The Saint Of Baghdad

by Michael Woodman

  “No sign of them,” he said. Then, “Got it.”

  He kicked CJ in the ribs.

  “On your feet, asshole.” He stepped back. Out of reach but close enough to guarantee the shot. “If it was my call, I’d blow your brains out. But Kowalski wants to flush those bitches out. So we’re going to burn you alive unless they oblige.” CJ got to his feet. “Keep your hands on the back of your head.” It was his first good look at the guy. Ex-military. But not so obviously. He had a ponytail trailing out the back of a baseball cap and tattoos on his neck. “Now turn around and head on down.”

  CJ was stepping out from behind the protection of the boulders when a shot rang out and he threw himself to the ground. That was when it hit him. Not the bullet. But the sound. Not the crackling thwack of Kowalski’s sniper rifle, but a dull thud. Then another. He rolled over. And that was when it finally came. The sniper shot. All sharp edges. Three sounds rolled into one. The explosion driving the bullet out of the barrel at supersonic speed, the zap as it cut through the air, and the sloosh of flesh as it blasted through Enya’s chest. She jerked back and hit the rock wall, her .38 skidding at the feet of ponytail, who was lying in a dead heap next to CJ. He scrambled across and scooped her up, laying her in the half-light inside the tunnel entrance. The bullet had ripped through her chest, tearing a hole in her back. It had missed her heart, but that was incidental. If she’d been shot in the driveway of a hospital, she might have had a chance. But here she had minutes.

  “I can’t feel anything,” she said.

  “That’s good.” He smiled, hugging her close enough to smother his tears in her hair. He couldn’t let her see them. Not tears. She couldn’t take that with her. Not sadness. The last glow of life that burned itself into her retinas had to be a smile. However much it hurt him.

  “I’m afraid,” she said, her face whitening, edged with blue.

  “Don’t be.” He stroked her hair. “Your brother will forgive you.”

  Her eyes opened wide. “You know,” she said.

  He nodded. He’d always known. He didn’t doubt that Declan had grown a conscience when he’d witnessed atrocities and realized that he’d been conned. But her brother was way too smart to think he could leak something that big and stay alive. But his idealistic sister? That geeky girl who escaped in Hollywood romcoms and dreamed of killing monsters in galaxies far, far away. That sentimental twin who saw her brother getting sucked deeper into Tratfors mire. She’d do it. On an impulse. CJ had never believed her payback story. All those years waiting for him to emerge from a coma—that had never made sense. Revenge didn’t last that long. It outgrew itself. But guilt? That lasted forever.

  “He wanted to stop, but he couldn’t. I wanted to help him. I was careful, but…”

  There was blood trickling from her mouth. CJ kissed her, wiping it up with his lips.

  She’d made a mistake. Just like she had today. A mistake born of her nature. Everything they’d suffered. Alex. Declan. And his own years of pain. It all came down to Enya, and she’d carried the weight of it ever since. She was so goddamn smart. But for one split second, her heart had swamped her head. And it was over.

  “Declan forgives you,” CJ said. “And so does Alex.”

  “And you…” She mouthed the words, her eyes finding tears at last.

  He kissed her forehead. “I always did.”

  She went to speak, her voice barely a whisper. He ducked his head, his ear at her mouth to catch the words she whispered, and then she was gone. He held her tight against him, burying his head in her neck, his smile abandoned, his tears flowing. When he looked up, Leila was standing there, looking down at them pistol at hand, her face ashen.

  “Shit,” she said, looking at Enya and back at CJ. “Are you okay?”

  “We’re going to need a fire,” he said. “There are some flammables back there in those old cans. Kerosene, chemicals.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s almost sunset. Kowalski will have military-grade night vision or thermal imaging. Maybe both. After dark we’ll be like targets on a rifle range. Thermal is heat-based. Right now these rocks have been baking in the sun all day, so there’s not much contrast. But when they cool, you’ll get thermal crossover. It’ll mess up the image. He’ll know all this stuff. So as the light fades, he’ll switch to night vision first and then go thermal after dark. But there’s a window when none of them is optimal. And we’re going to mess them up even more.”

