Arabian Nights Part 6
Three Seconds
He woke to a rough voice.
"Will you evacuate the wounded and what's left of the mercenaries?" the voice asked.
"You are a professional soldier of France, Renaud," a harsh, gutteral voice answered, in heavily accented English. "You expect us to give all the niceties of polite, professional conduct to these desert rats? Half of them are just boys. Well-trained, but children nevertheless. Two of them are not even Arabic."
Heero tried to open his eyes and survey his surroundings. They seemed glued shut.
"They've been beaten," the man called Renaud answered. "What more do you want with them? They are just mercenaries."
"Why should I allow them to go? They may come against this base again, some other day. We should kill them all now and be done with it. Half of them are dead or wounded, anyway."
//... Trowa. //
Silence. Heero tried to rub the blurriness out of his eyes. His chest exploded in pain, which Heero quickly processed. Ribs. The bullet that had hit him had not killed him. The light armor vest had stopped the bullet, but not the impact that came with it. He tried to focus his eyes on the shadowy ceiling, then carefully turned his head toward the voices he had heard.
He was lying on a straw pallet on the floor of a tiny room. The only light came from the doorway from which the voices came. The room reeked of blood and shit. He looked around him and saw that Trowa was lying bare-chested among two other bodies, bloodied and still. Heero's heart clenched as he saw the Maguanac soldiers were both unmoving, eyes glazed and staring.
The surge of relief that struck him was dizzying when he saw that Trowa was alive. Lying between the corpses, Heero could see his chest rising ever-so-slightly with his shallow breaths.
"We were only hired. We are not responsible!" A new voice in the other room, babbling in panic-stricken Arabic. Sidi.
"I'm a professional soldier," the first voice said again, blurred with a thick French accent. "I think that you should allow these prisoners to leave. They will not be foolish enough to hire against us again."
Another silence. Heero crawled painfully over to Trowa, breathing through his mouth to muffle the stench of the bodies. He shook the Heavyarms pilot, hard.
"Trowa, get up," he whispered, keeping his monotone voice as low as possible.
Silence. After the loud carnage from before, the silence was deafening.
"Trowa..." The blood flowing from Trowa's gore-matted hair alarmed Heero slightly, in a detached, distracted way. He pulled the pilot to a sitting position with an agonizing effort, and fetched Trowa a hard slap to the face.
The Heavyarms pilot floudered and jerked away from him, blinded by blood, ready to kill with his bare hands.
"Trowa, it's Heero." Trowa sat up on his own, half of his face covered with tiny shrapnel gashes.
"Heero? Why in the hell are you hitting me for?"
Heero managed a grim smile. "I thought you were trying to die on me for a minute there. I'll need your help to get out of here. My ribs are broken."
Trowa took a glance and nodded seriously. His green eyes shone brightly in the dim light, like the eyes of a wild cat.
The officer's voice again. "Ah, you French mercenaries and your honor. Fine. I will let them go. They are only three together. All but the two foreigners."
"But..." Sidi's voice, rising in protest. The distinct sound of a slap.
"Those will remain here. They are needed for interrogation, and I have no intention of letting two unknown enemies go free. They will be killed."
// They're talking about us... // Heero thought, and his jaw clenched in determination.
"You cannot!" Sidi.
The officer laughed. "Would you like to stay with them and share their fate? I'm letting you and what's left of your comrades go free."
"That's not... that is not fair," Sidi's voice, a defeated whisper.
"You had better take those pathetic excuses for soldiers and leave while you can," the officer answered. His voice was flat and cold. The conversation was over.
"I... I'm only doing this for the sake of my comrades," Sidi said.
"Of course. Don't trouble yourself over these foreign infidel killers. They aren't worth troubling your conscience over. Renaud, escort this one back to his companions."
Trowa and Heero listened to Sidi's booted feet walk across the wooden floorboards alongside those of the French mercenary. A door squeaked open, then slammed shut.
// My fault, // Heero thought, chiding himself mercilessly. // I led these men into this mess. I couldn't even kill an enemy soldier. I stood there and let myself get shot. I'm a fool. Worse than a fool. I'm a coward. A gutless coward who can't even pull a trigger on a young girl to save his own life. //
The thoughts incensed him with a searing pain and anger worse than his wounds. // Coward... //
Another voice, different. "Do you think it is a good idea to let those mercenaries go free, Haroun?"
