Deep Black

by Sean McFate

  “Jase,” another merc yelled from across the room. It was an African; he was pointing at the floor. A corner of a carpet was flipped over. There was a trap door.

  The leader walked out of the smoke. “The slick bastard,” he said.

  The mercenaries put their fingers on the triggers of their assault rifles and aimed toward the door. The African nodded, then flipped it open.

  “Fuck,” the leader yelled, when he saw the C-4 wired to the underside.

  “Bloody hell,” Wildman said, as he watched the other merc hit team and the Saudi in the white suit sprinting out the back of the house together. He had watched the mercs sneak up and blow a hole in the back wall, rushing in through the smoke. Brave. He had listened to the firefight, knowing the mercs were cutting the Saudis down. He could have killed them all, if he’d wanted to. He could have blown them all to bloody hell.

  Instead, he’d waited for everyone to get out, then hit the detonator. The explosion was a burp. The house exhaled smoke, then settled. Wildman had shaped the charge to explode the tunnel and leave everything else standing. The people in this town had endured enough. They didn’t need another building going down. And he didn’t want their attention.

  “Didn’t expect that,” I said, lowering my night-vision binoculars.

  “Which part?” Boon asked. We were standing on the roof of a building two blocks away, near where the secret tunnel came out, with a perfect vantage point to the front of the building.

  “All of it,” I said, looking over my shoulder at Farhan. “Every damn thing.”

  Chapter 29

  The majordomo slipped away from the mercs in the confusion of the explosion and slunk down the dark street. The assault had been a shock. Worse, it had been an embarrassment. He had lost his team. He had lost his cool and begged for his life. Like a woman. Now he was angry. At himself, but also at whoever had complicated things.

  The mission was simple: find Farhan. It was his mission. He’d performed. So why were the American mercenaries here? Had Abdulaziz lost faith in him? Likely, he had to admit. Istanbul was a disaster, and this was no time for caution. The majordomo had done everything he could to secure Farhan, including hiring Locke’s merc team, among others. Why wouldn’t Prince Abdulaziz do the same?

  One thing was clear. He had to kill the brat.

  “Locke,” he cursed under his breath. The scumbag had betrayed him. Failing to hand over the prince, as was their bargain, was a capital offense in the majordomo’s book. The rigged house? Unforgivable. Locke must have assumed he’d be followed and planned to double-cross him. Was there no honor among hired guns? Was there no professional code? When he paid money for services, the majordomo expected obedience. Otherwise, people lost their heads.

  Locke will lose his head, the majordomo swore.

  He glanced back. The Apollo team was out of sight. They hadn’t worried about his leaving. Why should they? They were on the same side. Probably. It was hard to say for sure, since he was no longer sure how many sides there were.

  He pulled out his sat phone. Untraceable, except by the man who had given it to him. He paused. Was that how the Apollo team had shown up in Sinjar?

  “We have a problem,” he said, when his call was answered. “The American double-crossed us. I need . . .”

  He choked, unable to form the words. He felt a searing pain in his fingers, and he dropped to his knees, holding his hand. There was blood pouring down his arm. Half of his top two fingers had been cut off. The phone lay cracked on the ground beside him.

  “Get up,” a voice said.

  For the second time in an hour, the majordomo looked up at an assailant. This time, a man in a robe and long beard was standing over him, a bandolier across his chest and a scimitar in his hand. The waning moon was behind him, backlighting him so that the majordomo couldn’t see his face. But he knew that voice.

  “Youssof,” he said, clutching his bleeding hand.

  “Stand up, Majordomo,” the Wahhabi said. “Do they still call you that?”

  The majordomo spat. “Are you planning to kill me?”

  “Of course.”

  The majordomo went for the pistol in his suit pocket, even though he knew it was hopeless—he was missing his index and middle fingers. The Wahhabi kicked him in the face, then stomped on his arm. The pistol clattered away.

  “Not like that, old teacher,” the Wahhabi said.

  The majordomo struggled wearily to his feet, gauging angles. He grew up a street thug in Medina and had survived worse than this. The gun was a short dive away. He marked its location, in case he got turned around in the struggle.

