A return to true greatness. He smiled as he daydreamed the grandeur, and his forces rode comfortably behind him.
—
“What did you do to me?” Yasir said as he opened his eyes. Then putting his hand on his aching head, he looked up at Sabeen, who cradled him across her lap. Tears ran off her cheeks and splashed on the old skunk.
“I am so sorry! I had to do it. Forgive me,” she wept, then, having his attention, she clutched his face with both of her hands. “Please, Yasir. We must go! Quickly! My family in Jordan. They have money. They will take care of us both. We can go there, and live very happy. Please?”
The goatherd liked the thought of fleeing from Iraq and the war. Leave behind this horrible life, living in the dirt, sleeping on a stone floor. Then he noticed the open cell, and he pulled away from the young woman.
“You have killed us all!” he shouted, fighting to his feet. “You fool! You fool! Do you know what you have done?” He pulled Sabeen up by her shoulders and wrapped his hands around her throat. His eyes filled with rage, and the heavy girl screamed as Yasir squeezed.
“No, Yasir,” she struggled, his thumbs pressing hard into her throat, shutting off her cries.
“Stop! What are you doing?” A voice at the top of the stairs shouted, and Yasir let up his grip.
“Why would you kill the one who chose to stay and help us? You always were the fool, Yasir.”
As Sabeen stepped away from his reach, Yasir looked up the steps at the one surviving guard, and whined, “But she hit me! With the frying pan!”
Throwing his guts up had cleared Haazim the gunman’s stomach of the toxic chemicals, and he began to recover from the effects that the eyedrops had had on his central nervous system, wrecking its ability to control blood pressure and body temperature, among the many other side effects. Now the angry jihadi wanted revenge.
“Those three Christian whores, they fled with the American!” Haazim said. “They had this planned. They poisoned our food. In the vegetables. I could taste it.”
“What of it, Sabeen?” Yasir added.
The heavy girl blinked. “I know nothing. I only fried the meat. They made the tea and cooked the other things.”
At the top of the stairs, Haazim reached in his pocket and took out a set of keys and shook them at Yasir. “My truck is here. We can take it and capture those vermin. Those girls, we will gut like fish. But at all costs we must bring the American back before Abu Omar returns. Otherwise, we, too, must flee, or lose our heads.”
“They fled in my old truck?” Yasir smiled. “That is good! The motor has no power. We can catch them easily!”
“You will have to put two good tires on my pickup, first. They shot them flat, bullets through the sidewalls,” Haazim said. “We have a Nissan with broken axles sitting in the barn. You can take two wheels off it. They should fit.”
Yasir bowed his head, submitting. “As you say.”
Sabeen gave Yasir the stink eye. She folded arms like an angry mother and frowned. “What is this, Yasir? Abu Omar left you in command. This one should change the tires. You are his captain!”
“Quiet, woman!” Yasir hissed, and staggered up the stone steps, holding his sore head. He knew better than to argue with Haazim, a man who had used his rifle many times to kill men. The old Bedouin had never fired a shot at anyone.
“I will help, then,” Sabeen huffed, and frowned at the young gunman as she tramped up the steps past him.
“We will all do the work,” Haazim said, following Yasir and Sabeen. “It will save time. We have none to spare.”
—
A hand-painted light tan Shanghai Chinese-built Foton four-by-four double-cab pickup truck with broad-stroked splotches and bold stripes of dark brown down its doors and bed, driving rear guard at the tail end of Abu Omar Bakr’s parade, began honking. The peacock up front turned with a big smile and raised his riding crop triumphantly skyward, believing that his men had expressed more joy at his victory over Zarqawi. Then the self-proclaimed field marshal saw the curtain of dust rising to the north and heard the distant but fast-closing heavy machine guns opening fire.
“Go! Go!” he screamed, and slammed his fist on the roof of the truck cab.
The driver hit his brakes and stuck his head out the window. “What?”
