Deep Black

by Sean McFate

  I thought about the twenty years I’d spent in the line of fire, first U.S. Army Airborne, then Apollo. I thought about all the lives I’d taken: hundreds of men, and a few women and children, too. I balanced them against the lives I’d saved: hundreds of thousands when I stopped a genocide in Burundi, hundreds in Mosul, an entire village in northern Mali, and a busload of women on their way to a life of slavery and rape. Then I thought of the girl who didn’t make it off that sabaya bus and my best friend, Jimmy Miles, bleeding out in my arms. I still didn’t know what to do with that last one, so I buried it before it could grow on me. It’s what mercenaries do.

  “Just a drifter with a gun,” I said.

  “These young guys,” Kylah said, fingering the edge of the cup. “They come in once, usually after a knife fight outside the T-Top, they want to tell me everything they’ve done. Most of them haven’t done anything more than graduate from high school. Some of them haven’t even done that. You come in for months, you don’t say anything.”

  Not much to say.

  “The strong, silent type,” she laughed, when she saw I wasn’t going to answer. “A man with a past.”

  “I’m tired, that’s all. It’s what happens when you get old.”

  She chuckled. “I don’t really care about your story. I just like a man who has one.”

  “The more you know about mine, the less impressed you’ll be.”

  “Let me guess: deaths you can’t forget, mistakes you can’t let go, a career you walked away from for . . .” She was winding me up, so I waited. She had it right so far. “A woman.”

  I thought about Alie MacFarlane, the woman I’d reconnected with in Ukraine after a decade apart. I’d fallen for her in Burundi, when she was a twenty-four-year-old ex-nun with legs that wouldn’t quit. I’d met her again in Ukraine, and a whole lot of trouble had gone down. Still, I couldn’t let her go. She was the love of my life. Maybe. She had made me realize what I’d given up—a family, a house, a normal life—but she hadn’t been the cause. I’d given those things up years ago, when I dropped out of graduate school at Harvard to put my boots on the ground for Apollo Outcomes and Brad Winters.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Kylah wasn’t convinced. She leaned on the desk and smiled. Her tank top fell open, and it was an effort to keep my eyes from drifting down. The effort failed. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

  “Then what broke you?” she asked.

  Failure, I wanted to tell her. The deeply personal kind. The kind that gets your best friend killed and makes you question everything you’ve ever done, and all the things you’ve ever believed, both about yourself and the world.

  But I wasn’t sure that was the right answer, and I didn’t know how to tell her that anyway. So instead I touched her hand.

  “I don’t think so, cowboy,” she said. “I’m not a one-night kind of girl.”

  Good, it’s probably better that way, I thought, even though I didn’t believe it.

  “And this isn’t what you want.”

  She was wrong. Right now, it was the only thing I wanted.

  “We’ve a good friendship going, Tommy, and that’s not easy to find. Why ruin it for a roll? Especially when I’m not what you’re looking for.”

  “You’re wrong, Kylah.”

  “You didn’t shave that mangy beard for me, Tommy, and we both know it.”

  Alie? I thought, and the memory came to me: her creamy skin in the hot bed in Amsterdam, and the surprising darkness of her nipples, and the way she screamed. The way she forgave me for what I’d done.

  “You’re looking for yourself under all that shit,” Kylah said. “Believe me, I’ve seen it, and you’re not going to find it here.” It’s only sex, I almost said, but she wasn’t finished. “Besides,” she continued as a sly smile started to touch her pretty face, “I’ve had a man for a while now, and I don’t think it would be right to sleep with his boss.”

  My jaw dropped. “Wildman!? You’ve been fucking Wildman?”

  “Hell no,” she said. “Do you even know your friends?”

  “Boon?”

  She shrugged, and I could tell she was enjoying my surprise. “I like a man with a story,” she said. “And he’s got one. Besides, he’s sexy as hell.”

  “He’s a Buddhist!”

  “Well then, he’s the dirtiest damn Buddhist I’ve ever met,” she said. I didn’t know if she was being serious or pulling my leg with that last sentence, but I knew the image was going to haunt me.