  “So you want me to get stuff that burns?”

  “Can you?” He looked back at Enya. “I need a minute.”

  She nodded and taking the flashlight, she disappeared down the tunnel.

  CJ crawled outside and fetched his pistol and ponytail’s M16. Back in the tunnel, he crouched next to Enya and swept his hand through her hair and down onto her neck, where his fingers found her gold locket.

  Twenty-Five

  The scene was black-and-white, stillness and bare rocks, otherworldly, like a lunar movie set waiting for a man in a spacesuit to hop into frame. But there was no hopping spaceman. Just something glowing white and trailing black smoke as it was tossed over the boulders up by the mine entrance where they were holed up. Kowalski looked up over his rifle’s night vision scope. It was not yet dark, but light was fading. He watched the something tumble down onto the rocky slope below the adit. A jacket or some old sack they’d found in the tunnel. They must have found some oil, too, because it was burning. Not brightly. Smoldering, more like. And billowing clouds of black smoke. He went back to the scope. The smoke was getting dispersed by the breeze, but not enough of it to make a difference. In fact, the breeze was making it worse. Building a wall of particles to diffuse what little contrast there was and graying everything out. He took a thermal imaging monocular out of the bag at his elbow and tried his luck. No better. Rocks and boulders and sheets of gravel. All heated up to different temperatures and now cooling at different rates, with a white-hot glowing ember trailing filaments of wriggling heat in and around them all.

  Great.

  He set the monocular aside and went back to the scope on his Remington bolt-action rifle. It was mounted in a makeshift shelter built around the concrete blocks using bits of corrugated metal and broken timbers, so it looked like part of the collapsed structure.

  It was a clusterfuck.

  Seven men dead. Or else they were lying somewhere wishing they were dead. He’d had to call it in on the satellite phone. Short and sweet. Help. That was the gist of it. An immeasurable blot on his copybook. Tratfors had simple rules. Create a solution and execute it. Use whatever resources you need. Break any laws. Do anything you want. Except fail. That was the only codicil. The failure clause. Fail and you’ve swapped one problem for two. Fail and you become the problem. And one that someone else will be assigned to solve. They were masters of the cover-up, able to call in markers signed by powerful corporate clients and compromised intelligence and law enforcement officers. Trails of dead bodies had to be avoided wherever possible although they were manageable at a push. Failure was not.

  Kowalski was thinking about that call.

  It was a mistake.

  At first light, there’d be a chopper hovering overhead with a fully equipped SWAT team. And there was every chance that the first bullet fired would be at him. The best case would be a happy outcome before dawn. Brink and Rose both dead. Killing them was the only task at hand. Thanks to Preston’s wily gambit in Vegas, they had a complete picture. The bug planted in Leila Rose’s bag wasn’t just a transponder. It was a mic, and it had survived long enough to do its job. The cloud server, the hard drive, the encrypted key. They had the whole picture. They didn’t catch the password. But they didn’t need it. They already knew what was in that vault. They just had to find out who else knew and kill them.

  Brink, O’Brien, Rose.

  One down. Now all he had to do was kill Brink and Rose and this clusterfuck and all the botched operations that led up to it would all be forgotten. T
he situation was recoverable. They were pinned down. They had an M16 now. But so did he. And he also had the Remington, and at this range—less than five hundred yards—when the smoke cleared and the heat dissipated enough to use the thermal imaging scope, he could chop them down with laser-like precision.

  He went back to the scope and cleared his head.

  Patience.

  A few minutes later, he got what he was waiting for.

  Brink.

