The Shroud of Heaven

by Sean Ellis

  Kismet backed away quickly, realizing that the assassin had in all likelihood abandoned the doomed troop mover just as he had. He turned a quick circle, making sure that the killer had not somehow flanked him, then hastened to the other side of the wreck.

  The passenger side door was gone, ripped off its hinges by the force of the collision, and thrown well beyond the gateway. Kismet drew the obvious conclusion: the door had been open at the moment of impact. He scanned ahead, seeing for the first time that beyond the gate, the service road connected with a paved street and the city proper. After a momentary survey, he detected movement, and recognized the retreating back of the killer, now well over a hundred meters away.

  He took off running before he could even consider the alternatives. It galled him to have been so close to capturing his foe, only to suffer such a setback. The first steps were sheer hell, but his determination carried him through, and once he hit his stride, the pain seemed to recede. The pounding in his skull however returned with a vengeance and as he sprinted toward the street, dark shadows gathered in his vision.

  He knew on a clinical level what was happening. He was getting dehydrated. The outpouring of energy in pursuit of the killer beneath the brutal desert sun had sapped his finite reserves. The adrenaline that fired him through one bruising encounter after another was no substitute for the most basic element of life: water. He only hoped the assassin was feeling it as well.

  A horn blast and screeching tires alerted him to the peril he had completely ignored. Though traffic in the city was light, it was by no means nonexistent, and he had wandered into the middle of the Arbataash Tammuz or 14th July Street, one of the busiest thoroughfares in this section of the city. He reached the center of the divided road without mishap, and paused there to wait for a clearing. After so many close calls, this minor brush with fate hardly fazed him.

  Despite the delay, he was gaining on the assassin. His longer legs gave him a definite advantage but his stamina was not without limits. He waited for an opening in traffic, and then darted toward the far edge of the road, vaulting the concrete barrier to continue across the barren expanse.

  Aziz’s murderer had nowhere to hide in the open vastness. Acres of dusty nothingness stretched in every direction. The tableau was broken only by an occasional warehouse or shipping container storage yard. The assassin however seemed to be angling toward a construction site, with tall columns of steel and masonry springing out of the sand like a stricken forest. Kismet focused the flagging strength of his will power into a final burst of speed.

  As he neared the incipient structure, its overwhelming scope became apparent. The upright columns, arranged in pairs around the perimeter, delineated an area as large as a football stadium. A great deal of excavation had been done, literally carving the site out from the desert floor, but the building work was yet in its infancy. He had no idea what purpose it would serve when, or if, it was completed. All he saw now was a chaotic maze in which his foe might seek refuge.

  At the edge of the site, the assassin made a misstep, tripping over a piece of re-bar and sprawling headlong. Kismet seized the opportunity, and before the robed figure could rise, closed the gap and pounced.

  The assassin struggled from his grip, kicking at his outstretched arms and backpedaling away. After enduring so much, Kismet was not about to be thrown off now. Shrugging off the ineffectual blows, he charged forward again, leaping from a crouch at his enemy’s mid-section.

  His arms closed on air. Somehow, the assassin had ducked beneath him, rolling across the ground and springing up lightly, even as Kismet committed to the futile assault. This time however, the trained killer made no attempt to flee.

  As Kismet struggled to rise, he felt something strike the back of his knees. The assassin had gone on the offensive, knocking his feet from beneath him with a low sweeping kick. This was followed immediately by a flurry of punches aimed at his face and torso. Some of the blows he blocked, and those that made contact were not especially forceful, but the overall effect of the assault was cumulative. He felt like a piece of steak being tenderized by repeated hammer blows.

  Rejecting the innate impulse to protect himself, he lashed out into the heart of the storm. His fist caught the assassin on the cheek. Though a swath of fabric—the killer’s veil—muted the intensity of the contact, the insistent attack ceased as the robed figure pitched backward. Kismet’s follow-up was sluggish; he was at the limit of his strength and resolve. Sensing this, his opponent sprang lightly erect and ran at him.

