Juba’s more practiced military eyes saw what the commander did not. All of that armor out there snarling at the gates was not actually doing anything but making a lot of noise. The Abrams normally operated in violent but precise choreography, and their crews were extraordinarily well trained with the machines. Now they were having difficulty parking the damned things? Not bloody likely. And all that marching, like some old army forming up in a straight line for an attack? The hair on his neck prickled, as if touched by a cold hand. This was, somehow, Swanson at work.
“BINGO,” SAID KYLE. “I got the spotter. On the roof of that building five doors down on the diagonal street to our left.”
Sybelle checked the rooftop through the scope on her rifle and caught the sunlight flickering off the lenses of a set of binos. “Uh-hunh. He’s got a good view of both places from there and is safe, back out of the attack zone. Has to be the triggerman.”
“Yeah. Let’s go get him.”
They squirmed out of their hide in the back of an abandoned house, checked the outside, and went into a cautious lope alongside the walls. The place had the look of a movie set, lots of empty buildings but no activity. Still, they took their time and proceeded with great caution: stop, observe, assess, move.
The building was a three-story affair of concrete blocks, with the third story added much later to the original structure. It leaned slightly to the right, and mortar had oozed out between the bricks before drying. A shop was on the first floor, and residences probably were above it. They stopped for almost ten minutes and waited in silence, watching for movement inside.
“There has to be a guard in there,” whispered Kyle. “Just can’t see him.”
Sybelle handed him her rifle and got her local clothes back in order with the scarf over her hair and a veil pulled across the lower part of her face. “I got it.” She stood and walked along the side of the building, stepping boldly through the front door.
The guard was seated in a straight chair, leaning against the wall of the shop with his AK-47 balanced on his lap. He looked up at her silhouette in the doorway and barked, “Woman, what are you…”
Sybelle whipped the pistol up from her side and shot him twice in the face, and Kyle came ducking inside at the soft coughs of the silencer. They rotated through the cluttered store, finding no one else, and Swanson pointed to the stairs. Sybelle took a moment to step out of the cumbersome gown and scarf and followed Kyle up.
A closed door was at the head of the short staircase, and Swanson eased it open. He went to the right and Sybelle went left. Nothing. There was only one other room. With Sybelle covering, Kyle pushed hard through the closed door, and it flew open but did not bounce off the wall. He immediately double-tapped two rounds through it, and the guard hiding behind the door gave a little cry of pain and surprise and toppled to the floor, where Kyle shot him in the head.
They moved on. The third floor was empty, and when they crawled up to the roof, they saw the triggerman standing nine feet away, exposed in the morning sunshine, binoculars to his eyes, watching the sideshow being put on by the rumbling beasts of Task Force Steel. Kyle Swanson kicked him behind the knees and jerked back on his head at the same time, forcing a fall. As soon as the surprised man was on the deck and out of sight from the street, Kyle shot him in the eye and dragged the dead man inside. Sybelle jumped over the corpse, swept up two cell phones that lay side by side on the top of the wall, and also hurried back through the door.
Inside, she examined them as gently as if they were diamonds. Normally, a cell phone used as a trigger would be predialed to a number and the operator only had to press the SEND button to complete the circuit. “Whoa, girl,” she said to herself. “Easy does it.”
“Look at this, Kyle,” she said, pointing to the and marks scrawled in black greasepaint on the faces of the phones. “The Arabic symbols for ‘one’ and ‘two.’ Got to be the houses.”
“Good to go,” Swanson said. “I checked this guy out and he’s nobody. Probably a midlevel type who could be trusted with just enough responsibility to carry out this job, but I doubt if he had anything to do with the planning.”
“So how do we get higher up the food chain?” she asked.
Kyle grinned. “Let’s blow some shit up and see who comes calling.”
“Oo-rah,” said Sybelle, picking up the number two phone. She pushed down on the SEND button.
The entire town seemed to jump on its foundations as a bright and blinding flash of light ignited like the wink of a miniature sun and was followed by a deafening, crashing roar. The three outside guards were swallowed in a hell of fireballs that cometed into the sky and rolled out into the street while debris scythed through the air, chopping at everything in its path. Then came the rolling concussion, giant fists slamming across the landscape and splintering windows.
Swanson and Summers were burrowed in the corner against the interior wall when the concussion rolled through with freight-train power. Rafters sagged and plaster cracked. Toys and dishes and furniture tumbled around, and they breathed through open mouths to equalize the pressure pounding at their ears. A flying lamp cracked Sybelle on the head hard enough to make her see stars, and Kyle was punched in the gut by a table leg.
When the initial explosion was done, a secondary series of smaller detonations began cooking off with loud booms, and when Kyle and Sybelle finally crawled outside on the roof, they saw that the target building was utterly gone, leaving behind a blackened hole in the ground from which smoke rose in filthy columns. Destruction ringed it. Dozens of U.S. troops might have been killed in a raid on the place.
THREE BLOCKS AWAY, THE commander of the insurgents was knocked flat by the explosion and jumped back to his feet with a shout of exasperation and fury. “He set it off too early! That stupid, ignorant son of a whore! The Americans are not even in the streets yet and now they have been warned! I am going over there and kill him myself!”
Juba laughed. “You’re a fool. If you go out there, the only one who will die is you. Your crude ambush attempt is over.”
The commander spun around in anger. “Don’t call me a fool! You cannot accept the hospitality of my home and then dare to insult me! Do not forget that it is you, Juba, who is under my protection, not the other way around.” The bearded man vaulted down the stairs, grabbed an AK-47, and sprinted toward the triggerman’s building, trailed by a bodyguard.
Juba raised his eyes and looked beyond the edge of the village at the armored vehicles bumping about over a couple of miles of ground. Nothing but a feint. Shake, he thought. Getting closer.
30
COUPLE OF GUYS RUNNING this way, and they don’t look too happy,” said Sybelle, peering around the edge of the door.
“Right.” Swanson dug a finger into each phone and levered out the batteries and then smashed the instruments with hard stomps of his boots. “Let them come in and we grab them.”
The insurgent commander was the first through the door, and he was allowed to rush into the center of the room, but when the bodyguard crossed the threshold, Sybelle clocked him hard in the mouth with the butt of her M-4. His head snapped back, his feet flew out from beneath him, and he collapsed. At the same time, Swanson launched onto the commander’s back and rode him to the floor, rolled him over, and popped him hard on an ear to daze him. By the time the man collected his senses, a strip of duct tape was across his mouth, plastic flexicuffs ensnared his wrists behind his back, and more duct tape had been wound around his ankles. Between the colors and shapes dancing in his eyes, he saw that the bodyguard was sprawled unconscious, also being wrapped like a mummy in black duct tape.