Chương 114: Chapter 112 Interlude 19

The establishment had no name, or if it did, no one had bothered in a long time to repaint it on the worn wood of the entrance. It was one of those places on the edge of the Imperial Capital's entertainment district that survived not for its food or drink, but for its discretion and for asking no questions of its clientele. In that establishment, at a table in a corner, beside a window whose shutters looked as if no one had closed them in decades, a man sat alone.

He had the dull gaze, that kind of gaze that observes nothing in particular and that simply wanders with nothing better to do. His clothing, of good quality in its day, was stained in several places and wrinkled as if he had been wearing it for several days in a row.

At his waist, however, he carried a sword whose hilt was well cared for, as if it were the only part of his person that still mattered to him, and beside it, almost hidden under the fold of his tunic, a small pouch whose luxurious appearance clearly contrasted with that of the rest of his attire.

On the table there was a bottle of liquor half-emptied, an empty cup that clearly had not been used in some time, and, scattered around the man's feet, two other bottles lying on their sides that gave testimony of the time he had spent in that same spot. The man lifted the bottle and drank directly from it, slowly, with the indifference of someone who no longer even bothered to savor the liquor.

And then, without warning, another man slid onto the bench across from him with an abrupt movement that made the table shake.

"Li Yundong", said the newcomer with a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.

"You have no idea how complicated it has been to find you." The man who apparently was called Li Yundong remained with the bottle halfway between the table and his lips, and for an instant his hand stayed still in the air, as if his brain were having trouble concentrating on what was happening, and when it did, he lowered the bottle very slowly to leave it resting on the table with a care that betrayed how much effort it was costing him not to let his hand tremble.

His eyes, until a second ago dull, focused on the man before him with a new and quite unfriendly clarity.

"I would never have looked for you here", the newcomer continued with the casual tone of someone making a social observation.

"This place is, literally, lost to the sight of the Heavens. And even so, look at you, here you are." The newcomer had not bothered to introduce himself and, by the way he settled onto the bench, it was clear that he had no intention of doing so. He was a man of firm build, with a posture that maintained even when seated that particular restraint of someone always calculating the distance separating him from the exits.

His clothes were sober but of good workmanship and, although he carried no visible weapons, there was something in the way he rested his hand on the table that suggested he didn't need them visible to have them at hand. Li Yundong looked at him with a mixture of fear and caution as one of his hands slid barely a few centimeters toward his side, toward the place where the hilt of his sword protruded slightly beneath the table.

The movement did not escape the other man, who registered it without moving a muscle of his face, but he also didn't grant it sufficient importance to react. Instead, he reached out his hand and, with an insulting naturalness, took Li Yundong's bottle, poured himself a drink in the cup that was empty, and drank.

"There is no need to look at me like that", he said after swallowing, setting the cup on the table without haste.

"If I had wanted to kill you I would not have bothered to sit down, I would have assassinated you the moment I saw you and by now I would be several streets away from here." Li Yundong did not reply, but the trace of tension in his shoulders did not yield either. The other man, far from being offended, smiled slightly, as if that response were exactly what he had expected.

"I don't like senseless fights", he continued, leaning back a bit and leaving both hands visible on the table, a gesture whose false courtesy fooled no one.

"They cost time, they cost Qi, and above all, they cost attention. And attention, in my trade, is the most expensive thing that exists." He made a brief pause before continuing, as if giving Li Yundong time to finish processing what he was going to say next.

"The bounty for which I am here is not for you", he said at last.

"It is for the objects you stole. If you hand them over to me without causing problems, I let you keep wasting what remains of your life in this miserable hole and I forget that I ever saw you." Li Yundong listened to him in silence, and for a moment, in his dull gaze there was kindled something that resembled more the flash of a cornered animal than the decision of a man.

Without finishing the thought of what he was doing, his hand completed the gesture he had begun earlier and closed over the hilt of the sword beneath the table. The other man saw it and sighed.

"In your place I would not do that", he said, and for the first time his tone moved away from the casual register and into something more direct.

