He lay there breathing rhythmically.
Then and only then did the Extinguisher see that he had a nice set of tits, too.
Chapter 25
Colonel Mauricio Primitivo awoke to the sound of a screech owl. It perched in a tree branch directly over his aching head. It looked down upon him and gave out an ungodly moan.
The Maya called it a moan bird. But to Colonel Primitivo's eyes, it looked like the ghostly soul of death as it regarded him with its slow-winking eyes.
The colonel took stock. He lived. Obviously.
Memories came back to him.
He remembered giving the command to fire. Remembered, too, the rattle of automatic fire that distinctly came from the wrong direction.
The hot breath of supersonic rounds zipping by him had made spiteful sounds like glass rods breaking. His firing squad had crumpled before his eyes, and then he became aware of a dull pain at his own back.
The pain was still there, he realized.
It was the last thing he remembered before his senses were robbed from him and the first thing he felt now.
He tried to stand up. And failed.
Rolling over, he propped himself up on one khaki elbow. Good. He could do that. He could not be mortally wounded and have such strength after lying bleeding into the jungle floor for God alone knew how many hours.
Stripping off his uniform blouse, he exposed an entry wound in his abdomen above the pelvic saddle. It was an angry red. He gave it a ginger squeeze, and it oozed blood like a small, fleshy volcano.
There was no pain. So he reached around, gritting his teeth as he sought the inevitable exit wound.
What he found was actually smaller. It burned when he gathered up the surrounding flesh and squeezed it. His fingers came back crimson. They kneaded the flesh, seeking hardness and bringing a grimace to his face. But no hardness was to be found.
This was good. It meant the bullet had passed cleanly through the flesh, not striking bone and, it was to be hoped, carefully avoiding organs great and small.
A searing pain racked him as Colonel Primitivo clambered to his feet. He winced, his thick whiskbroom mustache bristling. Well, pain was a sign of life after all.
He stood on his booted feet, swaying slightly.
Men lay all about him, dead. They were very dead, he saw. He gave one a kick for deserting him in the hour of national emergency and then, dripping blood from the clearly God-sent wound, he stumbled off toward Chiapas Barracks.
Never again would he take offense if a woman playfully punched his growing paunch and joked about his love handles.
They had saved his life.
Chapter 26
When he realized he had sucker-punched a woman, the Extinguisher raged, "Damn, damn, damn, what a stupid idiot I am!"
It was not his way to strike a woman. It was against his personal code. But he had done it, and there was no recalling the blow.
Kneeling, he checked her pulse. She breathed. Of course. Before he struck, he had calculated the force of the blow in advance. It was possible to kill a human being with one well-placed punch. But that was not the Extinguisher's way, either. The dead give up no Intel.
Cradling her limp head in his lap, he checked her mouth. She hadn't bitten or swallowed her tongue. That was good. No broken teeth, either. Also good. Women were fussy about their teeth.
For over an hour he squatted in the unfamiliar jungle protecting the female Juarezista guerilla, wondering what to do when she woke up.
Somewhere an unseen animal vented a fierce screech.
"Hope that wasn't a jaguar," he said to himself, snapping the Hellfire pistol up in its Whip-it sling.
If it was, the animal didn't approach.
At length, his conquest began to stir.
A cold shock of fear went through him as the Extinguisher realized the acute difficulty of his position.
Carefully he laid her head on a stone and stood up, his mind racing.
An idea struck him in a bolt of inspiration.
Unsheathing his Randall survival knife, he used it to slice open his left bicep, just enough to produce blood.
Then he jammed the point of the blade into a nearby tree. Two tough mahogany trees stubbornly refused to take the blade, so he plunged it into one with a reddish trunk with bark that hung in long pale strips like peeling dead skin.
Then the Extinguisher stood over her, waiting.
Her eyes fluttered open, roved dazedly, finally falling upon his boots. They looked up.
"Que?"
He pitched his voice to its lowest register. "You had a close call."
She shook her head as if to clear the cobwebs of sleep. Abruptly she took it into her hands as the pain told her shaking was a bad idea.
"What happened to me?" she moaned.
"Someone threw a knife at you. The only way to save your life was to knock you out. I caught the bite of the blade along one arm before it hit that tree."
Her eyes went from the streak of blood showing on his arm to the knife hilt protruding from the weird peeling tree.
"Jou-jou saved my life."
"Why not?" he said casually. "You saved mine back there."
With his help she found to her feet again.
She looked around perplexedly. "The one with the knife-where did he go?"