by Gary Haynes
The female owner of the store and her staff had been security vetted, and she’d agreed to open early, although she hadn’t been told who her only VIP customer would be. The advance detail with their magnetometers and K-9 sniffer dogs had done their job; all regular procedure. Pouter was due back at Blair House, the official state guest house for the President of the United States – POTUS – in half an hour. Located at 1651–1653 Pennsylvania Avenue, it was only a mile and a half away. Still, Tom was as vigilant as a polar bear with a newborn cub. After watching Pouter walk into the store, he scanned the immediate vicinity and assumed radio contact with the snipers, who confirmed the surrounding buildings were still clear. Satisfied, he ordered his team to let the civilians pass.
But his antennae were up.
Chapter 3
As return fire pinged through the air about him, Basilios dived down and rolled in the stony track before raising the AK, the stock tucked into his shoulder. A man with a mangled left leg was bleeding out by the truck’s front passenger-side tyre, while another was half-crawling towards the tailgate. The Salafist was leaving a trail of blood as black as oil. Basilios knew that meant he’d been hit by a round in the liver and that he had thirty minutes tops to live. Seeing movement in his peripheral vision, he clenched his jaw and focussed.
There were just two remaining able Salafist fighters, and they were heading for the safety of the remnants of the surrounding buildings, letting off short automatic bursts as they ran. Basilios guessed they were fearful of the truck exploding. But before he had a chance to let off a burst of his own, they fell like bowling pins, cut down by scattered volleys from his comrades.
A few seconds later, he signalled for them to cease fire and, raising himself up, jogged over to the twisted hunk of metal that was the truck. Two Salafists were motionless in the front, their faces lacerated almost beyond recognition by careering shrapnel. But as he bent down to recover their superior weapons, he heard two more pickup trucks enter the street.
The men behind the barrier called out to him to get back. Straightening up, he turned towards the end of the road and saw the unmistakable outline of two shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenade launchers being aimed in the direction of the barricade aboard the approaching trucks, the rear tyres fishtailing with acceleration.
He darted towards a nearby doorway, using his free hand to signal to the men to disperse. As he reached the doorway, he had to duck down under a hanging lintel before spinning around and crouching in the brick dust. He guessed they were Yugoslav-made 90mm RPGs, favoured here due to their light weight, and the reinforced plastic design. Just a little over twenty-four pounds when armed, two trained men could load and fire six unguided projectiles in a minute. He knew the rocket was propelled from the launcher at a speed of two hundred and fifty yards per second. It was accurate enough to be used effectively against large armoured vehicles up to half a mile away. The barricade wouldn’t stand a chance.
The rockets hit the barricade a couple of seconds later, crippling explosions that sent up a flurry of metal shards and wooden splinters, and caused the middle section of the wall to implode. After the initial din and the devastation caused by the blast, Basilios heard the trucks skidding to a halt. Vaguely, through the dust cloud and to the left of the lintel, he glimpsed the fighters disembarking and running forwards in a jagged line, strafing the remnants of the barrier. They shouted out: Allahu Akbar. And he knew it was almost over.
As those men and boys who were still able returned sporadic fire, Basilios saw a fighter emerge from the subsiding dust. He was sprinting towards the doorway. Basilios scrambled back and stood up, letting the AK drop to his side from the clip. If he shot the man, he would give away his position, and by the way things were going outside, that meant he’d die before he could wreak a sufficient revenge.
He pulled out a piece of cloth from his cargo pocket and used it as a tourniquet to stem the flow of blood from his leg. Wincing, he eased further back into a dark recess, his right hand going for his combat knife. Gritting his teeth in frustration, he realized he’d dropped it in the melee. Even so, he figured he’d have to dispatch the man quickly and quietly. He squatted down, half hidden behind an overturned wooden table and waited.