  “You were never a good student,” he said, glancing in the direction of the mercenaries.

  “They won’t come,” the Wahhabi said. “You won’t scream for help. You will die with honor.”

  “I don’t care about honor. And neither do you.”

  The Wahhabi laughed. “I am changed.”

  “You found religion,” the majordomo chuckled. Fool.

  “Even better, I found purpose. I no longer serve you and your kind. I am a prophet now.”

  “A prophet?” The majordomo laughed. “A prophet of what?”

  The Wahhabi eyed the majordomo’s Italian loafers, white suit, and red pocket square. It disgusted him. “You were my superior once,” the Wahhabi said with disgust. “What are you now?”

  The majordomo pictured the gun. He considered diving for it, but this wasn’t the moment. And yet he couldn’t sit by and be insulted by his former underling, a stupid man who had shown no proficiency in anything but cruelty.

  “I hired you, waghadd ghabi. I am still your leader.”

  The Wahhabi paused. He shut his eyes.

  Of course, this cretin wouldn’t know, the majordomo thought. He had used cutouts and middlemen.

  “I found you in the gutter. I gave you purpose, not this false piety.” He gestured at the Wahhabi’s pilgrim robes. “I am the man who hired you for this mission. I am paying you to kill Farhan.”

  “No,” the Wahhabi said. “This mission did not come from you.”

  “Of course it came from me, working through middlemen.”

  “I no longer take orders from you, or any man. My orders come from God.” He tossed the majordomo his sword and drew his curved jambiya dagger. “Pick it up, old teacher. Unlike you, I kill with honor now.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  The Wahhabi didn’t answer. The majordomo relented. He reached down and picked up the sword. The Wahhabi was no fool. He had thrown it away from the side with the pistol, but the distance was only two steps. The majordomo straightened, the plan fully formed in his head. He held the sword in front of him, as he had learned to long ago.

  “Breaker of oaths,” the Wahhabi intoned, “torturer of the faithful, one of us must die. We fight as equals. Let Allah decide justice.”

  The majordomo raised his sword, feinted and lunged, knowing that when the Wahhabi parried the blow, his momentum would carry him down to the left, where he could grab the pistol and raise it in one smooth motion, ending this foolishness.

  But the Wahhabi didn’t parry. He deftly sidestepped, grabbed the majordomo’s sword hand, and twisted violently. The sword dropped and the man screamed; the Wahhabi thrust his shoulder into the majordomo’s chest, knocking him off his feet.

  “Have mercy!” The majordomo begged for the second time this night. “Please!”

  “I will give you one gift,” the Wahhabi said slowly, picking up the scimitar. “I will kill for you those you wanted dead.”

  “No,” the majordomo started to say, but the Wahhabi sliced his old mentor’s head from his neck. The two parts flew soundlessly apart and fell to the dirt. The Wahhabi picked up the head and noticed the phone, cracked on the ground. It was still working. Whoever the majordomo had been talking with, the call was still live.

  “Al-kafir mmayit”—the infidel is dead—the Wahhabi said and threw the phone into the shadows. “Saif al Haqq,�
�� he cooed to the sword, calling it the Sword of Truth. “You are Allah’s judgment. I am slave to your will.”

  He turned. There was a little man ten meters away, watching. The Wahhabi walked past him without a word. Then he stopped and, severed head in hand, turned back. “Did you get it?” he asked.

  The man closed the camera on his mobile phone. “Yes, sayyid,” he said.

  “All of it?”

  “Yes, sayyid.”

  The Wahhabi smiled. “Good. I am Allah’s sword and prophet. Let it be known.”

  Chapter 30

  “What happened?” I asked, as Wildman stowed his detonators. I could tell he wasn’t in a hurry. He took out his canteen and drank a long gulp of water. It was the middle of the night, and it was chilly on the rooftop, but the zero percent humidity of the northern Iraqi desert would still dry you out in half a minute.

  “Unexpected visitors,” he said.

