Cowboy Justice at Whiskey Gulch
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Elle James
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16
Prologue
Parker Shaw was greeted with silence as he swam up out of the darkness. He stared at the stars in a clear night sky and wondered where the hell he was.
When he tried to move, pain radiated throughout his body. He lay back panting, his head swimming, his vision fogged by a gray haze.
A breeze swept over him, carrying the scent of smoke and aviation fuel, sending a rush of images through his confused mind.
Afghanistan.
The mission...kill...who?
Lying as still as possible was the only way to keep the pain at bay.
Kill who?
Taliban leader Abdul Akhund.
Memories rushed in.
They’d gone into the town, made their kill and were on their way out to their extraction point when all hell broke loose.
The alarm went out and a dozen Taliban came out of the woodwork.
They’d barely made it to the field where the helicopter was to pick them up. Once all six Deltas were on board, the pilot lifted off the ground.
The rest was a little fuzzy.
There was a loud bang...the aircraft shuttered...and dropped from the sky.
Parker lifted his head enough to see the wreckage of the helicopter a few feet away. His heart raced and he struggled again to move. Pain ripped through his leg, ribs and arm. Hell, everything hurt. But he had to get to the helicopter.
With one hand, Parker pushed to a sitting position. His other arm hung at his side, useless. His head spun, the cuts on his arms burned and the throb in his leg was excruciating.
When he tried to stand, only one leg worked, the other too injured to support his weight. The only way he could get to the chopper was to drag himself.
He dug the fingers of his good hand into the dirt and pulled himself toward the mangled wreckage, the knot in his gut nothing to do with his injuries. He knew before he reached the mass of twisted metal what he’d find.
Amid the crushed fuselage lay his friends, his team, the men he considered brothers.
No sounds rose from the wreckage. No moans of the dying. Those trapped inside had died instantly upon impact. The only reason he’d survived was because he’d been thrown.
Shouts and an engine’s rumble disturbed the silence.
Unable to walk, much less run, Parker turned away from the destruction and dragged himself away.
Headlights pierced the darkness. A truck rolled to a stop beside the helicopter. Men with AK-47s dropped out of the back and surrounded what remained of the chopper, with Parker having made it a mere twenty feet away.
With the Taliban surrounding the downed Black Hawk, it was only a matter of time before they discovered him.
He lay still, facedown, and played possum.
With his injuries, he’d just as soon be dead.
A shout sounded and footsteps pounded the earth, heading toward him.
He couldn’t fight back. He didn’t have a gun. His knife was still in the sheath around his waist, but he couldn’t fight off at least half a dozen armed Taliban. If he wanted to survive, he had to remain “dead.”
Peering through his eyelashes, he watched as each of the men gathered around him, all talking at once.
Parker’s Pashto was sketchy at best. From what little he understood, they were wondering if he could be alive.
One man poked his side with the barrel of his rifle, hitting one of Parker’s injured ribs.
With every ounce of control, Parker fought to keep from making a sound or from flinching.
As if still unsure, the guy nudged him with the toe of his boot. Then pushed harder until Parker was rolled onto his back.
In Pashto the man said, “These are the men who killed Akhund.”
One of the Taliban terrorists dropped to his haunches and pulled at the buckles on Parker’s body armor, then jerked it off his body.
Bolts of pain ripped through Parker, driving him to the edge of a blackout. He must have moaned.
The Taliban fighter jumped back, holding the bulletproof body armor to his chest and called out in Pashto, “He is alive!”
A taller guy gave the order. “Take him.”
Too injured and broken to fight back, Parker continued to feign unconsciousness, hoping his deadweight would deter them from carrying him to wherever they had in mind. He needed to stay with the chopper. Eventually, a team would be sent out to recover the bodies.
If taken by the Taliban, they might never find his body. He had no doubt they’d end up killing him.
Two men hooked their hands beneath Parker’s shoulders and hauled him to his feet.
The pain shooting through his arm and injured leg made him pass out, only to come to while being dragged toward the truck.
Parker was in big trouble. His team had taken out Akhund to rid Afghanistan of one of the most ruthless terrorists the Taliban boasted of. Akhund’s MO had been to torture, drag his prisoner in front of a camera and then behead him.
