PROLOGUE
A flash of light in the distant morning sky captured the attention of the Land Rover’s blood-soaked driver. Polarized Oakleys shielded his eyes from the brunt of the sun’s rays; still, he squinted through his windshield’s glare, desperate to identify the burning aircraft that now spun and hurtled towards earth, a smoldering comet’s tail of black smoke left hanging above it.
It was a helicopter, a large Army Chinook, and horrific though the situation must have been for those on board, the driver of the Land Rover breathed a subdued sigh of relief. His extraction transport was to be a Russian-built KA-32T, crewed by Polish mercenaries and flown in from over the border in Turkey. The driver found the dying Chinook regrettable but preferable to a dying KA-32T.
He watched the chopper spin in its uncontrolled descent, staining the blue sky directly in front of him with burning fuel.
He turned the Land Rover hard to the right and accelerated eastward. The blood-soaked driver wanted to get as far away from here as fast as possible. As much as he wishedthere was something he could do for the Americans on board the Chinook, he knew their fate was out of his hands.
And he had his own problems. For five hours he’d raced across the flatlands of western Iraq, fleeing the dirty work he’d left behind, and now he was less than twenty minutes from his exfiltration. A shot-down chopper meant that in minutes this place would be crawling with armed fighters, defiling bodies, shooting assault rifles into the air, and jumping around like fucking morons.
It was a party the bloodstained driver would not mind missing, lest he himself become a party favor.
The Chinook sank off to his left and disappeared behind a brown ridge in the distance.
The driver fixed his eyes on the road ahead.Not my problem,he told himself. He was not trained to search and to rescue, he was not trained to give aid, and he certainly was not trained to negotiate for hostages.
He was trained to kill. He’d done so back over the border in Syria, and now it was time to get out of the kill zone.
As his Rover accelerated through the haze and dust at over one hundred kilometers an hour, he began a dialogue with himself. His inner voice wanted to turn back, to race to the Chinook’s crash site to check for survivors. His outer voice, on the other hand, was more pragmatic.
“Keep moving, Gentry, just keep moving. Those dudes are fucked. Nothing you can do about it.”
Gentry’s spoken words were sensible, but his inner monologue just would not shut up.
ONE
The first gunmen arriving at the crash site were not Al Qaeda and had nothing to do with the shoot down. They were four local boys with old wooden-stocked Kalashnikovs who’d held a sloppy morning roadblock a hundred meters from where the chopper impacted with the city street. The boys pushed through the growing phalanx of onlookers, the shopkeepers and the street kids who dove for cover when the twin-rotor helicopter hurtled down among them, and the taxi drivers who swerved off the road to avoid the American craft. The four young gunmen approached the scene warily but without a shred of tactical skill. A loud snap from the raging fire, a single handgun round cooking off in the heat, sent them all to cover. After a moment’s hesitation, their heads popped back up, they aimed their rifles, and then emptied their barking and bucking guns into the twisted metal machine.
A man in a blackened American military uniform crawled from the wreckage and received two dozen rounds from the boys’ weapons. The soldier’s struggle ceased as soon as the first bullets raked across his back.
Braver now after the adrenaline rush of killing a man in front of the crowd of shouting civilians, the boys broke cover and moved closer to the wreckage. They reloaded their rifles and raised them to shoot at the burning bodies of the flight crew in the cockpit. But before they could open fire, three vehicles raced up from behind: pickup trucks full of armed Arabian foreigners.
Al Qaeda.
The local kids wisely backed away from the aircraft, stood back with the civilians, and chanted a devotional to God as the masked men fanned out in the road around the wreckage.
The broken corpses of two more soldiers fell clear from the rear of the Chinook, and these were the first images of the scene caught by the three-man Al Jazeera camera crew that jumped from truck three.
—
Just under a mile away, Gentry pulled off the road, turned into a dry streambed, and forced the Land Rover as deep as possible into the tall brown river grasses. He climbed out of the truck and raced to the tailgate, swung a pack onto his back, and hefted a long camel-colored case by its carry handle.
As he moved away from the vehicle, he noticed the drying blood all over his loose-fitting local clothing for the first time. The blood was not his own, but there was no mystery to the stain.
He knew whose blood it was.
Thirty seconds later, he crested the little ridge by the streambed and crawled forward as quickly as possible while pushing his gear in front of him. When Gentry felt suitablyinvisible in the sand and reeds, he pulled a pair of binoculars from the pack and brought them to his eyes, centered on the plume of black smoke rising in the distance.
His taut jaw muscles flexed.
The Chinook had come to rest on a street in the town of al Ba’aj, and already a mob had descended on the debris. Gentry’s binoculars were not powerful enough to provide much detail, so he rolled onto his side and unsnapped the camel-colored case.
Inside was a Barrett M107, a fifty-caliber rifle that fired shells half the size of beer bottles and dispatched the heavy bullets with a muzzle velocity of nearly nine football fields a second.
Gentry did not load the gun, only aimed the rifle at the crash site to use the powerful optics mounted to it. Through the sixteen-power glass he could see the fire, the pickup trucks, the unarmed civilians, and the armed gunmen.
Some were unmasked. Local thugs.
