China Strike

by Matt Rees

  The wrestler swung the butt of his AK-47 at Wyatt’s head. The colonel moved just enough to be sure that it didn’t take his eye out. He let it connect with the hard part of his brow and dropped back onto the mattress with a groan.

  Three sets of footsteps, heavy in boots, came over the floor toward him. The gunmen pinned him. One of them patted Wyatt down carefully. As Wyatt foresaw, the searcher didn’t dwell on his genitals and the metal cylinder stayed where it was. Then a hood went over his head, a pillowcase of cheap nylon. Even before the water spilled over him, Wyatt prepared to die, and to die again and then again after that.

  It was waterboarding without the board, the way American troops first did it in the Philippines to insurgents there a century ago. Wyatt suffocated, emptying his mind, knowing that there was nothing in the world that mattered except his mission. To accomplish that mission, he had to allow himself to believe that it too was insignificant. Only when he was detached from all existence could he allow these men to murder him over and over and yet remain alive. Each time they lifted the pillowcase off his head, the man in the burgundy suit bellowed, “Who told you? Who told you we had the American?”

  He gave the same answer over and again. “You want the sarin. I’ve got it for you. Give me the American.”

  He made it sound like a simple trade, but it wouldn’t look that way to the man in the burgundy suit. Wyatt knew Hezbollah didn’t have the American that he wanted. The Islamic State had him. If the man in the suit was smart and suspicious—and Wyatt gave him an A-plus on both counts—he’d realize that whoever told Wyatt that Hezbollah had the American also wanted to get Wyatt’s stock of sarin. That person might want the nerve gas for the sake of Hezbollah, to kill the Sunni Muslims of the Islamic State. But if that person had failed to mention his contact with Wyatt and his possible acquisition of the world’s deadliest substance, then the Hezbollah chiefs would no doubt conclude the man intended to use the sarin for his own purposes, maybe even to take over the group.

  “Who told you we have the American?”

  They knew Wyatt was tough. He couldn’t appear to break too easily. He had to convince them that they had destroyed him. The pillowcase went on and off four times and his body was shuddering almost beyond his powers of endurance when he finally told them. “Abu Aisha,” he murmured.

  The goons holding him went still. The man in the burgundy suit glanced around at them. This was the most dangerous moment any one of them had ever experienced. Wyatt was counting on that. Abu Aisha was the head of Hezbollah’s military wing in Beirut, the only man with a network powerful enough to threaten the dominance of Sheikh Hassan and the other religious leaders.

  The man in the suit jerked his neck to signal another torture. Wyatt wondered this time if he was, indeed, dying. He had been close before, in Vietnam, in Haiti, in Afghanistan. He reminded himself that the closest death had actually come to him was in Woodley Park, Washington, about five hundred yards from the vice president’s mansion on Observatory Circle. He found that fact humorous, given all the crazy-ass places he had been and the full set of bad guys who had tried to rub him out. He would have laughed at the thought, if he hadn’t been suffocating. The memory of that moment in northwest DC drove him to survive, because the thing that wouldn’t let him die was, in the end, always his thirst for revenge, and the man who tortured him in Woodley Park was either going to die before him or because of him—once Wyatt had completed the operation that man demanded of him. Until then, nothing would scare him and absolutely nothing could kill him. If these Hezbollah men could’ve forced Wyatt to swallow a hydrogen bomb, he’d have crapped out a mushroom cloud and carried on.

  “Who told you we had the American?” the suit man bellowed.

  “Abu Aisha.” Wyatt struggled to hold onto consciousness. This was the moment, the turning point.

  Calculation flickered over the interrogator’s features. “When are you going to give him the sarin?”

  Smart and suspicious, Wyatt thought. But a sucker anyhow. “I already—” He coughed and choked, as he laid the trap for Abu Aisha. “I already gave it to him.”

  The man in the suit came out of his crouch. He went toward the door. “I’ll be back,” he said to his thugs. He gestured toward Wyatt. “Don’t kill him. Break him to pieces.”

  Before the door was shut, the four men were kicking Wyatt and hammering him with the butts of their rifles. As he went into unconsciousness, he thought: this is working out just fine.