The officer let out a single harsh bark of laughter. "No, it isn't a good idea. And they will not leave this base alive. They're going to be shot before they reach the edge of the compound."
Heero forced himself to sit upright. The pain made his vision blur, but he still listened to the voice of the OZ officer named Haroun.
Trowa looked at him and whispered so low under his breath Heero barely heard him. "We can't let him murder Sidi and the others. We are responsible for enough of their deaths. We can't let him slaughter the rest of them."
"Hai," Heero replied in a soft gasp; every breath was an agony that was difficult to ignore, even with his training to help him block it out. He checked his clothes systematically. They had stripped him of everything; masks, vest, webbing, weapons. He was dressed only in his fatigues and his boots. Trowa had been stripped as well.
// At least they left me my boots, // Heero thought, unable to repress a smirk as he reached into the inside of the left one, feeling for the small switchblade carefully taped there, a trick he had learned from Duo.
He crawled painfully toward the lighted doorway. It took a great deal of his willpower not to allow himself even a small cry of pain. Trowa followed, and they stayed back in the shadows, flat on their stomaches, surveying the other room.
The officer named Haroun was sitting at a warped table, talking quietly with two of the government men from Mecca, the capital of Saudi Arabia.
On the table were Heero and Trowas' belongings, their binoculars, their pistols, and the three grenades they had left between them after the battle.
There was a rebel soldier standing at the doorway, leaning nonchalantly with a Russian assault rifle slung over his shoulder, smoking a handrolled cigarette.
Biting the inside of his cheek to keep himself from crying out, Heero used the wall to slowly pull himself to a standing position. He stood for a moment, dizzy, swaying, forcing himself to remain awake and not give in to the darkness that tempted him to yield to unconsciousness. He eased the switchblade out to keep it from clicking, looking over at Trowa meaningfully. He jerked his head slightly at the guard, then drew his thumb across his throat in pantomime. Trowa understood, nodding soundlessly.
Leaning against the wall, listening to the OZ officer and the Arabian traitors bantering about power over the lower quarter of the country, Heero felt the sweat bead and trickle down his body. It wasn't just heat or pain that made him sweat. It was anger.
He knew what he had to do. He knew he could do it. And he knew he had to do it now. Ten, twenty seconds from now might be too late to save the Maguanacs.
// They'll kill us... // he thought, calmly. He looked over at Trowa, tensed to spring, ready to fight to the death at any moment.
// Of course, // Heero answered himself, with a fatalistic serenity. // But they're sure as hell just going to kill and torture us anyway. At least we have to try and save the others. //
He looked at Trowa and pushed himself away from the wall, barging into the lighted room. Heero tackled the guard from behind, jerking the switchblade in a brutal slash from left to right. The guard was still gargling shock, even in death, but Heero knew the job was sufficient as he dropped the dying man. The knife was viciously sharp and had gone straight through the carotid artery, judging from the blood that gushed from the wound, soaking Heero's arm in it from the shoulder down, dripping from his fingertips.
Trowa streaked in after him, his attack just as quick as Heero's, and rushed between the two Arabian politicians, grabbing for one of the pistols.
The officer was closer and faster. He was surprised at their sudden uprising, but he swept the gun up swiftly and surely and brought up his left hand to slide the action back and cock it.
When Heero saw Haroun pointing his gun at Trowa's bare chest, he did the only thing he could think of to do at the time. He grabbed one of the shrapnel grenades from the table and pulled the pin.
He heard the pin clatter on the table, just before the snicking sound of the action on the pistol.
The two politicans began to babble in frightened tongues.
Haroun kept the pistol pointed at Trowa, but he locked his eyes with Heero. And he did not fire. Heero held the grenade tightly in his right hand, slippery with the lifeblood of the guerrilla soldier, visibly shaking with the pain the attack had caused, slumping back against the cinder- block wall.
"If I... let go of this..." he whispered, pronouncing every word clearly and deliberately in Arabic, "it will... go off. We'll... all die..."
He watched the officer's eyes, fearful and calculating and furious at the same time.
"It's... a three-second fuse..." Heero added, a chilling smile on his face. "No chance... you won't... have time to pick it up... and throw it away."