The fighter ducked through the doorway to avoid the swinging lintel before pivoting around to face the street. He was bearlike, the sleeves of his combat jacket rolled up, revealing thick forearms covered in dark matted hairs. His head was wrapped in a black bandana, the hallmark of al-Qaeda-inspired militants. Basilios knew that the noise from the discharge of small-arms fire and the shouting and screams of battle would mask his steps, but thick beads of salty sweat rolled down his forehead and into his eyes as he began to move forwards.
At the last moment, the man clearly registered Basilios’s presence and, turning his head, he began to swing his assault rifle around. Basilios hit him hard in the exposed floating rib with the stock of his AK, winding him. He cracked his skull with the AK’s metal butt. Dazed, the Salafist buckled, and knelt in the dust, his head lolling to one side.
Basilios wrapped his arm around the bull-like neck and jerked him up with great force before dropping to the floor. There was a strangely intimate crack as Basilios fractured the man’s C2 vertebrae as if it was parched wood. The burly body went limp, and Basilios eased the dead man’s head to the rubble. But it had been the first time he’d killed a man so close up that he could feel his last breath leaving his body. It left him feeling both energized and shattered.
He moved to the other side of the building, careful to avoid the electricity cable that had fallen through the shattered roof and lay doglegged on the floor. The cable’s live end vibrated and popped and fizzed, evidencing that the portable generator was still intact, or at least functional.
He crouched by a shell hole, listening to the small-arms ricochets and the shrieks from the wounded. He saw two helmeted fighters dragging a boy of no more that fifteen by his hair from the remnants of the wooden shack opposite. They wore green flak jackets and wraparound shades, their postures menacing. The boy was weeping and pleading for his life. They propped him up against a concrete wall and, as he covered his face with his hands, they stepped back and raised their carbines.
Basilios knew the boy’s father, a decent man, who plied his trade as a mechanic among the surrounding towns and villages. He did his best to rationalize the situation, but as they reversed their short rifles, about to bludgeon the kid to death with the metal butts, he took aim and fired at their legs, three rounds each. As they collapsed to the floor, he saw the side of the boy’s head explode in a mass of blood and bone fragments.
Devastated, he scanned the flat roofs above and saw a sniper edging back behind a pile of plastic chairs before turning and half crawling towards the adjoining building.
Basilios glanced around the doorway, telling himself that he would mourn the boy later. Those townsmen who hadn’t fled were dead or dying. There was nothing to be done except to try to survive and then join up with the women and children in the hills. Perhaps I will be able to lead them to safety? he thought.
They couldn’t return to the town, that was for sure. In those towns and villages where the Sunni Islamists had taken control, it’d been a liberation that had turned into a religiously-motivated occupation. People received forty lashes for stealing, and teenagers were beheaded for voicing a barely inappropriate reference to the Prophet. Sharia law had been imposed with a dogmatic ferocity. He didn’t want to imagine what it would be like for a Christian town.
Move, he thought. Keep moving or die.
Chapter 4
Twenty minutes later, Pouter emerged onto the sidewalk again, her hips still doing the swinging routine. One of the Russian security detail, a blond guy with sloppy lips and tombstone-grey eyes, who looked as if his mother had substituted breast milk for protein shakes fortified with creatine, held four meringue-coloured paper bags dotted with little lilac flowers.
Tom guessed they held shoe
ware worth more than he made in months. But the bags looked absurdly incongruous, and he shot one of his team a disdainful stare as the guy was about to snigger. Ed Swift, a rookie agent from Kansas, who was yet to get a scratch on active duty. Truth was, Tom had to repress a smirk, too. The Russians were kind of touchy about such things.
The rear door to the limo was opened and Pouter slid in. Tom breathed a sigh of relief and ordered his team to mount up via his PTT. He sat in the front of the SUV next to the driver, Sam Collins, a veteran DS agent, who Tom had worked with on three foreign-embassy assignments and trusted like a brother.
Sam had shaved what was left of his hair. He stood six-four and two hundred and twenty pounds, most of which was functional muscle. At fifty, he could still down most of his fellow agents before they’d finished clenching their fists. As he pulled away from the kerb, Tom opened up a secure laptop and checked the route ahead via images sent from a small UVA, an unmanned surveillance drone, which was being controlled by an ex-US Air Force pilot at the nearby Marine Corps Base Quantico.
