Page 95 of Lethal Game

The group numbered about eight to ten men, all of whom spoke at once, their hands gesturing in large, abrupt movements that had Con moving to step in front of Sophia and the tent without conscious thought. Smoke, River, Henry, and Stalls joined him.

The group paused about fifteen feet away. Their shouting however, didn’t stop, and Con did his best to sort out the various complaints and demands they had.

The sickness is your fault.

You’re not here to help, you’re here to desecrate the dead.

This woman-child should go home to her husband. Her presence here is an insult.

Go home, Americans. Take the sickness with you.

The men kept yelling, but the messages were the same. They didn’t want American military help and they thought Sophia was too young and female to be of any use.

Con replied in Arabic, though one or two of the men were using a dialect he hadn’t heard before.

“We’re here to diagnose the sickness and treat the sick,” Con told them. “That is all. This woman is a doctor and she won’t desecrate the dead. She needs samples from the sick, the living.”

A couple of the men stopped shouting, but the others didn’t.

This is your fault.

What did you Westerners do to us?

Take your diseased woman away.

Well, shit. He was going to have to shake a stick at them. He lifted his weapon and said, again in Arabic, in a dark, loud voice, “Go back to your families.Now.”

Three or four of the men began backing away, disappearing into the dark. The remaining men held their ground and continued to shout.

How hard was he going to have to shake the stick? He flicked the safety off on his weapon, but before he could do anything else, Sophia stepped forward holding up a vial of blood. She didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything but hold the tube high and in front of her.

The men facing them slowly fell silent, then in the face of Sophia with her blood and the four soldiers with their guns.

The men slowly faded back into the night.

Wow, that was one threat he’d never tried before, and damn if it didn’t do the job.

In the hospital tent, a woman began wailing, her grief a knife in the night, reminding Con that the real enemy was one none of them could see.

Except for the woman standing next to him.

Con glanced at her thigh where her Beretta rested in its holster. “Stay here with the team.”

She raised one brow. “Going somewhere?”

“Yep. Going to see if I can find a volunteer to give you the samples you need.”

“Shouldn’t Dr. Blairmore do that?”

“If he was going to do it, he’d have done it. Someone may have made threats.” Con shrugged. “Whatever the reason, you don’t have what you need to identify the bug that’s killing these people.” He angled his head at the big tent. “I’m going to see if one of them wants to be a hero.”

Despite the four soldiers standing with them, she tucked the tube of blood into a pocket, pulled her gun out, checked to see if her magazine was loaded and slid one bullet into the chamber. “Okay.”

Holy fuck. Did she have any idea howamazingshe was? Standing there like a young Valkyrie before her first battle, ready to lay down the law as she knew it.

It was all he could do to keep his hands to himself and walk away from her, walk through the canyon of darkness between them and into the house of dying in front of him.

He pulled a mask out of a pocket, put it on and moved to the center of the large tent, surrounded by hundreds of beds, almost all of them occupied. A few of them with corpses. When he spoke, it was in Arabic.

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