by Scott McEwen
“A guy could get lost in the neighborhood.”
Zhilov chuckled. “If you get lost in Casablanca, just walk toward the sea until you hit the coastal road. The sea is very big. Not even a Yankee can miss it.”
Gil checked the side-view mirror, but all he could see was a wall. “I don’t think there’s a straight road in this entire district.”
“This is the Anfa,” Zhilov said. “The original part of the city, before the French took over and tried to make the city look like Paris.”
A teenager rounded the corner and seemed to check himself for a moment before continuing forward, stopping halfway down the short block and going into the house they were watching.
“Do you know that kid?”
Zhilov shook his head. “I never see him before.”
“He seemed to know you.”
Zhilov gripped the wheel, adjusting himself in the seat that was too small for him. “I cannot disagree.”
Gil muttered an obscenity. “The op is blown. He’ll tell the hajis we’re out here and put ’em on alert. We should clear.”
The Russian shook his head, his good humor gone now. “If we leave, they disappear. Then it takes weeks to find them again. I think to wait is good idea. When they come out, you shoot them, and I take you back to hotel for the rest of my money.”
Gil drew the suppressed USP .45 from inside his jacket. “And suppose they come out blasting with automatic weapons.”
Zhilov reached beneath his seat for a micro Uzi submachine pistol. “Suppose they do?” he said in his gravelly voice.
Gil glanced around, feeling boxed in by the limited field of vision due to the curvy nature of the alley. There were almost no positions of cover. He knew they should clear the scene; that the situation was borderline untenable. But he also knew that Zhilov was right: Bashwar and Koutry would disappear to another safe house and would be ten times harder to reacquire.
The Russian took a suppressor from under the seat and attached it to the muzzle of the Uzi. “We going in to get these goddamn guys or what?”
Gil shook his head. “We’ll let the situation develop.” He glanced into the back of the van, which was crammed full of rolled-up carpets. “What is all that shit back there, anyway?”
Zhilov shrugged. “Rugs rolled up. I steal the van from rug vendor other side of city.”
Gil gave him a wry grin. “Weren’t exactly planning a fast getaway, were you?”
“Listen, you goddamn guy. You want to unload the shit? You are my guest.”
“Be my guest. We say be my guest.”
Zhilov looked out the window at the house. “You say your way, Yankee. I say mine. I just want to kill these goddamn guys and get my money.”
A few minutes later, a black van with its headlights off pulled passed them, stopping near the house three doors up on the left. The back doors opened, and a man stepped out holding a suppressed MP5 submachine gun. There were three more men in the back.
Gil sat back in the seat. “What the fuck is this happy horseshit?”
Zhilov sat back as well, though it scarcely made a difference in his case because of his bulk. “It’s those goddamn Jews I tell you about.”
“Mohave? What the fuck are they doing here?”
Zhilov looked at him. “To kill Arab terrorist, maybe?”
Gil got ready to dismount the vehicle in case shit started flying in their direction. The boys with LX Mohave were well known for shooting first and never bothering to ask any questions. A softball-sized glob of what looked like modeling clay landed on the roof of the Mohave van with a heavy thud and stuck in place. Gil knew instantly that it was a wad of C4 plastic explosive molded around a timer-detonator, having seen the same kind of bomb used in Indonesia a few years earlier during a rooftop attack on a diplomatic convoy.
“Sticky bomb—get down!”
He and Zhilov squashed themselves as low as they could as the Mohave men rushed to dismount the doomed vehicle. The bomb detonated with a blinding white flash, catching the driver and one of the gunners inside, flattening the van and throwing the dismounting gunners through the air. The concussion spider-webbed the windshield of the carpet van and echoed through the alleyway.
Like a giant bird dropping, a second glob of C4 landed in the street unseen among the stunned Mohave men struggling to pick themselves up. It detonated in another thunderclap of blinding light, and all three men disintegrated.
