Abrahem broke off, blinked and lowered his chin so that Tariq might not see his grief as it wrenched at his heart and tugged painfully at the muscles of his face.
‘I know of your pain, Abrahem,’ Tariq replied finally. ‘It is shared by all of us, for there is barely a Muslim across the world that has not lost a member of their family to this scourge of our people.’
Abrahem nodded, keeping his head down and chewing on a slice of meat as he recovered himself.
‘I shall not stop,’ he said, ‘until I have changed the face of America. This will be my legacy.’
Tariq’s eyes widened as he looked at the young man before him, his face cloaked in shadows and his eyes dark with a vengeance that burned brightly and yet consumed the life force within him. The brightest stars, Tariq recalled, always burned the fiercest before dying young.
‘Your life is worth more than this,’ Tariq said carefully. ‘Be not wasteful with it.’
Abrahem’s dark eyes locked onto Tariq’s with a fearsome gaze.
‘Do not worry yourself, Tariq. Every last ounce of my being will be used to its full potential and America will suffer the agony of its loss for a thousand years. They will pay for what they have…’
Abrahem fell silent as his eyes rose to the sky somewhere above them outside. The wind rumbled and he could just make out the whisper of the waves rolling onto the nearby beach, but something else caught his attention. Something unnatural, rhythmic, man made.
Abrahem dropped his food and grabbed Tariq.
‘We must leave, now!’
‘Why?’ the old man asked, confused.
‘The Americans. They are already here!’
*
USS Harry S. Truman, US Fifth Fleet,
Persian Gulf
‘Lone Warrior, Ranger One, in–bound Bullseye, ETA two minutes.’
Ethan heard the pilot of the Sikorsky SH–60 Seahawk call his position in the darkness, the horizon outside invisible and the cockpit aglow with green digital instruments, and then the co–pilot looked over his shoulder and give a brief thumbs–up to the occupants in the rear.
Ethan sat alongside Lopez in a jump seat, and around them sat an eight man team of US Navy SEALS, part of the Navy’s Special Warfare Insertion division. Both he and Lopez has been flown out of Basra as part of a Carrier On–board Delivery flight to the USS Harry S. Truman, which had replaced the damaged USS Carl Vinson.
The elite troops surrounding Ethan were heavily armed and already briefed to expect resistance, and despite their training and skill listened patiently to Ethan as he spoke to them through his microphone.
‘The target is Abrahem Nassir and he must be captured alive. We have evidence that he left Iraq and travelled on a merchant vessel down the coast of Somalia, and the carrier group’s radar data suggests he made landfall here within the last hour. His assistance is essential to us if we are to prevent the attack that we believe he has planned. The capture of Nassir or any of his lieutenants may prevent another Pearl Harbor or nine–eleven.’
Ethan nodded once to clarify that he was done and the team leader gave him a thumbs up and moved alongside the Seahawk‘s port side door, ready to lead his team out on rappel lines already coiled in preparation on the deck. He felt the Seahawk dip as it began to descend toward Somalia’s rugged coastline, plunging downward and pulling Ethan up into his straps with negative G–force as the helicopter plummeted from the sky.
Suddenly Ethan’s head was pulled down and his butt slammed against the seat as the Seahawk pulled up at the last moment, its rotors hammering the sky outside as the side doors were hauled open and he saw the SEALS hurl out their rappel lines and without hesitation they jumped in a rapid but orderly queue out of the helicopter and into the faint light of dawn outside.
Ethan held his position, knowing better than to get in their way as the soldiers deployed. A rush of sea air hit him, cold and brisk and vibrant, and was followed by a waft of jet fuel and then the crackle of small arms fire as the SEALs hit the beach and encountered the enemy.
‘Let’s go!’ he shouted.
Lopez moved instantly as she clipped herself to the port rappel line and launched herself out into the vigorous downwash of the helicopter’s rotors. Ethan followed on the starboard line and they plunged downward together, Lopez crashing into the surf at the edge of a broad beach that was just visible in the faint light.