Parker couldn’t run. His leg was most likely broken. He couldn’t fight, his shoulder seemed to be dislocated, and his ribs felt like someone was piercing him with a hot poker.
If they were going to behead him, he hoped it would be soon. It couldn’t be any worse than the torture he was already facing.
The pain sent him in and out of consciousness.
He came to again when they dropped him in the dirt in front of the pickup’s tailgate.
The largest, meanest looking man in the group grabbed his hair, yanked his head up and said in Pashto, “You are one of the infidels who killed Abdul Akhund.”
Yeah, you moron, Parker thought. He closed his eyes and pretended to pass out.
The man holding his hair backhanded him across the cheekbone and released his grip on Parker’s hair.
Parker crashed to the ground and lay there, hoping they’d think he was dead and leave him alone.
That wasn’t to be.
A booted foot kicked Parker in the ribs. If they weren’t already broken, they would be now.
Once wasn’t enough. The man kicked him again.
After the fourth kick, Parker grabbed the man’s foot with his good hand and pulled it out from under him.
The man came down hard on his backside.
The other men surrounded him, kicking wherever they could get a foot in.
Parker balled into the fetal position, covering his head the best he could with his one good arm, the other lying uselessly beneath him. Agony racked his body to the point he had to disassociate himself from what was happening.
His vision blurred as he teetered on the verge of blacking out, yet again.
The big guy shouted, and the kicking ceased.
Parker sucked in a labored breath, pain knifing through his chest with even the slightest movement.
He was grabbed again beneath the arms and hauled to an upright position, dangling between the men holding him.
The big guy punched him in the face several times and then in the gut.
Blood dripped from a cut above his eyebrow, blinding one of Parker’s eyes. The other had been hit enough it had begun to swell, making it difficult to see.
If not for the sound of a helicopter, the men would have continued to hit him. Instead, the one who was apparently in charge shouted orders to the terrorists holding him.
They tossed him into the back of the truck, jumped in with him and took off, headed away from the crashed chopper and the village where the Delta Force team had met their mission objectives.
Parker needed to stay at the crash site. It was the only way a rescue team would be able to find him. However, with two men holding on to him, Parker had no way of escaping.
Through the slit of his swollen eyelid, he watched as the dark silhouette of a Black Hawk helicopter appeared on the horizon, heading toward them.
The Taliban driver hit the accelerator, picking up speed, taking Parker farther away from his chance of rescue. His only hope disappeared in the cloud of dust the truck kicked up behind them.
If he survived whatever the terrorists had in store for him, he was on his own to get back to friendly forces.
The truck headed into the hills on a dirt road that curved through a narrow valley. Every rut, bump and swerve hit Parker with a fresh jolt of torment.
When the vehicle finally stopped, the leader appeared at the end of the truck bed, carrying a machete. He waved it at the men and ordered them to take their prisoner to the top of a hill.
This was it. The point at which he’d be beheaded.
They dragged him out of the vehicle. When his legs hit the ground, the jolt of pain made him black out. Not for long enough.
At the top of the hill, they dropped him in the dirt.
The big guy chopped limbs from a scrubby tree with a machete and created four stakes. He handed them to the men with instructions to pound them into the ground. Then they tore off Parker’s uniform jacket, ripped it into long strips, and tied them to the stakes.
Parker fought the best he could with one arm and one leg. It took four men to hold him down, while two more tied his wrists and ankles to the stakes.
Their leader stood over him with the machete, his eyes narrowing, his lip curling into a feral sneer as he leaned over and slid the machete across Parker’s side and then over his broken leg, leaving two lines of blood. “He will die a slow death as the birds feast on his flesh.”
Then he spat on Parker, turned and left. His men followed. The sound of the truck engine echoed off the hills, slowly fading away.
Parker lay in the silence, the cool night air biting his exposed flesh. Blood seeped from the wounds in his side and thigh and he thanked the Lord for sparing him the beheading.
He wouldn’t give up. No, sir. Not while there was fight still left in him.
