Midnight. Sinjar was quiet, as the world always is before the hammer comes down. There might have been an American drone high overhead, invisible in the night, but the bombs were gone until morning, when the targets would be crawling, and the snakes were tucked up in their corners with their rifles and their murderous certainty. Mount Sinjar was burning, but the smoke was gray on black and the fires too small to be seen from several kilometers away, where the empty desert fed into empty streets.
The majordomo waited, it wasn’t clear what for. Nothing was moving in the building. No lights were on.
His radio beeped. He beeped twice in return. A figure started forward twenty meters away, gaining momentum as he ran. The majordomo watched. When the figure neared the shuttered door, the majordomo dropped his arm to signal his men. The night exploded with gunfire. The front of the building began to chip and scatter. The running man kicked open the shutters, which didn’t seem to be locked—or maybe it was his adrenaline that smashed them so easily—and disappeared inside.
Another man followed, sprinting beneath the automatic covering fire, and another followed him. The majordomo watched, his Kahr PM9 in his hand, as his men poured into the building. For a long moment it was bedlam, as assault rifles blasted away in the shadows. He could hear his men yelling to each other in Arabic as they cleared each room. There was no one in the window on the second floor. There was no one trying to escape through the door. He waited, his pistol raised, but nothing happened. The shooting and shouting died away. He dropped his arm to his side.
It’s done, he thought, as he walked toward the building.
Then something exploded, shaking the street, and before he had thought through his next actions, he rushed toward the building.
Smoke was pouring out the door. Behind it, the sound of heavy fire had doubled, and he knew two sides were fighting. He could hear his men shouting. The orderly assault had devolved into a firefight, bullets ripping crosswise against each other. The majordomo held his breath and plunged into the smoke. He slammed into a wall and stood with his back against it, catching his breath, until he saw one of his men dead at its base, saw the holes in the plaster, and realized the wall wouldn’t stop the enemy’s rounds.
He hit the floor. He wasn’t wearing a vest. He had assumed the mercenaries would surrender. There was no reason for the prince to fight, and even less for the mercs. Negotiating was one thing. But why were they willing to die here, in this nothing place? He wasn’t willing, and this job was his life.
He glanced around the wall into the main room. Visibility was near zero, save for the red laser sites skipping through the smoke. He aimed at one and fired six quick shots. Immediately, automatic fire sprayed the wall around him and he dove for cover.
A small canister arced through the air, bounced off a wall, and landed two meters in front of him. It exploded, a white light and boom that left him blind and deaf. A flashbang grenade.
A hand reached out and tapped him. A man was signaling to him from behind an upturned wooden trestle table. It was one of his men . . . but who? He was wearing a gas mask, making him unrecognizable, and besides, the majordomo had never bothered to learn most of their names.
The man lifted his mask. The majordomo knew him by sight. He scrambled behind the trestle table. “False targets,” the man said in Arabic, meaning the laser sites.
The majordomo nodded. The man lowered the mask, making him look once again like an alien in the smoke. The mercenary had set up laser sights to draw their fire. Had they anticipated the attack? Had they planned a counterambush all along?
But why?
“Aistaslam,” he yelled. “Aistaslam!” Surrender.
But the prince didn’t surrender. Instead, the majordomo’s call was greeted with a fresh barrage of gunfire. If that was the way he wanted it . . .
“Aim low,” the majordomo said, pointing toward the other end of the table and putting a second clip into his pistol.
The man nodded. They rolled in opposite directions until they had clear lines of fire, the majordomo on his belly aiming knee high. He emptied his clip. He heard a scream, then a thud. He rolled back behind the table. He was starting to understand the layout now, sense the flow of battle, but he still didn’t understand why. What did the mercenaries have to gain?
The majordomo loaded his third clip. Only one more after this. He nodded to the man with him behind the table, who was reloading his Heckler & Koch UMP submachine gun.
“Ayn hi alakharin?” Where are the others?
The man shrugged. The smoke was thick, adding to the darkness of the night. A torn shutter hung on one hinge. The majordomo thought of retreating and regrouping, but there were only three mercs and Farhan’s foolish friends. He had twelve highly trained men. Or at least he had twelve when the assault started.
“Satchel charges!” he ordered in Arabic, signaling toward the back, where the gunfire was heavy. “I will cover you.”
He could see the man’s eyes inside the gas mask widen, then glance at the small pistol, an ineffectual weapon for this purpose. He seemed to be making up his mind. Refusal would end his career, if the majordomo could identify him later. And if they survived.