"You have no real possibility of defeating me. And if by chance you did, the only thing you would achieve is to attract to yourself exactly the kind of attention I am completely certain you do not want, since we are too close to the palace of this cursed place to be making noise." He picked up the cup again, drained it in one swallow, and set it upside down on the table with a sharp little tap that seemed to be, more than a gesture, a small form of punctuation.

"So tell me", he concluded.

"Are you going to be good and do this the easy way, or are we going to have to resolve it in a way that neither of us wants?" Li Yundong looked at him for a very long instant, without blinking, and the other man held his gaze with the somewhat bored patience of the hunter who already knows that his prey has understood that there are no more places to hide.

Finally, Li Yundong's shoulders yielded forward into a defeated posture, and a long sigh escaped his lips as he withdrew his hand from the sword and slid it toward the interior of his clothing.

"I'm glad you're being reasona…", the other man began to say as he smiled with a flash of satisfaction. But the word remained trapped in the middle of his throat when Li Yundong's hand emerged from within his clothing and, instead of a storage pouch or one of the objects he was looking for, what he held was a talisman whose reddish glow revealed that it was already activated.

For a fraction of a second, the bounty hunter's face went through all the possible expressions before stopping, finally, at the pure fury of someone who had just understood that he had made a miscalculation.

"Son of a b,!" he roared as his free hand moved at a speed that was not that of a normal human body, and around him the air began to move in what was undoubtedly the rushed beginning of some kind of protection technique, but the phrase did not manage to finish before the talisman exploded. The sound of the explosion echoed throughout the entire nearby area, loud enough to make the shutters of the neighboring houses rattle in their frames, and the consequences were immediate.

The shockwave of the explosion tore the entire lower floor of the establishment apart and projected it outward in the form of debris that shot off in all directions, spewing splintered wood, broken stone and pieces of furniture against the adjacent streets. The upper floors of the building, without the lower floor to hold them up, hesitated barely an instant before obeying gravity and collapsing upon themselves with a dry roar that mixed with the echoes of the explosion itself.

And the adjacent buildings did not escape either. To the right of the facade, the wall adjoining the establishment collapsed inward with an almost clean crack, opening the side of the neighboring construction as if by the cut of a knife. But, nevertheless, the shockwave kept pushing and dragged the rest of the building in the opposite direction, making its walls shift outward with an ever-greater inclination.

By good fortune, another building stood in its path and stopped it mid-collapse, leaving it leaning against it at a precarious angle, like a house of cards about to topple over entirely. But the worst result was to the left. The building that occupied that spot made a corner with another perpendicular street, and having no adjacent building to hold it up on its most exposed side, when the shockwave pushed it, its already compromised structure gave way with nothing to stop it, toppling entirely toward the street.

It fell upon the people who at that moment were walking below, right in the middle of an afternoon that until a second before had been perfectly normal, and among the pedestrians trapped, there was a group that looked like a family of five. The parents, a handmaiden dressed soberly who carried in her arms one of the two small girls, and the other girl who was walking right beside her and talking with her sister.

It was the kind of everyday image that could be seen on any street at any hour, and that would have been irrelevant if not for the fact that, in a fraction of a second, it ceased to exist beneath the mass of stone and wood that collapsed on top of them. But no important witness remained in a condition to take note of that small detail.

The sun beat straight down upon the strip of dust and stone that separated the borders of Iraq, Jordan and Syria, an arid land where the heat filtered through the windows of the vehicles as if the air itself had the consistency of sand. A small convoy advanced along a poorly paved track, raising a trail of dust that was lost behind it on the horizon.

At the head marched a white SUV with the blue emblem of the United Nations painted on its sides, followed by two trucks loaded with humanitarian aid with their tarps drawn tight to protect the sacks and boxes they carried inside, and closing the formation went three more escort jeeps with their respective soldiers. Halfway through the convoy, between one of the trucks and the first escort SUV, there was a vehicle different from the others.

