The Traiteur's Ring (12 page)

“Two – Five – are you clear?”

“Two, clear.”

“Five, clear.”

“One – clear. Three and four are clear.” Chris sounded like their leader again, the quiver in his voice gone, and Ben felt glad. “Two, five, secure the crow, and check the bodies.”

“Roger, that,” he heard Auger say, but he no longer cared what anyone else was doing.

His best friend’s right thigh was pretty shredded and bled onto the floor, the skin hanging in thick strips from the exposed muscle underneath. But, that seemed the least of his problems. Ben could see a growing pool of dark blood forming around Reed’s left hip where it ran like a small stream from under his vest.

“I can’t really get my breath. Oh shit, Ben,” Reed said, his voice a loud, rattling whisper.

“I got ya’, bro,” Ben said and squeezed his buddy’s gloved hand. He hoped his voice carried more confidence than he felt.

Ben pulled out his knife and cut away the straps of Reed’s harness and the shoulder straps holding his armored vest in place. He didn’t see any marks on the vest.

But he did on Reed’s body.

Reed wore no utility shirt, but his brown T-shirt had a dark hole just below his left armpit and the whole left side soaked through with dark blood. Ben tore away the shirt with his hands and stared at the small dark whole in the side of Reed’s chest and felt his own chest tighten.

“Chris,” he called out with a quivering voice. “Help me roll him on his side.”

Chris knelt down beside him and cradled Reed’s head in his lap and grabbed his shoulders.

“Easy does it, bro,” Chris said softly in Reed’s ear. The calm, cool voice made Ben feel braver and more confident.

Until he saw the ragged, baseball sized hole on the right side of Reed’s back, just past his spine.

Oh, God no. Jesus, please. Please, no.

“Is it bad?” Reed’s voice sounded muffled like he spoke through a mouth full of cotton.

Ben shook open a large trauma dressing and packed it partially into the wound and taped it tightly in place. “No biggie, dude,” he lied to his best friend in the whole world. “Easy day. We’ll fix you right up, and you’ll buy the beer in Germany on the way home in a week or two.”

He rolled Reed over onto his back. His friend smiled up at him with thin, bluish lips. His face looked so pale, it seemed nearly grey. Ben had his backpack off and pulled more gear out of it and handed an IV set-up to Chris who assembled the tubing and plunged it into a clear bag of fluid. He heard faintly, like background noise, Lash’s strained voice calling for an emergency MedEvac. Ben plunged a needle into one of the veins in Reed’s forearm and hooked the tubing up to it and quickly taped it in place.

“Squeeze that bag as hard as you can,” he ordered Chris. The officer used both hands and squeezed the bag of fluid to his chest.

Reed’s eyes were closed now, and his breathing seemed terribly shallow.

I need to put in a chest tube. His left lung is probably down. He needs a tube.

He needs a Traiteur
.

The voice sounded like Gammy’s, but he knew it was the old man’s. Ben held his breath and looked down at the ring on his right hand. The ring was crimson and seemed to glow and pulsate on his hand.

I can’t. I don’t know how.

Yes, you do, Bennie.

Gammy again, but not really he knew. The old man’s voice came to him as its own.

The power is in you, Ben. Not in the ring. Never in the ring. It is in you
.

The tingling in his hand moved up his arm and even his chest seemed to pulsate with an almost buzzing like vibration.

Ben looked up at Chris, whose eyes were closed and lips moved, apparently in prayer. He turned and saw Lash had opened his lap top and spoke furiously into his radio, though curiously Ben could hear nothing, as if he watched a movie with the sound turned off. Past him, Auger pulled flex cuffs on the prisoner. Ben raised his right hand, but this time it wasn’t the ring that caught his eye.

He watched the golden light that surrounded his hand and his arm to the elbow begin to flicker, like it emanated from a million microscopic fireflies. Ben laid his hand on Reed’s chest and watched for a moment as the gold light spread out across his friend’s chest and became haloed by a faint and pulsating bluish haze. Ben closed his eyes and felt a heat that came from his chest and pulsed down his arm and out his finger tips with a burning-like pain that was not entirely unpleasant. He became aware of a soft chanting sound and realized the sound came from his throat, though the words were foreign and meant nothing to him.

