After about three weeks of abuse, they managed to escape. Hiding during the day and traveling at night, they had returned to the school. They’d now been in the basement for a month and a half, surviving on emergency supplies the looters hadn’t managed to find.
Akil told them that he and the men he was with were leaving for Turkey after sundown. When he asked the women if they would like to travel with them, they looked at each other and nodded.
Amira said that her friend thought she might be pregnant and needed medical attention.
“We’ll get that for you in Turkey,” offered Akil.
The opening chords of the darkly beautiful “’Round Midnight” by Thelonious Monk played on Crocker’s iPod. There was something hauntingly sad about the way the angular chords built to the melody. Crocker had read somewhere that the jazz genius had composed it when he was eighteen years old.
It might have been written for this moment-the broken, abandoned school, his men snoring gently behind him, the light from the sun slanting through the wreckage. Kids had played here. The rooms were once filled with laughter and young, eager faces. It bothered him that one man-one tyrant and his supporters-had been allowed to wreak so much damage. How did the world allow this?
Birds chirped, unaware of the human madness around them. A breeze rattled aluminum roofing that had once covered the entrance to the playground.
Where are the children now? he wondered, aware of an engine chugging in the distance. As it slowly drew closer, Crocker shouldered his HK416 and decided to take a look.
Standing at the far end of the third floor where the roof was still more or less intact, he peered out the shattered windows and saw an old Corolla sedan approaching tentatively, stopping every ten feet as though the people in it were looking for a specific address. Nothing about it appeared alarming, but still he kept it fixed in the crosshairs of the EOTech 553 gunsight.
As the Corolla drew within thirty feet of the school, a curious thing happened. Hassan emerged from the building and waved it down. Crocker watched as the Corolla stopped and Hassan ran to the back door, opened it, and helped a very pregnant young woman out. They embraced. Then a young man emerged from the driver’s side and kissed them both.
What the hell is this? A family reunion?
Crocker watched as the driver hurried to the back of the car, popped open the trunk, and handed the pregnant woman a suitcase. Then he returned to the Corolla, waved to Hassan and the woman, and started to back the car down the street.
Who’s she? Crocker asked himself. Is she the person Hassan was talking to on the phone?
His thinking was interrupted by the whoosh of an approaching RPG. The Corolla was twenty feet from where it had left her when it hit the car from behind and exploded, destroying the car and throwing Hassan and the pregnant woman to the ground.
The pregnant woman screamed repeatedly in Arabic. The men downstairs stirred and reached for their weapons. Crocker flew down the concrete steps two at a time, his 416 ready.
What the hell is going on?
He found Hassan and the pregnant woman lying on the pavement, hugging each other and trembling. He helped her up first. She was bleeding from a cut to her forehead and was blubbering hysterically, pointing at the burning car and saying, “K…K… Khoya…”
Hassan pointed to a piece of shrapnel embedded in his arm. “Look. Oh God!”
“Get inside!” Crocker shouted. To the woman: “Lean on me. Hurry.”
She struggled to walk. “Khoya! Khoya! My…brother!”
“Come.”
“My brother! My brother!”
He had to pick her up in his arms. With his free left hand he reached out to stop Hassan, who was stumbling toward the burning car in a half crouch. He was holding his ears and appeared disoriented.
“Hassan, get back inside the fucking school! Turn around!”
Hassan pointed toward the car and mumbled something. Then a peal of automatic gunfire came from beyond the car and ricocheted off the pavement around them. Crocker ran the woman to the schoolhouse. He passed Mancini wearing running shorts and cradling an M7A1.
“Incoming. Down the street! Past the burning car!”
“Who are they?”
“Unclear! Get Hassan. Bring him in. He’s fucked up.”
Mancini grabbed Hassan under one arm and scooped up the suitcase with the other. Hassan struggled, seemingly determined to rescue the man in the burning car even though he was surely burnt to a crisp by now.
Akil ran out to help wrestle a very resistant Hassan inside. Crocker left Suarez to watch him and the pregnant woman, then returned with Davis to try to deal with the attack from the end of the block.
“Who the hell are they?” asked Davis, slamming a mag into his automatic rifle.
“Unclear.”
“How many?”
“Unclear again.”
What they didn’t need was a big commotion, which could bring Assad army reinforcements and air support. They were completely vulnerable and didn’t even know their way out.
“You two stay here and defend,” Crocker said to Mancini and Davis, who returned fire from the front of an adjacent structure that appeared to have been a church of some sort. “Akil and I are going to try to flank them from the right.”
“What about Hassan?”
“Suarez is guarding him and trying to calm him down.”
He signaled Akil to follow him to an alley that ran behind the buildings. Much of it was blocked with rubble and garbage like broken bicycles and furniture, making it impossible for a vehicle to pass. They squeezed through, Akil in Marine Corps shorts and a white Hooters tank top, Crocker in his usual black tee and pants.
None of the men had shaved in the past several days, so they didn’t stand out. Nothing to mark them as Westerners, or trained operators. Even their weapons weren’t that unusual. HK416s with attached grenade launchers, SIG Sauer P226 handguns, SOG knives, an RPG-7 with an assortment of warheads that Crocker carried in pouches on his black combat vest.
The firing on their left was close. Sounded like mostly small-arms stuff, with the occasional boom of a grenade. Seeing a badly damaged apartment tower ahead and to the right, Crocker signaled that this was their objective. He veered right, breaking a sweat, hopped a low concrete wall, pushed past a bloodstained mattress, and entered the back stairway. The trapped, stale air tasted like bitter coffee.
He pointed upward. At four o’clock, the stairway was completely blocked by a collapsed wall, so he turned left into a hallway and then into a large apartment that had been completely burned out. Ran in a crouch to the front windows, past the burnt remains of sofas and rugs, a child’s crib, a cracked flat-screen hanging precariously from the wall. Akil followed.
Below and slightly left sat a jeep and a Toyota pickup with a nasty-looking.50 cal machine gun mounted in its bed. Several men with beards were crouched around the front of the jeep, firing automatic weapons. The jeep flew a yellow flag with the green logo of an arm raising an assault rifle and over it in Kufic script “Party of God.”
“Hezbollah,” Akil whispered.
Crocker hated those fuckers, having tangled with them before in Lebanon. He was aware that the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia had come to Assad’s aid in the south and east. At least they weren’t encountering Assad’s army. Not this time.
The pickup was in the process of turning and backing up so that the.50 cal would have a clean shot down the street at the school.