“When are you coming?” Ahmed Abel asked. “I want Fatima back now.”
His voice was laced with anger, as if the man had been pacing all night long. Sassi felt a pang of guilt course through her, despite knowing she had made the right decision. As they rounded the corner two blocks away from where they had parked, she made another mental note to expedite placement of a water trailer on this block. The logistics plan called for one trailer per block, but rebel fighters had hijacked one of the flatbed trucks carrying two trailers. Fatima’s block had yet to receive theirs.
Fatima’s father was standing in front of their house. He was pacing quickly, holding the phone to his ear and running a hand through his hair. His back was to her as he walked toward the house next door.
“We are close,” Sassi said.
He stopped walking and said, “What do you mean?”
“I have Fatima here in the village. We are twenty meters from your home.”
Abel turned around. “What do you mean!?”
She punched off the phone as they approached Fatima’s father. She confirmed that it was him and that the house was the one she had moved them into a couple of days ago.
“Here we are,” Sassi said. She spread her arms, with one hand holding the phone and one hand still clasping Fatima’s hand. The effect was Sassi raising Fatima’s arm as if she were declaring her champion. Though perhaps there was no victory in reuniting her with this angry man, who was conversely more upset at the timing of their arrival than happy with the fact that she had actually delivered his daughter back to him.
“Why did you surprise me? No warning?” Abel accused. He looked over his shoulder with a twitchy motion and then jerked his head back toward Sassi.
Sassi focused on her peripheral vision, noticing movement a few houses up the road. It occurred to her that the two or three people who were scurrying around were near a house that was two blocks directly behind the home where she had retrieved Fatima’s doll.
“The reception was bad most of the way. You were so upset last night, we wanted to return Fatima to you as soon as possible. As you can see, she’s happy and healthy. She ate a big meal last night and slept well on the trip this morning. I’m not sure I see the issue,” Sassi said.
For the first time, Abel looked down at his daughter. There was a moment of empathy, love reflected in his eyes. The nervousness shifted for a flash to a soulful, wounded look. He had missed his daughter, Sassi registered, even worried about her. So, why the agitated behavior? If she had been in his shoes, she would be on two knees hugging Fatima, glad to have her back, promising never to let her out of her sight again.
“Fatima. Come. Let’s go,” Abel said. His demeanor shifted quickly back to agitation. The activity in her periphery increased.
She knelt and kissed Fatima’s forehead, then hugged her. Running her hands down Fatima’s shoulders, Sassi whispered, “You’ve been a good girl. So brave and strong. I will come back to see you.”
“Every day? Please?”
“Every day. Yes. Of course,” Sassi said.
“Let’s go, Fatima. Come into the house now,” Abel barked.
Something was happening up the road, but Sassi maintained eye contact with Fatima.
“Be brave, Fatima. I’ll check on you every day that I can.”
“But that’s not every day,” Fatima said.
“It will be every day possible.”
After a second, Fatima seemed to register that the balance between Sassi’s promises and her father’s demands had shifted toward her father. She hugged Sassi’s neck one final time and stepped away.
“Thank you for getting Aamina back for me,” Fatima said.
“You’re welcome, Fatima. Now, go with your father.”
Fatima walked to her father, who didn’t hug her but simply guided her into the house while looking over his shoulder intermittently at Sassi and the house up the road. He urged Fatima into their newly resettled home. Fatima looked over her shoulder with large, seemingly reluctant brown eyes. She waited until the wood frame door slapped against the jamb and the clicking of the dead bolt rang like a pistol shot before turning to head back to the car.
Sassi had been so absorbed in the moment that she just now realized Hakim was not with her, nor was he anywhere in sight. She strode quickly back to the street she had followed to reach Fatima’s house and then made her way toward the main artery they had taken into town. To her left, there was movement, as if someone was tracking or following her. From Fallujah, Iraq, to Herat, Afghanistan, Sassi had been in difficult combat situations. Those circumstances had helped her develop a sixth sense when operating in different locations. While she was certainly concerned about being chased from the village yesterday, Sassi had chalked that up to poking her nose where it didn’t belong. If the armed men had been serious about coming after her, they would have pursued. It was just another near miss, like so many others she had encountered and survived.
But being followed in a nearly vacant war-stricken town was never a positive development unless children were the ones following in pursuit of relief or safety. After all, that was Sassi’s life mission: taking care of the displaced families of the world, especially the children, who deserved so much better.
She spotted their UN vehicle, but still no sign of Hakim. She saw the men who had been in the trail car dash across the street, running from her right to left in the direction of the house from which she had retrieved Aamina. They were carrying M4 rifles with silencers and wearing outer tactical vests over their black shirts and olive cargo pants. Their desert-tan hiking boots kicked up dust as they sprinted. One was tall and lanky; the other was short and stocky. They both had short hair, not completely shaved, but as if they had been trying their best to grow it out.
