“What’s our time hack?” Boon asked.
“Thirty minutes to city limits,” I said. “Inshallah.” It’s in God’s hands.
We were on the road to Sinjar, driving fast in blackout drive using only the moon and night-vision goggles. It was dangerous, but we made better time that way.
“How long do we stay on the hardball?” Boon asked, meaning the paved highway.
“As long as we can,” I answered. “We don’t want Farhan to slip by while we’re dicking around in the back country.”
“Curious, no patrols,” Boon said.
“Count your good karma,” Wildman answered.
“I don’t like it,” Boon replied.
I checked his profile as he drove in silence: stiff jaw, high cheekbones, nothing squirrely in the shape of his head. Kylah was right, Boon was a good-looking guy.
“How’d you do it?” I asked. “With Kylah, I mean.”
He smiled. “I figured you’d get around to asking.”
But he didn’t answer. Maybe that was part of his secret. He’d never let on that he was sleeping with Kylah, but it must have been going on for a while. Why had I never noticed? I guess I could have asked for more info. I guess I could have been asking him about his life all these years. But I didn’t. Instead, I leaned my head back and watched the moonlit landscape fly by. My mind wandered to Dvořák’s “Song to the Moon” from his opera Rusalka. A hundred years before Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Dvořák’s mermaid sings a song to the moon, asking it to tell the prince of her love. Things go badly from there. But the aria is like the mermaid herself: beautiful, poignant, and vulnerable. The music makes you want to reach out and grab her, hug her and tell her he’s not worth it. Princes can be found everywhere. Your hero is right here, Kylah, staring at the same moon in the same silver-black sky.
The moon winked. Or at least that’s what it looked like. I sat up and looked out the bulletproof glass, but all I could see was the distant hills to the north. No lights, no human settlements. Then a shadow blinked across the moon.
“Eyes right,” I said.
A minute passed. Nothing.
“Uh, boss, what are we looking for?” It was Wildman.
Good question, I thought. “Stand down. My bad.”
Three minutes later, we heard the unmistakable whine of a drone overhead.
“Bogie, ten o’clock!” Wildman yelled.
“Two o’clock!” he yelled seconds later. It was circling us.
“Should I get off the road?” Boon asked, calm as always.
“Too late,” I said, cursing my overconfidence. By now, it would have locked its Hellfire missiles on us. If it fired, we’d never know what hit us. There was no way to signal that we weren’t ISIS militants, cruising along in stolen American vehicles. Wildman’s Jolly Roger on the whip antenna didn’t help; it looked like a black ISIS flag, even close up.
“Let’s hope we aren’t worth it,” I said.
“Explains the lack of ISIS on the road,” Boon replied.
We held our breaths for a solid minute, keeping our pace while the drone whined overhead. It would be just our luck to be taken out by our own guys, but of course the drone operators wouldn’t see it that way. We were off the grid. They’d never figure out who we were, if they even bothered to check.
Eventually the drone whined off to the west, toward Sinjar.
“That’s your Buddhist karma,” I said to Boon, when it was out of range. “You must have been a hero in a past life.”
“I’m not a Buddhist,” Boon said.
I looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“My brother was a Buddhist. A monk. He was burned alive by heroin smugglers. I gave up on Buddha that day.”
“But you were a monk, right?”
“I was twelve. An apprentice.”
He was serious. I could tell it by the set of his jaw. Buddhism meant something to Boon, and whatever it was, he wasn’t a part of it. “So what are you?” I asked.
“I’m a merc,” he said.
Twenty minutes of silence later, Boon pointed toward a crag rising against the horizon on our right. It would have good overwatch of the city.
“Roger, let’s head there.”
We stayed on the highway until the hillock was at one o’clock, then we turned off road. Sinjar’s edge was only a kilometer ahead; to the north sat a mountain, long and flat on top, with steep sides. It was by far the largest thing around, so it had to be Mount Sinjar, where the Yazidis were trapped by ISIS. There were seven gray smoke columns near the mountain, barely visible in the purpling morning sky.
Air strikes, I thought. The United States effort was focused in this quadrant.
“Stick to the low ground,” I said.
Twenty minutes of creeping later, the morning sun was peeking across the horizon, turning the desert dirt Martian red and throwing long shadows off the rocks. We found a good place to conceal the vehicles, a small but deep saddle with a couple of boulders. The younger Kurds quietly ate their breakfast while Boon, Wildman, the older Kurd, and I reconned the area on foot.
Good thing. When we topped the rise, we saw Sinjar on the other side of a low, flat plain at the same moment we saw the militants. There were six, sitting below us in a natural shelter in the windward ridge, looking back toward the city. They had rugs spread around them, and they were talking casually as they ate breakfast with their fingers. The way they moved suggested familiarity with the land and each other, as did their peasant garb. If it hadn’t been for their AK-47s, they could have been Bedouin.
For a second I thought about sniping them out. We could take all six in two quick rounds, but it would attract attention—and who knew how many other jihadis were hidden among the boulders?
I signaled Boon, Wildman, and the older Kurd to move away from the edge, so that we wouldn’t be seen or heard. The jihadis should have posted a guard here. They hadn’t. I looked back to make sure the Humvees and Kurds were hidden. They were. I couldn’t see any dust tracks leading to this spot from the city side, but I could see other tracks leading to other locations along the rise. No truck in sight. These jihadis hadn’t driven up to this lookout. They must have walked. They might have been local shepherds, conscripted into lookout duty. Their AK-47s looked older than me; I wasn’t even sure they would fire.
“Not too bad in town,” Boon said. He was lying on his stomach and peering through his field glasses.
I flattened myself beside him and peered through my glasses at our objective. Sinjar was just another dingy, impoverished desert town: two-story buildings, brown on brown, no natural or artificial charm. It looked like every other settlement for a thousand klicks around.
Boon was right, there wasn’t much movement. ISIS checkpoints sat at main intersections around the city, but many appeared unmanned. Three were smoldering ruins. I looked up and saw two drones circling high above. Boon saw them, too.
“Death from above,” he said.
One drone banked sharply and took an attack profile. A Hellfire smoked off its rails and streaked toward the ground. A fireball, black smoke, and then, a few milliseconds later, a loud thunderclap. One less checkpoint.
“I want one of those,” Wildman whispered.
Allah’s vengeance, I thought. Or, as Boon put it, death from above. The militants below us must have seen it, too. They were jabbering loudly to themselves. When I peeked over the edge, they were packing up their meal. It looked like they were in a hurry.
Above us, the drones veered north and disappeared. Low on fuel, or maybe they hunted at night and always went home at first light.
“Three technicals, moving along the ring road around the city,” Boon said, staring through his binos.
“I’m seeing two more checkpoints being set up, nine o’clock position,” Wildman said.
“The mice come out when the hawk’s away,” Boon said, and I had to agree. If we’d been here at night, I might have chanced a dash across the plain. But with no drones, the ISIS lines became active, and I couldn’t see a clean way in. In any event, this ridgeline was probably crawling with ISIS.
“We’ll have to find another avenue of approach,” I whispered. “We’ll never get across this plain in daylight without being seen.”
“Not our worst problem,” the Kurd said.
He pointed south across the desert, and now I understood why the drones and jihadis had left in such a hurry. The morning sky was clear and blue, but a brown smudge was developing in the lower quadrant. I watched it grow, swirling upward and outward an inch at a time. It was a dust storm, headed our way. Fast.