Escape from Baghdad! (38 page)

Kinza smiled. “This time will be much worse.”

Then, ensconced in a roadside café, replete with shishas and mint tea, they plotted.

The entrance into Avicenna's neighborhood was a narrow street, wide enough for single lanes of traffic. Dagr could see that the flow of cars was being subtly discouraged. A heavy food cart stood at the mouth, and there were a knot of rough-looking men by the stall, pretending to eat dinner and drink tea. Motorcycles had been parked around it, taking up half the street, choking both ways of traffic into a single narrow lane. There was a snarling traffic jam, swearing, threatening, and then stoic indifference. People parked their cars haphazardly and walked.

It was not such a huge inconvenience. Further down the street, the way narrowed even more. Alleys branched off onto either side, all of them dead ends. The street itself took a left turn and continued onward, reducing in width until it was barely four feet across. It was a neat solution, a self-contained neighborhood, the houses acting as enfilading barriers. Near the center of the mass was Avicenna's own house, on subtly high ground, like a citadel. Satellite imagery from
Google earth revealed that, from the air, the whole neighborhood looked, in fact, like a fort, with a curtain wall of houses, narrow avenues for movement, and a number of strategically placed tall buildings that would serve very well as towers.

“See the covered truck on the main road,” Hamid said. “That's theirs too. They can block the entrance of their street by just backing it up. Thirty seconds. Probably a machine gun under the tarp.”

“Funny, I was hoping we could ram a car right down that street,” Dagr said. “What about snipers?”

“Two flanking towers,” Hamid said. “Left and right. Plus the men by the cart are all armed, six of them at least.”

“Do we have to use this street?”

“This is the only entrance into the neighborhood. The houses on the perimeter all around are like walls,” Hamid said. “The people living on the lower floors don't know it. The upper floors and roofs are controlled by Mukhabarat. The roofs are almost continuous—like the battlements of a turret wall. I even saw places where gaps between buildings were bridged with sheet iron.”

“How many men does he have patrolling on top?” Dagr asked.

“Must be over 200 men if they take shifts,” Hamid said. “He isn't fucking around. This is wartime footing.”

“Can we break into one of the perimeter buildings and climb to the roof?” Kinza asked. “If we can get to the roof, they're fucked. Their precious little fort becomes a nice high road for us to walk around on.”

“He has every inch scoped by security cameras,” Hamid said. “I counted them. Not the cheap Chinese ones either; these move around and everything. He'll know the minute anyone unauthorized enters any of those buildings.”

“The perimeter buildings will also be rigged with explosives and alarms,” the Lion said. “I have seen this system before in Damascus. Avicenna blew up an entire six-story building there to kill a single enemy. He has no respect for innocent life.”

“Don't worry, neither do we,” Kinza said.

“It's a fort right?” Dagr said, doodling on a pad. “It's like a medieval fort set inside a neighborhood. As any military historian of note will tell you, the weakest point of any fortification is always the gate.”

“The gate being the street,” Kinza said.

“If we can get in there somehow, we bypass the perimeter defenses entirely,” Dagr said. “They have to regroup, fall back in. Their high ground, their cameras, the boobytraps—everything becomes neutralized.”

“Once inside, we slip into the interior buildings, start creating a panic,” Hamid said. “Blow shit up.”

“They'll fall back to Avicenna's house, try to control the center, maybe,” Dagr said. “Any chaos is our friend. But it's a moot point because I don't see how we can get past the gate. Not without casualties.”

“Well we don't want casualties,” said Kinza. “Not yet anyways.”

“We have Kevlar,” Hamid said. “We can take a couple of hits.”

“So this is the plan,” Kinza said. “We hit it at night. Hamid RPGs the towers from a hidden location. At the same time, the Druze hits the truck and takes it over. Best case, he crashes it into the street, blocking the road from further use. We'll want some privacy once we're inside.”

“And us?” Dagr asked.

“While this is happening, we are innocently approaching the fake cart for some dinner. You go in front ‘cause you look harmless. As soon as the RPG hits, we start knifing those boys on the ground.”

“You want me to knife six men?”

“Ok, actually what I meant was that
I
will knife them,” Kinza said. “Then we drop the food and run into one of the dead-end alleys. There should be confusion at this point, what with the explosions and crashing trucks.”

“Let me guess, I get to be the tank.”

“What happens to us?” Hamid asked.

“You two get up to the roof,” Kinza said. “Take the high ground. Find cover. Hold them off. Move around. Get seen on camera.”

“Get seen?” Afzal Taha was looking puzzled.

“Don't you understand?” Hamid laughed. “
We
make the noise. All those Mukhabarat cunts come buzzing after us. The Old Man sees you and starts to get excited. Kinza gets in free.
Maybe.
”

Dagr, too, was understanding the implications of the plan. Nausea welled up inside him. He stared at Kinza, saw nothing comforting in his face.

“You might not survive,” Kinza said. “Hamid knows.”

“You send us to certain death,” Afzal Taha said. “For what gain?”

“He'll be loose behind their lines,” Hamid said, a desperate yearning on his face. “He'll get
close
.”

