Heart of a Hero (21 page)

Horror swamped her. This could
not
be happening. She couldn’t take any more. No more. Not another second in this awful place.

Hunter turned his back on the smoke and scanned the trees along the opposite bank of the Shilongwe. “Sarah?”

She couldn’t answer, couldn’t talk. Couldn’t think. All she could do was stare at the billowing black smoke and think about what had happened at Ishonga.

“Sarah—” he grabbed her arm “—listen to me!
Focus.
The helo will come from there, see? From the north. Look.”

She moved her head woodenly. He was pointing his gun upriver.

“When it does, we have to move fast. And I mean
fast.
Do
everything
I say. No questions. Got it?”

She stared at his blackened face. It was totally expressionless, showing no glimpse of compassion for what was happening in that village along the Oyambo. The man was inhuman.

Resentment pooled in her stomach. She wanted to get away from him, from this place. Far away.

“Do you understand me, Sarah?”

She forced herself to nod numbly.

“Good. Now see that sandbank, just beyond the shallows?” He pointed into the river. “That’s where our guys will land. As soon as the chopper approaches, we wade out there. You hang on to me. Got it?”

Before she could answer, Sarah heard the distinct and distant chop of helicopter blades, the sound expanding and contracting through levels of humidity along the river. Her heart began to jackhammer. The machine materialized, silver in the shimmering, white-hot sky. It banked and flew in low along the course of the brown river. The sound grew louder. Deafening. Water rippled and flattened out in concentric circles as it closed in. Trees bowed. Leaves flew and birds scattered.

She felt Hunter’s hand grip hers. Her heart tripped in a panicky lurch of fear and relief. In a couple of hours she’d be out of this hellish place, away from this man and everything he represented.

The helicopter hovered over the sandbank, and she could see the pilot inside giving a thumbs-up. Hunter yanked her forward. “Head down,” he yelled over the roar of the lethal rotor blades as he pulled her into the river.

Warm water filled her shoes instantly and thick silt sucked
at her feet. He drew her in deeper. Faster. The brown water was now above her waist. It was deeper than she’d thought. She could feel the current dragging at her clothes. The downdraft from the chopper plastered her hair onto her head and whipped the ends sharply against her cheeks. Tears streamed from her eyes as she squinted into the force of the wind. Hunter dragged her in even deeper. She hung to him for dear life. They were almost there. Then she heard a crack.

Hunter froze. So did she.

Then another sharp crack split the air.

Gunshots.

Terror sliced through her heart. “Someone’s shooting at us!” she screamed, the vortex of wind and sound sucking up her words and flinging them out over the water.

A bullet pinged against the chopper, then another. Everything blurred into slow motion. Sarah registered the pilot making signals to Hunter. He gestured back. The chopper lifted, veered sharply up to the left and climbed high over the treetops.

Sarah stared in dismay as the metal beast, her only hope of rescue, her lifeline, disappeared, becoming a silver speck in the shimmering heat of the Congo sky.

A bullet slammed into the river right next to her, shooting a jet of water into her face. She opened her mouth to scream, but before any sound came out, Hunter’s hand hit her hard on the back of her head, knocking her facedown into river. She spluttered, choking in a mouthful of water that tasted like sand. She tried to wriggle free, to gasp for air, but Hunter yanked her under. She held her breath. She couldn’t see. He drew her down deeper, and suddenly she could no longer touch the bottom. Water swirled around her, tangling her skirt up around her hips, her hair over her face. She was running out of breath. She tried desperately to fight Hunter’s death grip, to reach the surface.
But she couldn’t. He held on, keeping her under. Her lungs were going to burst.
He was drowning her! She was going to drown!
She felt herself being pulled sideways as the current merged with another and doubled in strength. Then it tripled, sucking her into a cold deep channel, dragging her to the bottom. And everything went black.

07:42 Alpha. São Diogo Island.
Monday, September 22

“W
e lost McBride’s signal there, ’bout thirty klicks south of the Cameroon border.” December Ngomo pointed at one of the LCD screens mounted along the wall, his heavily-accented voice reverberating through the FDS situation room.

Jacques Sauvage moved closer to the screen. He narrowed his eyes, studied the terrain in silence, his concentration pulling at the scar that sliced down the left side of his face. “That where the pilot saw them go under?”