It was an SUV a bit older than the official ones, with the paint scratched by the many trips it already had behind it, and inside went four archaeologists who had joined the UN escort for the simple reason that traveling alone through that part of the world was much less safe than being accompanied by soldiers. They were three men and a woman.

The men were in their thirties and forties, with skin weathered by years of excavations under climates similar to this one, while the woman was rather younger, barely in the middle of her twenties, and there was noticeable in her the somewhat clumsy mixture of someone who had not yet been through enough archaeological campaigns to have completely lost her enthusiasm but who had already lived through enough of them to have learned to be quiet when the veterans were speaking.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Until that moment, the journey had been calm. Too calm, some of the UN soldiers said in low voices among themselves, since in those zones calm was never a good sign and tended to precede something that broke that calm abruptly. And in this case, that intuition was not mistaken.

The explosion was the first thing, a blinding flash, a lash of heat and a sharp roar that shook the air as the SUV at the head of the convoy literally leapt into the air in a cloud of fire, smoke and twisted metal, before falling again to the ground transformed into a formless mass from which flames and a thick black smoke escaped. The entire convoy stopped dead while the soldiers riding in the other vehicles reacted with the swiftness their training conferred upon them.

They leapt outside with their weapons already in their hands, deployed around the trucks and covered the flanks with their bodies as they shouted instructions to the few civilians who were traveling in the convoy, ordering them to crouch down, not to stick their heads out, and to stay where they were. Inside the civilian SUV, the four archaeologists obeyed without anyone having to repeat it twice.

They sank into their seats until their heads were below the level of the windows, and in the thick silence that followed the roar all that could be heard was the crackling of the fire from the first vehicle and the metallic click of the safeties of the rifles the soldiers had just released. From the SUV that closed the convoy, the radio soldier began to speak with a controlled voice that only let the nervousness show through in the rapidity with which he pronounced the words.

He gave the coordinates, identified the convoy, repeated that they were under attack and requested support, in a succession that seemed to have been recited a thousand times before. And while the radio soldier kept speaking, another of the escort jeeps, located at the level of the second truck, also leapt into pieces. This time the blast came accompanied by a dull and prolonged echo that arrived from some point in the irregular terrain surrounding the track.

An echo that the woman, peering barely above the dashboard, recognized not by direct experience but by all the movies and video games she had played in her life, since it had an unmistakable sound. It was the sound of a grenade launcher, and before she could finish processing what had just happened, the gunfire began.

It came from three different directions, a series of dry and quick discharges, and among the dust raised by the explosions emerged the figures of a group of armed guerrillas who launched themselves toward the convoy while firing on the run and shouting something in Arabic that none of the archaeologists understood, but whose meaning needed no translation. Chaos spread through the convoy for several interminable seconds.

The UN soldiers, surprised by the swiftness of the attack, took an instant to locate the positions of the attackers, but soon their training took control. They reorganized behind the vehicles, sought cover behind the wheels and engines, shouted orders to one another and began to return fire with short and precise shots. For several minutes the firefight maintained a sort of precarious equilibrium.

The guerrillas fired from their positions and the soldiers responded from theirs, without either side managing a clear advantage, and in the civilian SUV the archaeologists remained huddled against one another, with their heads pressed to the floor and their hands covering the napes of their necks. Two of the men, the older ones, prayed in low voices.

The woman recognized the Latin of the first one and the Spanish of the second, and it surprised her, in some corner of her mind that was still capable of noticing useless details. The third man, the youngest of the three, was not praying, but rather had his eyes very wide open, fixed on a point on the ceiling of the vehicle, with his breathing fast and shallow until, suddenly, he fainted. His body slid to one side without a single sound and remained leaning against the door like a poorly placed sack.

The other two men barely reacted, too focused on their own prayers to notice the detail, and the woman remained looking at him for a few seconds with a strange mixture of envy and secondhand embarrassment. Meanwhile, outside, the gunshots sounded closer and closer until the precarious equilibrium broke.