Even through his closed eyes he could see the sudden explosion of light and for a moment he felt a ripping pain through his chest. He felt certain he had been shot, as well. He opened his eyes in time to see a bluish haze fade rapidly away. He realized he couldn’t breathe and heard a bubbling from his own chest. The pain was excruciating and he thought he cried out, certain he would lose consciousness any second. Then another light flashed, and the feeling vanished.

“What the fuck was that? Did you see that light, Ben?”

Ben looked up. Chris still squeezed the IV bag but turned his head left and right.

“Was that lightning?” Lash called out from where he knelt in front of the laptop.

“I didn’t see it,” Ben lied.

“I think it was lightning.”

Reed’s voice.

Ben looked down at Reed who smiled up at him. His face looked pink and healthy, though he grimaced a little. “Did it look like lightning to you? Jesus, my arm is cold.”

“It’s the IV fluid,” Ben said. He felt like he floated in a dream. He had the sense that he spoke lines written for him by someone else, like in a play or something. “You can stop squeezing, boss,” he said to Chris.

Ben placed a dressing quickly over the smooth unbroken skin beneath Reed’s left armpit before Chris could get a look.

“Holy shit, my leg hurts,” Reed said. “Hey, man, is that all my blood?” His voice sounded a little panicked.

“Looks like more than it is,” Ben said and looked at Chris who kind of shook his head and shrugged.

“MedEvac helo in the courtyard in five mikes,” Lash called out, his voice still tight and frightened for his teammate.

Ben stuffed his gear back into his bag and slung it over both shoulders. “Let’s get him out to the courtyard.” He looked up at Chris. “You want me to go back with him?”

“Maybe,” Chris answered. “Let’s see how secure we are here. The PJ’s can handle him if need be,” he said, referring to the Air Force Special Operations Medics aboard the MedEvac helicopter. “If we can spare you I want you with him, though.”

“’Kay,” Ben said. Across the room, Auger knelt with his knee in the back of the prisoner’s neck and strained to see how Reed looked.

“He looks stable, guys,” Ben called out to the team. “He’s gonna be okay.”

“Jesus, I hope so,” Reed said with a nervous laugh.

Lash snapped together a stretcher beside them, and the three of them loaded Reed onto it while Auger continued to kneel on the prisoner who now began to cry. Ben’s headset clicked with a keyed mike somewhere, and he reached on the front of his vest and turned up the volume. He then clicked the button to allow him to hear the command channel, as well as their team tactical channel.

“Ghost – target secure – four crows.”

“Mustang, secure. Five crows.”

“Viper, secure,” Ben heard Chris’s voice and a split second later heard it again in his headset as it bounced back to him from a communications satellite in space. “One crow.”

“Yeah, thanks to Rambo over there,” Lash chuckled.

Ben looked up at Chris and then shifted uncomfortably under the concerned glare from his boss. He would have some explaining to do later.

But not as much as when he figures out that the lethal holes in Reed’s body have somehow disappeared. How the hell will I explain that?

He looked down at Reed who grimaced up at him and squeezed his hand.

He realized he could care less about either question right now. His best friend was alive, and the men who controlled the slaughter on his people were captured or killed – killed if they had been in his line of sight.

The bleeding from Reed’s shredded leg had slowed to a trickle and he wrapped a battle dressing around it. Then, he popped a Syrette of morphine into his friend’s exposed hip.

You see now the power in you and why our people need you.

Ben ignored the voice and together with Chris lifted Reed in the stretcher and moved towards the courtyard and the sound of the Blackhawk helicopter beating the air into submission.

Chapter 10

The burning in his leg had subsided a lot, and Reed found he could relax a little now. Mostly he thought it was because Ben didn’t look that worried – at least not about him. His friend seemed lost and far away, but when he came back to the world and looked at him or joked with him, Reed saw nothing that made him think his friend was worried. He felt relief that Ben rode with him in the helicopter.

Reed ran over the strange dream in his head again. The concussion from the grenade blast must have knocked him out for a while. He remembered Chris looking down at him, terrified, and he remembered Ben leaning over him. But so much of what followed seemed a mix of reality and the strange dream that he found it impossible to tell which was which.