The man looked at the majordomo and shook his head no. The smoke curled around them, purple in the darkness. The majordomo could feel the anger burning inside him.
“I’ll go,” the majordomo said, grabbing the satchel charge out of the man’s equipment pack.
The man nodded his agreement. He rose slowly to a crouching position, his smoke mask clinging to his face. He rested his H&K submachine gun on the top edge of the table, lined up his shot, nodded that he was ready, then jolted backward as blood exploded out the back of his head.
The majordomo stared at the body as it caught on the edge of the table, then tipped and slipped to the floor. He hadn’t heard the shot, only the echo. A dozen echoes. A hundred.
The table was cracking, splintering to pieces. A dozen high-powered guns were firing. The mercenaries were advancing, and he knew he had no chance of fighting his way out of whatever this trap had become.
Green laser dots danced across his chest. He dropped the satchel charge and his pistol, and came out with his hands on his head. This wasn’t over. There was no way, that he could see, for the mercenary to escape Sinjar with the prince, his friends, and a pregnant woman. One way or another, he would take Farhan dead or alive.
Dead is better, he thought. Dead is final. Dead is quiet.
He felt the rifle in the back of his head.
“Down!” an American voice said, and the majordomo slowly lay facedown on the floor. “Where are the mercs?”
The majordomo didn’t know what that meant.
“Where are the Americans?”
“With you,” the majordomo tried to say, but a boot was on the back of his skull, pressing his mouth into the ground.
Something hit the floor next to him. It was tobacco spit. “Where’s the fugitive?”
A boot bore down on his head. He felt his hands being flex-cuffed behind him. Someone grabbed his arms, turning him over. He looked up at a huge man in body armor with enough heavy artillery to blast through a building. His face was painted in night camouflage.
“Identify,” the man said.
“I work for—” he hesitated, wondering if his next words would doom him or save his life, then plunged ahead “—Saudi intelligence. General Abdulaziz.”
The man stared down at him. He looked sideways at a second man in body armor, then spat again, inches from his ear.
“You’re Abdulaziz’s majordomo?” he said with disgust.
The majordomo nodded. “Who are you?”
The American kicked him in the ribs, and pain shot up his right flank. “You shot one of our guy’s knees out,” he growled. “Do you know how fucking dangerous it is to get your knee shot out in a place like this?”
“You killed my men,” the majordomo objected.
“Getting a medevac out here is going to be a son of a bitch,” the man said, spitting again, “and God knows if the company will pay for it, probably not, when they hear about this clusterfuck.”
“We’re on the same side,” the majordomo said, as the realization swept over him.
The boot came off his neck, reluctantly. The majordomo sat up and indicated his cuffs. The American stared at him, then cut him loose. The majordomo shrugged his way out of the flex-cuffs, then straightened his white suit jacket. He wiped something from the lapel and realized it was blood. He had dirt in his mouth from the floor. The smoke was clearing, and he could see five or six mercenaries in body armor with heavy weapons kicking corpses to roll them over. His men’s corpses.
“Muntahiki,” the majordomo muttered under his breath with disgust, using his pocket square to wipe filth from his lips.
“Jase,” another merc yelled from across the room. It was an African; he was pointing at the floor. A corner of a carpet was flipped over. There was a trap door.
The leader walked out of the smoke. “The slick bastard,” he said.
The mercenaries put their fingers on the triggers of their assault rifles and aimed toward the door. The African nodded, then flipped it open.
“Fuck,” the leader yelled, when he saw the C-4 wired to the underside.
“Bloody hell,” Wildman said, as he watched the other merc hit team and the Saudi in the white suit sprinting out the back of the house together. He had watched the mercs sneak up and blow a hole in the back wall, rushing in through the smoke. Brave. He had listened to the firefight, knowing the mercs were cutting the Saudis down. He could have killed them all, if he’d wanted to. He could have blown them all to bloody hell.
Instead, he’d waited for everyone to get out, then hit the detonator. The explosion was a burp. The house exhaled smoke, then settled. Wildman had shaped the charge to explode the tunnel and leave everything else standing. The people in this town had endured enough. They didn’t need another building going down. And he didn’t want their attention.
“Didn’t expect that,” I said, lowering my night-vision binoculars.
“Which part?” Boon asked. We were standing on the roof of a building two blocks away, near where the secret tunnel came out, with a perfect vantage point to the front of the building.
“All of it,” I said, looking over my shoulder at Farhan. “Every damn thing.”