Free On the riverside of promise by Vasileios Kalampakas Page A

aback. It was an unwelcome
surprise; he hadn’t expected her to be so rigid. Feisty was one
thing, but not playing ball when guns were involved was childish,
even stupid and possibly lethal.
     
    “Listen, the head doctor is already trying to
make a run for it in the ravine. They’ve left everything behind.
Maybe all that stuff from the caravan will be more than enough to
keep them satisfied. There’s morphine in there and lots of canned
-”
     
    “You think they’re looking for a fix? And
some corn beef? You just take care now, Ethan.”
     
    She gave Ethan a cold dismissive look and
shook her head slightly, disapprovingly. Ethan frowned and was
about to say something when a Rover zipped past the gates
haphazardly. A dozen men armed with AK-47s rode on the back, most
of them wearing combat fatigues. Few piece of clothing matched
their size and most were certainly at least a size or two
larger.
     
    Only a couple of them wore shoddy boots; the
rest rode barefoot. They had grim, lean faces. They were mostly
skin and bones like on the edge of starvation, but their red-shot
eyes shone with a cruel, alarming intensity. In the back of the
faded green and grey rover lay two dead bodies, the white of their
feet marred by the red of their blood.
     
    The sisters stood motionless, following the
example of the mother superior, who was looking at the band of
marauding bandits with contempt that bordered on hate.
     
    Another rover passed through the gate. It
braked badly and skid for a few feet on the courtyard dirt. Ten
more men, slightly yet markedly better fed, better equipped. Some
wore sunglasses, some berets and caps. Ethan noticed a big brute of
a man sitting in the co-driver’s seat. Once everyone else had
jumped off the rover, he stepped out. He was wearing spotless
combat fatigues as if they had just been pressed. He wore the
insignia of a Major. It was a good thing he didn’t seem familiar at
all.
     
    “That’s their leader; if we get to him, the
rest will follow,” he said to Nicole who was eying the bandits with
seeping, fervent anger. She did not answer; she gave Ethan a sharp
accusing look and simply turned away. The next moment she vanished
inside the impromptu hospital room.
     
    Ethan called after her, but she ignored him.
It was at that point when he attracted the attention of one of the
armed men, who pointed his rifle at him and shouted something
incomprehensible; it sounded like Igbo but not a dialect Ethan
could understand clearly.
     
    Ethan put his hands up and grinned like an
idiot, trying to look the part of a mildly insignificant,
completely harmless fool of a journalist. The armed bandit was
still aiming the rifle at him, shouting incoherently, looking back
and forth nervously. Ethan thought it could be he was asking
’should I shoot him?’; it could be he was asking ’can I shoot
him?’. It would’ve made little difference had that been the case
though.
     
    The burly man was overlooking the sisters
with one hand cradling a short-barreled AK-47; the paratrooper
version. In his hands, it looked little more than a large handgun.
He motioned with his free hand and half a dozen men fanned out two
by two’s, going inside the rooms and halls on the west side of the
monastery.
     
    The rising heat added to the tension; Ethan
was sweating. He was hoping Ludwig had gotten everybody out in
time; more people would mean more problems to solve. He was also
hoping Nicole wasn’t thinking of doing anything stupid. Stupid
tended to pile on stupid and that had a propensity to make people
end up dead or worse.
     
    He was searching for a sight of her, but to
no avail; for the first time the thought entered his mind that
perhaps she was already running away. It wouldn’t help him much,
but it wouldn’t make things harder either.
     
    Ethan’s self-appointed guard had stopped
shouting; now he was grinning, showing a cave of a mouth. He was
still aiming his gun though and Ethan thought it was time to