Blowback

by Brad Thor

  “Okay then,” replied Billings. “We’re all agreed?”

  A chorus of “Fuck Bravo team” resounded throughout the lead Stryker. It was good-natured competition, and Billings knew his men well enough to know that when boots hit the ground, it didn’t matter what team they were on, the men were all brothers united against a common enemy. He had no doubt Russo was whipping his men up as well.

  As Billings felt their Stryker slowing down, he knew it was only a matter of moments before they would have to step outside and try to figure out what the hell was going on.

  THREE

  W hen the Strykers finally came to a halt in the center of the village, the soldiers jumped out and took up defensive firing positions. Though no one said anything, they were all feeling the same thing having made a complete circuit of Asalaam. There wasn’t a single living soul in sight, and it had put everyone on edge.

  Justin Stokes, a young, skinny private from San Diego who had a bad habit of engaging his mouth before his brain, said, “Maybe it’s siesta time.”

  “At 10:30 in the morning?” replied six-foot-four Private Rodney Cooper from Tampa. “Stokes, my grandmother doesn’t even take a nap at 10:30 in the morning.”

  “Whatever it is,” said Stokes, “something about this place isn’t right.”

  “It’s fucked up is what it is,” added Schlesinger. “Where the hell are all the people?”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out,” replied Lieutenant Billings, cutting the crosstalk short. “We’re in the game now, so let’s keep communications on an as-needed basis.”

  “Yes sir, Lieutenant,” the men responded as Billings walked over to where Russo was standing. He was using the reflex sight on his M4 to look for any movement at the far end of the road.

  “What do you think, Jimmy?” asked Billings.

  “I think it’s too quiet,” said Russo as he lowered his weapon.

  “Maybe we’re looking at an ambush.”

  “I don’t think so. If somebody was going to hit us, it would have already happened.”

  “So what the hell’s going on, then? Where are all the villagers?”

  Russo double-checked his firing selector and said, “I don’t know, and I’ve got a feeling I don’t particularly want to know. This village isn’t our problem. We’re here to check up on three American aid workers, so let’s do that and get the hell out of here.”

  Billings studied the cracked, sun-baked facades of the mud brick houses up and down the narrow road, some with their doors and windows standing wide open, and agreed. “All right. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll take Alpha team to the building the missionaries were using as their health center. You and Bravo team do a house-to-house search, but no door kicking. If you find one that’s already open and no one responds to a polite knock, you and your men can go inside and look around, but tell them not to touch anything. We’ll meet back here in fifteen minutes. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir. Fifteen minutes,” replied Russo, who then turned to his men and said, “We’re on. Let’s saddle up.”

  One of the Strykers shadowed Bravo team along the main road, while the other followed Billings and his men as they walked a block over to a worn, low-rise building that looked like it might be a school or an administrative office.

  “Provincial Ministry of Police,” said Private Mike Rodriguez, from upstate New York, as he read a faded sign above the doorway. He was the only one on the team, besides Russo, with a workable grasp of Arabic.

  Billings looked at the one-sheet briefing he’d been given in Mosul and cursed. “Goddamn it. They’ve got this piece of shit map flipped around. We’re supposed to be a block over in the other direction.”

  “Why don’t we take a look inside anyway?” said Stokes. “It’s an official building. Maybe there’s official information inside.”

  “Which we haven’t been authorized to enter or look for,” replied Billings. “We’re here to do reconnaissance only. If we find an open door, we can go in, but if a door isn’t open, we’re not going to start kicking—”

  Before Billings could finish his sentence, Cooper leaned into the flimsy, weather-beaten door with his massive shoulder and popped it off its hinges. As the team looked at him, he said with a smile, ”Somebody must have forgotten to lock up.”

  “The hell they did,” replied Billings. “The next person who tries anything remotely—”The lieutenant was cut short by the overwhelming stench that poured out of the building.

  “Jesus,” exclaimed Schlesinger. “Don’t these people know they’re supposed to put their garbage outside for pickup?”

