2
FOUR DAYS EARLIER
“Did they recognize you?”
Dan Inman rubbed his white-tinged beard and glanced over at his much-taller colleague, Bilaal Al-Khiyani—Sheikh Bilaal Al-Khiyani—who was scanning the snow-capped mountain peaks on the horizon before them, his green eyes fierce and focused, brown skin gleaming in the sun, thick, lustrous black hair blowing in the cold mountain breeze. They’d been in the foothills of the Karakoram Mountains for a week, on a fruitless mission to rendezvous with an Afghani informant who insisted on meeting in a small village somewhere in the no-man’s-land between Pakistan and India. The man was a no-show—either he’d changed his mind or someone else had changed his mind for him. It wasn’t too unusual—informants chickened out or were found out and executed all the time. Of course, sometimes these “informants” were just bait, an attempt to lure American or Allied agents into a trap.
They’d taken the right precautions: Three days of drone surveillance of the village to catch any sign of militants; detailed validation of the initial information handed over by the informant to prove himself. And with Dan’s deep tan and beard to go with the Sheikh’s natural bronze, they’d assigned agents with the right skin-tone to make the trek to the small village where a white man would stand out like the goddamn abominable snowman. The unforeseen problem was that one of the agents was somewhat famous in the closed circles of the Islamic world.
“I could have sworn one of those teenagers in the village said the word Sheikh,” Inman said after waiting a moment for Bilaal to answer his previous question. “And I think it’s safe to say you’re the only Sheikh within three hundred miles of this mountainside.”
Sheikh Bilaal smiled grimly, finally looking at Inman. “I heard it,” he said quietly, his tone controlled but serious, his Middle-Eastern accent more pronounced as it always got when the man was amongst Arabic or Urdu-speaking locals. Bilaal was a good partner, Inman thought. A good man, a good agent, and a damn good friend.
Perhaps the only real friend, Inman thought. Nobody else knows me like he does—not even Irene. Especially not Irene.
“Yes, I heard it,” Bilaal said again. “But they cannot be certain of who I am, so it is of no consequence. And even if they did recognize me, it is nothing more than a curiosity. Nobody—not even my closest family in the Kingdom of Khiyani know that I am more than just a pretty face on a golden throne.”
Inman laughed heartily. “You’re still a pretty face, great Sheikh—a pretty brown face on a white mountain.” He shook his head, reminding himself how strange it was for a billionaire Sheikh to serve on the front lines of the global war against terror, getting his hands dirty, getting his feet wet, getting things done. Indeed, Inman had been skeptical when he’d first been assigned to a job with Bilaal—a small but dangerous operation in Somalia a few years earlier. What the hell is an Arab king doing in the goddamn CIA anyway, he’d protested. Have we lost our minds?
“Technically he’s not in the CIA,” John Benson had said when Inman stormed into his Dubai office after first getting the assignment. “He’s with the Khiyani Intelligence Bureau. The CIA aren’t the only ones fighting the war on terror. We’ve got agents and officers from forty different countries joining forces on missions across the globe. The Khiyani Intelligence Bureau is small, but they train with Israeli Mossad and they’re the real goddamn deal. This guy is legit, Dan.”
“Khiyani Intelligence Bureau? The word bureau says it all. He’s a goddamn bureaucrat,” Inman had snapped. “Some macho billionaire who reads the Economist and does too many pushups now wants to experience the thrill of a real-world secret mission. Hooah. Are we selling experience-vacations to rich assholes now?”
Benson took a breath and smiled. “He is rich. And he can in fact be an asshole. That’s why I think you guys will get along just fine. You have so much in common.”
“You know I ain’t rich,” Inman had said, finally cracking a smile. Benson was solid, and he wouldn’t saddle Inman with someone who was a liability. “Which means you just called me an asshole.”
“One of those kids had a cell phone,” Inman said, grinning away the memory of that conversation as he pulled on the collar of his blue parka. “Didn’t look like a satellite phone, so I doubt it gets any service up here, but you never know. Like you said, it would be a curiosity to have the Sheikh of Khiyani hiking along the Pakistan-India border, and if the right—or wrong—people heard about it, they might get very, very curious.”
“Regardless,” Bilaal said, turning and glancing at their footprints in the fresh powdered snow that had dusted the mountains overnight. “Though it could compromise my future ability to do covert work in the region, it does not put us in any current danger. In three hours we will be at the pickup point.”
Inman nodded, glancing at their tracks and then back up at the tall, supremely confident Sheikh Bilaal. Inman was no slouch, but this man had a way of carrying himself that conveyed royalty, oozed aristocracy. Perhaps that’s why Dan liked being around him so much: The Sheikh added a touch of grace to the mostly unglamorous, sometimes horrific work they did out here in the shadows. By God, if Irene had any idea what he’d done with the very same hands he ran along her naked curves . . . hah, she’d never let him touch her again! Not that it would that bad, he thought for a moment. After all, Irene’s curves had been getting a bit too pronounced for his taste these days, he reminded himself as his jaw tightened.