“Yebo,”
Ngomo said in his native Zulu.

Rafiq Zayed looked up from the report in his hands. “Any chance he lost coverage when he went back into dense bush?”

“Negative,” said Ngomo. “The signal was lost right there, in the Shilongwe River.”

Sauvage cursed under his breath. The satellite phone that emitted McBride’s GPS signal may have been damaged.

Or worse.

They all knew Hunter had a backup radio, but breaking radio silence now would be suicide. It would broadcast their location to anyone who had the equipment to tune in. They had no way of knowing now whether their man had taken a bullet and gone down.

Sauvage turned to Zayed. “You have the chopper on standby in Cameroon?”

Zayed nodded, his liquid eyes intense under hooked brows. “But sending it in now would be a death mission. Airspace has completely shut down in the north. Whole place is set to blow, and anyone with half a brain is getting the hell out.”

Sauvage checked his watch. “Then we wait.” Time was not a luxury they could afford, but they had little alternative now. “If McBride is okay, he’ll head north, to the border.” He turned his back on the screen and engaged the eyes of first Zayed, and then Ngomo. The corner of his mouth curled slowly into his characteristically crooked smile. “It was looking too smooth,
non?
Trust Irish to take the tough way out.” Sauvage used their affectionate tag for McBride. But apart from his Irish accent, the men knew nothing about Hunter’s past. McBride, Sauvage, Zayed and Ngomo
never
talked about the past. Not in a way that mattered. It was an unspoken pact among these men. It went to the heart of the bond between them.

All they knew was that Hunter had arrived at the gates of the Légion Étrangère—the French Foreign Legion—fifteen years ago with a thick Irish brogue and a look of murder in his strangely colored eyes. That look had eventually left him.
Mostly. But the brogue had stayed, only softening, becoming veiled after years of his speaking only French.

These disparate men had understood each other back then, as they did now. For hidden reasons of their own, each had been driven to the gates of Fort de Nogent in Paris, desperate to seek asylum with the notorious “Legion of the Damned,” where a man could bury his past in order to fight for France. If he survived his contract, he could come out with a new identity and a French passport. A shot at a new life.

They’d all earned their second chance by coming close to death in the name of a country that was not their own, fighting with a crack army of foreigners, the biggest and most legitimate mercenary force in the world. They’d served in places like Bosnia, Rwanda, Zaire, Chad, central Africa, Lebanon, Somalia, the Gulf. They’d developed the Legion mind-set, where soldiers of many nations and many pasts had to set aside differences and stand by each other and die for a foreign nation. The resulting bond that had formed between the men was formidable, sealed with discipline, trust, solidarity and respect for tradition.

It was this mind-set, this philosophy, that McBride, Sauvage, Zayed and Ngomo took with them when they left the Legion to form the Force du Sable, an efficient, lean, private military company that over the last ten years had developed a reputation for having trained some of the most skilled and dangerous soldiers on earth—fearless warrior monks who now served as a model for future rapid-action units in a modern world of limited-intensity conflict and terrorism.

Zayed’s eyes flashed back to the LCD screen and he gave a soft snort. “Tough way out? That terrain between the Shilongwe and the Cameroonian border is some of the most hostile known to man. Plus he’s got the nurse with him.”

“McBride’s come out of worse,” Ngomo said simply, and turned back to his computer, his massive hands dwarfing the keyboard.

08:03 Alpha. Shilongwe River.
Monday, September 22

As the river widened and the current slowed, the drop in velocity and Sarah’s limp weight began to drag Hunter down. Wet clothing didn’t help. At least the sealed biohazard container was buoyant, as was his waterproof pack. With the container in one hand and his other arm hooked across Sarah’s chest, he gave slow, powerful scissor kicks, swimming diagonally across the current, using it instead of fighting it.

As he moved downriver, he scanned the wall of tangled vegetation that crowded the banks for any signs of movement, but saw none. The forest was dense along this stretch. There was likely no one about for miles.

Hunter soon found what he was looking for—a break in the vegetation. He aimed for a gentle slope of white beach about a hundred yards downstream. At least they were moving in the direction of the Cameroonian border.

