by Mike Kraus
They said little as they went along, except to discuss possible routes that would keep them concealed as they approached the office building where they had spotted the light. The first sign that they were on the right path came as they were just half a block from the building in the form of the sound of a diesel engine starting up. The low rumble was quickly accompanied by the sound of a second engine, both of which sounded like they were quickly drawing closer to the pair.
Linda and Frank ducked down a nearby alley, crouching behind a pair of dumpsters as they watched the road with a limited field of view, waiting for the vehicles to appear. It only took a moment for the pair of large box trucks to roll by, both of them heavily weighed down based on how they bounced on the road. They went along slowly as the drivers avoided debris in the road, and Frank could see that there were three armed men in the front cabin of each vehicle, though the contents were a mystery.
“They’re heading south,” Linda whispered, “probably more reinforcements for the fight at the city.”
“Must mean things are going our way, you think?”
Linda shrugged. “Who knows. Not our concern right now, though. If they were loaded down with fighters then this is the perfect time to make our way inside.”
Frank took a deep breath and nodded to her. “I’m ready.”
Linda’s smile was genuine. “I appreciate you being here. I know this isn’t what you signed up for when you helped me out at that gas station.”
“I’m just happy to be here, with you. Helping to take this guy out, I mean.” Frank stumbled over his words, swallowing hard and avoiding her gaze.
“You’ve done way better than I ever thought you’d be capable of. Not bad for an accountant-slash-trucker.” She patted him on the arm and he smiled at her.
“Listen, Linda, before we go in, I wanted to ask—”
“Sh!” Linda put a finger to her lips as the smile and relaxed look disappeared, replaced with a wide-eyed expression of concern. “Hold the questions till later. You hear that?”
Frank cocked his head, listening intently until he picked up what she was talking about. A conversation drifted across the wind, coming from somewhere close by. It was loud and intense, in some language he didn’t understand, though the emotion behind the words told him more than enough. “Sounds like arguing.”
“Someone’s getting chewed out.” Linda peeked out from behind the dumpster and motioned with her head. “Come on. I need to get closer. I can’t make out everything they’re saying.”
The pair slunk out of the alley and down the street toward their destination. The building in question was illuminated softly from within, and the sound of a cluster of voices grew louder the closer they got. Linda and Frank slipped behind a row of rectangularly-trimmed hedges just outside the building before crouching down and holding still so they could hear what was being said inside.
“…not possible that they’re still holding out.” The first voice sounded tinny and had a slight staticky quality, and Linda realized that the person was somewhere else speaking through a radio.
“Possible or not, it’s true. We just sent two more groups to the front line. Without the mortars, we can’t advance.”
“Pound them with rockets, then!”
“We have been, but they’re ineffective at that range.”
A frustrated growl was followed by the sound of something breaking. “We need those codes! Direct the two groups you just sent down to come in from the east and west. Force their defenders to break off from their northern line to protect their flanks. Once they do, have the main force push across the river and attack them head-on!”
Linda’s eyes widened and she whispered in Frank’s ear. “We have to get word to Jackson. Warn him of what’s coming.”
“I thought we needed to get Omar first.”
“If they break through into the city and steal those codes…” Linda shook her head. “No. We need to make contact with Jackson.”
“How? We don’t have a radio.”
“No,” she said, “but they do.”
“So we’re going to walk inside and ask to borrow it?”
“After we kill them all, yes.”
Frank was about to argue with Linda over her ‘kill first, ask questions later’ approach when she started creeping behind the bushes over toward the door without saying anything else. Son of a… he screamed internally as he followed behind, wishing they could have come up with a better plan. She reached the edge of the bushes where the stairs met the building and peeked out at the half-open door. A sliver of cigarette smoke drifted out and Linda reached up to grab the rail on the stairs. She glanced back at Frank with an expression that asked if he was ready, and he nodded in affirmation.
In a smooth, catlike motion, Linda pulled herself up over the railing. When her feet hit the ground she pushed into the door with her shoulder while drawing a knife from its sheath on her chest. A faint gurgle was the only sound the man inside the door made as she slashed clean through his throat and grabbed his gun to keep him from pulling the trigger and alerting others to his condition.
Frank, feeling especially exhausted after all they had been through, exited the bushes and took the conventional way up the stairs before slipping inside the doorway. He gave the bleeding, quivering man on the floor a quick look before turning away to face Linda. She had already cleaned her blade and replaced it in its sheath and had her rifle up to her shoulder, waiting for his arrival. With a quick wave of her hand she signaled for Frank to follow her into the next room.
Based on the voices they had heard while crouching outside the open window to the building, Linda had expected there to be no more than two men in the room talking to someone on a radio. Supporting that assumption was the fact that they had said that two groups were on their way, so she figured that even if there were more people in the building, there couldn’t be too many. As Linda charged through the door into the room where she and Frank had heard voices, the sight of half a dozen faces turning to look at her made her heart skip a beat and she realized that she had made a dreadful miscalculation.