  Billings, a man all too acquainted with the smell of death, knew that they weren’t smelling garbage. “Cooper, Rodriguez, Schlesinger, and Stokes, you’re coming inside with me. The rest of you stand guard out here and keep your eyes peeled. The shit might hit the fan very quickly.”

  “It smells like it already has,” said a redheaded private from Utah as he readied his weapon and took up his watch.

  Tucking their noses into their tactical vests, Billings and his men stepped inside. After clearing the vestibule, Cooper kicked in the door of the pitch-black main office, and the rest of the team buttonhooked inside. A chorus of “Clear—Clear—Clear” rang out from the different members of the team as they swept through the room, guided by the beams of the SureFire tactical flashlights mounted on the Picatinny Rails of their M4s.

  The reason the room was so dark soon became apparent. The windows had been completely covered with heavy wool blankets.

  Rodriguez shot Schlesinger a puzzled look and whispered, “Are those supposed to be blackout curtains?”

  Schlesinger traced the edge of one of the blankets with the beam of his flashlight and shrugged his shoulders in response.

  “Why would these guys want to block out light here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Maybe they were trying to hide something.”

  “Or hide from something.”

  Billings didn’t care what the blankets were for. “Tear them all down, “He ordered, “and let’s get some light in here.”

  Stokes and Cooper stepped over to the windows and began pulling the blankets down. Light flooded the room. As it did, Schlesinger glanced up, and his voice caught in his throat. “Holy shit.”

  In unison, the rest of the team looked up and saw what Schlesinger was looking at. Suspended from the ceiling were at least fifteen decomposing corpses.

  Cooper, the biggest and until this point one of the bravest members of the squad, recoiled in horror. Stokes made the sign of the cross while Rodriguez and Schlesinger instinctively raised their rifles and swept them back and forth along the length of the ceiling, ready to fire. “What the fuck is going on here, Lieutenant?” implored Schlesinger, the fear evident in his voice.

  Billings had no idea what the hell they were looking at. The bodies had been tied flush against the ceiling, and the heavy timber braces had completely hidden them from view when the team had first entered the room. Billings was about to say something, when a voice crackled over his radio. It was Russo.

  “Alpha One. This is Bravo One. Do you copy? Over.”

  Billings, his eyes still fixed on the gruesome scene above him, toggled his transmit button and said, “This is Alpha One. I read you, Jimmy. What have you got?”

  “We’ve found somebody, Lieutenant. He appears to be one of the village elders. It looks like he hasn’t eaten in a week, but he’s alive.”

  “Where’d you find him?”

  “He was hiding behind one of the houses we were checking. My guys think he was foraging for food.”

  “Does he know what happened to the rest of the villagers?”

  “He says all the survivors are hiding in the mosque. That’s where we’re headed now.”

  “Wait a second. Survivors?” repeated Billings. “Survivors of what? And what do you mean they’re hiding in the mosque? What are they hiding from?”

  “I’m still trying to figur
e that out. The old guy keeps repeating some word in Arabic I don’t understand.”

  Billings motioned to Rodriguez and then said into his radio, “What’s the word? I’ll see if Rodriguez knows it.”

  There was a pause as Russo asked the old man to speak directly into his microphone. Then it came—an intense, raspy voice that sounded like a set of hinges in serious need of oiling, “Algul! Algul! Algul!”

  “Did you get that?” asked Russo as the old man backed away from his radio.

  Billings looked at Rodriguez and noticed that the soldier’s already ashen face had lost what little color was left. The bodies strapped to the ceiling had gotten to all of the men, but they had to hold it together.

  “You ever play Xbox, Lieutenant?” muttered Rodriguez, his eyes still glued to the grotesque forms hovering above them.

  “No,” said Billings, who failed to comprehend any connection between a video game and their current situation.

  “Algul was the first Arabic word I ever learned. I learned it playing a game on Xbox called Phantom Force.”

