A look of sudden pride crossed the man’s features, a look that just as suddenly faded to one of apprehension, a hunted look creeping into Ansallah’s eyes as he tried to fathom which answer would satisfy Shakir. Danger signals were everywhere, and he must not speak the wrong words.
“I …” he began, “… we were ordered to bring the shipment to Baghdad.”
“I know,” Shakir answered hurriedly, “but you have only two of the containers. Why not wait for the main shipment tomorrow?”
“I don’t have two, I have one,” Ansallah responded. The words were not what Shakir had expected. He had two canisters, didn’t he? Not one. Shakir concluded that he had somehow misunderstood, as Ansallah continued, “I … wanted to deliver at least one of them myself.”
“To whom?” Shakir asked.
“The general who will use it to strike fear into the enemies of Iraq. If you had been alive, of course, I would have …”
“No, no! Go on. I wasn’t there, so you were entitled to act. What else?” Shakir wondered if the feigned solicitous words were convincing enough, but Ansallah smiled and pushed his chest out another inch. “I knew General Sumed Hashamadi would be the first commander to have the honor of unleashing our weapon, and I wanted to put it in his hands myself. What they have done to our country must be avenged. Have you seen Baghdad? Have you seen what the Yankee bombs have done to us? I can’t wait until they start dying by the thousands in agony, just like those dogs from Kuwait we tested it on. Remember how they screamed and cried? I want to see the Americans and the British and the Egyptians and Iranians, all the enemies of God, die the same way, in screaming agony!”
Shakir held his expression tightly in check as he watched rage and hatred consume Ansallah’s mind. He let it subside before speaking again.
“Do you have any idea, Mahmed, how dangerous this virus is to Iraqis, too?”
Ansallah snorted. “Of course. But no more dangerous than the Americans who murdered my brothers.”
There it was. Shakir had forgotten the two Ansallah brothers fighting in Kuwait.
“You lost both of them?”
He nodded, flame in his eyes.
“I am sorry, Mahmed.”
“You understand, then?”
“Yes, but I must disappoint you.” Shakir watched Ansallah’s expression change again to puzzlement. “General Hashamadi is not to receive any canisters. These must go to headquarters in Baghdad, and I am ordered to deliver them.”
Ansallah considered that for a few seconds. This was his leader, his commander. Since Shakir was alive and still in the country and driving an official vehicle, he was undoubtedly acting on official orders, and defying him could be fatal, especially now that the army was retreating and a civil war was beginning.
But he had referred to “them.”
“Shakir, I have only one canister. General Hashamadi was sent the other one three days ago.”
A courier had shown up at the lab, he said, in uniform, flown in by helicopter. The written orders were from the high command and signed. Ansallah had delivered the canister himself.
It was Shakir’s turn to be off balance and confused, but he struggled to hide it as he stood up. The guard came awake at the same instant and leaped to his feet, and Ansallah stood as well.
“I’ll send a car back for you in a few hours,” Shakir lied.
The guard shook his head. “No. You take us in your van, Doctor.”
“Look, I have no time to waste, and you two should go back to the lab.”
Ansallah seemed passive, but the guard, for some reason, was not about to be left at the side of the road. As Shakir watched in amazement, the soldier unholstered his gun and aimed it somewhere in the vicinity of Shakir’s feet. “We’ll go in your van, Doctor. Now.”
Shakir stood a second in thought, then nodded, watching for the guard to relax, which he did just a bit. Shakir motioned behind him and addressed Ansallah. “First there’s something I need to show you. Wait here.”
Praying that neither would follow, he walked the few steps back to his green van and opened the passenger door, reaching in and pulling the Uzi from the floorboard, feeling for the safety. He had cocked it hours ago, just in case.
The sound of footsteps shuffling through the sand announced the approach of the guard, and Shakir pulled himself back from the van in one calculated motion, pivoting to his left to hide the gun until he had swung completely around and brought its muzzle almost point-blank to the stomach of the soldier, who had made the mistake of reholstering his pistol.
