Escape from Baghdad! (41 page)

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

“Resting,” Dagr said. “You?”

“Cleaning up a bit,” Kinza said. He gestured slightly with his knife. “Mukhabarat guys. Never liked them. Couple of beards too.”

“Salemi's or random people?”

“Does it really matter at this point?”

“Guess not.”

“Is that fucking Hoffman?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Dagr said. “I thought I was hallucinating.”

“Should have fucking known he'd come and fuck things up,” Kinza said. He looked profoundly disgusted. “What's he doing?”

“He appears to be trying to give that woman some flowers.”

“She's hot.”

“She's shooting at him,” Dagr said.

“Fucking Hoffman,” Kinza said.

“It must be the wrong kind of flowers.”

“Are you just about rested up?”

“I guess,” Dagr looked around the living room. “You want some tea or something?”

“I had a Coke earlier.”

“That Apache is blocking the way,”

“We'll just have to go around,” Kinza said. “Fucking Hoffman.”

Avicenna, ensconced in the safe room of his command center, was not having a particularly happy time. First of all, the fuckwit Yakin had deserted his post, which meant the cameras were unmanned.
Second, he had pissed on the floor. The room was not very large and poorly ventilated; Avicenna now had to spend the duration of the fight breathing in the shithead's urine.

His main concern, however, was the absence of Red Hawk 1 and 2 on radio. The likelihood of both teams manning the eastern quadrant going incommunicado appeared slim. The actual fighting should have been confined to the southern quadrant, where Hassan Salemi had already reported that the enemy was pinned down behind cover and soon to be annihilated.

He spent fifteen minutes repeatedly flashing them; it was possible that the equipment was faulty, particularly in a crisis. And then he called Red Hawk 3, which was a two-man sniper team on the roof. They were stationary, as much eyes and ears in the sky as anything offensive. Red Hawk 3 also did not answer. He began to feel the first moments of disquiet. It was the Lion, after all, the old enemy who just wouldn't go away. It was a bit of a relief when Red Hawk 4 answered. He sent them to go investigate.

Red Hawk 4 consisted of two retired desk workers who had spent most of their careers pushing papers and interrogating mild criminals of dubious intelligence. They wore ill-fitting suits and cheap rubber-soled shoes. The only gunplay they had experienced had been in the firing range during the mandatory practices. They looked more like pigeons than hawks.

It was not surprising, therefore, that when they saw Dagr sauntering around the vicinity of the eastern quadrant, they did not, at first, find it suspicious. He did, in fact, appear to be the quintessential civilian: clumsy, furtive, ridiculous. Then Kinza slipped in behind them from a patch of shadow, knives in each hand, stabbing up beneath the ribs, lifting the first man damn near two feet off the ground.

He let the knives go and caromed into secret agent number two, tripping him and ending up mounted on his chest, raining down
hammer fists. The nose pulped, the teeth caved in, and then the flailing stopped as the man went limp. Behind him, Dagr was turning over the knife victim, planting his feet against the gurgling chest to try and retrieve the K-Bar. The suction of the chest cavity held the blade firm. In the end, it took both men to pull it out.

“The worst thing about knife fighting is when it gets stuck,” Kinza said.

“No,” Dagr said. “The worst thing is being the guy who gets stabbed.”

Behruse was rather annoyed. The enemy Taha was pinned behind a parapet on a roof but refusing to give. He had slightly higher ground and was thus able to prevent saturation fire from all sides. Salemi's men were behind him but unable to make the jump due to there being
two
of the fuckers, both wielding automatic weapons. He had called for the grenade launcher, but the dumbfucks of Blue Raptor 1 were late.
Very late
.

It was a bit of a standoff, and while it was only a matter of time before they got off a lucky shot and actually hit the fucker, the amount of noise they were making was a bit of a concern. Sooner or later, authorities would show up. It was with extreme reluctance that he called up Avicenna on his radio, screwing his index finger into his other ear to cut out the noise.

“Hello. Hello?”

“What?”

“Hello! Avi!”

“Behruse? Where's your com?”

“We're trying to raise Blue Team 1 with it,” Behruse shouted.

“What!? Where the hell are they?”

“They were bringing the rocket launcher,” Behruse said. “Listen, Avi, we have the fuckers trapped, and they're bleeding. I just need the rocket launcher.”

“What the fuck happened to Blue Raptor 1?”

“I dunno.”

“Red Hawks 1,2,3, and 4 are not answering either.”

“What?”

“The entire fucking color red is not answering!”

“That can't be right, Avi. That's the whole eastern quadrant.”

“Five teams are out of communication, you stupid fuck,” Avicenna screamed through the phone. “Get Salemi out there.
Someone is fucking killing our men there.
”

“I got the Lion pinned right here, boss,” Behruse said. “I can see him moving around.”

“How many of them?”

“The Lion and one other guy,” Behruse said. “It's the old Republican Guard guy Salemi was looking for.”

“Is he the man who got Salemi's son?”

“Er, no.”

“Then where the fuck is that fucker?”

“What?”

“Where is the fucker who killed Salemi's son?”

“Er, not here?”

“Could he by any chance be
in the fucking eastern quadrant killing all our birds?
”

Blue Raptor 2 was a four-man team of Mukhabarat enforcers-turned-gangsters, well experienced in running down miscreants and dealing back alley justice. Each of them having been drummed out of the service for excessive brutality and corruption, they had found shelter under their old godfather, the Old Man known in dark corners as the founder of all things secret.

Their loyalty was huge, the devotion of desperate men, and if their courage did not quite make up to the same figure, at least they had a numerical advantage. Their approach into the eastern quadrant was stealthy and cautious. Had they been paramilitary or Republican
Guard, they would have fanned out and taken flanking positions and tried to reach the high ground. The Mukhabarat training did not cover urban house-to-house combat, however, and their own training in petty enforcement made them believe that moving in a pack was the safest method of maintaining their advantage.

The eastern quadrant was marked out as the corner of a dilapidated building that housed a sweatshop making textiles. Having been ordered to make a meticulous search for the intruders, Blue Raptor 2 started on the ground floor and worked their way up, slapping their way through dozens of cowering women and children. They gained entry to the roof by a rusty door and found it covered in wire lines of drying laundry.

Making their way through these rows of abayas and billowing shirts, Blue Raptor 2 began to feel slightly foolish. There were no signs of the enemy. Rather, it was a peculiarly innocuous night with a three-quarter moon and a slight breeze. Up here the resonance of gunfire was faded and harmless, sounding like distant fireworks. They made their way through the laundry, poking left and right with the muzzles of their guns.

They had their orders but were not in a hurry. It seemed to them that if the enemy were to be found elsewhere, it would be no bad thing. They had made it all the way across the roof when the leader, upon turning, found his company shortened by one. He opened his mouth to call out when the unfortunate individual staggered into view, pulling down an entire clothesline. His throat was lacerated, a gaping red necktie looking obscene against the whiteness of his shirt.

Blue Raptor 2 opened fire in all directions, fingers convulsing against their automatic weapons. The laundry was duly slaughtered and the wounded man, who might have had several minutes longer to live, found his existence cruelly shortened by a rip of bullets. When they had exhausted themselves, the leader raised his hand and looked around. They had hit nothing. The enemy had disappeared, like a ghost.