“I know you are a spy,” Shadaa told Chelsea in English. “Get inside.”
“No spy.”
“Who do you work for? The council? I doubt it. The Americans? Turkey?”
“No spy. Somalia.”
“Stand against the wall.”
Chelsea moved slowly, trying to relax her muscles, trying to remember the exercises — they had done this in training, this exact scenario, an attacker coming behind you with a gun. The Krav Maga instructor was bigger, stronger, ready to fire.
Toooch… toocch.
Gunshots, below, not here.
Chelsea saw Shadaa jerking around, looking toward the door at the sound of the bullets.
What happened next was reflex, hammered into her by weeks of training with the team.
Pivoting on her left foot, she swung her elbow with all her might into her captor’s side, then punched up with her right fist, aiming for Shadaa’s chin. Shadaa, taken off guard, fell back; Chelsea’s fist hit her neck instead.
Then it was about anger and fear, but mostly anger.
Chelsea threw herself at the other woman, crashing her against the wall. She wanted to knock the gun from Shadaa’s hand but couldn’t see it. Instead she pushed her against the wall, grinding her shoulder and wedging her legs, springing into her.
A sharp elbow to her rib caught Chelsea by surprise. As she started to fall, she grabbed the other woman by the throat with her left hand and together they tumbled over, spinning onto the floor. Chelsea went down on her back, pinned by the larger woman’s weight.
Shadaa had lost the pistol, but instead of trying to retrieve it, she squirmed around, punching Chelsea in the face. Chelsea twisted and the next blow missed.
Knife! Knife!
Chelsea struggled to get up but her feet tangled in the long dress. Shadaa grabbed her right shoulder and pulled her down, trying to twist her over so she could strike her face. Chelsea’s fingers groped in her pocket, searching for the hilt of her weapon. Shadaa, knee on the floor for leverage, jerked Chelsea backwards, lifting her slightly, angling into a body slam the way a wrestler would.
The blow nearly knocked Chelsea out. She flailed with the knife, jabbing through her dress. Shadaa lifted her again, aiming to smash her hard against the floor, but instead she collapsed, stung by the slashing pain that tore up her side.
Chelsea looked into her face. Shadaa’s eyes crossed.
Chelsea plunged the knife into her enemy’s stomach.
Harder! Harder!
Johnny beat Turk to the patio, pivoting over the short wall with a quick jump. He grabbed the MP5 from the man he’d slain, pulling the strap off the dead body with a sharp yank. Blood burbled from the man’s forehead, spreading across the stones like spilled ink, more purple than red.
“Inside,” said Turk, coming up behind him.
They left the bodies there, rushing through the large, empty dining room.
Johnny halted, swiveling his head right and left to make sure she wasn’t there. He fought the urge to call her name — it would only put her in more danger.
“Stairs are back this way,” prompted Turk. “Come on.”
It was only with the last blow that Chelsea remembered she was plunging her knife into a human being. By then, Shadaa was long dead, her blood everywhere, spurting and oozing and leaking, soaking into the carpet and floorboards.
Fifty blows with the knife. So much anger.
Was it gone now?
Chelsea got up. Blood covered the knife and her hand, already sticky. The smell was pungent, similar to the smell of a field-gutted deer in the hot sun, if you’d smeared yourself with the blood and gizzards.
The door sprung open. Chelsea whirled, knife out.
“You OK?” Johnny Givens filled the doorway, one of the guard’s MP5 in his hands. “You OK?”
64
“Coms coming back online,” Krista told Johansen. “But it looks like we’ve lost a few of the video bugs.”
“Government center?” asked Johansen.
“Still working. No damage to the buildings. Leave it to the Russians to miss anything important.”
Johansen looked at the screen showing a live feed from an Air Force Global Hawk coming south to get a better view of the attack. A Russian fighter to the west challenged the UAV by turning on its target radar. The American pilot ignored it: what was a little petty harassment between hostile almost-allies?
The Russians had hit the south side of Palmyra — an indication of where the Syrians and their allies were planning their assault. They had also bombed the airport — a first. But aside from putting two good-sized craters in the already unusable runway, the Russians had done little damage.
“Air Force says Syrian helicopters taking off from Damascus,” said Krista. “The attack’s coming soon.”
“You have coms with Christian yet?”
“Negative.”
“Keep trying. It’s time to get everyone the hell out of there, and us, too.”
65
Ghadab had no patience for waiting, and despite the great respect he owed the Caliph, he could not keep himself from pacing back and forth inside the mosque. An aide had been assigned to him, ostensibly to see to his needs; the young man was more a guard assigned to monitor him. He was too skinny to do much more than that, though the radio he held in his hand would undoubtedly bring a phalanx of guards if Ghadab tried to do something so unworthy as to burst into the consultation chamber at the far end of the prayer hall.
All morning long, different delegations, advisers, commanders, messengers had come and gone. The hall was filled with them, and many others roamed outside, awaiting an audience. The crowd included a few old acquaintances, but to a man they had greeted Ghadab with barely a nod. It seemed word of the council’s displeasure had spread.
Unable to focus, his thoughts flew in different directions: plans for different attacks, the idiocy of the Americans, the coming apocalypse, Shadaa.
She kept intruding.
He remembered the weight of her body against him, the curve of her side, the way she felt beneath him…
He forced himself to think of his mission. Nearly everything was in place; the students had been infiltrated two years before and needed only to be activated. All that waited was settling on a target. Rome, Amsterdam, America again… Boston…
Ghadab walked the length of the hall, then back. His minder stayed at his elbow.
“Ask your radio how much time,” he said to the young man. “Find me when you have an answer. I will be outside.”
The young man’s brow knitted, but Ghadab didn’t wait to hear his protests.
The mosque was constructed on a stone platform; a gentle slope ran to the walls, which separated the holy grounds from the street. Men clustered in groups all across the yard. The only thing they all had in common were the AK-47s dangling haphazardly from their shoulder straps. There were young and old, traditionally dressed, combat clothes, and a few in Western-style suits.
A man in a black military uniform ran up from the street and went straight into the mosque. Ghadab thought nothing of it until another followed a minute later.
“What’s going on?” Ghadab asked his minder.
“You are on the schedule. Soon—”
“No. The messengers?” He gestured toward a third, just running up from the street.
A few feet away, one of the brothers was listening intently to his mobile. Ghadab turned from him and saw that several others were doing the same.