  Wildman had rigged the whole building, not just Farhan’s escape tunnel. He had the option to blow up as much or as little as he wanted. He had chosen a small explosion. I’d known the man for three years; it wasn’t his usual choice.

  “So?”

  He finished drinking. He looked around at the eight people on the roof: me, Boon, the prince’s posse, the woman he’d knocked up. We were a ragged crew.

  “They were Apollo,” he said.

  Apollo Outcomes?! That hit me hard. Our vantage point had given us a clear view of the front of the building and the trap we set. We had seen the majordomo, with a dozen highly trained men, rush in. We didn’t have eyes on the other group, which had entered from the back, but I knew they had done quick and violent work. They had taken out a Saudi hit team in minutes. They were professionals. But Apollo?

  “You sure?”

  Wildman nodded. “I went through the Ranch”—Apollo Outcomes’s private training facility and proving ground in Texas—“with two of them.”

  “They may have moved on.”

  “They didn’t.”

  The way Wildman said it was final. He was certain. And I was going to have to accept it. My old company, Apollo Outcomes, and my old mentor, Brad Winters, were here.

  Maybe the mission was a favor for a business associate. The prince’s father? Winters had business associates everywhere; of course he had Saudi princes in his pocket. But that was a full Apollo Tier One team down there. That was a snatch-and-grab operation, with shoot-to-kill authorization. And apparently, the majordomo had no idea it was coming.

  Did Winters know I was here?

  The thought invoked a fight-or-flight response. I reached for the ground and sat down. I needed to think this through.

  Keep calm, Locke, I thought.

  I reviewed what I knew. Winters had sold out my Apollo team in Ukraine. Since then, Wildman, Boon, and I had hoofed it down to Erbil, where we could lay low until I figured out how to action Winters. We’d be truly safe only with Winters dead, but killing the CEO emeritus of the world’s largest mercenary corporation was no easy day.

  Maybe we got sloppy? My mind wandered to Kylah. My old Airborne buddy Bear. The oil executives. Did one of them know Brad Winters?

  The majordomo. He was the linchpin. He was the man who offered me a million dollars to kidnap the Saudi princeling, whose father was the head of Saudi intelligence’s black operations division. And an ISIS special forces killer. And a lover who had a change of heart and was starting a family with an American-Persian woman in the middle of a war zone. Father uses majordomo to retrieve son, but majordomo doesn’t tell Dad about the pregnant girlfriend. Majordomo is also in love with his boss’s daughter and Farhan’s sister, Umma something or other (I still had trouble with the local names), but is rejected by the family due to his low birth—and especially by the very prince he was hiring me to find.

  Then there was Istanbul. Why was Farhan there? How was he there? His father didn’t sound like the kind of man to let inmates, even his son, take a weekend pass. Farhan must have been sent there for a purpose, only to escape and return for Marhaz, his pregnant wife. Father is outraged, sends his majordomo to retrieve Farhan yet again. Majordomo hires us.

  Now an Apollo team shows up, also looking for the prince. Coincidence? Or did Winters know I was here? I had smashed my satellite phone, destroyed my Apollo-registered tech, lived off cash and barter on the fringes of the globalized world for four grueling months. We had walked hundreds of kilometers, hitched rides in the back of Turkish tobacco trucks, smuggled ourselves across multiple borders, and lived like paupers in a lousy squat with no electricity and hardly any running water.

  No way Winters could have tracked us. We were off the grid. The Apollo team could have been a nightmarish coincidence.

  But why were they also after Farhan? How important was this prince? And why?

  “What is going on?” I whispered. I saw the prince turn, trying to avoid my sight. Wrong move. He knew more than he was telling me.

  “I need to know what is going on,” I said, standing to face him. “Now.”

  He glanced at his wife. “I told you my father was ruthless,” he said.

  “This isn’t about bringing you back to be a good son,” I said. “Those men didn’t seem to mind if they killed you. Why?”

  He didn’t want to talk. I could tell. But he had information, and I didn’t have time for games.

