Demon (2 page)

Hank sat up and blinked twice before he could fathom what unfolded around him.

The signalman had the driver of the flatbed on the ground, pummeling him with punch after punch, screaming in triumph. Bone crunched and flesh tore. Then the signalman took his hard hat off and beat the driver in the face with it over and over again until another worker tackled him and stabbed him in the neck with a screwdriver.

Hank's hand shook as he covered his mouth, trying to keep from puking. He couldn't form thoughts. His mouth moved, but no sound came.

Out of the corner of his eye, two pipe fitters rolled around in the sand, clawing at each other's faces, snarling like wild beasts. One gained the advantage and pushed his thumbs into the other's eyes. This time Hank couldn't stop from vomiting, bile and blood spilling down his chest.

Run
, he finally managed to think.
Now. Run now.

Hank heard what sounded like a hammer smacking a watermelon. Even with the dozens of songs of death around him, this one chilled him to his core. He shivered and turned. Behind him a worker beat another man's head in with a pipe wrench.

Run now
. Hank coughed and vomited more red phlegm.
Get up and run!

Hank pushed to his feet. His legs wobbled and his body swayed. Lightheaded, he tried to focus, his blurred vision sharpening with each blink. All around him the desert bled. Hank had forty-nine men on this shift and every one of them engaged in savage murder. They screamed, and they killed only to be killed.

Except Hank. He found the strength to move through the carnage. No one paid him any attention. It was as if he didn't exist, an invisible witness to the slaughter.

Hank shambled, shuffling forward, his body weak and his muscles aching. He wanted to run, wanted to at least walk at a brisk pace, but couldn't find any more energy. His stomach was a sack of worms, all of them wriggling, folding in on themselves. His eyes shifted left and right, expecting at any moment one of his workers would choose him and crush his skull with a hammer or wrench.

Hank made it to his company truck and climbed in. His hands shaking, he managed to pull his keys from his pocket. As he did, a pipe fitter named Julio, from the Philippines, dragged one of the locals over and smashed his head repeatedly into the truck's bumper.

Julio was a family man, like him. Working in Iraq and sending money home. All for a better life.

The hollow sound of the skull striking metal distracted Hank, and he dropped his keys. He reached down and grabbed them off the mat. When he sat back up, Julio was on the ground, a different worker destroying his face with a heavy-duty C-clamp.

Jesus Christ,
he thought.

Hank coughed more blood into his hand and took one more glance at the massacre. As he slipped the key into the ignition and fired up the truck, Hank realized he didn't know where to go but feared if he didn't leave now, one of them would finally notice him and unleash their fury. Or he might contract whatever had infected them. Either way, he had to go somewhere, anywhere, far away from here.

Basra.
There was a military base there, Camp Bucca. It was the only one in the south still controlled by coalition forces. Everything else had been turned over to the Iraqis.

The screams stopped. Hank surveyed the site, surprised by the sudden silence. No one moved.

He covered his mouth and suppressed a sob, listening to the quiet, hoping he'd hear someone cry out in pain or for help. No one did.

Call for help,
he thought, but resisted. If it was airborne, he needed to stay ahead of it. Whatever it was, it hadn't affected him. He had a chance to escape now. Help he could call for later from the road.

Hank shifted into drive. The thought of going to An Nasiriyah crossed his mind, but he didn't trust local doctors or police. No, he wanted to find Americans. Had to find them.

Just get the fuck out of here,
he thought and turned toward Basra.

CHAPTER TWO

M
ike Caldwell wiped sweat from his brow and checked his watch. Sunrise had come and gone, and his target still hadn't shown up. The temperature was already eighty-five degrees, and he didn't want to be out in the open much longer. He lifted his binoculars and looked on the market four stories below him in Basra's commercial district of Ashar.

Where are you, Anwar?
Mike thought as he scanned the faces of the merchants setting up shop for the day.

