The Secret Soldier (7 page)

“And he’ll help us?”

“He doesn’t think so. But we’re gonna change his mind.”

THE SIRENS FROM THE STREET COULDN’T HIDE THE WOMEN SCREAM
ing from inside the bar, their high voices begging in a language Omar couldn’t understand. What had he done? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He was in a tunnel with death on both ends, and the only way out was the rifle in his hand.

Fakir peeked through the front door, stepped inside, fired a blind burst to keep the troublemakers down. He hefted a grenade, pulled its pin, flipped the handle.
“Wahid, ithnain—”
he said.
One, two—

He tossed the grenade high and deep, aiming at the back edge of the bar. It spun end over end and disappeared. The explosion came a half-second later, and the screams a half-second after that, not even words, pure animal keening. Another wave of shooting began outside, the quick snap of pistols against the rattle of AKs. Amir and Hamoud defending their posts. “Time to go in,” Fakir said. “Finish this.”

Omar’s watch read 12:16. They’d walked into the corridor at 12:13. All this had taken just three minutes.

ROBBY PEEKED DOWN FROM
the balcony. He could hear again, a little. Outside, an amplified voice shouted in Arabic. The police telling the jihadis to surrender, Robby figured. Good luck with that. The AKs outside were still firing, three-shot bursts, the SOBs conserving their ammo while the ones in here killed everyone who was left. In London the police wouldn’t have wasted any time; they would have mounted up and attacked. But these Bahraini cops would take ten or fifteen minutes. Too long.

Two men stepped into the bar, holding AKs. They were young, as young as he had been when he joined the squaddies. But old enough to step in here and kill. The one who’d come in first was bigger and seemed to be in charge. He stepped behind the bar, fired a burst.

Robby squirmed back, pushed himself to his knees. The two men who’d helped him in sat with their backs to the wall, their feet pressed against the table that was barricading the stairs. “They’re going to kill everyone down there,” Robby said.

“The police are here,” the man closer to Robby said. He had a faint French accent. “We should wait. The ones down there don’t notice us.”

Shouts came from downstairs as the jihadis herded people toward the bar’s back corner, almost directly below the balcony. Robby didn’t know why no one downstairs was fighting back. He supposed people would do anything for a few extra seconds.

“They’re going to put them in the corner, shoot them all,” Robby said. “Then come up here. We’re gonna die, let’s die fighting.”

“You have an idea?” the Frenchman said.

Robby explained.

“
Merde.
Not much of a plan.”

“It’s a start.”

BODIES WERE SLUMPED UNDER
chairs, against walls, huddled together behind the bar. At least thirty people were dead. The others couldn’t possibly think Fakir had something different in store for them. Still, they obeyed.

Fakir grabbed a wounded woman by the leg, pulled her from under a table. “Move!” he yelled. She crawled for the corner. Omar could almost smell his bloodlust. Fakir was an animal now, not even an animal.
And what am I, then?

“Enough, brother. It’s enough.”

“No. All of them.”

Outside, an amplified voice shouted:
“Drop your weapons. You are surrounded by the Bahrain Civil Defence Force. Drop your weapons. This is your final warning.”

A few AK shots stuttered from the street outside. Then a single rifle shot, close and loud, cracked the night. The AK stopped.

“Let us out,” a man in the corner shouted. “It’s over.”

“Quiet—” Fakir yelled.

 

 

THE TABLE SMASHED HIS
skull wide open.

Omar saw it a quarter-second before it hit, a blocky blur of heavy, round wood, its legs facing up. It caught Fakir’s head with a sick crunch. His neck snapped forward and he collapsed, his bulky body falling sideways like a curtain.

For a moment, the people huddled in the corner didn’t move, as though they, like Omar, did not believe their own eyes. Then a man shouted something in English and ran for the door. And somehow despite his doubts, Omar didn’t hesitate. He turned toward the men and women in the corner and tugged at the AK’s trigger—

Just as Robby Duke, all two hundred pounds of him, landed on him, Robby jumping from the balcony with his arms spread wide, berserk from shrapnel and blood loss and everything he’d seen. He crashed into Omar, smashing him onto the bar’s wooden floor. The AK came loose from Omar’s hand and bounced sideways, firing two shots into the ceiling before the trigger came loose. Omar frothed at the mouth, concussed and barely conscious.

Robby pushed himself to all fours and then his feet and looked over at what was left of Josephine the flight attendant. He very carefully put his boot on Omar’s neck, feeling the bones of Omar’s larynx under his heel.
“We’re not all the same,”
Josephine had said, and sure as death she’d been right. Omar mumbled something Robby didn’t understand and wrapped a weak hand around Robby’s ankle, and a woman yelled “Don’t,” and Robby smiled and put all his weight into his heel. Omar kicked against the floor and a terrible wet half-gasp slipped out of his mouth as he tried to breathe through the useless blocked straw of his crushed windpipe, until he finally gave up and died.

