‘You don’t come to my home and threaten me,’ he heard Boom whisper from behind, right in his ear. ‘Who the fuck you think you are, eh?’ Boom spat on the floor by Cole’s feet. ‘Now do as the man says and move.’
Cole knew that Boom was right. He had no choice; he had to move.
And in a movement so fast it left no time for anyone to react, Cole slipped his head to one side, out of the way of Boom’s gun, and fired an elbow back into the man’s body. Cole heard the crack of ribs, but ignored it as he pulled Boom’s arm over his shoulder, his own hand slipping over Boom’s where it gripped the Beretta, depressing the trigger.
He fired once, taking out the man with the AK with a shot to the chest, before swinging Boom by the arm until he ended up in front of Cole as a human shield. In the same move, Cole stripped off Boom’s hand from the gun and took full control of it himself.
Firing the Beretta, Cole took Boom’s ear in his mouth, teeth clenching down tight to secure him as Cole’s other hand slipped into his own waistband and withdrew another pistol, firing it simultaneously with the first.
He felt Boom’s body shaking, and knew his traitorous friend was being hit, doing a good job of acting as Cole’s shield; but in less than six seconds since his first move, all of Khat’s men were down and out, neat bullet holes in their chests and heads.
The crowd in shock, Khat rooted to the spot with disbelief, Cole opened his bloody mouth and dropped Boom’s bleeding, bullet-riddled body to the floor and accelerated towards his target, planting a powerful thrusting front kick right into Khat’s chest.
The gun dealer went sailing back into his tent, all the air knocked from him, and Cole followed instantly, guns raised and ready.
The small covered tent at the back of the stall was filled with crates of guns, explosives and ammunition, and Cole saw Khat groping around on the floor, struggling to get his breath back. Two men unloading crates stopped what they were doing, looked at Khat, looked at Cole, and went for their guns. Cole shot them before they had a chance to aim, then quickly raced around the tent, stuffing items into a canvas bag. He slung it over his shoulder, along with a shotgun and an AK-47, then saw Khat grabbing for a gun out of one of the crates. Cole smashed the butt of the Kalashnikov into the man’s head, knocking him unconscious.
Cole reached down and hauled the gun dealer onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, glad that Khat weighed so little. He knew that there would be a commotion outside, people wanting to help Khat but scared to enter the covered tent.
Cole made some last-minute preparations, then slipped out of the rear of the tent into another aisle of stalls. He got some odd looks as he carried Khat on his shoulders, bedecked with guns, but he knew he had time before anyone realized what was going on.
He also knew that he couldn’t go back to the other side now, towards his car; too many people had seen him over that way, too many people would try and stop him. And so he raced away from the back of Khat’s tent, through the aisles of the maze-like market, towards the dark, forbidding jungle; one hand securing Khat to his shoulders, the other holding his AK as an effective visual deterrent.
A moment later, a huge explosion rocked the market, and Cole could see dozens — perhaps hundreds — of people diving for cover, hands over their heads. Cole didn’t even bother to look — he knew it was Khat’s tent which had blown up, having set the timers on his plastic explosives for thirty seconds.
Even from so far away, he could feel the heat on his back; and then he could hear the sound of thousands of rounds of ammunition firing at all angles, the heat from the explosives having cooked them off. As he ran awkwardly towards the edge of the clearing, he hoped he wouldn’t be shot by one of the uncontrolled stray rounds.
He had almost reached the jungle when he heard the shouts, only now audible above the roaring explosions and the cooked-off ammunition.
There was a mixture of Khmer, Thai and Vietnamese, but the raised voices all seemed to be shouting the same thing.
Over there! He’s escaping! Catch him!
Kill him!
7
The room was stark and bare, empty except for the form of a hooded man, kneeling on the dirt floor with his hands tied behind his back.
He was wearing a torn shirt and what looked like the trousers from a suit, almost as if he had been wrenched from his daily life and normal routine and been dragged kicking and screaming to this dank, evil cell.
Perhaps he had.
Another form entered the room then, tall and slim. This form, too, was hooded, but this hood was far more menacing than the simple rice sack placed over the man’s head; it was pure white with the end pointed, eye-holes cut out from the cloth, black nothingness beyond them. Eyes steeped in shadow; soulless, merciless.
The figure was cloaked in the robes of an Islamic cleric, and a hand shot out quickly from the robe, yanking the hood from the prostrate man. He looked up, and some people would have recognized him as Brad Butler, a war correspondent with CNN.
The same hand dropped the hood to the floor and took hold of the man’s hair, pulling back sharply to expose the throat, even as the other hand withdrew a long, curved, ivory-handled knife.
Butler’s screams stopped just as soon as they’d started as the figure started sawing — back and forth, back and forth — until the man’s head came off entirely, blood spraying in a bright crimson shower over the robes, the hood.
And hidden within the hood, those black pools that should have been eyes still betrayed no shred of emotion at all.
Within the hour, Abd Al-Aziz Quraishi was back in his office within the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Interior in downtown Riyadh, his bloodstained robes now replaced by a clean set, ready for the day ahead.
A minor and distant member of the House of Saud, Quraishi was Assistant Minister for Security Affairs, a role which suited his needs to absolute perfection.
Although he was a devout Muslim — and indeed believed that not many people across the whole of Islamic history could rival his religious zeal — he was also much more widely educated than most fundamentalist radicals.
As such, he very much believed in Sun Tzu’s advice in The Art of War, written five thousand years before — know your enemy.
It was a mistake many of his brethren had made over the years — their strict upbringing, their blinkered approach, their ignorance of the world outside their narrow perceptions, had made them fail in their jihad time and time again.
But not Quraishi; he knew his enemies all too well. He had been born into one of them, the horrifically corrupt House of Saud; and he had travelled to the United States to learn more about the other, the Great Satan itself.
After joining the Saudi Royal Guard Regiment while still in his teens, Quraishi had volunteered to go to America for officer training at West Point.
And so he had willingly entered the belly of the beast, examining his foe from within; learning American military tactics firsthand, but more importantly, developing an understanding of her people.
And what he had found disgusted him. Yes, they were pleasant enough, but it was all on the surface; deep down there was simply nothing there, years of capitalism and secularity and greed and corruption eating away at the moral fiber of the nation until there was nothing left but blind automatons, slaves to the marketers and advertisers who sold the bland and mundane products of the companies who really ran the country.
His years in America had been insane, like living in a Disneyland populated entirely by spoiled children. Every day there had made him nauseous, but he had put on a façade of acceptance, shown himself willing to adapt to American ways, pretend to be impressed with American customs. He knew it would be expected of him, and would bear fruit in the future, when he could use the relationships he would develop there.