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Anbar Province

“My gift awaits.” Fazul swept his arm toward the American woman lying on a ripped mattress in a fetal position, sobbing.

Hunter despised the
muj
, but at that moment he hated himself more as he pulled up his dishdashah and climbed on top of the woman, upon Jackie Nelson. She let out a low groan, a sound that penetrated Hunter's bones.

Forgive me
.

Ramadi, Anbar Province

Camille took off her Oakley sunglasses and rubbed her eyes. The bustling market was a security nightmare. Everyone and everything seemed to be in constant motion and the honking of car horns was deafening. Worst of all, they all were armed. She had long ago given up on trying to keep track of the flow of people for someone who might be watching them. Some of her best operators were close by dressed as locals, in case someone decided she was a target of opportunity and tried to snatch her like they had the American geologist a few weeks ago. Whatever the
muj
were doing to that poor woman, they were not going to have the chance with Camille Black—even if that meant premature death.

A hawker jumped in front of her with a display case of Iraqi bracelets and necklaces. She brushed him aside, remembering how she and Hunter were once enjoying a night market in Istanbul when two men had tried to rob them at gunpoint. They neutralized the threat and, rather than deal with the hassle of the police, Camille had wanted to flee the country. Hunter had surprised her with a better idea: kick up their vacation a notch and tour ancient ruins, staying one step ahead of the Turkish police, putting their skills to the test. Hunter knew how to treat a woman to a good time. She'd give anything to live like that again, she thought, as she and her Lebanese interpreter walked into yet another store selling satellite dishes and cell phones, Iraq's two postwar obsessions. It was the fourth Omar's Electronics they had visited in the past two hours. Since nowhere in the town seemed to have electricity unless it was from a generator, she couldn't imagine that business was exactly booming.

“
Marhaba
,” Camille and her interpreter said.

A voice returned the greeting from the back room. Camille nosed around. The shop was hardly bigger than a dog kennel and it was crammed with every imaginable cell phone accessory and pizza-box-sized satellite dishes were mounted along the top of the walls all the way around the room. Camille stretched and peeked behind the counter. A prayer rug and a sleeping mat were rolled up and stuck in a corner. A picture of a man with the cuddly look of an Islamic extremist was tacked to the shelf. She pointed to it and whispered to her interpreter. “Any idea which one that is? I've seen his picture all over today and I can never remember which is which. Long mangy beards, serenely rabid eyes—they both look alike to me.”

“It's al-Zahrani. He claims he is bin Laden's chosen one. He says al Qaeda has become weak because of heresy from within. He says its membership must be purged of all of Abdullah's heretics.”

“I know, Abdullah, the other Crown Prince of Evil. Succession problems will get you every time.” Camille picked up a Hello Kitty cell phone skin. “Isn't that how the whole Sunni/Shi'a thing started? Not that I'm comparing Mohammad's ascent to heaven with Bin Laden's descent to hell.”

 

The shopkeeper ducked down as he squeezed through the low doorway. He spoke in Arabic, revealing a mouth full of gold fillings. Camille assumed that he was apologizing for the delay.

“I'm Sally Winston, a correspondent for
Newsweek
. I'm doing a story on yesterday's skirmish here in the
souk
.” She paused for the interpreter, hoping Omar hadn't caught on that American journalists hadn't dared to venture out on their own in Iraq in years, but rather relied on their Iraqi staff to do the real reporting.

The man pursed his lips, shook his head and waved his hand. She didn't need a translation. She had received this same message all day.

“Look, all I want to know is how this guy got away from the soldiers. Was anyone helping him?” Camille showed the man an old picture of Hunter. He was clean shaven and his hair was shaved in a Marine flattop, a look she much preferred to his current beard, civilian-length hair and moustache. She pulled out a hundred dollar bill and waved it in front of him. “I'm really getting sick of everyone playing dumb.” Camille turned to the interpreter and said, “Don't translate that last part.”

Omar spoke, then the interpreter said, “Perhaps I know someone who saw him leave the
souk
. Perhaps he had friends.”