He neared the bank, sought footing in the silt, dragged Sarah up out of the water and laid her down on the sand. He immediately checked the seal on the biohazard canister. To his relief, it was secure. His rifle and machete were also still strapped across his back. He shrugged off his pack, glanced around. The place was deserted. They’d be safe for a while.

He turned his attention to Sarah, and his heart stalled. There was froth around her mouth and nose, and her skin was going blue. He dropped to his knees, felt for a pulse.

There was none.

Guilt rammed into his heart. He hadn’t realized she was this far gone. He’d been too worried about being shot at, too worried about losing the pathogen. He quickly opened her mouth, clearing away foam, checking for any foreign material. He placed one hand on her forehead, tilted her chin back with the other, opening her airway. He pinched her nostrils shut, sucked in a deep breath of air and put his mouth over hers.

He blew a slow and steady stream of breath into her, his eyes fixed on her chest, watching for a sign that air was getting into her lungs.

He waited two seconds, saw her chest rise and sink as the air expelled from her lungs. He sucked in another deep breath and once again positioned his lips over hers, keeping his eyes trained on her chest as he blew. He saw it rise again. He quickly located her breastbone and began chest compressions, alternating compressions with breaths, again and again.

Hunter’s whole body ached. He was wet with river water and sweat, being steamed alive under the equatorial sun. His vision began to swim, and the guilt in his heart was nearly overwhelming. He’d thought of the biohazard container first. He’d thought of the mission, of the millions of people who would die if he didn’t get the pathogen out of the jungle. But perhaps, just maybe, if he’d tended to Sarah a second earlier…Hot anger swirled through the cold guilt in his chest. He’d be damned if he was going to let her die!

He gritted his teeth. He’d gotten her this far. Now he was going to take her
and
the pathogen all the way.

He sucked in another deep breath of air and forced it steadily it into her lungs, mechanically pumping her heart.

And then suddenly, he felt the small flutter of a pulse. Hunter’s heart stumbled, kicked hard against his ribs. Her limbs spasmed and her stomach began to heave. He quickly flipped
Sarah onto her side and she retched violently, expelling river water and lumps of foam.

Relief, thick and sweet, surged through his veins. He held her as she heaved. Color was returning to her skin, oxygen getting into her blood.

Hunter’s eyes burned hot with gratitude. His jaw went tight with the sense of triumph over death, and he lifted his face to the sky. And for an instant he almost found himself yelling thanks to a God he no longer believed in.

When he looked at her face again, she was watching him, her eyes dark hollows in a pale void. He wiped her mouth with the edge of his wet shirt and tried to smile. “You made it.”

She said nothing, just stared at him.

He sniffed back the strange cocktail of emotions burning in him, and lifted a wet ribbon of hair from her brow. “I’m going to move you up the beach to some shade, okay?”

She closed her eyes, nodded.

She felt like a wet rag doll in his arms as he carried her up the small strip of sand. He laid her down in the shade of a palm, but as he tried to step away, she grabbed at the fabric of his shirt, balling it in white-knuckled fists, her eyes wide like an animal snared in headlights. She was terrified he was going to abandon her. She saw him as her lifeline.

If only she knew.

“Hey, it’s okay, I’m not going to leave you,” he said, lowering himself onto the sand beside her, knowing that if it really came down to it, he couldn’t keep his word. He lifted her head, rested it on his lap, tried to stroke some of the sand from her damp hair, and while he did, racked his brain for some comforting reassurances he could whisper to her.

But nothing came to him. He felt totally useless. He could satisfy a woman physically, knew what places to touch, how to
drive her to such dizzying sensual delirium that she would scream out for release. But emotionally? This was uncharted territory for Hunter McBride. He had no idea how to simply make a woman feel safe. Christ, he’d barely managed to keep her alive.

The tang of remorse stung his tongue. He told himself he’d done the right thing, he’d kept his priorities straight. And if it truly came down to the wire, if he was literally forced to choose between Sarah Burdett or the pathogen, he’d
have
to go with the latter. There was no option. That was his job. Black-and-white. Pure and simple. Because if they didn’t get this lethal bug into a lab and find an antidote, millions would die three weeks from now—people just as innocent and unprepared as Sarah Burdett.