The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes. I stood amongst the carnage in the social club, pulling a fresh belt of ammunition onto my weapon’s feed tray. The machine gun in my hands was hot to the touch; I’d gone through a hundred-round belt in less than two minutes. Probably two dozen bodies lay on the floor, ripped apart by gunfire. The air stank of powder, smoke, and death.
Tailor lit a cigarette, his carbine dangling from its sling. “April fool, motherfuckers,” he said, snapping his Zippo lighter shut. My hands started to shake. The Calm was wearing off, and soon I’d be hit with a flood of emotions as adrenaline dump shocked my system.
The only people we’d let out of the building alive were three Indonesian girls Hudson and Wheeler found in the basement. They were drugged up and had been used as playthings by the terrorist recruits. We found a weapons cache also. AK-103 assault rifles and GP-30 grenade launchers from Russia. G3 rifles from Iran and Pakistan. Rocket-propelled grenades and launchers from China. Thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition. So we dumped some gas, popped a thermite grenade, and burned it all.
As we hurried outside, we noticed that the air reeked of gasoline. In the few minutes we were inside, Animal had kept himself busy by dousing all of the cars parked on the street with gas. As we backed down the street, Hudson tossed a road flare out of the van, igniting the gas and setting the whole row of cars ablaze, just like the building.
The fire quickly spread to the neighboring warehouses. Before long, the entire block was engulfed in flames. It took the city firefighters all night to put the inferno out. In the morning, they found an Ace of Spades playing card stuck to a light pole at the end of the street. Our little calling card been Colonel Hunter’s idea. I liked it.
LORENZO
April 10
I stood on the balcony of our apartment. It was part of a complex at the south end of the city, near the intersection of old world and new money, oil-rich and third world poor. The compound itself was relatively modern, but more importantly, it was landscaped in such a way that we had quite a bit of privacy. We had some university students sharing one wall, and an old couple below us, but they all kept to themselves. We entered only through the attached garage, and that was in a van with tinted windows. The ID I had used to set up the lease was a top-of-the-line forgery of a Zubaran Oil Ministry employee who worked weird hours, and our only paleface, Reaper, never went outside anyway. We might as well have been invisible.
The balcony was where I came to contemplate. Every wall inside our hideout had something mission related tacked up, as I had to memorize a lot of facts and faces, but that could get obnoxious after a while. I had brought the manila folder from Thailand with me and had been absently flipping through the photos. It had been a long time since I had seen most of those people, and I had never met any of the kids, and now they were all going to die if I didn’t play my cards right.
Over the last few weeks there had been shootings, bombings, and all manner of craziness. Normally Zubara was a quiet place, but now there were blue uniformed SF troops on every corner, and random checkpoints set up by the secret police. There was a war going on, and it was making life difficult for us honest criminals.
I suppose I could call myself an honest criminal. I had tried being a regular criminal, but I found that I didn’t have the stomach to lie to and steal from normal folks. Terrorists on the other hand had lots of money, were fun to lie to, and nobody seemed to mind when I occasionally killed them. And it was easier to sleep at night since I was able to convince myself that I used my sociopathic tendencies for good. Mostly.
The local news was full of stories about random murders and disappearances. Somebody was going down a checklist of the Zoob’s terrorist underworld like a bad issue of The Punisher, and the worst part was that we had no idea who it was. The word on the street was that it was the emir’s secret police killing men loyal to General Sabah, but from what I had seen, this was too professional for those thugs. My money was on the Israelis, but even that didn’t make any sense. The hits were stirring up the fundies and talk of revolution was becoming more and more common. If the emir lost power, then the Izzies would have yet another oil-rich country hating them and funding Hezbollah and that struck me as a bad thing, but then again, I had never been the diplomat type.
So if it wasn’t the emir, and it wasn’t Mossad, who was raising so much hell in the area? It couldn’t be the CIA, as they were way too obvious. I had no evidence, but I was sure that whoever had blown Falah’s heart out was one of them. Having some sort of hit squad mowing down the people that I was supposed to be infiltrating was definitely screwing with my work. It didn’t really matter, though. I just had to keep a low profile until I could get to Adar. Piece of cake.
The sliding door opened and Reaper appeared, gangly and squinting at the sudden brightness. The boy really needed to get more sun, but that would take him away from his precious computers and high-speed Internet.
Reaper was an interesting case. He’d been one of those super-genius kids, awkward and goofy as hell I was sure, and he’d been attending MIT when he was fourteen. When I’d met him six years ago he’d been on the run from the law. Ironically enough, he had the most serious criminal record of my crew. My rap sheet only showed a handful of juvenile offenses whereas Reaper, the child prodigy, had been an overachiever and been indicted for several hundred counts of felony fraud, hacking, and embezzlement before he was old enough to drive.
Time magazine had written a cover story about him. Reaper had used that as his resume when he’d asked to join my crew.
He shuddered. “Man, it’s hot.”
I chuckled. “Wait until summer. It’s barely ninety. How’s your machine thingy coming?”
He shrugged. He’d been working on the device for Phase Three for weeks now. His room was covered in bits and pieces of the complicated gizmo. “I thought about going with a low-inductance capacitor bank discharge, but I said hell with it, the explosive pumped flux compression generator will be so much cooler.”
“You know, I dropped out of high school specifically so I wouldn’t have to know what any of those words meant.”
“I thought you dropped out to commit a triple homicide.”
“Quadruple,” I corrected him. “All I need to know is will it work and will it be ready in time?”
I knew it would be. Reaper had an IQ that was off the charts. He could process data like I could languages. “Starfish will be good to go, but we’ll need a couple of test runs out in the desert, just to make sure.”
“You named it Starfish?” It didn’t resemble a starfish, it looked like a big tube in an aluminum housing. “That’s cheesy.”
“Cheesy awesome,” he answered with pride. I’m sure the name had some sort of geeky historical reference. Reaper changed the subject and pointed at the folder in my hand. “You been thinking about your family?”
I shrugged. “A little, you know . . .” In actuality, I was terrified a bunch of my nieces and nephews were going to get shot in the head for something that they didn’t even know about, but I couldn’t let that show to the kid. He needed me to be sure, indomitable, fearless, all that leadership crap.
Reaper looked slightly embarrassed. “You worried about them?”
“Only if we fail.” The rest went unsaid. We both knew what would happen then: Eddie would kill everyone that had ever mattered to us just out of principle. But he hadn’t come out here to talk about that. “What’ve you got?”