  The charge was abruptly aborted as Kismet brandished his pistol, aiming directly at the other person’s face. The assassin froze and for a long moment, both simply stood their ground, panting with exhaustion. Finally, Kismet broke the relative silence. “That’s better. Now, let’s talk about a few things.”

  The assassin took a tentative step backward, but Kismet gestured with the Glock, asserting control. “The safety’s off. You know I mean it.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  The assassin’s voice was low, intentionally unrecognizable, but even that short declaration served to establish certain facts about the killer’s identity. The words were delivered in English—confident, unaccented, idiomatic English. Despite the conscious effort at disguise, there was something faintly familiar about the voice. Kismet tried to keep his foe talking.

  “Believe me, I will. It’s the least I can do for the soldiers you killed today.”

  He could almost sense the mocking laughter behind the veil. “You know I could have killed you, back at the museum.”

  Kismet felt a chilly whisper of déjà vu. When he spoke, he felt he was reciting the words from a script burned in his memory. “Why didn’t you?”

  He knew exactly what the assassin was going to say, or at least the substance, but his expectations were proven wrong. Instead of speaking, the assassin remained silent for several seconds, then abruptly flashed into motion.

  Kismet squeezed the trigger reflexively, snapping off a shot that pierced the air where an instant before the assassin’s laughing eyes had been. He missed by a hair’s breadth and immediately began tracking the movement with the barrel of the pistol, but the assassin remained a moment ahead of his impulse to fire. The Glock barked several times in succession, but the bullets zipped ineffectually past their target. He stopped firing when his foe ducked around an enormous stack of unused masonry blocks, and resumed the foot chase with the gun still locked in his right hand.

  As he approached the corner around which his quarry had disappeared, he was able to distinguish a strident cry in Arabic. The words were simple enough for him to translate.It was a cry for help. While the tone was several octaves above the low voice the assassin had used, Kismet had no doubt that the same person was now summoning help, perhaps from the workers on the site. Underneath the shouted words however, there was a strange humming noise, like a building electrical current.

  Ready for anything, Kismet raised the Glock and rounded the corner.

  A sea of faces gazed back at him. Hundreds, possibly thousands of men, young and old, armed with crude signs demanding that the United States leave their country, as well as sticks, stones and at least a few AK-47 assault rifles, stood their ground directly ahead of Kismet. To a man, they were barefoot. The assassin had already vanished into the throng, blending chameleon-like into the surroundings, which left him alone to face the wrath of the mob.

  It dawned on Kismet right then that the construction site in which he now stood was not a stadium or high-rise office complex, but rather the Al-Rahman mosque, which upon completion would be the second largest in the country and certainly one of the largest houses of worship on the planet. Not only was his presence an affront to the collective political will of the group before him, he was also insulting their faith by standing on holy ground.

  No one moved for a long, eternal moment. Then, from somewhere in the back of the crowd, a shout went up, demanding that the blood of the infidel be shed. Th
e tide turned and the outraged sea roared toward him like a tsunami.

  Six

  At nine o’clock that morning, roughly fifteen minutes before Kismet and Chiron had set out with their escort to interview Mr. Aziz at the Baghdad Museum, a very different sort of meeting was taking place not far from the route chosen by Colonel Buttrick. The assemblage was open to any male resident of the city, but implicit in the invitation was the message that those who chose to attend ought to have a deep belief that there was no God but God—Allah in the local parlance—and an abiding faith in the guidance of the imams, the spiritual heirs to the Prophet Mohammed. The meeting—a protest rally—was for, of, and by the Shiite citizens of the city, which accounted for roughly half its population. Baghdad was a melting pot where many members of that majority sect, displaced by the pogroms of Saddam Hussein during his twenty-six years in power, had ultimately relocated, living and working alongside the more secularly minded Sunnis.