For thirty minutes, maybe an hour, he lay still, gathering strength, working at the bindings around his wrist. He pulled and tugged, slowly trying to wiggle the stake loose in the ground, until the stake finally pulled free.
Fueled by that little bit of success, he pressed his hand to the wound in his side. The blood had congealed. He could do little until he freed his other wrist and ankles. Beyond that, he didn’t dare think. A man with a broken leg, left alone in the hills, had little chance of survival.
Parker rolled to his side, the broken ribs shooting a fresh kind of hell through his body. He reached for his other wrist and yanked at the bindings. The stake came free quicker than the last.
He lay back in the dirt, breathing raggedly. For a long moment, he considered how much easier it would have been had the Taliban cut off his head. But that would mean they’d won. When he survived and made it back to friendly forces, he would thumb his nose at the men who’d left him to die.
Pressing his good arm to his chest and side, he struggled to sit up, failing twice before succeeding. He bent his knees and scooted on his buttocks toward the stakes holding down his ankles. Then he leaned over and reached for the one holding his broken left leg.
Because his legs were spread wide and bending over hurt his ribs, he had a difficult time reaching with his right hand. Eventually, he snagged the binding and jerked hard, leaning back as he did.
Sweat popped out on his forehead. Through the stabbing pain in his ribs and leg, he persevered until the stake slid free of the hard-packed ground.
Not taking a break from the pain, he worked the other leg free. With only one functional hand, he didn’t bother to untie the bindings from around his wrists and ankles. However, he was able to slip the stakes free at the other end.
A broken leg and a dislocated arm would make it impossible for him to get far. The rescue team would have located the crashed helicopter. Hopefully, they would have extracted his fallen brothers and realized they were one short.
His throat tightened as images of his teammates’ bodies, trapped in the wreckage of the Black Hawk, flooded his mind. He should have died with them. But he hadn’t. Eyes burning, he vowed to live because his fallen comrades would have expected that of him. To honor their deaths by living the life he’d been spared.
Maybe walking out of the hills and all the way to the forward operating base wasn’t reasonable. But if he could let them know where he was without alerting the Taliban, he might have a chance.
Over the next twenty-four hours, he put his plan in place, dragging his broken body over the rocky hilltop inch by inch, gathering, arranging and creating a message his country would see, but not the Taliban. If they were looking.
When he was done, he found a spot in the middle, lay down and covered his body in dirt to help combat the chill of the night air and slept.
Morning dawned, waking him with the bright light of the sun rising on the eastern horizon. His leg throbbed and his ribs burned with every breath he took. What he wouldn’t give for a drink of water. With the daylight, he started to second-guess his decision to send a message.
How long should he wait for help to arrive? Should he find a way to get himself out of the hills and back to the FOB? Or was it like getting lost in the forest? Should he stay in one place and let the search party have a better chance of finding him? When they didn’t find his body in the wreckage, they’d either assume he’d escaped. Or they’d assume he’d been taken to an unknown location in a Taliban-held village.
He’d give his message another day and then try to get himself out of the hills.
With the pain of his injuries slowing his progress, he used his one semi-functional arm to drag himself around the top of the hill, searching for anything he could use to splint his broken leg.
The area was dotted with sparse vegetation consisting of a few short bushes and one gnarled tree—about four feet high with crooked branches—leaning toward the southeast side.
At the edge of the hill, Parker looked down into the valley below. A few taller trees reached for the sun. If he made it to the bottom, he’d have to climb back up to wave down any helicopter or airplane that might fly over.
If a friendly aircraft didn’t fly over in another day, he’d drag himself to the valley for straight sticks to use as splints and a crutch. In the meantime, the crooked limbs would have to do. They’d be hard enough to acquire as it was.
He spent the next hour pulling himself up the side of the gnarled tree and breaking off limbs. Then he worked the knots loose on the ties around his ankles and used those strips of cloth to wrap around the limbs he’d pulled from the tree.
His dislocated arm hung useless throughout.
When he had his leg sufficiently splinted, he pulled himself up to stand by the tree. Then he wedged the knotted end of the fabric around the wrist of his bad arm into a fork between low branches near his knees.
