The Assassin (7 page)

His next movements were somewhat detached, almost mechanical in the precision with which they were carried out. Kealey reached down for the backpack, his hand slipping into the main compartment. He flipped a switch and lifted the bag, tossing it onto the table, counting the seconds in his head. At the same time, he used his left hand to grip the lower edge of his T-shirt. Arshad Kassem reached for the pack and pulled it across the table, his gaze fixed on the younger man. When he got to five, Kealey closed his eyes and threw himself to the floor.

The charge went off a split second later. Kassem and his bodyguard were instantly blinded by the flash of light, then deafened by the following concussion. The older man was blown out of his chair as Kealey struggled to his feet, ears ringing with the blast, pulling up on his shirt as his right hand wrapped around the butt of his Beretta 9mm pistol. The weapon came up an instant later. He had just enough time to meet the wide eyes of the guard over his front sights before he pulled the trigger. The man’s head snapped back, and he crumpled to the floor in a lifeless heap.

Kealey couldn’t hear the footsteps in the hall, but he knew they had to be coming. He scrambled for the dead guard’s AK-47, jarring his fingers on the tile floor in the process. He lifted the weapon and squeezed the trigger as the door flew open. His rounds caught the advancing guard in the chest, propelling him back into the hallway. At the same time, Kealey flipped the metal table onto its side to put an obstacle between the door and his own body.

Kassem was splayed across the floor, his hands and face scorched by the magnesium powder in the improvised charge. He was howling in agony, hands pressed to his ravaged face. Trying to block out the screams of pain, Kealey listened for movement in the other parts of the building. He heard feet pounding overhead and then a shouted phrase in Arabic.

He wouldn’t last long in this little room, he knew that much. Sliding the Beretta into his waistband, he leaned over and slammed a fist into Kassem’s face. The man went instantly limp. Kealey crouched and grabbed him by the front of his shirt, lifting him up and onto his shoulders. It took all his strength; Kassem weighed at least 200 pounds. His radio was still transmitting. Tilting his head down to his hip, he shouted, “Paul, light up the second floor.
Now!
”

Walland wasn’t sure what was happening, but when the sound of the explosion reached him, his training took over. The M4 snapped up in his arms, and he instantly found the guard on the left through his telescopic sight. He squeezed off a 3-round burst, then switched his aim to the next fighter as the first hit the ground. The man’s AK was already coming up, his finger landing on the trigger as Walland’s second burst tore through his chest. A wild spray of bullets ripped into the frame of the first Tacoma, shattering the glass in the driver’s side door.

Owen flinched as cubes of safety glass exploded over his upper body. He turned to the left and tracked for targets with his rifle, but saw right away that Walland’s shots had found their mark. The radio traffic was coming loud and fast; he heard Walland shouting something on the handheld and then Kealey calling for cover over the SINCGARS.

He immediately grabbed for the handset and shouted, “Gregg, Morales, that’s you! Hit the second floor with everything you got!”

Kealey was moving as fast as he could through the dimly lit hallways, struggling to keep Kassem’s body on his shoulders and his weapon up at the same time. The sound of a heavy machine gun thumped in his ears, growing louder as he pushed forward. He reached a corner and cut it wide, catching sight of an armed guard on a wooden staircase. He was about to fire when a volley of rounds ripped through the front of the building. Kealey saw a flash of red, saw the man’s left leg collapse, and he went sideways, crashing through the banister to the floor below. The sound of the splintering wood was lost in another hail of automatic fire. Tipping his head back to the radio, Kealey said, “Owen, tell your guys to watch their fire. I’m coming out.”

He burst into the sunlight a moment later, shards of cement from the building’s façade crumbling beneath his feet. The Delta troopers in the first two trucks continued to pour rounds into the second floor as Kealey heaved Kassem into the back of the first Tacoma, then climbed in after him. He caught a jagged piece of metal on his way over the side, felt a sudden tearing pain, and looked down to see a bloody rent in his trousers, just above the left knee.

