The Sanctuary (52 page)

“There,” he muttered, pointing the rifle at them, as if indicating a cornered prey. “Come.”

He advanced cautiously, the gun held level in front of him. Mia followed in his footsteps. They edged through the trees, one step at a time, until they rounded the two hulking trunks.

Corben lay there on the ground, his back propped up against the larger of the trees. He was also hit, somewhere in his midsection. His shirt was drenched with blood, and an empty Kalashnikov was still in his hands.

He looked up at the mokhtar with drained eyes. The mokhtar started cursing him fiercely, nudging the rifle threateningly at him,
then
he went berserk, shrieking louder, getting ready to pump a bullet into Corben’s brain.

Mia stepped in front of him, blocking him, yelling, “No!”

The man was livid, rattling on in Kurdish, pointing back at his injured son, screaming abuse at the fallen agent. Mia kept shouting “No” back at him, repeatedly, again and again, waving her arms angrily, until she finally grabbed the muzzle of the rifle and pushed it away.

“Enough,” she hollered.
“Enough already.
He’s down. Your son’s hurt. So’s another of your men. They need help.”

The mokhtar grudgingly tilted the rifle downwards, took one last scowl at Corben, and nodded.

She watched him turn away and head back into the shadows. She knelt down beside Corben and lifted the AK-47 off him, saying, “You won’t be
needing
this anymore, right?”

He nodded, keeping his dazed eyes on her.

She checked the wound. It was to his abdomen. It was hard to tell what the bullet had damaged on its way into him. A lot of organs were crammed in there, and most of them were crucial.

“How painful is it?” she asked.

“It’s…not great,” he said, wincing.

Whatever it had hit—stomach, liver, kidneys, intestines—the damage needed to be fixed quickly. Gunshot wounds to the abdomen were almost invariably devastating. From the level of bleeding, Mia thought there was a decent chance that his aorta hadn’t been ruptured, but if that was the case, all it gave him, if he didn’t get treated soon, was a slight extension to the minutes of life he would have if it were.

“We need to get you back to the village.”

He nodded faintly, but the somber acceptance in his eyes told her that he knew he’d never see it.

The mokhtar hurried back to her. He was gripping the lead of a horse, one of the ones he and Corben had ridden up. “There’s no sign of your horses,” he stammered. “This is the only one we have left.”

Mia scanned the obscurity around them. She couldn’t see any sign of the other horses either.

She heaved a dejected sigh. “Your son needs medical attention quickly. And the other man, from your village…”

“Shāker, my cousin.
He’s dead,” the mokhtar informed her, his voice as tenebrous as the forest around them.

Mia nodded. She knew what had to be done. “Take the horse, with your son. You can ride down with him. I’ll stay here with Corben.”

“I can’t leave you here like this,” the mokhtar argued. “We can put him on the horse and walk him down together.”

“There’s no time for that. He needs help fast.”

The mokhtar shook his head with frustration. “You came after me, to save me.”

“Then hurry down and send for help,” she insisted. “Go on.”

The mokhtar studied her for a beat, as if committing her face to memory, then nodded. “I’ll help you make a fire.”

“No, just go. I can do it.”

He looked at her with eyes that were dark with remorse. He gave in reluctantly, threw one last angry glare in Corben’s direction,
then
led the horse away from her, towards his fallen son.

They split up the lighters and the torches—the mokhtar would need to see his way down—and the blankets they managed to recover. Moments later, the mokhtar helped his son onto the saddle before climbing on behind him, and with a final, heavy-hearted wave of the torch in his hand, he rode off. Holding up a flaming torch of her own, Mia watched him ride off, her eyes clinging desperately to his receding figure until the darkness swallowed him up entirely.

S
he checked on Corben again. There wasn’t much she could do for him, apart from keeping him warm. With a different kind of chill seeping into her bones, she sought out the bodies of both villagers. She found them, one, then the other, lying on the cold ground, bereft of life. She checked each of them for pulses, just in case, and felt
a bile
of anger at Corben’s reckless actions rising in her throat. Remorsefully, and with a tremble in her hands, she pulled the jacket off one of them and brought it back to cover Corben.

She then got to work on building a fire. The winter rains hadn’t yet arrived, and the twigs and branches she collected were dry and brittle. She managed to get a good fire going opposite the tree Corben was against and gathered a small pile of additional wood to keep it fed.

She wondered how long it would be before help arrived. Given that they’d ridden for close to two hours to get to this spot, she reckoned it would take at least twice as long before anyone appeared, probably even longer given that they’d be making the entire journey at night—and that was assuming they would actually attempt it at night and not wait until morning. A warm feeling spread through her as she thought of Evelyn and Tom wistfully. She knew they wouldn’t wait till morning, and yet, at the same time, she didn’t want to put them in any more danger.

The exhaustion—both physical and mental—was overwhelming the last traces of adrenaline that had kept her going. She surrendered to it and slid down to the ground beside Corben. They just lay there in silence for a while, staring at the bonfire, listening as it crackled and popped, watching as the flames licked and curled around the twigs before pulling them down and consuming them.

“Last thing I remember is going out to meet my mom for a drink,” Mia eventually said. “How did we end up here?”

Corben chewed on it for a brief moment.
“Because of assholes like the hakeem.
And me.” His hollow voice was laced with regret.

Mia turned to him. “You wanted it that badly?”

He shrugged. “It kind of beats everything, doesn’t it?” He winced.
“Everything except a bullet in the gut.”

“Did you kill Farouk?”

Corben’s nodded faintly. “He was badly hit, but…yes.”

“Why?”