Gil jumped out of the carpet van as a third glob of C4 landed on the roof. Zhilov remained in the driver’s seat, knocked unconscious by the concussion of the second blast. Gil rolled beneath the van, expelling the air from his lungs and covering his ears. The bomb exploded, and the load of carpet absorbed much of the pressure wave, but the chassis of the van was thrust violently downward on its leaf springs, and Gil’s head was briefly sandwiched between the exhaust pipe and the street. It felt like a mule kick to the head, and his internal combat systems were knocked off-line.
8
MOROCCO, CASABLANCA,
The Old Medina
As his head cleared slowly from the effects of the explosion, Gil opened his eyes to see two pairs of feet hurrying past the burning Mohave van. When they paused to grab a pair of MP5s, he knew they had to be Bashwar and Koutry fleeing the scene. He groped around for his .45, finding it beneath him, and began to drag himself from beneath the burning carpet van.
He saw the two disappearing down the alleyway in the dark beyond the flames and forced himself to his feet, hearing the distant wail of European-style high-low sirens. Still shaken, he tucked the .45 inside his jacket and hobbled after them, keeping close to the wall and using the doorways to keep under cover as he shadowed them through the alleyways of the Anfa.
People emerged from their homes but no one moved toward the glow of the flames. Gil could feel their accusatory glances as he passed, but he kept his face hidden as best he could. When the fuel tank of the carpet van erupted behind him, everyone ducked back inside, slamming their doors in fear. He lost sight of Bashwar and Koutry at the end of the alley as they ran across the Boulevard Mohamed El Hansali toward the Café Al Jazeera. His balance returning, he darted across the boulevard after them. He caught sight of the two again as they dashed past the café and down the street into a park dotted with trees. So far nothing about their movements gave Gil reason to believe they were aware of their tail. They didn’t even look back as they hurried to put distance between them and the scene of the crime.
He crouched behind a car and watched through the windows as they stashed the MP5s up in a tree and hurried off toward a slightly crowded area to the north. Gil tailed them up another street, where they ducked inside the Casablanca youth hostel. He checked his watch and decided to give them an hour to get settled before going in after them. Walking back in the direction he’d come, he heard the sirens of fire trucks racing down Boulevard Hansali.
Getting blown up in the street was not Gil’s idea of how to efficiently execute a mission. He found a table at a street-side café with a television on the counter and ordered a mutton sandwich. He was still eating ten minutes later when the BBC reported there had been a possible nuclear event in the southern United States. It went on to report that both US and British military forces were now on alert all around the world.
He took a satellite phone from his jacket and called Pope.
Pope answered after a number of rings. “Typhoon?”
“Yeah,” Gil said. “Hey, I’m watching the BBC. What the hell’s going on back home?”
“We don’t know yet,” Pope said. “But if I had to guess, I’d say there’s been a premature nuclear detonation on or near the Mexican border.
“How did it go with our AQAP friends?” he asked.
“Not good,” Gil answered. “Those jackasses over at Mohave showed up and queered the deal. They tried to cut in on our action and got themse
lves blown up—the Russian too. I’m still tracking the targets and should be mission complete within a couple of hours. Who’s responsible for the nuke? Any idea?”
“None. But I want you back here as soon as this op concludes.”
“Roger that.”
“Are you compromised?”
“I don’t think so,” Gil said. “A few locals may have seen my face, but it’s dark, so there shouldn’t be anything to worry about it. I’ll fly out ASAP.”
“Are you injured?”
“Mildly concussed, but nothing I can’t handle.”
“You’ve definitely dealt with worse,” Pope remarked. “What happened to the Russian?”
“They were dropping monkey bombs on us from the roof, and he got smashed.”
“You’d better fly out on your Canadian passport,” Pope advised. “You can cross at Niagara Falls. I’ll have a woman there waiting to bring you over.”
“I can bring myself over.”
“Okay. Let me know when our AQAP friends are out of the picture.”
“Roger that. Typhoon out.” Gil put the phone away.