“We are being overtaken, you fool! Go! Hurry!” Omar bellowed. And then he saw more dust rising along his left flank and screamed. “Go now!”
“What about the others?” the driver said, still hanging his head out the window, his foot on the brake.
Omar took out his pistol and pointed it at the man. “Drive this truck as fast as it can run, or I will shoot you and drive it myself!”
The man got the message, seeing the business end of the Makarov pointed at him. He hit the gas before he put the truck in gear. When he popped the clutch, the launch sent Abu Omar’s machine gun captain sidekick somersaulting over the tailgate.
The truck right behind them ran over the Haji, leaving him mangled but alive, yet no one stopped.
“Down in the wadi!” Omar yelled, slapping his hand on the roof of the truck. “We must get away!”
The driver stopped the truck once again and looked at the drop-off, a good four feet, then a steep slope.
“We will roll over,” he said, getting out to tell his master.
Omar had no patience with this fool. He jumped off the back of the truck, walked around with his pistol pulled, and shot the man without losing stride. Two other soldiers sat inside the pickup, and the boss gave them a cold look, pointing the gun as he would his finger. “Man the guns. I will drive.”
Both Hajis rolled out through the passenger door and left Omar the cab all to himself. Then the two soldiers scrambled onto the bed and took hold of the machine guns.
As Omar hit the gas, machine gun fire from two directions came hot into the dry riverbed and followed them as dirt sprayed in twin rooster tails behind them. Two other gun trucks followed Omar while the rest of the legion turned to the flank and the rear to stand and fight.
At the lead echelon of the rear guard, a tan-painted heavy-duty T-King two-ton diesel truck pulled a large trailer with a high canvas-covered square object mounted on it. As Haji home-built Hummers formed a line with the bigger vehicle, their PK machine gun crews laying down opposing fire against the Marines, who closed on them from two sides, six volunteers bailed from their small wagons, and pulled the canvas off the trailer. The two men who drove and rode in the Chinese truck took charge of the volunteer crew and a four-stack-high-by-four-rail-wide rack of Katyusha rockets.
The two men who knew what they were doing took hold of the gear cranks that maneuvered the angle and trajectory of the launching platform and eyeballed a best-guess aim at the fast-closing Marines. Then the rocket gunner and his partner knelt behind the side of the big truck, taking cover from the rockets’ back blast as well as incoming fire.
The gunner held a long control line in his hands, and before he fired, he searched around for the six volunteers who had helped rig the rockets. Finally, he saw them taking cover on the back side of the missile trailer.
“Move away!” he yelled, and waved for them to clear from behind the launcher. “Come here! You can’t stay there!”
The jihadi jefe in charge of the men pointed his rifle at the rocket man, and yelled, “Fire!”
So the man with the launch cord pushed the button.
A blowtorch of white-hot burning rocket exhaust from the sixteen missiles incinerated all six men. The pro who had pushed the launch button and his partner jumped in one of the now-empty desert-rat pickups and sped away, leaving the big, slow-moving T-King for the Marines.
Sixteen 122-millimeter Katyusha rockets rained onto empty ground, due to the firing delay. Captain Crenshaw had seen the Hajis pulling the cover off the launcher, and managed to maneuver his Marines away fr
om the line where the gunner had aimed the missiles.
Now half of his company raced around the right flank of Abu Omar’s army while Colonel Snow closed from the left. The skipper and the other half of his company closed from the rear, hell-bent on annihilating the enemy as the pincers closed on their flanks.
“I am the Borg!” Crenshaw growled in his favorite Star Trek voice over the command radio, seeing the plan come beautifully together. “Resistance is futile.”
Part of the al-Sunnah legion tried to make a stand and fight to the man, as their general had ordered them. But most of the Hajis now tried to evaporate into the desert, following the example of their fearless leader.
