The Yemeni smiled and patted the boy on the shoulder. He turned and shouted to those outside. “Bring the truck!”
A dozen minutes later the three AQ pickups split at a crossroads. Nine men headed to the south in two trucks. They worked their mobile phones for local help to assist them as they went to scour the landscape for the lone sniper. The Yemeni and two other AQ drove the two wounded American prisoners towards to a safe house in nearby Hatra. There the Yemeni would call his leadership to see how best to exploit his newfound bounty.
The Yemeni was behind the wheel, a young Syrian rode in the passenger seat, and an Egyptian guarded the near-catatonic soldier and his dying partner in the bed of the truck.
Twenty-year-old Ricky Bayliss had recovered some from the shock of the crash. He knew this because the dull throbbing in his broken shin bone had turned into molten-hot jolts of pain. He looked down to his leg and could see only torn and scorched BDU pants and a boot that hung obscenely off to the right. Beyond this boot lay the other soldier. Bayliss didn’t know the black GI, but his name tape identified him as Cleveland. Cleveland was unconscious. Bayliss would have presumed him dead except his chest heaved a bit under his body armor. In a moment of instinct and adrenaline, Ricky had dragged the man free of the wreck as he crawled into a shop next to the crash, only to be discovered by wide-eyed Iraqi kids a minute later.
He thought for a moment about his friends who had died in the Chinook and felt a sadness muted by disbelief. The sadness dissipated quickly as he looked up at the man sitting above him in the truck bed. Ricky’s dead friends were the lucky bastards. He was the unfortunate one. He and Cleveland, if the dude ever woke up, were going to get their goddamn heads chopped off on TV.
The terrorist looked down at Bayliss and put his tennis shoe on the young man’s shattered leg. He pressed down slowly with a wild grin that exposed teeth broken like fangs.
Ricky screamed.
The truck sped down the road, crested a rise just outside of al Ba’aj, and then quickly slowed before a roadblock at the edge of town, a standard local insurgency setup. A heavy chain wrapped to two posts hung low across the dusty pavement. Two militiamen were visible. One sat lazily on a plastic chair, his head leaning back against the wall of a grammar school’s playground. The other stood by one end of the chain, next to his resting partner. A Kalashnikov hung over his back, muzzle down, and there was a plate of hummus and flatbread in his hands, food hanging off his beard. An old goat herder urged his pitiful flock along the sidewalk on the far side of the roadblock.
The Al Qaeda man cursed the weak resolve of the insurgency here in northwestern Iraq. Two lazy men were all they could muster for a checkpoint? With such idiocy the Sunnis might as well just hand over control to the Kurds and the Yejezi.
The Yemeni slowed his truck, rolled down the window, and shouted to the standing Iraqi, “Open this gate, fool! There is a sniper to the south!”
The militiaman put down his lunch. He walked purposefully towards the pickup truck in the middle of the road. He put a hand up to his ear as if he did not hear the Yemeni’s shout.
“Open the gate, or I will—”
The Yemeni’s head swiveled away from the insurgent nearing his truck and to the one seated against the wall. The seated man’s head had slumped over to the side, and it hung there. An instant later, the body rolled forward and fell out of the chair and onto the ground. It was clear the militiaman was dead, his neck snapped at a lower cervical vertebra.
The gunman in the back of the truck noticed this as well. He stood quickly in the bed, sensing a threat but confused by the situation. Like his new leader in the driver’s seat, he looked back to the local man in the road.
The bearded militiaman approaching the truck raised his right arm in front of him. A black pistol appeared from the sleeve of his flowing robe.
Two quick shots, not a moment’s hesitation between them, dropped the Egyptian in the truck bed.
Bayliss lay on his back, looking up at the scorching noontime sun. He felt the vehicle slow and stop, heard the shouting from the driver, the impossibly rapid gunshots, and watched the masked man above him fall straight down dead.
He heard another volley of pistol rounds cracking around him, heard glass shatter, a brief cry in Arabic, and then all was still.
Ricky thrashed and shrieked, frantic to get the bloody corpse off of him. His struggle ended when the dead terrorist was lifted away, out of the truck bed, and dumped onto the street. A bearded man dressed in a gray dishdasha grabbed Ricky by his body armor and pulled him up and into a seated position.
The brutal sun blurred Bayliss’s view of the stranger’s face.
“Can you walk?”
Ricky thought it some sort of shock-induced vision. The man had spoken English with an American accent. The stranger repeated himself in a shout. “Hey! Kid! You with me? Can you walk?”
Slowly Bayliss spoke back to the vision. “My… my leg’s broken, and this dude is hurt bad.”
The stranger examined Ricky’s injured leg and diagnosed, “Tib-fib fracture. You’ll live.” Then he put his hand on the unconscious man’s neck and delivered a grim prognosis. “Not a chance.”
He looked around quickly. Still, the young Mississip pian could not see the man’s face.
The stranger said, “Leave him back here. We’ll do what we can for him, but I need you to get up in the passenger seat. Wrap this around your face.”
The bearded man pulled the keffiyeh head wrap from the neck of the dead terrorist and handed it to Bayliss.
“I can’t walk on this leg—”
“Suck it up. We’ve got to go. I’ll grab my gear. Move!” The stranger turned and ran down into a shaded alleyway. Bayliss dropped his Kevlar helmet in the cab, wrapped the headdress into place, climbed out of the bed and onto his good leg. Excruciating pain jolted from his right shin to his brain. The street was filling with civilians of all ages, keeping their distance, watching as if an audience to a violent play.
Bayliss hopped to the passenger door, opened it, and a masked Arab in a black dress shirt fell out into the street. There was a single bullet wound above his left eye. A second terrorist lay slumped over the steering wheel. Bloody foam dripped from his lips with his soft wheezes. Ricky had just shut his door when the American stranger opened the driver’s side, pulled the man out, and let him drop to the asphalt. He drew his pistol again and, without so much as a glance, fired one round into the man in the street. He then turned his attention to the pickup, tossed in a brown gear bag, an AK-47, and an M4 rifle. He climbed behind the wheel, and the truck lurched forward and over the lowered chain of the roadblock.
Ricky spoke softly, his brain still trying to catch up with the action around him. “We’ve got to go back. There might be others alive.”
“There aren’t. You’re it.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
Ricky hesitated, then said, “Because you were with the sniper team that fragged those dudes at the crash site?”
“Maybe.”
For nearly a minute they drove in silence. Bayliss looked ahead through the windshield at the mountains, then down at his shaking hands. Soon the young soldier turned his attention to the driver.
Immediately the stranger barked, “Don’t look at my face.”
Bayliss obeyed, turning back to the road ahead. He asked, “You’re American?”
“That’s right.”
“Special Forces?”
“No.”
“Navy? You’re a SEAL?”