Owen was turned around in his seat, eyes wide in anger. He had to shout over the sound of gunfire. “What the fuck happened in there? And what the hell are you doing with him? There’s no way we’re taking him—”

“I can’t explain it right now. Just drive.” Kealey was fighting to stay calm, but when the Delta colonel didn’t respond right away, he fixed him with a fierce look and screamed, “
Now
, Paul! Let’s go!”

The other man seemed stunned by the expression on Kealey’s face, but it pushed him into action. The truck accelerated rapidly a split second later, the other vehicles following suit. Soon they were racing back to the train yard. Owen called the other vehicles for a sit rep, breathing a long sigh of relief when the casualty count came back zero. Then he punched in the frequency for the Agency pilots on the dash-mounted SINCGARS radio. Once the call went through, he hurled the handset against the dash and turned to glare at Kealey through the open rear window of the truck cab.

“I hope you have a good fucking reason for this.” There was a hard edge to his elevated voice. “One way or another, you owe me an explanation.”

“I know.” Looking down at Kassem’s unconscious body, Kealey felt strangely numb. “And you’ll get one, I promise. But for now, just get us out of here.”

CHAPTER 7

SYRIA

With night slinking in, the sun slipped low to the west, red light bleeding over the sparse landscape, climbing over the limestone hills that surround the dead cities of the Byzantines before sliding south to touch the modest peak of Talat Musa on the Lebanese border. Far to the north, a lean figure wandered past the great earthen mound of the Aleppo Citadel, surrounded by humanity but, at a mere twenty-six years of age, lost to it already. No one cared to notice. They were occupied, as always, by the menial tasks that filled their waking hours. Had they looked closer, they might have thought the young man walked without haste, without purpose. These descriptions, however, were not applicable to any part of his life.

Rashid Amin al-Umari had been a driven man since the fall of the Baath regime. His drive was mired in hate, which was not unusual in this tumultuous region, though a rage of such rigidity is rarely forged by one incident, as was the case with this young man. Despite his youth, al-Umari often felt that he had nothing left to look forward to. All that remained to him were memories. Memories of the good years, the years before an American bomb stripped his world away.

He remembered that day with the kind of clarity that only enduring pain can provide. The Pentagon, of course, had called it an accident. Months later, unnamed U.S. government officials had, in a vague admission of sorts, described his mother and sister as “collateral damage,” but the fact that they had been innocent bystanders was glaringly obvious; the most callous observer could not argue otherwise. On the other hand, even Rashid could concede that his father’s activities had made him a valuable target. When the rubble was finally cleared, not enough of Karim al-Umari had remained to fill his grave, but the man’s legacy lived on.

Karim al-Umari’s rise to power had begun long before Rashid had the presence of mind to truly appreciate it. In later years, the elder al-Umari rarely indulged his only son when it came to the intricacies of the family business — or the politics of his country — but for Rashid, a naturally astute young man, it had not been difficult to piece it all together. The signs were hard to miss, the whispers easily overheard. By 1988, Karim al-Umari was known and feared as a dominant figure in the Baath Party, made prominent by the wealth his construction empire generated, made powerful by his connection to the chairman himself. It was the newly installed leader of the party who saw fit to provide the fledgling company with several lucrative contracts in the late 1970s, shortly after his own succession to the aging Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. When it came to the expansion of the capital, it seemed as though the party’s funds were limitless; even the prolonged, costly war with Iran had failed to lessen the regime’s enthusiasm when it came to spending the people’s money, and with each new government building that cropped up in the capital, the family empire continued to reap the benefits.

It was not, however, until 1985 that the elder al-Umari received his just reward. This prize came in the form of position, a chair on the Revolutionary Command Council, which carried with it control of the southern provinces of Muthanna and Qadisyah. It could scarcely have been a better gift. For Karim al-Umari, the oil-rich land offered an irresistible opportunity. He borrowed heavily against his company’s assets to purchase several refineries, and as with all his business ventures, it proved to be a successful gamble. It was al-Umari who first adopted Western extraction techniques, and al-Umari who proposed the construction of a pipeline to the Red Sea port of Jeddah. When his plan was implemented in 1989, his newly created Iraqi Southern Oil Company saw an immediate 30 percent boost in profits. One year after Iraqi oil started winding its way across the Saudi Arabian desert, Karim al-Umari’s personal net worth exceeded one billion U.S. dollars, and his position within the party was rivaled by only the chairman himself.