  We arrived at the T-Top as the sun disappeared behind the edge of the world, Kylah clinging to me on the back of the motorcycle. I loved Erbil at dusk; it had a desert swank to it. We zoomed through its empty streets, me still in sunglasses as I had no goggles or helmet, and Kylah with her fiery hair in the wind. I wanted to be happy, and mostly I was. She was a good friend; we understood each other. But I couldn’t get the image of her with that dirty little Buddhist I called my running partner out of my head.

  I pulled up next to a row of technicals: modified pickup trucks, each with a heavy-caliber machine gun mounted on the bed. They were modern warfare’s ubiquitous cavalry, and a tool of the trade in my line of work.

  The bar was crowded, but I spotted Wildman right away. His outsize laugh and burly frame were hard to miss. He was playing darts with throwing knives, his version of a drinking game. He smiled when he saw me with Kylah, then laughed when she put her arm around Boon.

  “He’s a killer,” Wildman said, slapping me on the back and ordering me a double Jack straight up.

  I thought of replying, but I didn’t have anything to say. I finished my drink and told him I was hitting the head. On the way back, I passed the empty stage. There was a cheap Yamaha keyboard in the corner. I plugged it in, set the program to concert piano, and started playing Chopin’s third Étude, called “The Farewell.” Of all his music, Chopin thought this piece his most poignant. It begins simple enough but ends in a maelstrom of emotion, which suited my mood.

  The piano wasn’t my instrument. I’d been a violin virtuoso until I gave it up at fourteen, after I realized I’d never be the best in the world. I had the work ethic, but not the innate talent. I could never play Carnegie Hall, but I had the talent to impress someone like Kylah, and that was what I wanted tonight. I wanted to show her I was more than a drifter with a gun.

  I guess I wanted to lose myself, too. Music can do that, just like a slug of high-end bourbon or a two-week walkabout in the ISIS-infested mountains. Running my fingers along that keyboard could take me to any moment in my life, or anywhere else I wanted to go. But at the T-Top, all it took me to was my regret.

  I lifted my fingers, letting the music crescendo around me. The Yamaha was tinny and the T-Top a bunker, but the chords lingered, buzzing around me, until my revelry was interrupted by yelling from the bar. It was the war tourists. I thought for sure they were barking at me to play Lynyrd Skynyrd.

  I turned, but nobody was even looking my way. Everyone was focused on the television above the bar. An American was on his knees in front of a masked man, who was reading a prepared message. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, like the ones at Guantanamo Bay. The executioner was in black. The desert was empty behind them. I looked away, but I knew it was done when the squaddies exploded with anger, smashing their glasses on the bar. Someone’s beer hit the television set and shattered. I walked out without another word, my heart in my shoes.

  Wildman caught up to me two blocks later. “I’ll cut their cocks off and feed them to the dogs,” he said. “They’ll fucking pay.”

  “We’re leaving,” I said. “Tell the Kurds. And where the hell is Boon?”

  “He had already left,” Wildman said. He didn’t need to stay with Kylah. “Give him an hour.”

  I didn’t want to. I really didn’t want to. But I did.

  Chapter 8

  “Where have you been?”

  Brad Winters dismissed the menace in the question. It had been only twenty-three hours
since the robbery. He had traveled halfway around the world. What did the prince expect? “It’s important not to seem impatient,” he said casually.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m here, officially, to fight Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen on your behalf, a battle that is timely but not urgent. And you’re being tracked.”

  “By whom?”

  “The CIA. I have it directly from government sources.”

  “It’s not a matter of international politics for a man to avenge his sons. And it’s not suspicious.”

  “Not yet,” Winters agreed.

  Abdulaziz sighed. “Ten billion dollars,” he said absently, “and a lifetime’s work.”

  “Ten billion is nothing. You’ll lose your head for this.”

  “I’m not going to lose my head. I’m going to be a national hero.”

  “If you let me do my job.”

  Winters raised the leg rest in Abdulaziz’s Rolls-Royce Phantom and stared out the window at the sunset over Riyadh. Lovely Riyadh. Sleek and curved like an unveiled woman, and hot as hell.

