capital. Again he glanced down at the dead man heaped at the base of the cliff.
Smith frowned. Before he ducked back into the shadows, he needed a closer look at that guy and at whatever he was carrying. Right now Jon had no idea what the hell was going on. One thing was only too clear, though. Somebody was very interested in making sure that he wound up dead.
Slowly at first, and then with growing speed and confidence, Smith climbed down the rugged limestone bluff, making his way from outcropping to outcropping and handhold to handhold. He dropped the last meter or so onto the floor of the Sarka gorge and then moved determinedly toward the shattered corpse splayed across a nearby boulder.
PART TWO
Chapter Eight
Darkness had fallen across Baghdad. In the eastern half of the city, bright lights shone along the wide, modern avenues, gleamed from the windows of barricaded government ministries, and illuminated the still-crowded bazaars.
West of the Tigris River, the cramped alleys of the Sunni-dominated Ad-hamiya district were lit only by the dim lamplight spilling from tiny shops and shanty teahouses, and out through the latticed windows and gates of older homes. The night air was cool and crisp with just a hint of the clean smell of rain lingering from a brief storm earlier that evening. Men in traditional Arab kaffiyehs, checked pieces of cloth worn over the head, lounged in small groups outside the teashops, smoking cigarettes and exchanging the day’s news and gossip in low voices.
Abdel Khalifa al Dnlaimi, a former colonel in Iraq’s once-feared Intelligence Service, the Mnkhabarat, walked unsteadily down one of the narrow alleys. He was much thinner now than in his days in power, and his hair and mustache were streaked with gray. His hands trembled. “This is madness,” he hissed in Arabic to the woman following modestly in his footsteps with a full shopping basket in her arms. “This place is still a stronghold of the mujahideen. If we are caught here, death would be a kindness ?and one we would not be granted either quickly or easily.”
The slender woman, cloaked from head-to-toe in a shapeless black abaya, drew a step closer, narrowing the gap between them. “Then the trick is not to get caught, isn’t it, Abdel?” she said coolly in his car in the same language.
“Now shut up and foens on your job. Let me worry about the rest.”
“I don’t know win I’m doing this,” Khalifa grunted sourly.
“Oh, I think you do,” the woman reminded him. Her voice was ice-cold.
“Or would you really rather face a war crimes tribunal? With your choice of the gallows, firing squad, or a lethal injection? The ordinary people you and your thugs terrorized for so many years haven’t exactly been forgiving, have they?”
The former Mukhabarat officer swallowed hard and fell silent.
The woman looked ahead over his shoulder. They were drawing nearer to a large, two-story mud-brick house, one built around an inner courtyard in the traditional Iraqi style. Two hard-faced young Iraqi men stood in the open courtyard gate, carefully eyeing passersby. Kach guard held a Kalashnikov AKM assault rifle casually at the ready.
“All mission teams, this is Raid One,” the woman murmured in Arabic, speaking into the throat microphone concealed beneath her abaya. “Source One and I are moving into position now. Are you set?”
In turn, other voices ghosted through the small radio receiver fitted in her right ear. “Sniper teams reach. Targets zeroed in. Assault teams ready. Extraction team ready.”
“Understood,” she said softly. She and Khalifa were only meters away from the gate now. “Stand by.”
One of the AKM-armed guards stepped out into the alley, blocking their way. His eyes were narrowed in suspicion. “Who is this woman, Colonel?” he growled. “The general summoned you to this meeting. Only you. No others.”
Khalifa grimaced. “She is my wife’s cousin,” he stammered uneasily. “She was afraid to walk home from the market alone. She has heard the Americans and their pet Iraqi dogs, the Shia collaborators, are raping women caught on their own, without a man to protect them. But I only agreed to bring her this far.”
The woman lowered her dark eyes modestly.
The guard moved closer, still frowning. “You have compromised our se-curitv,” he muttered. “The general will need to know this. Bring the woman inside.”
“Raid One, this is Sniper Lead,” she heard over her radio. “Just say the word.”
The slender woman looked up again with a faint smile on her lips. “You may fire when ready, Sniper Lead,” she said quietly. “All teams move now.
Now!”
The guard’s eyes widened in sudden alarm at the expression he saw on her face. He began raising his Kalashnikov, thumbing the firing selector off safe.
There were two soft thuds. Both guards crumpled in a mist of blood, shot through the head by high-powered rifle rounds fired from a rooftop more than a hundred meters away. Before they even finished falling, a group of six men who had been lounging outside one of the nearby tea stalls rose briskly and moved toward the open gate, bringing silenced Heckler and Koch MP5SD6 submachine guns out from under their loose-fitting jackets. Two of the gunmen dragged the bodies into the courtyard and dumped them in the deep shadows near one wall. Then they turned and sauntered back to stand at the gate in place of the dead sentries. No one looking out from the house would see anything amiss.
The woman pulled her own weapon, a 9mm Beretta pistol fitted with a silencer, out from under the food piled in her shopping basket. Together with Khalifa and the four other men, she drifted silently into the courtyard, carefully staying in the concealing shadows. She checked her watch quickly. Less than thirty seconds had passed. Faint sounds of music, the eerie keening of a popular Arab male singer broadcast on Syrian State Radio, filtered out through the shuttered windows of the house.
Satisfied, she signaled the assault team toward the front door of the house.
Moving in pairs, the four men sprinted up the steps. Covered by the others, the point man gently tested the solid wood door, making sure it was unlocked.
He nodded once to his teammates and held up three fingers to signal the beginning of a three-second countdown.
They tensed. One. Two. Three.
Suddenly the point man kicked the door open and burst inside, followed closely by his comrades. There were a few muffled shouts, but they were immediately cut short by the harsh stutter of silenced submachine guns.
The woman crouched near the open door, holding her pistol ready. Trembling openly now, Khalifa waited with her. The former Mukhabarat colonel was praying frantically under his breath. Ignoring him, she listened closely to the staccato reports pouring through her radio earphone.
“Hallway secure and front rooms secure. Two hostiles down.”
“Back rooms secure.”
Another submachine gun chattered briefly.
“Staircase secure. One enemy down.”
There were more shouts somewhere inside the house, followed by yet another quick burst of silenced gunfire.
“Top floor secure,” a calm, confident voice said over the circuit. “Two more hostiles down. We have one prisoner. Raid One, this is Assault One.
The house is clear. No friendly casualties.”
