by Cindy Dees
Fever Zone
Danger in Arms Series, Book 1
Cindy Dees
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Copyright © 2014 by Cindy Dees. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-61417-700-5
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Before You Go…
Kill Zone
Also by Cindy Dees
About the Author
One
The West Bank, Jerusalem, one year ago
Yusef Abahdi looked around the street nervously, more out of habit than any sensed threat. This was perhaps the most troubled spot on the planet, after all. Out of reflexive instinct to protect, his hand came to rest on his young daughter’s too thin shoulder. The street was as it always was, bright, dusty, and crowded, simmering with hostility under the everyday sounds and movements of a typical workday drawing to a close. Strange how the barrier in front of him had even become a normal part of their world. It sliced right across the street, cutting through buildings and concrete with complete disregard for architecture or function. The obscene, steel-barred fence and its razor-wire spiral blended into the landscape as easily as anything else in this unnaturally divided world.
Salima grabbed the fence’s bars with her bony little hands, her face pressed to the gap. Her expression was eager and he glanced through to the Jewish neighborhood on the other side to see what so excited her.
A birthday party.
A dozen boys and girls not much older than his daughter laughed and squealed while several harassed mothers scurried around the table trying to serve cake to the squirming youngsters.
“Daddy, can I have a piece of cake?” Salima asked him hopefully.
“No, sweetie. It’s not your party.”
“Can I have a birthday party?”
“It’s not your birthday.”
“But why can’t I ever have cake?”
Why indeed? A hot knife of impotence slashed into his gut, crystallizing into despair at his inability to provide for her, to even feed her adequately, let alone give her cake for her birthday. So many moments of despair like this piled one on top of another, crushing one another until, like carbon molecules compressed impossibly tight, they’d formed a kernel of diamond-hard rage within him.
“Come away, sweetheart. It’s nearly time for Mommy to come home.”
His wife, Marta, with a master’s degree in literature, worked as a domestic for a wealthy Jewish family in the Sheikh Badr Quarter. A maid. And he, with his doctorate in biochemistry, was unable to get any work at all. Who would hire a Palestinian man from Ramala—a hotbed of terrorist activity—to work around hazardous chemical or biological agents? No Israeli company was foolish enough to try. The Mossad would have something to say about it for sure. They would leave this place if there were anywhere else to go. But they were Palestinians. The lost people. Dispossessed half a century ago, with no country nor home to call their own.
His daughter moved away from the fence reluctantly. Marta would ride the Egged #4 bus through the Silwah quarter to where the route ended, just shy of the Israeli checkpoint. He and Salima would walk the rest of the way home with Marta to their tiny flat in the Al-Izzariyya ghetto. And if Marta had impressed her employers with her diligence that day, perhaps they would send the remains of lunch home for her family to eat—a few stale sandwich halves, maybe some grapes or limp lettuce. If Marta had worked especially hard, perhaps there might even be an orange for Salima.
The area directly in front of the checkpoint was clear, kept that way by the threatening weapons of the IDF soldiers. The Israeli Defense Forces were surly these days. They always were when their government rumbled about new crackdowns. Or maybe it was rumbles from the Palestinian Authority threatening to turn Hamas’s more violent arm loose on the Israelis that did it. Either way, Yusef was careful to hold Salima’s hand tightly and keep her well back from the crossing.
“Here comes Mommy’s bus,” he announced as the large green shape turned the corner two blocks beyond the Israeli guard house.
“Pick me up so I can see!”
He lifted Salima under her armpits and hoisted her up in front of him.
BOOM!
The concussion knocked him completely off his feet and Salima fell across his head, further stunning him. Dust filled the air, choking and gray, tasting of concrete. Screams erupted, and his daughter’s high-pitched keening made him frantic like no sound he’d ever heard before. He scrambled to his knees, oblivious of shards of glass and sharp rubble cutting his hands and knees.
“Baby! Salima! Are you hurt?”
“Daaa—deee!” she screamed.
The back of her head bled where she’d struck the ground, and Holy God, it was bleeding a lot. But he saw no other obvious injuries. He ripped off his shirt, sending buttons flying, and wadded it against her scalp wound. He gathered her close, holding her so tightly she struggled against him. He loosened his grasp just long enough to tie the shirt around her head in a rough bandage, then pulled her close again.
Salima’s voice was muffled against his worn cotton t-shirt. “Where’s Mommy?”
It was if another explosion detonated inside his head, a burst of blinding, searing light that made his eyeballs ache.
Marta.
Merciful God. That was her bus.
