by S. A. Beck
His mind ran through the events of the past thirty-six hours. Where had he gone wrong? People got hurt in the field through either miscalculation or bad luck. Which had it been for him?
After Ahmad and his men took care of the boys who had killed Edward, they had driven back to Marrakech in silence.
“You should not feel badly about them, my friend,” the arms dealer had said when he dropped Grunt off in town. “They killed one of your men and killed many a good man in the hotel as well.”
When Grunt hadn’t responded, Ahmad put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. It was an unusually intimate gesture for someone who made his living selling death.
“You feel bad because they are young? I feel bad too. But think of it this way. As soon as they burst into neutral ground and started killing people, they had taken their own lives. They were fools to do this. Soon enough, someone else would have killed them. That is the law. And do you think whoever else did it would have been so kind as to give them a quick bullet to the back of the head? No, my friend. They would have suffered too much. And imagine if the Saudis had taken them! They would have lived for many terrible weeks.”
Grunt shrugged. Everything Ahmad had said was true. Not that it made any difference to how he felt. He’d become a soldier because he wanted to be a warrior. As a kid, he’d devoured stories of chivalric knights and noble samurai. He’d dreamed of becoming an honorable fighter defeating evil in the world.
It hadn’t worked out that way.
His first fight had been Operation Desert Storm, the move to push Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. That was pretty straightforward. Evil dictator takes over another country. You go in and kick out the evil dictator. Fair enough.
The bombing of the Iraqi cities hadn’t been too cool. He had tried hard to ignore the reports of “collateral damage.” He had tried hard to ignore the reports of smoke billowing from exploded oil wells and the Euphrates River becoming radioactive from the spent uranium rounds fired by the American A-10s. Instead he focused on the happy Kuwaitis cheering as their country was liberated. He got good at focusing on one thing and not another.
Things got trickier when he joined the Special Forces. He’d done well in Desert Storm and had applied for the military’s most prestigious fighting unit. He passed the training with flying colors and found a girlfriend in Isadore and a best friend in Vivian and plenty of fellow warriors to fly around the world and kick ass with.
Most of his missions had been against targets the public had never heard of. One was a drug kingpin in Central America who had just come up with a new highly addictive and ultimately fatal drug. They’d gone in and wiped out the lab before the stuff could make it to the streets. Another target had been an international arms dealer who had gotten his hands on some plutonium and was trying to sell it to the highest bidder. After wiping the guy’s bloodstains off his computer and checking his files, Grunt’s team had discovered a list of the highest bids. The names and nations there had given Grunt nightmares for weeks.
Then they’d gone into North Africa to hunt down a radical Islamic group called the Sword of the Sahara. By then, Isadore had left to start her “freelance” career, and Grunt was nursing a broken heart. When General Meade offered him the mission, he’d leapt at the chance. A bit of action in a remote corner of the world always made him feel better.
He had thought it strange that the general had asked him to go instead of ordering him.
“I only want volunteers for this mission,” the general had said by way of explanation. “It’s going to be tough.”
It had been. The Sword of the Sahara had gotten onto the US government’s hit list because it had good funding from various sources in the oil-rich Gulf States and could afford to attract the best fighters in the region. The shadowy powers that started and funded radical groups all around the world had finally gotten serious. Instead of just throwing some money at some wild-eyed hicks with guns, they’d built the foundation for a proper army, complete with highly trained fighters and sophisticated weaponry like surface-to-air missiles. Luckily it was just in the beginning stages. It was the job of Grunt, Vivian, and their team to nip it in the bud.
What General Meade had failed to mention before they burst in on the group’s camp in the middle of the night, guns blazing and tossing incendiary grenades, was that the jihadist fighters had brought their families with them.
A woman and three small children went up in flames right in front of Grunt’s eyes. He had been responsible for that.
By the time the team had figured out what was going on, it was too late to stop. The terrorists were fighting back, and all the innocent people got caught in the crossfire.
That night, the Sword of the Sahara was wiped out, at the cost of a couple of hundred innocent lives.
General Meade congratulated them on a mission accomplished. Grunt and Vivian resigned from the Special Forces.
So as Grunt lay dying in the alley, he looked at the balance of his life and wondered if it had been a force for good like he had intended or if he’d screwed up royally. Yeah, the Sword of the Sahara fight had stained his soul forever, but on the other hand, he’d stopped the sale of enough plutonium to make three ICBMs. Any one of the people on that buyers’ list would have used it. He’d saved a hell of a lot of lives in that mission.
So okay, on the whole, the balance was positive. But that didn’t feel good enough.
Because he’d failed at his latest mission.
After Ahmad had dropped him off back in Marrakech, Grunt had purchased a new cell phone and a SIM card so that he couldn’t be traced and tried to call Vivian to warn her that Isadore was on her way. But he’d been stymied by the region’s poor cell phone coverage. He couldn’t get a connection with Mali. He tried a few times but still couldn’t get through.
