Once more, Bolan had proved his willingness to take a bullet for an ally
The Land Rover lurched, and with the odd plunk of a bullet striking the hardened skin of the big off-road vehicle, they were charging away from the battle scene.
The enemy had set up an ambush. It had taken alertness, luck, shooting skill and bald audacity to escape the attack.
But not before putting a few dozen into his enemies first.
The Land Rover charged over the broken road, escaping to let its occupants fight another day.
But Bolan knew the worrisome truth.
Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, Scarce can endure delay of execution, Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my Soul in a moment.
âWilliam Cowper 1731â1800
The Task
Hatred and vengeance are my eternal companions, not because I choose to give in to them, but because I oppose them. When my body falls and my soul is seized, hatred and vengeance will have one less wolf at their heels.
âMack Bolan
Sofia DeLarroque shook her head. The wounds from an AK-47 couldnât have been more obvious if the shooter had circled each ragged hole in black marker and wrote âAK hitâ with an arrow pointing to it.
The entry wounds were big enough to stick a finger into, and the bullets had cut completely through the body, their sharp steel cores plowing through muscle and bone like a boat hull through water, no deflection. Thankfully, there was little fragmentation or shrapnel. Truly dangerous bullets hit flesh and tore themselves apart, spinning missiles off the main track of the wound path. As it was, the child she was working on was bleeding badly, and she was running short on gauze to apply pressure bandages.
Welcome to day 216, she reminded herself.
Two hundred sixteen days in Afghanistan.
The American government claimed to have decisively beaten the supporters of the Taliban. So why did Americans and Afghans and international relief workers still come under attack on a daily basis?
Sofia wiped her brow, aware of the smear of gore she left on her platinum blond hair and her smooth, porcelain-like forehead. She could have been a model if sheâd chosen to stay in France. She was tall, leggy, with just enough fullness of figure to give her deadly curves in all the right places. Crystal blue eyes that people said were perfect for seducing the camera instead were busy trying to evaluate how to best keep a psychopathâs victim stable long enough to make it to a surgical table.
Same stuff. Different country.
Ethiopia.
Palestine.
Afghanistan.
All the lands sheâd chosen held the same things in common. Thugs and violence causing pain and suffering to the weak and helpless.
The thought flashed across her mind like lightning, and she tried to put aside the mental image of other children, the same age as this one, screaming and twisting terribly as bullets ripped into them.
Shame crushed Sofia as she gripped the girlâs hand, looking into her big, watery brown eyes. Tears glistened on the girlâs olive cheeks as thin, weak lips moved noiselessly.
âItâs all right,â Sofia whispered. She stroked a few strands of thick, black hair from the girlâs forehead, fighting off the memories that had been dogging her heels for exactly two hundred thirty-eight days and nine hours.
Images of grim murderers dressed head-to-toe in black, sweeping automatic weapons across fleeing, unarmed refugees in a Palestinian camp. The sound of cloth tearing echoed the distant sounds of bullet-spitting slaying machines as bodies were swept off their feet and flung cruelly, mercilessly into bloody rags.