He scooped up Salima and began to run, rushing the checkpoint in blind panic. Later, he realized that probably the only thing that kept the IDF soldiers from mowing him down right there was the fact that Salima, bloody and sobbing, was clasped against his chest. But as it was, they grabbed him, wrestling him to a stop.
“My wife is on that bus!” he shouted in Arabic, too frantic to think in Hebrew. “My wife! Dear God, my wife!”
Thankfully, one of the boys—for they were little more than boys, really, toy soldiers—understood him.
“Let him through,” the you
ng man said to the others.
Their harsh grips became a rough shove forward. And he was through.
The carnage was hideous. He pulled the sleeve of his shirt across Salima’s eyes. She protested, but he ignored her. There was blood everywhere. And specks of pink, shiny stuff, anywhere from fingernail to fist-sized. He staggered forward, dodging a burning car and chunks of concrete. He spied a dismembered foot, still in its sock and shoe.
Bloody people were beginning to stagger away from the burning carcass of the bus, helped by other bloody people. He looked around, scanning faces beneath thick coatings of dust and blood. Marta. He had to find Marta. He and Salima needed her.
He saw a bloody purse.
An arm.
A pair of pants with the lower torso of a man in them.
They were objects. Odd things disconnected from their owners. Not people. Vaguely he registered that he must be going into shock. But who wouldn’t at the sight of this monstrosity? Belatedly, it occurred to him what the pink chunks were. Human flesh. Cooked until it lost its red, raw meat color.
And then he saw her.
She was lying on the ground. Her eyes were closed and one side of her face was black—charred-paper, black skin peeling away from the red flesh below—but it was his Marta. He pushed past the small crowd gathered around her. A Hasidic Jew with a broad-brimmed hat and long payoth sideburns crouched beside her, gazing down at the caved in place where the left half of her chest used to be.
“Dead,” the Jew announced emotionlessly. “Somebody cover up the corpse.”
She had a name. She had a name, god damn it! She was not a thing! She was a human being! A wife. A mother—God, a mother.
The diamond of rage within his breast exploded, sending agonizingly sharp shards coursing through his veins, cutting him from within until everything he knew, everything he was, bled out beneath his skin. And when the anguish had consumed him completely, the crystals of rage turned to ice and he froze inside. He became a white, Antarctic void.
He clutched his bleeding child to his breast while he stood over the body of his dead wife. And he could not cry. He could not cry.
After a long time, a single thought formed out of the blood and ice and rage.
I am Yusef Abahdi. I am the wrath of God.
Two
A hot breath of air wafted across Mike McCloud’s left cheek, carrying with it grit and a hint of death. The metal plate beside his face, almost too hot to touch, made his right cheek sweat. He eased his left hand forward, reaching up awkwardly from his prone position to dial in a minute windage adjustment to his tricked out Barrett XM 500 sniper rifle’s scope.
He scanned the street below, beige on beige, sand blowing across dirt, dust devils rising from shimmering waves of heat. Khartoum. Once a great city straddling the vast Nubian plains of the Sudan, now a certified armpit of the universe. Abandoned by the civilized world to wallow in its atrocities of violence and filth of body and soul. He looked out across the skyline, dirty brown in the morning sun—brown mud buildings that had long since lost their stucco, a few brown stunted trees coated with dust like skeletal ghosts. Brown people in streets brown with crusted clay. But beneath the brown surface lay a black hole of the human soul.
The broad street before him was a particularly grim little corner of Khartoum’s worst slum, trampled by warring gangs, bled on and suffered on, ignored by the rest of the world. Except, of course, by El Noor. He was the new warlord in town and had his eye on capturing this worthless strip of real estate in a meaningless gesture of dominance over his neighbor.
Mike’s soon to be brother-in-law, a double agent for the CIA and FSB—and both agencies knew about it and used Alex as a conduit to pass information back and forth under the table—had passed a message from the Russians that a possible terrorist plot might be cooking in this happy little corner of Purgatory. El Noor was rumored to be meeting with an up and coming Palestinian terrorist. The guess was that El Noor was planning to finance an attack of some kind. And Russian intel placed the target inside the United States.
Which was why Mike was parked on this roof doing surveillance, sweltering under a scrap wood shelter in hundred-degree heat with sweat pouring down his forehead and flies viciously biting the exposed backs of his hands. And it was barely eight o’clock in the morning. Welcome to K-town. Jesus, what a hellhole.