He gritted his teeth, held his breath and leaned back. Pain shot through his arm into his shoulder. By leaning back, he could pull the dislocated arm downward. It wasn’t enough. Parker pushed up onto the ball of his good foot, raising his shoulder higher, the knot in the fork of the tree pulling his arm further down.
The joint slid back into the socket.
The searing pain was replaced by a dull ache. Parker eased off the tension and disengaged the knot from the fork. He raised the injured arm and flexed his elbow, finally able to use the arm and hand again.
His success lifted his spirits and hardened his determination to survive.
As the sun set on the day, he lay down in the hollow he’d dug in the middle of his message and covered his body with dirt, using both hands.
Hungry, thirsty, exhausted, his splinted leg aching, he lay for a long time staring up at the sky blanketed by stars. He told himself that the hunger and pain were a reminder that he was still alive.
When morning came, he’d start his crawl down to the valley, where he’d find a long stick to use as a crutch. Then he’d walk back to the FOB.
He felt as if he’d just closed his eyes when the distant thump of rotor blades echoed against the hillsides.
Parker’s eyes popped open, and he sat up.
The dark silhouette of a helicopter appeared over the top of a hill headed his way.
His pulse quickened and he scrambled to brush the dirt away from his body. Then he staggered to his feet, the pain in his leg nearly bringing him back down. Fighting back dizziness, he managed to remain standing. If only he had a flashlight or flare. Were they headed to another mission, or were they looking for him?
The helicopter flew over the top of his hill and disappeared over the next one.
Parker’s heart sank to the pit of his belly.
Okay, Plan B was to start the long trek back in the morning. Maybe he should start at night. The sooner he made it back, the better. He wouldn’t last very long without food. Even less time without water.
He squared his shoulders, pressed his hand to his broken ribs and took a step toward the edge of the hill.
Pain shot up his leg as he placed even the smallest amount of weight on it and hopped back onto his good leg.
Poised to repeat the effort, he paused.
The Black Hawk reappeared, heading straight for his hilltop.
Parker stood still. His breath caught and held in his lungs as he watched.
The chopper didn’t slow until it was within five hundred feet of his position. Then it hovered and sank slowly to the ground.
The gunner aimed his machine gun out the side door.
Parker raised his hands.
Several soldiers leaped to the ground, weapons ready, and established a quick perimeter. Two more jumped out and ran toward him.
Parker remained upright.
“Sergeant Shaw?” one of the men asked in a distinct Southern drawl.
“Yes, sir,” Parker croaked.
The man grinned and draped one of Parker’s arms over his shoulder. “Thank God. I’m Grove, the flight medic. That’s Skeeter. We’re gonna get you back to the FOB.”
The other man slipped Parker’s other arm over his shoulder.
He winced and bit down hard to keep from moaning.
Together, they carried Parker between them back to the helicopter.
“When we didn’t find you in the crashed helicopter, we thought we never would,” Grove said. “Then we got coordinates leading to your SOS and were told we might find our missing Delta here.”
Skeeter chuckled. “Smart move, man.”
“How you managed to make that big a sign was amazing. Given your injuries, even more so,” Grove said.
They eased him down onto the floor of the helicopter. “Lie down. We’re going to get you started on an IV,” Grove said as the perimeter guards climbed aboard, and the helicopter lifted into the air.
“Wait.” Parker held onto Grove’s arm and leaned toward the open door of the helicopter for one last look at the hill where the Taliban had left him to die.
As the Black Hawk rose higher, he could see the message he’d written in the large rocks he’d found an abundance of on that hill.
Grove shook his head, grinning. “I don’t know how you did it.”
Parker wasn’t sure, either. But it had worked.
Skeeter nodded. “That’s the biggest damned SOS I’ve ever seen.”
“And the first time I’ve seen an SOS actually save a life,” Grove said as he eased Parker onto his back. “Don’t worry. We’ve got you now. You’re going to be all right.”
Parker had fought so hard to make it to that point, pushing through the pain. Surrounded by US soldiers, he finally gave in.
His last thought as he faded into unconsciousness was, I lived for them.
