“Roger that.”
“Are you compromised?”
“I don’t think so,” Gil said. “A few locals may have seen my face, but it’s dark, so there shouldn’t be anything to worry about it. I’ll fly out ASAP.”
“Are you injured?”
“Mildly concussed, but nothing I can’t handle.”
“You’ve definitely dealt with worse,” Pope remarked. “What happened to the Russian?”
“They were dropping monkey bombs on us from the roof, and he got smashed.”
“You’d better fly out on your Canadian passport,” Pope advised. “You can cross at Niagara Falls. I’ll have a woman there waiting to bring you over.”
“I can bring myself over.”
“Okay. Let me know when our AQAP friends are out of the picture.”
“Roger that. Typhoon out.” Gil put the phone away.
He sat pretending to watch the television for another hour, keeping one eye on the street, and then got up and returned to the youth hostel. He walked through the doorway into an open courtyard, finding the office on the far side behind a sliding glass window. There a bald, unpleasant-looking fellow in his fifties sat watching a soccer game on a tiny television set. When he glanced up to see Gil standing on the other side of the window, his eyes grew wide, and he grabbed for a pistol beneath his shirt.
Gil jerked the suppressed USP .45 and shot him through the glass. The window shattered, and the man pitched over in the chair, landing on the tile floor with his brains blown out the other side of his head.
Gil looked around to make sure no one had seen and put the weapon away. He hadn’t counted on the hostel being a safe house. Stepping around the corner and into the office, he switched off the television and squatted down, using the man’s jacket from the back of the chair to wrap up his head, tying it tight with the sleeves to keep what was left of his gray matter from oozing out onto the floor. Then he carried the body across the hall and dumped it in the janitor’s closet.
Within a few minutes, he’d swept the broken glass into a dust bin and mopped up most of the gore. The crime scene was by no means spic and span, but with the light turned off, it would easily pass the cursory inspection of a late-night traveler standing outside the window. He took the ledger and a copy of the floor map into the dining room, where he wouldn’t likely be bothered by anyone looking for the dead man. There were seventy-two beds in the hostel, and just as Gil suspected, there was no record of two males having checked in within the last couple of hours.
He sat studying the map, checking off the occupied beds against the guest ledger. Thirty-three of the beds were occupied, with roughly a fifty-fifty split between males and females, the hostel providing separate dorm rooms for men and women. There were a number of two-bed rooms set apart from the dorms, normally reserved for married couples, and Gil guessed that Bashwar and Koutry would be in one of those.
He put the ledger back on the manager’s desk and made his way up the stairs with his hand inside his jacket. At the landing atop the stairs, he oriented himself with the map and made a right down the hall, deciding to check the most isolated room first. Halfway down the hall, he came to a rusty chain stretched across the corridor where he was supposed to make a left. A battered tin sign hanging from the chain read No Admittance, in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. Light shown beneath the door at the end of the short hallway.
Gil drew the USP and stepped carefully over the chain. A washstand stood against the wall, and a black daypack sat on the floor beneath it. He knelt low in the shadowy light to spot the monofilament line running across the corridor from inside the pack to a rusty screw set knee high in the opposite wall. He knew better than to mess with a booby trap unnecessarily, but he didn’t want his line of retreat obstructed in the event things went bad and he needed to egress in a hurry. Besides, this chintzy black-bag affair looked more to him like a Columbine High cum wannabe warrior booby trap than a device rigged with anything as sensitive or complex as a mercury switch.
So he pulled the bag gently from beneath the washstand to release the tension from the monofilament line. Then he checked to be sure that there was no second line attached to the bag before sliding it across and up against the opposite wall, where both bag and trip line would be clear of his path. He stepped to the door and put his hand on the doorknob, listening for movement or conversation from within the room. Hearing nothing, he turned the knob and stepped smoothly inside with the pistol before him.
Koutry looked up in complete shock from where he lay in bed. Gil shot him dead center between the eyes, blowing blood, brains, and bone fragments all over the white pillowcase.
Bashwar was not in the room. This meant he had either stepped out of the hostel while Gil was eating or had gone to take a shower. Koutry had obviously not been expecting him to return so soon. Gil checked the map and moved out down the hall toward the bathrooms.
The showers were empty, but in the next room he saw a pair of feet beneath one of the stall doors in the lavatory, easily recognizing the same Nike basketball sneakers he had seen from beneath the van. A towel and a bar of soap sat waiting on the sink. Gil put five quick rounds through the stall door. The only sound was that of the pistol cycling the rounds and the 230-grain bullets striking the tiled wall after they passed through Bashwar’s body.
Bashwar toppled off the toilet and his feet sprawled out beneath the door.
Gil kicked the door in to see the young man’s face jammed between the commode and the wall, his eyes open, face frozen in shock, with his gun hand still gripping the CZ-75.
“That’s for Benghazi, cocksucker.” He pulled the door closed.
On his way down the stairs, he met a group of Australian tourists on their way up and pretended to stifle a yawn, covering his face with his hand.
“Hey, mate?” one of them called after him. “Have you seen the manager?”
“No,” Gil said without looking back.
A half mile from the hostel along Boulevard des Almohades, directly in front of a pier lined with Moroccan naval vessels, he ditched the USP down a sewer drain and hailed a cab for the airport. It was time to get home and find out what the hell was going on.
9
Though one would not have necessarily guessed it by his present line of work, Daniel Crosswhite was a Medal of Honor recipient and a former Delta Force operator who had survived many deadly incursions behind enemy lines. He had been discharged from the army six months prior due to a fractured hip and pelvis sustained in his last combat jump. He could still run and fight, just not well enough by Special Forces standards, and so the army had asked him to resign his commission.
There were other factors involved, of course, primarily the fact that Crosswhite had led an unauthorized rescue mission in Afghanistan to rescue a female helicopter pilot named Sandra Brux. The mission had been a failure and had very nearly resulted in the deaths of two of the men in his command. Even though Crosswhite had gone on to help successfully rescue Brux a couple of weeks later, winning himself the Medal of Honor in the process, this had only caused his superiors to resent his presence in Delta Force all the more.
Crosswhite now drew a small disability pension from the Veterans Administration, but that barely paid the bills, and he was not the type to sit around waiting on what he considered to be a handout, especially when so many other veterans were receiving no assistance whatsoever. So he had sought out a former Navy SEAL named Brett Tuckerman to help him with a little enterprise he had dreamed up one night while watching the local news in his hometown of New York City.
Tuckerman was a true wild card: a gunfighter and gambling addict who couldn’t pass a poker game if he was chained to a D8 Cat going in the opposite direction. His friends within the Special Ops community all called him Conman, a nickname he had come by honestly. He and Crosswhite had first met during the unauthorized rescue mission into the Waigal Valley, and Tuckerman too had eventually paid the price for his involvement in the ill-fated mission by being kicked out of DEVGRU (also known as SEAL Team VI) a few months later — as had every other SEAL involved in the same op.