  When he came around, the sun was very bright. One of the windows was open, and a shutter had been raised a few inches. It was enough to blind him briefly. He was propped against the wall. With a moment’s surprise, he realized that he was standing up, held by a gunman on either side. He tested his legs, letting his weight go from foot to foot. They weren’t broken. Amateurs, he thought.

  From out of the glaring sunlight, a man walked forward. He wore a black T-shirt and a black hunting vest. His beard was slick, and his receding hair was black and cut very short. One eye was closed and sunken, the lids fused together over the missing eyeball. Abu Aisha, the man every intelligence service in the Western world—including a few that weren’t incompetent—wanted to kill. A hero of Shia Islam, feted in Tehran, reviled by the Sunnis of the Islamic State. The plotter of terror attacks in two dozen countries from Israel to Argentina and in cities from Paris to Bombay. Wyatt saw how much Abu Aisha wanted to strike him. The fact that he didn’t was, perhaps, a measure of the superficially top-notch job the thugs had done on him. There was nowhere left to punch that looked as if it could hurt any worse.

  The man in the burgundy suit shut the window and dropped the shutter. The air had been cleansed of the stink of the beating. Now Abu Aisha wanted privacy, in case Wyatt said anything dangerous. Anything more dangerous than he had already said.

  “You screwed up the sarin deal, Colonel Wyatt.” Abu Aisha’s voice was hoarse and low. “The American ICE agent took it from Damascus six months ago. From under your nose. When you were supposed to deliver it to us.”

  “Not all of it.” Wyatt wriggled a little against the hold of the gunmen on either side of him. Not to escape. Only enough to free his arm from the elbow down. To reach behind himself.

  “Where do you keep the rest?” Abu Aisha didn’t look directly at the man in the burgundy suit, but his eyes flickered that way, as though he were performing for his benefit, trying to clear himself of suspicion, to be sure the man would report his innocence to the supreme council and on to Tehran.

  “Where?” Wyatt slipped his hand slowly into the back of his pants and reached down for the cylinder between his legs. He had a story to play out, so he made his eyes confused and sent them from Abu Aisha to the man in the burgundy suit and back again. “You know that already.”

  “You are lying.”

  That was always a big win. Get the man who’s under suspicion by his own people to call you a liar. Those are usually his last words. Wyatt saw no reason to make an exception in Abu Aisha’s case. He ripped the cylinder out of his pants and hammered the pin at its base against the wall. He jerked free of the two gunmen on each side and grabbed Abu Aisha, spinning him around to face the man in the suit and the other two gunmen. He held the cylinder beside Abu Aisha’s head. As he did so he stopped his breath and started a countdown at sixty.

  The gunmen stumbled away. They lifted their weapons. The man in the suit called for them to hold their fire. He had made a mistake about Abu Aisha, bringing him here to face an accuser who had now turned on them. He didn’t want to be held responsible for the hero’s death too.

  “Wyatt, what do you want?” Abu Aisha tried to turn toward the cylinder.

  The gunmen frowned at the small object in Wyatt’s fingers. It must have appeared to be some kind of tiny grenade, perhaps. They hesitated. The man in the suit called out, “Wyatt, you will not leave here alive.”

  Forty-five. Wyatt clenched his arm across Abu Aisha’s chest and pinned him close. The Hezbollah man’s st
ruggles were for nothing.

  Abu Aisha coughed hard and wheezed. Then he went still. He’s getting the idea now, Wyatt thought.

  “Shoot him, quickly,” Abu Aisha said. His words came choking and desperate.

  “Abu Aisha, we cannot—”

  “It’s sarin. Quickly, kill him.”

  Thirty. Wyatt’s pulse hammered, but he didn’t breathe.

  The gunmen took a few seconds. Then they got it. They leveled their weapons and moved to the side to try to get a clear shot. Wyatt dragged Abu Aisha to the corner. They couldn’t shoot him without putting a bullet in their military chief. Then the man in the burgundy suit was coughing and so were the gunmen. They collapsed to their knees.

  Fifteen. Abu Aisha was heavy in Wyatt’s arms, ready to drop.

  The room filled with the stink of the sudden diarrhea in the gunmen’s cargo pants. The man in the suit vomited and lay on his side. The thug nearest the door fired off a few rounds as he fell, but they hit the wall six feet above Wyatt’s head.