So he’d gone to an internet café and sent a coded email. Both of them had set up anonymous email accounts. It was simple enough. Edward had explained the whole thing when they had first formed the Atlantis Allegiance. First, you avoided the big names like Gmail and Yahoo, which kept meticulous records on all their customers and sold that information to advertisers. Instead, you went for the privacy-based ones set up by hacktivists in places like Switzerland and the Netherlands. But even these required you to give a backup email where the server would send a confirmation code, so sooner or later, you’d have to give a name, right? Luckily, there were several free services like EmailonDeck that gave you a one-shot anonymous account through which you could receive the confirmation code.
Once that was done, you had yourself a truly anonymous email account. And as long as you used it in internet cafés, no one could trace you. Grunt had to admire Edward’s brains. He was a mess physically, but he thought like a warrior.
So Grunt went to an internet café and sent a coded email warning Vivian of the danger.
That part of his mission done, his next step was to get back there and help out. He was frustrated to see that he couldn’t get a flight until the day after tomorrow, so he had booked one and sent another coded email telling Vivian when he’d be back.
Then he’d gone back to his hotel room to get some well-earned rest.
The next morning, he checked out and moved to another hotel, both for safety’s sake and also to have the satisfaction of kicking the owner’s ass for selling heroin to vulnerable junkies. Then he robbed him and distributed the money to beggars—all women with children—on his way to find a new hotel. This time he picked one that wasn’t a haven for drug addicts. If he kicked a new hotel owner’s ass every morning, he’d develop a bad reputation.
Grunt didn’t sleep well that night. Memories of those burning families kept flaring up in his mind. At times, when he was just drifting off to sleep, he’d jerk awake, thinking he’d heard shots. Then he’d slump back in bed, knowing that was just his conscience playing tricks on him.
As the muezzin made his lilting call for the dawn prayer, Grunt got up. He was stuck in Marrakech for an
other day with nothing to do. He hated inactivity. After two hundred pushups and two hundred sit-ups and a cold shower, he felt a little better. He found an internet café that opened early and checked for Vivian’s answer.
Instead he found a message from his anonymous email account.
“UNABLE TO DELIVER MESSAGE DUE TO PRONY RELAY ERROR. COULDN’T CONNECT TO THE RESET BN SERVER.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? When faced with this sort of gobbledygook, he missed Edward more than ever. It took fifteen minutes on Google to figure out that Mali had blocked the email server he was using. It took another hour and some puzzling through a French computer magazine’s webpage to find out why.
Just two days before, Mali had blocked a long list of anonymous email servers. Their stated reason was to “combat terrorism,” which in this part of the world meant “suppress political dissent from the tribes we’re oppressing and combat the types of terrorists we personally don’t support.”
Grunt rubbed his chin. Edward had warned him that these email servers sometimes got blocked. A lot of people who wanted to guard their privacy used them—including political dissidents and members of various armed groups. Mali’s ban on the email account could just be to block actual terrorists—the country had no shortage of them, after all—or it could be targeting some other group.
The timing made him suspicious, as did a mention on one news site that this had been done as part of an American antiterrorism plan. That plan had included “extra funding for local security forces.” A bribe, in other words.
General Meade and his shadow government in the States knew the Atlantis Allegiance was in this part of the world. Isadore’s presence proved that, and Meade was deeply embedded in the antiterrorism section of foreign relations. Could he have guessed they’d be using anonymous accounts and instigated this just to hurt their communications? Or was it simply an unlucky coincidence?
Whatever. The main thing was that he couldn’t warn Vivian. He’d keep trying on the phone, which was risky because it could be located via the cell phone relays, but it appeared all their attempts at secrecy had been blown anyway. Hopefully he’d get through. And if he couldn’t, hopefully his silence would keep Vivian on her toes.
Worse was waiting for him when he got back to the hotel.
His hotel, although much better than the fleapit he’d stayed in the night before, was still a pretty run-down place on a narrow side street deep in the medina. Few foreigners came to that neighborhood, and those who did came looking for trouble. So anytime he saw one, Grunt would give them a quick once-over and size them up.
The man casually strolling along the street just outside his hotel made him look twice.
He appeared English, with the bony white skin, pale blue eyes, and blocky features of someone from a Northern industrial town, Birmingham or Manchester or some smaller place. His hair was shaved within half an inch of his scalp, and his face bore countless little scars that showed he had been in plenty of fistfights. The English, especially the working-class English, liked a good fight, and this man’s stocky body and thick arms, disproportionately long like a gorilla’s, hinted that he would be good in one. He wore scuffed black dress shoes, black pants, and a buttoned-up white dress shirt, completely inappropriate clothing for summer in North Africa. He looked like a waiter in some cheap restaurant.
He also looked like he didn’t belong here. The English working class didn’t go on vacation to the medinas of Morocco, they went to cheap resorts in the south of Spain like Benidorm.
A red light went on in Grunt’s head. Another went on when the guy didn’t glance at him as one foreigner will usually do with another in such a place. Instead he took a casual interest in a stall selling the bright-yellow slippers that Moroccan men often wore.