As the two rocketeers fled the battlefield, churning dust, racing for the wadi where Abu Omar had escaped, Sal Principato locked on the driver with his .50 caliber Special Application Scoped Rifle gunsights. Sergeant Carlo Savoca rested his spotting scope on the ground behind his corporal on the M82A3 Barrett.
“Go ahead and fire, Pizza Man,” the Iceman said.
A hundred yards left of where the two Marines had parked their Hummer and moved forward to a nice little hill that overlooked the Haji stream of trucks, Nick the Nose Falzone had snuggled into a second .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle while Marcello Costa, the Hoboken oddity in the otherwise all–New York City Mob Squad, spotted for him.
When Sal Principato’s big gun reported, Momo barely got out, “one thousand one,” when the ADI 655-grain bullet, running just a breeze faster than three thousand feet per second, splashed through the moving pickup’s side window. It destroyed the upper half of the rocket man’s body and blew out the windshield.
“Nice lead, Pepperoni,” Corporal Costa said, watching the truck go sideways and stop. “We got another customer running from the passenger side,” he said to Corporal Falzone. “Take him, Hawk-face.”
“Fuck you, Momo,” Nick said as he watched the man dig hard to get away, calculating the drift of his bullet, the light wind that came from the west, and took a two-ball lead with his Mil-Dot range-finder reticle on the soon-to-be-dead jihadi.
Costa took a breath, let it slide out, and held it as he relaxed into the big gun while oozing on trigger squeeze.
Boom! The mark 82 belched, blowing a dust cloud from the exhaust that came from both sides of the triangular compensator at the Barrett’s muzzle.
Again, less than a second passed while the bullet arced two thousand yards and splashed home, leaving the running man scattered in pieces across the sand.
“Nice shooting, Mob Squad,” Colonel Snow said on the intercom, seeing his MARSOC operators claim two clean kills with two shots. “What was that, two grand?”
“Twenty-one hundred,” Iceman said.
“Short of a record, but awesome,” Elmore said.
“It’s just business,” Iceman came back.
Momo added, “Nothing personal.”
—
Jack Valentine kept his foot pushed to the floor on Yasir’s piece-of-shit worn-out bucket of bolts. Giti, Miriam, and Amira sang in harmony. “I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses. And the voice I hear falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.”
The happy gunny joined the refrain as the old truck’s wheels churned dust. “And He walks with me, and He talks with me. And He tells me I am His own. And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.”
The three teenage girls sang every old hymn that Jack had ever remembered from those long-ago times, sitting with his mother and father at Coronado Baptist Church in El Paso.
The old truck rattled, and the girls and Jack bounced on the springs that stabbed them in the ass. Each time they hit bottom, all of them laughed. Successful escape, moving toward friendly lines at a good pace, no matter the pain or misery, it all seemed good.
“Where will we live?” Giti asked, looking across Miriam and Amira at the cheery Marine.
“What do you mean, where will we live?” he asked, his mind focused on keeping his northeast heading. Crossing the desert, like driving a boat on open water, he had to make sure he didn’t drift off course.
“In America?” she said.
Jack pondered and took a breath. He didn’t know. He had never gotten beyond the idea of making sure the three sweet Christian girls, who had lived as slaves the past year and risked their lives to help him escape, got a green card and a life in the United States of America. It was the least a grateful nation should do for three such heroes.
“Geez,” he puzzled. “I never thought about it.”
Amira began to cry.
“We have no one there, and we have no one here,” Giti explained. “What will America do with us? What will we do!”
Jack thought about it, and all kinds of horror pictures flashed in his mind. State Department turns them over to the Iraqi government, run by hard-thinking Shiites. Bureaucrats take charge of the three young Christian girls’ futures, one of them about three months pregnant. A total nonstarter.
“I’ll call my mom and dad,” Jack said. “Judge Darius Archer, he’s old now, retired, but he knows people. My girlfriend, Liberty, is an FBI agent. Her dad’s a big-time lawyer. They’ll help. So will our church, Coronado Baptist.”