  “If Farhan has gone back to ISIS . . .” Winters said smoothly, knowing the words were knives.

  “Farhan escaped assassination by my enemies. Farhan is smart. He’s laying low.”

  “Don’t be proud. He was running. If he rejoins ISIS . . .”

  “Then I’ll find him again.”

  “I hear Baghdadi is headed to northern Iraq.”

  “That’s only rumor.”

  “They say he’ll be in Mosul tomorrow.”

  Abdulaziz laughed harshly. “If a man like you or me knew where the leader of ISIS was going to be tomorrow, he’d be dead already.”

  “This is serious, Abdulaziz. There is more at stake than just your son. Much more. Let me help you.”

  “I’ll find my son,” the man barked. “You focus on Yemen. That’s all I should have ever hired you for.”

  You hired me, Winters thought, you don’t own me. But he kept his mouth shut and his eyes on Riyadh, all the way to his hotel. After all, this was the hard part, and it was only beginning.

  Chapter 9

  It was well past midnight by the time our two Humvees forded the Zab River and entered ISIS territory. We’d been using this series of smuggler trails for months, driving up through the mountains to the north of the highway, where the terrain was rough and people scarce. It was only eighty-five kilometers from Mosul to Erbil on the main road, about an hour’s drive, but this route would take us all night. We let the Kurds lead in their Humvee, out of tradition more than anything. By now I knew the way, but the Kurds had shown it to us way back when we arrived, and it was good to keep them on as guides.

  It was our last time through here, I realized, as we topped a ridge and spotted St. Matthew’s Monastery atop Mount Alfaf, one of the oldest Christian monasteries in existence and only thirty klicks from Mosul. It was a miracle it remained Christian.

  We followed the switchbacks up Mount Bashiqa. At the top was a craterlike depression, and in it was a secret military airbase, now abandoned. Our Kurdish guides had told us ISIS booby-trapped it, burying hundred-pound bombs in its single-strip runway and surrounding area, so we skirted the lip of the bowl as always. On the other side, we dismounted and walked the last few meters to the top of the ridgeline.

  “Ain’t it beautiful,” I said.

  Before us spread a vast plain with Mosul in the distance, the second largest city in Iraq. It was a hard twenty klicks: down this mountain, across the desert, through ISIS perimeter defenses, and into a city crawling with ISIS spies—all without being detected. But from up here, it was beautiful.

  “The moon’s killing us,” Wildman said. The gibbous moon lit up the desert in ways inconceivable to those raised among wooded hills.

  “We’re going to have to take it slow and easy,” Boon said.

  “Yeah. But we need to make our meet before dawn prayers.” That was when the city woke.

  “Activity to the south.” Wildman pointed. We held up our binos in unison. A convoy was traveling fast on the highway toward the city.

  “ISIS,” Boon said. “Six trucks. Humvees.”

  Most of ISIS’s military equipment was made in America and captured from the Iraqi army. We’d procured our two up-armored Humvees by ambushing an ISIS patrol on a scouting run a few days after our arrival in Erbil. Usually Boon, Wildman, and I would have split up between the two vehicles, but I’d given one to the Kurds as a show of respect. That had bought a few extra weeks of loyalty.

  “Looks like they’re towing artillery,” I said. “Probably heading to the Syrian front by night to avoid air strikes.”

  I traced the road ahead of the convoy into Mosul. An ISIS checkpoint guarded a roadblock with an artillery piece pointed straight down the highway. Just beyond, a huge black ISIS flag was draped over a welcome to mosul road sign. Twelve to fifteen crucified bodies lined the road.

  “Let’s move out,” I said. “Switch to blackout drive.”

  The Hummers hobbled down the mountainside at a nearly vertical angle, the Kurds in the lead. This part of the trek always made me nervous. This “mountain” was little more than a hunk of rock covered with loose dirt, and our path a goat trail. Every windstorm shifted the dirt and disguised the cliff edges, making our guides’ work treacherous. Worse, night vision came at the expense of depth perception and peripheral vision. One wrong move and a Humvee would tumble off the edge. That was why ISIS never came this way. They never even bothered to watch it.