  Zero. Wyatt dropped Abu Aisha. He took a knife from the belt of one of the gunmen and quickly slashed the carotid artery of each man to be sure of their deaths. He hurried to the window and opened it, breathing for the first time in over a minute. The hot breeze ballooned the light curtain. Halfway there, he thought.

  He knelt beside Abu Aisha. With the knife, he sawed through the dead man’s neck. He stamped on the vertebrae to shatter them and cut through the spinal cord. He tugged Abu Aisha’s black T-shirt over his shoulders to wrap the head. He took a PC9 pistol from the belt of one of the corpses and strapped a Kalashnikov over his shoulder. He put a spare magazine into the pocket on the thigh of his pants. With the pistol out in front of him and the severed head at his side, he went into the stairwell.

  Two of the men who had guarded him on the car ride were coming up the stairs. He double-tapped each of them, bullets to the head and chest. At the foot of the stairs, he took out the driver of the car. He moved into the garage and killed another two by the door. He rolled the heavy gate back and ran for the Mercedes. He set Abu Aisha’s head on the passenger seat and started the ignition.

  The Koran blasted from the tape deck just as the engine caught. Wyatt let it play as he drove up the slope through the slums. “I will punish them with terrible agony,” the imam recited on the tape, “in this world and the Hereafter. Nor will they have anyone to help them.”

  Wyatt let the traffic take him north and west, toward the Palestinian refugee camp of Bourj al-Barajneh. The effect of the waterboarding and the beating pulsed through him. He tensed every muscle, clamped his teeth together, and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He was nearly there.

  He turned off the Coastal Highway and weaved through the lazy pedestrians in the alleys of the slum that was still called a refugee camp by the UN, even though it had been there since 1948. Wyatt was sensitive to the presence of death, and Bourj al-Barajneh had been the scene of massacres and sieges during the Lebanese Civil War. There were souls around him now long gone from this life who smiled grimly in welcome, anticipating that his arrival in the camp was no more than a staging point and that he would soon join them in the other world. He cursed them and coughed. He wondered if he had managed to keep the sarin out of his lungs.

  At the open storefront of a falafel restaurant, he turned into a side alley. The scent of frying chickpeas on the air made him nauseous. He rolled his neck and shoulders. “Jesus, soldier, get it together,” he muttered to himself. “You’re Colonel Lawton Wyatt. You’re not going let a team of half-assed dune coons put the scare on you. You’re not about to die. You’ve got a job to do.”

  He rolled the car to a halt at the end of the alley and ducked into a stairwell. He struggled up to the second floor with the Kalashnikov on his shoulder and Abu Aisha’s head in the T-shirt dripping blood on the cheap tiles of the steps. He rapped on a pink metal door. It opened slightly. A man who bore an unsurprising resemblance to the Hezbollah guys Wyatt had just killed stared out at him. “Who are you?” he said.

  “I’m done answering questions today, buddy.” Wyatt pushed inside and shouted, “Touma, I’ve got what you want. Marwan Touma, come out here, damn it.”

  The man at the door checked the stairwell and bolted the door. He didn’t challenge Wyatt again.

  A short, stocky man with a neat black mustache and thin hair flapped out of the bathroom in a long white jalabiya and a pair of cheap sandals. “Ahlan wa-sahlan, ya Pasha Wyatt,” Touma said. “Welcome, my bad, bad brother.” He took hold of Wyatt’s shoulders. “Truly we are brothers. Many people have tried to kill me and failed. Look at the state of you. Evidently you have also disappointed a would-be murderer today. We are the same, you and I. We cannot be destroyed.”

  “Can’t say the same thing for some people.” Wyatt dropped the T-shirt to the floor. The head hit the tiles with a dull thud.

  Touma bent over and rolled back the fabric of the T-shirt. He examined the face of the dead Hezbollah military chief. He squeezed Abu Aisha’s cheek gently between his thumb and forefinger, an uncle congratulating a small child on its cuteness. He took a cell phone from his pocket and dialed. “Sit down, Wyatt. This will only take a few moments.”

  Touma was an arms dealer. He usually based himself in Damascus, where Wyatt had first done business with him. He used Beirut as a base when things were too hot across the border in Syria and because it was easier to find women to sleep with there. He survived because he was close to everyone, including the Islamic State. In the Middle East, Palestinians like Touma had to have good relations with every kind of sect and splinter group because no one loved them and everyone needed a very good reason not to just go out and slaughter them.