Shakir had never killed a human being before. He had never thought of doing such a thing. The horrible testing of the virus on two hapless Kuwaitis had been an army atrocity carried out in spite of his protests. He had fired guns because the military insisted that the scientists at the underground lab know how to defend themselves and their project. But the sudden staccato burp of lead from the deceptively small Uzi caught Shakir off guard as he pulled the trigger. He was unprepared for the rush of noise, and the look of horrified surprise in the eyes of the guard whose lower chest and stomach had just been blasted away, his heart beating a few final, futile strokes as the ruined left ventricle deprived the brain of consciousness and the muscles relaxed, the body, blown backward a few feet by the force of the bullets, falling in a heap in a growing pool of crimson.
Ansallah’s shock was visceral as well, but his response was catlike. As Shakir stared for a second at the body by his feet, Ansallah sprang behind the white van and drew his own pistol, cocking it loudly and peering around the corner to draw a bead on Shakir as he yelled in a shaky voice, “What are you doing, Shakir? Why did you kill him?”
“I … I have my orders, Mahmed. He would not listen. Put down the gun. I have no desire to hurt you. I didn’t want to hurt him.”
Ansallah’s voice was rising to somewhere between a shaky, panicked cry and a scream of fright.
“Why did you do this? Why, Shakir?”
“Put the gun down and step out in the open, Mahmed. I won’t hurt you.”
Ansallah wasn’t listening. “He was Republican Guard, Shakir! You have killed a Republican Guardsman!”
“Ansallah! Drop that gun and come out.”
Ansallah was shaking his head, slowly at first, then with rapid determination, fully visible through the windshield of the white van.
“No. I don’t trust you. I think you’re trying to stop Saddam.” Ansallah darted suddenly to the driver’s side of the white van, putting the bulk of the van’s body between himself and Shakir. Ansallah pulled the door open then, as if getting ready to start the engine and drive away.
What is he doing? That van’s lost a wheel!
Shakir’s puzzlement lasted only a second. As Ansallah moved to lean into the van, the image of the canister somewhere in the vehicle appeared in his mind, and in an instant Shakir had jumped over the body of the guard and raced to the right rear window of the van. Ansallah was struggling to lean past the driver’s seat and reach a small Styrofoam box on the floor behind the passenger’s seat.
“Stop! Don’t move!” He knew the commands would be in vain, and his blood ran cold, but Ansallah could not be allowed to touch the container. Shakir yelled again, smashing the glass with the barrel of the Uzi in one lightning-quick motion, making sure Ansallah heard his warning as the younger man’s right hand snaked toward the box, the pistol forgotten on the seat. Nothing else mattered to Ansallah but getting control of that canister, saving it from Shakir, and saving it for Saddam and his generals. His eyes were completely round with fear and determination, his mind focused on nothing else, and Shakir saw him launch his body across the seat, his hand poised to snatch away the lid and grab the canister.
The Uzi was aimed this time, held in Shakir’s shaking hands through the broken glass of the window, the barrel pointed at Ansallah’s head and upper body. Shakir’s finger held the trigger, waiting for the echo of his final scream to Ansallah to register and cause him to back off.
He knew, however, that it was hopeless.
Ansallah’s hand touched the box, and Shakir’s finger responded.
The now-familiar staccato report of the exploding cartridges as they hurled a lethal train of lead through the disintegrating head and torso of Mahmed Ansallah had a tragic inevitability as the entire sequence of horror seemed to stretch into slow motion. He saw the body flung back toward the steering wheel, the right hand shattered by the bullet stream, and was aware that with cold precision he had kept the aim above the box containing the deadly canister. But suddenly he realized the bullets were no longer firing. They hadn’t been for some moments, though the ringing in his ears belied that truth. The clip had been exhausted, and he finally relaxed the pressure on the trigger and stepped back, shaken and dazed, then propelled into action by the sure knowledge that someone on the nearby highway must have witnessed the murders.