Two men charged at her from her right, a direction that she had not anticipated. All the activity had been to her left. Before they could reach her, she dashed ahead of them toward the UN SUV. Heart racing and lungs burning, she dug deep. Always a good athlete, Sassi was able to outrun these two men. She doubted they would shoot her in the back, even though she hated to even think about such an eventuality. Her motive was pure. Her mission was universally respected and accepted. It would be senseless to harm her in any way. The foundation of her belief system was that she had survived so many tough situations because of the purity of her motive and mission. Even the evilest, vilest people could see through their hatred and understand that children required protection.
Nothing could happen to her because, well, it simply wasn’t allowed. Not by international law. Not by the lowest standards of human dignity. Not for any reason. The children came first, always.
Three things were happening all at once, as best she could determine. First, she was being chased by two armed gunmen who were ten meters behind her. Second, two American military members were stacked against the wall of the house with the maps in its basement. Third, a motionless figure was lying in the side street to her left. It was the same street that Hakim had veered onto in order to relieve himself.
As Sassi reached the UN vehicle, she remembered that Hakim had driven and had the keys. She hoped it was unlocked. She leaped across the hood of the car, sliding to the other side, where she adroitly landed like a gymnast doing a dismount. Instead of raising both arms to the sky, she retrieved her pistol and sighted on the two men closing on her.
An explosion rocked the map house, and the muffled pop, pop, pop of gunfire echoed from below. Her immediate concern was that her pursuers stopped running and leveled their AK-47s on her. She hadn’t had to fire her weapon in defense in the ten years since Iraq, but she did so now without reservation.
She fired at the man who already had his AK-47 leveled at her. The shot caught him in the arm, spinning him away from her and causing him to reflexively squeeze the trigger. Wild shots zipped over her head, but she didn’t flinch. The second man had just completed raising his rifle, having fumbled with it for a brief moment, giving her time to
squeeze a second shot, which was far more accurate than the first.
The man fell like a shot quail, dropping straight to the ground with a bullet wound to his chest. She was up quickly, running around the front of the SUV and kicking away the weapon of the wounded man. Both men wore gray shirts and black pants with red bandannas. As Sassi recalled, they were members of an ISIS offshoot, but she couldn’t remember its name, which was unimportant at the moment anyway.
Her immediate questions were, how many more of them were there, and why were they coming after her?
What was happening in those two houses with the maps and the doll?
Was Hakim okay?
Her mind tumbled with all those thoughts as she put away her pistol and searched both men for weapons and cell phones. She had learned to do this in Anbar Province. Tough times had sharpened her combat edge, even though she was loath to use the skills. First gathering two knives and two cell phones, she stuffed them in her cargo pocket as she jogged in the direction she had seen the body lying in the street—Please don’t let it be Hakim!
Rounding the corner, she nearly collapsed. Hakim was lying motionless in a pool of blood, his throat slit, most likely by one of the knives she had just collected from the men she shot.
More gunfire erupted from the map house and its neighbor. Two men dressed the same as the two she had just shot came barreling from the back door as two Americans popped out close behind them, giving chase. As soon as the two ISIS splinter cell gunmen disappeared behind a house, a barrage of gunfire opened from the windows of a house just kitty-corner from where Sassi was kneeling above Hakim’s body.
Ambush.
The gunmen were the rabbits, and the Americans raced directly into a baited ambush. They dove for cover quickly, but she had no time to process the rapidly deteriorating situation. A presence behind her was preceded by foul body odor. The arm of a man reached around her neck with the other hand lifting her hair, as if he was preparing to slice her neck open, perhaps as he had done to Hakim.
She took a deep breath, caught off guard that this could really be the moment she died. She would die because she had returned a little girl to her family and home. A war-torn, shithole of a home, but the only home Fatima had known, nonetheless. It was home, and that was where she had committed to returning Fatima and thousands of other children and families.
It was years since Sassi had been home to Tuscany, and now there would be no one to mourn her. She thought of her secondary school and university friends, all fleeting relationships once they saw she was an international justice vagabond, marching to the sound not of the cannon but to the shrieks of young children. Perhaps the children would be her angels? Her family certainly would barely notice that she was gone. Maybe a quick funeral to pay respects and not lose status in the community, followed by a larger party to celebrate the fact that she’d died for a noble cause despite repeated admonishments about her career path. It would be a highbrow soirée with the Tuscan elite, including the mayors and governors of several towns and provinces. They would celebrate one another and their feigned support for the dignified pursuit of human justice in the grittiest of circumstances.
She saw the blade glint in the morning sun. The man poured stale breath on her. His prickly black beard scratched her face as he leaned in close and said, “Pray to Allah.”
Sassi closed her eyes, trembling against the cool steel of the blade.
CHAPTER 9
Vick Harwood
Harwood made himself small, as Command Sergeant Major Murdoch had always instructed him to do. He crawled inside a deep cut in the wadi so that his body, weapon, and rucksack were fully beneath the level of the slope.
He was inside a ragged gash that had been hollowed out by repeated rain. Back in Georgia where he lived, torrential downpours created these man-sized ravines. The only climate he had experienced here in the Lebanon-Syria border area was arid, but he imagined that when it rained, the water sliced through the clay and shale like a sharp knife. Up close, his nose was pressed into the dirt. Rocks and pebbles poked from the wall of the gully, one storm away from being washed downhill. Dirt smelled pretty much the same wherever he was—musty, fresh, and oddly comforting. Burlap from the ghillie suit mixed with the aroma as well, helping conceal his position. Harwood had spent what seemed like a lifetime boring into the dirt. The ground had saved his life on several occasions, and he hoped this would be another one for the record books.
