When he managed to open one of his eyes, he saw the knife lying on the sand, a few shafts of moonlight glinting off the blade. Proctor’s prostrate body lay a few inches from it. The Englishman’s big, shaved head was facing him, blood oozing from the lips.
Tom eased himself up, the pain making his head spin as the wound seemed to widen. The woman was nowhere in sight. He heard the boat’s powerful outboard engine roar away. For a few seconds, he thought the worst. But then he heard her weeping and realized she was lying on the other side of Proctor’s corpse. The trauma had gotten to her at last; that and physical exhaustion, the result of lack of food and sleep, he guessed.
He sensed movement behind him and, grimacing, turned his head around as best he could. Nathan and three operatives were barrelling down the slope towards him.
“Is it her?” Nathan called out.
Unwrapping the MP5’s strap from his hands, Tom crawled around the dead body, dragging his legs behind him. She was curled up on the sand, her facial features still obscured. It had to be her, he thought. But he had to be sure.
“Your middle … name, ma’am?” he asked.
She struggled to pull the tight blindfold from her eyes. Then the gag was removed. He recognized her.
“It’s Gertrude. My middle name is Gertrude,” she said, faintly.
As Nathan reached him Tom nodded his head a fraction.
Nathan spoke into his cheek mic. “Affirmative ID,” he said. “Phoenix is safe.”
Lying on a poncho liner, Tom heard a muffled explosion and glimpsed a flash of white about two miles out at sea. Standing over him, Nathan said that the escaping speedboat had just been hit by a Hellcat missile fired by a Reaper drone. A few seconds later, the suppressed sound of fast-approaching helicopters could be heard faintly offshore. Tom looked past Nathan, but, with their navigation lights switched off, the inward MH-60 Black Hawks resembled two massive hornets as they travelled low to the water from the west.
After Nathan had shielded him from the mini-sandstorm blown up by the rotor wash, Tom saw a crew chief from the Special Operations Aviation Regiment appear from the side door of one of the Black Hawks, wearing night-vision goggles. He stood beside a skinny guy with a blacked-out face, who was scanning the beach with his M-240B machine gun. The crew chief called Nathan over, informing him exactly how his men should proceed. Navy SEALs were respected throughout the military, but this was his gunship.
As Tom and the secretary were carried towards the fuselage of the rear helicopter, he heard other explosions coming from the hamlet, knowing the operators had just blown up the fighters’ weapons and vehicles.
Nathan came up beside him once more, patted his forearm gently.
“Your men take their snaps back there?” Tom asked, remembering that the Delta assaulters had done so for evidence at the fort in the Kurram Valley.
“For a civilian, you know too much. But the guys wanted me to say that you got a night of hard drinking to look forward to when you’re up to it.”
“Sounds good,” Tom said, nodding. “Kali?”
“He’ll live. Thanks to you, dude.”
Within a couple of minutes, they were safely in the air.
He looked over at her. Although it was dark, the only light emanating from the illuminated dashboard in the exposed cockpit, he could see her body lying strapped to a stretcher pushed against the side of the cabin. She was wrapped in blankets, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow but not erratic. A medic was crouching down by her side and had set up a drip-feed.
As he lowered a respirator to her nose and mouth she resisted him, flinging her head from side to side.
“Tom,” she said, desperately.
He stretched his hand over towards her.
“It’s all right, ma’am. We’re going home.”
After getting berated by another medic for that, he felt the morphine take effect as he saw his own respirator being lowered to his face.
He breathed deeply, anxious for the ordeal to be over. But as he closed his eyes the pitiable faces of the dead came to him. He shivered.
Their eyes were hollow, their expressions reproachful.