A Cold Day In Mosul (10 page)

He heard laughter from the kitchen as the children played some game under the supervision of his wife, and he smiled. Yes, that was the reward for being a good Muslim and fulfilling one's duty. Life was good, thanks to Allah. Perhaps there would be peace in his time after all.

He heard a loud thud, followed by what sounded like wood splintering. Another thud. He rushed from the sitting room and into the foyer. The front door to the house had burst open, and three Balaclava-wearing men stood in the entrance, clad in combat fatigues and carrying assault rifles. The barrels were pointed directly at him. Bright white lights near the tips shone into his face, blinding him.

Isam raised his hands fearfully, covering his eyes with one palm.

One of the militants shut and locked the door while a second moved from window to window, confirming that all the curtains were shut. The third walked right up to him and shoved him to the floor, pinning him, then bound his hands behind his back with some sort of plastic that dug into his wrists.

"What's going on?" Isam said fearfully. "I have done everything you asked. Performed my duty for Dawla to the letter."

"We are not with Dawla," a gruff voice said in disdain. The accent was Syrian.

He was hauled to his knees; there were only two masked men in the room. Where had the third gone?

My family.

Sure enough, the third masked man returned from the direction of the kitchen, marching his family into the room. Isam suddenly felt like he couldn't breath. He would do anything in that moment, as long as the men didn't harm his family.

The militant forced the group to kneel in front of Isam. Under the light from their weapons, he saw that his two kids were cowering in fear, while his wife, her face uncovered, stared at the intruders with obvious hatred. It shamed him that his wife was stronger than him in that moment.

I must be strong,
Isam thought. He filled himself with hate.
I will not give in to these infidels. I will tell them nothing!

The third man left once more, vanishing down a side hall, maybe to look for other members of his family. The intruders couldn't know that they had gathered every member of the household already.

"What do you want?" Isam said. He had tried to make his voice hard, but couldn't help the subtle tremor that permeated his words.

"You have been helping Dawla interrogate people at a certain black site," one of the masked men said. "Where is this site?"

Isam glanced at his cowering children.

Do not give in to the infidel.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Isam said.

The masked man stepped forward. He produced a pistol and held it to the head of his youngest child, his son Fahd, aged five.

"Tell me the address."

Isam stared at his boy, and felt himself breaking. He couldn't allow his only son to die.

He opened his mouth, but then he saw his wife's face once more. The hatred had never left. If anything, it had deepened, smoldering worse than ever before.

She was right, he knew. He could not give in to these infidels, no matter what.

Isam immediately smothered his paternal instincts. He no longer felt anything for his son. Not a thing. For him, the boy had died the moment the intruders stepped into the house.

That was what separated man from beast: a man could rise above the internal wiring of his brain and overcome the most powerful of instincts. Faith conquered all.

And if Allah required the death of his son, then so be it.

* * *

Ethan's finger was on the trigger of the Glock, the muzzle pointed at the boy's head. The illumination from Doug's WeaponLight lit the scene.

"Give me the address!" Ethan shouted.

The doctor flinched, but his face abruptly hardened. "Do it." His eyes blazed with hatred.

Ethan could tell with a certain degree of confidence when a man was bluffing. There were certain tells, tics, microexpressions.

And this man was dead serious.

The doctor was going to sit there and watch as his child was executed at point blank range, believing the whole time he was doing the right thing and that his son would go straight to paradise.

"Stand down," Doug whispered quietly beside him. He was clad in combat fatigues, and wearing a balaclava, like Ethan—clothing donated to them by the resistance.

Ethan and the others already knew the address. They had followed the doctor to the suspected black site that very morning. No members of the Islamic State had come to escort him—the doctor had driven all the way on his own. So Ethan was very well acquainted with the address already. Still, he needed to hear the man say that location; needed to know that they could trust any intel he gave. Because what they still didn't know was whether a certain high value target awaited them at the black site.

Ethan gazed at the defiant doctor a moment longer, then glanced at the kid. The boy's eyes were terrified. The hatred for the infidel that rotted the souls of so many others in that land had not yet taken root. The boy was innocent.

For a moment, the burning face of the child from his nightmares flashed into his mind. He dismissed it.

Ethan lowered the Glock.

The doctor broke into a wide grin. "You are a coward. You must be from the West, where all the cowards come."

"No, I just hate killing kids," Ethan said.

"How's it look out there," Doug said into his unencrypted radio.

Three members of the resistance were outside, on the rooftops of nearby buildings, ready to alert them to the first sign of trouble.

"All clear," a voice returned.

William entered from the hallway, back from his search of the house. He carried a syringe. "I found his supply of scopolamine."

The doctor glanced at the syringe and shuddered.

eleven

E
than lay prostrate on the rooftop of a small house, peering through the 4x fixed mag scope attached to his A4. A PVS-22 night sight attached to the forward rail of the rifle gave everything a bright green hue in the moonlight.

He ran the scope from left to right across the dye house in his sights. The building was three stories tall, including the rectangular, central superstructure on the roof, which occupied roughly half the area of the preceding floors.

A cinder block fence enclosed the facility. A pair of armed militants guarded the main entrance, while two more patrolled the inner grounds. Another two observed from a second story walkway that girthed the building, and a final pair watched from the rooftop, making a circuit about the superstructure.

The woman prisoner was apparently held in one of the interior rooms, in an office area past the mechanical room. The doctor had sketched a quick floor map of the plant for them. Many areas remained blank, as he had seen only parts of the interior, but the operatives had committed the doctor's map to memory nonetheless.