He sat pretending to watch the television for another hour, keeping one eye on the street, and then got up and returned to the youth hostel. He walked through the doorway into an open courtyard, finding the office on the far side behind a sliding glass window. There a bald, unpleasant-looking fellow in his fifties sat watching a soccer game on a tiny television set. When he glanced up to see Gil standing on the other side of the window, his eyes grew wide, and he grabbed for a pistol beneath his shirt.
Gil jerked the suppressed USP .45 and shot him through the glass. The window shattered, and the man pitched over in the chair, landing on the tile floor with his brains blown out the other side of his head.
Gil looked around to make sure no one had seen and put the weapon away. He hadn’t counted on the hostel being a safe house. Stepping around the corner and into the office, he switched off the television and squatted down, using the man’s jacket from the back of the chair to wrap up his head, tying it tight with the sleeves to keep what was left of his gray matter from oozing out onto the floor. Then he carried the body across the hall and dumped it in the janitor’s closet.
Within a few minutes, he’d swept the broken glass into a dust bin and mopped up most of the gore. The crime scene was by no means spic and span, but with the light turned off, it would easily pass the cursory inspection of a late-night traveler standing outside the window. He took the ledger and a copy of the floor map into the dining room, where he wouldn’t likely be bothered by anyone looking for the dead man. There were seventy-two beds in the hostel, and just as Gil suspected, there was no record of two males having checked in within the last couple of hours.
He sat studying the map, checking off the occupied beds against the guest ledger. Thirty-three of the beds were occupied, with roughly a fifty-fifty split between males and females, the hostel providing separate dorm rooms for men and women. There were a number of two-bed rooms set apart from the dorms, normally reserved for married couples, and Gil guessed that Bashwar and Koutry would be in one of those.
He put the ledger back on the manager’s desk and made his way up the stairs with his hand inside his jacket. At the landing atop the stairs, he oriented himself with the map and made a right down the hall, deciding to check the most isolated room first. Halfway down the hall, he came to a rusty chain stretched across the corridor where he was supposed to make a left. A battered tin sign hanging from the chain read No Admittance, in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. Light shown beneath the door at the end of the short hallway.
Gil drew the USP and stepped carefully over the chain. A washstand stood against the wall, and a black daypack sat on the floor beneath it. He knelt low in the shadowy light to spot the monofilament line running across the corridor from inside the pack to a rusty screw set knee high in the opposite wall. He knew better than to mess with a booby trap unnecessarily, but he didn’t want his line of retreat obstructed in the event things went bad and he needed to egress in a hurry. Besides, this chintzy black-bag affair looked more to him like a Columbine High cum wannabe warrior booby trap than a device rigged with anything as sensitive or complex as a mercury switch.
So he pulled the bag gently from beneath the washstand to release the tension from the monofilament line. Then he checked to be sure that there was no second line attached to the bag before sliding it across and up against the opposite wall, where both bag and trip line would be clear of his path. He stepped to the door and put his hand on the doorknob, listening for movement or conversation from within the room. Hearing nothing, he turned the knob and stepped smoothly inside with the pistol before him.
Koutry looked up in complete shock from where he lay in bed. Gil shot him dead center between the eyes, blowing blood, brains, and bone fragments all over the white pillowcase.
Bashwar was not in the room. This meant he had either stepped out of the hostel while Gil was eating or had gone to take a shower. Koutry had obviously not been expecting him to return so soon. Gil checked the map and moved out down the hall toward the bathrooms.
The showers were empty, but in the next room he saw a pair of feet beneath one of the stall doors in the lavatory, easily recognizing the same Nike basketball sneakers he had seen from beneath the van. A towel and a bar of soap sat waiting on the sink. Gil put five quick rounds through the stall door. The only sound was that of the pistol cycling the rounds and the 230-grain bullets striking the tiled wall after they passed through Bashwar’s body.
Bashwar toppled off the toilet and his feet sprawled out beneath the door.
