As soon as he made the turn, his light, sweeping the stone surfaces, caught something that stopped him: to the left was a stone pit filled with human bodies. Charlie looked quickly: Some of them were skeletons, others recent deaths. Dozens, it seemed. He switched off the light and tried to walk past the pit. But he couldn’t. Couldn’t go more than three steps. What he had seen seemed an illusion. It had to have been. So he swung back and clicked the light on. Saw it again, the same thing, its after-image burning inside his eyelids when the light went out, the odor clinging to his nostrils. All the bodies in the pit had been decapitated.
He continued to shuffle through the rung tunnel, passing another open pit, also to his left, wondering what the proprietors of this prison could have been thinking. Was this some sort of gruesome training facility for the Hassan network? This time he didn’t linger. He came to the other corridor. Turned left. At the end of this one was a faint dusting of light from what seemed to be a series of openings, but the rest of the corridor was in darkness.
“Jon,” he said, speaking softly. “Can you hear me?”
His own voice echoed back at him. Then silence.
He shined the light along the upper level. All of the cell doors there seemed to be open. Then along the lower level. Several times he heard the hiss of flies as he moved past cells. Come on, Jon. Be alive, damn it. Charlie held his breath, pointed the light into the cell on his left. This image, too, stuck in his mind after the darkness returned, and he stood there for several moments looking at it. Body parts from maybe thirty or forty people, scattered across a small rectangle of stone floor: expressions of horror, frozen on the faces of dozens of decapitated heads.
He trained his light up the corridor, checking the doors of each cell for any that were closed. Hearing it again: a nasal breathing sound.
A sudden blaze of lights blinded him. Charlie froze. Coming at him from the front of the prison was a throaty roar of engines, a pair of headlights. Louder, brighter. He turned and hurried back through the corridor the way he had come, toward the connecting tunnel. But it was too late. A burst of gunfire shattered the stone ahead of him, and another ricocheted off the prison cell bars. Then another. Charlie sprinted toward darkness as the vehicle roared closer, diving right out of the corridor and crouching down next to the first pit, catching his breath.
Where were the diversions? Nadra and Wells? Had something gone wrong?
He listened, breathing heavily. Making a decision. The lights of the vehicle were jerking wildly, coming closer. Men shouted in Arabic. Then, a roaring of another engine from the other corridor, a pair of lights on stone. Armed guards converging on the rear of the prison.
Charlie slid himself into the pit, burrowing his legs into the pile of bodies, holding them above his head with his elbows. Breathing the putrid smell of decay, as leaking fluids seeped down his arms. Concentrating so that he wouldn’t vomit, Charlie drew the gun from his sweatshirt and waited as the vehicle brakes pumped at the end of the corridor. He heard it skid around the corner and turn, saw its lights bouncing on the stone. It stopped just past the pit. Charlie listened to the men breathing, speaking urgently in Arabic, words he couldn’t quite make out. One of them carried a light and turned its beam up and down the tunnel. The light moved across the pit, shining for a second into Charlie’s eyes. He waited, trying not to breath. Got a fix on the men as they turned away. As soon as the vehicle began to move again, he lifted his gun, aimed carefully through the corpses and shot the driver in the back of the head. The vehicle slammed into the wall and crashed onto its side. The other man jumped and shouted, having no idea where the shot had come from. He began to fire his pistol wildly without seeing the prey. Three, four times. The noise was deafening, bullets ricocheting off the walls and ceiling, thundering and echoing through the prison corridors. The man shouted at him in Arabic, to come out and show himself. Mallory took careful aim as the man turned in circles, and he hit him with a clean shot in the chest.
More voices. Another cart was coming from the west corridor. Charlie crouched and waited. As soon as it slowed to enter the tunnel, he fired. One, two, three. Two down. The second golf cart slammed against the stone wall, one of its headlights shattering. Then there was nothing. Just silence and echoes.
Four guards head into the rear of the prison. None of them returns. That should spook them a little bit.
