WAR: Intrusion (39 page)

Tom nodded in agreement. The others all followed.

Hands shaking, Helen passed out the vials and the syringes. She instructed the others on what doses to give the patients. Nausea nearly overwhelmed her as she injected her assigned patient, then removed the connection to the breathing apparatus.

Beyond the door there was a terrible clatter. The rebels had made it through the barricade.

Helen filled another syringe and knelt beside Eileen. She didn’t realize that tears were streaming down her face until Tom gently removed the syringe from her hands and passed her his handkerchief. He injected the girl and bowed his head.

Several thumps out in the main room indicated that the booby-trap had tripped up the rebels as intended. But Helen knew that would only make them angry. “Who’s…next…” she gasped. She turned around, only to find the rest of the staff passed out on the floor. Helen reached for the nearest vial. Her hand slipped and she toppled face first onto the ground.

Her last thought was that she really wished she could just die here.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

JESUS
FUCKING CHRIST.

Lachlan had seen the aftermath of the rebels’ attacks before, but the yard in front of the hospital was soaked in blood and littered with body parts. Tire tracks ran across the carnage, as if the rebels hadn’t cared that they drove over legs and arms. Fury and horror threatened to choke Lachlan as he picked his way through the gore toward the main building.

Too late. They’d arrived too fucking late.

Marcus had dropped his team a couple of kilometers up the road to avoid hostile fire. Shortly afterward, Lachlan’s team had found the burned remains of an overturned pickup. Lachlan and Dev had been forced to mercy-kill a teenaged boy and a middle-aged woman who’d been lying next to the wreck. The rebels had mutilated them both, leaving them alive, but nothing more than limbless torsos attached to featureless faces.

Yet even having seen the state of those two victims hadn’t prepared Lachlan to handle the shock of seeing so many more mutilated bodies. From the number of victims, Lachlan suspected that those people who’d attempted to flee the hospital in the pickup had been dragged back here to be hacked into pieces and left to bleed out. For the first time in years, his stomach threatened to revolt.

He saw the same shocked horror on the faces of his men.

“Should we gather up the body parts?” Hoss asked, his normally vibrant voice dull with shock.

“After we’ve cleared the interior,” Lachlan said. At his signal, Levine took point. He disappeared through the hole where the reinforced front door had once hung. A moment later, Lachlan and the rest of the team followed.

Blood and entrails slicked the floors, making each step treacherous. The team split up. Lachlan took one group to clear the rooms to the right and Dev led the other group to the left. The first several rooms were empty and free of blood. Then they came to the main operating theater. Blood covered the floor, the walls, and dripped from every available surface. Hacksaws and scalpels and other instruments lay scattered about the tables and counters. Tiny pieces of flesh were still stuck to some of the implements.

Hearing a whimper to his left, Lachlan spun to face the threat, weapon aimed at the shadow in the corner. But then his brain registered what he was seeing. Tattered, bloody fragments of a lab coat stuck to what little dark skin remained on the man. The rebels had sliced off his face and limbs and opened his abdomen, yet the man still had one eye. His gaze pleaded with Lachlan for peace. Although he had no tongue or lips, his throat worked to form speech.

Furious that the rebels could do such a thing to another human being, Lachlan put a bullet through the man’s brain, then lurched over to the sink in the corner and lost his lunch, heaving so hard he feared he would rupture some internal organ. Yet he saw no shame in his reaction. The fact that he heard other men on the team doing the same only proved that his men still retained their compassion.

The water had been shut off at the source, so when he was finished, Lachlan rinsed his mouth out with water from his canteen. Then he turned to face the rest of the team, doing his best to avoid looking at the body of the man in the corner.

“Let’s keep moving,” he said. Yet there was a marked hesitancy in the team as they exited the operating theater and moved down the corridor. Thankfully, they found only one other body, that of one of the security guards. He lay on his back just inside the broken rear door. The bullet holes in his torso indicated that he’d died when the rebels had breached the back door. Apparently the rebels only mutilated living beings, because they’d left the guard’s body where he’d fallen.

“Any intact survivors?” he asked Dev’s group when they’d completed their own search.

Dev shook his head, looking as sick and horrified as Lachlan felt.