  The movement was clear even through swishing smoke. His head flashed between two boulders, and a burst of gunfire kicked up the dirt all around Kowalski’s concrete hidey-hole. He returned the fire, a single shot pinging off a boulder way too late. So they’d spotted him. Not that it would help them any. It would take extremely good fortune to sneak a round through his improvised fortress. But they’d be emboldened by their new weapon, so they were sure to try again. And so they did. That head again. A sliver between the rocks and a short burst of fire. But this time Kowalski was ready and on target. A direct hit. A splash. Brink got kicked backwards, and Kowalski could see the black stain of his blood on the rocks behind him even through the gray smoke. That wasn’t there before. He could see his M16 too, slithering aside on top of the boulders as Brink fell backwards. Kowalski was watching the M16 when it mysteriously disappeared as if of its own volition by sliding off the rocks.

  Leila Rose.

  She must have sneaked a hand up and grabbed it.

  A security blanket. That was all it was. Now that Brink was dead, she was finished. She’d make a deal for sure. Things were looking up. The job was not yet wrapped up, but with Brink dead, the rest was easy. And killing him felt wonderful. It made Kowalski realize that there was so much more to this than simple accounting. He’d always hated the bastard. He was British. That didn’t help. And something else. Something that had been there even before he’d humiliated him at the country club and escaped from West Coast Drum, leaving enough dead bodies to kick off aftershocks that were still rumbling through Kowalski’s life. Something that went back to Iraq. Him and Solo. Jarhead buddies. A Cockney dick and a California prick. The comedy duo on everyone’s best buddy list.

  “Who’s there?”

  He lurched around and went for his pistol, but he pulled his hand up short. The voice was close, but not that close. It was coming from his headset lying on the ground nearby. Leila Rose must have found the headset on that ponytailed dickhead Morse. Great. Now they could cut a deal. A short-term deal.

  “Hey, Leila. Long way from the news desk, eh?”

  “I’ve got want you want. The hard drive and the key.”

  “So bring them on down.”

  “Sure. I’ll do that right away. Why don’t you step out into the open, so I know where to find you? And if you could pull your pants down and stick that sniper rifle up your ass that would be a big help too.”

  Kowalski chuckled.

  “So we got a Mexican standoff. What next? Let me help you with that. First light, they’ll be a chopper here with guys who don’t do much talking. At least you’ve got a chance with me.” He waited, but there was no response. “Leila?”

  She made him wait, then said, “Brink and O’Brien are dead. I just want to get out of this.”

  “Either you trust me, or I trust you. If I get the hard drive and the key, it’s mission over for me.”

  “You’re such an asshole. You think I’m stupid.”

  “We don’t have to make this personal. How about you hide the stuff somewhere up there, then come down? You’ve got the M16. I’ll slide on out of this hole and we can meet up in the middle of the clearing here. Brink left the keys of your Range Rover in the ignition. If you tell me where you hid the stuff, I can take the keys up there with me. And if I find it, I’ll toss them down to you.”

  “I don’t know.” She was wavering. She wanted off that mountain. She wanted out of all this.

  “Or you can wait for the SWAT team.”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  He didn’t push it. Let her stew. Think about that chopper. The morning chorus. Gunfire and grenades. She’d think herself into the wrong decision sooner or later. That was the problem with most people. Weak. If they wanted something enough, they rationalized it every which way until it added up to the answer they needed.

  A few minutes later, she was back on the comms.

  “I hid it,” she said. “And no way you’ll ever find it without me. But I’m not going to tell you where it is. Not until you’re up here.”

  He thought about that. Maybe he could afford to take some risk. What were the chances that a well-known TV network correspondent would gun him down? If he showed some trust, she’d do the same. All he needed was a clean shot.

  “I want to see Brink. Pull him out in the open. I want to make sure he’s dead.”

  “You think I’m stupid,” she said again. “So you can shoot me.”

  “Then I won’t get the hard drive.”

  “Maybe you don’t want it. Maybe I was wrong about that.”

  “So let’s wait on the chopper.”

  Another round of silence. Then he saw movement through the smoke. The light was fading fast now. The rocks would be cooling. The thermal imaging would work, but it wouldn’t show the visual detail he needed to ID the body. Brink and Morse were about the same size, so their dead—but still warm—bodies would show the same on thermal. He had to stick with the night scope. If he got lucky, Leila Rose would hoist Brink up above the rocks like a scarecrow and hold him there long enough for Kowalski to ID him and get a kill shot on her.

