Lana and Ludmila watch him. They creep forward, staying low.
One of the men in the yard looks back at the sound of their shooting, but the next instant is killed himself.
Lana hears distant shots and sees that Tahir and Will on the far side of the fire are also cutting down jihadis. One of the men in front of them barrels toward the woodpile before detonating his suicide bomb. His cohorts, Lana guesses, must already have been hit. The woodpile, eight feet deep and six feet high, is singed and shakes violently. Most of it, though, remains standing.
The shooting stops, but Lana feels the tension still building. Who among the jihadis is simply wounded and now waiting with his hand on a button? And there’s the man hiding ahead of them in the trees.
They continue moving toward him, wary of another suicide vest, when he rises up with the rocket launcher, which must have been stashed behind a tree. Lana realizes the missile is the jihadis’ last resort. She and Ludmila open fire, cutting him down.
After moving closer, Ludmila shoots him in the head, taking no chances. The pair enter the clearing with extreme caution, every step feeling like a passage through a minefield, not of munitions but of men.
Ludmila puts a bullet into the brains of all six bodies. Lana didn’t have the stomach for systematically executing men who might be wounded, but she can’t deny that she’s grateful for Ludmila’s actions.
The posse has yet to step from behind the woodpile, but the police chief calls out to them: “Thirteen accounted for here, plus the seven back at the house. There’s still one out there.”
“No, he’s in here,” Emma calls from the house.
Lana can’t see her daughter, but warns her to stay inside.
“Cairo killed him,” Em goes on.
“Then that’s twenty-one, all of ’em,” the chief yells.
But it’s not over.
At that moment, Lana realizes the posse doesn’t know about Tahir.
They’ll mistake him for—
“We have an African man with us now,” she yells, interrupting her own thoughts. “He’s one of us.”
Her shouts issue just as Tahir steps from the brush and smoke to join Will, who’s keeping his distance from the fallen, but eyeing them carefully.
Tahir, like Ludmila, spares no sentiment. He shoots six of the enemy in the head, veering left for the seventh, a man lying crumpled on the ground. Tahir raises his rifle for the last time when the jihadi detonates his suicide vest.
Will, Ludmila, and Lana dive for the ground as a roaring pressure wave expands the air around them. She hears burning fragments whistle by her, every one of which can kill or maim.
“Ludmila?” she says the second she knows that she herself has been spared.
“Fine,” the Russian replies.
So is Will. But Tahir is not.
Lana runs to the bloodshed, hoping for a miracle. There is none. She freezes at the sight, eyes squeezing shut. All she can think about is the life-saving choice the Sudanese made minutes ago up in the deer blind. He didn’t have to kill the four jihadis. He could have let her die along with Will, Ludmila, and the soldier. But he bet that after so many years of his double life, he could take a final stand and try to give his family a stable future.
And perhaps he had.
Epilogue
The bride stood with her father at the end of an aisle, flanked on both sides by rows of crisply attired guests on folding chairs. She glowed in the brilliant sun-cast rays streaking her white gown. The park setting was as lush as the orchids and magnolias adorning the bridal arch, where the pastor, groom, and best man waited.
A harpist struck the familiar first notes. About a hundred people rose to watch the young woman stroll past.
Don stood to Lana’s left on the aisle proper, Emma beside her with Sufyan. Lana glanced at the young man, knowing how empty his home felt since the loss of his uncle. He had grieved for months, but smiled now as Em took his hand. At least his uncle had long ago seen to their well-being.
Lana also took some comfort in the fact that while Fayah Kouri’s indoor and outdoor cameras had captured most of the violence in Hayden Lake, smoke had obscured the gruesome killing of Tahir by a suicide bomber. Sufyan would never have to endure the sight of that explosion.
More than one billion viewers had so far clicked onto the videos of the battles at Fayah’s house. The decisive defeat of ISIS and Al Qaeda’s first major act of joint terrorism had led to the exchange of vicious recriminations on social media from partisans of each radical Islamist group.
Divide and conquer.
Maybe.
Emma took her mother’s hand. Lana noticed that she still held Sufyan’s, and wondered whether they’d marry. She hoped that decision remained a few years away, although they had both decided to attend the University of Maryland at College Park to study computer science. Emma planned to minor in criminal justice with an eye on eventually joining the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Sufyan joked that he planned to minor in basketball — a small miracle that he could laugh at all so soon.
Now the ring-bearer started up the aisle. The pastor needed but one small hand signal to bring the border collie — now named Good Boy — to the arch. Soft-gripped in his mouth, the dog held the handle of a small wicker basket carrying the wedding bands. When he heeled by the couple, Lana would have sworn the dog was smiling. His new master certainly was.
Lana’s own dog, Jojo, was back on his feet after more than a month of drug-induced immobility. When he rose for the first time at the veterinarian’s office, his legs were shaky as a newborn calf’s. But as soon as he steadied, he walked over to Emma. It was as if he sensed that she, more than anyone, needed to feel extra-protected. Jojo went almost everywhere with Em now, as much an emotional support dog as a guard.
Cairo was back in retirement at the kennel owned by Deputy Director Holmes’s son. The old Malinois and Bob were both in pretty good shape, considering all they’d been through. Holmes’s first act upon reassuming his duties was to force Marigold Winters to resign. She promptly took a position with a Washington think tank that shared her xenophobic beliefs.
Fortunately, she hadn’t had much to seize upon of late. For more than five months, the country had experienced a respite from radical Islamist violence, but Lana had not let down her guard. She knew the invisible invaders hadn’t disappeared. From her own cybersleuthing she’d gleaned that those men and women remained as determined as ever to defeat the U.S. and, like their kinetic counterparts, were doing all they could to learn from their failures so their successes could prove more deadly in the near future.
The other invisible invader was smallpox, but those outbreaks had become rarer and more tightly contained.
The pastor cleared his throat and the ceremony began. The bride and groom exchanged vows and rings and then kissed at the pastor’s invitation.
Lana marveled over the lovely couple. Who would have thought?
She looked around, spotting a few smallpox survivors. They would always bear their scars, but some were luckier than others. Among the latter was Matt Lauer, leading the applause as the couple walked down the aisle together. Without him, Jimmy McMasters and Ludmila Migunov might never have met.
The Today Show had dedicated an hour to the pair’s “spectacular bravery,” as Lauer called it, introducing them a couple of weeks after Hayden Lake and Jimmy’s long-odds heroics in the Gulf.
The boat racer had been brought on set first, appearing with his hands up and saying, “Don’t worry, Matt. No hugs today, I promise.”