Moving a few steps at a time, they approached the back entrance of the main building. Al-Fasr drew the SIG Sauer semiautomatic from its holster. With a nod of his head, he motioned for Shakeeb to follow. Holding the pistol in front of him, he entered the large hall that extended through the center of the house. The hall was strewn with debris — smashed furniture, paintings torn from the walls, shards of broken vases. The only untouched object in the room was a framed photograph of the Emir, smiling down on the room.
They had already been here. Al-Fasr took a deep breath and forced himself to remain calm. He had long ago forsaken his religious upbringing, but now he wished that he could summon help. Allah, I beseech you…
He opened the door to the family sitting room.
More debris. Carpets, smashed sculptures, broken lamps lay like rubble from an earthquake. His eyes swept the ruins, as he prayed that he wouldn’t find what he most dreaded.
He saw something on the floor — a hand protruding from behind the slashed leather sofa. Al-Fasr scrambled through the rubble, around the sofa. He gazed down on the woman’s body. Her lifeless eyes stared straight upward.
“Mother!” He knelt beside her body. Blood oozed from a single purple hole in her forehead. Her hand was still warm, her fingers clenched in a fist. For nearly a minute he remained with her, his chest heaving in sobs.
He felt Shakeeb’s hand on his shoulder. “They may still be here, Colonel. We must leave.”
He nodded and rose. Shakeeb was right. He could not help her, but the others — his father, his sister Aliyah. Perhaps…
He didn’t have far to look. In the doorway to the kitchen, he nearly stumbled over a body. It was his sister. Like her mother, the young woman had been executed, killed by a single shot to the forehead.
Al-Fasr dropped to his knees, overcome by his grief. He kissed his sister’s dead cheek. He clutched her body, rocking her as if she were a sleeping child.
As through a fog, Shakeeb’s voice came in a low whisper. “I heard something. Someone is in the hall.”
He rose and picked his way through the debris. Around the edge of the kitchen door he saw a man in a camouflage army uniform. He wore the black beret of an officer in the Emir’s Royal Guard. His back was turned, and he seemed to be studying an object on the tiled floor.
The officer sensed their presence behind him. He whirled around.
In a crouch, Al-Fasr held the SIG Sauer in both hands, the sights superimposed over the officer’s chest. He waited. He wanted the man to recognize him.
An expression of alarm spread over the officer’s face, and his hand went for his holstered sidearm.
Al-Fasr waited.
The officer’s pistol was clear of his holster, coming upward —
The nine-millimeter Parabellum round struck the officer in the middle of his chest. He reeled backward, then dropped. His weapon clattered to the floor beside him. Spraddle-legged, he braced himself with one hand, clutching his chest with the other.
Al-Fasr strode over to him. He knelt and picked up the officer’s pistol. The man stared back up at him, his face contorted with pain.
As Al-Fasr rose, he noticed for the first time the object on the floor, three feet away, that had captured the officer’s attention. Around it spread a crimson pool of blood. Al-Fasr’s breath left him in a single gasp.
He was looking into the eyes of his father’s severed head.
In the next instant, Jamal Al-Fasr, the Yale-educated eldest son of a cultured Abu Dhayed family, was transformed into a madman. His lungs filled with a burning fury. A primal scream erupted from him.
He seized the AR-15 assault rifle from the petrified Shakeeb. With his thumb he slid the fire selector to automatic. He shoved the muzzle into the wounded officer’s face.
The man’s eyes widened. “Please, have mercy…”
Al-Fasr held the trigger down. The officer’s head exploded in a gelatinous spray of bone and brain matter. Al-Fasr kept the trigger depressed. He continued firing until the magazine was empty.
Smoke spewed from the heated barrel. Al-Fasr’s chest heaved up and down, his breath coming in hoarse gasps. His trousers and boots were splattered with blood and bits of flesh. On the floor the Royal Guard officer’s body jerked and twitched. The remains of his skull looked like a shattered melon.
Gently, Shakeeb removed the weapon from Al-Fasr’s hands. He extracted the empty magazine and shoved in a fresh one. “They heard the gunfire, Colonel. We must leave.”
Al-Fasr remained for another moment, staring at his father’s head. The sightless eyes gazed back at him.
The Jet Ranger dipped its nose and skimmed over the hill behind the compound. Al-Fasr saw a vehicle coming — a desert-camouflaged four-wheeler, not a Rover like those used by the Emirate Defense Force. This was a larger vehicle, wider and lower to the ground.
An HMMWV — a Hummer — not more than fifty meters away.
Americans. Too late to avoid them. Would they open fire?
Al-Fasr hunched in his seat, braced for a burst of machine-gun fire.
None came. As the helo swept past the Hummer, Al-Fasr locked gazes with the occupant of the right seat. The man wore full battle gear, including the Wehrmacht — looking helmet and a sidearm. He was an officer, Al-Fasr guessed, probably Marine Corps. They had come not to lead the assault, just to support the Emir’s cowardly Royal Guard troops.
Al-Fasr felt a wave of hate overcome him. They helped kill my family. For an instant he considered swinging back, ordering Shakeeb to open fire with the AR-15.
No, the helicopter was too easy a target. He would take his revenge at another time. Another way.
He pointed the nose of the Jet Ranger southeastward, toward the coast. They would remain inland from the shoreline and fly over the mountainous southern border of the emirate. During his planning he had established a contingency base in the high country of Yemen. That was where he and the Sherji — his militia of freedom fighters — would go if the coup somehow failed.
Now the coup had failed.
As the Jet Ranger sped across the low plateau, Al-Fasr tried to assemble the pieces of his shattered plan. One persistent thought burned in his mind like an ember. Someone had betrayed them. No matter how long it took, he would find the traitors. When he did, he would know how to deal with them.
Someone had summoned the Americans. Who? It had to be the Emir himself. Sheik Al-Fatiyah, the fat old Emir, was a man of meager intelligence whose appointed successor, his son, was even fatter and more unintelligent. Though the emirate possessed vast oil reserves, the Al-Fatiyah family’s idea of governance had been consistent. Squander every dinar on family palaces in Abu Dhayed, villas in Switzerland, yachts in Cannes. And ignore the discontented masses who hated them.
As an Air Force officer, Al-Fasr felt a burning desire to restore the emirate’s military. Under the Emir, the defense force had become flabby and obsolete, dependent on the benevolent shield of the American military. He intended to devote some of the nation’s wealth to modern weapons, freeing the country from the onerous patronage of the United States.
The Americans. Where had they come from? Saudi Arabia? Oman? How had they entered the emirate without his intelligence sources reporting their presence?
As he thought about it, he realized it should be no surprise that the Americans would support the Emir. They were addicted to cheap gasoline. Stupid and corrupt as the Emir was, he could be counted on to maintain the flow of oil.
Five miles from the shoreline, Al-Fasr banked the Jet Ranger to the west and headed for the high mountainous ridge that defined the emirate’s southern border. The vegetation became more sparse. The moonlike mountain-scape showed only sprigs of sage, an occasional scrawny shrub.