Boots trundled past him downhill. The two men shouted at each other in Arabic. He imagined they were discussing who might have driven the SUV and where that person might be. They probably received a GPS ping on the Suburban. The man who had escaped knew it was unlikely that any of his three comrades had survived. It wasn’t a stretch to assume that the man who had ambushed them—the Reaper—had also commandeered the vehicle. That suspicion would have the entire compound, if not the entire valley, on high alert.
Harwood considered his options again. Attack in broad daylight with the initiative, if not the element of surprise, or wait until nightfall and conduct a full reconnaissance. The enemy always had a vote in his plans also. His experience had taught him that even the best-developed plans included envisioning all the enemy options and possibilities. He could be discovered in this prone position and shot dead, for example. The likelihood of someone tripping over him increased with every hour of daylight, with every minute that the team at the compound realized what had taken place.
Harwood didn’t discount the idea that there might be a connection between whatever was happening in the compound and what was happening along the Israeli border with Syria. Without much warning, Syria had attacked Israel in the oft-contested Golan Heights in an attempt to reclaim what the Syrian president saw as historically Syrian land. Whoever owned the Golan Heights had the strategic and tactical advantage, particularly from a defensive point of view with respect to Israel. Hezbollah and the Syrian Army worked side by side with the assistance of Iran to fight the United States via proxy in Israel.
All those entities were invested in some fashion in the Beqaa Valley. Training, logistics, recruiting, and other crucial military functions took place here. Harwood had done his homework regarding the region prior to deployment. There were any number of terrorist groups and very few lifelines to be found in the Beqaa.
After a few minutes of contemplation, he had reached his decision.
He rotated his body so that he was on his back, looking skyward. A few wisps of high-layer clouds floated like jet contrails in the sky. His rucksack poked into his back, straightening his spine a bit. A flood of exhaustion swept over him, but he couldn’t succumb to it. To do so would be certain death. He listened, taking in the distant sounds of the two men running. They continued downhill. He had kept the key to the Suburban but suspected they had a spare.
A few minutes later, the SUV engine rumbled and whined as it climbed the hill. Two doors slammed, accounting for both men. The gate squeaked as it opened and then banged shut. Men spoke loudly in the backyard. The agitated tones said more than the words he couldn’t understand. Their men were dead. Someone had stolen the truck. They needed to find this person.
A baritone voice of a presumably big man silenced the four or five men talking. He barked out instructions. Harwood visualized the alpha among the group pointing at one man and then another as he issued concise directives. The voice was commanding and authoritative. He conjured an image of the big man in the logistics convoy in Syria who had been controlling the drones. His final directives were peppered with the word American.
Either they had Clutch and he was issuing instructions on what to do with him, or he suspected an American was behind the kills at the Sabrewing drone crash site and was detailing a plan of how to pursue the killer.
Or both.
CHAPTER 10
Sassi Cavezza
The problem for the man was that he flinched.
Sassi sensed that the soldier who held a knife to her throat had looked awa
y. It was nothing obvious, just a simple turn of the shoulders, a slight distraction that caused the blade of the knife to fall a millimeter away from her neck. The lessening of pressure communicated to her that the man was momentarily distracted. This, coupled with the cessation of breath on her neck, prompted her to act. It was a calculated risk, but better than any alternative she could envision. Like a high-speed microprocessor, her mind had been processing the options, which primarily centered on dying quickly or dying slowly when the knife was biting into her skin.
The warm trickle of blood reaching her collarbone was the only reminder she needed to move swiftly.
The first order of business was to get the knife away from her neck, even if only fractionally, to prevent any errant movement from cutting her carotid artery. That was a game ender. Her muscled arms shot straight up toward the powerful forearm of the man holding the knife. She made her hands into bladelike wedges, stiffening her fingers as she had been taught in her UN-sponsored self-defense classes. Palms facing outward, she jabbed her fingers between the man’s forearm and her neck. Her first target was the arm holding the knife, which was his right arm extended across his left arm that was bracing her.
Her logic was that his dominant hand was the one holding the knife. Getting control of that would force him to use his weaker side to control her body. She was powerful in her own right. Constantly lifting and running, Sassi had prepared herself for moments like these by focusing on her physical and mental condition. Her quick reflexes and initiative paid off. She was able to grasp his forearm and wrist, controlling the knife hand, and push it away enough to slide her left shoulder into him while ducking.
Her rapid spinning motion created a centrifugal force with the arm holding the knife, which was reflexively flexing inward, toward where she once was located. His left arm was powerful, but his left hand was not positioned well enough for him to prevent Sassi from rolling away. As soon as she was free of his grasp, she assisted the knife’s forward movement into the man’s abdomen. She wanted the penetration to be higher, but there were too many bones at the rib cage and sternum. At least she would get shock effect with the knife embedded deep in his belly.
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