The Secret Soldier (46 page)

Which slammed closed behind him as he got inside. He saw two men. One sat on a motorbike five feet from Wells. The other stood at the far end of the gate, maybe twelve feet away. “Hey,” the man on the bike said. Wells lifted the Glock and shot him twice in the chest. The silenced rounds sounded like distant fireworks. The man’s mouth opened, and his hands came up and he fell off the back of the bike, his legs still squeezing the saddle—

Wells turned toward the second man, who was coming at him, running, and got one shot off too high and missed. Now the guy was on him, four feet away, and Wells saw the knife in his hand. Wells pulled the trigger again, and the round caught the guy in the left shoulder and twisted him sideways. The guy stumbled, and Wells stepped aside and arched his back like a toreador and let the knife slide by. When the guy had fallen into the wall, Wells raised his arm until the tip of the silencer was almost touching the back of his head and shot him twice, even though once would have worked just fine. The top of his skull exploded, and his brains and blood splattered onto the concrete.

From the house, a voice yelled, “Ramzi! Marwan! What’s happening?”

 

 

BAKR WAS IN THE
kitchen, making a pot of tea, when he heard the commotion, the unmistakable puff of a silenced pistol. Even before he asked the question, he knew. They’d gotten here somehow, the
muk
or the Americans. He didn’t understand how they had tracked him, but the answer no longer mattered. He still had time to kill Kurland. And then to escape with his video camera and lay out the evidence that proved the princes had supported him. “Come,” he said to Abdul. The camera and knife were on the kitchen counter. He grabbed them and ran.

 

 

WELLS HEARD THE JEEP
outside the gate. He didn’t have time to open it. Gaffan would have to get in on his own. Wells ran for the front door and then changed his mind and angled toward the driveway in back. He ducked low as he passed two barred windows. At the back-right corner of the house, he stopped. The ambulance was parked across a short apron of asphalt, in front of a big windowless garage.

He stepped into the yard between the house and garage. Through a barred window, he saw the kitchen. A pot of tea steamed on the stove, but the room was empty. The back door into the house was open a few inches. Wells listened for footsteps but heard nothing. Had they gone upstairs? They wouldn’t keep Kurland on the first floor. But Arab houses rarely had basements.

Then Wells remembered the cell in Lebanon that Meshaal had described. He ran for the garage, fearing that he was already too late.

 

 

BAKR AND ABDUL CLIMBED
into the cell. They wouldn’t have time to make a proper video, but they could still put the camera on the stepladder and record the moment when Bakr cut off Kurland’s head.

Kurland stirred as they reached him. His skin was gray, his eyes red and inflamed, as if his body had responded to the amputation by giving up its defenses against infection. He said something Bakr didn’t understand and stuck out his tongue. He smelled like an open sewer, his insides rotting. Bakr didn’t understand how Kurland had gotten so sick so quickly. But no matter. Bakr set up the camera on the stepladder, its top step now coated with dried blood. “Tell him the Americans haven’t met our demands and the time for his execution has come,” he said to Abdul.

“Do we have time?”

“Do it.”

Abdul spoke. Kurland responded with two words that needed no translation.

“Ask him if he wants to convert to Islam.”

This time the answer was three words.

“Fine, then. Tell him that by coming to the Arabian Peninsula, he’s broken Islamic law, and that he’s rejected the opportunity to save himself by converting. Tell him the penalty is death.”

 

 

THE GARAGE WAS A
big concrete shed, three car-sized bays wide. Wells tried to lift the front doors, found them locked. He ran to the windowless door on the side of the garage, pressed on its steel handle. It, too, was locked. He wondered if the men inside were waiting, standing inside the door with their rifles poised. Forcing your way into a room without covering fire was an all-time no-no. But he needed to keep coming. So far, the sirens weren’t any closer. Help—if the Saudi police qualified as help—was a ways off.

Wells put the tip of the silencer to the edge of the door, just above the handle. He angled it diagonally down and squeezed the trigger twice. By his count, he’d fired seven rounds here, and three at the house in Jeddah. He still had nine rounds left. Which ought to be enough.

From somewhere inside the garage, a man shrieked.

