by Chuck Dixon
A girl, the girl from the balcony, stared blinking into the blue light. Her eyes were dark under drooping lids; the pupils were black buttons in the center of a tawny corona. Someone had drugged her. The deep stupor formed clouds over her fear.
He lowered his rifle and held out an open hand to her.
“Kani,” he said. “Come with me. Your father is here.”
Hejar sat in the cramped rear seat of a Mercedes. The gunfighter drove with his comrade in the front passenger seat. Music pumped from the speakers front and back. Some kind of rap music. American or French, maybe. Hejar couldn't tell. He gave them directions back to where the truck waited.
“Down here and make a right turn,” he said.
“What is the street name?” the gunfighter said.
“I do not know. I have not been here long.”
“You cannot remember the street?” the passenger said.
“I cannot read.”
The pair in the front seat spoke a rapid exchange in Arabic. Hejar struggled to keep up. He tried to recall the lies that the American made him practice. He was from Yemen to explain his accent and unfamiliarity with Mosul. He came to ISIS with his cousins to fight for Islam. They sent him out to find batteries for their radio. Hejar sweated as he waited for the questions.
“What do you think of this car, brother?” the gunfighter said, turning his head to offer Hejar a broad grin.
“It is nice. What did you pay for it?”
The pair exploded at that.
“We paid two bullets,” the passenger said. He held two fingers up to Hejar. The driver hooted and slapped the steering wheel.
“I would have paid three but negotiations ended quickly!” They both howled.
“I see. I see.” Hejar forced a chuckle at the pair’s wit. “Up here. This next street. Make the right turn.”
The Mercedes made the turn to creep along a debris-littered alley.
“This is where you stay with your cousins? There are better places, brother,” the passenger said.
“Maybe tomorrow we help you find a house nicer than this,” the gunfighter said.
“Maybe I will let you get me a good price,” Hejar said. “I don’t have that many bullets.”
They liked that. The gunfighter threw back his head to guffaw. The passenger beat on the dash with his hands.
Hejar reached forward between the seats to pluck the heavy revolver from the driver’s holster. He fired twice through the seat backs. The sound in the enclosed place was painfully loud. The passenger was hurled against the dash where his body jerked and seized. The driver’s head bounced off the steering wheel and he lay still.
Covering one ear with the palm of his hand, Hejar fired twice more until the passenger lay unmoving across the console between the front seats. He tossed the revolver to the floor. He reached forward to turn the key. The engine and the music died at once.
His leg hurt worse than ever, stiff from just the short time he sat in the car. He clenched his teeth to fight down the urge to whimper as he opened a rear door of the sedan and hobbled away toward the waiting truck.
52
“Where is Rona? Where is your sister?” Bazît shook his daughter by the shoulders.
“She is gone,” Kani said. Her voice was just above a murmur. She did not seem to be aware of who was speaking to her.
Levon braced himself against a wall where he could watch the hallway and companion doors. Shuffling of rushing feet and raised voices were louder now. A rattling sound from the hallway. They were testing doors.
“We need to move,” he said.
Bazît slapped the girl’s face. Once gently. Once not.
“Where has she gone?”
“She did not want to be a bride. She left me.”
“Left you? Left you for where?”
The girl was looking past her father, staring at the open window that led to the balcony.
“She’s dead,” Levon said.
Bazît whirled to him, face ashen.
“She threw herself from the balcony.” Levon nodded to the window.
Bazît turned back to his daughter. She was speaking in a monotone.
“They say I am too young to be a bride. My khus is not ripe yet. They made me—made me—”
He clamped a hand over her mouth to stop her from saying more. A thin mewling sound rose from deep in his throat. Tears rolled down his clenched face. Blood trickled from where he bit his own lip. His body shook with shame and rage, his eyes locked on his daughter’s face with feral intensity.
“Now. We need to leave here,” Levon said.
Bazît crushed the little girl to him. He whispered words in her ear too soft for Levon to hear. He broke the hug to speak to Levon in a low voice edged with menace.
“We will go home now.”
A hand tried the door handle, rattling it up and down. Voices in the hallway rose in volume. Rifle butts battered on the door and frame. They stopped at a shouted command followed by a volley of rapid fire that ripped through the wood around the door lock.
Men crashed through the door and stumbled over the mattress that had been shoved against it. They were in the room in a rush, aiming rifles in all directions. The connecting door to the next room lay open and they charged toward it.
A stream of automatic fire exploded from the open doorway and through the plaster of the shared wall. The compacted crowd of men fell back on one another as those closest to the wall were riddled with multiple rounds. The others were on the floor in a bloody tangle of dying and wounded.
A large man stepped from the other room with a smoking weapon to his shoulder. In a controlled fashion he walked among them pumping rounds into anyone still moving. He stooped to pluck grenades from the lanyards of a vest worn by one of the dead. Three Russian-made frags with a ring pull set inside a bell-shaped plastic cap on a baseball style grenade.
More voices outside the door. He pulled the ring from one of the frags and held it for a one count before sending it in a lob to bounce into the hallway, trailing blue smoke. He dove through the bathroom door; hands clapped over his ears and mouth open wide in a silent shout. A shriek from outside the room was cut short by a bark of thunder that shook the walls and floor.