Gil kicked the door in to see the young man’s face jammed between the commode and the wall, his eyes open, face frozen in shock, with his gun hand still gripping the CZ-75.
“That’s for Benghazi, cocksucker.” He pulled the door closed.
On his way down the stairs, he met a group of Australian tourists on their way up and pretended to stifle a yawn, covering his face with his hand.
“Hey, mate?” one of them called after him. “Have you seen the manager?”
“No,” Gil said without looking back.
A half mile from the hostel along Boulevard des Almohades, directly in front of a pier lined with Moroccan naval vessels, he ditched the USP down a sewer drain and hailed a cab for the airport. It was time to get home and find out what the hell was going on.
9
DETROIT
Though one would not have necessarily guessed it by his present line of work, Daniel Crosswhite was a Medal of Honor recipient and a former Delta Force operator who had survived many deadly incursions behind enemy lines. He had been discharged from the army six months prior due to a fractured hip and pelvis sustained in his last combat jump. He could still run and fight, just not well enough by Special Forces standards, and so the army had asked him to resign his commission.
There were other factors involved, of course, primarily the fact that Crosswhite had led an unauthorized rescue mission in Afghanistan to rescue a female helicopter pilot named Sandra Brux. The mission had been a failure and had very nearly resulted in the deaths of two of the men in his command. Even though Crosswhite had gone on to help successfully rescue Brux a couple of weeks later, winning himself the Medal of Honor in the process, this had only caused his superiors to resent his presence in Delta Force all the more.
Crosswhite now drew a small disability pension from the Veterans Administration, but that barely paid the bills, and he was not the type to sit around waiting on what he considered to be a handout, especially when so many other veterans were receiving no assistance whatsoever. So he had sought out a former Navy SEAL named Brett Tuckerman to help him with a little enterprise he had dreamed up one night while watching the local news in his hometown of New York City.
Tuckerman was a true wild card: a gunfighter and gambling ad
dict who couldn’t pass a poker game if he was chained to a D8 Cat going in the opposite direction. His friends within the Special Ops community all called him Conman, a nickname he had come by honestly. He and Crosswhite had first met during the unauthorized rescue mission into the Waigal Valley, and Tuckerman too had eventually paid the price for his involvement in the ill-fated mission by being kicked out of DEVGRU (also known as SEAL Team VI) a few months later—as had every other SEAL involved in the same op.
After that, Tuckerman had lost all interest in serving in the United States Navy, returning home to Las Vegas to take up the game of poker full-time. He spent the next five months snorting coke and chasing women up and down the Strip. When Crosswhite finally caught up to him, he’d been facedown in his own vomit in a Bellagio hotel room that wasn’t even registered in his name.
Tuckerman and Crosswhite now sat staring out the back window of a beat-up dog grooming van in Detroit, watching the house of a methamphetamine dealer named Terrance Booker. A decked-out yellow Hummer pulled up in front of the house, and two men got out, each with a bulging black backpack slung over his shoulder. He glanced at his watch, shaking his head in dismay. “Exactly zero three-thirty hours. How are these motherfuckers so punctual? They’re fuckin’ criminals.”
“So are we,” Crosswhite said, shrugging into his body armor. “They got our goddamn money with ’em?”
“They do.” Tuckerman wasn’t a large fellow—only five foot six, 145 pounds—but at twenty-nine, he still carried most of his muscle from his days in the SEALs.
Crosswhite was taller, a few years older, handsome with dark hair and a devil-may-care smile. “Remember,” he said, “this motherfucker’s been down twice for child molestation, so if he puts up any fight at all, don’t hesitate to waste his ass.”
They were dressed for combat pretty much the same as when they’d operated with Special Forces, only instead of camouflage, they were dressed all in black with FBI stenciled on their body armor front and back. They carried no identification, and they always wore leather tactical gloves. They’d made a pact with each other on the first day: if either man was ever wounded badly enough that he needed a hospital, the other would put a bullet through his head.