Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

The odds didn’t particularly bother him. Besides, it was always better to be the one holding the high ground. They would have to flush him out, and that meant they’d have to show themselves. He just had to be ready.

My kingdom for a set of night-vision goggles, he mused. And some thermals. He shivered against the cold and tried to tune it out. Then he sensed movement to his left.

Careful steps, inching their way towards him.

A hunter’s movements.

He shut his eyes for a few seconds to sensitize his retinas, then opened them again and scanned the trees. Which was when he heard a step crunching against the gravelly soil, only this one was coming from his right side.

Mia’s heartbeat thundered in her ears as she strained to see into the brutal darkness. She hated the feeling. She knew someone would soon be dead — again — and she couldn’t do anything about it.

The night suddenly lit up with flashes of muzzle fire, and gunshots echoed through the trees. She counted at least a dozen, irregularly spaced, different, and heard horses whinnying frenziedly and bolting, their hoofbeats clattering into the distance — then silence.

Not quite silence.

Groans.

Pained, injured moans. Followed by shouts, in Kurdish.

Angered, furious, pained wails.

She bolted out into the open and rushed towards the source of the noise, dodging tree trunks and loose stones, trying to stay on her feet.

The first man she reached was the other villager. He was down, injured but still alive. He’d been hit in his side. He was in a lot of pain and was visibly scared. He beseeched her for some help, his eyes struggling to stay open. As she got down to have a look at his wound, she heard the mokhtar scream out wildly and turned her attention to the source of the shouts. She saw a shadow moving through the trees up ahead and heard more gunshots, then the distinct clicking sound of an empty magazine.

She gestured to the villager, indicating that she’d be right back, and heard the boy cry out to his father. The boy coughed violently, more of retch than a cough, clearly badly injured. She crept forward, closer to the skirmish, and found Salem, the mokhtar’s son, lying on the ground. He was bleeding from just below his shoulder, and the wound seemed dangerously close to his upper lungs. He coughed up some blood, confirming the probable puncture there, and its severity. The mokhtar was there, by his side, his face contorted in worry and anger, his trembling fingers clasped around a rifle. He held it aimed at a couple of thick trees that rose up around ten yards away.

“There,” he muttered, pointing the rifle at them, as if indicating a cornered prey. “Come.”

He advanced cautiously, the gun held level in front of him. Mia followed in his footsteps. They edged through the trees, one step at a time, until they rounded the two hulking trunks.

Corben lay there on the ground, his back propped up against the larger of the trees. He was also hit, somewhere in his midsection. His shirt was drenched with blood, and an empty Kalashnikov was still in his hands.

He looked up at the mokhtar with drained eyes. The mokhtar started cursing him fiercely, nudging the rifle threateningly at him, then he went berserk, shrieking louder, getting ready to pump a bullet into Corben’s brain.

Mia stepped in front of him, blocking him, yelling, “No!”

The man was livid, rattling on in Kurdish, pointing back at his injured son, screaming abuse at the fallen agent. Mia kept shouting “No” back at him, repeatedly, again and again, waving her arms angrily, until she finally grabbed the muzzle of the rifle and pushed it away.

“Enough,” she hollered. “Enough already. He’s down. Your son’s hurt. So’s another of your men. They need help.”

The mokhtar grudgingly tilted the rifle downwards, took one last scowl at Corben, and nodded.

She watched him turn away and head back into the shadows. She knelt down beside Corben and lifted the AK-47 off him, saying, “You won’t be needing this anymore, right?”

He nodded, keeping his dazed eyes on her.

She checked the wound. It was to his abdomen. It was hard to tell what the bullet had damaged on its way into him. A lot of organs were crammed in there, and most of them were crucial.

“How painful is it?” she asked.

“It’s…not great,” he said, wincing.

Whatever it had hit — stomach, liver, kidneys, intestines — the damage needed to be fixed quickly. Gunshot wounds to the abdomen were almost invariably devastating. From the level of bleeding, Mia thought there was a decent chance that his aorta hadn’t been ruptured, but if that was the case, all it gave him, if he didn’t get treated soon, was a slight extension to the minutes of life he would have if it were.

“We need to get you back to the village.”

He nodded faintly, but the somber acceptance in his eyes told her that he knew he’d never see it.

The mokhtar hurried back to her. He was gripping the lead of a horse, one of the ones he and Corben had ridden up. “There’s no sign of your horses,” he stammered. “This is the only one we have left.”

Mia scanned the obscurity around them. She couldn’t see any sign of the other horses either.

She heaved a dejected sigh. “Your son needs medical attention quickly. And the other man, from your village…”

“Shāker, my cousin. He’s dead,” the mokhtar informed her, his voice as tenebrous as the forest around them.

Mia nodded. She knew what had to be done. “Take the horse, with your son. You can ride down with him. I’ll stay here with Corben.”

“I can’t leave you here like this,” the mokhtar argued. “We can put him on the horse and walk him down together.”

“There’s no time for that. He needs help fast.”

The mokhtar shook his head with frustration. “You came after me, to save me.”

“Then hurry down and send for help,” she insisted. “Go on.”

The mokhtar studied her for a beat, as if committing her face to memory, then nodded. “I’ll help you make a fire.”

“No, just go. I can do it.”

He looked at her with eyes that were dark with remorse. He gave in reluctantly, threw one last angry glare in Corben’s direction, then led the horse away from her, towards his fallen son.

They split up the lighters and the torches — the mokhtar would need to see his way down — and the blankets they managed to recover. Moments later, the mokhtar helped his son onto the saddle before climbing on behind him, and with a final, heavy-hearted wave of the torch in his hand, he rode off. Holding up a flaming torch of her own, Mia watched him ride off, her eyes clinging desperately to his receding figure until the darkness swallowed him up entirely.

She checked on Corben again. There wasn’t much she could do for him, apart from keeping him warm. With a different kind of chill seeping into her bones, she sought out the bodies of both villagers. She found them, one, then the other, lying on the cold ground, bereft of life. She checked each of them for pulses, just in case, and felt a bile of anger at Corben’s reckless actions rising in her throat. Remorsefully, and with a tremble in her hands, she pulled the jacket off one of them and brought it back to cover Corben.

She then got to work on building a fire. The winter rains hadn’t yet arrived, and the twigs and branches she collected were dry and brittle. She managed to get a good fire going opposite the tree Corben was against and gathered a small pile of additional wood to keep it fed.

She wondered how long it would be before help arrived. Given that they’d ridden for close to two hours to get to this spot, she reckoned it would take at least twice as long before anyone appeared, probably even longer given that they’d be making the entire journey at night — and that was assuming they would actually attempt it at night and not wait until morning. A warm feeling spread through her as she thought of Evelyn and Tom wistfully. She knew they wouldn’t wait till morning, and yet, at the same time, she didn’t want to put them in any more danger.