One thing at a time. Just stay alive, and you’ll figure out a way.
Only a short distance farther on, after passing though after a half dozen turns and two more electronic gates, the man next to Lourds removed the blindfold.
‘Be ready. And when you must, shoot to kill.’
‘When? Not if?’
The man didn’t reply. He took out his sidearm and drew back the action. Then he freed a knife with a curved blade.
Walking a bit farther, they paused at an office. One of the other men unfolded a sheaf of papers and handed them to a guard sitting at a desk, watching security monitors. ‘Your lucky night, I see. The colonel will be happy to see your prisoner, Foad.’ The man flipped one of the pages as Foad stepped behind him. A knife flashed briefly in Foad’s hand as he slit the security man’s throat.
Lourds stood there frozen, not believing the cold-blooded killing he’d just witnessed.
Foad grabbed the dying man’s hair and shoved his face into the desk, preventing him from standing and fighting in the small room. Crimson sprayed over the desk and the monitors.
‘Go, Adan!’
‘God be with you, Foad.’ The man holding Lourds’s arm tugged him into motion. They rounded another corner. A uniformed guard stood in front of a door. He looked over at them and yawned, then smiled and waved.
Without a word, Adan left Lourds and took a step toward the man and drove his knife up under the guard’s jaw. The blade slid through the soft palate and into the man’s brain. He died as he was falling.
Horrified, Lourds watched as Adan grabbed the dead man’s radio earbud and an electronic key from the dead man’s pocket. Adan shoved the key into the door’s reader and waited for the light to turn green before slipping the dead bolts free. He pushed the door open and motioned Lourds inside.
Heart beating rapidly, Lourds entered the room and spotted Miriam huddled in the corner. At first he thought she was dead. Then she stood and tried to approach him. Chains mounted on the wall kept her from taking more than a few steps.
‘Thomas …’ Her voice was hoarse and ragged. Bruises marred her face, and all she wore was a pair of red panties.
Lourds went to her, not knowing what to say or do. Instantly, she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her cold body up against his. Warm tears trickled down her swollen face. Anger and sadness swelled in a knot at the back of Lourds’s throat. He turned to the two men with him. ‘Can someone get these chains off her?’
Adan dragged his kill into the dark prison cell. The other man produced a picklock set, crossed to Miriam, and got to work on her cuffs.
In a few seconds, Miriam was free. ‘You came for me.’
‘I did.’
‘I knew if anyone did, it would be you.’
Before he could reply, the dull roars of several explosions filled the prison cell.
46
The shaped charges at the back of the prison building worked perfectly, creating a smoke-filled crater Mufarrij could have driven a tank through. The shattered wall burst apart in broken chunks.
Mufarrij pulled a scarf over his lower face to block the dust, then stepped into the prison, his AK-47 leading the way.
A man coughed to the left, and Mufarrij turned with his finger on the trigger. The emaciated body and dulled eyes belonged to a prisoner, though. The man lay unmoving on a thin mattress on the floor and watched with little interest. He lifted one sticklike arm.
‘Water. Please. Water.’
Mufarrij ignored the man and pressed on. The blast was supposed to allow them entrance to a hallway. Instead, he stood in a prison cell. Their intel had been off. That would cause complications, which he hoped wouldn’t snowball.
On the other side of the bars, two dazed guards started to pick themselves up. Seeing him, their hands fumbled for their dropped weapons.
Mufarrij shot them, hitting both men with short, controlled bursts that drove them back and burst their hearts and lungs. Some of the rounds danced between the steel bars, striking sparks. One of the ricochets flattened further against Mufarrij’s body armor.
At the door, he pulled out a shaped charge, slapped it onto the locked door, and activated the three-second timer. When he stepped back, the six men following him stepped back as well. They worked as a unit, as he had trained them.
The charge exploded, blowing the locking mechanism to bits. The door swung open, clanging against the far wall.
Mufarrij went through, holding the assault rifle close to his body. At the corner ahead of them, a guard peered around and pointed a pistol at the advancing Saudi strike team.
Never breaking stride, Mufarrij stitched a short burst at the man. One of the rounds struck the wall, and the next two smashed the Guardsman’s face into pieces and pitched the corpse into the hallway. Mufarrij stepped over the dead man and took a quick look into the hall beyond.
Three Guardsmen held the corridor. Their rifle rounds smacked into the walls, ceiling, and floor, one bullet nicking Mufarrij’s right ear. He pulled back, warm blood spilling down his neck, and motioned to the squad member who carried an AK-47 outfitted with a GP-30 Obuvka.
The man nodded, readied the underbarrel grenade launcher, and pointed it out into the hallway. He fired immediately and ducked back to cover.
When the grenade exploded, filling the hallway with a deafening BOOM!, Mufarrij wheeled around the corner with the assault rifle snugged tight against his shoulder. One of the three men staggered out from the wall and lifted his weapon. Mufarrij put a short burst into him, dropping the guard where he stood, and kept going.
Waking up from his rest in one of the unoccupied cells — which were growing fewer every day — Colonel Davari ran to the main prison security network headquarters. He carried a rifle he’d taken from one of the Guardsmen along the way.
‘What is going on?’
The three Guardsmen manning the security cameras talked rapidly into their microphones, trying to organize the security details. They sat tensely at their workstations, juggling between the different cameras with their keyboards and joysticks.
Davari crossed to the officer in charge, a hard-faced man who had served the prison for a dozen years. ‘Wafaei, what is happening?’
‘The prison has been attacked.’
‘I can see that!’ Davari’s gaze raked the monitors.
A full-scale offensive lit up the front of the prison. Heavy weapons fired on the tall security wall, knocking down sections, shorting out electricity. On one of the screens, a Guardsman returning fire was standing beneath one of the wall sections as it came down. One moment he was there, the next he was gone, buried under hundreds of pounds of rock and concrete rubble. ‘Who’s attacking us?’
‘We do not know.’
‘Have you seen them?’
Wafaei crossed to one of the workstations and took over the keyboard. He tapped keys, and the image blanked. ‘This is all we have seen.’
A new window opened on the computer monitor. Three men caught by the security cameras as they crept close to the wall. They wore thobes, but those served only to disguise the weapons they carried. When they were challenged by a Guardsman walking his post, the men reacted immediately. One shot the Guardsmen while the other two pulled out rocket launchers, took aim at the guard posts at either end of the wall, and fired. They were already pulling back before the rockets struck their targets.
‘They took out the sniper teams in the front.’ Wafaei wiped sweat from his face.