“Where are Helen and the other foreign workers?” Lachlan asked. They’d found no Caucasian bodies. Only African. “She and her staff would never abandon their patients.” He didn’t know if the fact that the foreigners were missing meant that the rebels had taken them because they planned a public execution, or if the rebels intended to sell the foreigners into one of the sex or labor markets.

“Check this out, Commander.” JC motioned to him from a broken door underneath a sign that said Morgue.

Using their torches to guide them into the dark underground room, the team carefully picked their way through smoldering debris that covered a steep flight of stairs. The room was small and smelled slightly of gas.

“This is where the staff holed up,” Lachlan said.

JC nodded. “They barricaded the door, but were gassed and burned out.”

“Commander, there are untouched bodies in here,” Lance called from the area where the morgue’s bodies were kept. Three corpses were in body bags. Six bodies lay on gurneys. The tubes connecting them to various medical devices had been removed. Their expressions were peaceful, as if they’d just drifted off to sleep.

Hoss bent down and picked up an empty medicine vial that had fallen next to a syringe. “Morphine.” He set the vial on the end of the nearest gurney.

“Commander, here’s one of the foreign staff,” Lance said as he moved to the back of the room. He knelt beside the body of a young, red-haired woman in a nurse’s uniform. Both of her forearms were wrapped in bloody t-shirts. Lance peeled back one of the makeshift bandages. “Looks like a self-inflicted cut to the artery.” He motioned for Lars to shine his torch closer, then pointed to a spot on her biceps. “Injection site.”

He rose and examined each of the bodies on the gurney. “Everyone has that mark.” His bleak eyes met Lachlan’s. “I think the staff hid in here.” He nodded toward a sheet piled near the door. “They tried to stop the gas from coming in. When they realized that they weren’t going to escape the rebels, they administered overdoses of morphine to their patients so they wouldn’t suffer at the hands of the rebels.”

Damn it. Lachlan could almost taste their terror. Knew that Helen would have been fighting her fear in order to do what she considered the most humane thing for her patients. All the while knowing that she herself might soon be under a rebel’s knife.

The shadows of the unlit room pressed down on Lachlan, suffocating him with too much fear and despair. “Everyone out.” The government would send a team in later to collect the bodies. For now, he and his men had to find out where the rebels had taken their prisoners.

Lachlan walked out to the road. A recent rain had turned the dirt into a morass. He indicated for the team to split up. “Let’s find out which way the rebels went, lads.”

“I’m sorry, boss,” Hoss said, some time later. “I followed the tracks of a large truck out to the paved road.” He shrugged and his mouth settled deeper into a frown. “The pavement didn’t give up any secrets and I saw no other signs to indicate direction.”

The others nodded in unhappy agreement. Hoss was the team’s best tracker. If he couldn’t find clues, no one could.

“All right.” Lachlan pulled out his sat phone and checked in with Marcus. “Tell me you’ve found something,” he growled when the helicopter pilot answered.

“Yes, sir.” Marcus’s lack of a smart-aleck remark proved how serious the situation was. “Thermal imaging shows a number of people alive at a compound that matches the description of the leper sanctuary that the local government says is the hospital’s official evacuation site.”

Lachlan’s hopes soared.

Then reality crashed in. Helen wouldn’t have left the patients at the hospital in order to go to the sanctuary.

“There’s also a convoy of rebel trucks being chased south by the government forces,” Marcus said. “Several of the rebels’ troop transports and a few covered pickup trucks have passengers, but with our quick flyby, we couldn’t tell if any of those are foreign prisoners. Still, if I was going to pick one option to investigate, I’d go after the trucks.”

“Agreed,” Lachlan said. He could already hear the helicopter’s rotors approaching.

“Are you going to ask for permission from the local government?” Marcus asked as the helicopter came into view. “Or have Kris run it by Azumah? The convoy is heading over the border. It might end up in Volta, or it could end up in Dahomey.” Technically, WAR wasn’t supposed to operate in Dahomey without express permission from the national government.