Shakir knelt by the right rear wheel of the white van and let the adrenaline shake him, for how long, he wasn’t sure. The sound of a truck or car passing filled his ringing ears every few minutes, but the vans were parked in such a way as to hide the bloody scene from the view of anyone passing.
At last he forced himself to stand and slide open the white van’s door, suddenly desperate to verify that the box he had killed for did, in fact, contain the canister.
It did.
Shakir’s actions became deliberate and directed then, as his mind seemed to detach. He pulled the shattered body of Ansallah all the way into the van and closed the driver’s door, then dragged the guard’s body to the van as well and loaded it inside. He took one of the two jerry cans of gasoline for extra fuel, and used the other to douse the interior of the white van, soaking the two bodies thoroughly.
The canister was another matter. There was no kind of fire he could build rapidly that could reach a thousand degrees for five minutes, yet he had to be sure the virus was completely dead.
There were two choices. Take it or bury it. If he took it, it could still be used. If he buried it, the chances of anyone actually finding it were remote. The canister itself was glass-lined stainless steel. It could lie in the desert for a hundred years without risk of leaking. He could always come back later and neutralize it. Right or wrong, that seemed the best course of action.
There was a small wadi off to the south of the roadway, and Shakir walked to it, digging the deepest hole he could in the north wall and burying the canister without a trace, carefully spreading the sand back into place before leaving. He triangulated on a nearby rise in the terrain to the northwest, and another to the northeast, making careful notes on the location before returning to the vans.
There had been some military traffic on the highway all morning, but now there seemed to be less traffic of any sort, and Shakir waited until there was nothing in sight before lighting a small trail of twisted rags found in the van, the end of which lay in a puddle of gasoline that would ignite the van. He was three kilometers to the east when the sight of flames engulfing a speck of white metal bloomed in his rearview mirror.
Shakir drove for an hour before his self-anesthetized mind returned to the reality around him. General Hashamadi had last been the commander of the forces arrayed against the rebel Kurds in Kirkuk, which lay nearly 250 kilometers away, through countless military convoys and checkpoints. Somehow, he not only had to reach the general, he had to get possession of the most powerful weapon the man had ever commanded.
Baghdad lay dead ahead less than 150 kilometers; and to the south of Baghdad a few miles, his wife and children waited. He prayed they were all right. He could be there in just a few hours, load them in the van, and drive to safety. It would be foolhardy, if not suicidal, to go after the remaining canister. He had no orders, and he was already a dead man officially. Going to Kirkuk would be an act of desperation as stupid as Ansallah’s suicidal attempt to reach that Styrofoam box in the face of an automatic weapon.
But, try as he might, the logic could not overwhelm the determination to right the wrongs, and recapture the genie.
And if those two men he had just murdered were not to have died in vain, he could do no less.
Shakir gripped the steering wheel a bit harder and began mentally plotting the course north.
11
Mildenhall Air Base, England
Thursday, March 7, 1991—12:00 noon (1200 GMT)
The sight of a uniformed major striding resolutely into the tranquil beauty of the Mildenhall woods on the west end of the base told Colonel Richard Kerr volumes. He recognized the major. He had spent most of the night in the man’s airlift command post, monitoring the progress of the Balair DC-10 and Operation Scorpion Strike.
After catching a flight to Mildenhall from Keflavik the previous day, and spending most of the night in the command post, he had been exhausted. The minute the message had arrived that the C-141 had lifted off again from the Iraqi desert, he had headed for bed, still shaking his head over the call from Will Westerman that had set the whole thing in motion a few days before. They hadn’t seen each other for a year, and suddenly his old pilot-training roomie had called from somewhere over the Atlantic in a presidential jet, trying to piece together a sneaky-pete mission by secure satellite phone. He had needed help with the logistics and clearances, and Kerr had responded immediately.
Kerr looked at the last of the ice cream cone in his hand, an indulgence from the nearby BX. He finished it in one bite and decided to let the major find him as he stayed put on the bench, enjoying the warmth of the sun.