Anwar al-Sahd, a local rug seller and moneyman for a Shiite death squad operating in Basra, was late for work. British intel had identified him as the bridge between the death squad and Iranian intelligence operatives in the area. A banker, so to speak. The Iranians deposited, and Anwar transferred it to the people with the proper motivation. Mike hated bankers more than terrorists. Terrorists at least did their dirty work. Bankers like Anwar were slimy and ran away when the shit hit the fan. No honor in people like that, no matter what the cause.

And he was late, which pissed Mike off even more. He sat on the roof of a dilapidated Basra hotel and waited because his boss in Langley wanted him to punch Anwar's ticket for helping coordinate a suicide bomb run on a British SAS safe house for special operators. “Why can't the Brits snuff him out?” Mike had said when given his orders. “It was their people.”

“Because we owe them one,” Glenn Cheatum, the deputy director for operations, of Central Intelligence, had said. “And the Brits want to stay removed after putting down that IED warehouse a few weeks ago. They're not officially in-country, remember.”

“Must maintain the PR even if you want revenge, huh?”

“Stow it, Mike, and do your job.”

“It's bitch work.”

“It's killing and it's what you're good at.”

Mike let the memory go as he wiped sweat from the gaskets around the binos' lenses before scanning the market once more.

“Where are you, you little bastard?”

Probably long gone. Maybe he made the Brits surveilling him. Maybe the British intelligence was shit.

Then Mike found him. He recognized him easily from the surveillance photos he'd studied the night before. Anwar was short and round and had a wispy beard only a goat could appreciate. He rode into the market on a fire-engine red moped with flames painted on the front and a fresh pile of rugs strapped to the back. For an asshole banker, he had a sense of style. Or humor, depending how you looked at it.

Mike pushed up to a crouched position, slung the binos over his shoulder, and hotfooted it across the roof to the stairwell. Inside, he patted the dust from his clothes. He wore a pair of khaki cargo pants, black T-shirt under a tactical vest, and a pair of polarized Oakleys. Although Mike had a dark tan, he couldn't pass for an Arab. So, instead, he'd try to pass for a government contractor.

As he descended the stairwell, Glenn's words echoed around his head. “It's killing and it's what you're good at.”

Mike couldn't argue that fact. Someone else would have sniped Anwar from the roof. But a rifle shot would scare the crowd in the market. A panic would follow, maybe even an angry mob, and walking out of the hotel wouldn't be easy. A silenced shot up close still would have put him in an exposed position from street-level. Guns attracted attention pretty damn fast, and Mike didn't want attention. Instead, he planned to be mobile before and after, in a position where he could hit and walk away. This required getting up close and personal to minimize attention. Not a lot of people could handle that kind of kill.

The trip down the stairwell and out onto the street took about a minute. Mike didn't rush. Anwar should still be setting up shop for the day. Plenty of time.

He would have preferred to take care of the banker at his residence, but the guy had a rotating home. The Brits quit trying to keep up with him, choosing to monitor him at Ashar. It seemed the only place he was guaranteed to be was in the market selling his damn rugs.

Once out on the street, Mike cleared the area around him with quick glances, making sure no one watched or followed him. The chances he would walk into a setup were slim, but the time he didn't act with caution would be the time they found his severed head in a gutter.

He didn't see anyone ghosting him, and no one on the street seemed interested. The windows in the surrounding buildings were clear. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Mike turned and headed into the outdoor market. As soon as he was within shouting distance, merchants barked at him, peddling their goods from their canopied booths, trying to entice him with cheap offers on everything from cigarettes to pirated movies to frankincense. Mike ignored them, pushing through the growing crowd of shoppers.

His eyes locked on Anwar, standing in his booth, flopping rugs down on tables. Mike sidestepped around an old man arguing about the price of dates. From his pocket he pulled a Spyderco Calypso knife, flipped the three-inch blade out, and held it against his thigh away from Anwar's eye line.

As Mike neared, a customer walked up to Anwar and grabbed a rug and started haggling.

Shit,
Mike thought. He'd had Anwar to himself. Now he had to hope he'd get another chance before more customers showed up. If that happened, he'd probably have to back off and wait for the crowd to die down. Or risk a pistol shot. But as the crowd grew, the chances of escaping after such a hit would diminish.

