Free The League of Night and Fog by David Morrell Page A

and conquer—that’s what the snipers were hoping to do. But that tactic could work the other way around.
10
    A s Arlene lunged up the rocky slope, dodging from boulder to boulder, the sniper shot at her again. Diving behind cover, she suddenly recognized where she was. This cluster of jagged stone was where she’d hidden the bodies of the two men who’d attacked her. She glanced around, startled.
    But this
couldn’t
be the place. There wasn’t any sign of the bodies. Even allowing for the efficiency of the desert scavengers, the corpses wouldn’t have disappeared completely yet. There ought to be something—bits of flesh, bone, and cloth—crumbs, as it were.
    All the same, she was positive that she recognized the spot.
    Then how … ?
    A bullet ricocheted off shale. She peered upward through a chink between boulders, pistol ready, eager for a target. The shot made her wonder if this ambush in the same spot where she’d been attacked earlier was more than coincidence. Had the bodies been found and carried away? Were these snipers avengingfriends who’d been killed? If so, the ambush made sense, as did the way the snipers seemed deliberately to have avoided killing her. Before that eventuality, they meant to do to her what their friends had intended to do. Her chest heaving, she stared harder through the gap in the boulders, straining to see the target.
    But when she did distinguish a blur of movement—a scarved, robed Arab scurrying down the slope, over boulders, across a ridge, and down the continuation of the slope—she became confused again. Because the Arab took cover and aimed a rifle, but not toward her. Instead he aimed toward the ravine at the bottom of this slope.
The ravine into which Drew had tumbled
.
    Swinging her gaze in that direction, she saw the second sniper: another Arab, his scarf flapping behind him as he ran down the opposite slope, converging on the ravine.
    A welter of possibilities occurred to her. Perhaps the snipers had not been convinced that Drew was as weak as he appeared. Or else these Arabs felt so superior to women that even an obviously weakened man seemed more of a threat to them than an able armed woman.
    But yet another possibility insisted, its implications so disturbing it had to be considered before the others. Now that she thought about it, it was the most obvious explanation but so outrageous that she must have subconsciously rejected it.
    She
wasn’t the target. Drew was!
11
    D rew flinched from a bullet that grazed the right edge of the ravine, continued its downward trajectory, and walloped shale below him to his left. Dizzy, he lunged toward an indentation in the wall to his right, the direction from which the bullet had come.
    But in that instant, a bullet from the left cracked against that indentation. Avoiding the cross fire, he toppled backward. Through a swirl of weakness, he fought to reason out his dilemma. He’d been convinced that Arlene was the primary target,that one of the gunmen would grudgingly take the time to kill him, then join his partner to assault Arlene. But both were now attacking him! It didn’t make sense!
    He rubbed his aching jaw where his teeth had smacked together from the force of his fall. Hearing rifle shots from his right and left, he shielded his eyes from shale flying off both rims of the ravine. He heard another shot, this one less powerful, from a handgun, not a rifle. Arlene.
    But another sound, subtle, like a breeze or a deflating tire, was more obtrusive. Down here in the muffled ravine, it had paradoxically deafening force.
    An angry cobra rose to strike at him.
12
    A rlene ignored the risk of breaking an ankle and continued to charge down the rocky slope. She cursed herself for letting her judgment be clouded by sexual arrogance. Admit you took for granted that the biological accident of your being female makes you an irresistible target for lust. You were so self-absorbed you didn’t understand what was going on. You