Slim To None. Taylor Smith

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ then soaked into the lower part of the balaclava covering her nose and mouth. It was way too hot to be wearing complete covering, but they were going for anonymity and the intimidation factor here. Nothing said wet-your-pants scary like the Ninja warrior look.

      The market town they were about to enter was under the thumb of Sheikh Ali Mokhtar Salahuddin, a militant anti-western Sunni warlord who’d managed to survive Saddam Hussein’s brutal reign of terror through sheer, Machiavellian bloody-mindedness, plus a close alliance with the dictator’s sadistic monster sons. Uday and Qusay Hussein had been killed in a shoot-out with U.S. forces the previous month. Saddam himself was on the run and his former soldiers had thrown away their uniforms, but all that meant was that there was no telling the players without a scorecard—and the scorecard kept getting rewritten. No matter how many times the administration back in Washington crowed “mission accomplished,” Iraq was descending into anarchy, with allegiances shifting daily.

      Meantime, the ruthless Sheikh Salahuddin clung to control of his personal fiefdom. He was a force that would have to be reckoned with or eliminated, sooner or later, Hannah imagined, but as much trouble as the warlord was proving to be to coalition forces, the Brandy wine team hadn’t been sent to bring him down. Rather, its mission was to extract an old woman and her granddaughter living at the western edge of the town. It seemed like a lot of firepower for some granny and a kid, Hannah thought, but who was she to question orders?

      Dawn was still a few hours off, but a searing wind stirred the fine sand that seemed to blanket the landscape. Hannah’s clenched jaws scraped grit over tooth enamel, while underneath the balaclava, the sweat on her cheeks and brow congealed into a gluey, sandpapery mud pack. Great. A dermabrasion facial, the repressed girlie-girl in her thought ruefully.

      The group moved ahead stealthily, pausing now and again when Ladwell raised his hand. They pivoted, taking in every nuance of their surroundings. Even with night-vision goggles, it was a tough call to distinguish anything. The boulder-strewn, scrub-covered terrain was an abstract painter’s canvas of green, splotchy shadows. Whirlwinds of dust obscured the stars and the crescent moon overhead. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. The lack of light and definition, combined with their dusky camos and matte black weapons, would also render the team virtually invisible to any adversary. In theory, anyway.

      If captured, they were hosed. No rescue would be mounted to save their sorry hides. Officially, they weren’t even here. They would not be counted among the dead, wounded and captured in this dirty little war where the enemy could be anyone from a Saddam fedayeen to an adolescent holy-martyr-wannabe body-wrapped in Semtex.

      Despite the high risk, Hannah hadn’t hesitated to sign on for the mission. After all, if she bought it here, who would mourn? What family she had didn’t need her. Gabe would be the beneficiary of the hefty insurance policy that came with these contract jobs, so that if one day he wanted to escape the clutches of his father and the woman who was now his mom in all but name, he’d have the means to do it. As for Hannah’s police career, that had self-destructed, too, along with the rest of her once reasonably happy life.

      Behind her were nothing but burned bridges. And when you’ve got nothin’, you’ve got nothin’ to lose.

      CHAPTER

       6

      Al Zawra, Central Iraq

      Zaynab Um Ahmed awoke with a start, the ripe smell of leather filling her nostrils. A gloved hand was clamped onto her mouth. She struggled and tried to cry out, but her captor was relentless. Another hand bore down on her collarbones, exerting more than enough force on those frail bones to keep her pinned to the mattress.

      Her first thought was for Yasmin, her twelve-year-old granddaughter, who’d been sleeping in the twin bed next to hers, but she could neither move nor see if the child was safe. No sound came from the other bed. Zaynab struggled and moaned, but the man holding her down was unyielding.

      She turned her attention to the ghostly, nearly featureless head looming over her. The room should have been pitch-black, and yet was not. In a dim, reddish glow, she made out a pair of dark eyes, intently fixed on her. When Zaynab whimpered, the head gave a sharp, warning shake, and a whispered command sounded from that awful lipless face. “Shhh, grandmother! Be still.”

      The old woman went limp, her terrified gaze darting left and right in that red spectral glow. There’d been no electricity in town for weeks now, ever since Salahuddin’s men had seized control of the area, taking advantage of the power vacuum left after the American invasion. No one knew whether Salahuddin had cut the power lines and telephone communications or whether the foreign forces had done it. All anyone knew was that the country was sliding into anarchy. This was what some people had feared would follow if Saddam were ever overthrown. No one loved the dictator, but in a nation rife with ugly ethnic divisions, the devil one knew was perhaps preferable to whatever supposed savior might follow—for some, anyway. Zaynab had known too much grief in her sixty-two years to believe in anyone anymore.

      People said Salahuddin was the spiritual “younger brother” of Osama bin Laden, but Zaynab had her own take on the opportunist who was now terrorizing her town. After all, she’d known the little monster all his life. He was about the same age as her own children, but unlike Mumtaz and Ahmed, Salahuddin had dropped out of school at sixteen, becoming a drunk and a thug who was suspected of several sexual assaults. He had wormed his way into the inner circle of Qusay Hussein, but inevitably fell afoul of the dictator’s family and landed in jail. Some people said it was during his time in prison that he adopted the jihadist cause. Whatever the case, after he was released, Salahuddin disappeared—to Afghanistan, some said, to fight the Soviet invaders of that country.

      He’d shown up back in Al Zawra only a few months earlier, calling himself “Sheikh” Salahuddin. Whether or not he was a follower of bin Laden, Zaynab thought, he certainly didn’t need the blessings of Al Qaeda to launch a so-called holy war. He had always had delusions of grandeur and been given to spouting the worst kind of hateful nonsense. Since he’d taken over the town, nothing had been working.

      Zaynab tried to make out where this dim red glow in the room was coming from. Out of frugality and fear of fire, she was always careful to extinguish candles and oil lamps before she and Yasmin went to bed. Even on bright, moonlit nights, she kept the curtains drawn close against the dangers that lurked outside. But now, the room was a patchwork of black shadow and crimson light. The armed invaders—from her pinioned position on the bed, she could make out at least two others dressed in full military camouflage—were carrying shielded torches.

      As Zaynab turned her gaze back to the soldier holding her down, a sense of weary inevitability and terrible sadness overcame her resistance. Of course these men had been sent to kill her and her granddaughter. Why not? Everything else had already been taken from her. Now, why not her precious granddaughter and her own useless life?

      The soldier took away the hand on her shoulder, lifting one finger in warning. Zaynab felt too beaten down to move as he reached up, yanking off the balaclava that had obscured all features but those dark eyes.

      Zaynab squinted, then blinked through her tears. This was not one of Salahuddin’s hooligans. In fact, it was no man at all. It was a young woman with the dark eyes of the forty-two virgins who were said to welcome devout men into paradise. Was she dead, then? And did the houris come to faithful women, too? How was it possible that the angels of paradise were dressed like soldiers, in camouflage shirts and trousers? Had things gotten so bad that even heaven was beleaguered by battling forces?

      The dark-eyed soldier-angel leaned close and whispered urgently in the old woman’s ear. “Shhh, grandmother! Don’t be afraid. Mumtaz has sent me.”

      Mumtaz? СКАЧАТЬ