[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (22 page)

It wasn’t my life that flashed before my eyes at that moment, it was something far lighter and quicker, loud and white and then suddenly black, more than enough to blind me and throw me down to the ground.

The next thing I knew, Junior was standing over me.

Damn,
I thought,
I am in heaven.

Heaven? Me? Obviously, God has a very strong sense of humor.

“Dad. Up,” said Junior. “There’s still one of them in the compound.”

“What the hell?”

“I threw the flash-bang a little too far. I needed to divert his attention.”

“Who?”

He pointed to my right. “The guy I killed.”

A bullet-ridden body lay to the right of me, just past the corner. Junior had seen him approaching and shot him. I couldn’t have done better myself.

“There’s one behind the back of this building,” said Junior. “See if you can pin him down and I’ll swing around the other way.”

Junior ran off before I could stop him. It wasn’t the worst idea in the world, though I would have preferred it if I was the one in motion, taking the bigger risk. I crawled back to the edge of the building. As soon as I ducked my head out at the bottom of the corner, bullets ripped into the wall. I pulled back quickly, then stuck the gun out and began firing maniacally, trying to draw his attention.

The tango was happy to comply. He fired several dozen shots. I couldn’t quite hear if the gun had clicked empty, but poked out and fired anyway.

Boom … crash
—Junior threw another grenade.

The dust had barely settled when I heard a bloodcurdling scream. If you can imagine what a Hound of Hell might sound like when someone steps on his tail, you’ll have about half the noise I heard. The other half was several decibels higher and four times as fierce.

I got up and peered around the corner. Junior was smashing the barrel end of his gun into the black-shirted torso. There wasn’t much left of the body when I got there, even though he couldn’t have been more than forty feet away.

“He killed her. He shot her in cold blood.” Tears were streaming down Junior’s face as he raged. “The bastards gunned them all down like fucking paper dolls. Kids and everything.”

He kept hitting the body, not stopping until I pulled him away.

“Keep your head,” I yelled. “We haven’t cleared the place.”

“This motherfucker. This mother—”

“All right, all right, I get it. Let’s go. We’re going back.”

“We have to bury them.”

“Bury these guys?”

“The victims. The little girl.”

“No, Junior. Man up now. We are getting
out
of here before we get killed. We’re down to a pistol and whatever bullets are in that gun.”

“I have one more mag.”

“That’s my point. The border patrol can send over troops. Come on.”

He didn’t entirely snap out of it, but he did regain enough of his senses to come with me as I tugged him toward the gate.

“You’re hurt,” he mumbled as we went down the path.

“No.”

“You’re limping.”

“My knee’s stiff. That’s all.”

He came over and put his shoulder under mine, helping me back toward the fence. I didn’t really need his support, but it took his mind off the girl, and his anger.

*   *   *

The commander of the border guards gave me the usual business you’d expect from a C
2
officer, explaining how tricky the border situation was and how difficult dealing with the smugglers could be.

I wasn’t in much of a mood to hear it, so I cut him off.

“We had to leave your man’s body up there,” I said. “Delhi will want him back. Get a patrol together and I’ll show them where he is.”

“We must call for permission,” said the commander.

“If you do that, it’ll take days. On the other hand, if you were trying to rescue a lost American visitor…”

Out of excuses, the commander smiled. He called the lieutenant I had met earlier and tasked him to lead the group back. A dozen men, the best of the troop, were mustered.

Junior stalked back and forth in the compound as they were gathering, restless. I’ve seen rabid dogs that were calmer. Finally we mounted up, with half the troop on bicycle and the rest divided in a pair of ATVs. The patrol was methodical to the point of madness, with scouts moving a short distance forward before the rest of the unit came up, and a flanking unit dismounting and moving parallel to the main group through the low jungle brush. The Indians formed up for an assault as they reached the border. Finding no opposition, they began moving toward the enemy camp. They secured the perimeter in what seemed like slow motion, then began taking down the compound building by building.

