The cold air was recycled and stale, belched out by noisy climate control units. Bridge wouldn’t have minded if this was a day raid, and they were escaping the searing heat that had threatened to overwhelm her every day since she arrived. But at night the desert froze, and they’d just spent two hours driving through it, with Bridge huddled under layers of blanket and a keffiyeh woven around her head.
She said nothing, maintaining mission silence, but she didn’t need to. Ahead of her in the stone corridor, Adrian turned and grinned. “Never bloody happy, are you, BB? Can’t live with the heat, can’t live with the cold. It’s a wonder you made it out of here alive…” He looked down at the dark patch spreading over his chest, looked back at Bridge with unusual sympathy, said, “You’d better go —”
She was in the jeep, rattling over rocks and sand while bullets zinged by her ears. The headlamps were barely strong enough to show ten feet in front of her. “How do you know where you’re going?” Adrian shouted from the passenger side. “You can’t see a thing.” Daylight flipped like a light switch, noon sun high and hot, foiling Bridge’s sight with heat shimmer, exposed for all to see. Night again, flip, and a bullet from the pursuing jeep ripped through Adrian’s shoulder —
The Russian guard demanded to know what they were doing here, who authorised their presence, what papers did they have? Adrian played the self-righteous alpha male card, puffing himself up and gambling the guard wouldn’t argue with an alleged order from an alleged senior officer. His Russian was excellent. Bridge’s wasn’t, but she had enough to interject with technical bluff that would lend veracity.
The guard said OK, but he’d need to go and check. That was fine. Bridge knew they only needed three minutes, tops, inside the server room. Adrian knew that, too, but he still killed the Russian, stabbing the guard in the back with his dagger as he turned away. Up and through the lungs, preventing any cry of pain. All that escaped from the young soldier was wheezing air and blood.
Bridge stared down at the man’s body, and he stared up at her, and blood bubbled up from his mouth as he smiled and said in Adrian’s voice, “First one’s always the worst —”
She was so close now, the ruins of the village behind her, if she could just keep the damn jeep upright and rolling for another twenty clicks she’d be home, and she thought of Adrian’s body lying in the ruins of the Russian base, and then she remembered there wouldn’t be a body because of the grenades, but there was something on the passenger seat, underneath a desert blanket, and when she pulled it back with one hand and glanced down, not wanting to take her eyes off the dirt track she was now following, it was Adrian’s head that looked back up at her, and he laughed, “Silly girl, didn’t you notice how quiet I’d been? As if I could have lived through that —”
She said it wasn’t necessary to kill the guard; they could have been in and out before he came back. Adrian argued the kill had bought them time, because now they wouldn’t raise an alarm until they found his body, and to make his point he dragged the Russian’s corpse behind one of the server racks. Bridge was still in mild shock. Her first live kill, and she’d been trained to expect some disorientation, but she had no doubt that Adrian had made a mistake.
“What if they expected him back right away? What if there are hidden surveillance cameras here, and someone just watched you kill him? This was never part of the plan.”
“Neither was getting stopped by someone guarding the bloody computers,” said Adrian, red-faced from hauling the body by himself, “so we improvise. Anyway, this is a cave. You can see for yourself there’s no cameras here.”
“No, I can’t. Have you even seen the latest stuff? The Chinese are making wifi cameras the size of a pound coin, these days. Christ, you can buy them on Amazon. I bet the Russians get first dibs.”
“There are no bloody cameras,” Adrian shouted. “Fuck’s sake, I knew you weren’t ready for this. You’re panicking.”
“I’m not panicking,” she shouted back, “but now I might only have half the time I need to locate the right server.”
“Then you’d better hurry up and get looking, hadn’t you?” he said, just as another guard ran into the room and she’d never been so sorry to be proven right —
Driving through the desert, alone, swallowing back tears —
Adrian’s hand at his stomach, blood spreading through his manicured fingers —
The jeep sputtering to a halt, fuel gauge bottomed out —
Adrian pulling his ICE grenades, shouting at her to hurry —
And the icy dark of the desert night, closing around her as an Allied patrol drove by.