The al-Umari oil conglomerate endured the occasional setback, of course. The first gulf war was extremely costly; Rashid’s father lost tens of millions over the course of the following decade, including the cost of repairing a bomb-shattered refinery south of Basra. In truth, though, Karim al-Umari barely noticed those losses; by the late 1990s, his considerable power was worth more to him than any amount of money. Unfortunately, that power also made him a target, and with the American invasion of 2003, it all came crumbling down.

In the thirty-six months since the bombing that claimed the lives of his mother, father, and twelve-year-old sister in the Iraqi capital, Rashid had worked to align himself with the insurgency. It was difficult, at first; it was a world he did not understand, and his connections were tenuous at best. Ironically, it was the demise of Karim al-Umari that provided his only son — the sole heir to the al-Umari oil empire — with the means to make contact. In those early days, Rashid’s contributions were limited to his rather generous donations, most of which found their way to the Mahdi Army in Sadr City. Because of his ties to the former regime, the trust was hard won. He was forced to labor for months in the background, offering support from a distance, working his way into their confidence. The test, when it came, arrived in the form of information: the time and location of a meeting involving several high-level officials. When the empty building was not razed by a surgical airborne strike, it was believed that he was true to the cause, that he did not belong to the West, but to Moqtadr al-Sadr himself. With the trust came a place in the organization and the friendship of the most senior commanders. And then, on a frigid morning in late January, three days after he’d flown in from London via Amman, he’d been introduced to the German.

No one seemed to know exactly where Erich Kohl had come from. More uncertain still was his role in the organization, though the fact that he rarely left the sheik’s side said much in itself. Some suggested that he’d been aligned with the Red Army Faction in the early nineties; others, that he had worked for the Stasi — the East German secret police — before the wall came down in ’89, though al-Umari had quietly pointed out at the time that the German appeared too young to have taken part in those events.

In time, his interactions with the foreigner became more frequent. Their alliance was a strange one, born more out of their status as outsiders than anything else. Despite their respective ties to al-Sadr, Kohl remained an infidel, Rashid nothing more than the wealthy son of a Sunni power broker. Over the course of many conversations, al-Umari gradually revealed the depths of his frustration, the impotence he felt when the greatest victory they could claim was the lives of a few young soldiers on the road to Najaf. During these discussions, Rashid never noticed that the German’s words were few and far between; al-Umari did the talking for both of them, but he was never dissuaded, never brushed aside.

Despite his rhetoric, the arrangement was largely satisfactory to Rashid al-Umari. He was doing his part, and in private moments, he could concede the truth: that no matter what he felt, that despite the terrible thoughts that drove him, he was content to speak with his money. He was a student of science, an academic… It was not in him to lift a weapon against his enemy, to find a man in his sights and squeeze the trigger. With this distinction in mind, the view from the periphery was enough to feed his inner rage; he felt no particular need to take the next logical step.

All of that began to change on a cool, still night in late May. It was Rashid’s third trip to Sadr City in as many months, and although he took meticulously planned, circuitous routes out of London, he could not help but fear that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service — better known as MI6 — would eventually take an interest in his movements. This concern had been expressed to Kohl in hushed tones, along with his displeasure at having to leave so early in the ongoing offensive, despite its undeniable lack of success. It was a familiar refrain, but the German did not offer his usual sympathetic ear. Instead, he spoke quietly of another path. He murmured of men in the north who were waiting to act, and the names he used were instantly recognizable to al-Umari. Some were dated names that went back to his childhood, while others could still be found on every watch list in North America and Western Europe. Here, at last, was the possibility of a real victory. Rashid al-Umari listened intently for two hours and, the following morning, left Sadr City for the last time. He was not sorry to leave it behind.