Ghosts of Yesterday by Alan Dean Foster

Author:Alan Dean Foster [Foster, Alan Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804180498
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-06-10T21:00:00+00:00

Kinnear struggled to swim up out of the blackness. Attempting to open his eyes felt like trying to lift a tenton boulder. He couldn’t do it, didn’t really want to do it. A part of him, the part that was conscious and trying to awaken him, yelled that if he did not wake up, did not face the icy cold and the excruciating pain in his left leg, he was going to expire. He would die frozen and bleeding to death in a foreign landscape of snow and ice and rock, and he would not have anyone to blame but himself.

Behind his eyes, he tried to think of something else. Anything else except waking up and dealing with the here and now. It was cold, cold—so what more natural than that he should flash back three years ago to the sweltering, stinking sauna that was Vietnam? He had been a lieutenant colonel then and Nolan had been a major. The whys and hows of that bizarre day, why two high-ranking officers had ended up running for their lives down a filthy backstreet in Saigon wondering as they ran how they were going to survive, did not really matter. What had mattered to him at that particular moment was the blood.

The blood that was dripping down the inside of his waistband and slowly soaking through his pants. The blood that was oozing like crimson honey from the gunshot wound in his lower left abdomen. The blood and the searing pain that shot through him every time he moved, took a breath, or even thought about taking one more step. He had wanted to quit then, maybe find somewhere to hole up until the pain went away of its own accord. Nolan had saved him. It had been Nolan’s voice that he had followed through the haze of pain, Nolan’s strong hand on his arm, pulling him forward, guiding him around the stalls of chattering merchants and the silently staring wide-eyed children clumped together in the streets.

“Come on, Tom,” Nolan had kept saying. “Not much farther now.”

“Where?” Kinnear remembered himself asking over and over, as if the query had come from somewhere else, from another person. “Where?”

“The embassy,” Nolan repeatedly told him. “If we can get to the embassy, we’ll be safe.”

“Says who?” Kinnear remembered laughing and spitting blood—a combination of reactions to circumstances that most human beings, thankfully, would never have to experience. Who had shot him? Why? He remembered. Even the best assassins sometimes run into other assassins.

“Says me,” Nolan had replied, dragging him on. “Keep moving.”

And somehow, someway, Kinnear had. He’d put one booted foot in front of the other, his increasingly numb steps lubricated by his own blood, and Nolan had gotten him to the embassy. The last thing he remembered was the stunned look on the MP’s face as they hit the gate, and then he had fainted. When he woke up, he was in an army hospital in the Philippines and Nolan was in the bed next to him.

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