When she’d gotten safely inside, Tom and his team could relax. Their remit didn’t extend to guarding the exterior, let alone protecting her inside her suite. A fresh DS team would ensure the perimeter was secure for the dayshift, and the Russians looked after their own at close quarters.
As Pouter walked up the steep steps with her bodyguards, sheltered from the light rain that had begun to fall by the dark green canopy, Tom was glad it was home time for him, too. But as she got just a couple of yards from the door, it was flung open abruptly. A suited man barged out, brandishing a handgun, and Tom willed the Russian bodyguards to fill the space between them and his charge, to fling her to the rear and pump ten rounds into the guy’s chest.
He barked a series of short orders via the PTT and hit the emergency button under the dash. That sent an ultra-quick response requirement to the local PD, the Secret Service, the FBI and the DS. The SUV’s four heat-seeking cameras clicked into 360-degree vision for the various agencies that were now surveying the scene on video screens, just in case the hovering low-level drone got knocked out or malfunctioned. But by the time his team were halfway to the flight of steps, with their SIGs drawn, he could see that the Russian agents had holstered their own handguns.
He held up a field scope and recognized the face of the ostensible attacker from his briefing photos. The man was in fact the Russian president’s fifteen-year-old nephew and the handgun was a squirt gun that he was now firing into the face of the hulk carrying the shopping bags.
The kid had a mental age of nine, according to Tom’s security briefing notes, and that meant that all anyone would feel would be sympathy. Still, his team had reacted well, even Ed the rookie. Drills had their place in producing long-term muscle memory and instinctive positive action, but there was no substitute for a real test. He radioed his team to stand down and called it in before making a mental note to pat Ed on the back and say a quiet encouraging word.
Suddenly, he felt overcome with exhaustion. He hadn’t had a day off in a month due to a minor epidemic of flu at the Washington office. His father, a recently promoted three-star general who worked at the Pentagon, was in Ankara, Turkey, at present, but he was due back in a week’s time, and Tom had arranged to take a short, well-deserved vacation to spend some downtime with him.
“You okay, Tom?” Sam said, as he fired up the SUV.
“Yeah, just a little tired. You know how it is.”
“Yeah, goddamned adrenalin dump with nowhere to go,” Sam replied, referring to the anticlimax on the steps of Blair House.
“Let’s get outta here, Sam.”
As Tom rested his head against the SUV’s headrest, feeling jaded, he knew he’d worked long and hard to heal the relationship with his father. He no longer felt anger towards him for deserting his mother when he was eight. He still blamed him for her subsequent miserable existence and his own sense of betrayal in his formative years, but he didn’t hate him any more.
Once Sam had dropped him off at the departmental lot and he’d typed out his report on his laptop, it would be less than a week before he could drive out of DC and over one of the four-lane road bridges that crossed the Potomac to his one indulgence in life: his retreat.
But he had a nagging feeling about the prospects of getting some quality downtime. In the last few months, every time he’d thought life would experience a little peace, he’d gotten the mental equivalent to a jab in the ribs with a cattle prod. All his senses were telling him that it wouldn’t be any different, but he couldn’t think of one reason why.
In Syria, the white sun had mellowed into a tangerine-coloured half crescent, sinking beneath the mountainous horizon, the temperature falling ten degrees already. Dusk wasn’t far off. Basilios was huddled a yard or so beneath the rim of a multiple rocket crater. It was half-filled with fetid water, leaking from fractured sewerage pipes. The smell resembled rotting cabbages, the three corpses strewn around him turning rigid as rigor mortis set in.
He’d replaced the makeshift tourniquet with a wrapped shirt sleeve, and had kept up the pressure by twisting a thin piece of wood that he’d pushed through the knot. After killing another six Sunni fighters, his desire for revenge was beginning to abate.
Glancing up now, he saw that the acrid smoke created by the explosions had drifted away. But the fires that had raged in the town’s decimated stone and timber buildings had created a thick black-grey cloud that was floating towards the east. He decided to wait until darkness had fallen to make his escape. He would have a better chance. The Sunnis didn’t have night vision, he guessed. Certainly not goggles, although they could have the odd infrared scope.
The attackers had checked out the interlinked craters about five minutes after he’d scrambled into the hole. As he’d heard the footsteps approaching, he’d stuck his head and shoulders underneath a corpse’s torso, conscious of the brown-red blood still leaching out from the exit wounds. After a burst of semi-automatic fire had thudded into a couple of the dead bodies, the craters had been deemed safe, he’d assumed. A hot shell casing had landed on his leg and had burned him even through his desert-tan combat pants, but he hadn’t flinched.
Time passed, slowly. But when the light had faded to the point where his passage could only be betrayed by the receding fires and sketchy moonshine, he decided to act. With his back pressed to the hard-packed mud above the water level, he eased up the crater with his heels, refusing to moan as the movement exacerbated the pain from his leg wound.
He turned sideways and glanced over the stony rim. Thirty yards or so away, mess tins rested on oil burners, and backpacks and weapons were stacked in clusters, the stony ground strewn with spent casings. A broad-shouldered man urinated on a dead body. A solitary dog barked. Basilios could just about make out his family house, the ground carpeted with ash around it. The single-storey structure had been rendered a shell, with crisscrossed blackened beams and shattered stonework. He figured his father and brother had been murdered by now, too, as all the other townsmen had been. But there was nothing to be done.
He scrambled over to the other side of the crater, his AK resting across his curled arms. He’d decided to crawl towards the drainage ditch in the opposite direction to the Sunnis and follow the cut as it ran parallel to the ridge about four miles away. He’d find his mother and sisters and comfort them as they pulled at their hair and mourned their dead.
Then he froze.
He’d sensed someone behind him, and strained now to hear a telltale sign, a heavy breath, a step, a round being chambered. A split second later, he heard a voice speaking in Arabic.
“Everyone in your town is dead. You are either a coward or lucky.”
With an adrenalin rush coursing through his veins, Basilios knew he had two choices: surrender or turn and engage his enemy. Knowing that the Salafists had beheaded those who had given up or were injured, it wasn’t much of a decision to make. But as he was about to turn and discharge the rounds that were left in his clip, the man talked again.
“I will let you live so that you can tell others what will happen to them if they resist us. It seems you are lucky then.”
The accent was foreign and he couldn’t pin it down. But there were jihadists from over seventy countries here, almost fifteen thousand men, or so he’d read, and he dismissed the thought. If the man let him live, he could lead the women and children to safety, which had become his purpose now. He felt he had no option but to turn his head around and let the AK fall from his grip.
The man standing atop the craters was around the same height as him, Basilios thought, dressed in black combat fatigues. He had long straggly hair and an equally unkempt beard. Otherwise, his head was covered by a black headdress. He was unarmed save for a handgun slung low under his armpit and a sheathed sword at his waist. His features were angular;