Ethan crashed down alongside her and they both dashed up the beach as staccato bursts of gunfire raked the sand around them, returning fire from the SEAL’s M–16 rifles clattering up into a tightly bunched gathering of low buildings perched on the edge of the beach.
‘There’s too many of them!’ Lopez yelled above the gunfire.
Ethan could see multiple flickering fires amid the buildings and among them at least twenty rifles firing back at the SEALs storming up the beach. To his right two of the SEALS switched their firing mechanisms to the M–16’s underslung grenade launchers. Two grenades popped in graceful arcs over the rifle fire of their comrades and thumped down amid the enemy.
Ethan shielded his ears as the grenades detonated with bright flashes of light, clouds of lethal shrapnel scything through the armed militants defending the buildings as screams competed with the gunfire. The SEALs immediately began charging into the hail of uncoordinated fire, advancing by sections with each man covering his buddy and presenting a continuous and withering field of fire to their enemy.
The Seahawk had pulled back from its vulnerable hovering position, climbing rapidly as it turned away and moved to cut off any escape route to the north.
‘Come on!’ Ethan snapped.
He jumped up and began running south down the beach, keen to cut off anybody who might make a dash from the cover of the village. The damp sand slowed his sprint as though he were in a childhood dream and fleeing from some unthinkable monster from the depths of his imagination. He struggled up the bluff, Lopez alongside him as they crashed through dense fields of long grass clogging the bluff.
‘Enemy.’
Lopez’s harsh whisper slowed Ethan and he crouched down, his chest heaving for air as he heard the clatter of machine gun fire nearby. Above it, faint but audible, he could hear the sound of running feet beating a hasty retreat toward their position. Ethan looked at Lopez and saw that she already had her pistol gripped firmly in both hands.
Ethan checked his own weapon and then he leaped out into plain view and aimed into the dim light to see a crowd of women and children rushing toward him, panic in their eyes as they staggered to a halt and threw their arms in the air with a crescendo of cries and pleas for mercy. All were dressed in long, black burqas, only their eyes visible as they held their arms aloft and shielded their children with their bodies.
Ethan lowered his pistol as Lopez moved out of cover alongside him, lowering her own weapon as she surveyed the terrified villagers.
‘Abrahem Nassir,’ Ethan snapped, keen to entrap the villagers while they were still in fear for their lives and perhaps figure out where their target had gone. ‘Abrahem Nassir?!’
One of the women turned and pointed over Ethan’s left shoulder, toward the south, and Ethan instinctively glanced in that direction.
‘Ethan!’
Lopez’s startled voice alerted him, but it was too late. Ethan turned back in time to feel something club him across the side of his head and the gloomy beach reeled as he was hurled to the ground. He saw Lopez being overpowered, realized with the last of his consciousness that many of the women concealed in the burqas were in fact men, and then everything went black.
***
XXII
‘Warner!’
Ethan heard the voice from the distant periphery of his awareness, pulling him in along with the unwelcome embrace of a throbbing ache that permeated his skull. Something jabbed him in the chest and he sucked in a lung full of air as he bolted upright and bright pain lanced behind his eyes.
‘Take it easy.’
The voice soot
hed him and he felt the gloved hands of two Navy SEALS supporting him, one with a rifle guarding them and the other with a water canteen that was offered to Ethan. He drank from it gratefully and suddenly the pieces of his memory reconnected themselves and he looked at the SEALs in shock.
‘Lopez?!’
‘We haven’t found her yet,’ the soldier replied, ‘but we have prisoners and we don’t think Nassir can have got far. You’re lucky his people didn’t shoot you in the head where you lay.’
Ethan nodded. ‘Gunfire would have exposed them, and they probably didn’t have time to hang around.’
‘Neither do we,’ the SEAL replied. ‘We’ve wasted enough time looking for you so get off your ass and get moving. We’ve got work to do.’
The canteen was snatched away and the SEALs marched off. Ethan hauled himself to his feet and followed them at a jog back toward the village where the Seahawk helicopter was now landed on the beach, its rotors spinning slowly as the pilots awaited the SEALs gathered on the beach before them.