  Anxious for answers, the lieutenant demanded, “What the fuck does it mean?”

  “Loosely translated, it’s a horseleech or a bloodsucking genie, but usually it’s used to describe a female demon who lives in the cemetery and feasts on dead babies. When there are no babies left, it moves on to whoever is left in the village and keeps feeding until no one is left alive. I’ve also heard it’s a derivative of an Arabic word which means living dead and devourer of women and children. However you slice it, Algul is Arabic for vampire.”

  Billings was about to tell Mike Rodriguez he was full of shit, when one of the bodies strapped to the ceiling above them opened its mouth and covered the soldiers with a fine mist of bloody froth.

  FOUR

  O UTSKIRTS OF B AGHDAD

  T WO WEEKS LATER

  A t first, Scot Harvath couldn’t tell if he had been shot or not. After the blinding white flash, his vision was blurred, and all he could hear was the thunderous pulse of blood as it rushed in and out of his eardrums. He had never expected Khalid Alomari to be carrying a third pistol under his robes—a knife, a razor, maybe even a grenade, but not a subcompact. It just proved yet again how desperate the man was.

  From somewhere beyond the pounding in his ears, Harvath could hear the voice of his boss, Gary Lawlor, telling him to wait, telling him not to go in without backup, but Harvath had come too far to lose Alomari again.

  Dubai, amman, Damascus…the terrorist had always been one, if not two steps ahead. For the past two months, Harvath had been trying to close the gap and capture the man Western intelligence had dubbed the heir apparent to Osama bin Laden. Some of the more flippant analysts and operatives at CIA headquarters in Langley, as well as some in Harvath’s own Office of International Investigative Assistance (OIIA) at the Department of Homeland Security, had taken to calling Alomari “Osama Junior,” or “OJ” for short.

  Normally the first one to find the humor in any situation, Harvath didn’t care for the nickname they’d given Alomari. It downplayed the devastation the killer had wreaked in his short but very impressive career. Not only that, but Harvath took this assignment quite personally. In Cairo, the terrorist had come within a hair’s breadth of killing him. The chase had been a nonstop game of cat and mouse, and even with the resources he had at his disposal, Harvath had not actually laid eyes on his quarry until two minutes ago. If the president had simply charged him with killing Alomari instead of apprehending him for intensive interrogation, this soul-sapping assignment would have been over a long time ago, but it was precisely because Alomari was so elusive and so good at what he did that the United States government wanted him taken alive.

  Hailing from Abha, the same remote mountain city in the southern Saudi Arabian province of Asir that four of the fifteen 9/11 hijackers had come from, Alomari had been born into a wealthy Saudi family, with a Saudi father, a French mother, and excellent connections to the Saudi Royal Family. Though he was highly educated, had traveled extensively abroad, and never wanted for money or creature comforts, Khalid Alomari had grown up feeling something was missing in his life. He carried a hole inside him that no amount of sailing the Greek islands, sunning himself on the French Riviera, or looking out over New York’s Central Park while indulging himself in champagne and women in the Plaza Hotel’s decadent Astor Suite could fill. Like another infamous Saudi trust-fund brat, Alomari eventually found what he was looking for—militant Islam.

  In 1999, Khalid Alomari was only twenty-one years old when he was first introduced to Osama bin Laden. The two men hit it off instantly. Their backgrounds were very similar and they had much in common. When bin Laden mentioned that several men from Alomari’s hometown of Abha were destined for greatness in the eyes of Allah, Alomari had begged to be allowed to be included, but bin Laden had other plans for the young man who had become almost like another son to him. Alomari was destined for greatness as well, but not by flying an airplane into a skyscraper. He possessed talents far and away more impressive than any of the brothers of 9/11.

  Alomari had something that no other young jihadi who had come to bin Laden ever had before. The boy not only possessed exceptional taste, style, and intelligence, but thanks to his French mother, he had a wonderfully European set of facial features that allowed him to pass for almost any nationality.

