Johansen had lied about the Agency wanting Massina to take a lower profile. As far as they were concerned, the louder the better. He, on the other hand, worried the inventor was making himself too much of a target.
Johansen couldn’t worry about that now. There were too many other things to fret about.
Chelsea spent the day organizing her work area, setting up the control units. When the sun set, she went outside and put the bomb mechs to work clearing the artillery shells from the wreckage around them. Each shell had to be carried into the desert a mile away and quietly rendered inert. Which was a bit of a bummer — all those explosives would have made a good-sized boom.
It took longer than she expected. She had to call it quits at sunrise with about half the job still undone.
“Half day, huh?” joked Johnny as she closed down the units.
“Yeah, I’m a slacker,” she told him. “Calling it quits at twenty hours. What are you doing?”
“Patrol.”
“Good luck.”
He looked pretty good in his long Arab shirt and baggy pants, Chelsea thought as she went downstairs. Very movie-star-like. It was hard to believe that just a few months ago, he was on respirators and in a drug-induced coma, legs gone, chest full of blood.
A half hour later, Johnny joined Turk and Christian and set out south in a pickup, aiming to launch a UAV over their target area. Turk — a former SEAL who looked like an Arab, though he was born in Indiana — was at the wheel; Christian, who despite his name was a first-generation Muslim immigrant from Kurdistan, rode shotgun in the back. Johnny handled coms, in contact with the base via supplied video feeds and old-fashioned radio. While they had brought helmets that could do the same, to a man the team considered the helmets too cumbersome to use except in an actual assault. Wearing them now would make it obvious that they weren’t a patrol of Daesh soldiers — which was what they hoped to pass for, at least from a distance.
After they had driven for about a half hour, they stopped to launch a Hum. With the two battery-powered engines running full-out, Johnny ran with the aircraft across a flat stretch of sand until he felt it trying to lift from his grip. Putting his head down, he increased his speed, then threw it like a javelin. The UAV tucked right, then swooped back level and began soaring, climbing slowing into the night. The sound from its electric motors faded quickly; by the time it reached 1,200 feet, it was both impossible to see or hear in the night sky.
Johnny hopped back into the pickup. He had preprogrammed the little bird to fly a figure-eight pattern above the truck, acting as a scout.
“There’s a checkpoint near the road to our east,” Johnny told Turk, showing him the screen. “Five miles.”
They tucked east, then south, skirting a small settlement to reach a ridge two miles due northeast of Palmyra where they could survey the city and surrounding area easily.
A pair of highways intersected near the tip of the city, making it an important crossroads. The highways themselves were barely that: they accommodated a single lane of traffic in each direction, and though paved, it was hard to tell in places because of the sand that typically covered the pavement. An airport once used by the Syrian air force sat like a dog’s tail at the southeast corner of the city. The runways were too cratered for use by planes, but the Daesh forces had about two platoons’ worth of men stationed in barracks there. A brackish, seasonal marsh folded against the edge of an ancient lake bed at the opposite end of the city; a smaller, similarly dead lake sat nearby.
Daesh troops were scattered at intervals around Palmyra’s boundaries. Turk mapped out a path between them and set off on foot, leaving Johnny and Christian with the truck. He walked around the back of the hill to a dried creek bed, using that to get within fifty yards of a building on the city boundary. He was just about to climb over a wall into the backyard when Johnny spotted movement on a nearby rooftop.
“Seventy meters to your left, two guys on that house,” he told Turk.
Turk dropped behind the wall. Johnny watched the two figures kneel near the bricks that marked the edge of the roof. They were looking in Turk’s direction, but didn’t seem to be able to pick him out of the shadows.
“They see me?” asked Turk.
“Hard to tell.” A moment later, one of the men began spraying his AK-47 in Turk’s general direction. He ran through the entire magazine before stopping. The firing was erratic, but near enough to Turk to make it clear he’d heard or seen something.
“Shit,” muttered Turk.
“Yeah. We got lights.”
“Patrol?”
“Maybe — pickup coming from the center of town. One of our guys is on the phone.”
“I’m gonna back out.”
“Stay low.” Johnny turned to Christian, who was watching the feed over his shoulder. “Maybe we should do a diversion.”
“Nah. He gets out without being seen, Daesh writes this off as two guys with overactive imaginations.”
Turk crawled three hundred yards to a dirt road, changed direction slightly, and then half crawled, half ran, back in their direction. By that time a patrol had arrived. They did a perfunctory search, barely looking over the wall before heading back and returning to their post in a building near the city center.
A half hour later, sure that they hadn’t been detected, Johnny recovered the UAV and the three Americans headed back to their base.
40
It began with a car bomb in the market area an hour and a half after sunrise. The brothers used too many explosives, but that was hardly a drawback: Ghadab grinned as he watched a woman a block away pitched into the air by the explosion.
She wasn’t wearing a head covering when the bomb exploded. Clearly, God had seen her and directed her demise.
The explosion set off an alarm at police headquarters. Three of the four officers on duty were cut down as they rushed from the building. The fourth came out with his hands up.
He was taken to Ghadab, who was supervising the raid from a roof across the street. Without bothering to question him, Ghadab slit the man’s throat. Blood fanned the air purple-red before he even pulled the knife away.
The ravages of war had reduced the population to barely over two hundred, the majority women and children. Shouting and firing their Kalashnikovs as they went door to door, Ghadab’s men rousted thirty-three males, all but two or three over the age of fifty or under the age of fifteen, to an empty lot in the shadow of the old storage tanks near the center of town.
“What a pathetic collection,” Ghadab told Yuge the Iraqi. “Not one of them could fight for the Caliphate.”
“That one there, the fat one,” said Yuge, who’d begun interrogating the captives as they were brought over. “He claims to have fought for us.”
“What is he doing in the city, then?”
“He says he is a spy, with information for the Commander.”
“Bring him to me.”
Yuge grabbed the man by the shirt and dragged him to Ghadab. His white shirt and pants had been soaked with sweat; dirt caked on them like mud. A coil of fat above his sagging shoulders supported his head.
“Who are you?” demanded Ghadab.
“Ari, son of Rhaddad,” said the man, as if he expected Ghadab to have heard of him.
“What are you doing in this village?”
“I am preparing for the brothers,” claimed the man. “The infidels are all around. They are planning to strike Palmyra.”
“When?”
“Soon. Very soon.”