‘Clear, boss,’ he said.
‘What’s the layout?’
‘One main display room full of junk, two smaller ones behind it full of more junk. A back door — locked — looks like it opens onto a dirt alley. No enclosing walls there. Internal staircase leads to a second story. Old woman peeling spuds upstairs, ugly as a big toe. Three other rooms, all bedrooms. On the rooftop is a washing line and a TV satellite dish.’
The place appeared to be free from threat. Any location that’s been surveyed and cleared of unauthorized persons is technically secure, says the PSO handbook. But life experience was making me cautious. I moved to the side, allowing al-Eqbal to pass, and our diamond pattern was set to move into the confined space. The overall mission for this and almost every other PSO detail was running through my head: prevent assassination, injury, kidnapping, assignation, and, almost above all, safeguard the principal’s schedule. Dual problem right there, I reminded myself. We had us an assignation and it wasn’t on the damn schedule.
Al-Eqbal interrupted my thoughts. ‘I will go in alone,’ he commanded with a wave of his hand as if we were troublesome flies. ‘There is not enough room.’
I looked at the shop and he had a point. It was no Wal-Mart. ‘You can’t go in there without an escort.’
We stared at each other for a few moments before he sighed wearily and said, ‘One guard only. Young man, you are worrying too much, I think.’
‘We can only spare five minutes here, sir,’ I said.
The principal shook his head at me as if to say that I just didn’t get it.
‘Meyers, accompany our dignitary,’ I said.
‘Yes, sir,’ Meyers replied.
The book inside my head played like a bad song that wouldn’t go away:
1. Do not let the principal enter a doorway first.
2. In hallways, keep the principal in the center.
3. Keep the principal away from windows and alcoves and areas limiting escape and evasion.
The cousin put his arm around the principal’s shoulders. They walked toward the shop entrance, chatting, laughing. Meyers took up station ahead of them, scoping left and right. A pro.
I scanned the street. A yellow taxi, with a replacement fender and door panels that gave it a patchwork appearance, drove by slowly, blowing smoke. The driver leaned across the bench seat toward us, eternally hopeful for a fare. Fifty meters down the road, several middle-aged men having a conversation crossed from one side to the other. Nearby, the wind had picked up some dust and blew it into a corkscrew that was moving in our direction. More grit flew into my eyes. I opened them in time to see a woman in a dark blue burka that was billowing like a sail — the bottom hem flapping and whipping around her ankles — walk into the middle of the road, stop, turn around, and then retrace her steps. Two young men on pushbikes swerved to avoid her. A couple of blocks further down, a man pushing a wheel-cart pulled over to sell bunches of bananas.
The drivers reversed our vehicles and parked them in front of al-Eqbal’s cousin’s shop — one of a group of five with common walls. A narrow alley was at either end of the block. The buildings on the other side of the wide street were mostly unpainted gray concrete, two and three storys, with flat roofs, two windows per floor, no balconies. Some were homes; the living rooms of some functioned as shops, like al-Eqbal’s cousin’s. Over the roofs of these houses rose the imposing mass of TV Mountain. I’d been on its summit years ago when I first came to the ’Stan. The Taliban rocketed our position there, trying to dislodge me and several other special tactics officers while we called in air strikes on their fundamentalist asses. Looking down from the summit, the gray city seemed to wrap itself around the base like a blanket of clothes-dryer lint.
I spoke into the small boom mike, part of the system that allowed our team members to communicate with each other over short distances. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked Meyers.
‘Settling in for the long haul, boss. They’re brewing tea,’ came his reply through my earpiece.
‘Tell Mr Big he’s got two minutes left.’
Stefanovic, Fallon, and Detmond were all Army. They faced out, looking idly toward the mountain, waiting. Their M16s were pointed at the ground. Detmond lit a cigarette. With the principal out of the picture, so was their focus. Our drivers had the engines running. Gangsta crap thumped from an open window.
To pass the time, I asked Stefanovic, ‘So why did you volunteer for this?’
‘Who volunteered?’ he said. ‘I cleaned out my sergeant in a game of hold ’em. It was this or latrine duty. Happens again, I’ll take the crappers. You?’
‘Brain fart.’
‘You asked to do this shit?’ Fallon said. He glanced at me, seeing but not believing.
Detmond grunted.
‘Got a volunteer joke for you,’ I said to our little formation. ‘A guy walks into a bar with a pet alligator. He puts it up on the bar and says to the freaked-out patrons, “I’ll make you all a deal. I’ll put my dick in this here ’gator’s mouth and keep it there one minute. At the end of that time, the ’gator will open its mouth. If I still have my dick, all of you have to buy me a drink.”
‘Of course, the crowd agrees, so he drops his pants, puts his pecker in the ’gator’s mouth, and the room goes silent. At the end of one minute, he picks up a beer bottle and smacks the ’gator over the head with it. The ’gator opens its mouth and out comes the guy’s wang, unharmed. The crowd goes nuts and the free drinks flow. After a while, the guy stands on the bar and says, “I’ll make y’all another offer. I’ll pay a hundred bucks to anyone else willing to give it a try.”
‘A hush falls over the crowd.
‘“C’mon,” says the guy. “Aren’t there no damn volunteers out there?”
‘A lone hand slowly rises over everyone’s heads. It’s a young blond woman.
‘“I’ll do it,” she says, “but only if you don’t hit me on the head with no beer bottle.”’
Fallon’s attention wandered off.
Detmond grunted.
‘My mother’s blond,’ said Stefanovic flatly.
I cleared my throat and told them to keep up the good work, then moved away to check the cousin’s front door.
No one was coming out. I was getting impatient. Loitering on the streets of Kabul with a Stars and Stripes patch on your shoulder was only slightly less moronic than sticking a fork in a wall socket. Besides, his five minutes were definitely up.
‘Meyers…’ I said into the mike.
‘He’s telling me he wants another five minutes,’ came the reply.
‘He can’t have them,’ I said, but I knew this guy would take them whether I agreed or not.
I turned in time to see a girl of no more than fourteen years old, dressed in black and wearing a pink scarf over her head, run into the building adjoining the cousin’s. She was bent over with her arms wrapped around her belly as if she were pregnant, and left the front door open behind her.
I was about to say something about this into the mike when a deafening explosion turned the world into a giant dust ball. It punched me backward through the air and I slammed into the house ten feet behind. Dust clogged my nose and eyes and my lungs were clenched, closed tight.
Could.
Not.
Breathe.
I pawed the dirt from my face and saw a massive white, black, and gray cloud boiling into the sky. Below it, two of our Landcruisers were tipped on their sides. My men were down. Something released in my chest, and I sucked down a lungful of powdered building, which brought on a coughing fit. When I pulled out of it, I could see through watering eyes that al-Eqbal’s cousin’s house was gone, along with the neighbor’s, heading skyward in the expanding gray and black mushroom cloud. Jesus… Meyers would be in that cloud somewhere. I wanted to move, stand up at least, but everything was in slo-mo. Rog-erson’s Landcruiser was parked outside the spot where the neighbor’s house used to be. I could see her profile. Something about it was wrong. Oh, shit… her face… she didn’t have one.