Instinct: A Chess Team Adventure - By Jeremy Robinson Page 0,33
case and riffled through the supplies. She took out the IV kit and set it aside. Her hands shook as she removed the syringe from its sterile packaging and attached the needle.
The old woman stopped repeating the words when she saw Sara turn to her, needle in hand. Her face twisted into a mask of concern, as though she were asking, “Are you no better?”
Sara fought the tears growing in her eyes. Her emotions would undo her if she let them. “Hold her down,” she said to the two Delta operators, who looked just as confused as the dying old woman.
“Hey . . . ,” King said, obviously perplexed.
“I don’t want to do this. I really don’t. But look around you. Everyone in this village is dead or gone. And look at the bodies. They’re all women! The men are buried out there, in the field. If they all died from Brugada, and the women didn’t, then her blood is the last chance we have. Getting her healthy enough to survive this might take days. We don’t have days.” Tears broke free and ran down her cheeks.
King and Bishop laid down their weapons and held the woman tight. King propped the woman up so that her head was against his chest. He wrapped his left arm under and around the woman’s arm and squeezed. With his right hand he gently rubbed her head. “It’s okay,” he whispered. Though he knew she had no idea what he was saying, he felt sure she’d understand the gesture.
Sara pushed the woman’s dirty sleeve up away from her forearm. The veins were easy to see against her malnourished skin as they filled with blood from King’s tight grasp. She struggled only a moment and then became resigned to her fate.
“I’m sorry,” Sara said as she worked the needle into the woman’s vein. Sara sniffled as the woman’s very life-force seemed to drain away with the blood filling the syringe.
Fifteen seconds later, the syringe was full. Sara removed the needle from the woman’s arm and capped it. The future of mankind now depended on a syringe full of an old woman’s blood. Sara instinctually picked up a cloth to put against the puncture wound created by the needle, but the sludgelike blood left in the woman’s body lacked the force to exit the wound. Her slowing heart was trying to pump mud.
“Nguoi Rung,” the woman said once again. Then her eyes closed and she was gone. Dead as the rest of the women left rotting in the village. But unlike the other women, her body remained unbroken and her death, while not of her choosing, was for a far more noble cause.
“There’s nothing left for us here,” Sara said. “We can set up camp somewhere else. Somewhere safe. And I can analyze her blood.”
“And if you don’t find what you’re looking for?” King asked.
“We’re going to be here for a while. If someone else survived this mess, we’ll need to find them.”
ROOK AND SOMI had placed the remaining four motion sensors along the most likely routes into the village. Rook paused at the top of the slope, searching for any movement in the jungle below.
“See anything, Gung Ho?” Somi asked.
“Not a thing.” Rook looked back at her. “You’re in intelligence, right?”
Somi nodded. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that someone should have known the LZ was hot.” He stood and headed toward the village. “More than that, I’m wondering how they knew we were coming at all.”
“Coincidence?”
Rook shook his head. “You think we should chalk it up to dumb luck?”
Somi clapped him on the shoulder. “Sometimes that’s exactly what intelligence is.”
He smiled as they crossed through the field, watching for the little orange flags Bishop had placed in the grass marking the clear path.
“Seems like your opinion of the intelligence community isn’t that great,” Rook said.
“You could say that.”
“How’d you get into it?”
“My father.”
“Seems kind of old-world.”
“This is the old world.”
“Right . . . But you must have a choice now?”
Somi’s momentary frown wasn’t lost on Rook. “Not everything is a choice. Not when it comes to family. Or honor.”
The field cleared and they entered the village. The stench of thirty rotting corpses filled his nose, but not even that could foul his mood. He saw King, Bishop, and Sara standing over a body. “Man, now I know why they named this place Anh Dung. It smells like shit.”
Sara whirled on him like a tornado. “What did you just say? Look around you! Do you have