“And what of us?” he had asked. “What judgment must befall us for the sacrilege?”
He would never forget the light in Shirazi’s eyes as he crossed the room to lay a hand on his shoulder. “Sacrilege?” his uncle asked. “There is no sacrilege in destroying the infidel. Remember the words of the hadith-paradise is found ‘neath the shade of swords.”
So it was, in very truth. Harun stamped his feet in an attempt to restore circulation to his freezing toes, steeling himself against the doubts that plagued his soul.
This was the will of Allah…
The call came just as Harry had checked his bags. “Afternoon, Danny. What’s the good word?”
“Not good,” Daniel Lasker replied. “Our back-up team arrived on-site at Richards’ apartment in Falls Church to find Agent Sarami lying near the back of the apartment, knocked unconscious. His gun and satellite phone were both stolen, along with his wallet. We’re doing an inventory on the apartment as we speak, but nothing seems to have been disturbed.”
“Blast it!” Harry exclaimed in frustration, startling the woman in line ahead of him. “I told him to stay put. Any luck running the tags on that Suburban?”
“That’s where it get’s interesting, Harry. We ran it through the Homeland Security intranet, but the Bureau has put a Level-1 Priority block on the tag. Our best guess is that they’re running a big investigation and—”
“Don’t want other agencies stepping on their toes,” Harry finished for him, thinking aloud. If anyone had thought that the bureaucratic infighting would be cleared up by the reorganization following the 9/11 attacks, they should have known better. If anything, things had only gotten worse.
“Does Kranemeyer want me to come back to Langley? I’ve not boarded yet.”
“No. Everything is still go-mission. Contact information for Richards will be uploaded to your TACSAT when you land in Israel. He’s in position.”
“Copy that.”
It was cold on the valley floor, the type of cold that makes up in bitterness what it lacks in actual temperature. The two men waited in the shadow of the cliff, out of the sight of any watchers.
“Thanks for coming,” Thomas said after a long moment.
“My sister told me to bring you back alive,” was the reply, Sirvan’s tone filled with amusement.
Thomas flushed, thankful for the darkness to hide his face. He could still see the look in Estere’s eyes as the two of them had left camp — the look of a proud young woman holding her emotions fiercely in check.
The young Kurd cleared his throat. “Time?”
“Five minutes to drop,” Thomas replied, cupping a hand round the luminous dial of his dive watch.
The silence was well-nigh unbearable, just a faint breeze there below the cliff. Thomas found himself holding his breath, waiting senselessly for the sound of airplane engines. They would be flying too high, he knew that. Coming in with their transponder disguised as that of an airliner.
The laser designator was there, fifty meters ahead of them, hidden in the scrub brush of the valley floor.
Waiting.
It came like a ghost out of the night, the parachute a faint shadow in the pale light of the crescent moon.
The two men exchanged a tight-lipped smile before leaving their cover. So far, so good…
“They’re not leaving,” the man announced grimly, eyeing the old antebellum mansion with binoculars aimed through the tinted windshield of the Suburban.
“You read the audio transcripts, Vic,” his companion retorted. “A security detachment was dispatched twenty minutes after you took out Sarami.”
The man called “Vic” sighed. “Call the rest of the team and tell them to rendevous with us in Falls Church. Time for Plan B.”
“Plan B?”
“Sit tight and wait,” came the terse reply.
They drifted into the village from the north, a pair of strange, misshapen figures shuffling awkwardly forward.
The thick biosuits made communication difficult, so the two men communicated largely by hand signals, punctuated by an occasional hissed instruction.
Death hung over the village like a cloud as they moved forward, picking their way through the detritus of human life. Mutants in the land of the dead.
A girl of perhaps five years of age lay across the threshold of her home, her face still distorted in the agony of death, her body bloated from a day in the sun. Thomas looked down for a moment in pity, then passed on. He could hear Sirvan whispering a prayer behind him.
They both stopped beside the body of a middle-aged Kurdish man, lying on his belly in the dust of the street. His arm was splayed out from his side, the flesh ridged with black veins of blood.
Thomas looked over at Sirvan and saw the Kurd nod through the helmet of his biosuit. The two men knelt by the body and Thomas drew his combat knife, laying it beside him as he moved to roll the body over.
Suddenly, Sirvan’s hand descended on his arm with a grasp of iron as a gasp broke from the Kurd’s lips.
“Stop!” he hissed, never slackening his grip.
“What?” Thomas demanded in surprise.
Sirvan’s index finger shot out, pointing below the dead man’s armpit. There, stretching from beneath the bloated body, barely visible in the shadow, was a thin wire.
The corpse was booby-trapped.
“A pressure trigger,” Sirvan whispered, struggling to make himself understood. “If we roll the body from off the mine…”
He didn’t need to finish. Thomas knew all too well what he was talking about. A bouncing betty. Once the pressure came off the trigger, the mine would bounce two or three feet into the air and detonate, spraying shrapnel in every direction.
His skin crawled at the thought. They wouldn’t have stood a chance.
“Why the wire?” he asked at length, unsure as to whether it was simply a back-up mechanism, or something more sinister.
Having apparently wondered the same thing himself, Sirvan’s fingers were already tracing their way along the wire, careful not to touch the thin strand separating them from death.
“More explosives,” he hissed a moment later, pointing to the house on the other side of the street, pantomiming an explosion from its walls. “A trip-wire,” Sirvan announced, coming back to Thomas’s side. “Tension-sensitive.”
Thomas nodded, understanding what he meant perfectly. Trip wires were often activated by pressure against them, essentially pulling a trigger. This was a dead man switch at its most basic. Whether tension was applied or relieved, the end result was the same.
Annihilation.
“Can it be disarmed?” Thomas asked. He already knew the answer, so it didn’t surprise him when Sirvan shook his head “no”.
“We do not have the time,” the Kurd replied. “Given daylight, I could try. Now — no. I was ordered to bring you back in one piece, remember?”
Thomas laughed, the tension broken for a bare moment in time. “Then, we move on?”
Sirvan looked ahead, his eyes probing the dust of the street. “No. Look there — and there. Claymores.”
Something was wrong. Very wrong. Thomas could feel his skin crawl, and his eyes searched the darkness for an unseen enemy. This had been prepared — for them, for someone…
He picked up his knife and thrust it back into its ankle sheath. “Then that leaves us with the child,” he said slowly.