Not that they’d be dropping out of the cloudless sky to shatter the Salafists’ bones anytime soon. Basilios knew the nearest detachment of President Bashar al-Assad’s defenders was miles away. Truth was, he didn’t trust them either, especially after they’d teamed up with Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon and Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Like their Sunni enemies in this sectarian civil war, Shia Muslims weren’t exactly fond of Middle East Christians. As for the politically-motivated Free Syrian Army, they were busy fighting against Assad’s men in the far north and the jihadists in the south. Syria was a maelstrom of violence, and he was resigned to his fate.
Peering through the gap in the barrier, he saw the lead truck entering the decimated narrow street, the heavy Browning .50 cal M2 machine gun mounted on the deck randomly spitting out high-calibre rounds at a rate of over five hundred per minute.
Within a few seconds one of the bullets hit the goat herder in the neck as it passed through a paint tin with the ease of a fine blade through gossamer. The boy fell instantly, blood oozing out of the entry wound as he twitched in the dirt. The old baker bent down to the boy, cradling the floppy head. Basilios watched as the boy’s eyes bulged and watered like those of a stranded catfish. But as the old man started to pray in Aramaic, their mother tongue and the ancient language of Christ, he knew it was a shot to the carotid artery and was lethal.
Feeling wretched, Basilios spread his feet and held the grenade in his abdomen. He removed the safety clip and placed his left index finger in the grenade’s pin. Keeping a firm grasp on both the grenade proper and the safety lever, he pulled the bent pin, straightening the soft metal as it was released.
He jumped up and heaved it towards the truck. Bobbing back down, he jerked up the AK that was hanging over his thigh and, peering through the gap in the barrier again, braced himself. He hoped the searing fragments from the grenade would pierce organs, shred muscle and sever arteries, that his enemies’ bodies would resemble the wreckage about him.
The grenade exploded in a bright orange-white flash, the sound oddly muted. But the shrieks that followed soon afterwards could have woken a coma patient.
Once he’d recovered from the disorientating effects of the shockwave, Basilios motioned to his comrades to stay low, and ensured they’d clicked off the safeties on their weapons. Then he scaled the haphazard wall, his movements so frenzied that he gashed his leg on the edge of an iron girder, and sucked up air like a sprint swimmer. He reached the top in less than three seconds, using a couple of wedged-in planks of wood that he’d positioned when the barricade had been built.
Ignoring the searing pain, he dropped down onto the hard-packed dirt on the other side of the barrier and launched himself at the paralyzed truck, firing from the hip in automatic mode. Slaloming to avoid the cratered earth, jagged masonry and smouldering timbers, he felt no fear. He felt nothing, in fact, but a crazed desire to kill.
A mackerel sky is a harbinger of a storm, Tom Dupree’s long-dead mother used to say when he was a kid. As he turned his gaze back to the redbrick facade of a high-end shoe store on M Street, Georgetown, Washington, DC, he just hoped it would be confined to a change in the weather. He was wearing a charcoal-grey, loose-fitting suit, a matching silk tie and aviator shades. It was early morning, seven hours behind Syrian time, the half-hidden sun appearing to linger above the outskirts of the great cityscape.
Georgetown was an historic neighbourhood situated in the north-west of the capital along the banks of the Potomac. The street was clear of the majority of commuters and tourists who’d clog it up in an hour’s time. Tom was standing on the sidewalk after exiting an adapted black SUV.
He pushed his clear earpiece in a little deeper with his left forefinger and spoke briefly to his team via his push-to-talk, or PTT, radio. Adjusting his plastic hip holster, which held his standard-issue SIG Sauer P229 handgun, with his right hand, he felt edgy. He always felt edgy protecting the offspring of a foreign dignitary in DC, but today’s charge was special, at least as far as the suits on Capitol Hill were concerned.
The Russian president’s daughter stepped from an up-armoured stretched limo parked five yards away with the gracefulness of a ballerina, her slim legs sheathed in silk pantyhose. The Russians had brought their own cars, flown in on Tupolev Tu-330 transport planes. The cars had dual foot-pedal controls, just in case the driver had a heart attack or got hit in the head by a high-velocity projectile from an anti-material rifle. The hoods were reinforced for ramming, the tyres of the run-flat variety. They always had at least three with blacked-out, bulletproof glass, the other two acting as decoys.
But despite the impressiveness of the vehicles, it was the president’s daughter who caught everyone’s eye. Before Tom had seen her photo, one of his team had said that she was hotter than the Mojave Desert come midsummer. He’d told him to hush his mouth and show a little respect. But he hadn’t lied, he thought.
She walked like she knew it, too. Hips swinging, her mouth a half-petulant, half-seductive pout, as the handles of her Gucci bag rested in the V of her slender arm. The three Russian agents, who Tom took for Presidential Security Service men, or maybe FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, walked around her in a triangular formation.
They were bulky, with close-cropped hair, like Tom’s buzz cut; their faces as hard and expressionless as concrete busts. Despite his normal rising sense of paranoia in such circumstances, Tom could think of a lot worse assignments than helping to guard Pouter, as she’d been nicknamed by one of his protective detail. He’d let that one pass, but only when they weren’t in radio contact. The DS command centre had given her the pro-name the Fabergé, a form of codename, and that was just too damn clumsy.
His Bureau of Diplomatic Security team – four men and two women – flashed their blue-and-gold badges to the few rather bemused-looking pedestrians on the sidewalk before cordoning it off with their outstretched arms. There was no need for PD tape here, although a couple of counter snipers from the Support Unit of the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service were on the flat roof of a three-storey brownstone row house opposite. A few million bucks’ worth of realty, for sure, Tom thought. Two more armed agents in black fatigues were positioned at the back of the store, and two more in front. There was an emergency response team sitting in two SUVs a hundred yards away, monitoring the scene on secure laptops. The president’s daughter was in a multi-layered security bubble; one that would take a platoon of hardened US Marines to burst through, and Tom reckoned she knew this, too.
The female owner of the store and her staff had been security vetted, and she’d agreed to open early, although she hadn’t been told who her only VIP customer would be. The advance detail with their magnetometers and K-9 sniffer dogs had done their job; all regular procedure. Pouter was due back at Blair House, the official state guest house for the President of the United States – POTUS – in half an hour. Located at 1651–1653 Pennsylvania Avenue, it was only a mile and a half away. Still, Tom was as vigilant as a polar bear with a newborn cub. After watching Pouter walk into the store, he scanned the immediate vicinity and assumed radio contact with the snipers, who confirmed the surrounding buildings were still clear. Satisfied, he ordered his team to let the civilians pass.
But his antennae were up.
As return fire pinged through the air about him, Basilios dived down and rolled in the stony track before raising the AK, the stock tucked into his shoulder. A man with a mangled left leg was bleeding out by the truck’s front passenger-side tyre, while another was half-crawling towards the tailgate. The