  There were a few among the crowd who were not Arabs, nor even citizens of Iraq, but were in fact Persian agitators, bent on stirring the sleeping giant that was the Shiite majority in Iraq to forcibly oust the United States’ occupying forces and establish a theocracy. Their simple message resonated with a people too long oppressed, who looked upon the foreigners in their midst as merely the latest form of subjugation.

  Nearly three thousand men had gathered in front of the Parliament building, not far from the Sujud palace and the military parade grounds, outwardly carrying signs, American flags and effigies, the latter items to be consigned to flames when the watchful eye of the news media turned their way. But under their robes, they carried weapons. For the most part, these consisted of knives and cudgels. A few however had laid their hands on Russian-made assault rifles and sidearms abandoned by the defeated Iraqi military forces. While there was no particular plan to make use of these articles of destruction, the rabble were ready for the call to arms; ready and willing.

  Shortly after the four Humvees had passed by unsuspectingly, the crowd had commenced a march to the Al Rahman mosque, a distance of just over two kilometers. The raw skeleton of the massive Islamic temple had become a powerful symbol to these people. Because it was incomplete, not yet bedecked with gaudiness like the extravagant Umm al-Ma’arik or “Mother of All Battles” mosque which stood more as a testament to the former president than to God, it represented the potential of the Shia to shape their own destiny, albeit with a gentle nudge from their fellow believers to the east.

  The center of the mosque site was an open circle, more than one hundred meters across, where no work had yet been done. In fact, very little would be done in this area at least until the construction reached the final stages, following the erection of a glorious gilt dome. For now however, the area served as an impromptu amphitheater where a number of honored speakers whipped the already fervid crowds into a religious frenzy.

  It was no coincidence that brought the assassin to this place. The rally was an ideal place to blend in and escape the searching eyes of the US military. Had Kismet realized that his foe had intentionally led him to this place, he would have greeted the notion with a degree of irony. There was a very good reason why the crowd spread out across the mosque site was exclusively male. The Quran did not permit members of the fairer sex to attend such a gathering.

  Therein lay the one piece of information concerning Aziz’s murderer about which Kismet had no doubts. It was the secret he had, for no rational reason, held back in his discussion with Buttrick. In the initial moments of the chase, when they had grappled at the museum, he had felt breasts. The cold-blooded, highly trained assassin was a woman.

  At just that instant however, the assassin’s gender, or for that matter, the inequality of the local religious teachings was the last thing on Nick Kismet’s mind.

  He instinctively brought his gun to bear, waving it in a broad arc before him in hopes of intimidating the crowd. It was a foolish effort, he realized. In the zeal of the moment, a collective sense of invulnerability had come over the protestors. To be sure, each man had applied the simple logic of the odds—there were far more of them than bullets in his gun. However, the charge was deflected somewhat. The human surge seemed to run into an invisible barrier three meters from where he stood, wrapping around him to either side while maintaining that minimum safe distance. In the space of a heartbeat, he was surrounded.

  Realizing his mistake too late, Kismet turned to flee. Although they had outflanked him, the mob was at its weakest point where they had filled in at his rear. The human wall was a thin line no more than two men deep. He swung his pistol in their direction and fired.

  The shot was intentionally high. The last thing he wanted to do was compound an already dire situation by killing someone. If he crossed that line, the crowd would settle for nothing less than dismembering him. As it was, the sound of the discharge fanned the flames of wrath, but for those directly in the line of fire, the warning shots had the desired effect. The men dropped in a panic, weakening the line as he charged.

  In that moment of sublime pandemonium, Kismet reckoned his chances of escape were about even. Despite the overwhelming force of numbers, the crowd was a cumbersome entity, limited by the strength and speed of its leading edge. Those in the middle had to rely on guidance from their comrades and sometimes the lines of communication were slow and unreliable. The seeds of a plan sprouted as he closed in on the skirmish line. All he had to do was get past them and he would have the advantage.

