Kealey had taken a long moment to digest all that, standing in the hot sun beating down on the craggy slope. “We’re going to have to keep the tunnel’s entrance covered tonight,” he’d said. “In case Nusairi and White try using it to make a getaway.”
“Yup.”
“That means you’re going to have to let Tariq know about it.”
“If he doesn’t already. There isn’t much that gets past Mirghani or his headmen.”
“That isn’t my point,” Kealey said. “It’s one thing for them to be aware the tunnels exist. Another to find out the Agency had a role in digging them. Or that it chose to support a particular group-ethnic, political, whatever-over theirs.”
Mackenzie had shrugged his shoulders. “Them’s the breaks,” he’d said. “This is a complicated world. Now we need them, and they need us. A whole new codependency is born. We can’t worry about Tariq feeling slighted.”
All of which was true, Kealey thought now as they rolled by the decayed, sun-bleached railway station with its merging of Arabian and British architecture-the simple curve of the entry arch overlooked by Victorian gables with elaborate moldings and the remnants of a high clock tower, its dial and workings long ago removed by thieves or vandals.
With the station and its splintered, torn-up tracks at their rear, they doused their headlamps in the deepening night, then passed the buildings that had housed the British officials and finally saw the long rows of workers’ huts ahead of them in the dimness.
“We’ll be there in a couple minutes,” Mackenzie said to his passengers. “Better get ready.”
Kealey took three sets of thermal night vision goggles on headsets from a compartment under the dash, passed one back to Abby, and put the other between himself and Mackenzie. A moment later he heard Abby palm a 30-round clip into her Sig 552 5.56mm assault rifle and reached for the 552 in his seat well, setting it across his lap. Seth Holland’s knee-jerk admonition to treat the weapons with care back at the embassy had been almost the same as when he’d handed Kealey his Glock 9mm pistol before they headed out to Bahri.
Under very different circumstances, the recollection might have struck Kealey as humorous. But he found nothing remotely amusing about what was about to go down tonight, just as he could find nothing to like about the rapidly shifting political expedients and allegiances around him. On the other hand, he thought, it was worth reminding himself that his own objective was neither complicated nor ambiguous.
He wanted Simon Nusairi; it really couldn’t have been simpler, or more serious, than that.
“The commander is in the beyt there…the last in this line,” Tariq said, pointing. He had braked to a halt in front of the Cherokee, gotten out, and hastened over to speak with Mac through the driver’s side window. “There are three or four of his men in the one next to it.”
Mackenzie nodded, gazed out into the night. He could see what appeared to be firelight in the windows. “No chance he could’ve left the lamps burning to trick us and snuck off while the cats were away?”
Tariq angled his head slightly toward one of the tall, vacant officers’ buildings behind them. “My cats have had their eyes on him from the rooftops,” he said. “He and the American remain within.”
Kealey looked across the seat at Tariq. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s move in.”
Tariq nodded and hurriedly returned to the Outback.
The plan was to hit hard and fast, using the element of surprise to their best advantage, and to keep their targets from scattering into the night.
Tariq sped up to the farthest hut, the one occupied by Nusairi and White, jolting to a halt directly behind it. His wheels spinning up dirt and pebbles, Mackenzie simultaneously sheered up in front so no one could rabbit through the entrance, the Cherokee’s doors flying open even as it stopped, Kealey and Abby springing from inside with their night vision goggles down over their eyes, Mackenzie following an instant later.
Behind them, Tariq’s fighters in the Wrangler and Volkswagen stuck to the same execution, the Wrangler shooting around back of the second hut, the VW screaming up to its front door, its occupants spilling from both vehicles. The Hyundai wagon took up a rear position, its men doubling as lookouts and backups in case anyone managed to escape from either of the two huts.
Semiautomatic gunfire tore from inside the huts at once, the staccato bursts shattering their windowpanes amid explosive sprays of glass. Kealey rushed over to the first hut in a crouch, flattened his back against it to one side of a broken window, peered inside. And then he saw them in shades of gray through the lenses of his NVGs-Cullen White and Simon Nusairi. White held what appeared to be a Kalashnikov in his hands and had ducked behind a table with an oil lamp on it. Nusairi was scrambling through a door on the far side of the room, an identical weapon in his fist spitting bullets ahead of his path.
Kealey pivoted on the ball of his foot and returned fire, the Sig 552 quivering in his hand. Then he went flat alongside the window again. He heard guns answering Nusairi’s volley out back-Tariq and his men. Abby, meanwhile, had shuffled up next to him even as Mackenzie backed against the opposite side of the window frame and triggered a salvo of his own into the hut.
A dozen yards away the second hut was also caught in a storm of semiauto fire, the salvos blowing out its windows, bullets pecking splinters from its wooden door. Kealey heard an extended peal from one of the guns inside the hut and then saw one of Tariq’s fighters go down to the ground with a howl of pain, clutching his stomach as he curled into a semifetal position.
He zoned in on his goal, looked across at MacKenzie and Abby.
“ Cover me! ” he called, motioning toward the door.
A brisk nod from Mackenzie, then Abby. Mackenzie edged from the window to the door along the outer wall of the house, stayed there to the right of the entrance. Abby, head tucked low, raced around the Cherokee, using it as a shield as she put herself to the left of the door.
Kealey looked over at Mackenzie, held up three fingers, ticked off a visual countdown. Three, two, one…
And then Mackenzie backed up a step, directed his fire at the lock plate, almost tearing it free of the door itself. He released the AK’s trigger, sent the door crashing inward with a high leg kick to the twisted remnants of the flimsy metal plate, and poured more rounds into the hut, Abby joining him now with a rippling burst from her rifle.
“ Now! ” Kealey shouted, and they momentarily ceased fire as he went in low, the stock of his weapon against his arm, his fist around the grip, finger squeezing the trigger.
Bullets streamed from his gun into the hut as he laid out a side-to-side firing pattern, sweeping the room, his eyes seeking out White through the goggles.
He was still kneeling behind the table, having shuffled behind a chair. Incredibly, the oil lamp on the tabletop remained unbroken, throwing its pallid orange light around the room. Not wanting to be a stationary target, Kealey dove to one side, swung the rifle in White’s direction, prepared to fire-and suddenly the chair was thrown across the room at him, flying through the air, nearly hitting him smack in the chest. He managed to avoid it on reflex and had some vague, marginal awareness of it hitting the wall directly behind where he’d stood as he arced the snout of his gun toward the oil lamp and blew it to bits and pieces.