The Crisis (63 page)

But Ghedi knows this man whispers against him, saying he's not the Maahdi, that such talk is idolatry. He persuaded them to attack those who gave aid, knowing the result would be starvation and full-scale war. He too has followers among the Waleeli. Soon there will have to be a choice, and only one faction can win.

This doesn't bother him. If he dies, his jaw won't wake him with such agony that only pride keeps him from howling like a dog smashed by a truck. He murmurs, “What would your master the Prince have me do?”

Yousef shrugs. “Kill Americans; that's our jihad. If enough hands throw enough stones, we can topple the largest pillar. Then we will restore the Great Caliphate, as the Hadiths promise. This I believe.”

“I too,” says Ghedi, but he makes his tone ironic, and searches the faces in the gloom.

What should he do? The question gnaws at him like a desert rat. He's pulled his men back from the city. To face the Americans means losing them in prohibitive numbers. On the other hand, he still holds the countryside, south, west, and in a great half moon around the Governing Council territory. On the third hand, his people are starving. God has not sent rain. The drought's iron, unshakable, a doom from Heaven. Yousef promised food, but little has arrived, only a trickle of trucks from Sudan. Barely enough to feed his fighters, let alone their families.

He rubs his face, keeping his fingers from his jaw. Thing were better before. Everyone fed, with the Waleeli secretly controlling distribution.
The Americans had tried to disarm and trick him. Sent the Muslim woman to tempt him. But he'd attacked instead. It's Yousef's doing, that subtle perfumed voice in his ear.

But Yousef is his comrade in jihad . . . and jihad's the will of God.

Yet it's destroying the very people he's fought to save.

It's so confusing sometimes he finds it hard to breathe. He must pray more fiercely.

What he does know is that his friends and comrades will stand with him. If he's wrong they'll die beside him. He reaches to fondle hair, knead shoulders, grasp their hands. Hasheer stands back, gaze troubled. Ghedi grabs him and pulls him close, smelling an elusive scent on his clothes. Cigar tobacco? But he never smoked.

“The whiteface, Olowe, wants you to make peace,” his friend murmurs into his ear, clinging in the embrace, so the others might think they are kissing.

“How does that benefit him?”

“If you return the hostages, the Americans will forgive. Why not? It's no sin to stop fighting. In a year or two, when the rains come, they'll leave. You've shattered the clans, destroyed the democrats. When the foreigners go, it'll be you against the Council.”

Ghedi isn't sure the rains will ever come again. Has God cursed them? Is it not God who speaks to him, but some desert demon? But no demon would ask him to fight in God's name. And why does the boy say “you” instead of “we”?

But he voices none of this. Then those thoughts too flee, eclipsed as an idea occurs. A way out. Could it work? He resolves to think it out, alone with God, and maybe his sister. He's never admitted this to his men, but he talks things over with her.

“Yes?” Hasheer prompts, still embracing him. That tobacco smell again.

“We'll see,” he grunts. He rumples his hair, then pushes him away. The young man grins, gazing at him.

Deep in the cave, Zeynaab's buttered fingers spin a flat thin square of dough on the smoking griddle. The heat scorches her face; the spitting oil sputters, stinging as she drizzles it on the bread the men will eat when they're done talking. She glances now and then at them in the flickering dim, and never says anything at all.

 

DAYLIGHT came slowly, ebbing from the ground into the dusty sky. Everything was hazy, like a morning mist in California, but it was dust. Metallic-tasting, fouling Teddy's throat and itching in his nose. He rotated his head in tiny increments, only when the wind gusted. He sucked
a grudging sip from the tube. He judged the wind as fifteen, twenty miles an hour, from the southeast. Each gust whipped up minute grains from the shattered stonework in which he lay buried. Only half his face showed. Their camouflage capes and uniforms blended with weathered stone, powdery sand. He knew exactly where Kowacki and Cooper were, but even so could barely make them out under the piled stones. They lay motionless, curled around their weapons, so no straight line showed to distant binoculars. They'd lie like that through the entire day.

His own weapon lay under his right arm on pebbles and shattered rock. The rocks shone in a muted rainbow. Pale crimson. Violet. Quartz white. Among them as light came, he noticed a shard of porcelain, blue and white. A gust blew sand from it, revealing the eroded ghost of a leaping rabbit, hind legs gone forever.

