He rolled like a log, his two-hundred-pound bulk smashing against the man’s leg still planted on the ground. It was just enough to knock the little man off balance, but not down. He stumbled backward.
Jack’s plan to head-butt the guy and maybe find a way to cut his ropes was dead in the water.
So was he.
The guard roared, ready to launch another kick at Jack’s exposed face. But a strong hand wrapped around his forehead, pulling it back. The man’s shocked look gave way to agony as a knife blade punched through his throat, the drop-point tip a steel tongue beneath his larynx. He gurgled and gasped, clutching at the wound as he dropped to the ground, drowning in his own blood.
Sands knelt down, pinned the guard’s head to the ground, and jammed the bloody blade back into his neck, severing the spinal column to finish the job.
Sands said, “Sorry, slick. It’s been a while.”
The former Ranger was dripping wet, dressed in a well-worn hiking coat and a faded Browning ball cap.
Jack’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell—”
Sands wiped his bloody Ka-Bar on the dead man’s coat, then stepped over and cut Jack’s ropes from his ankles and hands, and then killed the Coleman lantern.
“What are you doing here, Sands?”
“I like the night air. Went for a walk.”
“I don’t get it.”
“No time for touchy-feely shit right now, kid. We gotta get you the fuck out of here.” Sands pulled his pistol, a heavy, all-steel Beretta 92FS.
“Not yet.”
Jack knelt down and picked up the dead man’s weapon, an AK-103 with a folding stock. “They’re going to kill the miners in the morning.”
“Let’s get you back down the hill first.”
Jack stood, checked the weapon, racked a round. “I won’t keep you.”
“I ain’t leaving without you.”
“Then follow me.”
* * *
—
Jack and Sands reconnoitered the mining camp. Someone had restored the diesel generator. The lights were back on. That wasn’t good.
The miners had been put to work gathering and disassembling equipment, putting out the remaining fires, and anything else they were directed to do by the barrels of the rifles pointed at them.
Jack and Sands took their time, working their way around the periphery, as far away from the light as possible. The sound of the ceaseless rain and the rumbling diesel covered their tracks, but the cold air turned their breath into steaming vapor.
They caught the first guard by himself taking a leak. Sands seized him by the skull and twisted. The man’s neck broke with a muffled crack.
His partner was next, taken down by the butt of Jack’s rifle to the back of his head and then Sands’s knife across his throat.
The two of them dashed across the compound, where Cluzet and the last guard hovered over a group of miners filling sacks with processed material.
Sands fired his Beretta, putting two nine-millimeter rounds in the guard’s forehead.
“Don’t even think about it,” Jack said as the Frenchman reached for his pistol.
Cluzet’s tattooed hand froze in place. He smiled as Jack and Sands stepped into the light, Jack’s rifle and Sands’s pistol both pointed at him.
“You wanna fill in the details?” Jack asked, grabbing Cluzet’s pistol from its holster.
“I’m a working man, hired to do a job, that’s all.”
“And killing innocent people is part of the job description?”
“Who is innocent in this godforsaken world? Nobody gets out of here alive, anyway.”
“Great. A fucking philosopher,” Sands said.
Cluzet turned to Sands. “I didn’t think you had any game left in you. Tonight truly is full of surprises.” He grinned widely.
Sands’s pistol cracked. The Frenchman’s head snapped backward, the smile still plastered to his face. He toppled over, splashing into the mud on the flat of his back, his arms flung wide.
“We could have questioned him.”
“Yeah. We could have,” Sands agreed, holstering his weapon. “Now can we go?”
“What about them?” Jack nodded around the camp. The miners had dropped to the ground or crouched behind equipment, terrified, when they heard the gunshots.
Sands sighed. “Let’s get these people organized. See if you can find a sat phone or a radio in one of those trailers while I go talk to them.” Sands stomped off toward a knot of miners, speaking Spanish in a friendly, comforting manner.
Jack had other business first.
He stepped over to Cluzet and snatched Cory’s amulet off the lifeless neck.
He still had a promise to keep.
81
Jack drank enough water from the storage tank to fill an aquarium, or so it seemed, before heading over to the undamaged office trailer, where he found a fully charged sat phone.