The doctor. Ethan thought of the earlier interrogation session, or rather the lack thereof. It was the strangest thing: the doctor had seemed about ready to allow his son to die, but when they sequestered his family in a different room and prepared to inject him with scopolamine, the man had surrendered. Either he had been putting on a show of defiance for his family, or he feared the drug more than anything. Maybe it was a combination of both. It made Ethan wonder what terrible things had been done to Sam.

"So, what do you think?" Doug said from beside him.

"They're definitely guarding someone valuable," William said from his other side.

"Maybe, maybe not," Ethan said. "Either way, we have no guarantee it's Sam."

"No," Doug admitted. "We don't."

The doctor had no idea who the prisoner was. She had no scars, birthmarks or other identifying features on her face. She was not of spectacular beauty, nor ugly. The prisoner had a wide, slightly Roman nose, and big lips. That rather generic description could have matched fifty thousand women in the region.

Ethan continued to scan the plant with his scope. He saw what looked like a momentary spark come from the rooftop, and brought his reticule upward. The two guards there had paused near the southeast corner of the building. They seemed to be taking an extended break: Ethan saw the characteristic red glow of cigarettes.

"Since when do muj smoke?" Ethan said. "Check out the rooftop."

"You remember what it was like when we were embedded with the jihadists, don't you?" William said, observing the scene through his own A4. "The guys with the guns can do what they want. My brigade defied sharia all the time. The men played games on their phones. Watched Western movies. Listened to pop songs."

"Playing video games and watching Hollywood movies is one thing, but
smoking
?" Ethan shook his head. "Never seen a muj break sharia like that. Something doesn't seem right. Honestly, I don't think these guys are Islamic State."

"Look muj to me," Doug said. He, too, had the scope of his A4 to his eye.

"What about the men at the entrance," Ethan said. "They don't even have beards."

"So?" William said. "Jihadists come from all countries and nationalities. Maybe they're Chechen."

"All the Chechen fighters I knew had beards," Ethan argued.

"Then maybe they're Native Americans," William said. "I don't know. They're here, they have rifles, they're dressed in black... I'm going to say they're muj."

"If Sam is here," Doug interjected. "Does it really matter who's holding her captive?"

"No it does not," Ethan agreed.

"Good." Doug continued to observe the grounds. "The patrol just passed the entrance. Start your timers." Shielding his phone with his body, Doug tapped the screen.

Ethan and William likewise started their smartphone timers.

Pocketing the devices, the three of them donned their balaclavas over the earbuds and microphones they were wearing. Those were plugged into their phones, which would relay any voice or text messages via the encrypted RF transmitters hidden in the connected USB sticks. While the rebels had lent them Hytera radios, Ethan and the others preferred to use an encrypted band for their private communications.

Ethan returned to the trapdoor and took the steps to the first floor of the house. William followed close behind, while Doug remained on the rooftop. The building was unoccupied of course—the Islamic State had chosen an abandoned side of town to host its black site.

At the exit, William departed to a side alley, while Ethan proceeded forward, hugging the brick house. Resistance fighters watched from the surrounding rooftops, ready to provide backup, but he didn't find their presence all that reassuring. Firstly, he wasn't certain how much he could trust them. Secondly, they weren't highly trained soldiers. The resistance fighters were just as likely to shoot at Ethan and the other operatives as they were at the actual enemy.

He left the house behind and hurried at a crouch across the street. He reached the cinder block wall that enclosed the plant and flattened himself against it. He approached the edge.

Flames burned brightly around the corner, where two oil lamps illuminated the main entrance, providing light. In times of war and occupation, denying power to civilians was to be expected, but the power situation must have been dire indeed if the Islamic State couldn't afford to redirect some of the grid to an important site like this.

Loitering upon the road that led into the plant, the entrance guards stood equidistant to one another in the light. AKs hung menacingly from their shoulders; drums had been attached to both rifles, bringing the total round capacity of each to seventy-five.

Pulling back behind the edge, he said, quietly, "In position."

A moment later William's slightly muffled voice returned in his earbud: "Ditto. Starting countdown."

Ethan stopped the timer and, based on the result, he set the countdown on his phone to three and a half minutes and then pocketed the device. Keeping his back to the cinder block fence, Ethan slowly made his way around the corner toward the circular pools of illumination the guards stood inside.

His steps were practiced and precise; he lifted the sole of each foot very slowly from the ground, as though peeling away a sticker, and when his heel touched the surface in front of him, he meticulously rolled the foot flat. He was very much like a panther padding through the night toward its prey.

When he reached the proper range, he stopped, still shrouded in darkness. He withdrew one of the two Voron-3 blades he carried from its sheath. Though he could not see it, he knew the Russian-made 55-58 HRC stainless steel metal tapered to a deadly spear point in his grip.

He moved to the left a pace so that he wouldn't be in the path of William's knife, in case the other operative missed his planned throw. He double-checked his own range with Doug, who confirmed that Ethan stood exactly five meters away from the closest man. That was the trick with knife throwing: the muscle memory was trained to a certain distance, which was why even famous marksmen always threw from the same range.

Ethan and William had experience with actual throwing knives, but the Vorons were weighted and balanced differently, so the two of them had to practice extensively earlier, updating their neural pathways until they were confident they would not miss. Doug and the resistance fighters were ready to snipe the tangos if they did, of course, though at the cost of the element of surprise.

Knife in hand, Ethan waited. The seconds ticked past tensely. The waiting was always the worst part. When he was in the thick of the action, under fire and giving it as good as he got, he was completely fine. But waiting, that really tested the nerves. He thought of all the things that could go wrong, all the problems that could send the mission spiraling into failure. The holes in the plan piled up in his mind. He was going to miss the throw. He knew it.

What the hell am I doing?

He took a silent, deep breath, and called upon his sniper's discipline to steady his mind. Calmness returned. He could do this. He
would
do it.