Mirage

He had no idea how long it would take the sniper to figure out his plan, so he moved quickly, jumping the ten feet to the ground. He manhandled the door into position so that he could drag it backward while he crouched in its shadow. His fingers barely grabbed hold, and the door drove its trailing edge into the loose gravel.

In seconds, lactic acid was already building in Cabrillo’s thighs and back, and his fingers were going numb. He continued inching forward, dragging the door behind him and staying low so as not to show himself to the sniper. A moment after he emerged from under the side of the derelict ship, the sniper zeroed in and triggered off three shots in rapid succession. Each one hit the door in almost the exact same place.

The kinetic force of the high-powered rounds made Juan lose his grip, and the door fell down on top of him. He quickly scrambled back to his feet, heaving the door nearly vertical. The sniper fired again, and again his round ricocheted off the door. The metal was dimpled by each hit, and energy transfer made the steel scalding hot, but the rounds just wouldn’t penetrate.

Juan knew now that the race was really on. The sniper couldn’t shoot him so he’d have to come after him. Cabrillo had to cover a hundred yards to reach his sport utility vehicle. The gunman had almost a quarter mile, but a lot of that was downhill. He was unencumbered while the Chairman had to lug his shield all the way back to the truck or else the sniper would stop charging, raise his rifle, and shoot Cabrillo as he fled.

Juan hauled the heavy door across the open plain like an anchor he could not drop. Gravel and sand built up where the metal hit the ground, and it felt like he was dragging half the desert with him. His back was screaming by the time he was a quarter of the way to his destination, and his legs shook like jackhammers, yet he didn’t slow or pause. Pain was the body’s way of telling a person to stop doing something. Holding a hand to a candle hurt, so the instinct was to pull it away, but the mind ultimately controlled the body, and you could leave your hand there until the flesh roasted off.

Cabrillo’s body was telling him to drop the door and rest, but his intellect knew something his body didn’t. If he abandoned his shield, he would die, so he bulled through the pain and kept dragging the door. All the while, the gunman was surely out of his hiding place and ru

As if to verify his suspicion, the sniper fired at him again. The sound of the rifle was much closer — too close — and the impact felt much stronger as the bullet had lost little of its power over the shortened distance.

Juan craned his head around. The fishing boat he had first thought was the eerie boat was only twenty yards away. The gunman? A hundred? Two? Juan had no way of knowing and risked getting his head blown off if he peeked around the door.

For perhaps the tenth time, he lifted the door slightly higher onto his shoulders so it would skip over the mound of debris accumulating at its base as he was dragging it along. Juan decided to shift position, lowering the door so that it glided easier across the sand but more than doubling the strain on his arms, legs, and back. His teeth ached from clenching his jaw so tightly, but he somehow managed to quicken his pace.

Sensing that his quarry was escaping after all, the sniper fired off a wild volley of shots on the fly, triggering his semiautomatic as fast as he could cycle it. Several rounds hit the door, but most peppered the ground to either side of the Chairman.

Like any race, the last leg was the hardest fought, and both men were pushing with their all. Cabrillo gave a primal shout as he towed the heavy door, his legs pistoning against the stony ground. He looked again and saw the prow of the fishing boat was a tantalizing five yards away.

He let the door drop to the ground and started sprinting. The sniper was forty yards back and ru

Juan felt a wasp sting of pain on his neck as the hastily fired shot hit the steel hull just as he crossed around it, and he was stung by flecks of dislodged metal. The truck was just a dozen paces away.

He launched himself over the UAZ’s hood just seconds before the sniper reached the boat and fired at him again. The driver’s-side window shattered. Juan hit the ground on the far side of the truck, rolled to his feet, and reached through the open passenger window, his eyes now on the gunman for the first time since the battle began. The man wore khakis from head to toe, but not the clothes of a native Uzbek or Kazakh. He looked like he’d stepped from a Beretta clothing catalog.

The man stopped less than twenty feet away and started swinging his rifle up to his shoulder for the kill shot.

Cabrillo’s hand found the familiar shape of Yusuf’s old AK-47, the weapon he insisted they bring along because smugglers used the old seabed to carry contraband into and out of the country. He pulled it out of the passenger footwell enough so that he could swing the barrel toward the sniper.

The stock of the sniper’s rifle was just six inches and a half second away from the optimum firing position when Cabrillo found the safety and trigger and loosened a twenty-round burst through the shattered driver’s window. Several of the shots never made it out of the SUV, but enough did, and his spray and pray worked.

The sniper shook as if he’d grasped a live electrical cable when eight of the erratically fired bullets raked his body from hip to head. Juan didn’t have the strength to stop the AK barrel’s inevitable rise on auto, and his last shots punctured the UAZ’s roof. He finally willed his finger off the trigger as the gunman collapsed in the sand.

He let the AK drop from his hand and he sagged to the ground, his back leaning against the truck. He gulped lungfuls of air. He had no concern about the sniper miraculously coming to get him. This wasn’t a movie. The man was clearly dead. Still, Juan gave himself only ninety seconds before levering himself back to his feet.

He rounded the SUV and then staggered to the sniper. Like his clothes, the sniper didn’t have the facial features of a native. He looked—

The explosion knocked Cabrillo off his feet, and the concussive wave blew rust scale off the old fishing boat as if it had been hit with a hurricane-force wind. The sound echoed and rolled across the desert like thunder, and, seconds later, bits of rock and stone and steel rained from the sky. Cabrillo lay on the ground, his hands clamped behind his head to protect it until the hail of debris stopped and just dust and smoke drifted over him.

He stayed on his hands and knees and crawled over to the fishing boat and looked beyond. The prow of the eerie ship was simply gone. All that remained was a smoking hole in the desert floor, a crater the size of an Olympic pool. Thermite, he thought. The sniper had used thermite and a timed detonator to do this much damage. Juan realized now that the largest piece of the ship remaining was the door he himself had used.

He went to it now and gave it an affectionate pat. “Didn’t know I was saving you while you were saving me.”

It was only then he noticed the small brass plate that had been affixed near the door’s lower side. He hadn’t seen it when he was unpi

Stamped into the little piece of brass were just a couple of words. It would be days before he understood the implications of what he read, and a few weeks for the ramifications to be felt, but in those first few seconds all he had to go on was his own confusion.