But who were they? Charlie checked their clothes, removed one of their handguns. All four carried keys. ID badges. Money. He took all of it, then got behind the wheel of the first golf cart and drove back into the east corridor, the direction he had been walking.
He stopped a third of the way up and killed the engine. Listened. He heard what sounded like breathing again and got out to walk, his senses sharpening with each step.
“Jon. Can you hear me?” He stopped. Heard breathing ahead to his right. His own and someone else’s, a nasal raspy sound. “Jon!” he called again.
That was when the building shook, as if it were being rocked by a powerful earthquake. Charlie instinctively crouched, gun raised. He felt the reverberations again, like an aftershock. That was it. Jason and Nadra at the gate. The diversion. He heard sounds from outside. Men screaming. Gunfire. A steady report of automatic machine gun fire. Bullets slamming stone.
Keep going. Keep moving.
He came back to where he had been: the cell with the decapitated heads. He didn’t look this time, instead turned to his right. Another closed cell door. He clicked on the flashlight and scanned the stone floor. Found a man. Sitting against the back cell wall. Torn clothes. A dirty face. But breathing. Looking back at him, probably only seeing the light. It was a face he hadn’t seen for years.
“Jonny,” he whispered, turning the light to the side.
Jon Mallory watched, half-sitting, half-lying on the concrete.
Charlie tried the keys. The first didn’t fit. The second didn’t fit. He tried a third and felt it slide in. He twisted to his right. The lock turned, its gears opening the door.
“Come on, Jonny!” he said. He helped lift up his brother and walked him out into the corridor. Felt Jon holding him. “Let’s get out of here.”
THEN HE HEARD the second explosion. The floor rumbled, and his legs buckled. Then another. Distant shouts in Arabic. More gunfire.
Charlie tried to find his brother’s eyes in the dark. “Are you all right, Jonny? Can you hear me?”
“Where are we?” Jon said.
“We’re in a prison in Mancala. But we’re getting out of here. Can you walk?”
“I think.”
“Try.”
“I am.”
Charlie retrieved one of the guards’ 9mm pistols from his waistband. “Here,” he said. “Take this. It’s ready to fire. Just in case.” He pressed the gun into his brother’s right hand, sensing that Jon had probably never held a gun before. Feeling a weight of guilt as he let go. What really mattered now was getting Jon out of here alive. Even if he didn’t make it himself. “All right?”
“All right.” Jon shuffled behind him toward the faint light at the front of the prison building, a hand on Charlie’s back.
“Keep going, Jonny. We’re getting you out of here, okay?”
Jon grunted affirmatively. At the end of the corridor, light showed through narrow slats in a tall iron gate. Daylight. The light he had seen from the other end. Charlie pushed through it, and they came into an oval-shaped entry chamber with another light source: a two-foot-wide circular hole in the ceiling, a halo of afternoon sky. He looked at his brother, saw his expressionless face, the eyes watching him like the eyes of an animal.
Charlie studied the walls in the dim light until he found it: a pair of metal entrance doors.
“Let me go ahead for a minute. I’ll come back for you. Okay?”
Jon closed and opened his eyes, a signal of assent. “Okay,” he said. Charlie walked toward the doors. One last barrier before the outside. He located a metal knob and twisted. In the next instant, hi
s eyes were flooded with daylight. He waited to see or hear a rescue vehicle. Where were Nadra and Jason?
Silence. Warmer air. He was under a stone archway, leading to a red-dirt courtyard. He looked back, for Jon, who was in the shadows on the other side of the opened doorway.
Charlie stepped across the archway, his gun raised. Stopped. Still letting his eyes adjust. He took another two steps. Walked out of the shadow into the dirt of the courtyard. Then something slammed against the back of his head, and a hand smashed down on his wrist. No! His gun fell to the dirt; as Charlie grappled to recover it, a knee rammed into his groin.
