Agent in Place
The knife came up in an arc that Court couldn’t see, but he felt the arm swinging freely and he fell back and away quickly. The blade cut deeply into the magazine rack on Court’s vest. Realizing he was now in a life-and-death struggle with the British mercenary, Court continued rolling backwards, kicking his feet over his head and flipping over onto his knees.
He reached down to the SIG pistol in his drop leg holster and pulled it free as heavy machine-gun fire began raking the building. The entire scene was still clouded over with dust and building materials. Court fell onto his back, worrying that the man with the knife could be inches away, and then he kicked himself backwards along the floor, gear and pack and all, until he hit the far wall.
He couldn’t see Saunders, but he knew where he’d been, and he aimed and fired eight rounds as fast as he could press the trigger.
His ears rang, and another mortar hit just outside the building, sending shrapnel into the room over Court’s head. He stared forward in the thick dust and raised his weapon again to fire more rounds, but then Saunders appeared just two feet away and coming fast.
Court fired once into Saunders’s chest plate before the British mercenary fell onto Court, knocking him onto his back.
The man was already dead, a bullet wound in his left temple and another in his throat.
Court pushed the gear-laden body off him, fought his way up to his feet, and ran out the door to the bedroom.
One flight down in the stairwell he turned to go down to the first floor, and then he stopped abruptly. Anders lay facedown on the landing, blood pooling under him. There was a ragged hole in the wall where a high-explosive mortar round had entered the stairwell, sending shrapnel out in all directions that eviscerated the Dutch KWA employee.
Court continued his descent.
He got to the front door of the building, and in the low light of dusk he saw the two BMPs in the street, their engines running, their lights on. The rear hatches of both vehicles were closed, but a top hatch on the second BMP was open, obviously waiting for the three contractors still in the building.
Court considered making a run for the vehicle and climbing in, but he saw this as an opportunity. If he could lay low in the apartment building while the KWA men egressed, they would assume he’d been killed in the mortar attack.
KWA wasn’t a “no man left behind” type of outfit.
Of course, Court realized staying behind would still leave the nonsignificant issue of dealing with whoever was heading this way on the technicals Van Wyk had reported, but he figured he could try to find a basement and wait out the attack, then search for a phone to report his intel to Vincent Voland.
It was a good plan, but the plan ended when Van Wyk rose up out of the hatch and saw Court standing there in the front door of the building. “Move your ass!” he shouted, and he brought his Galil assault rifle up through the hatch and aimed it down the road, as if to cover Court.
Court stood there, decided he would be better off exfilling with the contractors and then searching for another opportunity, and then he started running towards the armored vehicles.
He made it fewer than five steps before he heard the unmistakable whiz of an incoming rocket-propelled grenade round. He ran on another two steps, and then his body was tossed into the air. The sound and fire came simultaneously, and after the incredible assault to his senses, he was blind and deaf. He did feel his body slam back into the street, pounding his right shoulder and right leg.
He lifted his head and shook it a moment until he could just barely see a foggy distorted image. It was the darkened road by the apartment building, and on it the two infantry fighting vehicles raced off to the west.
Court dropped his head back down into the street, and his helmet clanged. He felt a trickle of wet on his lips, and he licked it, tasted blood and concrete and dirt. He brought a hand to his face, rubbed his eyes a moment, and then focused more clearly.
Three pickup trucks raced past him in the street, coming from the southeast, and then they slammed on their brakes, skidding in the rubble all around.
Armed men with beards and dark clothing leapt from the beds of the trucks, not twenty-five meters from where he lay.
Court raised one hand to the men in surrender, but only for a moment, because his hand dropped back down as he lost consciousness.
* * *
? ? ?
Court woke with a bag on his head and his hands tied behind his back. He was lying on his left side, bouncing up and down against the hard surface, and this told him he was likely in the bed of one of the technicals he saw just before passing out. He didn’t know how long he’d been out, but he felt cool night air blowing on his arms that he’d not felt before, so he imagined some time had passed.
His body armor had been removed, as had his boots, utility belt, and drop leg holster. His watch was gone, as was his helmet. He realized he must have been stripped down to the dirty white T-shirt and the green, black, and brown camo battle dress uniform trousers he’d gotten from the KWA loadout room down in Babbila, and the two pairs of boot socks he’d put on that morning.
Men spoke Arabic above him. From the positioning of the voices he suspected they sat on the sides of the bed and back at the tailgate, and he lay between them at their feet, but his ears rang still and his head hurt too bad to even try to concentrate on what the men said. It didn’t matter really, he figured, because he knew all he needed to know about what was going on.
He’d seen the dark clothing and the beards, both common with ISIS fighters, and he knew he was fucked.
They’d only taken him alive so they could execute him more dramatically than a bullet to the head as he lay unconscious in the street. Whatever they did to him would be for show now, and he’d seen all the various manners by which they put someone to death on video. The beheadings, the burnings in cages, the drownings, tying men to landmines and IEDs. He’d seen children ordered to kill prisoners with guns and knives, and he’d seen mass executions where dozens of men would be taken, one by one, and put to death, as a crowd looked on.
The only thing ISIS had generated in its five years of existence, as far as Court could tell, was a lot of inventive ways to instill terror via torture and death.
And now he could do nothing but await his own miserable fate.
* * *
? ? ?
The drive lasted a long time, but Court had no ability to determine how long. He figured it must have been eight or nine p.m. when the vehicle began ascending into hills, and for another hour or more it climbed and descended, turned on hairpin curves, and even stopped a couple of times.
He’d nodded off but came to when the tailgate slammed down behind him, then hands grabbed his ankles and pulled him roughly out of the pickup. He braced as his torso was dragged on the tailgate, hoping whoever was pulling him had the decency to help him to the ground so he didn’t fall four feet, although he knew there was no reason to expect such decency.
As he feared, he fell straight down and crashed hard onto his back on dirt and rock.
Multiple arms pulled him up to his feet now, then half walked, half dragged him down a gravel path and into an enclosed space—some sort of a building. He was shoved against a wall and then pushed down on his butt; even through the bag he could tell it was pitch-black in the room, and then the hands guiding him let him go.
The door slammed shut.
He thought about his predicament, and he held out no hope. His bindings were well tied, and he’d heard the trucks of a dozen vehicles at one time or another during his ascent into the hills, so whoever owned this territory seemed to own it outright.
The door to the room opened and Court felt other men being shoved against him, pushed down onto the floor. These would be more prisoners, and this made him think that ISIS was storing prisoners so they could execute them en masse as soon as the sun came up tomorrow.
CHAPTER 64
At some point Court fell asleep, and he dreamed of his own death. He was with dozens of other men, all wearing the orange suits that ISIS loved to dress its prisoners up in as a way to dehumanize them. They were each taken, one by one, on a short walk, then pushed to their knees and shot in the back of the head.
The dream was horrific, but more so as Court had watched his fellow prisoners receive the shot that blew their brains out. When Court’s time came, in contrast, he found himself oddly at peace.
He thought about Jamal Medina and Yasmin Samara, and Dr. Saddiqi, and he lamented that he could not fulfill his promises to help them, and he thought about Tarek and Rima Halaby and their two children, and about Bianca Medina, who, while certainly not innocent, was nonetheless still a mother who loved her child, and wholly undeserving of all that had happened to her.
It was sad he wouldn’t fulfill his mission here in Syria, but there was nothing he could do about it, so as he walked to his death in the dream, he told himself it was finally time to let go, as if he knew a long-awaited and much-earned rest was coming for him.
He welcomed the rest as he bowed his head and waited for the gunshot.
* * *