Primary Duty by Jack Mars

Author:Jack Mars [Mars, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

11:15 am Central European Summer Time (5:15 am Eastern Daylight Time)

The Skies above Central Spain

The six-seat Lear jet flew north across the morning sky.

Ed was up front, sprawled out across the seats, sleeping. He was the smart one. It seemed like he really was out. He was on his back, and his chest rose and fell slowly. The pills he had taken must have worn off. Exhaustion would do that sometimes.

Luke had fallen into a doze soon after takeoff, then had been awakened by midair turbulence. It seemed he must have been asleep for less than a half hour. He had dreamed something, but he couldn’t remember what.

A few images, or fragments of images, remained. Becca’s face screaming. An explosion. Blood splashed across a stone tile surface. A crowd of people standing on a street, staring at him. He couldn’t remember the rest, and that was good.

What was bad was he felt like he hadn’t gotten any rest at all - none since he had left Austria long hours ago. He’d been awake, more or less, for 24 hours straight at this point. He’d spent yesterday sight-seeing in Salzburg, the evening having dinner and drinks, then the night and next morning flying across Europe to North Africa, raiding a squatters’ den of radical Muslims, then chasing a kid through a warren of alleyways, and watching him die.

Luke was tired.

He sat in the back of the long narrow cabin, staring out at the bright sky. His open window shade was the only source of light in the airplane. Far below the airplane, and below some skittering clouds, a red and orange plain passed. Far up ahead, there appeared to be mountains and some lowering thunderclouds.

A new series of images flitted through his mind. Becca as a young woman, in a long spring dress with a sunhat, laughing, not a care in the world. He could see her but didn’t remember the exact occasion. There must have been a hundred occasions like that one. Before Gunner came. Before the upheavals of recent years.

He pictured a collapsed stone pillar at a very old mosque in Lebanon. Kevin Murphy was there, underneath it, after a firefight. The column was thick and heavy, and somehow Murphy was beneath it. He seemed to be embedded in the floor. His face was there, and his left arm stuck out. He still had his Uzi in his hand.

He was talking, and he seemed fine. But a suicide bomber driving a truck bomb was coming. The mosque was going to be a firestorm, moments from now.

Suddenly, Murphy started making a squirming, snakelike movement. He was undulating madly, violently. Luke watched him in a sort of dream. He whipsawed, faster and faster.

Swann, screaming in Luke’s ear through the satellite phone:

“GET OUT! STONE!”

“Go!” Murphy said. “Listen to the man!” He didn’t even look at Luke. He was doing some sort of crazy desperate dance under there, rhythmic, insane.

“STONE!”

Luke turned and ran for the front doors.

Outside, the headlights of the truck were approaching.

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