  Perfect.

  But none of that happened.

  Instead a body slid over the boulder. She had to be pushing it with a stick, keeping herself out of sight behind the rock. It certainly looked like him—Brink minus the top of his head.

  How’s that for brain surgery, dickhead?

  Kowalski enjoyed the moment as the body slopped over the boulders and fell onto the slope. It rolled slowly at first, then picked up momentum and tumbled down the mountain, catching the smoky fire and poking it back to life. Some oily scraps of cloth stuck to the body and trailed tinselly sparks and embers until the body crashed into the rocks above the main adit and disappeared from his view.

  That was it. That was what he’d asked for.

  But it didn’t feel right.

  “Show me Morse,” he said. “Out in the open.”

  “Screw you,” she said. But a few minutes later, another body appeared. She wasn’t dragging it out in the open but shunting it over the boulder like the first one. Smart. That way he couldn’t get the shot in. But his eyes went back to the scope anyway. The fire was almost burned out, but there was still smoke trailing back and forth in front of her. She was heaving the body, shoving it off the edge of the boulders, one hand on his ponytail the other on his belt. Kowalski almost had her when her head and shoulders appeared above the body as she struggled to wrestle it over the edge. But then it was gone. He couldn’t take the risk. If he missed, their deal making days were over. She’d bury herself in the mine and he’d have to wait until the chopper turned up at dawn. So long as she was talking, there was a chance of settling it all before then. He watched the body tumble down the slope through the night scope, its face and belly blacked out with blood, until it crashed into the ridge of boulders above the bluff with the other body.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do a deal.” He waited, but there was no response. “Leila, are we going to do this or not?”

  The answer came minutes later. Her voice somber, resigned.

  “I’m stupid. You’re going to kill me anyway.”

  “Last chance, Leila. I want that drive. More than I want you dead.”

  “But I’ve seen what you’ve done. I’ve seen what’s in those files. And now this. How can you let me live?”

  “Expediency. I’ve got to get the drive. Don’t flatter yourself. You’re not so important.”

  But Leila wasn’t buying, and the line w
ent dead.

  CJ had long since run out of letters in his planning acronym. But beyond PACE, he could always add TC for TOTALLY CRAZY. He opened his eyes. Passing out was not part of the plan, but that was why it was called crazy. It was pretty much bound to go wrong.

  So how long had he been out?

  Minutes? Hours? It had been perfect up to then. Leila Rose had delivered an Academy Award performance, teasing Kowalski until he popped the question.

  It had to come from him.

  Habeas corpus.

  Let me see the bodies.

  It was not the most obvious scenario. But switching clothes and watches was never going to be enough. So CJ had scalped the dead man. Then Leila had blown the top off his head with her 9mm, blotching the rocks behind CJ with the dead man’s blood while CJ was blasting rounds at Kowalski and supposedly getting shot. He’d attached thin strips of cloth to Ponytail’s scalp before tying it on his own head. With that much hair flopping around and the black smoke from the stinkpot fire muddling the picture, he was gambling that Kowalski could never make out the difference. It was bold and brazen, and way out there even by Crazy James standards. And the critical point was that the ask had to come from Kowalski. It had to be his idea. All that had played out perfectly. The risk of Kowalski shooting the dead bodies on their way down was real enough, but slight. He wanted that deal with Leila, and she was barely playing along. He couldn’t risk firing a shot her way—at least, not unless he was sure of killing her. Besides, even if either of those bodies was still alive, then the bouncing down the mountain would surely have finished them off. And that was where the calculation had gone awry. With his pain tolerance set to default numb, CJ figured that rolling down a mountain was a big improvement on the alternatives. Stay loose and relaxed, he told himself. Stunt men do this stuff all the time. He’d lose some skin. That was a given. Pick up some bruises. Maybe even a fracture. A small one. Temporary stuff. But somewhere down that bumpy slope, he’d cracked his head on a rock. And even with the added safety helmet of a borrowed scalp, it had knocked him out.