  “Easy does it,” I said to Boon, as the path narrowed and the drop-off grew to a few hundred meters.

  Buddha calm, I thought, focusing on my breathing. I hated this part, because it was out of my control. But I trusted Boon. Not as much as I trusted myself, but about as much as I could trust anyone, even if he’d stolen my girl.

  Funny how it seemed like that now, I thought, as we skidded on the edge, even though Kylah was never more than a friend with an AK-47 and a hell of a set of legs.

  “Not gonna miss that,” Wildman said, when the cliff’s edge finally gave way to the desert plain.

  The ride was bumpy, but we made good time. When we got close to the city, we found a narrow, ten-foot-deep dry river bed, known as a wadi, our usual highway into Mosul. We followed the muddy oxbows for four kilometers, past orchards and farm buildings. We were one klick out when I saw the artillery.

  “Halt!” I yelled to the Kurds through the headset.

  Two hundred meters in front of us sat a 155-millimeter cannon, pointed over our heads at a major road junction. There was no movement through my night-vision goggles. Maybe the crew was asleep. Maybe they were aiming.

  “Back up,” I whispered. The Humvees reversed around the last oxbow and out of the cannon’s line of sight. We hadn’t seen this gun emplacement before. It was new. I stepped out of the Humvee to caucus with the Kurds, who had lived all their lives within a hundred kilometers of Mosul and knew this land. A vigorous debate ensued in Kurdish, hands gesticulating wildly as they whispered, arguing about the best way around.

  “Ah, guys.” Boon’s voice. “Guys. Silence!”

  He nodded behind him. Above us, on the edge of the wadi, stood a young boy. He was backlit against the moonlit night, so his expression was unreadable. We froze, as if posing for a portrait, staring at each other in mortified disbelief. I put my hand to my SCAR assault rifle as another face appeared, staring down at us with slanted, devilish eyes. A goat. The boy must have been a herder. We must have woken him, meaning his family was nearby.

  If he gives our position away, we’re dead.

  Boon held out a chocolate bar, flashing his Thai smile. My index finger moved to the trigger well of my SCAR. The kid didn’t move, but the goat sniffed the air.

  The older Kurd spoke. I don’t know what he said, but the child relaxed, shoulders slumping. He disappeared and I lifted my SCAR, but the old man put his hand over my barrel.

  “No,” he said. “He will help us.�
��

  I lowered my weapon, and the boy returned with his older brother. They skidded down the wadi bank on their butts.

  “The gun isn’t manned tonight,” the Kurd translated, “but there are bombs ahead, buried in the ground.”

  Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, were a trademark of al Qaeda and now ISIS. Some were triggered remotely; others, like those ahead, would blow under the pressure of a Humvee tire. In a wadi this narrow, there wasn’t much hope of getting past them, and culvert IEDs were hard to spot, especially at night.

  “Holy hell,” Wildman said, as the boy spoke to the older Kurd.

  “For us,” the Kurd translated, “for enemies of ISIS, he knows a way through.”

  Chapter 10

  The two militants were surprised to see the gaunt figure walking toward them out of the dry grasslands just south of al Hasaka, Syria. It was three in the morning, after all, and only lizards were walking this deep in the desert at this time of night. Sometimes they would see people flee the city by night, dragging their children with one arm and holding their pathetic bundles in the other. They were headed to Turkey via border crossings like Qamishli and maybe to Europe, if they didn’t die along the way. But walking? Into the city? From the south?

  An opportunity, the first militant thought. Three weeks ago, their Chechen Muslim commander, Omar al Shishani, had seized a Syrian artillery base nearby, decimating Syrian Regiment 121. Since then, it had been quiet, and the militant kept boredom at bay by harassing passersby. The smugglers’ trucks paid well to travel through the Caliphate, and even some of the desperate refugees had valuables they would trade for safe passage. If they didn’t comply, and his mood was righteous, the militant wasn’t above beating them and destroying the few things they owned. The walkers were fair game, in his opinion, because they had chosen to flee the Caliphate. This gaunt stranger was fair game because he was entering the land born of martyrs, and an entry tax was a small price to pay for an eternity of bliss.