A Gentleman's Game (33 page)

45

Saudi Arabia—Tabuk Province, the Wadi-as-Sirhan
22 September 0146 Local (GMT+3.00)

“I told you to take
it slowly,” Matteen said.

Sinan shot a glare at him, then turned the look on the front right tire of the SUV, deflated and useless.

“Get the spare and the jack,” Sinan said.

Matteen sighed, gesturing around them at the expanse of sand. “We can wait until dawn, Sinan. We can sleep in the car.”

“I want to get home.”

“You wanting to get home is why we have a flat tire in the middle of the desert.”

“Fine, I’ll do it.” Sinan threw his Kalashnikov onto the backseat of the Land Cruiser, went around to the back, opened the hatch. Matteen followed after a moment, grumbling, then reached inside to help him free the spare. They rolled it around the side of the vehicle, loosened the bolts on the flat tire, and then set about raising the car with the jack.

It had taken them far longer to get out of Egypt than it had to get in, and Sinan had been surprised by how swiftly and how viciously the Egyptian authorities had responded to the bombing, for all the effect Nia’s death had had. It puzzled him, and it puzzled Matteen, and it was only by Allah’s grace, Sinan was sure, that they had not been stopped in the airport in Cairo, where they had boarded the flight south to Hurghada.

Their contact had met them in Port Safaga and put them up for the night, then brought them to the fishing boat that would take them to Duba.

It was in Port Safaga that they learned what had happened to Muhriz el-Sayd, how he had been murdered by the police.

“They take our best from us,” Sinan had lamented. “They take our best, again and again, and we make no gains.”

“Our gains are not for this world but the next, Sinan,” Matteen had answered. “Do not lose your faith.”

Sinan hadn’t responded, dwelling once more on Nia, telling himself he had done what he had to do, that he had done what was required of him. She hadn’t left him a choice.

They’d crossed the Red Sea and made port in Duba, finding the SUV where Abdul Aziz had promised them it would be, the keys in the hands of a local
imam
who fed them and prayed with them before sending them on their way with their rifles once more at their sides. The drive was a long one, and while they made good time on the immaculate and barren highways for the first part of it, as they closed in on the camp the going was slower, and they were required to leave the roads. Before night fell, they stopped and prayed.

“Let’s wait until morning, Sinan,” Matteen had suggested. “I don’t like driving in the dark.”

“I want to get back home.”

“If we get hung up on a rock or boulder, we’ll end up stuck out here and have to walk.”

“Allah will not let that happen,” Sinan had said simply, and then climbed back behind the wheel of the Land Cruiser.

•

They had the tire changed in only a few minutes, and Sinan’s dour mood was only slightly helped by the fact that Matteen didn’t say “I told you so.”

Once the flat was stowed, along with the tools, Sinan moved to get behind the wheel, but this time Matteen stopped him.

“No, I’ll take it for a while.”

“I can drive.”

“I know you can drive, Sinan, but you’re impatient, and we only had the one spare. We’ll get there when we get there.”

Sinan thought about digging in, being stubborn. Instead, he moved around to the passenger’s seat, climbing in, waiting while Matteen got behind the wheel. The engine came back to life without hesitation and the headlights splashed onto the baked earth.

“I just want to go home,” Sinan said to no one in particular.

46

Saudi Arabia—Tabuk Province, the Wadi-as-Sirhan
22 September 0222 Local (GMT+3.00)

It took another hour,
because they went much more slowly now. Both Wallace and Chace had agreed that it was unlikely HUM-AA was expecting trouble or that there would be static defenses in place. Certainly, there would be sentries, but they were dealing with a training camp, one where the trainees and the trainers felt secure in their work. The residents were there to learn and to train, their days would be full, their nights dedicated to rest.

But Chace and Wallace weren’t going to take any chances.

They climbed down into the actual physical wadi, roughly two kilometers from the camp, picking their way down the sides, cautious with their footfalls, and once at the bottom stopped and took stock. The sides of the wadi rose roughly three meters on either side, and where they had entered was narrow, perhaps only four meters across. The ground beneath their feet was hard earth, cleaned by the rare floods that rushed through it in the spring. Chace saw tire tracks but had no idea how recent they were.

Wallace checked his GPS, showed his findings to Chace, and she nodded, then took the lead, now heading northeast.

After fourteen minutes, the wadi widened considerably and its walls had slowly begun to drop. Another GPS reading put them within five hundred meters, and here they spread out again, Chace to the eastern side of the wadi, Wallace to the western. Chace moved the P90 to her shoulder, made certain the safety was off and the selector was on burst.