He drew the rifle to his face, a millimeter at a time, ignoring the grating pain from what he was pretty sure now was a cracked collarbone. Lay motionless for a long while, scrutinizing the ninety degrees of sand, rock, and downward-sloping ground in front of him, stretching out to what he'd tentatively decided would be his firing position: a depression he could reach via one of the sand-choked canals.

He turned his attention to the rifle. It was no longer black, as when “Doctor Dick” Skilley had checked him out on it, but spray-painted in wavering splotches of earth and lavender; handguard, buttstock, barrel, suppressor, magazine. Even the heavy belled scope and its flip-up covers were painted. He hooked his thumbnail over them and flicked up, then migrated it to his eye. Rotated a switch, and peered.

He saw at once that the reticle was skewed, the image blurry. When he focused it didn't improve. The laser-ranging diode blinked on when he pressed the button, but pointed at a rock a stone's throw from the hide site, it read 450 meters, then 3600. The image stabilization didn't work either. He shook it. The tinkle told him all he needed to know.

Just. Fucking.
Great.
He took a slow breath, closing his eyes. Let it out between his teeth.

The scope was junk. He'd totaled it, slamming into that rock when he landed.

Okay, he had to fix this. But how? Kowacki had a sniper rifle too, but it wouldn't stabilize the extra-long, extra-heavy rounds Skilley'd given him. They had standard ammo, but it wasn't accurate enough at extreme range for the shot he'd planned.

He'd have to get closer. A lot closer, across terrain hard as shit to blend into.

He started to sweat, seeing the mission circle the toilet bowl. He wiped his face, then stopped; didn't want to smear his camo. Maybe he could swap scopes, put Kowacki's glass on his rifle? But the zero would be off. Without several sighting shots that wouldn't work either.

He lay motionless, ignoring the sand fleas biting, rocks knifing into his chest, bruised knees, the chafing burn in his crotch.

After all, he had all day to think about it.

D
EAD right there, Teddy thought.

Oh, yeah. Easy.

As dawn came again, their second in the ruins, he lay half covered with rocks, curled into the corner of the foundation. He was concealed by a camo cape that matched the sand around him. It
was
the sand around him, sticking to a special adhesive layer. He was indistinguishable from the jumble of pebbles and occasional tuft of dead grass. He was the Invisible Man.

He sure as fuck didn't feel like it, though. He felt like a chancre on a bridegroom's dick. As that asshole submariner he'd done the Korean mission with would have said.

They'd lain up in the abandoned village all the day before, with the total motionlessness only long training made possible. Only once, when the wind rose and gusted haze up from the desert floor so thick they couldn't see thirty yards, had he half risen, stretched agonizingly cramped muscles, and sipped from his gradually deflating camelback.

During the night just past he'd done a leader's recon. He'd left his rifle, taking only knife and night vision goggles and the little binoculars from his cargo pocket. He'd moved by inches, scouting every yard ahead
through the NVGs, in case this was all a setup and some canny skinny had planted something nasty. Freidebacher had told them the intel was solid, from a no-shit internal source, but he'd been burned often enough to take nothing Intel said at face value. It took three hours to crawl eight hundred yards. By the end of that time he could feel the sharp end of his fractured collarbone chewing through the muscles of his chest.

He'd spent an hour at the firing point, glassing every outcrop and bush right up to the well, a low tumble of rocks with what looked like Abraham's hut collapsed some distance away. No sign of water, no bushes or trees, though again there were stumps, the long-dead orchards they'd walked through the night before. But that was good. A clear field of fire. He averaged what the radian lines and his GPS were telling him and came up with 850 yards.

A very long shot with Cooper's M24—a bolt-action Remington, a modified varmint rifle—but doable if he held for the chest rather than the head. That made for less than a certain kill, but a solid hit with a 180-grain open-point boattail would ruin anybody's day without a skilled trauma team on hand. And he didn't see any out here.

Usually you avoided torso shots on a high-value target. But no better plan suggested itself. He'd lain for another half hour, listening to the wind. Then crawled back, reaching the hide just before dawn. He'd gestured, and they'd stirred and crept in. He went over the final things, actions on contact, their E&E plan.

