We made it back to our hideout before sunrise and slept hard. The sound of the Yazidis making breakfast woke me up too soon. Children were playing and the adults were doing chores. It looked like village life, in an old garage, in a war zone. Wildman and the Kurds sat in our Humvees’ turrets cleaning the “Ma Deuce” fifty-caliber machine guns, or fifty-cals, while I sat at the back of the garage, pondering. The presence of Apollo Outcomes caused cognitive dissonance in my head, but I had to ignore it. I needed to figure out our next move.
I considered the prince’s story: a recovering jihadi, escaping a ruthless father, returns to the Caliphate to rescue his pregnant wife . . . while possessing a key that arms fifteen nuclear bombs.
I had to assume the nukes were real. Why else would an Apollo Tier One team and a Saudi black-ops unit be on his tail? Why else would the majordomo offer me a million dollars to find a disgraced son? It was never about Farhan; it was about the nukes. It was about possessing the power to redraw the Middle East map.
So what was I supposed to do?
I needed to figure out all the pieces, to make sure they fit together. It was math, all angles and degrees, and if my calculus was wrong, the impact could go far beyond my own death. The smart move was obvious: kill Farhan, burn the bodies, and buy back my life with the key. Or I could just leave them here without the key, to find their own way to whatever life was waiting for them.
But my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t want to kill the prince, much less a pregnant woman, and leaving them behind wasn’t much better. The prince’s father, even if he was only half the tyrant everyone claimed, would never let them get away. Not after what Farhan had stolen from him.
And I couldn’t forget the Apollo team. I kept trying to cut them from my calculations, but my thoughts always circled back to the same conclusion: Brad Winters knows I’m here. That realization was like swallowing a sandbag. All our efforts to dust our tracks after Ukraine didn’t matter. I was never off the grid. Brad Winters knew where I was the entire time.
Then the realization hit, harder than the one on the roof: Winters had hired me.
Or he had told the majordomo to hire me, which amounted to the same thing.
Winters hadn’t just been watching me. He had been playing me like a grand piano. He had been keeping an eye on me, waiting for me to become useful to him again.
And I was useful to him, I admitted. How else did that Apollo team locate Farhan in Sinjar so quickly? After all, I was the company’s best man by far, and those yahoos at the house didn’t have the subtlety to develop the kind of contacts necessary.
It had to be me. Was that pride? Hell yes. But I’d earned it.
And what did you use it for? I chastised myself.
Brad Winters was the mastermind, not me. He had been manipulating the situation all along. He manipulated every situation. It was what the man did.
And I’d never realized it. In the nine years I’d worked with him, I’d never fully grasped who he was. And in the four months he’d been following me since Ukraine—laughing at my pathetic efforts to disappear, no doubt—I’d never suspected he could still control me.
He had trapped me. Again. He had tried to kill me again, just like in Ukraine. He would have killed me if I hadn’t been testing Farhan’s story and his father’s men. I thought of myself as a great mission tactician. A master in the field. But for the second time in four months, I had been outwitted by a . . . a businessman . . . and I had been lucky to survive.
“Oy!” Wildman yelled at one of the small kids. They were running around, playing terrorists and mercenaries. “If you’re going to low-crawl, get your fockin’ arse down. Do it right! And when you shoot, aim for center of mass, not the head.” He made a gun with his hand and aimed at the child’s chest. “Center of mass. Chest.” He thumped his chest. “More likely to get a kill that way, mate. And fire in short, three-round bursts. Bang, bang, bang. Got it? Bang, bang, bang!”
The children looked excited, even though they spoke no English. They were just happy to have this big merc talking to them. Ban, ban, ban, they screamed, running after each other. I was surprised, after all they’d seen, they still wanted to play war games, but what else did they know?
“Can’t teach kids anything these days,” Wildman lamented, as he turned back to his work.
Unbelievable. We were sitting on a nuclear key, in the middle of ISIS hell, and Wildman couldn’t have cared less.
Boon? Yeah, he cared. He’d badgered me for an hour, trying to figure out what we should do. Then he’d gone on walkabout.
“Don’t forget these people,” was the last thing he said.
I admit it: I was happy that these refugees weren’t my biggest problem anymore. After four months, I was tired of bashing my brains on little things. It sucked to be nobody. What I decided now, since this nuclear key had fallen into my lap, could change the world. I could make a difference.
I’d missed that.
I closed my eyes and let my mind wander over Kylah’s breasts when her shirt fell open, the faceless girl in the sabaya bus, the shootout, the cookies, Jimmy Miles calling me a fucking butterball piece of shit with a big stupid grin on his face, and Brad Winters pulling me aside in a boardroom somewhere back home, putting his arm around me and whispering, You and me kid, you and me, together, we’ll make it right.
I felt like a fool for ever listening. I felt marooned on an asteroid, watching the sun grow smaller. My brain started humming the introduction to the second part of Stravinsky’s queasy ballet The Rite of Spring, the music disorienting, creepy, even violent, celebrating the sacrifice of a virgin girl forced to dance to her death in a pagan ritual. The Parisians hissed it offstage at its premiere in 1913, causing a riot in the theater. They didn’t realize that the primitive society was them. None of us ever did.
I could never be free, that was what my brain was telling me, not if Brad Winters cared enough to find me.
Once my utility was concluded, though, once Brad Winters had what he wanted, he would have us killed. No loose ends. None of us, not even me, could dance on their own forever.
Mercs don’t panic; they get organized. They take things one step at a time. Right now I had an opportunity, because right now my old mentor needed me.
And he was coming. He had a hit team in Sinjar waiting for us to make a move, but that wasn’t the extent of his reach. Apollo would be coming in numbers. The Saudis would be coming in numbers. They were surely on their way. We needed to get out of Sinjar as quickly as possible.
