Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

He freaked for a hot minute, mostly because he thought Davila was dead. Davila certainly looked dead, what with all the blood slicking his scalp and drizzling down his face like the badly applied war paint of that idiot with the horns who’d stormed the Capitol. Once he realized Davila was only bloody—because head wounds bleed like stink— and breathing and, therefore, unlikely to die in the next two minutes, he dashed to the van. Hauling open the slider, he grimaced at both the screee of metal against metal and, to be frank, from his own fear.

Because Davila could die, and that would be on him, only him, no one’s fault but his.

Because you had to show off. Reaching in, he grabbed his duffel, unzipped it, and wrestled out the medic kit he always carried. His kit contained extras a standard Army medic’s did not: scalpels, arterial forceps, steri-strips, superglue, SAM splints. Duct tape aplenty.

Because you had to prove to yourself that you were right. Because you didn’t want to be wrong, especially in front of Davila, who is everything you are not.

Rushing back with his kit, he bent over his unconscious comrade. Davila had gone to ground on his stomach and that , John thought, had done the most damage. Davila hadn’t made a bad choice. Getting out of the way of a bullet was generally a good idea. But Davila had miscalculated, and his head had slammed into a boulder about a foot to his fight and hard enough to knock himself out and rip open his scalp in the process. Midway between Davila’s right eye and ear, an ugly, ragged, star-shaped wound had split his scalp to reveal the smeary orange gleam of bone. There was also a lot of blood, much of which was beginning to clot into gluey clumps with the consistency of strawberry jam.

Bad . Starburst wounds were the absolute worst. The result of a sudden impact rather than the slice of an edged blade or the corner of a wall, such a wound’s edges were often jagged tears, uneven and tough to repair. On the other hand, Davila’s hair was on the longish side and that might be good. John could tie Davila’s scalp together using his hair, going one knot at a time.

There was also blood on Davila’s left arm, not far from his armpit, and more red showing in a long gash on his left ribcage that John thought looked an awful lot as if a bullet had blistered over Davila’s chest, hit a rib, and then ricocheted into his arm just under the left biceps. No exit wound, either, which meant the bullet had spent most of its force on the rib and was still lodged in Davila’s arm.

Oh boy. He itched to take a look, but job one: get control of that head wound. People bled to death this way. Look at poor William Holden, dead-drunk, clocks himself on a coffee table and exsanguinates in his living room. And then he thought, Man, get ahold of yourself. Focus.

Squinting, he made out a biggish bleeder, the tiny artery showing itself in a slight pulsatile vortex of brighter blood in a pool of blood already beginning to darken. He had a mix of epi and lidocaine in his medic’s pouch that would’ve helped by forcing the small arteries and capillaries to squeeze shut, but this wasn’t the time or the place for anything fancy. Instead, he made a sandwich of several gauze dressings and then, snapping on a pair of gloves, quickly probed with his fingers to see if the underlying skull was still intact, didn’t float, didn’t shift.

Please, God. His fingers quickly spidered over slick, exposed bone. Don’t be fractured. Not here, not now. No place on a person’s skull was good for a bang hard enough to knock someone out, but if Davila had to get clobbered, the parietal bone was it.

The bone didn’t give, a small blessing. Palming the thick gauze dressing, he applied pressure with the flat of his hand. Wasn’t gentle about it; a ginger, tentative touch would accomplish nothing. Keeping up the pressure, he worked out a system. Check his watch, scan right. Check his watch, scan left. Check his watch, a quick look behind, and wash, rinse, repeat.

There was a lot to worry about, Davila being chief among them. The sound of the shots would carry far in these parts; Parviz’s partners hadn’t just materialized out of thin air. There had to be a settlement of some sort relatively close by. For all he knew, there was a posse headed up the mountain right this minute. Even a single set of eyes would be one too many.

Speaking of which...he flicked a look at Matvey. The boy hadn’t budged and still hunkered, motionless, at the base of the slope. Terrific. He now had a mascot. What the heck was he going to do with the kid?

One disaster at a time.

Best practice said pressure for a good five minutes; he shaved that to four and a bit before letting up on the gauze. Davila’s blood had seeped through the gauze layers to dye a dark-scarlet bull’s-eye. He itched to peel off the pack, check the bleeding but resisted. That would be a mistake. Dislodge a clot, and he’d be right back where he started. The gauze was wet but not boggy and, after another minute, he wound a gauze wrap around Davila’s skull in a rough turban, taking care when he had to lift Davila’s head, praying there wasn’t a neck injury on top of everything else. After securing the wrap with surgical tape, he made another gauze sandwich, stripped off his belt, and used that to apply more pressure, cinching down the belt as tight as he dared. He couldn’t be sure there wasn’t a fracture, and causing an intracranial bleed—which would surely kill Davila—was the very last thing they needed.