“Neither,” Lachlan said. “We were authorized to investigate the attack at the hospital. This chase is part of that investigation. Let the President of the UAR deal with the legal crap. We’ll radio the UAR team that’s following the rebels to indicate we’re friendlies, but we’re not waiting for permission Azumah or any fucking president.”

“Yee-haw, Commander! That’s what I like to hear.”

A heartbeat later, Marcus landed at the helipad at the far end of the hospital. Lachlan and his men raced over, climbed aboard, and within a minute, they were airborne.

Lars, who’d photographed the scene with his digital camera, opened up the team’s laptop and began uploading the photos to WAR’s secure website. This way, if anything happened to the team, WAR would still have a record of what had been done at the hospital. Just in case the government decided to cover it up.

As the helicopter sped through the night, his team checked their weapons. Then, based on what Marcus and his co-pilot remembered about the convoy, they planned their attack.

Lachlan only hoped there was something left of Helen to save.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

GIVEN
THE SIZE of the rebel convoy and his team’s suspicion that prisoners were aboard some of the vehicles, Lachlan ended up coordinating the takedown with the leader of the government forces who’d been chasing the convoy. The rebels had once again shown that while on their own they were capable of horrific acts of cruelty, when faced with an organized, trained military force they had little idea what to do. Their responses to being shot at by a helicopter had been wildly uncoordinated. It had been almost ridiculously easy for Obi to take out the drivers of the lead vehicles, which were open-topped Jeeps holding only rebel forces. After that, the takedown had been a simple matter of avoiding the random bursts of gunfire from the rebels.

With all of the rebels neutralized and the government forces beginning the process of transporting the rebels to a secure holding facility, Lachlan helped the last couple of foreign prisoners climb out of the lorry where they’d been squeezed between rebel soldiers. As with the others, these two women were glassy-eyed with shock. One of them couldn’t stop trembling and Dev ended up swinging her into his arms and carrying her over to the spot where Lance was examining the rest of the prisoners and providing them with water from the soldier’s canteens.

Lachlan gave his arm to the woman by his side and helped her hobble over to the group. Once everyone was assembled, he cleared his throat. Barely able to speak past the stranglehold of fear, he asked, “Where’s Dr. Kirk?”

“Not here. Not here,” one of the women murmured, rocking back and forth.

“Screams and pain and blood,” another woman chanted.

“An African man took her away in his car.”

Lachlan’s gaze lasered in on the man who’d spoken. “What man? Which direction did they go?”

The man shook his head. “I do not know. He arrived toward the end of the rebels’ demonstration.” He choked on the last word and glanced down a moment.

The other prisoners made noises of agitation, so Lachlan indicated for the man to walk with him a bit down the road. The man’s bare chest and back were covered in bleeding cuts. Lachlan suspected the man’s t-shirt had been used to bandage the arms of the wounded woman back at the clinic.

“About this man who took Dr. Kirk?” Lachlan asked.

“The other rebels treated him with great respect. He watched the final dismemberments, then dragged one of the still-breathing victims into the yard to kill the man himself. After that, he ordered everyone to assemble in the yard among the dying survivors and their body parts.” The man choked back a sob.

Lachlan understood the man’s anguish, but he couldn’t allow sympathy to interfere. He had to encourage the man to keep talking until he’d revealed what happened to Helen. “Go on, sir.”

“Tom. I am Dr. Tomas Demaan, from Belgium.”

Because Lachlan understood the need to be seen as an individual and not a nameless victim, he said, “All right, Tom. Please continue.”

“The man launched into a speech. All about how the rebels were the righteous protectors of West African sovereignty. How it was our fault that the rebels had dismembered our colleagues because we had corrupted them with our foreign ways.” Tears shone in Tom’s eyes. It took him several moments to regain his composure.

“When the man finished speaking, he ordered two of the rebels to bring Dr. Kirk to him,” Tom finally continued. “They forced her to kneel in front of him.”

Rage and terror surged through Lachlan.

“I do not know what he said to her. He spoke too quietly. But even though he had the rebels holding her nick her arms with their machetes, she simply glared at him in defiance. That angered the man. He…” Tom wet his lips, then continued hoarsely, “He yelled something at her in a language I didn’t understand, then he grabbed her throat between his hands and choked her until she fell to the ground.”