The Godless One (39 page)

"No," said Ari. "I want you to go in
after we shoot. If you get into trouble, just pull out your
Magnum."

The two bound guards heard this and
exchanged worried glances.

"Ah," said Ari. "I noticed you looking
at our license plate. Burn that number into your
memory."

"He's got spares in the back," one of
them said, kicking in frustration.

"Who are you planning to shoot?" the
other one asked.

Ari was helping Ahmad with his night
goggles and did not answer.

"Colonel," Abu Jasim called from the
barrier. That was something he’d missed. He should have told him
not to call him ‘Colonel’ in front of strangers.

"Yes?" he barked.

"They’ve replaced the padlock with some
combination gizmo."

"Get the bolt cutters."

They had spoken in Arabic, but when the
guards saw him bring the cutters from back of the van, one of them
sniggered.

"Hah! That’s titanium. Good
luck!"

"Hah!" said Ari. "Tell us the
combination or we’ll break your necks."

Abu Jasim grasped the English and
cracked his knuckles in anticipation. The guards did not have to
study his wolfish grin very long before giving up the
combination.

"Colonel, these two are going start
yelling their heads off the moment we go down the lane."

Ari cursed. Where was his
mind?

"Yes, by all means, get out the duct
tape."

"Already have."

The guards protested something about
being as quiet as church mice.

"I'd be careful what you say," said Abu
Jasim as he wrapped the tape around their heads. "We're hunting
vermin tonight."

Abu Jasim switched off the van
headlights and they lowered their goggles. Ahmad protested that his
were too tight. He was roundly ignored. They moved past the barrier
and began walking down the lane

"You'll have to get close, Colonel,"
Abu Jasim instructed. "Your targets will probably be wearing heavy
coats. The range on these things is ninety feet, but you'd better
cut that in half. Once they're down, we've got twenty seconds to
get to them. How many of them do you expect?"

"No less than two."

"You're still thinking of Uday, aren't
you? Yes, that old cripple would need help getting around in the
dark. But what if it's more? What if he brings all of his men with
him?"

"That Lexus isn't made to hold a
crowd."

Abu Jasim chuckled. "Always thinking
ahead..."

Ari took hold of Ahmad’s shoulder as
they walked. "If there are two of them, don’t fire. I’ll take care
of the man who needs to be brought down. If there are three, fire
when I fire. Take out the man nearest you. If there are more than
three, take out whoever you can and let your uncle take care of the
rest. We won’t have time to reload."

When they reached the Lexus Abu Jasim
released a sigh of regret, as if he had been fully intending to
hotwire the car and take off.

Ari signaled with his left hand. There
was to be no talking. This had been emphasized to Ahmad earlier.
Ari chose a spot for him in the bushes near the front of the car,
where anyone who approached would funnel out of the narrow foot
path from the house. Abu Jasim crouched next to his nephew. Ari
took up a position across the road from them.

He looked at his watch. It was a bit
past seven. The Super Bowl had been on for over half an hour. Ari
used this as a baseline: it had been a half hour since the Director
left the command post; a half hour since Sid Overstreet and others
announced their intention to take off for Farmville; a half hour
since Abu Jasim had picked him up on Route 60, not thirty yards
from where the lone tech sat at his console, the Director having
decided everybody available needed to be in the field. By now, Ari
thought, gunfire should be rocking the woods, unless the agents
were deftly netting suspects as they drove out to watch the game in
Farmville.

There was another alternative he had
not even considered, because it was inconceivable that the Boss
would ever back down. But then he heard cheering within the house.
The Boss was allowing the gringos to watch the game, after all. A
door slammed and a loud series of thumps echoed over the field, as
if someone was dancing on the porch.

Dancing
?

"Manning! Manning! Manning!" The joyous
chant skittered across the stubby corn stalks frozen in muddy ice.
‘Manning’? Was it a war cry? Were they warning their comrades that
the authorities were manning their weapons? Catching movement from
the side of his goggles, he faced Ahmad, who was grimacing stupidly
and making a throwing motion with his arm. Ari had no idea what he
was trying to mime. Did he want a hand grenade? Ari noted the
muzzle of his shotgun drifting his way and prayed he would not be
shot accidentally. Abu Jasim jabbed his nephew in the
shoulder.

Quit fooling
around
!

Otherwise, the young man
appeared to have settled down. The very fact that he did not yelp
when his uncle poked him indicated a measure of self-control. It
was possible he was beginning to enjoy himself—which was not
exactly something Ari desired. The only important thing he knew
about the young man was that Abu Jasim vouched for him. Yet for all
his griping, he was adapting remarkably quickly to the life of
polymorphic morality. Ari’s world view had been shaped in a land of
giant, meaningless symbols: the Imperial Palace, the gigantic
Swords of Q
ā
dis
ī
yah,
the erstwhile statue of Saddam Hussein famously toppled in Firdos
Square. That so much misery could be rooted in the vacuous minds of
the al-Tikritis and their ilk tweaked and perverted the conscience.
The ignorant were cruel, the clever were cruel. And yet it was
during the invasion of Kuwait that Ari had encountered a group of
Christian missionaries who—for reasons that he could not
comprehend—traveled north into the criminal country of Iraq. They
told Ari that no matter where they went, Iraqis had treated them
with generosity and kindness, and were more than willing to share
their meager dinners with them. It was an eye-opening statement.
Ari began to notice that in the souks, in the streets, and in homes
all round him there were good, decent people. The question then
became not how had cruelty triumphed, but how common pleasantness
(which might be called the ultimate good) burgeoned upwards and, in
its own way, prevailed. By bringing Ahmad into his scheme, was he
diverting him from his natural course? Watching Abu Jasim's nephew,
his head distorted by evil-looking night vision goggles and the
ridiculous ski mask, a sense of guilt swept through him. Once this
was all over, he would have to immediately pack him off home to a
hopefully better life. And Abu Jasim? He was too wickedly realistic
to miss the good in anything. He was fine as he was.

