Once more, his reaching fingers found no purchase. The smooth exterior of the vehicle was free of latches and other protuberances. With half a meter of ground clearance, the designers had not even bothered with collision bumpers. The rear of the vehicle was a featureless metal wall, rising vertically above nothingness before sloping forward at a forty-five degree angle. He once more found himself clutching the flimsy UN banner as he was yanked forward off his feet.
Miraculously, the flag did not tear as his weight pulled the fabric taut. The sudden shock was absorbed by the rubber bungee cords that stretched from grommets at each corner of the strip. As he lost his footing, Kismet swung forward and his face slammed into the vehicle. The impact was not hard enough to knock him loose from his precarious handhold, but it proved a thankful distraction from the jarring blows that now traveled up from his feet as they dangled and scraped along the rough macadam roadway. The heavy leather of his boots afforded a measure of protection, but that would not last. His footwear was being methodically sanded away by friction from the relentless forward movement.
The Humvee’s speed was impossible to judge, but Kismet knew intuitively that he was now moving too fast to safely let go. He could not give up in his quest to gain a perch on the vehicle even if he chose to do so. If the impact did not kill him, the drop onto the pavement would scour the flesh from his bones. Though his left arm now burned with exertion and the pain of torn ligaments, he summoned every ounce of will power that remained and channeled it into a single pull.
His muscles bunched under the tattered remains of his shirt. To avoid losing what little progress he had made, he jammed his right arm deep under the UN flag until he could feel the fabric cutting into his armpit. Though his progress seemed marginal, he found that by flexing his knees, he could lift his feet away from the constant scraping punishment, if only for brief moments.
Nothing else existed in his world but the task of hauling himself onto the back of the Humvee. The streets of Baghdad flashed by unnoticed, and even the pursuit of the assassin now seemed a secondary concern. Kismet counted twenty ragged breaths before trying once more to lift himself higher, but his effort collapsed after only a moment, yielding almost no reward. Gritting his teeth, he tried again.
Lt. Col. Jonathan Buttrick pushed the accelerator pedal to the floorboard, intent on closing the gap between his own vehicle and the rest of his command. He had no idea what had happened inside the museum, much less the identity of the robed malcontent who had opened fire on his men and stolen the resupply vehicle, nor did he care. The enemy had struck a blow on his watch, and that was intolerable.
One of his men, the driver of the stolen Humvee, was down, possibly dead from a crushing blow to cricoid cartilage. Buttrick had only glimpsed the man’s fall, hands ineffectually clutching his throat as he collapsed beside the vehicle, but his blue pallor was explanation enough; the man was suffocating. He knew the medics might be able to save the man with an emergency field tracheotomy, but it would be messy. Buttrick clung to the image of the gasping soldier in order to fuel his resolve.
“Where the fuck are we?” he growled.
The sergeant in the seat beside him was frantically checking his city map against the GPS locator. “We’re coming up on the Shuhada Bridge over the Tigris.”
Buttrick’s mind ran through possible strategies. The bridge would be an excellent place to catch their prey, but only with outside help. “Get on the horn and see if anyone’s patrolling on the other side. Maybe we can scare up a roadblock.”
“Yes, sir.” The sergeant’s fingers closed on the radio handset before his superior finished speaking.
Neither man was aware of Kismet’s life and death struggle, less than three meters away, nor could they have possibly known that his fingers were at that very instant clenched around the base of the radio antenna.
The military radio had the capacity to send and receive coded information on a shifting cycle of frequency modulation wavelengths. Yet, beneath all the computerized circuitry, it operated on principles that had not changed in over a century. At its core, the device converted the sounds of the human voice into bursts of electricity, which then traveled along copper wire to the antenna, and it was only there that the electrical pulse became a radio wave. The antenna was essentially an electromagnet, disrupting the local magnetic field with measured bursts of energy that could be gathered out of the air and deciphered only by a correctly tuned receiver unit. Depending on the power of the transmitter and the length of the antenna, it was possible for those signals to reach out over hundreds of kilometers, or even into space. Despite quantum leaps in technology, long-distance communications still relied on that simple conversion of electricity into magnetism.
When the soldier in the passenger seat of the Humvee depressed the switch, even before speaking, an electrical circuit closed. A pulse of electricity, amplified by a system of transistors and capacitors, raced from the small box secured to the dashboard, along an insulated coaxial cable, to the rear antenna mount, where it burst into the atmosphere in an invisible lightning bolt.
And like lightning, it would blast anyone unlucky enough to be touching the antenna at that instant.
Five
Two things saved Kismet. Two factors, which by their random and coincidental nature, could only be described as pure luck.
Unaware of the impending radio transmission, and only faintly cognizant that such a surge could erupt from the antenna, Kismet had but one goaclass="underline" to reach just a little higher. His knees slipped ineffectually against the metal shell of the vehicle in a struggle to find purchase and relieve, if only for a moment, the burning fatigue in his arms. His right elbow was tucked under the UN banner strung across the back end of the Humvee but he didn’t trust the thin fabric to hold his weight. His left arm however, bruised at the elbow during the struggle at the museum and on fire with lactic acid buildup, could hold on no longer. His fingers, though rigid like claws, began to uncurl, involuntarily slipping away from the spring-coil at the base of the antenna. The failure of his grip saved his life.
Though grounded by the glancing contact of his feet with the roadway, his fingers were barely touching the antenna. Had the transmission occurred mere seconds earlier, the fierceness of his grip would have held him locked in place as the current poured through his body, but the severity of the shock was greatly minimized due to the marginal contact between Kismet and the antenna. Even so, the surge slapped his hand like a blow from a baseball bat.
The shock seized every muscle in his body, instantaneously firing all the nerve endings in a numbing jolt. The kinetic release knocked his hand away, and would have easily thrown him aside like a rag doll had his right arm not been entangled in the UN flag. Therein lay the second bit of luck to which Kismet would owe his life: the fabric held up under the sudden weight of his collapse.
Hung up in the banner and stunned by the electrical discharge, Kismet dangled behind the racing Humvee like a fish caught by the gills in a net. His feet trailed helplessly along the roadway as the vehicle pulled onto the Shuhada Bridge.
The call for assistance reached several listening ears. A two-man patrol cruising in the vicinity of the now defunct Baath party headquarters, just north of the city’s transportation hub, immediately turned toward the 14th July Highway, racing to intercept the fugitive vehicle. Further away, a Sikorsky UH-60A Black Hawk helicopter was diverted from its landing at the Baghdad International Airport and sent to provide aerial surveillance. Its estimated time to contact was less than three minutes. All over the city, R/T operators began relaying the urgent call for help to their commanding officers, who in turn began weighing Buttrick’s urgent needs against their own respective assignments. More then a few of these hastily dispatched squads of soldiers to the target area, but even the closest contingent had no chance of reaching the bridge before the chase moved beyond, onto the west bank of the Tigris River. Despite their tardiness however, it was reasonable to assume that the crew aboard the Black Hawk would guide the reinforcements, via radio transmissions, through the urban area in order to trap the commandeered Humvee.