Page 97 of Stone

I glanced back at the vehicle again. “The last man standing is the one who needs the least bullets. If I can get a clear shot, I can hit their tank and blow ‘em sky high.”

“Let’s get under shelter, then we’ll plan our next move,” Lou rasped, almost wheezing as he sprinted close behind me.

The rocks loomed up ahead. They were at the bottom of a small mountain range but would still provide some cover; we just needed to be clever about it, and, anyway, they were a damned sight better than being left a sitting duck in the desert with constantly shifting dunes that would give us up in no time.

This was a Marine’s worst nightmare. We often didn’t know if the men who approached us were Iraqi or Kuwaiti. Even the people we were here to protect were suspicious of us, which led to misunderstandings and stand-offs. Some Kuwaitis believed foreign soldiers even stepping on their soil was a desecration.

Frankly, we were pissing against the wind.

A loud crack splintered the air, and something whizzed past my ear. Heart jolting, I ducked left, my arms automatically going over my head as I sprinted for the rocks just ahead of us.

“They’re firing on us!” Spence shouted. “Take cover!”

We dived behind a formation of rocks just as a line of sand around my boots turned to dust as bullets hit the ground all around me.

“Fuckers,” I spat, crouching low and turning to get my bearings by peering through a gap in the boulders. “They’ve hemmed us in.” My heart raced out of my chest as I watched the vehicle approach at speed. Whoever was in that car didn’t like us at all.

“No choice now,” Duggan muttered, pulling his sniper rifle from his back and setting it up. “We gotta fight back.”

An old beat-up black Mercedes stopped about fifty feet away, its four occupants screaming in Arabic as they exited the car.

“What the fuck are they saying?” Spence muttered through the bedlam. Taking his rifle off and checking his ammo.

“Somethin’ about camels,” Lou murmured. “I think they’re sayin’ someone shot at their camels. They think it was us.”

“For fuck’s sake!” My eyes rolled up toward the heavens, and I heaved a sigh. “You couldn’t make this shit up.”

“I think they’re Bedouin,” Spence advised. “If they are, we’re not the fuckin’ enemy.”

Duggan lined his rifle up through a crack in the rocks. “We’re always the damned enemy. Fuckers nearly shot me.”

“We don’t wanna start an international incident,” Lou whisper-shouted. “They’re our fucking allies.”

“Allies don’t shoot our asses,” Duggan pointed out.

“These ones do,” I retorted. “Over damned camels.”

“I can’t get a comms signal.” Spence cursed under his breath. “We’re out of range.”

I scraped a hand down my face. “Maybe we should’ve run back toward the triangle instead of away.”

“There was no cover that way,” Lou reminded me. “We would’ve been dead. Anyway, it’s too late for woulda, coulda, shouldas.”

“Christ,” I muttered. “We’re gonna have to shoot. There’s four of them and four of us, but we’re damned snipers. We can disable them but not go in for the kill—”

I was cut off by another spray of bullets hitting the rock behind our heads.

Pulling my rifle off, I did my checks and lined it up through a tiny gap in the rock. “Don’t go for the car. Give them a means of escape. If we cut off their route, they’ll be backed into a corner. Give ‘em a choice to leave us be.”

“Got it,” Spence muttered, taking aim through his sight. “But remember, our ammo’s limited. Don’t wanna waste too much.”He squeezed his trigger and popped off a shot, aiming at the ground next to the feet of two of the guys.

A barrage of deafening fire came at us. The men took shots at the rocks behind where we huddled without care or thought.

Duggan aimed and fired a bullet that whizzed past the ear of one of the men, who immediately threw himself on the ground, his gun going flying. “They ain’t trained,” Dug pointed out. “Poor bastards got ‘emselves in a sitch they can’t control.”

Lou popped off three warning shots into the air.

Another of the Bedouins took a dive into the dust. He lost grip of his weapon, and it flew across the ground. The two remaining peppered the rocks with gunfire, screaming at us in their language.

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