Free The Third Target by Joel C Rosenberg

out but it was too late. The two men standing in the doorway had been hit. They fell to the ground outside, screaming in agony. Horrified, and without thinking, I dropped the gun, jumped to my feet, and ran through the open door to their side. But they were not Omar orAbdel. They weren’t anyone I knew. To the contrary, both were in uniform. They were soldiers in the Syrian army. Both held machine guns in their hands. The safeties were off. They had been about to kill me.
    One of the men was writhing on the pavement, choking on his own blood. Seconds later, he went limp. The rifle dropped away. He was gone.
    The other man had been shot in the face and chest. He was dying a slow, cruel death, and worst of all, he knew it. I stared down at him in the moonlight, sickened but unable to look away. He stared back at me, his eyes wide and filled with terror.
    “Help me,” he groaned in Arabic.
    I stood there for a moment, not knowing what to say.
    “Please,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.
    “I’m so sorry,” I said finally.
    “I don’t want to die. Please, do something.”
    But I just stood there, frozen. I wanted to help. I really did. But how? I had no medical supplies with me. I wasn’t a doctor. I had no training. There was literally nothing I could do, and as soon as he understood, his fear grew all the more.
    In all my years covering wars, I had seen my share of battlefield deaths. I’d seen men die in drone strikes and by Hellfire missiles. I’d seen suicide bombers and carpet bombings and sniper shootings. I had seen men die instantly and unaware. One moment they were full of bravado and testosterone, and the next they were gone.
    I’d also seen men die in the hands of professionals. I’d seen medics and fellow soldiers fight valiantly to save their friends, racing against time, doing everything humanly possible to save their lives.
    But I’d never seen anything like this. This man was about to leave this world and enter the next. He was begging me for help, desperately clinging to life, even as it slipped away. Then his eyes unlocked from mine. He was staring up at the sky now. He had forgotten aboutme. He seemed to be able to see something I couldn’t. He was riveted on it, and it filled him with panic.
    “No!” he shrieked. “No   —!”
    Another deafening gunshot pierced the night sky. Then all was quiet. I turned and saw a young boy standing next to me. At least, I assumed he was a boy because of the way he was dressed. But I couldn’t actually see his face. He was wearing a black hood, and he was aiming a pistol at the soldier’s head. Smoke curled out of the barrel.
    And then he turned the pistol on me.

11

    “Who are you?” he demanded in Arabic, his voice cold and detached.
    For a second I was too startled to answer. His head and face were covered by a black hood, but I could see his eyes, and that’s what chilled me. They were dark and soulless. There was not a spark of life or hope in them. He had gunned these men down without giving it a thought. He had clearly killed others. Probably many others. And I knew at that moment he would not hesitate to kill me.
    “I’m a reporter,” I replied in Arabic, my mouth bone-dry.
    He said nothing.
    “I’m supposed to interview someone.”
    Still nothing.
    “Soon,” I added.
    The boy just stared through me, this haunted, hunted look in his eyes.
    “At the Khaled bin Walid Mosque,” I mumbled, not sure why I was still talking.
    He obviously couldn’t have cared less, and I wondered if he was going to shoot me now.
    There was a long stretch of silence. Well, silence in the sense that neither of us was talking. The winds were howling through theconcrete canyons and across the barren wasteland of the streets of Homs. A fresh round of gunfire could be heard several streets to the east, the rat-a-tat-tat staccato of automatic weapons being fired in short bursts. I heard a stray mortar round or two, but the pitched battle of the last hour