Each man was placed in front of a post and tied tightly; then black cloth hoods were placed over their heads. Shakuri had held the strange man’s stare and had felt the heat of those dark, accusing eyes. He heard low voices muttering prayers. Some women wept.
“Attention!” roared the captain, and the firing squad soldiers assumed their proper stances and brought up the AKs, jamming the wooden stocks into their shoulders. “Prepare to fire!”
Shakuri forced himself to remain immobile, rooting himself to the spot, but felt his entire body tighten as if he were one of those unfortunates tied to the posts. His face betrayed nothing, but his heartbeat increased to an irregular, hard thump in his chest, and the arithmetic of the moment came to mind: Ten automatic rifles with thirty rounds apiece equaled three hundred rounds to expend on six men. Fifty bullets each and please, Allah, let that be enough. Inshallah. God’s will.
“Fire!” shouted the captain, and the ten triggers were pulled simultaneously, unleashing a storm of bullets at the helpless targets, raking up and down the line and hitting each man again and again. A layer of smoke flattened in the space between the firing squad and the condemned men, and Major Shakuri noted the bright orange flashes that spat from the multiple muzzles. Once the shooting started, it did not stop until the magazines were empty. Most of the defenseless victims surged forward upon the impact of the first strikes, then twisted or slumped toward the ground, still hanging from their posts. The bodies were ravaged by the continuous fire until there were no more bullets, and the captain said, “Cease fire.” The soldiers dropped their weapons across their chests and came to attention, their faces blank.
There was no moaning and not a twitch of life from the destroyed bodies, and Shakuri’s hearing came back to the sound of wailing from wives and children and other family members of the deceased. The captain saluted, and he returned it, then made the long walk back to his waiting limousine, struggling to hold himself together. During the trip back to his headquarters, he remained haunted by the flood of blood that had spouted from deep, gouging wounds and the fragments of brain and oozing trails of intestines and torn flesh that had been flung against the sandbags and covered the ground around the men. Most of all, he remembered the calm, furious stare of that one brave condemned man, the mayor, who would not be intimidated and cowed and bent to the will of the Iranians just because someone put a gun to his head.
The major took a few minutes to go to up to his suite, and when he looked in the bathroom mirror, he saw that his face was bright red. His stomach twisted, and he made it to the toilet just in time to vomit up his dinner, going to his knees in pain. He thought he might be having a heart attack, and he lay on the cool tiles until his breathing slowed while the visions of the execution continued to flash through his mind. I had to do it! There was no choice!
22
Swanson had frozen in place, nose to the ground, when he heard the long burst of automatic weapons fire in the distance. AK-47s were buzzing in a sustained staccato of fire, but it was far behind him, somewhere back in the city. He glanced at his watch: nine o’clock. Plenty of time.
Slowly, he surveyed the area around him again and saw nothing had changed. A static guard position forty yards away still remained quiet, with one soldier sitting on a lip of sandbags, a rifle across his knees, and talking down to his partner in the hole. The Iranians had not yet even thrown coils of barbed wire around the ammo dump, depending for security on the human eyes of men with guns, who generally saw only what they expected to see.
By ten o’clock, he was within a quarter mile of the small mountains of cases and crates, which were showered with bright lights. To Kyle, that also meant the reverse — those same glaring lights created helpful corridors of darkness between the stacks. He paused and checked his surroundings once again. The static guard post was now behind him, and a single roving soldier was on duty around the dump. Swanson had timed the man passing the same point every ten minutes. That opened a huge window of time.
Their training was working against them. The commandos were honed to be frontline fighters and were not accustomed to the rear-echelon garrison duty that had been thrust upon them; it was demeaning, and they were not good at it. When the rover guard passed the next time, Kyle eased his right leg forward and untied the drag bag, then slowly and softly assembled the M-16A3, putting in a fresh magazine. The faint clicks of the metal against metal sounded like thunderclaps to him but were unheard by anyone else. He waited another ten minutes for the guard to pass again before moving to his final position.
It was a little after eleven when the guard went by on his usual route, watching the ground as if studying his own footsteps, and ducking his eyes from the bright lights that blazed from portable wheeled stands all around. Kyle grinned: He’s blind as a bat!
Swanson had maneuvered to a spot where the illumination changed sharply into shadow, and slowly rose up beside a row of tall telephone poles, letting them mask his bulk. Five yards away was the deep valley of crates and containers, and he crossed it with three easy strides that would not draw a curious eye. Then, once in the wider cavern of shadow, he ventured deeper into the complex, his path determined by the patches of dark, until he was fully surrounded by the peaks of the containers loaded with explosives, bullets, grenades, and shells. No guards patrolled the interior area.
He took his time to plant bricks of C-4 at various points, picking out containers that he thought would cause the most damage. He was not after a hit-or-miss fire-and-light show but wanted to create a volcanic bonfire that would be almost impossible to extinguish. Then, when the rocket-propelled grenades exploded, they would fly all over the place, igniting even more explosions. Cases of hand grenades would pulverize whatever was around. Fifty-caliber bullets would cook off hot and punch through other cases, and the entire thing would sizzle and boom for hours. Knowing the Pathfinders would be bringing in more ammunition of all kinds, Kyle decided to expend all of his C-4 but for a single brick to be kept back for an emergency. The det cord was strung, and the timers were all set for 0230.
It was almost midnight when he left the place as quietly as he had entered, moving faster once he got past the guard post. He wished he could have taken those guards out, but their bodies would have called attention to the fact that somebody had been in the area. Anyway, those two would have enough to worry about in a just little while.
At the edge of the final field, he stripped away the ghillie, broke down the rifle again, put it all in the drag bag, and, once again in his baggy Egyptian clothes, walked back to the waiting 4Runner. It was time to go pick up his people.
Tech sergeant Bubba Talbot suppressed a smirk as he cocked the unique scarlet beret that identified him as an Air Force Combat Controller to just the right angle so the wind across the flight deck would not sweep it off his head; he was the man tonight. Four of the deadliest men on the planet walked with him to the Black Hawk helicopter that was sitting in the busy gloom aboard the giant aircraft: a two-man SEAL sniper team, a Marine Recon explosives expert, and some weird-looking dead-eyes dude with a big gun from the Christians in Action, better known as the CIA. All were sneak-and-peek gunslingers, and their job was to protect Talbot, the Combat Controller. The five experts had been chopped without explanation for temporary duty with something called Task Force Trident, assembled at Fort Bragg on the double, then flown across the Atlantic, and finally boarded the COD for the final leg to the carrier.