A loud rat-a-tat erupted nearby. Gunfire. He went utterly still, abruptly a predator on the hunt. Semi-automatic machine gun fire interspersed with single-shot rifle shots. Eight, maybe ten, weapons firing. Roughly two hundred yards to his left. He swung his rifle toward the noise, scanning methodically through his telescopic scope for its source. Armed men poured out of an ancient Land Rover, firing clumsily as they went. But the amount of lead they were laying down more than compensated for their lousy execution.
The street emptied as the locals melted into surrounding buildings. A motor revved and tires squealed. Closing in fast. From the other direction. Hello. He went on full battle alert as his position abruptly looked to be ground zero for some serious action. Another Jeep loaded with thugs careened around the corner. It screeched to a sideways stop, blocking the street.
Minions of Dharwani, this street’s warlord, fired sporadically out of doorways and windows at the intruders. They couldn’t match El Noor’s AK-47’s with their World War Two surplus M-1’s. One lopsided rout, coming up.
Quick head count to his left…four, five, six. All wearing the distinctive black beret of Marak El Noor pulled down ominously over their right eyebrows. Four more El Noor gunmen plus a driver on the right. Late teens to early twenties. Mike mentally groaned. Put a gun in the hands of kids that age, and they abruptly had the brains of codfish.
Worse, they’d cut off his primary and secondary escape routes out of his hide. Plan C—admittedly shaky at best—involved exiting down the bombed out street behind him, a den of drugs and arms-dealers and killers-for-hire who’d gun down a white man as soon as talk to one. He’d better sit tight for now. He had good camouflage, the high ground, and he could shoot circles around any of the boys below. Not that he intended to get himself noticed in the first place. He was just the lousy observer, here, underpaid and overexposed, with orders only to watch and report.
Glass shattered in front of him. He eased his right eye to the rubber cup on the end of the scope. One of El Noor’s boys was using his rifle butt to knock out the lone, remaining window in an otherwise boarded up storefront. The youth and two of his compatriots leaped through the gap, disappearing inside the building.
El Noor’s thugs dragged a guy out into the street. Three women garbed in traditional black Muslim abeya’s followed, wailing and screaming and pulling at the intruders’ belts. A thug swatted the most aggressive woman—probably the wife—away like a gnat, backhanding her to the ground. Blood sprang from her mouth. She crawled back toward the building on her hands and knees, silent now.
Mike’s gut clenched. He knew this drill. And it wasn’t pretty. But he’d seen it often enough to have become numb to it. This place had that effect on a soul. It sucked the humanity out of a man and left only a hollow husk behind. No surprise that Khartoum was touted as the birthplace of practically all the world’s most violent and vicious terrorists, Carlos the Jackal and Osama bin Laden heading up the hit parade of Khartoum’s infamous scions.
Another Jeep pulled up. That alley behind him was starting to look distinctly better. Where were Dharwani’s men? Surely they would respond to this aggression. This was an outright declaration of turf war. For a moment, he got the sensation of watching swarms of insects fighting over the crumbs of a picnic. They didn’t even look like human beings to him down there, with hopes and dreams and mothers somewhere who loved them. Damn, he was getting jaded. Next time Uncle Sam offered him a long rotation stateside, maybe he ought to consider taking the offer.
The remaining women’s abeyas billowed in a gust of hot breeze as they retreated to the illusory safety of the building. The gu
y in the street was on his own. A spark of compassion poked at Mike’s callous shell. It wasn’t that they were cold-hearted bitches. It was just that they, too, knew the score. The man could die, or they and the man could die. He didn’t blame them for choosing to live to see another day.
If he ever had kids, this kind of crap shouldn’t exist in their world. And at the end of the day, that was why he was out here, hot and miserable, and watching this shit fest unfold through a rifle sight.
El Noor’s thugs commenced beating the man, kicking and rifle whipping him. The victim fought back, but the thugs were quick, strong, and surprisingly efficient. The guy went down fast, staggering into one of his attackers and grabbing the El Noor man’s shirt as he fell. A flash of white showed at the neck of the olive camouflage fabric, but then the attacker swung the butt of his rifle, landing a vicious blow to the side of the local man’s skull.
Mike was startled. These dudes really knew their way around beating a guy to death. He’d never seen any of El Noor’s thugs demonstrate this sort of cruel efficiency before. Had the warlord upgraded his cadre? Maybe invested in some freelance mercenaries to train his guys? The powers that be in Washington would be interested to hear about this little development.
Dull thuds of steel on flesh and the victim’s screams drifted upward, pleas to a merciful God who clearly did not exist. The guy was probably dead by the fifth or sixth blow the way El Noor’s super-thugs were going at him. But they continued swinging their rifles, beating the victim’s dead body into hamburger to make their point to the locals peering out from behind their curtains at the extravaganza.