There he went, again. Losing himself in
thoughts unsuited to the moment. The same kind of distraction that
had almost gotten him killed at Manchester Docks. Of course, he
told himself, the only reason he had lost that fight was because he
had slipped at a critical moment....

Abu Jasim was signaling
him. The field.
Shit
. Someone was coming. The slushy crunch of boots on
fragmented ice could be heard distinctly. Ari leaned forward,
peering up the corridor of the foot path to the field at the other
end. Faint light from the house clearly marked the opening.
Suddenly, the light was obstructed. Someone was on the path. Ari
pulled back and raised his shotgun.

"It sounds like a joke," came a
familiar voice.

"Why would someone call the major with
a joke like that?" someone answered. "But who else knows about Abu
Sarhan?"

"Probably no one called him at all,"
came a third voice. "He's a fucking American. They like to torment
their captives. Look at Guantanamo."

"You aren't a captive. You're a guest.
If only—"

The conversation was abruptly ended by
a loud bang from the direction of the house.

"What was that?"

A series of additional bangs were
accompanied by intense light that radiated prickles of light
through the trees.

"Shit! Hurry!"

Ari held up three fingers. Abu Jasim
and Ahmad both nodded.

Gunshots at the house, then the sputter
of machine guns. Two loud explosions rattled the
landscape.

RPG
's, Ari hissed in his thoughts. The distant screams did not
shake his reflexes. The instant the three men came onto the
secondary fire road Ari took aim at the man on the left and fired.
Almost simultaneously came the curt
bam
of Ahmad's shotgun.

The man in the middle stood frozen in
astonishment as the men to either side went down, howling, jerking
uncontrollably on the ground, the Taser electrodes bouncing up and
down at their waists. He began reaching under his coat, but then
Abu Jasim had him in a bear hug. He knocked the pistol out of the
middle man's hand, took him by the scruff, and began marching him
up the fire road.

"You got these two? You've got about
ten more seconds before the charge dies."

But Ari and Ahmad had already drawn
their pistols and were up and running towards the prone men. By the
time the spasms stopped they had guns to their heads.

"We’re not really going to shoot them,
are you?" said Ahmad, mixing his pronouns. The Glock was a bit too
unsteady in his hand for Ari’s liking.

"We need these corpses to walk away.
Take his gun."

Ahmad kicked his man’s pistol into the
bushes.

"Why did you do that? It can be
sold!"

"I can go—"

"No, no. But don’t throw away his
goggles, too."

"What are we doing here?" Ahmad asked.
"Are we robbing them?"

"Abu Karim! I know your
voice!"

The man at Ari's feet had recovered
from the Taser's NMI effect and was touching his coat over the
bruise left by the XREP projectile.

Ari was as stunned as if he had heard
Saddam Hussein speak from the earth. Still holding his pistol on
him, he reached down and removed the man's goggles. His night
vision made the old burn on the man's face look black as
tar.

"Abdul Rahman!"

The man Ari had saved on the Highway of
Death, and who in turn had risked his own life by not following
orders that day in 2002, on Palestine Street.

"How can you still be alive?" Ari asked
in wonder. "Uday would have had your head the moment he found out
you hadn't shot me."

"Mine, also," said the second man,
sitting up. Ari received his second surprise. It was Omar
Pachachi.

Abdul Rahman sat up and tried to catch
his breath. "Are you 'Ari Ciminon'?" he asked. When Ari didn't
answer, he said, "I thought so." He looked around, not so blind
without his goggles because of the flashes of light from the house.
It was almost like a forest at dawn. "You know Uday. As soon as he
heard what you had done to Abdul Nidal, he laughed his head off and
granted you another year of life. Me, too, but at a
price."

Ari, man of action, wavered. There was
more booming up at the house. All he could think to say was, "War
of the worlds."

"The price was that I had to finish the
job," Abdul Rahman continued. "After the bombing at Dora Farms, he
ordered Omar and me to terminate you. Remember all those crates
that were stored in your basement?"

"National treasures, I was told," said
Ari, a little wanly. "They didn't think the Americans would bomb a
nice neighborhood like al-Masbah."

"There was enough explosive in them to
send you and your house to the clouds. The plan was to blow you up,
and then cry on American television about civilian casualties. But
the Americans came sooner than we expected. You rushed off to your
command post. And when that bomb went off in your yard, I told Uday
the explosives had worked, but you weren't home. We told him one of
your boys had been killed, and your wife..."

"And what did he say to that?" Ari
asked, as still as a corpse.

"He said it was sufficient, that after
what had happened...you were a dead man who only happened to be
breathing."

"So he let you live."

Abdul Rahman pushed his fists against
his eyes. "I did what I had to do for my family, as did
Omar."

As I would have
done
, Ari thought bitterly. Had the
American CBU not done its damage, Ari's family would have gone
extinct, instead of being a remnant. He was glad Abdul Rahman could
not see his bruises. He might interpret it as further punishment
for his godlessness. Ari could point out that in the world they
came from, the godly were slaughtered in far greater numbers than
the godless. Then Abdul Rahman would counter that that was only
because there were so many more of the former. And an old argument
would continue, uselessly, because no one should be put under the
knife just for existing.