But where could we go? This was no longer a matter of escaping a war zone. Winters could track us anywhere. He had proven that.
We needed a plane, and we needed it fast. My list of favors had run dry, so I couldn’t call any pilot friends. There was only one active airport in northern Iraq: Erbil. That was a dangerous road, and an expected one. If I were Winters, I’d watch my two escape routes: north to Turkey and east to Erbil. Everything else was war zone.
I took out my map, looking for another way out. My fingers traced routes as if they were printed in Braille. Different roads led to different dead ends: ISIS, the Syrian army, Shia militia, the lawless tribes of the interior, Winters, the Saudis.
We looked cornered, but my intuition was screaming there was a way. So I used a trick that had long helped me hear my subconscious voice: I closed my eyes and let the music flow. The Ring of the Nibelungen entered my head, faintly at first, then louder, until I recognized “Rhine Journey.” Before there were hobbits and Smaug, there were Nibelungen and Fafner, chasing a magic ring to rule them all. “Rhine Journey” is ten minutes of musical transformation, from doubt to certainty. It starts as an unformed universe and ends with the cosmos complete in seven days. The music confirms creation with trumpets of optimism and crescendos of destiny. Go to God, it told me. Go to the Father. It is the only way.
It could work, I thought. It was crazy, dangerous, and stupid . . . which was why it could work.
The prince was asleep with Marhaz in his arms when I rejoined the team. I stared at the two of them, so young, so foolish. To my surprise, I was moved by their affection, but I wasn’t surprised that I thought of Alie. She was Marhaz’s age, early twenties, when I met her, and she was smart, erratic, and very, very bad for me. We’d proven that in Ukraine, if it hadn’t been clear before. She was gone now, disappeared in Europe somewhere, but I knew I’d see her again. That’s the way this works, right? There are people you can never get away from. And really, that’s the only thing that keeps you going sometimes: the thought of seeing them again.
I was surprised to see Marhaz staring at me, trying to read my face. “We’re going,” she said. Farhan didn’t move from his unconscious embrace. The baker was sleeping sitting up nearby, his AK-47 across his lap. He was supposed to be on guard duty.
“Tonight,” I whispered, bending down beside her. “But it will be a fast run with limited space. We can’t take your friends.” She nodded. “Do you think Farhan will object?”
“He will go along,” she whispered firmly, biting off the words, and I believed her.
“Will his friends?”
“They will do it for me,” she said, and I realized who had been keeping them alive in this hellhole the last six months, while Farhan was in his father’s prison.
“If they go north and are captured, will Farhan’s father have them killed?”
She thought for a moment. “They can’t be captured,” she said.
I nodded and slipped away. Moments later, I found Wildman and Boon.
“Here’s the plan,” I said, unfolding the map. It took a few minutes to explain.
“Fook no,” Wildman said immediately.
“That’s insane,” Boon said.
“Which is why it might work, right?”
Boon shrugged. He was looking at Marhaz, probably thinking about the baby. My plan was the only way. He hated it, but I knew he was going along.
I looked at Wildman. “You can walk away if you don’t like it,” I said. “They need your type here.”
“I’m not bloody walking,” he snapped back. “Not if that means staying in this desert. And besides, what would you knobs do without me?”
“What about the Kurds?” Boon asked me.
“What about them?”
“We can’t expect them to follow us, not on this.” He was right. I’d fallen into the typical American trap of thinking our allies, in this case the Kurds we’d been partnered with for the last few months, should just do what we said, even if it wasn’t in their best interest.
“I’ll talk to them,” I told Boon. “Wildman, you set the demolitions.”
Wildman smiled, his missing teeth cracking his black bear beard in the dim light of the warehouse. I looked down and saw his little friend staring at us, the one who had led us to the first meeting place yesterday morning.
“Take the kid,” I said. “He knows this town.”
Wildman didn’t argue, just cuffed the kid and pointed toward the canteens. Apparently, my gruff explosives expert had made a friend. First time for everything.
One last task. The moment of no return.
I woke Farhan roughly, laughing as he sprang into a defensive position, his AK-47 in firing position. He must have been exhausted to fall asleep that deeply. He’d been on the road from Istanbul for three days.
“I need your phone,” I said.
“What phone?”
I had frisked everyone for phones so that nobody could track us. It was a rookie move to carry a mobile phone on the run. If it was turned on, even for a second, it could give us away. But I suspected Farhan hadn’t complied with my orders. So-called leaders never did.
“Don’t be stupid,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he assured me, as he pulled a phone from his robes. “It’s not mine. And it’s untraceable. Yes, I’m sure. I’m no fool.”
It was a satellite phone, but unlike any I’d seen before. Custom-made. I extended the small boom antenna and dialed a number. “Hey. It’s me . . . I need a favor. I’m gonna be coming in hot.” I looked at my watch. “ISIS. Maybe others . . . After midnight . . . Yes . . . Of course . . . Roger . . . wilco, out.”
Farhan reached for his phone. “I’m keeping it. And I need something else from you, too.”
“The key?”
I nodded. He understood my price. “The key.”
He hesitated but Marhaz appeared behind him. She must have been listening. She guided her hand slowly over his. “We have to trust him, habibi.”
He looked at her. Was that what love looked like?
He handed over the nuclear key.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get you out of here, or you’ll die trying.”
He grunted. I don’t think he heard the joke.
“What would he have done, had he not met you?” I asked Marhaz, after we’d both watched the prince walk away.
She was silent, but only for a moment. “Gone home and rule his little kingdom in Saudi Arabia,” she said.