Grunt wasn’t fooled. Just because he couldn’t see this guy watching him didn’t mean he wasn’t.
Grunt played it casual. He was lucky enough to already be walking on the opposite side of the street, so he continued to do so. He resisted the urge to move his hand closer to where the pistol he’d purchased from Ahmad was hidden under his loose shirt. He didn’t want to advertise where he kept his weapon.
The street was narrow. It wouldn’t take more than three or four steps for this guy to close with him. If he had a gun, he could shoot at point-blank range. Or was the stranger going to shadow him?
Grunt pulled out his phone and pretended to text someone. In fact he turned on his camera and put it on selfie mode.
He used it to take a quick glance over his shoulder.
The Englishman was still standing at the stall, holding a pair of slippers in his hands as the old man who ran it implored him to buy one. But the guy wasn’t looking at the slippers.
He was looking right at Grunt.
Chapter 7
This is getting better and better, Grunt thought.
He walked as casually as he could down the street and turned the corner at the far end. Then he picked up speed and took a zigzag route through the alleys that ran through this neighborhood like a maze. He stopped once or twice at a corner to watch for pursuit, but none came.
Good. As usual, Grunt had scoped out the area, so he knew his way around. In a place like Marrakech, that was essential if you didn’t want to get lost.
Or if you wanted to lose someone.
He took a roundabout route back to his hotel. There was a back way along a narrow alley, a small door opening into the kitchen. With luck, this guy hadn’t found it yet.
He was in luck. No one was in the alley. He made his way to the door, pulled out his set of lock picks, and worked on the lock, hoping the deadbolt hadn’t been put in place. Usually in Moroccan buildings, a door would only be bolted at night. In the daytime, the lock was considered enough because it was a pain to slide out the heavy bolt every time you wanted to use the door.
The lock opened with a click. He put away his tools and pushed on the door.
He was in luck again. It opened.
Grunt’s nostrils were hit with the rich smell of a tagine cooking on the stove, and his ears were hit with a loud squawk from the hotel owner’s wife, a heavyset woman in a voluminous djellaba. She seemed more angry than afraid that a foreigner had just picked the lock on her back door and walked in. Amid a stream of curses, she grabbed a skillet and raised it above her head.
Grunt looked her in the eye.
“I have a gun,” he said in slow, careful Arabic. “But I’d like to save my bullets for someone other than you.”
He’d stolen that line from a cheap Egyptian action flick, but it had the desired effect. She stepped back and lowered the skillet.
“My husband’s a fool to let in foreigners like you. You’re nothing but trouble. Get out of your room, you and your friend!”
Grunt paused. “My friend is in my room?”
“My husband let him in. I sure wouldn’t have,” the woman said, brandishing the skillet again. “Go find another place to stay, the both of you.”
“Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”
He slipped past her, sped out of the kitchen before she decided to use the skillet, shoved the proprietor aside as he came to see who his wife was shouting at, and went to the stairs.
His room was just to the left of the upstairs landing, just out of sight. Grunt paused. Listened.
“Sir, my wife tells me—”
A quick glare over Grunt’s shoulder silenced him. The man retreated to his kitchen, where his wife started scolding him in an angry whisper.
Grunt eased the pistol out from under his shirt and crept up the stairs. Luckily they were concrete, so his footsteps didn’t make a sound.
He’d made it halfway up when a small noise from above made him pause.
Had that been the creak of a door hinge?
With infinite care, Grunt crept up the remaining stairs. The entire hotel seemed to have gone silent. The woman he’d startled had stopped her shouting. The hotel proprietor wasn’t speaking either.
Grunt almost felt like going back down there and giving them some money to continue their argument. They knew something was up, and their silence was broadcasting that fact to whoever waited for him upstairs.
At the top of the stairs, Grunt got on his hands and knees. If the guy was around the corner aiming a gun, he’d have it at chest level. It would take a fraction of a second to adjust his aim.
A fraction of a second had saved Grunt’s life before.
And it saved it now.
As he suspected, his door was open a crack. All he had time to see besides that was an eye and the muzzle of a gun behind that crack.
Grunt fired, then ducked back as the man returned fire, the bullet cracking off a chunk of concrete in the wall behind.
If Grunt had moved a fraction of a second later, his blood and brains would have been sprayed all over that wall.
Quick reactions and a good shot. That meant a professional.
Grunt stood at a crouch, whipped his hand around the corner long enough to fire a blind shot at the door, and hurried down the steps. He didn’t think either of his two shots had gotten the guy. He just hoped the second one would delay him long enough that Grunt could find a better place to fight.
Suddenly the man he’d spotted outside appeared at the foot of the stairs. Not having time to raise his gun, Grunt leapt and hit him boots first. The man flew backward and landed hard on the floor with a thud.
Grunt whirled around, and as he suspected, the guy who had been waiting in his room already stood at the top of the stairs.
Grunt blinked. He was the exact duplicate of the man he’d just knocked down. Same features, same clothes, everything.