“Yes,” Kinza said. He looked hard at the Lion. “Is it worth it, to kill this man?”

The Lion looked away, troubled. “I don't know. I think so. I used to think so.”

Kinza laughed.

“How close will you get, Kinza?” Hamid asked.

“Maybe close enough.”

“And if not?”

Kinza pulled out his bag, cracked the zip. Nestled in wax paper were six bricks of putty colored
plastique
. The neatly lettered insignia of the French Foreign Legions were stamped in each corner. A solid black finger press detonator lurked like a fat beetle in the middle, gun oil shining blue off the metal.

“Satisfied?” Kinza asked.

“Yes,” said Hamid. He looked at peace.

“What we need, is a helicopter,” Hoffman said. He glanced at Mother Davala, saw her frowning, and allowed his grin to widen. “A helicopter, my lovely dove, to whisk us away!”

“Shut up, you moron,” Mother Davala said.

“Fly me to the moon.” Hoffman sang.

“You imbecile,” Mother Davala cried. “You utterly brainless ninny. Dead! All of them are dead! Kinza, Hamid, all your men.”

“Not all dead,” Hoffman said. His face darkened momentarily. “Not quite. Some little Indians got away.”

“How am I going to kill Avicenna?” Mother Davala rested her head on her outsized revolver. “Who will I use now?”

“Hmm, as I was saying, what we need is a helicopter. Do you want to know why?”

“Oh what's the use?” Mother Davala said. “I wish to God I'd never rescued you from that creature.”

“We need it, Elderly One, because it's about to go down,” Hoffman said.

“What?”

“The shit is about to hit the fan,” Hoffman said. “Kinza is not dead, no, not by a long shot. And Kinza is not the man to take this kind of shit lying down. He's not a friendly kinda guy like me, unfortunately—”

“Not dead?”

“Oh no,” Hoffman said. “And neither is my former gunner Ancelloti. My new faithful lieutenant! My admiring Robin!”

“So we're not finished?”

“My man reports that Kinza, at this moment, is sitting in a café in the general neighborhood of our friend Avicenna's house,” Hoffman said. “And do you know who with? None other than our mysterious Druze dude!”

“What?”

“Well, I wouldn't trust Ancelloti. He's a drug addict after all, but I think it's safe to say that Kinza is not really that interested in coffee,” Hoffman said.

“You sly dog,” Mother Davala poked him with the revolver. “Here I thought you were a bumbling idiot. We need to get over there. Let them create the cover, we can slip in.”

“Not in, Mother, but over,” Hoffman said. “Excuse me while I make a call.”

“Hello! Hello!” A voice crackled over the static of the outsized sat phone.

“Alfred! Prepare the batmobile!”

“What? Who the fuck is this?”

“Colonel Bradley speaking here,” Hoffman said. “I said, prepare the batmobile.”

“Sir?!”

“Pilot, I am giving you the authorization code alpha Charlie foxtrot niner niner niner sigma sigma fullstop,” Hoffman said.

“Sir!”

“Standby for action! Man the torpedoes.”

“Sir, we have no torpedoes.”

“I meant the giant lasers!”

“Er, no lasers, sir.”

“Then what have you got?”

“Hellfire air-to-surface missiles, sir!”

“Excellent. Now listen carefully. This is a top secret mission. Tell no one. I repeat we have a mole in the team. Tell no one!”

“A mole, sir?”

“A leak! A traitor!” Hoffman shrieked into the phone, spittle flying everywhere. “A commie bastard Benedict Arnold! And it's probably that pedophile Fowler!”

“Sir!”

“In fact, I want you to shoot him in the leg the next time you see him!”

“Sir?”

“The leg, Marine!”

“Sir!”

“Now, load up and bring the chopper to the following location. Fly low, avoid all radar—”

“Sir, the only radar up here is ours.”

“Pilot, shut up!” Hoffman said. “Trust no one! The truth is out there! My most trusted secret agent, Agent, er Hoffman, is ready and waiting. You will rendezvous with him at 33 × 21'18” north and 44 ×
23'39” east coordinates. Codename Batman. I repeat. His codename is Batman. For the purposes of this mission, you are to refer to him as such.”

“Sir?”

“Obey Batman at all times.”

“Sir!”

“And bring the hellfires, boy,” Hoffman said. “We gonna blow shit up.”

Ancelloti stood shivering against a wall, wearing the nondescript clothes of a down and out day laborer. Luckily, his Latin coloring and the sheer quantity of dirt on his skin was enough to obscure the fact that he was not, in fact, Iraqi. This wasn't the best neighborhood in any case, and these days, pedestrians tended to give anyone shivering against a wall a wide berth.

The shivering was actually real. He was suffering from extreme withdrawal from the vast cocktail of drugs his body was acclimatized to. He had scored a solid cube of hash for the last of his money, and this was tiding him over. Barely. The problem with Hoffman's plans, he reflected, was that they went awry all too often. Every time, in fact. On the other hand, he had never seen anyone else land on their feet with such regular panache.