by Mark Greaney
Ricky screamed.
* * *
The truck sped down the road, crested a rise just outside of al Ba’aj, and then quickly slowed before a roadblock at the edge of town, a standard local insurgency setup. A heavy chain wrapped to two posts hung low across the dusty pavement. Two militiamen were visible. One sat lazily on a plastic chair, his head leaning back against the wall of a grammar school’s playground. The other stood by one end of the chain, next to his resting partner. A Kalashnikov hung over his back, muzzle down, and there was a plate of hummus and flatbread in his hands, food hanging off his beard. An old goat herder urged his pitiful flock along the sidewalk on the far side of the roadblock.
The Al Qaeda man cursed the weak resolve of the insurgency here in northwestern Iraq. Two lazy men were all they could muster for a checkpoint? With such idiocy the Sunnis might as well just hand over control to the Kurds and the Yejezi.
The Yemeni slowed his truck, rolled down the window, and shouted to the standing Iraqi, “Open this gate, fool! There is a sniper to the south!”
The militiaman put down his lunch. He walked purposefully towards the pickup truck in the middle of the road. He put a hand up to his ear as if he did not hear the Yemeni’s shout.
“Open the gate, or I will—”
The Yemeni’s head swiveled away from the insurgent nearing his truck and to the one seated against the wall. The seated man’s head had slumped over to the side, and it hung there. An instant later, the body rolled forward and fell out of the chair and onto the ground. It was clear the militiaman was dead, his neck snapped at a lower cervical vertebra.
The gunman in the back of the truck noticed this as well. He stood quickly in the bed, sensing a threat but confused by the situation. Like his new leader in the driver’s seat, he looked back to the local man in the road.
The bearded militiaman approaching the truck raised his right arm in front of him. A black pistol appeared from the sleeve of his flowing robe.
Two quick shots, not a moment’s hesitation between them, dropped the Egyptian in the truck bed.
* * *
Bayliss lay on his back, looking up at the scorching noontime sun. He felt the vehicle slow and stop, heard the shouting from the driver, the impossibly rapid gunshots, and watched the masked man above him fall straight down dead.
He heard another volley of pistol rounds cracking around him, heard glass shatter, a brief cry in Arabic, and then all was still.
Ricky thrashed and shrieked, frantic to get the bloody corpse off of him. His struggle ended when the dead terrorist was lifted away, out of the truck bed, and dumped onto the street. A bearded man dressed in a gray dishdasha grabbed Ricky by his body armor and pulled him up and into a seated position.
The brutal sun blurred Bayliss’s view of the stranger’s face.
“Can you walk?”
Ricky thought it some sort of shock-induced vision. The man had spoken English with an American accent. The stranger repeated himself in a shout. “Hey! Kid! You with me? Can you walk?”
Slowly Bayliss spoke back to the vision. “My… my leg’s broken, and this dude is hurt bad.”
The stranger examined Ricky’s injured leg and diagnosed, “Tib-fib fracture. You’ll live.” Then he put his hand on the unconscious man’s neck and delivered a grim prognosis. “Not a chance.”
He looked around quickly. Still, the young Mississip pian could not see the man’s face.
The stranger said, “Leave him back here. We’ll do what we can for him, but I need you to get up in the passenger seat. Wrap this around your face.”
The bearded man pulled the keffiyeh head wrap from the neck of the dead terrorist and handed it to Bayliss.
“I can’t walk on this leg—”
“Suck it up. We’ve got to go. I’ll grab my gear. Move!” The stranger turned and ran down into a shaded alleyway. Bayliss dropped his Kevlar helmet in the cab, wrapped the headdress into place, climbed out of the bed and onto his good leg. Excruciating pain jolted from his right shin to his brain. The street was filling with civilians of all ages, keeping their distance, watching as if an audience to a violent play.