 

 

KURLAND OPENED HIS EYES.
They were back. They were talking. The big one talked in Arabic, and the little one translated. That was how it went. But whatever language they spoke, they were beasts. They’d taken his
hand.
His left hand, with his wedding ring. Too late, he’d realized his ring was gone. He wished they’d taken his right. If he was going to die in this little room, he wanted to die wearing his ring.

Now they were back for the rest of him. He knew even before they spoke. They didn’t offer him water or Coke or anything else. No fake courtesies. Not that he wanted any. They seemed rushed. They made their speeches, their psychotic justifications, and ignored his curses and came at him. The big one holding a knife that must have been a foot long, with a black handle and a gleaming serrated edge. Kurland was afraid now, more afraid than he’d ever been, but angry, too. He wanted to see Barbara again. His kids. And grandkids.
I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve to die.
Though no one ever did.

Fine, then. He would die. But he didn’t plan to make it easy. Dignity didn’t matter to him anymore. His skin burned and his skull throbbed and his swollen tongue filled his mouth like a loaf of bread. They’d taken his dignity when they took his hand. So when they got close he shook his arm free of its sling and pushed the tip of the stump against the wall behind him—
the pain
—

He screamed. And dug his heels into the floor to rock the chair off its back legs, and leaned forward and toppled over, feeling a ridiculous surge of triumph as the floor rose toward him—

 

 

THE SHRIEK BROKE OFF.
Then started again, this time resolving into a man’s voice, words in English: “No, you don’t, you bastards—” Wells pushed open the door and came into the garage in three big sideways steps, holding the Glock in a two-hand grip, keeping his shoulders forward and down to make himself a smaller target. All useless if someone was waiting inside, but he had to try. He looked side to side—

A Toyota Camry, a shovel, a pick, a humming electrical generator, empty water bottles, an orange first-aid kit that looked like the twin of the one he’d found in Jeddah. No jihadis. He ran around the Camry and saw two flat metal plates, big, the ones that utility workers used to cover the holes they made when they dug up streets. A crude hinged hatch had been cut into the front plate. The hatch, two feet square, was unlocked. And open.

The hole was about twelve feet deep. Wells peeked down, saw metal rods embedded in the wall that seemed to serve as a crude ladder. But the hatch was too narrow and the cell too deep to allow him to glimpse the entire space below. Unless he squatted down and put his face to the hatch, he couldn’t see Kurland or the kidnappers.

 

 

BAKR COULDN’T BELIEVE THAT
Kurland had knocked over his chair.
Crazy American.
He and Abdul flipped it up, ignoring Kurland, who was yelling and waving his stump, blood leaking from the gauze. Bakr reached for his knife, but Kurland thrashed his head sideways so he couldn’t get a clean stroke. Bakr tried to grab his chin, but Kurland snapped his jaw like a wild dog. “Get the morphine,” Bakr said to Abdul. The syringes were in the first-aid kit, in the garage.

“We don’t have time—”

“I want the video to be clean, not this screaming—”

“The video, the video, you’re insane—”

“Do it!”

 

 

WELLS HEARD THEM YELLING
and backed away from the hatch and dropped onto his hands and knees. They didn’t know he was here. For the first time, he thought he might succeed. He was far enough from the hatch that the jihadi climbing out wouldn’t see him, close enough to be able to kill the guy cleanly. “This is stupid,” the man below said. His feet pounded on the metal rungs, rising step by step—

The man’s hands emerged and the top of his head, thick black hair. He rose through the hatch as if he were materializing from empty space, a magic trick. He swung his head around, defenseless. His eyes widened and his eyebrows rose as he saw Wells, and Wells leaned forward and put the tip of the silencer to his forehead and pulled the trigger and blew off the top of his head with a 9-millimeter kiss—

And gravity had its way with his corpse and sucked him back into the cell. Wells stood up, knowing he had only one chance. He stepped toward the hatch, and without hesitating put his hands at his sides and stepped through the hole like a kid jumping off the high dive—

He fell through. Halfway down he caught his shoulder on one of the rungs embedded in the wall. He twisted sideways and wrenched a knee as he landed. He stumbled forward over the legs of the man he’d killed. He braced himself against the wall, without a shot—