Ethan could see that in the soldier’s midst, on their knees and with their hands behind their heads, were a small knot of ragged looking Somalians surrounded by a captured cache of weapons. Nearby, four more prisoners were hauling bodies down onto the beach. It took only a few moments for Ethan to realize that the SEALs had suffered no losses during the assault, but that there were at least a dozen Somalian dead lying on the cold sand as the dawn glowed weakly across the sky.
‘Any injured?’ Ethan asked the team leader as he held the back of his head in one hand and winced at the pain.
The SEAL’s commanding officer shook his head.
‘No casualties in our team. Twelve hostiles eliminated but our main target remains at large.’
Ethan looked down at the captured militants, all of them staring at the sand with their hands behind their heads. He looked up along the bluff, beyond the village to the deserts that stretched away into the empty wilderness. Abrahem Nassir, if he had been present in the village, could have travelled no more than a few miles at best, assuming he had a vehicle.
‘Can we track them?’
The commander shook his head.
‘We can’t be seen over this country in broad daylight,’ he replied. ‘Even ignoring the international implications, the threat from shoulder–launched rocket propelled grenades to our helo is too great.’
Ethan knew that such basic weapons could be lethal to low flying helicopters no matter how advanced they may be, and the Somalians likely possessed them in spades.
‘I want Lopez back,’ Ethan said. ‘If Abrahem escapes I can pick his trail up later but I’m not leaving my partner here.’
‘We’re not here to babysit the two of you,’ the commander snapped back. ‘She knew the risks. It’s her problem now.’
‘Would you leave one of your men out here?!’
‘My men know the risks also and would take care of themselves.’
‘And if an American woman turns up on the Internet, held captive by Islamist militants who claim she was abandoned here by American soldiers? How do you think that will go down with the folks back home?’
The commander sneered at Ethan. ‘I’ll let Congress deal with that.’
‘Give her a chance. If we can’t locate her in the next ten minutes, I’ll stay behind and find her myself.’
The SEAL offered Ethan a grim smile.
‘Your funeral, pal,’ he said and then glanced at the prisoners. ‘I’ve got an idea.’
Ethan waited as the SEALs ordered the captives to their feet. The SEAL commander seemed to scan each and every one of the men before him, assessing them with a practised eye, before he picked three of them out.
‘Cut the rest loose.’
‘You’re letting them go?’ Ethan asked.
‘Kind of,’ the commander replied.
To Ethan’s surprise, many of the toughest looking men were freed and left standing on the beach as the SEALs dragged the three prisoners chosen by their commander back toward the Seahawk. The helicopter’s engines began running up again as one by one the SEALs filed back inside, the Somalians forced to lay on the helicopter’s deck as it lifted off.
Moments later three of the SEALS opened fire on the Somalians still on the beach below them, dropping them instantly in a hail of bullets as the Seahawk climbed away.
Ethan strapped himself in and watched as the SEAL commander talked to the pilots and the helicopter swung out over the ocean and headed south, climbing swiftly. The side doors had been left open, offering a vertiginous view of banks of misty cloud that soared past and then the helicopter broke free of them, climbing ever higher. Ethan guessed they were at five thousand feet before the helicopter levelled off and the SEAL commander spoke to their captors.
‘There will be no negotiations,’ he snapped, shouting above the roar of the engines and not bothering with a local dialect. ‘I know that you can all understand me. You will tell me what I need to know or you will not leave this helicopter alive, understood?’
The three captives stared sullenly into the middle distance, their heads pressed against the metal deck and rifles pinned against their skulls.
The commander pointed at one of them. ‘Him first.’
The SEALs hauled one of the Somalians to his feet, the militant unsteady as the helicopter rocked on the wind currents. The SEAL commander glared into the militant’s eyes.
‘Abrahem Nassir. Where is he going and what does he intend to do?’
The Somalian smiled, his teeth yellow.
‘Alluhah Akbhar,’ he snapped. ‘God is great!’
