He had not had sex with her. Shadaa’s body was pleasing, and it was within his right as a fighter to take her — God’s just reward. But something held him back, something beyond his religious beliefs.
He was pure. But so was she — something in the way she presented herself to him, how she bowed her head in submission.
“Enough,” he said aloud, urging himself back to work. He went to his office and began jotting down his orders to send his scouts to their various assignments.
But even as wrote, his thoughts drifted.
Maybe I’ll go back to the restaurant when I’m done. I should check on the girl to make sure no harm has come to her.
44
Johnny and Turk had just reached the wall of the abandoned compound when Johansen hailed them on the radio with a string of expletives.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Planting the last bugs,” said Turk.
“It’s too risky. Send the bot and forget the bunker.”
“We’ll be in and out in ten minutes,” said Johnny. “Relax.”
They scrambled over the wall and dropped into an alley between the compound buildings. Viewed from the koalas’ cameras, the alley had looked as wide as a highway. But Johnny scraped his shoulders as he followed Turk to the central courtyard. They stopped, checking with Christian to make sure it was clear, then sprinted across to the west wall. Johnny vaulted over like a gymnast. He ran up the street, waiting for Turk in the shadows near the corner.
Turk was huffing when he caught up. “Got the rope?” he managed.
“Yeah. Give me sixty seconds, then come.”
Johnny crossed the street, bolting to the side of a two-story building. He leaped, arms up, and grabbed the metal edge of the roof. But the edging was too thin — he couldn’t get a grip.
His legs took the shock easily but the stumps above them reverberated with the impact, sending it through his body. He took a breath, stepped back, and sprang upward again. This time he willed himself higher and managed to get his right elbow on the roof. Then he levered himself over the edge.
Johnny pulled the rope out of his ruck and tossed it down, anchoring Turk as he climbed up. Turk was halfway up when Christian warned that the patrol was approaching their street.
“Next building,” said Johnny when he got up. They jumped over and ran to the lip, a low wall just high enough to keep them from being seen from the ground. Once the patrol passed, they could plant the bugs on the corners and leave.
“Damn,” muttered Christian over the radio.
That’s not good, thought Johnny.
In the command bunker nearly one hundred miles away, Chelsea watched the Daesh patrol stop near the building where Johnny and Turk were hiding.
What had they seen?
She zoomed on Johnny, flat on the roof. There was no way the patrol could have seen him, and yet, there they were, all three men getting out of the truck.
Oh, God, she thought. Don’t let them spot him.
Johnny heard voices over the rumble of the truck engine below. Reaching into his pocket, he took out the video bug, slid the tiny switch to activate it, then slowly edged to the corner.
“What are you doing?” whispered Turk.
“Planting the bug.”
“Wait—”
“If we have to take them down—”
“No, listen. They don’t know we’re here,” added Turk.
Johnny held his breath. The men were talking. He hadn’t turned his translator on, but he could tell Turk was right — the voices were relaxed.
“They’re saying how much they hate their commander,” explained Turk. “They’re peeing on the steps where he’ll have to walk tomorrow.”
There was laughter below. A few minutes later, the men were gone.
45
“This is the best gaming laptop, period,” declared the salesman.
Massina couldn’t hold back a smile as the kid, barely into his twenties, waxed poetic about the laptop. “Better than Alienware?”
“Another awesome machine. But this is better.”
“It’s the one you own?”
“My laptop is a couple of years old,” confessed the clerk. “And, uh, I couldn’t afford either of these.”
“You get a commission on sales?”
“Yes, well—”
“I’ll take it. And that coupon for Battlefield.”
The salesman’s face lit up. “Your grandson will be very pleased.”
“Grandson? It’s for me.”
An hour and a half later, Massina had three new laptops, each from a different store. He went to a Starbucks, bought a coffee, and set about creating a series of phony identities. He spread them liberally over the web, opening social media accounts and visiting chat rooms, establishing a different background for each. Then he accessed one of the chat rooms Borya had discovered.
He’d told Johansen that Smart Metal would no longer probe Daesh. But he’d said nothing about doing it himself.
“God, what a lot of rubbish,” he muttered, scrolling through one of the conversations. He was looking for a user named GigaMan who accessed the site through a Kosovo provider who, among other things, supplied email addresses to Daesh gunrunners ID’d by Chiang.
GigaMan wasn’t active. Massina posted a few comments, cursing the others as dupes and idiots. This got him a handful of negative responses, but for the most part, he was simply ignored. He tried calling out GigaMan, mentioning him in one of the posts. But he got no response. After about a half hour, he signed out under the name he’d used, then went back in, using an anonymous server service and a different identity.
Nothing.
By then it was past midnight, and the store was about to close. Massina was the last one left.
“Tomorrow,” he said, closing down his computer. “We’ll find you tomorrow.”
46
Bugs planted, Johnny and Turk headed to the Daesh commander’s compound. In less than five minutes, Johnny had shimmied up the telephone pole at the side of the compound, pointed the bugs at the nearest window, and climbed down. Ten minutes later, they were heading north toward the bunker.
“Truck on the road ahead,” warned Chelsea. “There’s a turnoff on your right about a quarter mile. Take that and you can go north without being seen.”
Johnny checked the route. It was longer and rougher, if safer.
“They’re getting paranoid,” Christian said. “Worrying too much. And we’re only just starting.”
They followed directions anyway, treading along shallow ruts to a wavy line at the base of a ridge. There was no moon, and in the dim starlight the terrain looked unearthly; Johnny felt as if he were on another planet, far out in the solar system.
He fought against a wave of fatigue. They still had work to do; he couldn’t afford to relax. He shook himself, stretched, tried to find his concentration as he surveyed the landscape ahead.
The hills seemed to separate as they got closer, and Christian was able to find a pass east without consulting the satellite image. A thick layer of dirt slowed them as they got through, but beyond that they had firm ground and the outlines of a road. Christian drove with a lead foot; Johnny couldn’t see the speedometer but he guessed they were hitting close to a hundred miles an hour.
“We need to stop a mile ahead,” he told Christian, checking their position on the GPS grid. “We’ll be a half mile east of the target.”