“You okay?” Ben’s voiced pulled him from his weird thoughts. Must be the dope he’d given him for the pain.

“Yeah,” he said, but his voice sounded gravelly, and his throat hurt. “My throat is dry. Can I get water?”

“Sure,” Ben said, leaned over him, and stretched the mouthpiece from his camel back to Reed’s lips. Reed took a long pull on the warm, rubber-tasting water, but it felt nothing but good on his throat. “Sorry about your kit, dude,” Ben said. “Had to cut it away back there. The guys will get all your shit and bring it back.”

“No worries,” he said. His kit was the last thing he cared about right now. That crazy dream – he had felt certain he would die in only moments back there. He remembered feeling he couldn’t pull any air into his lungs and the nauseating, powerful coppery taste of blood in the back of his throat.

“Am I gonna have to have an operation?” he asked and felt a little bit like a kid, but he didn’t care. He hated medical shit. It skeeved him out. The thought of going to sleep and having doctors do stuff to him frankly terrified him.

“Nothing big,” Ben promised. “They may want to give you some happy juice to clean your leg up, but looks like no broken bones or anything. Just tore up some skin and muscle.”

“Oh, is that all?” Reed grimaced.

Thank God Ben is here or I’d be scared and crying like a baby.

In his dream, he felt like he had almost died, but then Ben saved him. Not with medicine and stuff, though. It seemed more like Ben had, well, sort of gone inside him somehow. Like he went inside him and took out the badness. Not fixed it – took it out somehow. He remembered pain and, then, the sense that his chest filled with light and heat. Then the badness disappeared, and he could breathe again. The not being able to breathe – that had been the worst part of the dream. When it went away, he knew he would be okay.

Reed realized his head had begun to feel swimmy. The morphine – he was sure it had to be that. Didn’t really feel bad, though. No sir – kind of nice, in fact. He turned his head and looked past the Air Force medic who sat back on a canvas bench. Outside the helicopter, the horizon had just a hint of purple, a little light in the blackness that heralded the dawn. The color reminded him of something, but he couldn’t quite grab it. A bluish light somewhere?

“Everybody get off the ‘X’?” he asked Ben.

“Sounded like it,” Ben answered, pulling the silver thermal blanket up around his shoulders.

“Good,” he said. It was always good when they got off target before it got light. He looked up at his friend again and remembered the sight of him wading through the little house, blazing away like a madman from some low-rent action movie. “Dude, you were like crazy shit back there. You just smoked everyone.” He didn’t mean to bring it up, but the morphine just let the words tumble out of his mouth.

“Yeah,” Ben said, and his eyes flashed with a glow or something that gave him a chill. “I’m glad it’s all over,” Ben said and put a hand on Reed’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” Reed agreed. His eyes caught the ring on Ben’s hand, the one from Christy, and it seemed a little like it glowed slightly, a bluish glow in the dark helicopter. His mind flashed suddenly to Ben leaning over him, his hand stretched out just above his chest. His friend’s eyes were closed, and his lips moved as he mumbled something strange – like in French or something. The hand, though – the ring pulsed with an orange light, and his hand sparkled with white light. Underneath he saw a bluish, purple glow – like the dawn outside. Tongues of fire-like light shot out from the finger tips.

Crazy fucking dream.

Reed closed his eyes. He felt safe with Ben’s hand on his shoulder. Safe and well.

He drifted into a deep and dreamless sleep.

*   *   *

Ben opened his eyes when he felt the nose of the helicopter pull up slightly and looked out the doorway. Below him he saw the task force camp rise up towards them – only the second time he had seen it from the air in daylight. He realized he must have slept the entire flight back from the Navy Amphibious Assault ship where they left Reed, only a dozen or so miles off the African coast.  The surgeon there, a man only his age it seemed, had promised to take good care of him, but wanted to watch his leg wounds for a few days. He had confirmed what Ben suspected – that although his skin and some muscle looked pretty shredded, there seemed to be no deeper injuries to bone, nerves, or blood vessels. The doc had predicted a full-function recovery. Ben had shifted nervously when they had pulled the battle dressings from Reed’s chest to reveal nothing but healthy skin underneath. Ben had just shrugged to the curious looks and said nothing.