“Oh, shi—” Linda backpedaled out through the doorway while she fired at the men standing around a table in the center of the room. They were nearly as quick with their weapons as she was, though, and by the time she had dropped two of them the other four were already firing back as they maneuvered for cover. Linda pulled the thick oak door shut as a hail of bullets hit it and she ducked out of the way and looked at Frank who was wincing as he stood on the other side of the doorframe.
“Okay,” she said, “so I might have slightly underestimated how many there are.”
Shouts from inside the room were met with more shouts from upstairs in the building, which were swiftly followed by the sound of footsteps as several more people began running for the staircase located down the hall. Frank looked up at the ceiling then back at Linda as she shook her head.
“Make that drastically underestimated.”
“Do we stay and fight?” Frank fought to keep the panic out of his voice.
“No.” Linda made the decision quickly, without hesitation. “It’s a suicide mission. Besides, I haven’t heard Omar here, so who knows if he’s here or somewhere else.”
The clatter of feet at the top of the stairs spurred the pair on and they both turned and ran through the front door just as the men in the side room opened the door and fired out into the hall, just barely missing Frank and Linda. Linda led the way across the street with Frank hot on her heels. Linda fired her rifle from the hip at a large window sitting in the front of a small restaurant, shattering the glass. She leapt through the open window, skidding along the glass and pulling herself behind the bar. She stood and fired at the building as the front door opened, bullets whizzing past Frank said as he jumped through the window and slid across the glass until he, too, was in cover behind the bar.
“Now what?” Frank shouted as he shouldered his rifle and fired alongside her. Bullets smashed
through brick and wood as they hit the front of the building across the street, sending the men who were about to charge out through the door reeling back inside.
“Give me a second to think!” Linda shouted back at him as she fired slowly and steadily, trying to conserve ammunition while at the same time ensuring that their enemies would be penned in long enough for her to think of a plan.
“Better hurry; they’re coming around the side!” Frank swiveled and fired at the corner of the building across the street, tearing chunks out of brick. Two men who had charged around the corner retreated behind a large truck sitting by the side of the road and began taking potshots at the restaurant.
“Dammit, they’re going to flank from the other side and converge; we need to escape out the back!”
Frank turned and glanced into the darkness at the back of the building and shook his head before taking a few more potshots at the two men off to the side. “That’s not gonna work.”
“Why not?” Linda mentally counted down her last three rounds, firing them in rapid succession before fingering the magazine ejection lever to dump out the empty one. She slapped in a new one and the bolt slammed home and she began firing at the door again.
“Well, half the building collapsed in on itself so unless you can dig through a bunch of rubble…” A bullet sang as it cut through a glass on the counter just a few inches away from Frank’s face and he yelped and ducked down, rubbing at the cuts on his cheek and forehead. “We’ve got to do something, though… maybe we should just run out the side over there? The ones at the front of the building can’t see us there so we’d just be dealing with the two on the side.”
Linda considered Frank’s suggestion for a second before shaking her head. “No. Here.” Linda shrugged off her backpack while firing one-handed and tossed it over to Frank. “Pull three more mags out for me.”
Frank unzipped her bag and tossed the requested magazines onto the bar counter before zipping it back up and handing it back to her. “Nope,” she replied, “you’re keeping it.”
“Huh?” Frank looked at her quizzically before dropping the bag and taking a few more shots at the pair off to the side of the building.
Linda looked at him, weighing the option of telling him the truth versus lying to him, wondering which would be more likely to get him to listen to her. In the end, she opted for a mixture of both. “Frank, someone has to get back to Jackson and warn him about what’s going on with the impending attack.” That was true. “Based on how these guys are acting and what I know about Omar, they’re not going to kill me.” That, however, was not guaranteed. “If you argue with me on this I swear I will make you regret it.”
“You want me to get out while you cover me, get to Jackson and then come back for you?”
“It’d be nice if you came back, yeah.” Linda snorted in amusement.
“How am I supposed to find you?”
Linda kicked at the bag at her feet. “I’ve got a tracker tag on me and the tracker’s in my pack still. Get to Jackson, get some reinforcements and hone in on the tag. By the time you do, they’ll have taken me to Omar. Even if I—even if I’m wrong about what they’ll do, you’ll still be able to stop Omar.”
“Not a chance. What the hell makes you think I’m going to just leave you here to get captured? They’ll kill you, Linda! He’ll kill you!”
Linda stopped firing for a moment and stared Frank dead in the eyes. “You’re going to do this for the same reason you started it. What matters is the mission; stopping Omar matters more than you or me or any other single person.”
Frank felt his stomach tighten into knots as he struggled with the choices laid before him. Capture and certain death next to his friend? Or having a very high probability of stopping the madman responsible for so much death and destruction.