Mike slowed and turned to the booth next to the rug merchant's. He feigned interest in some canteens and listened to Anwar argue for several minutes.

With a quick glance over his shoulder, he saw Anwar hand the rug to the customer, accept cash, and then the man was on his way. Mike didn't waste any time, turning and heading for the booth.

Anwar motioned for him to come closer, to see his beautiful rugs. Mike smiled as he reached the booth, three feet of table separating him and Anwar.

“You speak English?” Mike said.

“Of course, of course.” Anwar slapped a rug in front of him. “Interested in a rug, are you? Something for your beautiful wife or girlfriend? Maybe you have many girlfriends, a young man like you.”

Anwar laughed at his own joke and patted his gut.

Mike mimicked the jollity. “Can't tie me down with just one. But it gets expensive, you know?”

“A man can never have enough money for the amount of mistresses he requires.”

Again Anwar laughed like he'd just told the funniest joke in the world. Mike only chuckled.

“A man like you, though, has much money, yes? Strong, rich contractor.”

Mike looked down at his clothes and back to Anwar. “That obvious, huh?”

“I see you contractors here all the time. Blackwater, yes? Or whatever you call it these days. The clothes you all wear—so similar it is like a uniform.”

Mike smiled. It was just the reaction he'd hoped for when choosing the clothes. The other merchants would remember seeing a contractor. The description they might give, though, would pretty much match anyone in the area working private security.

“So, my friend, what kind of rug would you like?”

Mike shrugged. “I really don't know anything about them. What makes a good rug?”

“Easy, my friend, easy.” Anwar flipped over a red rug and pointed at the threads on the back. “Do you see how tight these stitches are?”

Mike leaned down, his nose about two inches over the rug. “I guess so.”

He said it loud enough to hear but low enough to draw Anwar down toward him. He moved his knife hand up to his hip at the same time. The images of the Brits Anwar helped kill flashed through his head.

Anwar, his head about a foot away and just slightly higher than Mike's, said, “The tighter the stitches and the more threads there are means the rug is of top quality. This rug—”

Mike's hand flashed up, sliced the blade across the bottom of Anwar's neck, and was back at his side in under a second. Anwar's throat opened up and blood rained onto the rug.

“God save the Queen, Anwar.”

Mike retracted the blade, slipped the knife in his pocket, and walked away from the booth. He glanced over his shoulder. Anwar had dropped to his knees, his head resting on the rug in his blood. No one had noticed yet.

Around the corner outside the market, the first yells of excitement and surprise caught up to him. He waited until he was a mile up the road to dump the tactical vest, Oakleys, and binos in a trash heap. Then he pulled off the black shirt, revealing a gray shirt underneath, soaked through with sweat.

Mike hailed a cab and took it to his hotel: the new Sheraton in Basra proper. It was a ten-minute trip.

Inside the hotel room, the air conditioner hummed. Chilly, like an icebox left open. It felt good. Next to the bed sat his half-full bottle of whiskey. Mike stared at it for a long moment before turning away.

In the bathroom, he washed his face and hands. The water was tepid. He tasted salt washing off his forehead and cheeks as the water passed over his lips. Then he straightened up, his back aching. His eyes lingered on his reflection as he dried his face.

“It's killing and it's what you're good at.”

Mike looked away. He pulled his knife out to wash the blade when he noticed his right hand shaking.

Anwar's face flashed in his head.

Get it together,
he thought and set the knife down. His eyes closed; he slowed his breathing.

Anwar's face flashed again, this time with his throat slit and blood pouring out.

Mike clenched his hand into a fist and squeezed until his nails dug into his palm. When the pain crept into his wrist, he let go. Opening his eyes, Mike peeked at his hand again.

It still shook.

Fuck it.

Mike walked out of the bathroom and sat on the bed. He poured a glass of whiskey and downed it. Poured and downed another.

He looked at his hand. The shaking had died down to a tremor. Mike drank one more glass.