  “You’re asking me to risk my men for you,” I said. “That involves honesty. And trust. So tell me what is going on, Prince Farhan, or tell it to those men down there.”

  He looked at his wife. She nodded, a hand on her belly in an instinctual protective position. The prince pulled a cheap chain from his black ISIS robe. At the end was a metal card. “I stole this from my father. In Istanbul.”

  “A credit card?”

  “A KSV-21 enhanced crypto card.”

  “What is that?”

  “A key.”

  “To what?”

  “Arm a nuclear bomb.”

  I blinked. “Your father has a nuclear bomb?”

  “Actually,” he said, “he has fifteen nuclear bombs. Or he will very soon.”

  Chapter 31

  “Gentlemen,” Brad Winters said as he entered the ambassador’s office. It had been less than a day since he was here last, and he was in a buoyant mood. He knew this call would come. No need to gloat.

  Ambassador Ensher stood and shook his hand, looking resplendent in a three-piece suit. The room smelled of stale coffee. It was early morning, but these men had clearly been here much earlier.

  “This is Emmanuel Garcia, my deputy chief of mission,” Ensher said with his usual formality. “This is Col. Charlie Mullens, our military attaché. He’s keeping us abreast of Fifth Fleet’s search. And Forsythe Martin. You probably know what he does.”

  Winters did. Forsythe Martin was the CIA chief of station.

  “A pleasure,” Winters said. It was clear they had been working the loose-nukes angle most of the night. They were taking it seriously, and even better, they needed help. Otherwise, Ensher wouldn’t have extended the invitation. It must have been grinding his worsted vest to have “the mercenary” back so soon.

  Good, Winters thought. He had realized long ago that the person who can walk away from the negotiation table first has the power, and everything was a negotiation. Especially national security.

  “Your country owes you a debt,” Ensher said in a flat tone, as Winters took a seat.

  I’ll take it in Euros, Winters joked to himself.

  “We’ve been checking your story,” Martin, the spook chief, said. “The CIA believes it credible. We’ve always been concerned about Saudi Arabia’s nuclear connection with Pakistan, but we didn’t think they would be foolish enough to exercise this option.”

  “The Saudi government officially denies it, of course,” Ensher said.

  “Good God, you didn’t mention it to the Saudis, did you?” Winters said, almost bolting out of his chair.

  The room shifted uncomfortably. �
��They are our allies,” Ensher said.

  “Excuse me, sir, but I thought they were the ones we were trying to prevent from getting the nukes. If you hinted at our knowledge—”

  “Don’t get your knickers in a twist, son,” Martin broke in. He was only six years older than Winters, but he seemed to be from a previous generation. His Brooks Brothers suit was ten years out of style. “We’ve got people on the inside. People we trust. It’s en passant.”

  Martin gave him a steely look on the last phrase, a spook’s term for “back channel,” unofficial and off the books. You’re not dealing with amateurs here, the look suggested. These men are among America’s best. Winters found that mildly unsettling.

  “A deal was transacted three days ago,” Martin said. “But it wasn’t sanctioned by the king. As far as we can tell, it wasn’t sanctioned by anyone.”

  “Who else knows?” Winters asked. Ensher looked at Martin, preferring not to share such sensitive information with a creature like Brad Winters. Winters waited him out. They needed his help; this was part of the price.

  “Right now, only the Five Eyes,” Martin said. The Five Eyes were the intelligence alliance of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. “We’re keeping it as tight as possible.”

  “Frankly,” Ensher said, “there’s only one party I’m worried about, and he’s in this room.”

  “Don’t worry,” Winters said, taking the taunt as a compliment. “I understand the gravity of the situation. Even a rumor, substantiated by United States actions, could cause a nuclear panic in the Middle East. Israel and Iran would feel threatened. They might launch preemptive nuclear strikes.”

  “Not to mention the possibility of a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race,” Garcia, the embassy’s second in charge, said.

  “It won’t get that far,” Winters replied. “Not if they find out Prince Farhan might have taken something nuclear into Iraq.”

  “Has he?” the marine colonel barked, clearly alarmed.

  “I don’t know.”