Then Robby found a chair and sat and wiped the spit off the side of his boot. Most of the televisions had been destroyed in the attack, but a couple still played, and Robby tilted his head to watch Man City and the Spurs until the cops finally showed. He knew he shouldn’t have killed the Arab, but he didn’t have the strength to care. He wondered vaguely if he’d go to jail.

But of course the world didn’t see it that way. He was a hero, Robby Duke. He’d saved at least twenty lives and killed a terrorist. In the days to come, the BBC and
The Sun
and everyone else would call him a hero. And as soon as the doctors let him out of the hospital, he said no to all the interview requests and the free trips to London and went straight back to work. Robby didn’t thank God for much anymore, but he was grateful to be able to work with kids who had no idea who he was or what he’d done.

YET EVEN WITH ROBBY’S
last-minute valor, Omar and his team did terrible damage. The Bahraini police found the bar so covered in blood and brains that they asked the Fifth Fleet to send a hazardousmaterials response team to sterilize it. Forty-one people were killed that night, not counting the four attackers. Six more died over the next two weeks. And the attack on JJ’s wasn’t even the deadliest terrorist attack on the Arabian peninsula that night. In Riyadh, the Saudi capital, a car bomb tore off the front of the Hotel Al Khozama, killing forty-nine people. And just off Qatar, fifty miles east of Bahrain, a speedboat filled with explosives blew itself up beside a supertanker loaded with millions of barrels of Saudi crude. Fortunately, the attack failed to ignite the oil. But it killed four sailors, breached the tanker’s double hull, and spilled one hundred fifty thousand barrels of crude into the Gulf.

Even before the sun rose on Saudi Arabia the next morning, a claim of responsibility arrived at Al Jazeera and CNN from a previously unknown group—the Ansar al-Islam, the Army of Islam. The group’s spokesman wore a mask and gloves, and stood before a black flag painted with the Islamic creed
.

“Our warriors protest the endless corruption of King Abdullah,” he said in Arabic. “He and his supporters live as infidels. They steal the treasure that Allah has given all Muslims. They desecrate the Holy Kaaba”—the cube-shaped building inside the Grand Mosque in Mecca that served as the center for Muslim prayer. “We reject them. And make no mistake. We will never stop fighting until we drive them from these sacred lands.”

WELLS AND GAFFAN SPENT TWO DAYS TRAILING THE DEALER FROM
Margaritaville. They didn’t know his name, so they were calling him Marley. He drove a black Audi A4 with tinted windows and a roof rack for surfboards. He lived in a gated community in the hills east of Montego, near the Ritz-Carlton and other four-hundred-dollar-a-night resorts. The development, called Paradise East, was still under construction, half its lots empty. An eight-foot brick wall, landscaped with ivy and topped with razor wire, surrounded the property. Two security guards patrolled around the clock with German shepherds.

Given his line of work, Marley had a remarkably stable life. He followed the same routine both days. He surfed in the mornings, had lunch at home. At around three p.m., he drove to Margaritaville and disappeared into the club, emerging at about two a.m. Going home, he headed east on the A1. After about twenty miles, he turned right onto an unmarked road that led up a hill to the gatehouse for Paradise East.

Like the development, the road was unfinished. The first quarter and the last quarter were graded and paved. But the middle stretch was a mix of gravel and red clay. Trees hemmed it in on both sides, leaving it barely wide enough for two cars to pass. It was a carjacker’s dream.

Wells intended to take advantage.

 

 

WELLS HAD OUTLINED HIS
plan in their hotel room that afternoon. When he finished, Gaffan shook his head. “What if somebody else comes up the road?”

“Hasn’t been a problem the last two nights.” The fancy neighborhoods outside Montego shut down after midnight. “And it won’t get loud if we do it right.”

“We don’t know if this guy knows Robinson.”

“He does. He’s smart, and he’s been around awhile.”

“We don’t even know his real name.”

“Obviously you’re not sold. It’s all right. I can do it myself.”

“I’m thinking out loud, is all.”

“We can’t touch him in Margaritaville. His house could work, but if something goes wrong we’re stuck inside the compound.”

“What about the other thing? The badges.”

“I’d rather keep that in reserve. It’s high-profile, and we can only do it once.”

“We could keep working the town, find Robinson ourselves.”

Wells felt his temper surge. Gaffan was younger than he was, less experienced. Gaffan had no right to question his judgment. Was this a glimpse of the future? These ops were a young man’s game, and Wells was more middle-aged than young. He wasn’t old, not yet, and he was in great shape, but the Gaffans of the world would keep coming. Their suggestions would get louder, until they turned into orders. And eventually he would lose the fight. An old lion forced to give up his territory. The young had no idea how relentless they were.

“How old are you, Brett?”

“Thirty-three. I know you have about a thousand times as much experience as I do. I’m trying to help, John. Work through the options. Didn’t mean to piss you off.”