Bayliss hopped to the passenger door, opened it, and a masked Arab in a black dress shirt fell out into the street. There was a single bullet wound above his left eye. A second terrorist lay slumped over the steering wheel. Bloody foam dripped from his lips with his soft wheezes. Ricky had just shut his door when the American stranger opened the driver’s side, pulled the man out, and let him drop to the asphalt. He drew his pistol again and, without so much as a glance, fired one round into the man in the street. He then turned his attention to the pickup, tossed in a brown gear bag, an AK-47, and an M4 rifle. He climbed behind the wheel, and the truck lurched forward and over the lowered chain of the roadblock.
Ricky spoke softly, his brain still trying to catch up with the action around him. “We’ve got to go back. There might be others alive.”
“There aren’t. You’re it.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
Ricky hesitated, then said, “Because you were with the sniper team that fragged those dudes at the crash site?”
“Maybe.”
For nearly a minute they drove in silence. Bayliss looked ahead through the windshield at the mountains, then down at his shaking hands. Soon the young soldier turned his attention to the driver.
Immediately the stranger barked, “Don’t look at my face.”
Bayliss obeyed, turning back to the road ahead. He asked, “You’re American?”
“That’s right.”
“Special Forces?”
“No.”
“Navy? You’re a SEAL?”
“No.”
“Force Recon?”
“Nope.”
“I get it. You’re like in the CIA or something.”
“No.”
Bayliss started to look back to the bearded man but caught himself. He asked, “Then what?”
“Just passing through.”
“Just passing through? Are you fucking kidding?”
“No more questions.”
They drove a full kilometer before Ricky asked, “What’s the plan?”
“No plan.”
“You don’t have a plan? Then what are we doing? Where are we going?”
“I had a plan, but bringing you along wasn’t part of it, so don’t start bitching about me making this shit up as I go.”
Bayliss was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Roger that. Plans are overrated.”
After another minute of driving, Bayliss snuck a glance to the speedometer and saw they were moving over the bad gravel road at nearly sixty miles an hour.
The private asked, “You got any morphine in your bag? My leg is hurtin’ bad.”
“Sorry, kid. I need you alert. You’re going to have to drive.”
“Drive?”
“When we get into the hills, we’ll pull over. I’ll get out, and you two will go on alone.”
“What about you? We’ve got an FOB in Tal Afar. It’s where we were heading when we were hit. We can go there.” The forward operating base would be spartan and isolated, but it would be well-equipped for holding off attackers and a hell of a lot more secure than a pickup truck on an open road.
“You can. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Long story. No questions, soldier. Remember?”
“Bro, what are you worried about? They’d give you a medal or some shit for this.”
“They’d give me some shit.”
They entered the foothills of the Sinjar Mountains minutes later. The stranger pulled the pickup over to the side of the road and into a dusty grove of date palms. He climbed out, pulled the M4 and his bag with him, and then helped the soldier into place behind the wheel. Bayliss grunted and groaned with pain.
Next the stranger checked on the soldier in the truck bed.
“Dead.” He said it without emotion. Hurriedly
he removed Cleveland’s Interceptor body armor and uniform and left him in the cab of the truck in his brown boxers and T-shirt. Bayliss bristled at the treatment of the dead soldier but said nothing. This man, this… whatever the hell he was, survived out here in bandit country through expediency, not sentiment.
The stranger threw the gear on the ground next to the trunk of a date palm. He said, “You’re gonna have to use your left leg for the brake and the gas.”
“Hooah, sir.”
“Your FOB is due north, fifteen klicks. Keep that AK in your lap, mags next to you. Stay low-pro if you can.”
“What’s low-pro?”
“Low profile. Don’t speed, don’t stand out, keep that keffiyeh over your face.”
“Roger that.”
“But if you can’t avoid contact, shoot at anything you don’t like, you got it? Get your mind around that, kid. You’re gonna have to get nasty to survive the next half hour.”
“Yes, sir. What about you?”
“I’m already nasty.”
Private Ricky Bayliss winced along with the drum-beat of pain in his leg. He looked ahead, not at the man on his left. “Whoever you are… thanks.”
“Thank me by getting the fuck home and forgetting my face.”
“Roger that.” He shook his head and grunted. “Just passing through.”