The SEAL commander smiled grimly back at his captive. ‘Not great enough to get you out of this!’
The commander nodded and without warning another SEAL yanked the militant backwards by the collar of his ragged shirt toward the open port door alongside Ethan. The Somalian’s smile withered into panic and he opened his mouth to scream something, but the cry was lost as the SEAL commander jabbed his knuckles into the Somalian’s throat. The militant’s eyes bulged and he staggered backwards, his hands flying to his throat as the SEAL by the open door, one hand gripping a safety rail, hurled the Somalian out the side of the helicopter. The Somalian flew backwards out of the Seahawk and into the air, his eyes and mouth wide open in an expression of terminal horror.
Ethan stared transfixed as the militant spiraled down toward the clouds below them and then vanished, his fate sealed. For some reason, perhaps to veil the fact that he was witnessing a cold–blooded murder, Ethan recalled his own parachute training and his knowledge of what would happen. The militant would reach terminal velocity in a few seconds, well over one hundred miles per hour. At that speed, hitting the water far below would break every bone in his body as effectively as if he had hit concrete.
Ethan looked back at the remaining two captives, who were both staring wide eyed on the deck where they lay at where their companion had recently vanished into oblivion.
‘Him,’ the commander pointed.
The SEALs hauled another of them to his feet, and this time the man started babbling immediately, tears flowing from his eyes.
‘Qeycad!’ he whimpered. ‘They are going to Qeycad!’
‘What’s there?’ the commander demanded.
‘A bush plane,’ the Somalian replied miserably. ‘Abrahem is to be flown to another country and out of Africa, that’s all I know!’
The SEAL leaned close to the terrified militant. ‘What does he intend to do then?’
‘I don’t know,’ the Somalian wailed. ‘They didn’t tell us everything! They paid us to protect them, that’s all!’
‘Where did he come from?’ the commander demanded.
‘Iraq,’ the Somalian said. ‘Basra, I know that much. They said he was from Basra.’
The commander looked at Ethan, who nodded. The information was likely legitimate if the Somalian knew that Abrahem was from Iraq. But it also meant that Abrahem would once again vanish.
�
�Do you know where Abrahem Nassir intended to go after Qeycad?’ the commander asked, his tone more reasonable.
‘They didn’t say,’ their prisoner replied, his voice trembling. ‘They just wanted to pass through the area.’
‘How did they arrive?’
‘A boat, from the gulf. It left immediately.’
‘You’re doing very well,’ the commander growled at his captive. ‘At this rate you may even live. Who was he travelling with?’
‘An old man named Tariq, who arrived here the day before.’
‘He was from Iraq too?’
‘Yes, a sheik, very powerful. We did everything he said. He had a lot of money but I don’t know where it came from.’
‘A benefactor,’ Ethan said, speaking for the first time since they had taken off from the beach. ‘Where there’s money, there’s a trail.’
Ethan realized that the helicopter was turning gently, the dim light streaming in through the windows changing angle as the Seahawk flew over the coast once more, this time heading inland.
‘Did they have vehicles with them?’ the commander demanded.
‘Yes,’ the Somalian replied, ‘two trucks.’
The commander turned to Ethan. ‘Qeycad is ten clicks from the coast.’
‘How long was I out?’ Ethan asked.
‘I don’t know, but it only took us a few minutes to find you. The helo’s are equipped with infra–red sensors that spotted your body.’
Ethan nodded as he tightened his harness. ‘They could have travelled three or four clicks by now, half way to the town. If they get there we won’t be able to find them.’
‘And if we’re identified over Somalian airspace it’ll be my neck on the line back home!’ the commander snapped. ‘And it’ll be much worse if we get hit.’
‘Just get me close enough,’ Ethan insisted. ‘I’ll do the rest.’
The commander forced the Somalian to his knees in the helicopter and turned to his troops. There was no spoken command needed, they simply responded by reloading their M–16’s magazines and preparing once more for combat. The commander checked his watch.
The Identity Mine (Warner & Lopez Book 3) Page 14