The shopkeeper snatched the banknote between two fingers. Camille held on.

“I need more, Omar,” she said.

“You made an offer. I answered your question.” He tugged on the bill.

“You're right. You did.” Camille released the bill and he jerked it away.

“Come back in one hour and bring more of these. Many more.” The shopkeeper shoved it into the pocket of his dishdashah.

 

As soon as they left the shop, Omar flipped open his cell phone and hit speed dial.

Anbar Province

The hokey-pokey started blaring from a cell phone in the other room while the tangos stood around, watching Hunter as he gyrated on top of his temporary wife, the American hostage named Jackie Nelson. Every thrust was like a knife stabbing into his gut. He despised what he was doing, what he had to do. Hunter tried to get the hokey-pokey out of his head, but it wouldn't leave.

He heard footsteps as someone ran to the phone, then the music stopped and Fazul's voice answered it. Fazul listened for several moments without speaking, then he shouted at the caller. Hunter closed his eyes and focused on the jerking motion of his hips as he tried to listen in, but he couldn't make out the words above Jackie Nelson's cries.

A few moments later, Fazul jogged back into the bedroom and kicked Hunter.

Hunter rolled away from Jackie and Fazul pointed his AK at him.

“My cousin tells me that a woman came into his shop today in Ramadi. She's looking for her friend—the one the Americans were taking away at the
souk
yesterday. Her friend is an American, she says.”

Stella
.
Oh god, what have I done?
Hunter's gut clenched so tightly that he felt like vomiting.
Stay in character. It's the only way out.

“It's a CIA trick,” Hunter shouted, channeling his rage through
Sergei the Chechen
. He felt the heat rising up his neck. “They lie. They lie that I'm American so that no one will help me. I am the enemy of your enemy. You saw them taking me away.” His voice raised in a crescendo. He threw up his arms and took a measured breath. “I am helping you prepare for the wedding,
insh'allah
. Would an American do that? Do you want a car bomb or a martyr vest? I recommend a car bomb because I can wire it for remote detonation with one of these cell phones, but you could send the boy in a vest,
insh'allah
.” He pointed at the teenage boy.

The boy snorted. “I am not a martyr. I am an executioner.”

One of the twins waved his finger at the teenager. “You, an executioner? You only hold their feet down while I am the one who chops off the heads.”

“Someday, I'll be the one who whacks off the heads. You wait and see.” The boy pointed to himself.

“Enough!” Fazul held one hand in the air; the other kept the gun pointed at Hunter. “You will build a car bomb, then we will decide if you live.”

 

Hunter sifted through the nest of wires, tape, blasting caps, rusty tools, torn brown paper sacks of nails, screws and other unrelated hardware. The half brick of Semtex was not much for a serious car bomb and would be better suited for suicide vests, not that he was going to volunteer any advice. At first he hadn't liked the idea of building a bomb for tangos, but then he'd realized that helping one al Qaeda splinter group take out another was probably a good thing. If he could get at least two of them to leave for the wedding, he was confident he could take the ones that remained and rescue Jackie. He piled the blasting caps together and started to untangle the wires.

“What are you doing?” Fazul said. “We don't have time for this. We need to leave within an hour. You have more to work with than you know. Come.” Fazul motioned with his hand and stepped toward the doorway.

 

An old Passat station wagon was parked beside a beaten-up seventies-vintage Nissan pickup missing its passenger door. Several blue plastic gas cans were crammed into the small truck bed along with a rotting wooden pallet. Fazul lifted the pallet. Underneath it were two faded green artillery shells with Russian markings.
Duds
. Hunter had been on enough training missions to Twenty-nine Palms to know that even a good percentage of American artillery shells didn't go off—fuses malfunctioned; propellants were faulty; shit happened—and these puppies were unstable and dangerous.

“Use these,” Fazul said as he knocked on the weathered shell.

“Stop! Don't do that!” Hunter waved his arms in the air. All it took to set off a shell with a piezoelectric fuse buried in the ground was for a shadow to fall across it on a hot day, and movement would generally do the trick for most other detonator types. Shells were designed for rough handling and the brutal launch from howitzers and their cousins, but the firing sequence began a process that successively withdrew the safeties. For some reason that Hunter would rather not find out, at least one of the safety mechanisms in each of the shells had failed to withdraw.