The woman heard a brief cry to her left, followed by the sound of a body falling against the gravel, and then another cry, and another, and among the gaps between the discharges there also reached her the voice of one of the soldiers asking for a medic who clearly was not going to come.

Through the windows, peering out just enough not to expose herself too much, she saw how one of the soldiers who had been covering the left flank was lying on the ground with one hand over his chest and the other extended, and how another, closer to the lead truck, seemed to have taken an impact in the shoulder and was now firing from the ground in an uncomfortable posture.

The guerrillas noticed it, and the discharges that came from outside became more continuous and confident, and among the dust the silhouettes could be distinguished rising up and advancing at a run toward the convoy, taking advantage of the fact that the defensive line had weakened. And inside the civilian SUV, the woman began to understand something that until that moment she had refused to process, that the soldiers were not going to hold out.

And when the guerrillas reached the convoy, it would not be a clean death that awaited those who were still alive, not her, at least, since she knew perfectly well what was likely to happen to her if they took her alive. Something in her chest contracted with such force that for an instant she stopped breathing, and then she summoned all her courage.

She slowly lifted her head, just enough to see the interior of the vehicle over the seat, and her eyes settled on the spare rifles that the UN soldiers had left in the cargo area of the SUV when they had given it over for the trip. They were assault rifles, not very different from the ones she had seen the soldiers fire, and beside them several magazines were stacked. She stretched out her arm trying not to think too much about what she was about to do, and grasped one of the rifles.

The weight of the weapon in her hands was real in a way that froze her for a second. It was nothing like what she had expected, and the cold of the metal screamed at her that this was not a game, nor a movie. But she had no time to think about it too much, so she checked the magazine with clumsy fingers, as she had seen done a hundred times on dozens of screens, and slotted it into place with a sharp click that sounded to her much louder than it probably was.

She pulled the charging handle and removed the safety, with each gesture coming to her so mechanically that for an instant she felt as if her body were executing a sequence it had never learned, and only afterward did she realize that her mind had indeed taught it to her, only that it had been on a couch, in front of a screen, and with a controller in her hands. She breathed deeply once, then again.

And she told herself, in a very low voice, words that she knew were stupid but that she needed to hear come out of her own mouth in order to be able to do what she was going to do next.

"This is just like an FPS", she whispered to herself.

"Just like Call of Duty, just like any action game. You aim, you shoot, and that's it." And before her brain had time to explain to her all the ways in which this was not like a video game, she leaned slightly out the window of the SUV and pulled the trigger. The shots came out in a short and disordered burst.

The stock struck her against the shoulder with a force she had not anticipated and the noise of the weapon so few centimeters from her ear left a dull throbbing in her head, but she kept firing, because she knew that if she stopped now she would not be able to start again. That made the guerrillas who were approaching the vehicle freeze paralyzed for a tenth of a second, since they were not expecting shots from that SUV apparently without soldiers.

No one had gotten out of it, no one in uniform had peered out, and therefore they had considered it a disposable target, and the sudden appearance of a barrel sticking out the window caught them completely off guard.

And despite the evident clumsiness with which the woman fired, despite the fact that the rifle kicked upward with each shot and that most of the bullets were lost in the wrong direction, several struck the figures she had closest to her, and the woman saw how two of the guerrillas fell to the ground abruptly, without the elegance with which enemies fall on screens. They fell as one falls in reality, and that was something for which no screen had prepared her.

What followed happened so quickly that she barely had time to process it. The other guerrillas, upon seeing their companions fall and having received fire from a vehicle from which they had not expected a response, threw themselves to the ground and crawled looking for cover behind the little they had available, convinced that in the civilian SUV there were soldiers hidden waiting precisely for this moment to surprise them.

But that meant the assault broke off, and what came next was a new tense firefight, in which the guerrillas remained pressed to the ground and the UN soldiers, taking advantage of that pause, retook positions and began to press them again.