Junior and I stayed with the lieutenant. I’d remembered seeing a laptop in one of the buildings, and decided I would retrieve it; I didn’t intend on alerting the Indians. The lieutenant barely paid attention to us, and it was easy to slip away as the last building was secured. I went back to the building that the smugglers had used as a headquarters, and walked to the wall where the laptop had been.

It was gone. So were the papers that had been there. Outside, the bodies of the smugglers had been retrieved as well.

The lieutenant organized a burial detail. Junior borrowed a shovel from one of the men, and buried the little girl himself.

*   *   *

The sun was starting to set by the time we got back. The commander wasn’t much of a military leader, but he did have a good idea of how to treat guests—he invited us to his private hut for drinks before dinner. Once there, he produced gin. And not just any gin.

“I have heard that you are a fan,” he said, whisking a bottle of Bombay Sapphire out from his cabinet. “Would you like it on the rocks?”

“As long as that means ice.”

Junior insisted he would drink only water. He stayed with it as the commander and I went several rounds, trading stories and refills. You’ve heard most of the old war stories the commander pried out of me, so we’ll jump back to Africa and Djibouti, where Trace and the boys were trying to fill in the gaps and wait for the call to cell phone Number 2 to tell them what to do.

(IV)

While for most normal human beings there was plenty to do, Trace considered the assignment as basically being “sit and twiddle your thumbs.”

Actually, she had a more colorful idea of what her thumbs were doing, but we’ll leave that out so as not to upset the librarians.

For the record, Shunt had infiltrated the bank’s computer network with his usual aplomb, but all that really did was make it possible for us to use the ATM without withdrawal fees. There was no Allah’s Rule account at the bank—a fact that was confirmed that afternoon, when the bank was held up a second time.

The second wave of robbers was bigger, and less merciful. They shot everyone in sight. Trace was retrieving Mongoose at the time, and though the CIA had suggested to its local counterparts that the bank be watched, no one seemed to have arrived in time to record the robbery, much less prevent it. Calls went out to watch all the local banks for deposits, even though the drug smugglers’ attitude toward banks was pretty obvious at that point.

Why rob the bank? You ended up with the cash, and maybe a little bonus. There was no electronic transaction number or other data to trace. Marked bills could be disposed of elsewhere with impunity—it had been a relatively small down payment, after all.

Of course, you could also ask, why not skip the drug-smuggling racket and rob banks for a living?

Garrett, our CIA secret agent man, was providing a lot more cooperation than Magoo had promised—no doubt thanks to his extracurricular interest in Trace. The evening I left, they convened a debrief session at a mutually agreeable hotel bar.

“I got some more information on that prescription drug setup,” said Garrett. “It’s in Bangladesh. They have a shipment at sea right now. I don’t think it’s the same one, but you guys might want to check it out.”

Talk about whispering sweet nothings in a girl’s ear. Trace responded immediately.

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“I—uh—well, I thought you might, you know, uh, be interested. The ship, uh,
Indiamotion.
Well, um, huh?”

Trace’s interest had been drawn to a shifty-looking man with a beard sitting several tables away, speaking with two equally shifty-looking individuals. Garrett followed her gaze, then tapped her hand.

“You spotted him, huh?” said Garrett.

“Yes,” said Trace.

“Hoshang Zal is the number-two guy in al-Quds. A real scumbag.”

“Interesting.”

Al-Quds is the export arm of the Iranian Revolution. Set up to help groups like Hezbollah, al-Quds (also called the Quds Force, Qods, Ghods, Gonad Rippers, and a variety of less flattering names) is charged with bringing the Iranian Islamic Revolution to other countries. While Israel has been the primary target of their beneficence, Quds has done its best to stir trouble up in other areas. They’re a subset of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a group very much like our own Boy Scouts, if our Boy Scouts were demonic sociopathic psycho jobs.

No slur intended on the Boy Scouts, who are none of those things.

Hoshang Zal was the branch manager for the organization’s Yemen operation, as Trace soon learned from Garrett. As such, he was actively directing operations in Yemen to undermine the legitimate government, back the rebels, and when possible, attack Westerners and their facilities. He hadn’t been all that successful on the last count, mostly because any Westerner with any sense had left Yemen long ago. But he was high on the Christians in Action list of International Slimeballs.