The ride back to Blair House was smooth, the Russian vehicles moving in a convoy up front. Tom watched Pouter exit the rear limo and strut over the few paving slabs to Blair House, the tricolour of the Russian Federation flapping on a flagpole in the centre of the building. The building had a beige-coloured limestone facade, with green shutters. It was one of four connected terraced townhouses that made up the one hundred and nineteen-room complex.
When she’d gotten safely inside, Tom and his team could relax. Their remit didn’t extend to guarding the exterior, let alone protecting her inside her suite. A fresh DS team would ensure the perimeter was secure for the dayshift, and the Russians looked after their own at close quarters.
As Pouter walked up the steep steps with her bodyguards, sheltered from the light rain that had begun to fall by the dark green canopy, Tom was glad it was home time for him, too. But as she got just a couple of yards from the door, it was flung open abruptly. A suited man barged out, brandishing a handgun, and Tom willed the Russian bodyguards to fill the space between them and his charge, to fling her to the rear and pump ten rounds into the guy’s chest.
He barked a series of short orders via the PTT and hit the emergency button under the dash. That sent an ultra-quick response requirement to the local PD, the Secret Service, the FBI and the DS. The SUV’s four heat-seeking cameras clicked into 360-degree vision for the various agencies that were now surveying the scene on video screens, just in case the hovering low-level drone got knocked out or malfunctioned. But by the time his team were halfway to the flight of steps, with their SIGs drawn, he could see that the Russian agents had holstered their own handguns.
He held up a field scope and recognized the face of the ostensible attacker from his briefing photos. The man was in fact the Russian president’s fifteen-year-old nephew and the handgun was a squirt gun that he was now firing into the face of the hulk carrying the shopping bags.
The kid had a mental age of nine, according to Tom’s security briefing notes, and that meant that all anyone would feel would be sympathy. Still, his team had reacted well, even Ed the rookie. Drills had their place in producing long-term muscle memory and instinctive positive action, but there was no substitute for a real test. He radioed his team to stand down and called it in before making a mental note to pat Ed on the back and say a quiet encouraging word.
Suddenly, he felt overcome with exhaustion. He hadn’t had a day off in a month due to a minor epidemic of flu at the Washington office. His father, a recently promoted three-star general who worked at the Pentagon, was in Ankara, Turkey, at present, but he was due back in a week’s time, and Tom had arranged to take a short, well-deserved vacation to spend some downtime with him.
“You okay, Tom?” Sam said, as he fired up the SUV.
“Yeah, just a little tired. You know how it is.”
“Yeah, goddamned adrenalin dump with nowhere to go,” Sam replied, referring to the anticlimax on the steps of Blair House.
“Let’s get outta here, Sam.”
As Tom rested his head against the SUV’s headrest, feeling jaded, he knew he’d worked long and hard to heal the relationship with his father. He no longer felt anger towards him for deserting his mother when he was eight. He still blamed him for her subsequent miserable existence and his own sense of betrayal in his formative years, but he didn’t hate him any more.
Once Sam had dropped him off at the departmental lot and he’d typed out his report on his laptop, it would be less than a week before he could drive out of DC and over one of the four-lane road bridges that crossed the Potomac to his one indulgence in life: his retreat.
But he had a nagging feeling about the prospects of getting some quality downtime. In the last few months, every time he’d thought life would experience a little peace, he’d gotten the mental equivalent to a jab in the ribs with a cattle prod. All his senses were telling him that it wouldn’t be any different, but he couldn’t think of one reason why.
Chapter 5
In Syria, the white sun had mellowed into a tangerine-coloured half crescent, sinking beneath the mountainous horizon, the temperature falling ten degrees already. Dusk wasn’t far off. Basilios was huddled a yard or so beneath the rim of a multiple rocket crater. It was half-filled with fetid water, leaking from fractured sewerage pipes. The smell resembled rotting cabbages, the three corpses strewn around him turning rigid as rigor mortis set in.
