The plan of using their knives to kill the two guards was a last resort and not without risk. Without the luxury of silencers on their weapons, they had to be sure at the very least that they could kill the two guards before the others realized. If they used their weapons then there was a good chance the remaining three would be able to escape and out gun them. Thomas was still weak. So physically he was in no shape for long drawn out gunfight. Unfortunately before Thomas could kill the guard, disaster struck. The guard that Hassan was about to kill stirred, mayhem arrived in full force.
“Ali!” The guard shouted just as Hassan was in the process of trying to slice his vocal cords from behind.
Knife combat is one of the most terrifying and primal ways to kill. The rules are simple. Expect to get cut, time is of the essence, and finally, the most important imperative, “Survival is everything.” Don’t hesitate. Lose control of those three rules and you are dead.
Although Thomas had been trained for it, nothing prepares you for the look of a man’s eyes in that situation. Resting his weight on the balls of his feet, Thomas slightly bent his front knee and made sure his elbows were in at the sides, his left hand was up for protection and leading, so to support his cutting hand by controlling the enemy’s weapon. In this case, the young Iraqi’s AK-47.
The young guard suddenly awake and alert to the screams of his fellow guards panicked as he tried to gather his bearings. He tried to pull the trigger to kill Thomas but hadn’t realized he still had his safety on. As he scrambled to find the catch on the weapon, the last thing he saw was Thomas’s Khurki taking his head off all in one movement.
Turning towards Hassan, Thomas dropped the Khurki, then pulled and removed the pin on the M67 grenade containing 6.5 ounces of composition B explosive from his jacket and lobbed the device into the tent just as one of the men attempted to exit it quickly to help the two soldiers outside. Designed to explode just four seconds after release and kill anything within five meters, Thomas threw the device underarm into the tent knowing that the explosive force of the weapon could disburse steel fragments fifteen yards from the center of the explosion.
Aware that Hassan and he were inside that radius, Thomas shouted, “Grenade!” Just as he ducked for cover, a loud and savage bang followed a wall of heat and wind ripped through the air. Hassan and the guard he was fighting with were both thrown into the air while the two remaining guards in the tent and the one who had been trying to exit it were torn to pieces by the blast and wall of flames.
“Hassan!” cried Thomas fearing the worst as he got up and made his way to his new friend who was now lying on the ground on the top of the soldier he had killed just as the blast erupted.
Reaching him within seconds, Thomas ignored the screams of the wounded Iraqi soldier who had exited the tent.
“Hassan,” Thomas whispered knowing that instantly his friend was wounded badly.
“Baba!” came the repeated cry of Saleem running from the high brush outside the camp.
The General looked up at Thomas as he checked him over.
“Fuck!” Thomas said. A piece of fragment was lodged deeply into his gut, and blood was pouring out at an alarming rate. Thomas knew instantly there was no way he could make the twenty-five miles to the extraction point.
“I know it’s bad, Thomas,” whispered the old solider, seeing the guilt on Thomas’s face.
He murmured weakly, “It was the only way, my dear.”
“Do not blame yourself,” he ordered taking Thomas’s arm. “It is my Qadar,” he smiled in an attempt to soothe. “Take Saleem and deliver him to his mother in Syria,” he ordered Thomas just as Saleem arrived at their sides.
“No, Baba,” replied Saleem with tears in his eyes. “I want to stay with you,” cried the son as he cradled his father’s head in his arms.
“Your mother and sisters need you,” said Hassan weakly. “You’re the head of our family now,” he said with fatalistic understanding of his future.
Thomas looked at Saleem then Hassan.
“From this day forward, I promise you that your family is my responsibility,” Thomas said.
When Thomas arrived and stepped on to the back of the Chinook just ten days after the still secret mission, he looked like a modern version of T. E. Lawrence with the smock of an Arabian Sheikh of from the nineteenth century around his head and full beard and child at his side.
Legend goes within Hereford that Thomas had replied somewhat flippantly to the RSM who had picked him up had asked how he had managed to walk out of the desert accompanied by a boy of no more than fourteen at his side and to survive, had killed over a hundred Iraqis along the way.
“Train Hard, Fight easy.” Yet that wasn’t what that the old timers of regiment still to this day talk about long after the young officer had Returned to Unit (RTU) and left the Army. Nor did they talk about the Military Cross he had been awarded when they described his escape to new recruits after their selection. That honor instead always belonged to the look Thomas had on his face when he walked into the Forward Operating Base (FOB) in Saudi, asking to see the Colonel.
“So what was it like?” Troopers would often ask.
“He had the eyes of the fucking devil,” came the reply of the NCOs with just a hint of admiration.
1
London
It was not a typical spring morning as residents and visitors of central London alike scurried through Mayfair’s famous Berkeley Square trying hard to avoid the icy spring rain that lashed at them.
At the window of one of the many townhouses located around the Square that act as private offices for wealthy men and women of the world using the London as a base, stood a distinguished man of forty-eight and lost in thought.
Sir Thomas Litchfield, or simply “Tommy,” to his friends or lovers was dressed in an expensively tailored double-breasted cashmere and silk suit, cut in a Prince of Wales style. He stood 6’2” in height, had a mop of black hair with flecks of white scattered through it, a pair of deeply set eyes that could look as if they could penetrate one’s soul, a strong clean-shaven jaw and muscular physique.
The digital phone on top of the antique walnut writing desk buzzed and interrupted his thoughts and brought him back to the world.
Leaving the window, the proud looking man took a short walk to the high desk in the center of the room and pressed the speakerphone option on it.
“Sir Thomas, I have Miss. Gurbanammedowova on line, shall I put her through?” asked the crisp upper class English voice of his personal assistant.
He answered with polite affirmative.
“Nara,” he said letting the recipient know they were connected.
The lady in question, or to be more precise “Gunara,” to quote the world’s newspapers and gossip magazines when the woman was often followed and photographed by them, was his thirty six years old Muslim Turkman, his companion and mother to his twelve year-old daughter, Victoria Emilia Litchfield.
Nara; blessed with a full naturally athletic, exotically bronzed body, stood 5’10” tall, with an angular, oval shaped face with high naturally puffed up cheeks, thinly plucked eyebrows over a set of deeply dark brown eyes surrounded by long black eyelashes, a pair of luscious lips, and a mane of incredibly long straight coal black hair; was considered to be amongst of the most beautiful women in the world.
“Hello, my darling. You wanted me?” Nara asked in her English Russian accent that Thomas had always found rather sexy.
Never one for small talk on telephones except when talking to their daughter, as time was money, he got straight to the point.