Levon was up and running through a haze of plaster dust from the ragged holes punched in the walls. He raced through the companion door into the next room. Bazît was there with Kani clutched to him. He kicked down a smoking mattress that he’d thrown up to shield them. Levon led the way to the next companion door and kicked it open. Carrying his daughter, Bazît followed his friend through the next room and into a hallway choked with smoke.
Wailing and cries for help came from the dense fog that filled the hallway with a chemical stink. A hand to the wall, the two men moved away from the voices. A man braced Levon in the smoky dark and asked what had happened. Levon told him that an infidel bomb had struck the hotel and they needed to get a child out to safety. The man blinked through the haze to see Bazît hugging the limp form of Kani to him. He offered to lead the way to a stairwell.
At the stairwell door, the man held the door open for Bazît and his burden to pass. Levon drove the barrel of his Browning into the soft flesh under the man’s chin. The Samaritan’s brains splashed up the wall and ceiling. Levon was in the stairwell charging down the steps after Bazît and Kani.
They reached the landing of the third floor. Boots rang on the stairs below. Levon pointed right and pushed Bazît and the girl to the exit door. When they were through the doorway, he pulled the pins from his last two grenades and dropped them down the stairwell where they clanged down toward the approaching voices.
A column of smoke rose up, propelled on a confined double blast of concussed air. Broken masonry rained down from above to clatter on the steps and railings.
Through the exit door, Levon hooked right in the dark hallway and caught up with Bazît where two corridors joined. Either the fire at the generator or the grenades discharged in the stairwell had
set off the sprinkler system. Water dropped in a fine spray from the ceiling. It only added to the panic allowing Levon and Bazît to navigate the halls unnoticed.
They found an open stairwell that led down to the second level and a broad mezzanine lobby area. The fuel smoke from the burning generator was thicker here. With the power down, the ventilation system was idle. Visibility dropped to ten feet or less.
A man in a gas mask stepped from the haze. His voice was muffled through the filter vent. Levon tilted his head, a hand to one ear. Speaking with impatience the man stepped within arm's reach. Levon took him by the back of the head and drove the point of a knife into his throat to the hilt. The man trembled once as the spade-shaped blade tore through the flesh and severed his spinal column from his brain.
Lowering the body to the floor, Levon tore the mask from the man’s head. He tossed it to Bazît who held it over Kani’s face. Her chest rose and fell in shallow breaths. They moved on, blinking back tears that sprang to their eyes in the stinging smoke. They raised their keffiyeh to cover their mouths and noses and trotted away from the source of the densest smoke.
Bazît was in the lead and shouldered open a pair of double doors. Rather than a stairwell the doors opened onto what was probably a ballroom. It was lit by portable lamps powered by batteries. The high-ceilinged room was lined with rows of tables that served as computer work stations. Laptops, towers and monitors strung together with yard after yard of bundled cables that ran across the carpeted floor.
And ten believers turned to regard the pair of blood-spattered strangers suddenly appearing in their man cave.
53
Bazît raised his rifle. Levon gripped the end of the barrel and yanked it down, his eyes never leaving the men seated and standing in the room before them.
“Noise discipline,” Levon said.
Bazît tore his weapon from Levon’s hand with a growl. He seethed through clenched teeth. He held it on the startled men, his finger resting outside the trigger guard.
“Step away! Against the wall! This way!” Levon barked commands, gesturing with his rifle.
There were no firearms in sight. This room was a techno-lair. Dead now, the keyboards and monitors were their weapons of mass destruction. From here they struck out at their enemies, the great Satans, by spreading lies and recruiting new fighters.
The men moved from their stations toward the wall. Some eyed the intruders with open loathing. Most of them were round-eyed in fear, their eyes on the strangers’ weapons.
“Backs against the wall! On your knees! Now!”
They did as they were told. Bazît kept his weapon trained on them, his daughter mute by his side. Levon worked down the line, making them drop to their knees.
“Hands behind your backs!” One of them made a move to stand. Levon stroked him across the forehead with a rifle butt. The man collapsed with a hollow groan. A second downward slam to the back of the neck silenced him. Every man did as he was ordered, knees on the ground and hands clasped behind them.
Levon told Bazît to make sure the door they entered was secure. The Yazidi made for the doorway, Kani keeping close behind him. Bazît shot the bolts on the doors and piled a few chairs against them.
“Lift your heads. Look at me.” Levon moved down the row of men, capturing images of them on the phone. They offered baleful looks before wincing as the flash popped inches from their faces. One of them wore a reflexive smile for his portrait out of habit.
“What are we doing? Why do we not kill them and leave?” Bazît said in whispered Kurd.
“You want them all dead? This is how we will make that happen,” Levon said.
“I can shoot them. Right now.”
“I mean every one of them. Every Daesh in this building.” Levon cradled his rifle to leave his hands free to key tabs on the phone’s screen.
“How is that possible? There are maybe hundreds.”