  No, Khalid Alomari would not be flying airplanes into buildings. He was much too precious for that. He would become bin Laden’s greatest weapon—a new power that the Western world would be forced to reckon with.

  Alomari trained in bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan and then was sent away for further schooling with Pakistan’s infamous Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence in Islamabad. There, the young man learned the fine arts of prisoner interrogation, blackmail, and assassination. He saw bin Laden only once more after that, just before the al-Qaeda leader had been forced to hide in one of his many mountain strongholds along the Pakistani-Afghan border. Alomari had been in the same room with bin Laden, celebrating the success of the September 11 attacks, when the famous video of his mentor was made, but unlike the other men present, Alomari had been smart enough to move behind the cameraman when the filming started. Not only did the footage prove bin Laden’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks, but it was also used as a who’s who of many of al-Qaeda’s inner sanctum. In short, it gave the Americans more intelligence than the al-Qaeda leadership had intended. Alomari had been smart to remain behind the camera and out of sight. If there was one thing he had learned from his time in America and the West, it was that either you manipulated the media, or it manipulated you.

  Now, Harvath desperately tried to wrestle the gun out of Alomari’s hand, but the man was amazingly strong. The terrorist let loose with a left hook, and Harvath lurched to the side, the blow glancing painfully off his shoulder. Harvath answered with a swift knee to Alomari’s groin, which caused the man to drop the gun and also to lose his balance. Grabbing the American operative by the shoulders, Alomari took Harvath down along with him.

  Before Harvath could right himself, Alomari swung an elbow and caught him right in the mouth. As he tried to recover, he could sense Alomari crawling away from him, and his only thought was that the terrorist was going for his gun.

  Harvath’s mind was in overdrive. He’d lost his H&K MP7 in the beginning of the scuffle and knew that it was out of his reach. He’d have to go for his sidearm, but could he pull it and fire before Alomari reached his gun and shot at him? Harvath didn’t have much choice.

  Reaching for his Beretta PX4 Storm pistol, Harvath drew the .40-caliber from his holster and rolled to his left. Raising the weapon, he pointed it in the direction he had last seen Alomari, but there was no one there. Quickly, Harvath spun 180 degrees. Rising to one knee, he swept the rest of the room, but Alomari was gone. There was only one way he could have escaped, and Harvath had no choice but to go after him.

  The Iraqi midday sun was blinding. It to
ok several moments for Harvath’s eyes to adjust and to make out the figure of Khalid Alomari, running, almost a full block away. The terrorist’s muddy-brown robes and brightly checkered kaffiyeh were unmistakable. Harvath didn’t waste any more time.

  Sprinting full out in combat boots and desert camo fatigues wasn’t exactly an easy feat. He would have preferred the shorts, T-shirt, and Nikes he ran along the Potomac in back home. However, combat boots and desert camo were what the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) Direct Action Team in Iraq wore, and that was what he had been issued for their coordinated takedown of Alomari. But the coordination had fallen apart.

  It wasn’t anyone’s fault in particular. Harvath had been forced to make a command decision, and that’s exactly what he had done. When the timetable had shifted and the team couldn’t get in place fast enough, Harvath, right or wrong, had decided to go it alone. If he didn’t catch Khalid by the time the terrorist reached the large open-air bazaar two intersections up, he knew he would end up losing him yet again. And if that happened, Harvath was going to be in even more trouble than he was now. If only he’d been authorized to kill this animal, he could probably take him out from this distance with his Beretta, but that’s not what his orders were.

  Harvath was very close to being SOL yet again, and he knew it. Trying to put everything out of his mind, he drew upon what little reserves he had remaining and ran even faster. Already up ahead, he could see the tented stalls of the large open-air market.

  When Alomari entered the souk, Harvath was less than fifteen feet behind him. The assassin ran down one of the many narrow aisles, up-ending tables and pulling down anything he could behind him to slow Harvath’s pursuit. No matter what he tried, none of it worked. Harvath leapt over everything and soon had the gap narrowed to within ten feet.