“But…” He spoke softly even as the fire from outside the restaurant intensified. “Some people do matter more. To me. I can’t leave you here by yourself. Not even if it means stopping Omar.”
“Frank,” she said, running a rough, dirt-covered hand down the side of his face, “get to Jackson. Then get back here to me. If you don’t, then we both die and the city—and the country—falls. If you do, and you make it back in time… then you can ask what you were going to ask earlier, and—”
“Get them! But don’t kill the woman!” The bellowed call came from the front of the building across the street, confirming what Linda had told Frank.
“See?” She shoved him toward the side of the room, kicking her pack over to him. “Now get going, Frank! Move!” He stumbled as he grabbed her backpack and ran for the side of the store, spraying the window with his rifle to shatter the glass. He jumped out as Linda leapt over the bar and advanced toward the entrance, firing at the two men on the side of the building and gunning them both down. Her movement, screams and gunfire distracted the group emerging from the building, focusing their attention on her instead of on Frank. She fired on them as they dove for cover, wounding three before her mag ran dry. She dropped the rifle and continued advancing as she drew her pistol, turning to her left and taking potshots at one hiding behind an overturned dumpster until the trigger pulled back with a solid click.
Off in the distance, as Frank struggled to run down the street with his legs still in pain and overloaded with two backpacks, he fought every urge in his body to turn around and go back to help Linda. Even as her shouts of rage and the gunfire suddenly stopped, he continued forward, propelled by the slightest bit of hope given to him by what he had heard shouted by their enemies.
“Don’t kill the woman!” It was the only thing keeping him going; the only hope he had of seeing Linda again. It was a faint hope, a mere sliver, but it was there. The city and country would stand—he would be sure of that. But if she fell, he wasn’t sure if he could live with himself and his choice to run instead of dying by her side.
Frank Richards ignored the screaming of his legs and the thumping of the extra weight against his side and chose to run even faster.
Chapter 6
The funeral for his parents and brothers is brief and unusually muted. In spite of the dangers involved in traveling back to his home country, Omar jumped on the first available flight, abandoning his classes and exams so that he could bury his family. Dressed in all black, he is surrounded by distant relatives who are wailing and gnashing their teeth in a home outside Tehran, grieving for the loss of the ones they loved. In Omar’s heart, however, there is no grief or sorrow or sadness. Anger burns bright, fueling an intensity that he has never before known in his comfortable life.
On the third day of mourning, as he sits quietly in a corner, a pair of men appear before him. They sit down and give their condolences, and tell him that they are with the government. His father, it seems, had spoken quite widely of his success in his studies and with the loss of so many officials and scientists, they have come to offer him a job once he concludes his studies. He sits and listens to their offer, speaking only when he has a question or wishes to clarify a point. They soon move outside the house where the two men speak more candidly, disclosing details about the attempted coup in an effort to further motivate Omar to commit his life to his country.
They speak of how the Americans were behind the coup, with specific instructions to kill dozens of scientists and government officials before executing the president himself, but how his parents were merely collateral damage. They speak of the heroic actions of the soldiers that burst in only a few moments after his parents and brothers were killed, and how doctors desperately tried to save their lives. They speak in cynical tones about how the truth will be swept under the rug because any finger pointing may give the Americans just the excuse they’ve been looking for to invade.
Then they speak of how he can help. How, because his family was never on a list, he can continue his studies in America, develop his craft and talents in a field that will help his country, and return to it after graduation. He will be offered a prestigious position in
military research and development, helping to shape the future of Iran to ensure that no one can ever try the same thing again. The offer is more than simply enticing. For a young man whose life has been overturned and virtually destroyed, it is impossible to resist.
In the late afternoon, with the wails of family mourning their dead in the background, he agrees with a handshake, and the two government men disappear as quickly as they appeared. Omar spends the next four days with his extended family, though unlike the first days he feels anger instead of grief. The anger is tempered with hope, though it is not a happy, joyful hope. It is a hope of revenge, a hope that his life can be spent finding ways to exact revenge for the death of his mother, father and brothers.
After his brothers and father and mother are buried, Omar heads back to America and immediately plunges himself back into his education. He doubles his scholastic workload and eliminates all forms of extracurricular activities even as his advisor protests and tries to insist that he needs to take more time off to grieve. Deposits still arrive in his bank account on a monthly basis, though the origin is an unknown name instead of his father’s. He does not question the deposits, assuming they are coming from someone connected to the two men he spoke with. His only focus and thought is his work, which he excels in.
Over a period of four years he blows past his peers, earning a master’s degree and a doctorate. The title of his thesis is unintelligible to anyone but an expert in his field, and combines chemistry and bio-engineering in new ways that turn him into a veritable rock star in a few small, niche scientific communities. He is cautious, though, to ensure that any and all research he performs and papers he produces do not cross lines that would raise eyebrows with military officials or attract the attention of national security agencies.
