The Outside Man by Don Bentley

Author:Don Bentley [Bentley, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781984805140
Amazon: B089S6S6BL
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2021-03-02T06:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-FOUR

The objective of war is to kill people, plain and simple. The advent of drones and precision weapons has mitigated some of the visceral nature of warfare. People can now sit in climate-controlled bunkers and rain down death without ever getting dirt beneath their fingernails. They don’t have to smell the putrid stench of a gut wound or hear the screams of the dying. In some aspects, war was becoming a rather sanitary endeavor.

This was not that.

This was me in the back of a truck full of half-dead terrorists. Terrorists who’d killed my countrymen. Together, we were about to roll into a compound full of Iranian commandos who would love to chat with me while using sharp metal objects as conversation starters. In other words, it was me or them.

In that equation, me wins every day of the week.

Bending over my patient, I fussed over his bandages in case the curly-haired guy in the truck was watching. Once I was sure that my back was blocking his view, I thrust the combat knife between the jihadi’s ribs and twisted.

He shuddered once, gasped, and went still.

It was a cleaner death than he probably deserved, but I was not the judge or jury. I was simply the executioner. Without medical attention, he would have died in the next fifteen minutes. But if the Iranian surgeons were as shit hot as Curly believed, they might have been able to save him. Which meant that sooner or later, he’d start answering questions, and those answers would not match mine.

I couldn’t allow that to happen.

Cold? Maybe. But life as a terrorist was a full-contact sport.

After wiping the blade on the dead jihadi’s blood-soaked shirt, I slipped the weapon into my pants. Next I loosened his bandages and let the blood pool down the front of his trousers. Only then did I turn back to Curly.

“Hurry,” I screamed. “He’s bleeding out.”

Curly looked at me, and his eyes widened. Then he turned back to the driver. The wind drowned out what he was saying, but it must have been a helluva speech. The truck surged forward, rocking me in the bed as we zoomed toward the compound’s gate.

The guards manning the crew-served weapons out front moved to intercept us, but Curly beat them to the punch. Opening his door and standing half out of the cab while the truck was still moving, he screamed something in Farsi. Old Curly must have had some pull with the Iranians. The steel barrier cranked upward, and the guards waved us through.

To his credit, our driver didn’t even slow down. Instead, he poured on the gas, and the truck accelerated through the compound’s entrance, roaring past the guard station in a cloud of grit and engine exhaust. I took the opportunity to check the knife’s positioning in my pants, ensuring it was secure and that the pointy end wasn’t about to stab something important.

I might have been heading into a compound full of people who wanted to kill me, but that didn’t mean I had to make their job any easier.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.