They moved very slowly now, listening hard, trying to ignore their own sounds, trying to control their own fear.

With one hundred meters to go, the wadi curved again, and Chace hugged her wall as she followed it around. Over the emptiness, she heard a rustling, the scraping of a foot, and peering the rest of the way, she saw the sentry, Kalashnikov held in one hand, covering his mouth to suppress a yawn.

She looked to Wallace, could barely make him out in the darkness across from her. She held up a finger, hoping he could read the sign, and she saw him return it, then made a circle, then showed him all five fingers. She lowered her hand, went back to watching the sentry, counting seconds.

The time the sentry had left to live.

47

Saudi Arabia—Tabuk Province, the Wadi-as-Sirhan
22 September 0248 Local (GMT+3.00)

Matteen stopped the car.

“What are you doing?” Sinan demanded.

Matteen grinned at him, opening the door and dropping out of the vehicle. “Relieving myself, if you don’t mind.”

Sinan groaned inwardly, closed his eyes, wanting nothing more than to be back in the safety and sanity of the camp, where the world was ordered, where doubt could not exist. He remembered Nia’s head in his lap, felt a pang of guilt.

Outside the car, he could hear the sound of Matteen passing water.

“Come on.”

Matteen climbed back behind the wheel, started the car once more. He drove carefully and slowly, and when at last they entered the wadi proper, their progress, it seemed, slowed to a crawl.

“It would be faster if we walked,” Sinan complained.

“You are too impatient, Sinan. You must learn to take things as they come.”

“And what has that gotten us? Patience, what has it brought?” Sinan gestured angrily. “This is holy land, Matteen, and it has been defiled time and time again by those
kufr
who would destroy everything we believe. Patience! Did patience remove the American air bases?”

Matteen just shook his head, concentrating on negotiating the wadi.

“Action,” Sinan said. “Action, not patience. We act, that Allah, praise His name, acts through us.”

“There is a time for action and a time for planning. The unseen knife cuts cleanest, Sinan, and your way would shout out to all who would hear what it is we do, what it is we are planning.”

“They should know! They should know, and they should be afraid!”

“They already are. They live in fear, haven’t you seen it? The West awakens every morning, anxious for news, nervous and scared, wondering where we will strike next. That is terror, Sinan. And when they talk about a war against terror, they don’t understand that they have already lost, because they are already afraid. And they will never sleep safe again, no matter how many missiles they drop on our camps, no matter how many of our brothers they capture and torture and murder. They fear us already, and thus we have already won. It will just take time for the victory to be complete.”

Sinan looked out the window at the rough terrain bathed in the headlights. He could hear the truth in Matteen’s words, and it soothed the heat in his blood.

He thought about Nia again, wondered again if she had been afraid. He hoped not; he didn’t want her to have entered Paradise afraid.

He wondered if she would be happy to see him when his time came.

48

Saudi Arabia—Tabuk Province, the Wadi-as-Sirhan
22 September 0253 Local (GMT+3.00)

Chace reached three hundred,
uncovered the scope on the P90, raised it again to her shoulder, and settled the crosshairs on the man’s chest. She moved her finger onto the trigger, pulling gently, exhaling, and the burst flew, the weapon hissing at the sentry, and through the scope she watched him jerk and topple, and she was moving forward again before he hit the ground. She looked around as she went, scanning, and saw no movement, no light.

She debated about moving the body, then continued past it, thinking it a waste of time.

There were eleven tents, the largest cluster of them centered in the wadi, with camouflage netting draped above them. Smaller tents hugged the walls. She worked from the eastern wall first, setting down her pack and removing the first claymore, extending its legs, setting it to face the nearest tent, some fifty meters from her, then stripping the end of her det cord with her knife, prepping it before attaching it to the mine.

She repeated the procedure with the remaining seven claymores, placing them roughly twenty-five meters apart, in a gentle semicircle, until the entire line was covered. She returned the pack to her back, its weight now negligible compared to what it had been, then attached the end of her remaining det cord to the daisy chain and quietly worked her way through the center of the camp.

Wallace was already finished and waiting for her with his end of the cord. She stood watch while he prepped the line, joining the segments, and then followed her back the way she had come. Back across the claymores, they stopped again, and Wallace took his timer, fitting it to the recess on the mine nearest the center of Chace’s chain. He checked his watch, set the timer, and then showed Chace four fingers.