He'd drunk a little water, munched a protein bar, then dozed under his cape. His stomach rumbled but hunger seemed to dull the pains. Keeping the worms quiet? Whatever worked.

 

NOT long after dawn pebbles grated close by. He opened his eyes and found himself staring at a sandal.

Teddy was impressed. The guy had come up out of the haze without a sound. Tall, black as licorice, with a peanut-shaped head in a black, sloppy turban-wrap. He wore a long shirtlike robe, cotton pants, tire-tread sandals. A cloth magazine bag was draped over one shoulder, a canteen over the other.

Holding a shorty Kalash, he stood atop a pile of rubble, looking around. The deliberation with which he scanned told Teddy he was a hunter. Behind him two more shapes writhed in the haze, trotting left and right while their boss watched directly ahead. One was headed for Kowacki's hide.

Teddy hadn't checked his paint yet, had been planning to when there was more light. He hoped the shine of his skin didn't give him away.
A millimeter at a time, he moved his hand up to shield it. He squeezed his eyelids tight, pulled the rifle in a little, and slipped the safety off.

Rocks crunched as the flankers pelted past. The tall one moved at last, in a slow zigzag down what had once been the main street of this abandoned hamlet. He went on through the ruins and Teddy relaxed.

Then he came back. Striding across the sand, shirttail flapping in the wind, he crossed their front with long easy strides. He looked downhill, away from Teddy's hide, toward the meet site by the well.

Then he stopped, and faced them. Faced the ruins, cocked his head, and shaded his eyes.

Teddy stopped breathing. The guy was looking at him. Right into his eyes, from fifty yards away. He didn't look back. It sounded mystical, but every sniper knew some targets could sense another's gaze. He lowered his eyes, focusing on the porcelain fragment. The rabbit's ears quivered in the heat rising off the ground.

Seconds were born, lived, drew long retirements, then died at last of old age.

The tall man stepped forward, frowning. Oberg's grip tightened on the rifle.

A dust devil passed between them, nodding this way and that as it whirled across the ground. The man stepped back, making a hand gesture. It swayed toward him, and he shrank away. Then it changed its mind, and spun off across the flat land in its unsettling simulacrum of purposeful life.

The Ashaari called to his buddies. They answered with yips and wails, some sort of code. Like yodeling. He gazed about for another moment, then burst into a run. Sandals flipping up puffs of dust, he sped off in an awkward, lanky lope, as if Abe Lincoln had taken up jogging.

Teddy allowed himself a very slow intake of breath, but didn't move, not even his pupils. He held still for a full hour, until full day had come and the sun burned across the open desert, throwing long shadows at them from the motionless rocks.

 

THE technical rattles and shakes. It bounces across the ragged land, far from any road. Three other vehicles speed along with it, raising skeins of dust that mingle with the haze.

Ghedi fingers the smooth shape in his pocket, examining the sky. Two other fighters watch it too, clinging to the mount of the machine gun as the pickup sways. At last, satisfied there's little risk, he takes out the cell phone, slips the cover off, and inserts the battery.

As soon as he flips it closed, he holds it out the glassless window. Another
truck swerves in, a gaunt boy stretching out one hand, the other wrestling the wheel. The two vehicles lurch and collide, jolting everyone. As they separate he tosses the cell into the other vehicle. It instantly turns sharply, accelerating toward the horizon.

“It's clear,” he tells Hasheer, beside him. Then looks behind him, to meet his sister's troubled gaze. He's told her this is men's work, but she insisted there are women among the hostages. She needs to come too. No point arguing, he's learned that.

He grips the side of the door and stands, braced against the hot breath of the wind. His whole face and throat throb. It's getting hard to swallow, or see. Or even breathe. Again uncertainty gnaws. He glances back at the truck grinding after him, rocking side to side on worn-out springs. Ten women, four men. He can turn them over. Give the money to Yousef for the new weapons, missiles to strike back at the fire from the sky.

But what then? Until they arrive it'll be dangerous to move, by day or night. The nomads have known about the subterranean oasis for centuries. From Ottoman times, Italian times, British, it's been a bolt-hole. But that was before eyes that see even in the darkest night. Sooner or later, the Americans will discover it. He has to be gone before then.