The woman continued firing from the window, now without aiming at anyone in particular, simply because she knew that if she stopped firing the illusion would break, and between burst and burst she shouted at one of the archaeologists who was praying to grab another of the rifles and back her up, but the man shook his head over and over again without opening his eyes.

The magazine emptied in what seemed to her a single instant, she closed her eyes for a second, opened them and sank again below the level of the window trying to remember how to change a magazine, but her fingers did not obey her and the stacked magazines kept falling between her hands from nervousness. But on the other side, the guerrillas had realized what was happening.

Enough time had passed for them to suspect that there were not really more hidden soldiers, but a single person firing erratically, and they began to rise again, with the intention of resuming their assault. It was then that the sound changed. At first it was only a distant pulse, almost inaudible beneath the noise of the gunshots, a rhythmic vibration in the air that everyone took a few seconds to identify.

But as it approached, the pulse became a thudding, and the thudding a roar, and suddenly all those present, the guerrillas and the soldiers and the woman, lifted their heads toward the sky. A combat helicopter appeared on the line of the horizon, silhouetted against the light of the sun and advancing rapidly toward the convoy with the clear intention of restoring order to the zone.

The guerrillas understood the situation instantly, so, without need of shouting anything to each other, they abandoned the attack, retreated at a run by the way they had come while continuing to fire at the convoy to cover their retreat, and moved away in small groups across the irregular terrain trying to take advantage of any fold of the ground that offered them cover.

The helicopter passed over the convoy with a roar that shook the chest of everyone who was on the ground, and without stopping launched itself after the retreating guerrillas, pursuing them toward the horizon. And in the convoy, little by little, something resembling silence returned. Only the crackling of the fire of the two destroyed vehicles could be heard, the voices of the UN soldiers asking for help for their wounded, and the dull throbbing of the helicopter that kept moving away.

The woman remained several more seconds with the rifle in her hands, not daring to release it, and then, slowly, set it down on the seat. She opened the door of the SUV and got down on trembling legs that barely supported her. As she did so, the ground beneath her feet seemed to her softer than it should have been.

She took a few steps without quite knowing where she was going, and then her eyes crossed with the bodies of the two guerrillas she had shot, lying a few meters from the vehicle, in postures that no screen would ever have represented, and everything her mind had been containing during the past few minutes rose all at once to her throat. She moved one step away from the vehicle and began to vomit against one of the wheels.

She vomited once, then again, and then a third time, until there was nothing left in her stomach, and even so her body kept trying to expel everything it contained while the tears fell down her cheeks without her having realized when she had begun to cry. And while she was doubled over forward, with one hand resting on the SUV to keep from falling, she heard footsteps approaching and felt a large and firm hand settle with care upon her back.

"Easy", a man's voice told her, in English with an accent that in her state she could not place, and in a soft way so as not to startle her.

"Breathe. It's all right. Just breathe." The woman nodded without lifting her head, unable to speak. The soldier rubbed her back slowly while she kept trying to recover her breath, and when finally it seemed that the worst of the spasms had passed, he spoke again.

"I don't know if you understand me", he told her.

"But I want you to know one thing. If you had not done what you did, those men would have reached the convoy before the helicopter scared them off. And if they reach the convoy, we don't live to tell about it. None of us. Not us, not your companions. What you did in there, whatever it was that pushed you to do it, has saved many lives. I want you to hold on to that tonight, when you try to sleep."

The woman nodded again, not entirely sure she believed him, but thanking him with those gestures since she was not sure she could speak. The soldier stayed with her a bit longer, until he was sure she was better, and then gave her a couple of soft pats on the back before returning to the side of the convoy, where his companions kept tending to the wounded and the dead.

And the woman remained there, beside the SUV, with her gaze fixed on a point of the horizon where the helicopter could no longer even be seen, while a part of her, a very particular and very small part, a part that until that moment had not even known existed, whispered to her that this afternoon, on this piece of land forgotten between three borders, something inside her had just broken at the same time as something new was being born, and she still did not know which of the two things was going to weigh more heavily on her for the rest of her life.