That could change at any moment.

He took a deep breath. The hot air carried away the last drops of moisture from his sweating body. “You found this in the desert somewhere?”

“How do you know?”

“It's armed. Don't touch it again.” Hunter pointed to the slanted grooves cut into the copper rotating band around the base of the shell.

“But it will work. I know it will. Amir, may Allah's blessings be upon him, used to make them work for us until—”

“Until he did something stupid like you just did and blew himself up? I can make it work for you, but only if you promise me you won't touch any of the explosives. I want to be in one piece when I meet Allah.”

 

One of the twins helped Hunter place the tools he needed in a flimsy cardboard box while the other twin stood guard a good ten feet away. Jackie's hoarse cries from when he was on top of her haunted him and he knew he would have to figure out a way to take out the tangos and save her. The bastards were going to pay,
insh'allah
.

 

At Hunter's insistence, the twins off-loaded the blue plastic gas cans and the wooden skid. He wanted as large a working space as possible and his body odor had grown so strong, he didn't want to hassle his nose anymore by adding gasoline fumes to the mix. Sweat poured down his face as he squatted in the back of the truck bed, hunched over the unexploded ordnance. He said a quick prayer to the real god, then checked to make sure a weapon was still pointed at him. It was. Then he said a second prayer. His explosives courses had been long ago and making truck bombs from old Russian shells was not on the standard curriculum. He knew some Russian and could make out the Cyrillic lettering—OF412—but didn't have a clue whether it meant it was a fragmentation high explosive or even an armor piercing round. This is why EOD guys had manuals. For all he could tell, the shells could contain propaganda leaflets.

The most explosive parts were at the tip and the least explosive at the base—that much he did remember as he tapped the metal at the bottom with his finger to determine its temperature. Bacon would fry on it. Nice, crispy,
haram
bacon. He could almost taste it.

“I am watching you.” Fazul waved his finger at Hunter. “I have seen Amir build many bombs and I know what it should look like. If you try to deceive me, I will know and I will kill you.”

“Don't worry, my friend. I'll make it right,
insh'allah
.” Hunter waved his hand, while in his mind, he had only his middle finger sticking up.

He considered smashing the Semtex between the 122 rounds, but was afraid such a crude detonator might not do the trick. He would have to build a proper bomb. He picked up a monkey wrench and adjusted it. Trembling, he reached for the fuse. It contained the highest velocity explosive in the round and the most unstable. He stopped himself short of touching it.

Breathe, man. Steady
.

He stared at his arm and tensed his muscles. All he could think about was his friend Demo Dave, may Allah bless his soul, who accidentally threw a wrench down on a fuse. Without letting himself think about it anymore, he took the wrench, placed it around the fuse and adjusted it to fit. He turned his hand in the air as if unscrewing a light bulb to make sure he would turn in the right direction, then he pushed down on the wrench. It didn't move, so he pushed a little harder.

No movement.

If the thing went off, the blast would be so large he figured it really didn't matter which body part was closest to it, so he shifted his position and straddled the 122 millimeter round. He ratcheted up the force, but it was stuck. The damn thing had come out of the gun spinning like crazy in the opposite direction, tightening the fuse even more as it had soared through the air. He didn't think he would ever get it to budge.

The sun burned the back of his neck. He took a deep breath and let out a curse in Arabic which was not nearly as satisfying as an English one. The blood vessels in his neck felt like they were going to burst. When he thought he had it, the wrench slipped. He picked it up and banged on the shell, cursing it in Russian. That felt better. The Russians knew how to curse.

He pushed harder than he thought he could, harder than he would've dared a few moments earlier, then he pounded the damn thing with the wrench and tried again. It turned. He removed it and set it aside in the truck bed, but felt no relief. If the second shell went off, it would detonate the first one, too—not that it mattered. One was more than enough to take out him, the tangos and a good chunk of their safe house. Apparently, one already had.