The sun was straight overhead now, the temperature in the mid-sixties, with small, puffy cumulus clouds shooting by above in the teeth of a strong breeze that whispered at the surface through the pine needles like a gentle zephyr. He loved the UK in the springtime.
“Colonel Kerr!” Major Ben Campbell waved his hand and called out as he spotted Kerr and moved in his direction, then sat on the adjacent bench.
“Sir, apparently everything went to hell with the mission after you and I left last night.” He filled Kerr in, holding back the one piece of information that had caused him to search out the colonel in person.
As the two of them had waited through the night, Kerr had regaled him with war stories of Colonel Will Westerman and the friendship that had begun in undergraduate pilot training. They were the type of stories senior officers love to tell to junior officers, and that junior officers have to pretend they enjoy. After that, the name Westerman was easy to spot.
“Sir, the names we had for the pilots were wrong. There was a crew change before the mission departed and two other pilots got on. One of them was a full colonel from McChord, a reservist named Harris, Douglas Harris, and—”
Campbell saw Kerr’s face go sallow. He hadn’t expected that reaction from the name of the first pilot.
“You know—uh, knew—him, sir?”
Kerr just nodded, Doug Harris’s face swimming into his mind’s eye.
Major Campbell continued, watching Kerr’s face carefully.
“Sir, your friend, Colonel Westerman?”
“Yes?” The answer was impatient.
“He was the other pilot. He was killed, too. I’m sorry, sir.”
Al Hajarah desert, south central Iraq
Thursday, March 7, 1991—7:00 P.M. (1600 GMT)
The purple twilight slowly engulfed them as Doug Harris sat with his back against the wall of a dry streambed and watched the stars emerge. Riptides of emotions were breaking back and forth on the shore of his resolve, one moment leaving him in silent, paralytic fear, the next propelling him to a false high of overconfidence. He knew fatigue was the driving force, but he couldn’t stop the process, and he dearly wanted to hide it. The last thing they needed now was for one of them to start unraveling. After all, he reminded himself for the fiftieth time, we’re only a short distance from the border, the weather is reasonable, the enemy is all but defeated, and we’ve got food and liquids.
But Bill Backus was dying before their eye
s. It didn’t take a surgeon to see that the big, affable sergeant was getting progressively weaker.
Will was still asleep, snoring soundly a few feet away, but Sandra had awakened after only an hour of rest to watch over Bill, who was drifting in and out of painful consciousness, his breath coming hard.
Bill Backus moaned softly again, and Doug could hear Sandra move to comfort him in the darkness off to the right. With clearing skies, the moon would rise in a few hours, and they could walk on in perfectly visible conditions.
The sled had proven harder to pull than they had imagined. When the sand was soft and easy for the sled to traverse, they had no footholds in the shifting dunes. When the surface was hard and easy to walk, it held on to the makeshift sled with a malevolent vengeance.
Will figured they had come no more than six miles before deciding to hide in the streambed.
Doug figured five.
What ate at them were the sounds they had heard before noon, the sounds of helicopters and jets coming from the direction of the crash site they had left.
It meant they had successfully evaded their own rescue force.
Will awoke on his own suddenly at 10:30 P.M. Within a half hour they were on their way again, their footfalls coming with a numbing cadence, the task of pulling together now achingly familiar, the navigation accomplished by reference to the star field overhead. There were no artificial lights on the ground, but occasional lights in the sky marked passing planes. They were Coalition planes, of course. If only that survival radio had been in the kit! Doug had concluded the Iraqis had taken it, probably to try tricking U.S. rescue forces the way the enemy used to do in Vietnam.
Midnight came and went, as did three more small wadis. They drank another Coke, nibbled on a shared MRE, and moved on, none of them speaking for a long time, until Will called for a rest.
“How is he, Sandra?” Will watched as she carefully checked Bill’s pulse and temperature, trying not to rouse the unconscious engineer.
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