“Ever hear of ‘broken arrow’?” Levon said the last in English.
“What is that in my language?”
“Not sure. Think of something very bad.”
“Cehnem. That is our word for where demons live.”
“That about covers it. I’m almost done here.”
Levon held the phone up to take a photo of himself then set the phone onto the corner of a table. Together, he and Bazît emptied their rifles into the row of kneeling men. Kani flinched at the long bursts of fire, watching the men as they died. Her eyes were as dead as a doll’s, as if she were blind to anyone’s pain but her own. Before her father could snatch her up into his arms she rushed forward to kick at one of the fallen men. Bazît carried her from the room over his shoulder. She spat back at the row of corpses sagged against the wall.
There were gasmasks still in plastic wrappers at some of the workstations. Levon grabbed a mask for himself and tossed another to Bazît. They exited the ballroom into a corridor that ran behind the back of the room toward the hotel’s kitchens. Smoke was thick along the ceiling. They took a moment to fix Kani’s mask in place and then their own.
“Where do we go now?” Bazît said.
“As far from here as possible. The demons are about to come home,” Levon said.
It was good to be king.
Or at least one of eight deputy directors at the NSA. One of the perks was a primo slot in the executive parking area a short walk from the employee exit. He was grateful that his three-year-old Subaru wasn’t a hike away in the peon lots that spread out across the Maryland hills.
Brett Tsukuda had his tie off, car keys in hand, and was ready to call it a day. It was just after seven in the evening and the end of a sixteen-hour day of briefings, meetings, intelligence reviews and threat analysis. He’d actually get home before the kids went to bed tonight.
“Sir! Sir!”
He turned to the uniformed guard jingling toward him across the dark lot from the building.
“Shit,” Brett said.
The guard escorted Brett up to the secure situation room on the third floor and saw him inside, the vault type door closing behind him. It was going to be a long night. He was already regretting skipping lunch. The men around the table didn’t give him any hope that he’d see home anytime tonight. Two other deputy directors and the director himself. A phone was jacked into a speaker crouching in the center of the table on spider legs. Not a phone. The phone.
“I’m told you can verify this, Brett,” the director said. He turned to a monitor on the wall and tabbed a remote.
A cell phone video in portrait mode began. Dim colors flashed across the scene before the phone came to rest on the face of a kneeling man. He squinted as a flash exploded inches from his face. This sequence repeated ten times as the video played out. The image paused on a man captured in the flash of light. The last man was lying on a carpeted floor, unconscious with blood on his face.
“What am I looking at?” Brett said.
"This video was time-stamped less than twenty minutes ago. GPS tells us it was taken in Mosul," the director said.
"This is in your wheelhouse, Brett. Do you know any of these faces? Any ISIL players you know?" said a leftover deputy director who insisted on referring to the Islamic State by the acronym preferred by the previous administration.
“What’s facial recognition say?” Brett said.
“Still waiting on that. Can you pick anyone out?” the director said.
“Take the video back to number four. No, further back. Number three. Yeah. Him.”
The image froze on the face of a man with a dark beard streaked with gray. His expression of pure bile was more malignant than the others.
“That’s Abd al Bari Sarraf,” Brett said. “Yemeni national. A half-ass, self-appointed emir. Evidence points to him as the main actor in some of the beheadings they put on the net. We have him located in Mosul at last reports.”
“What about the other faces?” The director.
“I recognize a few others here. Some are new to me. But if they’re
hanging with Bari Sarraf they’re all bad news.”
“He’s a priority target then,” the voice on the speaker phone said.
“He is, sir,” Brett said to the speaker.
“Then I’m greenlighting this. Right now,” the President of the United States said from the speaker.
“But what confirmation do we have on this? I mean, where did this video come from?” Brett said.
“It showed up in your inbox. No message. Just the video attached,” the director said.
"Do it. Final word." The speakerphone went dead with a click.
“My inbox? Who in Mosul has my email?” Brett said.
“We were hoping you could tell us that,” the director said. He turned back to the screen and tabbed the remote. The video advanced until the image of a grim-faced man appeared in the frame. The man on the screen said nothing. He only regarded the men in the room with hard eyes. Then the screen went dark before lighting up again with a wallpaper image of the sun setting over the ocean between palm trees.
“Holy shit.” Brett sank into a chair.
“So, you do know this guy?” the director said.
“Oh yeah.”
“How?” the leftover said.
“No time for that,” the director said. “Your call, Brett. Does his presence on the ground confirm that this is an actionable mission probability?”
“Like the word of God on high,” Brett said.
The director touched a keypad by his hand.
"Get me Quantico and Navy Intel now," the director said.
54
The Tomahawk launched off the deck of the destroyer created false dawn seen from the mainland. For miles around the ship the Med turned from midnight to high noon. The star-bright object rose high toward space on a hyper-sonic course before dropping in a controlled descent toward its target.
Yasin and Zamir stood in the crowd of men watching the hotel burn. Yasin clasped his little brother’s hand tightly in his so they would not become separated in the crowd jostling to bear witness. It was well past curfew, but the boys risked punishment to watch the blaze high above.