A man was shouting at him in Arabic. Then Charlie felt the pistol on his temple. Arms pulling him upright. A searing pain in his groin. A man was standing behind him, holding Charlie tight. Using him as a shield. Together, they began to walk, away from the stone archway, out into the open yard.
For the first several steps, Charlie’s eyes were confused by the sunlight. Then he saw where he was: a dirt courtyard, surrounded by tall mud-brick walls. An arched entrance to the west. Two rusted military trucks sat on blocks along the northern corner of the wall, along with a 1980s Ford station wagon. And then he saw other shapes: men lying on the courtyard dirt. More than a dozen of them. And to his left there were others, near the western entrance to the prison yard. Carnage. All of them shot, dark stains of blood in the dirt. Charlie turned his head slightly to see who was holding the gun: a swarthy man, with thick hairy arms and cold glistening eyes.
Maybe fifty feet away sat a rectangular box-like armored transport vehicle. A truck he recognized, out of place here: a French-made Panhard VBL armored scout car, fitted with a machine gun and grenade launcher. The man was using Charlie as a human shield so he could make it to the vehicle without being shot. He had been waiting on the other side of the entranceway, for Charlie to emerge from the prison. Based on the way the man was walking—sideways, facing west—Jason and Nadra had to be near the western entrance to this courtyard.
The man stopped and fired once as they came even with the entrance arch, the 9mm explosion thundering in Charlie’s ears. Another armored vehicle was parked just beyond the archway, he saw. A small transport carrier, a two-man armored VAB, with a roof-mounted machine-gun turret. The shot smashed into the front of the transport vehicle, caroming off the Kevlar surface.
Then Charlie noticed the thin trail of exhaust rising from the left rear side of the VAB. Engine running. It must be a vehicle Wells or Nadra had captured. They were inside, trying to figure how to take out his captor without harming Mallory.
The man kept moving, maneuvering him in tiny steps across the courtyard. A commander of some sort, who had just lost dozens of his troops, Mallory guessed. One of Hassan’s commanders. Charlie felt the man’s sweaty arms slide against his, the gun barrel pressing his temple.
When the gunman reached the side door of the vehicle, he pivoted Charlie slightly, so they were facing the armored car, keeping the weapon on Charlie’s head. He knew that if he made any sudden movement, the man would fire a bullet through him. But he also knew that he’d probably do so, anyway.
He glanced back again, trying to recall why this man seemed familiar. The thick-boned set of his face, the cold eyes, the muscled forearms. And then Charlie glimpsed something else: another figure, moving in a tight, intent loop behind them. Running in a crouch. Charlie twisted his head toward the scout car, so that his captor would look that way, too. Another step. He heard a sharp exhalation of breath and looked. And that was when he saw it happen: the man’s head exploding from the rear, pink mist flying off the back of his skull.
The 9mm handgun fell and his captor went down, his eyes open, registering nothing.
Charles Mallory stepped back, staring at the dead man. And then at the man who had killed him.
Jon Mallory was standing five feet away, holding the gun at his side, looking at his brother. Showing no expression.
Charlie watched in disbelief.
Jon, breathing heavily, in and out, said nothing. Charlie reached out to grab his shoulders. He tried to give him a hug, something they’d never done before.
“Don’t,” Jon said, pushing him back. “My ribs.”
Charlie let go, his eyes tearing up. He put his hands on his brother’s arm and led him to cover behind the armored vehicle, waiting for whatever came next. A burst of gunfire, maybe. But there was only silence.
Then he heard another engine engage. Tires rolling over the dirt, toward them. Stopping. Door opening. Footsteps.
“It’s over,” Nadra said.
“How?” Charlie said, coming out. “Where are the others?”
“There aren’t any others. They’re all gone or dead. We scared off a couple dozen of them with the explosions. They retreated.”
Jon stood behind him, holding the gun.
Pumped up with adrenaline, Charlie could tell, but still expressionless.
“He just saved your life,” Nadra said.