“Greed.
Self-preservation.”
He mulled his words.
“Greed, mostly.”
He leaned around so that he was facing her. “I’m not a good person, Mia. I wasn’t trained to be good. I was trained to be effective.
To get things done.
And I’ve done some questionable things, some awful things that were applauded by my superiors.” He shook his head with remorse. “I guess somewhere on that road, I decided I could also do it for myself.”

“So my mom, me…we were just, what? Useful?”

He shook his head faintly. “There was no master plan. It just kind of took me—took us all by surprise and sucked us all in. Something happens, an opportunity pops up, and you go after it. But the last thing I wanted in all this was for you to be put in harm’s way, to get hurt. That’s the truth. And regardless of my motives, I always thought I’d get your mom out, as soon as it was possible. The thing is, in my business, the first lesson you learn is that things rarely work out the way you plan them.” He coughed up a bit of blood and wiped it off his mouth. He looked up at her. “For what it’s worth, I…” He shook his head, as if deciding against saying it. “I’m sorry.
About everything.”

Just then, a spine-tingling cry shattered the stillness of the night. It was the unmistakable howl of a wolf. Another quickly responded, its cry echoing around them.

Not a wolf.

Wolves.

They never hunted alone.

A sudden feeling of dread wrung Mia’s gut. Her eyes swung over to Corben. He’d heard them too.

“It’s the blood,” Corben reported gloomily, straightening up. “They’ve smelled it.”

Another howl pierced the night, this one much closer.

How quickly did they travel?

Mia sat up, her eyes and ears on high alert.

“The guns,” he mumbled. “Get the guns.”

Mia hurled herself to her feet and pulled a flaming stick out of the fire. She scurried away on rubbery legs towards where she remembered the mokhtar’s son had fallen. She thought she remembered seeing the mokhtar put the boy’s rifle down there. She’d seen submachine guns by the two fallen villagers, but they were further afield, and she wasn’t sure she dared venture that far.

She advanced cautiously, sweeping the lighted brand left and right, scanning the murky obscurity for any sign of the predators. Her eyes picked out the old hunting rifle, propped up like a talisman against the tree where the mokhtar’s son had lain. She stepped towards it, and just as she reached out to grab it, she saw the gray forms lurking in the shadows. Her heart skipped a whole bar as she watched them skulk there, eyeing her. She stabbed the brand at them, causing them to flinch and retreat a step, but they weren’t easily cowed. They inched forward again, baring their teeth menacingly, their sleek bodies taut with anticipation.

She steeled herself and sliced the air with the brand, shouting at them as she took a careful step to the rifle. She snatched it with her free hand, its weight taking her by surprise, then pulled away, keeping her back to the bonfire, retreating while swinging the stick manically around her. Farther away, she heard yelps and angry snarls, and the three wolves that had been stalking her rushed off into the darkness. She heard them working feverishly on something and realized they had found the villagers’ dead bodies.

She hustled back to Corben before they came back for more. He’d managed to get himself up and was half-crouched, his back to the fire, a flaming brand in his hand. Mia handed him the gun.

“What about the automatics?”

“I couldn’t get to them,” she said fearfully.

Corben checked the rifle and frowned. It was a Russian SKS carbine, ex-Iraqi-army-issue. Its magazine had a capacity of ten rounds. Corben thought he’d heard two of them go wild, and the third had ripped through him, which meant he had seven shots left, if it had been fully loaded. He felt under its barrel. Its bayonet, normally swiveled, tucked in under it and nondetachable on the military-issue weapon, had been taken off, much to his dismay.

Mia was watching him from the corner of her eye. “What have we got?”

“Seven rounds, tops,” he informed her glumly.

The ghostly shapes soon materialized in the darkness around them, the golden glint of the flames flickering in their eyes. They swirled around Mia and Corben like a legion from hell, crisscrossing each other’s paths calmly, almost as if they were conferring with each other and planning their onslaught. They snapped their jaws and bared their teeth, taunting their prey, darting forward and lurching back just as fast, playing with them, testing their defenses.

Their fetid smell clawed at Mia’s nose as she lunged at them, her eyes stinging from the heat of her torch, her back inches from the raging bonfire that licked hungrily at it.

“We’re not going to be able to hold them off forever,” she hissed to Corben, “and
there’s
more than seven of them.”

Corben had been thinking the same thing.

His eyes had been scouring their perimeter, trying to gauge how many they were up against. From what he could see, there seemed to be ten of them, maybe a dozen. At least, those were the ones he could see on the front line.

He faltered, his strength long gone, his legs living on borrowed time. A couple of the predators decided to push a little harder and darted at him, their long muzzles wide-open, their wet tongues slobbering ravenously, their sharp fangs gleaming in the firelight. He stabbed back with his brand, struggling to remain on his feet, the throbbing of an overtaxed heart deafening in his ears. The wolves dodged the flames with ease, pulling back with lightning agility. As if sensing his faltering life force, one of them decided to go for the kill and leapt at him, paws and jaws flung wide and aimed at his neck. Corben squeezed off a round that caught it in midflight, and it yelped and dropped like a sandbag, at his feet. Another grabbed the opportunity and pounced at Corben, who stopped it with another shot. The others seemed momentarily spooked by the gunshots and the sudden deaths of their brethren and retreated, receding into the darkness.

“You alright?”
Mia asked
,
her eyes still locked on the shadows stalking them.

Corben could barely stand or keep his eyes open. He felt as if he were sinking into a smothering abyss.

“We’re going to need those automatics,” he rasped through clenched teeth. A burning sensation, more fierce than the heat from the bonfire, was scorching him from the inside. “Where’s the nearest one?”

“Down that way.”
Mia pointed in the direction of the fallen villagers. “But they were too far to reach, I told you.”