  At the moment of contact, he attempted to vault over the cowering defenders. His focus was narrowed to the three of four men who actually had a chance of stopping him. One man, older than his companions and more wary, was practically on his hands and knees. Kismet leaped over the man’s bent back, and was a step closer to freedom.

  Suddenly his world spun around. Instead of open sky, he found himself staring at the desert floor and before he could even begin to comprehend what had happened, the wind was driven from his lungs as his torso slammed into the ground. Someone, perhaps the old man, had snared his ankle, ripping him out of the air in mid-leap.

  The protest marchers swarmed over him like warrior ants, tearing blindly at his extremities. The gun discharged several times, although he made no deliberate effort to pull the trigger, and cries of pain and rage went up from the dog pile. The Glock was torn from his fingers a moment later, even as blows began raining down upon him.

  In that frantic moment, adrenaline took over. The instinctive need to survive—to flee and fight—directed his hands and feet in a way that his conscious mind could not fathom. He began to kick and punch and gouge, twisting like a dynamo, inflicting close-quarters damage that slowly accumulated to the point where his attackers were forced back, if only to arm’s length. As they fell away, Kismet’s fingers closed on the haft of his kukri and he wrenched it free from its scabbard, waving it menacingly. The large steel blade intimidated the mob in a way his firearm could not. It held promise of slashing wounds and lost limbs, rather than the almost intangible threat of a bullet hole.

  There was blood on the sand. Some of it was his, but at least two of the men had suffered gunshot wounds and lay motionless on the ground. Others bore the marks of Kismet’s adrenaline fueled counterattack with bloody noses and split lips, but he knew that whatever traumas he had managed to inflict were reflected and magnified on his own body. Rivulets of warm fluid were dripping from his chin, and somehow he knew it wasn’t perspiration.

  He feinted experimentally with the kukri, driving once more at what he perceived to be the weakest point. As he did, one youth broke toward him, screaming a war cry. Kismet whirled to face him, slashed blindly and the blade found flesh. There was a crunch of steel on bone as the heavy knife lopped off a hand, and the battle yell became a howl of agony.

  Kismet did not waste time surveying the damage. The youth had broken ranks to attack him, leaving a hole in the perimeter of the assault. Still slashing the kukri before him, he charged toward the g
ap. A few brave fingers snagged his clothing as he pushed through, but none were able to stop him. In a moment he was through.

  As the mob began to realize that their prey had eluded the pinchers and was now escaping, their rage grew to blinding proportions. Men pushed forward, heedless of those ahead of them, and dozens were crushed or trampled in the surge. The crowd seemed to fragment beyond that point, with individuals breaking loose and sprinting after Kismet, while most remained caught in the snarl. Notwithstanding this, their strength of numbers remained.

  Kismet wove through the obstacles of the construction site, more intent on staying in motion than reaching any particular goal. The task before him seemed overwhelming; he had to find refuge in an unfamiliar city where virtually everyone wanted him dead.

  For a moment, he thought about trying to cross back through the rail yard in order to rendezvous with Buttrick and his soldiers. He immediately dismissed that idea.All it would accomplish would be to bring the rage of the masses down on those men as well. Instead he stayed on a straight course, veering left or right only when an obstacle presented itself.

  He ducked his head reflexively when he heard the familiar crack of his own gun being discharged. The distinctive sound of the nine-millimeter pistol repeated two more times, but none of the rounds found their mark, and after the third concussion, the gun fell silent. It was only a momentary reprieve.Kismet knew there were other guns among the crowd.

  He reached the edge of the construction site, slipped through an inexplicable stand of trees, and once more onto the barren brown desert floor. The kukri in his right fist seemed like an anchor, weighing him down and making each step that much harder, but the crimson stain on its edge was compelling testimony to its usefulness. Besides, the thought of throwing it away was abhorrent. He had once believed he would die with the blade in his hand; now it seemed another such opportunity for that fate had arrived.