“The main terror group in Yemen is al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” noted young Mr. Garrett. “These guys have been trying to move in over the last several months. They’ve only been somewhat successful. They appeal to Shiites, and there aren’t as many as there are Sunni.”

Actually, the Shiite population runs about 42 percent, with Sunnis making up 55 percent of the overall census count. There are significant divisions within each subset—most Sunnis in Yemen are Shafi’i, for example, but other sects are represented—but for our purposes it’s enough to know than Quds and al Qaeda hated each other only slightly less than they hated us.

“Why don’t you take him out?” Trace asked.

“If he were in Yemen, we’d take him down straight away,” said Garrett. “Drone strike, sniper, car accident—he’d be gone. But as long as he stays in Djibouti, we can’t touch him.”

“Why not?”

Garrett shrugged. The decision had been made many levels above him in the government food chain. In fact, the whole matter belonged in the very thick file labeled:
BS Restrictions in the War on Terror / Diplomacy Department
, with a mention also in the
Political Correctness
tab. While the CIA and Defense Department
can
make attacks on declared enemies of the United States, and
can
help allies, no attack can be made if said enemies are
not
in the declared war zones. In other words, even if we know exactly what the bad guy is doing, even if we watch him do bad things, we can’t get him if he’s doing these things in most places of the world. Kind of like him yelling “Ollie-Ollie-osen-free” in freeze tag when you were a kid. And that’s on top of a myriad of other requirements and regulations, an insane finding process involving everyone from the National Security Director to the White House janitor, and a decision-making process that appears to involve a dartboard.
21

Garrett had played a small role in watching Hoshang in Djibouti a few months before, and plied Trace with various details over the course of two more drinks. Most of these details consisted of complaints about how his bosses refused to let him do anything about the bastard. How much of this was bravado designed to get Trace into bed is impossible to calculate, but enough of it was true that Trace went back to her hotel room (alone) and immediately called Shunt for information on Hoshang. After the requisite grouching about how overworked he was, Shunt found and forwarded a dossier on
Monsieur Hoshang Zal, le terroriste
(lifted from an intelligence agency not to be named) for her perusal.

The dossier confirmed Garrett’s earlier assessment that Hoshang wasn’t actually connected to our operation. Still, I doubt Trace finished translating the first paragraph before deciding to make Hoshang her pet project while killing time waiting for the drugs to land.

(V)

“This is not Somalia,” insisted Abdi the next morning when Trace sat down with him and the boys to explain what she wanted to do. “You cannot buy explosives at the market.”

“I don’t know,” said Mongoose. “Some of the stuff Shotgun’s eating looked pretty explosive to me.”

Shotgun smiled and continued chewing.

“We can make a small bomb with some mortar charges,” said Mongoose, turning serious. He’s one of our demo experts. “Or hell, I haven’t used fertilizer in a long time.”

“You are going to blow up innocent people?” sputtered Abdi. “You cannot, cannot do that.”

“Relax,” said Trace. “No one else is going to be hurt. Just the terrorist.”

“How do you guarantee this?”

“We’ll take care of it. Don’t worry.”

As Trace pointed out later, Abdi was undergoing a transformation. He’d started out pretty selfish, concerned only about himself and getting away with the most money he could manage. But now he was thinking about innocent people.

It wasn’t the world’s most dramatic development, but it was a start.

“Besides, an explosion is too obvious,” added Trace. “Our friend here needs to die … artistically.”

“Blowing his head off with a sixty would be artistic,” said Shotgun, using slang to refer to a machine gun (after the M60). “The blood would splatter very nicely.”

“Car bombs can be just as pretty,” insisted Mongoose.

“I’m thinking of something more creative,” said Trace, getting up from the table.

*   *   *

Bus service in Djibouti was erratic at best, but the drivers themselves were universally hailed for their professionalism. They unfailingly hit every stop, and always halted promptly for pedestrians in the streets. So as the battered city bus bore down on the man crossing the street, he paid it no mind, continuing across.