyes staring up at her, his face unnaturally white. She had killed him as surely as if she had shot him herself. Her heart was sick just thinking what she would have to tell his wife. It was a part of the business they were in; some of her friends had bought it in Afghanistan and Iraq. And her own husband had been tortured to death in a Cuban Intelligence Service prison outside Havana. She knew about loss.
    But this time she had been the one in charge; this time the responsibility had rested on her