She checked her watch, noting the time. Oh-three-oh-four, kick-off at oh-three-oh-eight. She slid her sleeve back down, nodded to Wallace.

Wallace pointed at himself, then at the western side of the wadi, then at her, then the eastern.

She nodded again, and they parted. Chace had to sling the P90 to climb out; although the wall was shallow, it was steep, and she needed both hands to get above it.

Once up and out, she scanned the terrain for cover and found an indent in the earth that met with the wadi wall. She rested in it, checked her watch again.

Oh-three-oh-six.

She readied her P90, looked across the wadi, trying to spot Wallace. She didn’t see him. She’d have been worried if she had.

She waited, hearing the night, counting down the seconds, waiting for the inevitable. Each claymore held 650 grams of explosive and 700 small steel balls, and when the timer ran down, the whole line would detonate in sequence. At their optimum distance from target, fifty meters, and placed as they had been some twenty-five meters apart, each mine would send its explosive load in overlapping coverage. The steel ball bearings would fly in a sixty-degree arc, covering up to two meters in height, and would tear through the tents as if they weren’t there, and tear through the people asleep inside them in much the same way.

For Queen and for country,
she told herself.

Then the timer reached zero, the daisy chain detonated, exploding in a sequence of flashing orange and red flowers, spitting steel that tore fabric, flesh, and bone.

49

Saudi Arabia—Tabuk Province, the Wadi-as-Sirhan
22 September 0308 Local (GMT+3.00)

Sinan jerked awake,
thinking at first that the flashes of light were something from a dream. He leaned forward, hands on the dashboard, and the bursts of fire continued in sequence, then vanished behind the wadi wall.

Matteen stopped the car, killed the lights, saying, “Did you see that?”

The heat came rushing back to Sinan, and he reached up, flicking the switch on the dome light so that it wouldn’t illuminate the interior of the vehicle as he opened the door. He grabbed his rifle, slipping out, and as soon as the door was open he heard the explosions, but worse, he heard the screams, echoing through the wadi.

“Matteen, quickly!” he hissed, and closed the door, clambering onto the hood of the SUV and then jumping from it onto the wadi wall, holding his rifle with both hands, fitting his finger through the trigger guard. He sprinted low, the Kalashnikov ready, atop the wall of the wadi, stumbling as his pace grew more desperate, driven by the cries of his brothers.

50

Saudi Arabia—Tabuk Province, the Wadi-as-Sirhan
22 September 0309:03 Local (GMT+3.00)

There weren’t many survivors,
but there were enough to keep Chace busy. She hopped her sights from one to the next, squeezing each burst carefully, timing the shots, placing them precisely. She went for center mass, tracking shots where she needed to, one burst for most, two when required.

She reloaded and heard the sounds of the dying, and then heard something else, and whipped around, dropping to her back and bringing the P90 up at the same time, seeing the man twenty feet behind her, his hands folded on his head. All the same, her finger had almost descended on the trigger before she registered what she was seeing, and it took another half a second before the adrenaline coursing through her allowed his words to register.

“Friendly,” the man was saying over and over again. “CIA, friendly, CIA.”

Chace scrambled to her feet, sprinting toward him, the P90 in one hand. She grabbed his hair and yanked him over onto his back, dropping to a knee and driving the muzzle against his neck. He looked at her with pure alarm, his mouth working inarticulately.

“Friendly,” he gabbled. “Friendly, in the name of God, I’m friendly.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Chace hissed in return, and she pushed the muzzle harder against his neck.

“Matteen Agha,” he said, and his English was accented, vaguely American. “My controller is Dennis Heppler at Langley, Juliet-ought-eight-nine-nine-two, please, I’m a friend, you must believe me.”

“Nobody told me that I could find friends here.”

The man closed his eyes, whispered, “I am unarmed, I am unarmed, please, you must believe me.”

Chace gritted her teeth, the frustration and impatience raging. “Where did you come from, why the hell aren’t you in the camp? Did you know we were coming?”

Matteen Agha shook his head, or tried to, saying, “No, we were on our way back, we were in Egypt. There were bombs, I warned Heppler, I told him there were five—”

“We?”

“—of the bombers, we were paired with them to act as their handlers—”

Chace yanked on his hair, hard, trying to silence him. “We?”

“My partner and I—”

The realization was utterly horrifying, and she released her grip on him, trying to get to her feet, turning to look across the wadi, opening her mouth to shout the warning.

Too late.