  He spoke quickly into the cell phone. He glanced up at Wyatt and smiled. But in his eyes, Wyatt noticed an underdog resentment that reminded him of black kids during his childhood in Tennessee. Touma hung up. “A few minutes.”

  “They’re waiting nearby?” Wyatt went to the window and peered down at the alley. Two small boys were tossing an injured kitten in the air.

  Footsteps sounded on the staircase, coming down the next flight. “Very nearby.” Touma grinned.

  Wyatt stretched his arms over his head, working against the stiffness of the bruises from his beating at the Hezbollah hideout. He was in a refugee camp where there was no law, in a country where there was very little law, in a region where the only real law was the kind that was administered with maximum cruelty. He was about to do a deal with people who put men in cages and burned them alive. He moaned pleasurably as he brought his arms down. Now he was really enjoying himself.

  The guard opened the door. Two gunmen stepped through. They had covered their faces with kaffiyehs, wrapped across their chins and noses, their eyes rheumy with the hot wind off the Mediterranean and the dirt of the Beirut alleys. Each held a Kalashnikov on Wyatt. The taller one spoke to Wyatt with the flat accent of northern England. “Why are you carrying an AK-47?”

  Wyatt grinned. “When in Rome.” He rolled Abu Aisha’s head across the floor with a flick of his foot. “There’s your guy. Where’s my guy?”

  The gunman called out in Arabic. “Bring him in.”

  A third man appeared in the doorway, his features covered in the same fashion as his companions. He shoved a stumbling, bent prisoner into the room. Where the man’s hands and feet were manacled, his skin was abraded and infected, with suppurating open sores. A stench of excrement and urine and old, old sweat and dirty wounds filled the space. Touma scuttled to the window and opened it.

  Wyatt crooked his finger and beckoned. The first gunman thrust the butt of his rifle into the prisoner’s back and sent him spinning across the room. Wyatt caught him with a hand on his shoulder. He leaned over him. “We’re going home, buddy,” he whispered.

  The man stared up at Wyatt like a beaten dog. Wyatt knew him to be in his midforties. But his hair was either ripped away in chunks or gone white, his beard was gray, and his face was as blue as an o
ld lady’s varicose veins, it had been so long since he saw the sunlight. His neck bore a thick scab from ear to ear. Someone had played at beheading him, probably just to mess with him, Wyatt figured.

  The first gunman lifted Abu Aisha’s head. “Hey, mate,” he called out to his former hostage. He waved the severed head. “This Shia bastard lost his noggin so you could keep yours.”

  The prisoner cowered. Wyatt squinted at the gunmen, trying to read them, attending to every motion. The humor with which the English jihadi swung the severed head at his laughing comrades could go sour fast.

  “Time for you to take that thing and go now,” Wyatt said.

  The gunman let his laugh trail off. He tossed the head toward Wyatt. “Why don’t you say good-bye?”

  Wyatt caught the head. He never did anything that didn’t contribute to the completion of his mission. He wasn’t about to start bantering with a cheeky lad from Bradford who had decided that England’s morals weren’t up to the standards of the Prophet, blessings be upon Him, and that torturing American Special Forces operatives would be his contribution to setting the world on the right path.

  Touma was quickly at the side of the Islamic State man, simpering and offering elaborate Arabic formulas of thanks. Two of the jihadis seemed ready to leave. But the English guy found something in Wyatt that spurred him to confrontation, some power that made him doubt his eventual victory over the West, perhaps.

  “You people make me sick, mate.” He pointed accusingly at Wyatt. “What are you doing in the Middle East, anyhow? You don’t belong here.”

  “I plan on leaving right away.” Wyatt balanced Abu Aisha’s head in his right hand. With his left, he touched the hostage’s shoulder. “Let’s go, buddy.”

  The gunman leveled his Kalashnikov. “Hang about. I’ve done and gone and changed me mind, in’t I.”

  “I hope your Arabic grammar is better than your English.” Wyatt tossed Abu Aisha’s severed head into the air. It looped across the room.

  The gunman glanced up at the head. Wyatt fired the Kalashnikov with one hand. It took out the gunman with a quick burst to the chest. He steadied the barrel with his other hand and shot down the other two before they even lifted their weapons.