listened intently, dumped the coffee, and jogged up to the command track, throwing a quick salute to Colonel Withrow.
“Colonel, Captain Summers and Swanson just reported in, sir. They are inside Hargatt and report that both of the suspect buildings are stacked to the rafters with explosives. It’s a trap, sir, to draw us in and blow up the buildings right in our faces. The bodies of the three snipers are in the first house, probably booby-trapped.”
“Your people are in the town?” The colonel looked at Newman in surprise. “You let them go in without telling me first?”
“We had a tip about Juba, sir. They just decided to finish the recon on the houses along the way when they saw an opportunity. Lots of refugees are moving out and covered their approach.” Newman and Withrow both knew that was a lie, but it was a discreet way out of the problem.
“Swanson recommends strongly that you hold off on entering the town for a little while longer but make a big feint at first light, growling about on the outskirts to draw the attention of any fighters who are still there. That will help him and Summers continue snooping.”
The colonel looked at his XO and a smile creased his leathery face. “Well, I’ll be damned. Okay, we’ll do it.”
A soft dawn spread over the quiet town. The streets were empty, the shops closed; the last of the refugees had padded away. The insurgent commander and Juba stood atop the distant rooftop of the commander’s home, watching the storm build.
“Here they come!” said the commander. “They are so predictable.”
The ground vibrated as the mighty armored armada waddled down the roads approaching the village, throwing up clouds of sand in its wake. The monstrous Abrams tanks fanned out from single file into one long row and took their time parking wheel to wheel, and the Bradley Fighting Vehicles maneuvered behind them in V-formations. Overhead, Apache gunships swung around to the west of town, darting close, then withdrawing to a safer and higher distance. Behind the armor came marching columns of infantrymen who wheeled about and spread out, almost in parade formation. A task force was on the move.
“Is this what you wanted?” Juba asked. “You think you can stop all that?”
“I do not intend to stop it, my friend. Let them come in. I want them to try to retrieve those bodies. We have a few fighters planted around to deliver just enough fire to channel the Americans toward the two houses. When their soldiers fight their way inside, the houses detonate on them. It shall be a great victory, praise Allah.”
Juba’s more practiced military eyes saw what the commander did not. All of that armor out there snarling at the gates was not actually doing anything but making a lot of noise. The Abrams normally operated in violent but precise choreography, and their crews were extraordinarily well trained with the machines. Now they were having difficulty
“BINGO,” SAID KYLE. “I got the spotter. On the roof of that building five doors down on the diagonal street to our left.”
Sybelle checked the rooftop through the scope on her rifle and caught the sunlight flickering off the lenses of a set of binos. “Uh-hunh. He’s got a good view of both places from there and is safe, back out of the attack zone. Has to be the triggerman.”
“Yeah. Let’s go get him.”
They squirmed out of their hide in the back of an abandoned house, checked the outside, and went into a cautious lope alongside the walls. The place had the look of a movie set, lots of empty buildings but no activity. Still, they took their time and proceeded with great caution: stop, observe, assess, move.
The building was a three-story affair of concrete blocks, with the third story added much later to the original structure. It leaned slightly to the right, and mortar had oozed out between the bricks before drying. A shop was on the first floor, and residences probably were above it. They stopped for almost ten minutes and waited in silence, watching for movement inside.
“There has to be a guard in there,” whispered Kyle. “Just can’t see him.”
Sybelle handed him her rifle and got her local clothes back in order with the scarf over her hair and a veil pulled across the lower part of her face. “I got it.” She stood and walked along the side of the building, stepping boldly through the front door.
The guard was seated in a straight chair, leaning against the wall of the shop with his AK-47 balanced on his lap. He looked up at her silhouette in the doorway and barked, “Woman, what are you…”
Sybelle whipped the pistol up from her side and shot him twice in the face, and Kyle came ducking inside at the soft coughs of the silencer. They rotated through the cluttered store, finding no one else, and Swanson pointed to the stairs. Sybelle took a moment to step out of the cumbersome gown and scarf and followed Kyle up.
A closed door was at the head of the short staircase, and Swanson eased it open. He went to the right and Sybelle went left. Nothing. There was only one other room. With Sybelle covering, Kyle pushed hard through the closed door, and it flew open but did not bounce off the wall. He immediately double-tapped two rounds through it, and the guard hiding behind the door gave a little cry of pain and surprise and toppled to the floor, where Kyle shot him in the head.
They moved on. The third floor was empty, and when they crawled up to the roof, they saw the triggerman standing nine feet away, exposed in the morning sunshine, binoculars to his eyes, watching the sideshow being put on by the rumbling beasts of Task Force Steel. Kyle Swanson kicked him behind the knees and jerked back on his head at the same time, forcing a fall. As soon as the surprised man was on the deck and out of sight from the street, Kyle shot him in the eye and dragged the dead man inside. Sybelle jumped over the corpse, swept up two cell phones that lay side by side on the top of the wall, and also hurried back through the door.
Inside, she examined them as gently as if they were diamonds. Normally, a cell phone used as a trigger would be predialed to a number and the operator only had to press the SEND button to complete the circuit. “Whoa, girl,” she said to herself. “Easy does it.”
“Look at this, Kyle,” she said, pointing to the and marks scrawled in black greasepaint on the faces of the phones. “The Arabic symbols for ‘one’ and ‘two.’ Got to be the houses.”
“Good to go,” Swanson said. “I checked this guy out and he’s nobody. Probably a midlevel type who could be trusted with just enough responsibility to carry out this job, but I doubt if he had anything to do with the planning.”
“So how do we get higher up the food chain?” she asked.
Kyle grinned. “Let’s blow some shit up and see who comes calling.”
“Oo-rah,” said Sybelle, picking up the number two phone. She pushed down on the SEND button.
The entire town seemed to jump on its foundations as a bright and blinding flash of light ignited like the wink of a miniature sun and was followed by a deafening, crashing roar. The three outside guards were swallowed in a hell of fireballs that cometed into the sky and rolled out into the street while debris scythed through the air, chopping at everything in its path. Then came the rolling concussion, giant fists slamming across the landscape and splintering windows.
Swanson and Summers were burrowed in the corner against the interior wall when the concussion rolled through with freight-train power. Rafters sagged and plaster cracked. Toys and dishes and furniture tumbled around, and they breathed through open mouths to equalize the pressure pounding at their ears. A flying lamp cracked Sybelle on the head hard enough to make her see stars, and Kyle was punched in the gut by a table leg.
When the initial explosion was done, a secondary series of smaller detonations began cooking off with loud booms, and when Kyle and Sybelle finally crawled outside on the roof, they saw that the target building was utterly gone, leaving behind a blackened hole in the ground from which smoke rose in filthy columns. Destruction ringed it. Dozens of U.S. troops might have been killed in a raid on the place.
THREE BLOCKS AWAY, THE