He looked at the girls, the three staring up big-eyed at their hero, and not having a clue.
“You’ll come home with me,” Jack said. “Live with my family. We have people who can get you in school, give you a good life. I promise. You’ll have a great place to live, with the best people you ever met.”
Giti smiled at her sisters. “See? Jesus has answered our prayers all this time. He brought Jack to us, to take us to America, and our Lord gives us a wonderful life!”
They began singing again, “Oh, how I love Jesus . . .”
Jack drove on, not having a notion where to start. But he swore to God while the girls sang that he would make sure that the three sisters in Christ got to El Paso. It would be over his dead body if they didn’t. And he knew that Elmore Snow would make sure they got to El Paso, too.
A half mile ahead, Jack saw a rise in the land, and he slowed the truck. Sometimes, crossing the desert, the earth can open up. A deep drop-off appeared, not on a map, caused by a subterranean cavern, which had once held water but ran empty, collapsing on itself. It opened a sinkhole or a rift if it was an underground river that had died.
As he crept forward, he saw the ravine, sheer sides twenty feet deep. He stopped the truck and looked up and down the land rip. In the bottom he saw a dusty, well-used road, cut by jihadi homemade Hummers no doubt.
“If they got the trucks down there, they got to have a road out,” the gunny told the girls, who also stretched their legs, looking at the great break in the landscape.
Jack rubbed his back against the cab, scratching the scabs and scrapes that now itched. He thought about his kit unharmed, but his clothing shredded off, and he called to Giti, who stood with her hand shading her eyes, looking up and down the ravine, searching for a way across.
“Say,” Jack said. “How’d my uniform and my back get cut to pieces but my gear not have a scratch? You know anything about it?”
“The men dragged you behind a truck,” Amira answered. “You don’t remember?”
“No,” Jack said.
“How could you not know something so terrible?” the girl said, surprised.
“Because I was knocked unconscious?” Jack said.
Giti smiled, then told Jack, “Yasir said that some of the men found you where the jets had bombed.
“They took your equipment, put it in their truck, and tied you to the bumper. Yasir said he found them dragging you. He stopped them so they would not kill you, and told them Abu Omar wanted you alive. Then he took you home.”
“Right. He saved my life so they could cut off my head on YouTube,” Jack said, taking his little binoculars out
of his operator’s vest and searching north, up the rift.
“Well, at least Yasir saved you from death at that time, or you would not be alive later, so you can escape and live,” Giti said. “He is not a bad man.”
Jack smirked at her and kept searching.
“This sinkhole looks like it shallows enough, way up ahead, so we can drive across,” Jack said. “Couple of feet drop on this side, but a decent-looking slope the rest of the way down and all the way up the other side. Looks like we can angle up, as long as we don’t roll over.”
“We will get out and watch at that point,” Miriam said.
“Yeah,” Jack said, getting in the truck. “Let’s roll.”
When the three girls got inside and shut the door, Jack ground the gears and got the old jalopy moving.
“We’ll do well if this collection of crap holds up much longer,” he said. “Clutch is shot and the gearbox totally worn-out. I don’t know what’s holding the engine together.”
“Yasir drives it to Haditha all the time,” Giti said. “He seems to have no trouble.”
“I hope you’re right,” Jack said, running north, along the side of the land cut.
He looked at Giti. “Why do you suppose Omar lied to me about my stuff? He told me that it got blown to bits. One gun broken in three pieces and the barrel bent on the other?”
“He tells lies at a whim,” Miriam said. “Why does a viper bite? He could so easily lie hidden, unseen, and do nothing. But he jumps from the grass and bites us.”
“Omar has no soul,” Amira added. “He gave it to Satan.”
“That is the kind of man that Omar is. A son of perdition,” Giti said. “The devil lives within him.”
—
“Drive faster!” Yasir called from above the cab, slapping his hand on the roof. “I see them! Far ahead! They reached the wadi and now search for a place to cross. We have them, Haazim!”
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