Alpha Force 03 - Desert Pursuit by Chris Ryan

Author:Chris Ryan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: RHCB Digital
Published: 2011-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

They found the boy just beyond the rise, with Li’s tracker locket strung around his neck. He was lying on his back with his head pillowed on his arm and his eyes closed as though he had simply fallen asleep.

‘Are you sure?’ whispered Amber, staring at the peaceful face. ‘Check again, Paulo.’

Paulo pressed his fingers to the boy’s neck, feeling for a pulse. He kept his fingers in place for a long time, but there was not even the faintest flicker of life. ‘I am sure,’ said Paulo finally. ‘He is dead. He has been dead for a while.’

‘It’s the boy from the village,’ said Alex. ‘The older one of the two brothers.’

‘What killed him?’ asked Amber.

‘There’s blood everywhere,’ said Hex, staring down at the boy’s bloodstained clothes. ‘It’s hard to tell where it came from.’

Paulo looked over the body, noting that the bloodstains were most concentrated on the right leg of the boy’s sirwal. Gently he eased the boy on to his left side and pulled the blood-stiffened material away from the right leg until the gaping wound behind the knee was revealed.

‘What the hell happened there?’ gasped Hex.

‘They had a dog,’ said Amber faintly. ‘A big, ugly-looking mutt.’

Alex shook his head. ‘This isn’t a dog attack. The wound is too neat.’ He looked down at Paulo, who was still squatting by the body. ‘Knife?’ he asked.

Paulo nodded. ‘I, too, think it was done with a knife.’ He leaned forward to inspect the wound more closely, then shook his head. ‘The cut severed the hamstring tendons,’ he said, looking up at the others.

‘Why would someone do that?’ asked Amber, in a quavering voice.

‘To stop him from running away,’ said Hex grimly. ‘It’s one of the Scorpion’s trademarks.’

‘He was carrying a knife,’ said Alex, remembering the hand-tooled leather sheath he had seen on the Scorpion’s belt.

‘The cut also severed a major artery,’ continued Paulo. ‘That is what killed this boy. He bled to death. Li did her best to save him by guiding us here with the tracker, but there was no real chance for him. No chance at all.’

They scraped out a bed for the boy in the hard ground and laid him in it, covering his face with his headcloth. Then they built a low cairn of rocks and stones over him, to mark his position and protect the body from scavengers. They left the tracker device around his neck, so that he could be found later and given a proper funeral.

‘Someone should say something,’ said Amber as they stood around the finished cairn.

There was an awkward silence. They did not know this boy’s name, or which god they should talk to on his behalf, and their sadness at his death was mixed with a guilty relief that it was not Li under the stones.

Finally, Paulo sat down beside the cairn and began to speak, not to any god, but straight to the boy. He kept it simple, as though they were friends sitting side by side, passing the time on a lazy summer’s day.

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