 

 

ABDUL FELL THROUGH THE
hatch, dead, and before Bakr could fully register what was happening, another man plunged into the cell, wearing a bloodstained gown, a pistol in his hand. The man landed awkwardly and fell forward, toward the side of the cell, and Bakr looked at him and then at Kurland, and knew what he needed to do—

 

 

WELLS TURNED HIMSELF AND
raised the pistol, but he was late, too late—

 

 

BAKR SCREAMED
“ALLAHU AKBAR!”
and drove the knife into Kurland’s belly, a killing stroke, Bakr knew, even as the man in the corner finally got his pistol up and the rounds tore at him, two in his arm and two more in his chest and a marvelous black warmth filled him—

 

 

WELLS FIRED UNTIL HE
had no ammunition left and pushed himself up and hobbled across the cell. The blood splashed out of Kurland and pooled on the concrete. Bakr had torn through the big arteries in his stomach. Wells knew he couldn’t do anything, but he knelt before Kurland and pressed his hands to the wound and tried to stanch the flow. “I’m sorry,” he said. Kurland’s eyes were closing, but he locked on Wells when he heard the English.

“American?”

“Yes.” The blood seeped around the knife blade, around Wells’s hands.

Kurland’s eyes drooped. “Stay with me,” Wells said. He pushed harder. Kurland groaned.

“My ring. My wife. Ring.”

Wells saw the stump, the left hand missing, and understood. “Your wedding ring.”

“Tell her—” Kurland’s breath came fast. His voice was a whisper.

“Tell her—” Wells said.

“Tell her I fought.” His head slumped forward, and he was gone.

 

 

WELLS CLOSED HIS OWN
eyes and leaned against the wall in a room with two men he’d killed and a third he’d failed to save. He would have world enough and time to consider how he could have saved Kurland. What he should have done differently. What his next move would be. Whether Saeed or someone else needed to pay for this atrocity. For now, he closed his eyes and sat in silence for eternity, or a minute or two. Until he heard someone in the garage above.

“John,” Gaffan yelled. “You in here?”

“Down here.”

“We clear?”

“Clear.”

Gaffan’s footsteps clanked over the plates. “Everything okay?”

“No,” Wells said quietly. “It’s not even close.”

And they had to be to calm the fury after Graham Kurland’s death. After ten years and two frustrating wars, Americans had lost patience with Islamic terror—and with Saudi Arabia, which seemed to be its biggest backer. The fact that the kidnappers had mutilated Kurland became a closely guarded secret; the national security adviser called it “the kind of detail that could start a war.” Plenty of Americans wanted war anyway. The day after Kurland’s death, protestors surrounded the Saudi embassy, and polls showed that forty-six percent of Americans wanted to invade the Kingdom. The president asked for calm, saying that the United States needed to investigate. Blaming the Saudi government would be premature, especially since the government’s forces had nearly rescued Kurland, he said.

Abdullah and Saeed also spoke out. In carefully managed interviews on CNN two days after Kurland’s death, the men expressed sorrow for his killing and vowed to punish the perpetrators.

“Un-Islamic,” Abdullah said. “A tragedy.”

“Terrorists,” Saeed said. “A crime.”

The next day, Abdullah flew to Chicago for Kurland’s funeral. The service and burial were closed to the public, but the reports that the king would be attending sparked promises of protests. Despite pleas from the Kurland family, the president, and the archbishop of Chicago, hundreds of demonstrators tried to reach Holy Name Cathedral, but police in riot gear faced them down.

At the funeral, the president was cool as ever. “Graham could have chosen to serve anywhere. He was that big a donor,” the president said in his eulogy, and the mourners laughed politely, as they were meant to do. “But he wanted to go somewhere difficult. He wanted to make a difference. I hope that the way he died isn’t all we remember about him. That would be the truest tragedy.”

When it was Barbara’s turn to speak, she stood blankly before the mourners, shaking her head until her children came and led her down. Afterward, though, she found her voice. With a dozen Secret Service officers and FBI agents around her, she led Abdullah outside the cathedral to the makeshift pen where reporters and camera crews waited. In her long black dress and mourning gloves, she stood awkwardly next to the king, not quite touching him.