He was a pro; his subject remained centered, his camera did not tremble or flinch.
Not until the moment when the moqtar’s head snapped to the side, burst open like a pressed grape, and sinew, blood, and bone spewed violently in all directions.
Gentry just couldn’t help himself.
He fired round after round at the armed men in the crowd, and all the while he cussed aloud at his lack of discipline, because he knew he was throwing his own timetable, his entire operation out the window. Not that he could hear his own curses. Even with his earplugs, the report of the Barrett was deafening as he sent huge projectiles downrange, one after another, the blowback from the rifle’s muzzle break propelling sand and debris from the ground around him up and into his face and arms.
As he paused to snap a second heavy magazine into the rifle, he took stock of his situation. From a tradecraft perspective, this was the single dumbest move he could have made, virtually shouting to the insurgents around him that their mortal enemy was here in their midst.
But damn if it did not
This was simple revenge, nothing more. Gentry knew his actions altered little in the scope of things, apart from changing a few sons of bitches from solids into liquids. His body continued firing into the now-scattering murderers, but his mind was already worrying about his immediate future. He wouldn’t even try for the LZ now. Another chopper in the area would be a target too good for the angry AQ survivors to ignore. No, Gentry decided, he would go to ground: find a drainage culvert or a little wadi, cover himself in dirt and debris, lie all day in the heat, and ignore hunger and bug bites and his need to piss.
It was going to suck.
Still, he reasoned as he slammed the third and final magazine into the smoking rifle, his poor decision did serve some benefit. A half dozen dead shitheads
TWO
Four minutes after the sniper’s last volley, one of the Al Qaeda survivors warily leaned his head out the doorway of the tire repair shop where he had taken cover. After a few moments, each second giving him increased confidence that his head would remain affixed to his neck, the thirty-six-year-old Yemeni stepped fully into the street. Soon he was followed by others and stood with his compatriots around the carnage. He counted seven dead, made this tabulation by determining the number of lower appendages lying twisted in the bloody muck and dividing by two, because there were so few identifiable heads and trunks remaining on the corpses.
Five of the dead were his AQ brethren, including the senior man in the cell and his top lieutenant. Two others were locals.
The Chinook continued to smolder off to his left. He walked towards it, passing men hiding behind cars and garbage cans, their pupils dilated from shock. One local had lost control of his bowels in terror; now he lay soiled and writhing on the pavement like a madman.
“Get up, fool!” shouted the masked Yemeni. He kicked the man in the side and continued on to the helicopter. Four more of his colleagues were behind one of their pickup trucks, standing with the Al Jazeera film crew. The videographer was smoking with a hand that trembled as if from advanced-stage Parkinson’s. His camera hung down at his side.
“Get everyone alive into the trucks. We’ll find the sniper.” He looked out to the expanse of fields, dry hillocks, and roadways off to the south. A dust cloud hung over a rise nearly a mile away.
“There!” The Yemeni pointed.
“We . . . we are going out there?” asked the Al Jazeera audio technician.
“Inshallah.” If Allah wills it.
Just then a local boy called out to the AQ contingent, asking them to come and look. The boy had taken cover in a tea stand, not fifteen meters from the crumpled nose cone of the chopper. The Yemeni and two of his men stepped over a bloody torso held together only by a torn black tunic. This had been the Jorda nian, their leader. There was a splatter path of blood from where he’d fallen to the outer walls and window of the tea stand, all but repainting the establishment in crimson.
“What is it, boy?” shouted the Yemeni in an angry rush.
The kid spoke through gasps as he hyperventilated. Still, he answered, “I found something.”
The Yemeni and his two men followed the boy into the little cafe, stepped through the blood, looked around a fallen table and back behind the counter. There, on the floor with his back to the wall, sat a young American soldier. His eyes were open and blinking rapidly. Cradled in his arms was a second infidel. This man was black and appeared either unconscious or dead. There were no weapons apparent.
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.
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