He sat down beside the shell and wiped the sweat from his forehead and waited for his breath to steady.

The second one was no less of a struggle, only a shorter one because he started at it with more force. He unscrewed the second fuse and pulled it from the shell. The bottom of it cleared the round, but something was attached. A six-inch cylinder was stuck to the bottom of the fuse. Hunter didn't have a clue what it was.

“You broke it!” Fazul pounded his fist on the side of the truck.

“Stop! A jolt can set these things off.” Hunter wrapped them in his headscarf to keep them from knocking against one another as he climbed from the truck, then he placed them in the sand at the base of a date palm.

“Where are you going? You must finish.” Fazul pointed a pistol at him.

Hunter ignored him, stayed in the spotty shade of the palm and began drawing a wiring diagram in the sand. Two footprints represented the Russian rounds and a handprint the cell phone. Hunter rested his chin on his hand as he stared at the desert floor. The sand burned as he raked his finger through it, connecting the two footprints and the handprint in a single big loop. Linking the ordnance in a series like that meant that the entire circuit had to be good or nothing would go off. Hunter wanted it to go off. The tangos were going to pay for what they had done to Jackie Nelson—and for what they made him do to her.

The faded, kinked wires of the old blasting caps did not inspire trust. A break in one of them could prevent the entire circuit from closing and the IED would be a dud. He kicked the sand and made two new footprints and a new handprint. They had to be wired parallel so that only one circuit needed to be completed to initiate a detonation. He pursed his chapped lips as he tried to remember how to do it. As he traced a line with his finger, he thought of Stella and wished things were different. Something about explosions brought her to mind. If only things between them were less volatile.

 

Careful not to shake the truck too much, Hunter sat on the tailgate and swung his feet up into the back. He took two blasting caps and twisted their yellow leads together, then repeated the procedure with their red ones. He checked the time on the cell phone. It was running out—only thirty minutes until the phone's timer would call the
muj
to prayer and complete the circuit, well before they arrived at the wedding.

With a few twists of a screwdriver, the back of the phone came off. Working as quickly as he could, he fastened blue and green wires to each side of the chip that controlled the ringer. He then completed the loop, connecting the blue wire to the two yellow leads and he saved the green wire—the color of the Prophet—to connect with the red wires. He wrapped the phone in tape to hold everything in place.

Returning to the centerpiece of his creation, he studied the fuse well at the top of the 122s, then pinched off a tennis-ball sized chunk of Semtex. The pink substance had the consistency of bread dough and some of it rubbed off on his hand. He made a mental note not to eat anything or touch his hand to his mouth until he got a chance to clean off the residue. If the Czech-made plastic explosive was anything like its American counterpart, ingestion of it could cause a different kind of explosion.

He stuffed Semtex into the cavities in the top of each 122 and shoved a blasting cap into each mass of the plastic explosive, praying that his plan would work. His improvised explosive device was now armed. The blast would be enough to rip the truck apart. Hunter climbed from the truck and waved his arm, presenting his work to Fazul. He knew he shouldn't be, but he was proud of his very first truck bomb. He was even prouder of his choice of victims. But the real beauty was that the bomb would detonate when the cell phone played the call to afternoon prayers.

Allahu akbar—Boom.

Man, he deserved a cold beer—Allah willing or not.

 

Fazul approached the side of the truck and looked inside. Moving his finger in circles in the air, he traced the wiring through several loops. Nodding his head in approval, he clutched Hunter's shoulder and shook it lightly. “All appears as it should. You have saved your life for now,
insh'allah
.”

“When you're ready to detonate it, all you have to do is call the cell number—935-7949.” Hunter read out the number of one of the phones that was not hooked up to the IED, just in case he got some wires crossed. He wanted either his timer to work or the whole thing to be a dud. The more he thought about it, being an accessory to blowing up a wedding was not something he wanted on his conscience.

“How far away should we be?” Fazul said.

The answer Hunter wanted to give was sitting on top of the goddamn thing, but he shaved off several hundred meters from how far he would personally distance himself and said, “One hundred meters.”