“Is that him?”
“I don’t know. He does not have the beard in the photograph.”
“It’s him. American commandos wear beards. They think they blend in when fighting in the caliphate.”
By now they had passed the yard, as well as the next property. “What are you doing?” Karim asked.
“I am turning around. You should shoot him before he gets in the house.”
Karim pulled the Uzi out of the bag.
“No. The AK. Use the AK.” Namir pulled into a driveway to turn back around, speeding up his movements.
“Why not the Uzi?”
“He is big. We are too far away. Use the AK.”
Karim put the Uzi down between his legs, grabbed the black AK-103 from between the seats and hefted it. He switched the selector from semiautomatic to fully automatic, he rolled down his window halfway, and rested the polymer hand guard of the weapon below the barrel on the glass of the partially opened window.
Karim said, “Hurry, now. Don’t let him get inside.”
“Yes, yes!”
Mike Wayne was dog-ass tired after a thirty-six-hour land-nav training evolution, and the smell of his own BO almost made him want to take a shower before he ate his chicken sandwich and fries.
Almost. He hadn’t eaten anything since the power bar he’d downed around noon, so he’d shovel some shitty fast food into his mouth as soon as he got inside to his kitchen table.
He hung up from his call with his sister and pocketed his cell phone, and walked to the carport door of his modest home. He fumbled with his dinner and the keys for a second, then put the key in the lock. Just as he turned the knob, out of the corner of his eye he saw a gray SUV pull up in front of his driveway and stop.
But before he even turned to check it out, he heard an unmistakable sound, one he’d last heard two weeks earlier on the Syrian — Turkish border.
An AK firing a full-auto burst.
The door in front of him splintered right in front of his knees, and he felt a blow to his right hip that staggered him but did not knock him down. He wore a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol at the four-o’clock position under his T-shirt, but now he was only thinking about cover.
He dropped the bag of fast food and his drink, got the door open, fell inside, and crawled forward on his elbows.
He knew he’d taken a round right in the hip joint, he was bleeding like hell, and he could not stand up. With a blood-covered right hand he pulled his .45, rolled onto his back, and aimed at the closed door.
And with a blood-covered left hand he pulled his mobile phone out of the pocket of his jeans and called 911.
And then he looked at the floor around him. Wayne was a medic in Delta Force, and he knew what all this blood meant. There was four times the amount of blood he’d expected to see from a GSW to the hip. He felt sure the AK round had slammed into his hip and either tumbled around inside him or broken into pieces. His femoral artery had been clipped and ruptured, and from the location of the hole Wayne knew it was too high on his body to tourniquet.
Too much blood lost too fast.
An ambulance could roll up his driveway right now with a team of vascular surgeons in the back, and he would probably still bleed out before they could save him.
Mike Wayne realized he was a dead man.
After a few seconds to come to terms with his fate, he looked back down the sights of his pistol, and he willed his door to open. More than anything in the world he wanted to shoot the guy who’d just killed him.
Just then, his phone was answered, “Nine-one-one, do you need police, fire, or ambulance?”
Mike kept his voice strong. “Gray GMC Terrain. Two occupants.”
“I’m sorry?”
The phone dropped from Mike’s hand. The pistol stayed up for a few seconds more, but his hand would lower and then come to rest at his side in a pool of blood before he was able to get one last target in his sights.
In the training at the Language School in El Salvador, the cell members had practiced firing their weapons while seated inside cars. The cars they used had been old junkers lying around the property, and none of them had had any window glass. Karim had misjudged the recoil of his Kalashnikov, because he’d propped it on the glass of the partially opened window to shoot, but as soon as he opened fire, the glass shattered, and the rifle dropped off target. He’d seen the last few rounds hit the street just twenty feet in front of him.
But by the time he lifted the rifle back up to his shoulder and pointed toward the carport door across the street, he just saw the boots of his target as he crawled through the door.
Karim shouted from the passenger seat. “Damn it! He got away!”
Namir said, “Get out and finish him! He is wounded!”
Karim did not move. “You do it!”
Musa al-Matari’s voice came over the speakerphone now. “Karim! Brother! You are a brave lion! I saw you shoot him! He’s in there bleeding to death. Go! Finish it. But hurry! And take the phone, so everyone in the caliphate can see your bravery.”
Karim took the phone from Namir, opened the car door, stepped out onto Lemont Drive, then raced up the driveway. As he ran he held the weapon at his hip and began sweeping it left and right, ready to engage anyone else out here who might have a weapon.
As he passed the F-150 on his left he saw a huge splatter of blood on the carport and a shining smear on the broken glass of the outer door. He swiveled around in front of the door, brought the rifle to his shoulder, and opened the outer door. He got ready to open the wooden door, but an idea occurred to him. He took two steps back and opened fire, emptying his entire magazine.
This done, he stepped to the side of the door, reloaded, then entered the small house.
The bearded man lay on the floor, ten feet from the door. A pool of blood around him. Bullet holes in his T-shirt. He was clearly dead. A pistol lay inches from his right hand. A cell phone lay next to his left hand.
Karim realized the man had been waiting for him to come through the door so he could shoot him.
He held up the phone’s camera on the scene while he muttered “Allahu Akbar” a half-dozen times.
Then he spun out of the doorway and sprinted back to the SUV.
Namir met him in the driveway, and Karim climbed back inside. With screeching tires the SUV sped down Lemont Drive, right past a seventy-five-year-old man wearing a U.S. Army Special Forces baseball cap on his head. He’d come outside once he’d heard what sounded to him like an AK-47 firing what had to have been two fifteen-round bursts, a sound he hadn’t heard in person since the jungles of Vietnam.
He walked down his driveway just as a vehicle sped in his direction. He didn’t recognize the SUV, so he noted the make and model, as had the victim, Mike Wayne. But the old Green Beret standing in his driveway also noticed that the GMC had Maryland tags.
He turned around to head back inside for his phone.
Namir and Karim were miles from the scene within minutes of the shooting. They headed north on I-95, still careful to stay within the posted speed limits, both men fighting the amped-up effects of the adrenaline in their bodies.
They felt euphoric about their operation, and even more so because Mohammed had watched it all live. He’d signed off so they could concentrate on their escape, but he’d praised the men over and over for their great success.
As they drove north they talked about returning to the safe house and telling David Hembrick about their killing of the infidel, and self-consciously they discussed how the video would look when the Islamic State PR people put it to music and effects and broadcast it out all over social media.