Bayliss left the grove and pulled back onto the road. He looked in the rearview mirror for a last glimpse of the stranger, but the heat’s haze and the dust kicked up by the truck’s tires obstructed the view behind.
THREE
On London’s Bayswater Road, a six-story commercial building overlooks the bucolic anomaly in the center of the city that is Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Comprising a large suite on the top floor of the white building are the offices of Cheltenham Security Services, a private firm that contracts executive protection officers, facility guard personnel, and strategic intelligence services for British and other western European corporations working abroad. CSS was conceived, founded, and run on a daily basis by a sixty-eight-year-old Englishman named Sir Donald Fitzroy.
Fitzroy had spent the early part of Wednesday hard at work, but now he forced himself to push that task out of his mind. He took a moment to clear his thoughts, drummed his corpulent fingers on his ornate partners desk. He did not have time for the man waiting politely outside with his secretary — there was a pressing matter that required his complete focus — but he could hardly turn his visitor away. Fitzroy’s crisis of the moment would just have to wait.
The young man had called an hour before and told Sir Donald’s secretary he needed to speak with Mr. Fitzroy about a most urgent matter. Such calls were a regular occurrence at the office of CSS. What was irregular about this call, and the reason Fitzroy could hardly ask the emphatic young man to return another day, was the fact his visitor was in the employ of LaurentGroup, a mammoth French conglomerate that ran shipping, trucking, engineering, and port facilities for the oil, gas, and mineral industries throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. They were Fitzroy’s largest customer, and for this reason alone he would not send the man off with apologies, no matter what other matters pressed.
Fitzroy’s firm ran site security at LaurentGroup’s corporate offices in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK, but as large as was Fitzroy’s contract with Laurent as compared to CSS’s other corporate accounts, Sir Donald knew it was no more than a drop in the bucket as far as the mammoth corporation’s total annual security budget. It was well known in protection circles that LaurentGroup ran their own security departments in a decentralized fashion, hiring locals to do most of the heavy lifting in the eighty-odd nations where the corporation owned property. This might mean something as innocuous as vetting secretaries at an office in Kuala Lumpur, but it also included the nefarious, like having a recalcitrant dockworker’s legs broken in Bombay, or a problematic union rally broken up in Gdansk.
And surely, from time to time, executives at Laurent’s Paris home office required a problem to go away in a more permanent fashion, and Fitzroy knew they had men on call for that, as well.
There was a dirty underbelly to most multinational corporations that worked in regions of the world with more thugs than cops, with more hungry people who wanted to work than educated people who wanted to organize and bring about reform. Yes, most MNCs used methods that would never make the topic list of the chairmen’s briefing or a budget line in the annual financial report, but LaurentGroup was known as an especially heavy-handed company when it came to third-world assets and resources.
And this did not hurt the stock price at all.
Donald Fitzroy forced his worry about the other affair from his head, thumbed the intercom button, and asked his secretary to escort the visitor in.
Fitzroy first noticed the handsome young man’s suit. This was a local custom in London. Identify the tailor, and know the man. It was a Huntsman, a Savile Row shop that Sir Donald recognized, and it told Fitzroy much about his guest. Sir Donald was a Norton & Sons man himself, dapper but a tad less businessy. Still, he appreciated the young man’s style. With a quick and practiced glance, the Englishman determined his visitor to be a barrister, well-educated, and American, though respectful of customs and manners here in the United Kingdom.
“Don’t tell me, Mr. Lloyd. Allow me to guess,” Fitzroy called out as he crossed his office with a gracious smile. “Law school here somewhere? King’s College, I suspect. Perhaps after university back home in the States. I’m going to venture to guess Yale, but I will have to hear you speak first.”
The young man grinned and offered a well-manicured hand with a firm grip. “King’s College it was, sir, but I graduated from Princeton back home.”
They shook hands, and Fitzroy ushered the man to a sitting area at the front of his office. “Yes, I hear it now. Princeton.”
As Fitzroy sat in a chair across the coffee table from his guest, Lloyd said, “Impressive, Sir Donald. I suppose you learned all about sizing people up in your former profession.”