Now, for that chest wound, that left arm. Plugging his stethoscope into his ears, he listened to Davila’s breath sounds. Steady, good inflation. Excellent. Unhooking his stethoscope, he pulled up Davila’s shirt for a look. An angry red-and-yellow stripe marked the bullet’s passage that ended abruptly in a larger, fleshy crater where the bullet had pinged off bone with enough juice to drill into Davila’s arm. That wound was a pulpy black and red hole from which blood leaked in a slow dribble.

Missed the artery? He hoped. He felt for a pulse at Davila’s wrist and found it; Davila’s fingernails were pink, blanched under pressure, and quickly refilled. Okay, so they’d literally dodged that bullet. As it was, the worst-case scenarios were two. Even slowed down by the ricochet and Davila’s bulk, the bullet might still have enough power to fracture bone, shred a nerve. Or the thing might be lodged against an artery. Or all three might have happened. That Davila had a good, strong pulse argued against that, but in the emergency room, where Saturday nights belonged to folks at the wrong end of a knife or gun, John had been surprised before .

Here, though, he didn’t have the luxury of an x-ray to tell him where to go. Just have to hope that sucker’s shallow. Cupping his right hand under Davila’s arm, he began carefully working along its length, gently squeezing his fingers. Davila had a lot of muscle, which was both good and bad. If he’d been a skinnier guy, that bullet might have punched through. An AK-47’s bullet was a high-velocity projectile with a low fragmentation risk and designed to penetrate not blow apart. The bullet was also long, which, in this case…

He hissed as his fingers found something solid and about as long as the tip of his pinky to the first knuckle. Just under the skin. The bullet was canted, the tip at an angle and pointing at Davila’s left elbow.

Excise that sucker. He could do it. Had scalpels as well as epi and lidocaine. He could take that out, clean up the wound, and hope that infection didn’t follow.

But that time was not now.

A glance at his watch, and then he sucked in a breath. Almost twenty minutes gone and already fifteen minutes too long.

Got to get us away from here, fast as I can. Lucky for them, there was a van whose owner, being kind of dead, was not going to object if he borrowed the thing. Sucked that the van was so rattle-bang, but better than nothing. They had to be gone, like, yesterday.

Except ... I can’t just leave the kid .

Hurrying back to the van, he jumped onto the flatbed. Where are you, where are you? His gaze hopped over jugs of fuel and water zip-tied to one side, and then he spotted what he wanted slopped over a jumble of odds and ends in a cardboard box.

Jogging back to the kid, he extended his own hands—wrists together, palms up—to show the child what he wanted.

“ Pozhaluysta ,” he said. “I’m sorry, but...please...” He didn’t know the Russian for hand, or I need to tie you up, so you don’t kill me .

The boy regarded him for a long moment. He made no move to comply.

Oh, come on, kid. Despite the chill, sweat beaded on his upper lip. What would he do if the boy refused? What were his options? Knock the boy out? No, he couldn’t do that. Killing the child was a nonstarter, period.

He could leave him, though. Except wouldn’t that only be killing the child in a different way? Where, exactly, was a boy like Matvey supposed to go? Odds were Matvey was far from or had no home to which he could return.

“Pozhaluysta,” he said, again. He didn’t want to order the child, even though Matvey had grown up in some very terrible ways and much too quickly. But he’s still just a boy stuck in a really bad situation.

And hadn’t he once been such a child himself? A kid in a desperate situation, forced to act because no one else could ?

“Please, Matvey,” he said “just do this, okay? I don’t want to leave you, but I also have to be careful. Because we are in big, big trouble.”

For another long moment, the child was silent. But then, Matvey said something John didn’t understand and extended his hands.

“I’m sorry.” Signaling for Matvey to turn around, he pulled the boy’s extended arms behind his body and cinched a zip-tie around both wrists. There. He’d do a pat-down as soon as he squared Davila away. Guiding the boy to a boulder, he helped him to sit. “I’m really sorry. Be right back.”

The kid said something. He had no idea what, though he sort of hoped it was something like no problem.

But probably not.