Haroun relaxed slightly. But the gun stayed pointed at Trowa. "You boys are more resourceful than I thought."
"And you... are just as much... a murdering bastard... as I... would have imagined."
The Arabic politicians were paralyzed with fear.
"It seems we have a stalemate, foreigner," the officer replied.
"Give... the orders... to bring those mercenaries back."
"The mercenaries?"
"Bring... them back here. Alive."
With a shrug that was amused and contemptuous, Haroun brought a radio out of the chest pocket of his battle fatigues, speaking into it in Arabic.
"They'll be here in a few minutes," he said to Heero, finally.
"They'd better... hurry. My hand's a little... slippery. Might... drop this." The officer spoke into the radio again.
A wave of dizziness struck him. Trowa moved slowly and smoothly towards him, putting Heero's arm over his shoulder to help him stay up.
"Would you like to sit?" the officer asked mockingly, offering a chair.
"I'll stand... thanks anyway," Heero gasped.
"But for how long?"
"Long as I have to."
The last of the Maguanacs, led by Sidi, entered the room and assessed the situation in a single glance. Five of them, including the little guide, and two of them wore bloody bandages. Five living, two wounded. Five out of a dozen.
// What a fucking mess, // the pilot of Wing thought miserably to himself.
Heero looked wearily up at the small Arab guide. "Sidi, can you fly one of those mobile suits out there?"
"Sure," he answered in unpracticed English, looking nervously around the room.
"Alright. Let's go." Heero limped forward. "You'll fly us out... of here."
"And if I refuse to let you go?" Haroun asked, raising the gun slightly, switching it from Trowa to Heero.
Heero smiled coldly. "I'll open my hand... detonate this grenade... and blow all of us to shreds. Do you understand ? We have... nothing left to lose. Now... move."
Speechless, the officer-in-command of the mobile suit base headed for the door. Trowa walked alongside Heero, helping him to stay conscious and on his feet. "Maybe you ought to give it to me," Trowa whispered, looking at the grenade in Heero's shaking hand.
Heero shook his head doggedly. "I'll... hold it." Trowa reached over and wordlessly took the gun from the officer's hand.
Outside, it was deep into the chill desert night. They slowly made their way toward the mobile suits, an odd procession with Heero supported by Trowa, Haroun beside them, the Arabian politicians two steps behind them, and the surviving Maguanacs leading in front and at the rear. The only weapons among the two government officials and the eight soldiers was the pistol Trowa held and the grenade clutched in Heero's bloody hand.
In the shadows on either side of them, the soldiers still left living after the Gundam pilots' attack on the base escorted them, held back from shooting only by Haroun's steady flow of orders for them to remain calm and to stay back.
If Heero had had the energy, he would have sneered in contempt. // This man doesn't want to die. He's afraid. As afraid as I was when I thought that Trowa was dead. //
They reached the mobile suits. The Maguanacs manned them all. Sidi climbed into the cockpit of one and helped Trowa help Heero up into it. The mobile suits roared to life almost simultaneously, Sidi piloting the one Trowa and Heero had climbed into. They huddled towards the back of it in the small, cramped space.
"Oh, I will meet you again, cold one!" Haroun shouted up at Heero. "I will look forward to it!"
// He certainly is in a hurry to die, // Heero thought, and the thought brought another grim, weak smile to his face. He tried to turn and deliriously answer the challenge, but Trowa suddenly had Heero wrapped in his strong arms. The left side of the Heavyarms pilot was a mask of blood. "Don't mind him, Heero." He put his hand over Heero's, the bloody one holding the grenade.
"Give it to me, Heero. We don't want it going off in here." Heero felt strong fingers prying the grenade out of his grasp.
The engine roared louder as the mobile suit prepared for takeoff. Trowa sat up and moved forward, tossing the grenade through the closing hatch. Its explosion was muffled as the hatch closed completely, and Trowa slumped against the back of the mobile suit in exhaustion. The suit jerked free of the ground and lifted into the dark sky.
Trowa leaned forward again, checking with Sidi to make sure they were heading back to the Maguanac base. He went back to report to Heero that the camp was less than an hour away, and that a doctor under Rashid would be waiting for them.
But Heero was sitting in the corner, his gore-streaked arms crossed over his injured chest, his head bowed in sleep, a slight smile on his face that almost made him look angelic.
TBC...
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