Fitzroy raised his bushy white brows as he poured coffee for both men from a silver service on the table. “There was an article about me. A year or two ago in the Economist. You may have picked up a few tidbits about my career with the Crown.”
Lloyd nodded, sipped. “Guilty as charged. Your thirty years in MI-5. Most spent in Ulster during the Troubles. Then a change of vocation to corporate security. I’m sure that flattering article helped with your business.”
“Quite so.” Fitzroy said through a well-practiced smile.
“And I must also confess that I’m pretty sure I’ve never met an honest-to-goodness knight.”
Now Fitzroy laughed aloud. “It’s a title that my ex-wife still mocks to our circle of friends. She likes to point out that it is an honorific of gentility, not nobility, and since I am clearly neither, she finds the designation particularly ill-suited.” Fitzroy said this with no bitterness, only good-natured self-deprecation.
Lloyd chuckled politely.
“I normally conduct business with Mr. Stanley in your London office. What do you do at LaurentGroup, Mr. Lloyd?”
Lloyd set his cup down in the saucer. “Please forgive my abruptness in requesting a meeting with you, and please also forgive the abruptness with which I come to the point.”
“Not at all, young man. Unlike many Englishmen, especially of my generation, I respect the acumen of the American businessman. Endless tea and cakes have hurt British productivity, there’s little doubt. So just let me have it with both barrels, as you Yanks like to say.” Fitzroy sipped his coffee.
The young American leaned forward. “My rush has less to do with me being American, more to do with the critical nature of my firm’s need.”
“I hope I can be of service.”
“I’m certain of it. I am here to discuss an event that took place twenty hours ago in Al Hasakah.”
Fitzroy cocked his thick head and smiled. “You’ve got me there, lad. Mus
t admit I don’t recognize the name.”
“It’s in eastern Syria, Mr. Fitzroy.”
Donald Fitzroy’s practiced smile faltered, and he said nothing. Slowly he lowered his cup to his saucer and placed it on the table in front of him.
Lloyd said, “Again, I apologize for the way I am rushing this along, but time is not merely crucial in this matter, it is virtually nonexistent.”
“I am listening.” The Englishman’s warm smile of ten seconds ago was dead and buried now.
“Around eight o’clock local time last evening, an assassin took the life of Dr. Isaac Abubaker. He was, you might know, the Nigerian minister of energy.”
Fitzroy spoke with a tone markedly less friendly than before. “Curious. Any idea what the Nigerian minister of energy was doing in eastern Syria? The only energy to be mined there is the fervency of the Jihadists who congregate before sneaking into Iraq to fuel the conflict.”
Lloyd smiled. “The good doctor was a Muslim of radical thought. He may have been in the area to offer some material support for the cause. I am not here to defend the man’s actions. I am concerned only about his assassin. As it happens, the killer survived, escaped into Iraq.”
“How unfortunate.”
“Not for the assassin. The killer was good. He was better than good. He was the best. He was the one they call the Gray Man.”
Fitzroy crossed his legs and leaned back. “A myth.”
“Not a myth. A man. A man of great skill, but ultimately a man of flesh and blood.”
“Why are you here?” Fitzroy’s voice held none of the paternal charm of their earlier conversation.
“I am here because you are his handler.”
“His what?”
“His handler. You vet his contracts, supply his logistical needs, assist him with intelligence, collect from the payers, and forward compensation to his bank accounts.”
“Where did you hear this nonsense?”
“Sir Donald, had I the time, I would offer you every courtesy you deserve, we could verbally fence, and I would feint and you would parry and we’d both strut around the room until one of our swords scored a killing strike. Unfortunately, sir, I am under a tremendous pressure, which forces me to dispense with the customary pleasantries.” He sipped his coffee again and made a little face at the bitterness of the brew. “I know the assassin was the one called the Gray Man, and I know you run him. You can ask me how I know this, but I will just lie, and our relationship in the next few hours depends upon our ability to speak frankly.”
