years now. We’d met in Africa, where he had been working as a mercenary, and we had both gotten screwed over by our respective employers. Working with me had proven more lucrative, and we’d been together ever since, through all sorts of craziness, and it still took me a moment to realize that Carl was
“I shot three of them. Took out some more with a grenade.” I shrugged. “The guys before me made a real mess.”
Carl regarded me suspiciously, wheels turning, probably wondering if I was going soft on him. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.” He gestured at the girl. “And what do we do with her now?”
I studied her for the first time. She was young. Probably in her twenties. I had thought that she was from the Philippines when I had first seen her, as most of the servant girls in Zubara were imported from there or Indonesia. They were literally a slave class. Now I wasn’t so sure. She would have been unusually tall for a Filipina and didn’t look quite like most of the servant girls I had seen here. She was snoring peacefully in a drug-addled haze. One eye was badly bruised, and it made me glad that I had shot those men.
“I couldn’t leave her. You should have seen the girl upstairs,” I said. Carl didn’t respond. Acts of mercy were few and far between in his life. I patted her down: no documents, no passport. Something caught my eye. “Check this out.” I held up her wrist. She had a gold ring on one finger.
“What’s that say?” he asked, squinting his beady eyes.
“California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo.”
“Think she stole it off a tourist, I hope?”
“I’m thinking that we’re going to need to come up with a pretty good cover story for when she wakes up.” I gestured around the room. Hundreds of pictures were tacked on the walls. Posters of Al Falah, Adar, building schematics, road maps, and miscellaneous paper littered every corner of the room. A scale model of the Phase Three target was on the coffee table, and there were at least ten visible guns, and that wasn’t counting the RPG in the corner.
Carl took his time responding. He would have just left her there. Hell, I don’t know why I hadn’t just left her behind. We were thieves, not heroes. “You’re the one with the imagination. I just drive good and shoot people.”
“Guys, come check this out,” Reaper called excitedly from the other room. “I’ve got your shooters.”
We entered the makeshift computer room and hovered over Reaper’s shoulder. He was playing some Finnish goth-metal over the speakers. “I’m skipping past the torture porn. This Adar guy was one screwed up son of a bitch . . . and
“Why isn’t there any sound?”
“Audio’s all screwed up, chief. It’s all static. The DVR probably didn’t burn the disk properly.”
“Slow it down.” There were two men, dressed in camo, faces smeared with black greasepaint. They were armed with blocky submachine guns. One was just over six feet, kind of stocky, and left handed. The other was thin, a lot shorter, probably about my size. Both were Caucasians. “They’re Americans.”
“How can you tell already?” Reaper asked.
“That’s Remington A-TACS camo. Not that common. They’re either Americans or Canadian airsofters. Look how they move, too. Pretty typical Western CQB doctrine.”
The two had entered the room at the same time, weapons shouldered. The shorter one covered the room to his front, while the taller one peeled off to the right.
Their professionalism seemed to fall apart a second later as the bigger one froze when he saw the girl hanging from the ceiling. Adar turned toward the shooter with a strange look, almost a smile, on his face.
The shorter of the two shooters kept his weapon pointed at Adar. The other one just flipped out. First he said something to Adar, but the Butcher didn’t seem to respond. He just stood there, smiling. It was creepy. The shooter then dropped his subgun, leaving it to hang on a single-point sling, reached down to his left thigh, and drew his handgun.
“What the hell is
“That’s a .44 magnum,” I said as the shooter put a round into Adar’s left knee. The kneecap exploded into blood and pulp, and the Butcher of Zubara dropped to the floor. The other infiltrator flinched and covered his ears as the powerful weapon discharged.
From there, the shooter proceeded to take Adar apart piece by piece, systematically. Adar tried to say something, holding up his right hand, only to get it blown off. The next round went into Adar’s left bicep, mangling his arm in a spray of blood.
The shooter’s accuracy was impressive. The fourth slug went into Adar’s gut. The fifth went into his neck, nearly taking his head off. The shooter then reloaded automatically, mechanically, without thought.
After the execution, the two shooters seemed to argue for a moment, then cut the mutilated girl down.
The pair then quickly ransacked the bedroom. Before they left, the tall one dropped the Ace of Spades onto Adar’s bleeding corpse. A grotesque grin remained on the Butcher of Zubara’s face.
“Who are these
“Who the hell carries a
“Look at these guys!” Carl was pissed. “What’s with the camouflage? Kids these days all want to wear camouflage and gear and play dress up! How are they going to explain that if they got picked up by the cops?”
“They’d just shoot the cops.” A professional should never be this brazen when there were more subtle ways available to pop somebody. “Play back when they’re arguing.” The taller shooter was young. He didn’t have a killer’s face, but there was no hesitation when he’d stitched those massive slugs through Adar. “He’s definitely American. Looks pretty corn-fed. He’s a pasty northern Midwesterner, probably has a cheese-wedge hat at home.”
“How can you tell when you can’t hear what he’s saying?” Carl asked suspiciously.
“It’s in the way he moves. I do this for a living, remember? His mannerisms, his gear, his clothing, all point to the USA. He might as well be wearing an Uncle Sam hat.”
“I guess. Well, when you play an Arab, I don’t recognize you, down to the dress and the perfume. You say he’s American, I believe you,” Reaper said.
“Go back a bit.” Carl frowned. “These guys have to stick out. How many Americans are in Zubara?”
“Officially? A couple thousand,” Reaper replied automatically. “And thousands more assorted Europeans. Mostly in Al Khor. If these guys have been operating in the poor side of town, they’d totally stick out.”
“Reaper, grab my notepad from the living room. We’ve got contacts in every district. I’m going to give a few of them a call.”
Reaper nodded, adjusted his Glock, and left the room.
“Kid’s gonna shoot his balls off, carrying his gun like that.” Carl said. Reaper flipped him the bird on his way out.
“We don’t have very good health insurance in this business, either,” I muttered, studying the faces of my new adversaries. These men were standing in the way of me completing Phase Three. Until I had that box, all of our work was worthless. Without that box, our families belonged to Big Eddie. I did not know who these mystery shooters were, but my new mission in life was to find them and kill them if I had to. I blew up the picture until it became grainy, zooming in on the tall one. These men knew their business. This was going to be a challenge.
There was a sudden crash and a surprised yelp from the living room. Carl and I both drew our guns and moved apart. I disengaged the safety on my STI and pointed it at the doorway. Carl took up position behind the desk, CZ extended in front of him.
“Reaper?” I shouted. “You okay?”
Our guest had awoken. Reaper stumbled into the doorway, his arms raised in a surrender position. The girl stood behind him with his Glock 19 pressed into the base of his neck. I didn’t have a shot.
“Sorry, chief,” he said slowly.
The girl glared over Reaper’s shoulder. The drugs must have worn off enough for her to come to, and she was obviously angry and confused. Her eyes darted about between us. “Nobody move! I’ll shoot this guy right in the
