Until tonight.
Seeing an unobstructed path up to the main door and no goons stumbling around out front, Turnbull motioned for his guys to move forward. As they ran, the rest of the team was breathing heavily, but not Turnbull.
They backed-up against the front stucco wall of the house, in line next to the door, and paused. A woman cried out from somewhere inside, probably upstairs. The police commandos always got meaner when they felt they were protecting women, and there were always fewer explanations required afterwards. Turnbull understood that, as a practical matter, he was going to have a free hand.
The dudes downstairs were in for a shitty evening, though no doubt orders of magnitude less shitty than the ones who were about to encounter Turnbull.
The other guys carried M4 variants, but Turnbull had left his back at the FOB. Instead, he carried his black Remington 870 short-barreled pump action shotgun with special shells – he used Federal Flite Control Law Enforcement Number One, a buckshot round with 15 pellets and a tight pattern. It cost him a lot out of pocket to score them on the economy, but in this kind of fight, he preferred to vaporize whatever he hit the first time he shot it. As for his pistol, the JAGs always said that any US soldier carrying hollow points was officially a war criminal. Turnbull figured these Islamic State bastards could file charges, if they lived.
He did not anticipate that being a problem.
The American didn’t need to rack in a shell – there was always one in his chamber. He nodded, and the team set for entry. Turnbull swung out about four feet back from the door, took aim at the top hinge and blasted it out. The guys inside went nuts as Turnbull pumped in a second shell and blew out the lower hinge. It should have been another team member who took down the door, but contrary to protocol, Turnbull hit the loose door running with his shoulder, knocking it into the foyer.
The stairway was right in front of him, just like the source had drawn it. The source had hesitated for a moment when asked to draw it. Turnbull stuck the Kimber to his temple and told him in broken Arabic that in 60 seconds the piece of paper that was just slid in front of him was either going to have a diagram of the house on it or his frontal lobe all over it. Turnbull made it clear that it didn’t matter to him which one it was.
All sorts of chaos was going down on the ground floor to Turnbull’s left – dudes running around, shouting, kicking over tables, kicking up piles of powder into toxic clouds. He didn’t see any of them with a weapon in hand yet, so they were the police commandos’ problem. Turnbull’s job was to clear the upstairs, and he bounded over the fallen door and onto the steps, taking two at a time upwards into the dank second floor, slipping two replacement shells into the Remington’s feed along the way.
The stairway rose up to the end of a long hallway going left; a couple of dirty, bare 60 watt incandescent bulbs hanging from cords dropping out of the ceiling threw off the only light. Not very climate change conscious, he noted.
Turnbull hit the landing and pivoted, 12 gauge up and ready. Just as he expected, there were two doorways leading into rooms off of the hall to the left, and then another room straight down at the far end.
Movement left – a big guy popped out of the first door, his face registering utter, fatal confusion.
The terrorist had a battered AK in one paw, but it was pointed down at the grimy carpet. Amateur, Turnbull assessed. Turnbull was already charging down the hall so he could not have stopped even if he had wanted to, and he didn’t want to. The terrorist froze seeing the American coming at him, shotgun barrel pointed directly at his face. Turnbull went straight on and speared him with it – the barrel caught one of his cheek bones and ripped through the skin with Turnbull’s 200 solid pounds behind it. The terrorist staggered back, a bloody flap under his left eye where the barrel had hit him.
Given a couple more seconds, the terrorist might have remembered that he was carrying an assault rifle, but he didn’t live that long. Turnbull half-stepped back, then shot him in the face. The buckshot went in through where his nose had been and out the back, painting the grimy walls with a sheet of crimson terrorist brains. He dropped to the floor like a sack of wet shit.
The American racked another shell into the chamber and scanned for targets. None, no movement. Ignoring the yelling from downstairs, he peeked around the doorframe into the first room. It seemed empty and he didn’t bother clearing it properly. No time. If some other shithead came out behind him, he’d deal with him. Right now, Kelly Turnbull had bigger fish to fry.
A few more steps and he was looking into the second room, his 870 searching for targets. None.
Instead, a girl, probably late teens, was tied down and bent forward over a wooden table. She was naked, of course, and bloody. She tilted her head around and back toward the American, eyes blackened and swollen, lips puffed up and red between her teeth. She looked right into his eyes, with no emotion or anger. She didn’t seem to want from Turnbull any outrage or concern. She saw in his eyes what Turnbull was going to do to her tormenter and that was enough.
Turnbull left the girl tied there and threw himself against the door of the last room at the end of the hall.
The flimsy door almost broke apart, but it held together enough to swing open and out of Turnbull’s way. It was the bedroom of Khalid al-Afridi.
Until Turnbull had wandered into his life, he had been happily handling millions of dollars for the rebel groups and, of course, kidnapping and sodomizing the occasional girl or boy who caught his eye.
The Accountant had been educated in Los Angeles before 2001; his dad was a secular government bigwig. After the liberation, the whole family had gone into the Sunni jihadist business. Sycophants of a secular dictator to enablers of fundamentalist savages – the al-Afridi family was nothing if not adaptable.
Now, the Accountant himself was standing there utterly naked, hands up, shaking. The girl’s blood was smeared across his stomach through his pubic hair and across the front of his thighs. There was a Makarov pistol about two meters away on the bedside table. There was no way he could reach it, no way he could effectively resist.
“Stop! Put down the gun!” Turnbull shouted perfunctorily, loud enough for the commandos to hear downstairs.
“Wait, I’m…” he stuttered, just as Turnbull fired a swarm of buckshot into his groin, making sure to obliterate his bladder and as much of the pelvis itself, and the nerves running through it, as possible. Khalid collapsed onto the floor at a terrible angle, bending at a place people just aren’t supposed to bend. Stunned, the Accountant, simply moaned. Blood was pouring out of him and onto the floor.
The American racked another shell into the chamber and quickly assured himself there was no one else in the room. Then he took the Makarov off the nightstand, walked over to the wounded man, and squatted. Turnbull could hear the ruckus downstairs dying down, so he needed to work fast. He bathed the Makarov in the blood spurting out of the Accountant’s ruined gut.
“You have a ledger, right? Look at me, pal.” Turnbull grabbed his chin because his eyes were starting to roll back. “Point to where they are for me and I’ll get you patched up and you’ll be out paymastering and fucking teenagers again before you know it. You hear me?”
Hope is a powerful ally. Khalid pointed to under a dresser. Turnbull got up, scanned it for wires, and then reached underneath into the hiding place. Bingo, the ledger.
Satisfied, Turnbull turned back to the Accountant.
“Drop it!” he shouted, again loud enough for his team to hear it downstairs.
The Accountant seemed surprised. He started shaking his head “No,” then began sobbing.