“It’s him,” Ethan says. “He did this to me.”
For a moment, there is nothing in the kitchen but the stench of burning meat and the gunpowder from the firefight.
“We’ll have air in two minutes,” Brooks says to Ethan. “This is the only cocksucker left and there’s no one in this room gonna say shit about what you do.”
A soldier standing by the stove and holding a sniper rifle says, “Fuckin-a.”
“Can you stand me up?” Ethan asks.
Brooks hauls Ethan out of his seat, Ethan groaning as he inches his way across the kitchen toward Aashif.
When they’re standing over him, the SEAL unholsters a SIG.
Ethan takes it out of his hand, checks the load.
It will occur to him months from now that if this had been a movie, he wouldn’t have done it. Wouldn’t have sunk to the level of this monster. But the ugly truth is it never even crosses Ethan’s mind not to do it. And though he will continually dream about the crash, about all the things Aashif did to him, this moment will never haunt him. He will only wish it could have lasted longer.
Ethan is naked, on his feet only with the support of Brooks, his legs like something that belongs in a butcher shop.
He tells Aashif to look at him.
In the distance, he can hear the distinctive whop-whop of the approaching Black Hawk.
Beyond that, it is as quiet as mass out on the street.
The torturer and the tortured hold eye contact for a long second.
Aashif says, “You’re still mine, you know.”
As he smiles, Ethan shoots him through the face.
* * *
The next time he comes to consciousness, he’s leaning against the window of the Black Hawk, staring three hundred feet down at the streets of Fallujah, morphine gliding through his system and Brooks’s voice screaming in his ear that he’s safe, that he’s going home, and that two days ago, his wife gave birth to a healthy baby boy.
CHAPTER 18
Ethan opened his eyes.
His head leaned against a window and he was staring down at mountainous terrain scrolling past at a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Cruising, if he had to guess, at twenty-five hundred feet AGL. He’d flown an air ambulance for six months after returning from Iraq and before applying to the Secret Service, and he recognized not only the voice of the Lycoming turbines roaring above his head but the dimensions of the BK117 airframe. He’d flown this model with Flight for Life.
Raising his head off the glass, he moved to scratch an itch on the side of his nose, but found his hands cuffed behind his back.
The passenger cabin had been arranged in a standard configuration—four seats divided between two facing rows, and a cargo space in the rear of the fuselage, hidden behind a curtain.
Jenkins and Sheriff Pope sat across, and Ethan felt pleased to see the lawman’s nose still bandaged.
Nurse Pam—having traded her classic nurse’s uniform for black cargo pants, a long-sleeved black T, BDUs, and an H&K tactical shotgun—sat beside him, a half-moon trail of sutures curving from a shaved portion of her skull, across her temple, and midway down her cheek. Beverly had been responsible for that, and Ethan noted a flicker of rage at the memory of what had been done to that poor woman.
Jenkins’ voice crackled through the headset. “How you feeling, Ethan?”
Though he felt groggy from the meds, his head had already begun to clear.
But he didn’t answer.
Just stared.
“Apologies for the shock yesterday, but we couldn’t take any chances. You’ve proven you’re more than capable at handling yourself, and I didn’t want to risk any further loss of life. Yours or my men.”
“Loss of life, huh? That’s what you’re so worried about now?”
“We also took the liberty of rehydrating you, giving you some nourishment, new clothes. Seeing to your injuries. I have to say...you look much better.”
Ethan glanced out the window—endless pine forests streaming through valleys and over hills that occasionally climbed above the timberline into sheer rock escarpments.
“Where are you taking me?” Ethan asked.
“I’m keeping my word.”
“To whom?”
“You. I’m showing you what this is all about.”
“I don’t under—”
“You will. How much longer, Roger?”
The pilot broke in over the headset. “Have you on the ground in fifteen.”
* * *
It was a jaw-dropping sweep of backcountry.
No roads, no houses as far as Ethan could see.
Just forested hills and the occasional squiggle of water through the trees—glimpses of stream and river.
Soon, the pine forest fell away behind them and Ethan could tell by the pitch change of the twin-turbine that the pilot had initiated their descent.