He’d replaced the makeshift tourniquet with a wrapped shirt sleeve, and had kept up the pressure by twisting a thin piece of wood that he’d pushed through the knot. After killing another six Sunni fighters, his desire for revenge was beginning to abate.
Glancing up now, he saw that the acrid smoke created by the explosions had drifted away. But the fires that had raged in the town’s decimated stone and timber buildings had created a thick black-grey cloud that was floating towards the east. He decided to wait until darkness had fallen to make his escape. He would have a better chance. The Sunnis didn’t have night vision, he guessed. Certainly not goggles, although they could have the odd infrared scope.
The attackers had checked out the interlinked craters about five minutes after he’d scrambled into the hole. As he’d heard the footsteps approaching, he’d stuck his head and shoulders underneath a corpse’s torso, conscious of the brown-red blood still leaching out from the exit wounds. After a burst of semi-automatic fire had thudded into a couple of the dead bodies, the craters had been deemed safe, he’d assumed. A hot shell casing had landed on his leg and had burned him even through his desert-tan combat pants, but he hadn’t flinched.
Time passed, slowly. But when the light had faded to the point where his passage could only be betrayed by the receding fires and sketchy moonshine, he decided to act. With his back pressed to the hard-packed mud above the water level, he eased up the crater with his heels, refusing to moan as the movement exacerbated the pain from his leg wound.
He turned sideways and glanced over the stony rim. Thirty yards or so away, mess tins rested on oil burners, and backpacks and weapons were stacked in clusters, the stony ground strewn with spent casings. A broad-shouldered man urinated on a dead body. A solitary dog barked. Basilios could just about make out his family house, the ground carpeted with ash around it. The single-storey structure had been rendered a shell, with crisscrossed blackened beams and shattered stonework. He figured his father and brother had been murdered by now, too, as all the other townsmen had been. But there was nothing to be done.
He scrambled over to the other side of the crater, his AK resting across his curled arms. He’d decided to crawl towards the drainage ditch in the opposite direction to the Sunnis and follow the cut as it ran parallel to the ridge about four miles away. He’d find his mother and sisters and comfort them as they pulled at their hair and mourned their dead.
Then he froze.
He’d sensed someone behind him, and strained now to hear a telltale sign, a heavy breath,
a step, a round being chambered. A split second later, he heard a voice speaking in Arabic.
“Everyone in your town is dead. You are either a coward or lucky.”
With an adrenalin rush coursing through his veins, Basilios knew he had two choices: surrender or turn and engage his enemy. Knowing that the Salafists had beheaded those who had given up or were injured, it wasn’t much of a decision to make. But as he was about to turn and discharge the rounds that were left in his clip, the man talked again.
“I will let you live so that you can tell others what will happen to them if they resist us. It seems you are lucky then.”
The accent was foreign and he couldn’t pin it down. But there were jihadists from over seventy countries here, almost fifteen thousand men, or so he’d read, and he dismissed the thought. If the man let him live, he could lead the women and children to safety, which had become his purpose now. He felt he had no option but to turn his head around and let the AK fall from his grip.
The man standing atop the craters was around the same height as him, Basilios thought, dressed in black combat fatigues. He had long straggly hair and an equally unkempt beard. Otherwise, his head was covered by a black headdress. He was unarmed save for a handgun slung low under his armpit and a sheathed sword at his waist. His features were angular; his fingers long and elegant-looking like a pianist’s.
“I’m no coward,” Basilios said.
With that he heard the sound of crunching boots and five jihadists appeared at the rim of the crater, encircling him. Two of them shouldered their assault rifles and jumped down on either side of his bunched-up body. They dragged him up and, pulling his arms behind his back and unclipping his AK from his padded belt, half dragged him to level ground, whereupon they forced his head down. Straining so as not to show the pain in his leg, Basilios was frogmarched over to the man he now figured was their leader.
