On my orders, we all pulled the strings attached to our soft palates and the dog tags out of our stomachs. They were all wrapped in string, encased in the pale blue protective gel, and still glistening with the blood of their original owners.
We slipped into a nearby ruin of a house and buried them in the ground. Then we went over our plans one last time. We sprayed ourselves in nanocoating and activated the Environmental Camouflage software. The disguise algorithms generated by the camouflage patterns fired through our systems, transmitting through the natural salts in our bodies to the nanocoating layer that covered our clothes and equipment.
The change was instantaneous. We disappeared into the background of the bullet-riddled ruins.
“As planned, then. Leland and Williams to wait here on standby, ready to secure our path of retreat in the event of unexpected developments. Alex and I to infiltrate the mosque and strike when the two targets meet. All clear?”
“Sure thing, boss,” said Williams. “Just try and keep it down, huh? I could do without having to take on the whole town in a shootout afterwards. There’s only four of us, right?”
Williams was fucking with us; that was his way of diffusing the tension. Of course there were “only” four of us. Four was exactly the right number for this sort of mission. That’s the way it was—the way it had been ever since the Second World War. Fewer than four and you ran the risk of coming up short; you only needed to lose one guy and the whole mission was in jeopardy. More than four and you lost the clean, clear line of command, and it also became exponentially more difficult to move covertly.
The four-man formation was first perfected by the British SAS on their anticommunist ops in the tropical jungles of Malaya. The real advantage was that it was possible to subdivide into two smaller battle units of two-man cells. The two-man cell, or buddy system, was effectively the smallest unit in Special Forces ops. Solo operation was virtually unheard of.
Two units of two. That was where we were at as we moved into the final stage of the plan. I was actually more used to buddying with Williams, but as we were the two ranking soldiers on this mission it didn’t make sense to have us both in the same cell.
Alex and I moved smoothly and silently out of the ruined house toward the mosque walls. There were plenty of guards on the lookout, but the combination of our Environmental Camouflage, the route we took, and the cover of darkness combined to form the perfect storm of disguise. We were indistinguishable from the ruins that surrounded us.
When we arrived at the mosque I gave the hand signal for us to split. Given the darkness and the thoroughness of our disguises it should have been virtually impossible for us to have even seen each other’s hand signals, but the software in our eyes was able to make out the contours of the other person and transmit their outline straight to each other’s retinas. Alex nodded to show he understood and started moving toward the rear entrance of the mosque.
As long as we kept close to the ground and the walls, the combination of nightfall and our nanocoating disguise meant that we were for all practical intents and purposes undetectable without infrared scanning technology. I crept alongside the mosque wall until I found a hole that went underground.
In the distance I could still hear the sound of gunfire as the civilians were murdered. I put the sounds behind me as I started crawling under the floorboards and into the mosque. This once-holy place, built to praise Allah, now reeked of stale gunpowder and rotting human flesh. I was sure that the mosque would be full of decomposing corpses. Moreover, amid the carnage would be the source of all the trouble—the so-called defense minister who was running the whole show.
As I continued crawling under the floorboards, I heard classical music emanating from a point in the distance. I would love to say that it was Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries or something similarly cartoonish for the situation. But it wasn’t. It was Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. A beautiful melody, singularly inappropriate for this moonless night where the only light in the sky was from the burning fat of the corpses as they lit the clouds above with an eerie crimson hue. I scurried toward the source of the sound and before long found a hole in the floor above me.
Slowly, I raised my head from the hole in the ground. If I’d had my SOPMOD with me I would have been able to attach the probe unit and use that to have a look around, but as it was, armed with only a battered AK, I had to use the old-fashioned method of checking the space out with my own eyes. After confirming that there was, indeed, nobody out there, I climbed silently out of my hole.
The Moonlight Sonata was coming up to its melancholy refrain. I moved carefully and deliberately from room to room, getting a good mental picture of the mosque’s layout as I did so.
The beautiful, swirling geometric patterns of the tiles, so typical of Islamic art, made the relatively simple layout of the mosque seem at first glance more like a maze than it really was. No doubt the effect of a cultural code I didn’t understand, making the “other” seem different—cool, even. I moved deeper and deeper into the darkness of the maze, following the scent of the music.
The music grew louder. I realized that I had now neared its source. The one room in the mosque with a light on. I closed in, glued to the wall, and poked my head through the archway long enough to take quick stock of the contents of the room.
The former brigadier general was alone. The Moonlight Sonata was coming from a small portable radio set on top of a table—volume cranked up as high as it could go. The defense minister was evidently deep in contemplation, his sunken pupils glued to the radio, one hand outstretched toward the speakers, as if he were somehow trying to physically absorb the sound. He was dressed to the nines in his former military uniform, spick and span, as if he were about to attend a formal ceremony.
By the look of things the room was completely unguarded. Target A was alone. It would have been a piece of cake to dispatch him on the spot. The problem was that Target A wasn’t currently deep in conversation with Target B as we expected he would be at this time. If the defense minister’s corpse was discovered before Target B, the American, arrived, he might slip through our fingers.
Is Target B even here in the first place? I wondered. Perhaps that sense of unease that we had before the drop was justified after all. Now would be just the right time for Murphy’s Law to kick in. Assassination was a complex job with many variables at the best of times. When you had two simultaneous targets, the difficulty level didn’t increase arithmetically so much as geometrically.
What to do? The one thing I knew was that I had no time to waste. We were right in the middle of enemy heartland, and all it would take was one false move for us to be overrun; Alex and I, at the very least, would be sitting ducks.
Time for a decision. The ability to act quickly and under pressure was one of the hallmarks of special ops after all. I killed my breath and silently replaced my AK with my knife. The moment the former brigadier general turned his back, I leapt across the room and pounced. Using one of my arms to pin his arms behind his back, I held the tip of my knife to his throat.
“You’re not my target,” I said. “But if you make a noise or move, I’ll kill you. Understand?” I was lying, of course, and I can’t say I was particularly proud of the fact that I was lying to a man who was about to die. That I was about to kill, even. But this wasn’t the time to be worrying about the finer points of battlefield ethics. “It’s the American we’re looking for. The man you were supposed to meet today.”