“I know he did.” Charlie turned to Jon, feeling a wave of gratitude toward his little brother. Looking at someone he had never really seen before. He had underestimated Jon, he realized. Not just today. Always. All of his life. He hesitated, then gave him a weak hug.
“Careful,” Jon said.
Charlie stepped back, and for an instant his brother shared a smile with him. Then he heard another engine start. The old Ford station wagon. Jason Wells driving, pulling away from the wall, swinging around and braking.
Nadra got in front. Charlie followed Jon into the back. As they drove out the entrance of the prison compound, he saw the damage the explosives had done, destroying a gatehouse, blowing a twenty-foot-wide hole in the mud-brick wall. He saw the firing range and the obstacle course on the other side of the prison building. A terrorist training camp.
Jon blinked out the window, holding the gun on his lap, saying nothing.
IT WAS SEVEN and a half kilometers to the dirt trail where Joseph Chaplin was parked, waiting for him. That’s what Jon heard. But he had no clear sense of time or distance anymore. He was no longer hurting, but numb, still hearing the echo of the gunfire. His gunfire. Breathing the faint cordite scent of the gunpowder. Replaying the scene over and over.
“I’m sorry, Jonny,” he heard his brother say, in a quiet voice he barely recognized. “I didn’t expect this to happen. I wanted you to be a witness. I didn’t want you to be involved. Not like this. I’m sorry.”
Jon stared out the dust-stained side window as the woods flickered past.
“Why’d you do that?” Charlie said. “Why’d you risk your life like that?”
The questions seemed to reverberate, and disperse, not quite reaching him. He gripped the gun in his hand and felt empowered, felt he could do anything. Then he glanced at his brother and felt something else. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t have any idea. Because you were about to be killed, I guess. I don’t know. I just did.” Charlie looked older and more vulnerable. His face had softened slightly. He wasn’t as invincible as Jon remembered.
“I didn’t think about it for more than a second,” Jon said. “Once I started moving, it just happened. I saw that man was desperate. Totally focused on one thing. He wasn’t thinking about me. I wasn’t even on his radar. He was thinking about the scout car. And his own survival. That was all.”
Wells turned his head. “The boy should get a medal.”
“I could never do that again in a million years,” Jon said.
“First time you fired a gun?” Wells said.
Jon didn’t answer. No. Of course not. He was a reporter. Curious about many things. He had twice gone to the indoor shooting range in Rockville to find out what it felt like to fire a gun.
“It’s the first time I’ve fired at another person,” he said. Or killed one.
Ahead, then, he saw their destination: a small, dark car parked on the edge of the road. Joseph Chaplin.
“This time it’ll be different,” Charlie assured him. “Chaplin
will take care of you. He’ll give you the rest of the details. And you can write the story. You can tell the story we’ve been working on together. Okay?”
Jon nodded, still gripping the gun. Still hearing the reverberation of the gunshot. Feeling the kick-back in his hand. Not wanting to let go.
JASON WELLS LET Charles Mallory off a couple of blocks west of the city center. It was 5:51. An hour and twenty minutes until dark. Maybe three hours before the planes went up, if they were going up. It was misty, felt like rain. But they couldn’t take anything for granted. Especially not after the night before.
Charlie smelled lamb and pig meat roasting on open spits as he walked back toward his room, his clothes reeking with the scents of death, dried body fluids on his hands and neck. He said a prayer in his head as he walked, thanking God that Jon was alive. He was anxious to just take a shower, to feel the evil wash off him and to be clean again. He wanted things to end now. But he knew that the real mission was still ahead.
As soon as he turned the doorknob to the apartment, though, he realized that something was wrong.
There was a wedge of artificial light on the carpeted floor of the room. Charlie knew that he hadn’t left any lights on when he’d gone out.
Someone was here.
Charlie pulled his 9mm handgun and swung it into the room. Found the target immediately. Sitting in the armchair. Dead center. Hands folded, empty. Charlie’s eyes went to the corners of the room. Then the doorways to the two adjacent rooms.
Viral Page 33