Yes, Irene had always been a full-figured woman, but after the two failed pregnancies, she’d let herself go a bit, it seemed to him. It made him angry, more than anything. Here he was risking his life for the good of mankind, and she couldn’t stay tight for him? Hell, it was her duty, wasn’t it? And if she wouldn’t stay true to her duties as a wife, didn’t that relieve him of his duties as a husband? Sure. Made sense. At least that’s what Dan told himself two days ago when he visited that Pakistani brothel in Islamabad, choosing a skinny brown lass with perky little breasts, a flat stomach, and slim buttocks that were nice and tight. That was one perk of working in the shadows, Dan thought as he glanced over at the Sheikh, who kept Dan’s secrets even though he did not hesitate to voice his disapproval. Indeed, for a man who came from a culture famous for harems, polygamy, and the buying and selling of women like cattle, the Sheikh was remarkably puritan in his tastes. Dan had never seen the man indulge—even though as far as he knew, Bilaal didn’t have a woman back in his kingdom, let alone a harem of them.
“They’ll think you’re a faggot if you refuse,” Dan had sneered at Bilaal on that first mission together, when they’d finished with the bloody business of putting down a Somali warlord like the dog he was and were then offered a taste of the warlord’s private collection of concubines, young East African beauties stolen from their villages and put into service. Bilaal had ignored the comment—just like he ignored the women offered by the second-in-command who had betrayed his warlord-boss to the CIA. “Oh, I get it,” Dan had continued after emerging from the filthy tent towards the back of the camp, buttoning up his pants and tossing a used condom into the red dirt as the Sheikh stood stoically at the edge of the camp like some chaste knight of old. “The great Sheikh doesn’t slum it with these African village girls, yeah? You got your pick of Arabian whores in the opium dens of Khiyani? Not to mention the revolving door of European supermodels that wouldn’t give a Yankee cowboy like me a second look. Good for you, buddy. But I gotta take what I can get, you know? The old lady back home just ain’t cutting it for this working-class American hero.”
“It is best to consider that before one takes the vow of marriage,” the Sheikh had said as the two of them walked away from the camp. “There are challenges to keeping sex exciting and fresh in a marriage, but once you commit to a woman, you will find that the possibilities are endless.”
“I prefer the endless possibilities of this shadowy world we’re forced to deal with,” Dan had grunted, shaking his head as he glanced at the smog of Mogadishu in the distance. “And what the hell do you know about marriage?” He'd paused after saying it, almost kicking himself when he remembered that the Sheikh had been married once, a long time ago.
But the Sheikh seemed unaffected. “I know enough to not do it unless I am ready to commit to the woman body and soul, completely and absolutely, always and forever,” he had replied after the smallest of hesitations.
“Are you seriously giving me a lecture about morality after you stabbed a man in the goddamn eye?” Dan had barked.
The Sheikh had shrugged, looking towards their helicopter as it approached. “The eyeball is the quickest way to the brain. That is why when birds fight, they go for the eyes.”
“You’re a goddamn weirdo,” Dan had muttered. “Billionaire king who stabs people in the eyeballs and believes in the fairy-tale of a perfect marriage.”
Images of his not-so-perfect marriage came pushing through as Inman turned back to the treacherous mountain path ahead. He’d never thought of himself as the marriage type. Hell, he wouldn’t even be married if Irene hadn’t gotten herself knocked up three years ago! He’d done the honorable thing and put a ring on her—hell, he figured he could always get pussy on the job, and he liked her well enough even if she was a bit heavy for his taste. Irene was tough, in that frontier sort of way. She was loyal. She was . . . normal, yeah? And fuck, it was nice to have something mundane and “normal” to come home to after killing bearded Taliban warlords and humping skinny Pakistani whores strung out on Afghani heroin. And a kid wouldn’t be so bad, he had told himself back then when he thought she was pregnant. Irene would take care of the critter, and it might be kinda fun.
But then she’d miscarried, and shit had gone downhill. Irene wouldn’t stop talking about having a goddamn kid. It was like she’d suddenly gone baby-crazy. Maybe she’d always been baby-crazy—who the hell knew! He considered just walking away from the marriage. It would’ve been pretty clean. No kids, and he had no assets on the books that a divorce lawyer could track down. All that dirty money he’d stashed away had come before Irene, anyway. Before Irene, and before the Sheikh.
Dan would’ve laughed out loud if it weren’t for a gust of freezing wind that made his teeth chatter. It’s gotta be the sickest joke that nobody’ll ever hear: a man like me sandwiched between a wife like Irene and a partner like Bilaal. Hell, if there’s any good in me, it almost certainly came from one of those two!
And now he missed her. Now he wanted her warmth. Now he remembered that he hadn’t left her when it would have been so easy, that he’d held her close after the miscarriage, promised her they’d try again when she was ready. God, maybe there was a part of him that loved her, yeah? Didn’t want to fuck her so much anymore, but one out of two wasn’t bad, eh?
Dan tried to smile again, but he couldn’t, and this time it wasn’t the chilly mountain air. This time it was a reminder that Irene had rescued him in a way, that he had stayed with her because she’d given him hope that he wasn’t all bad, all dark, all shadow. She’d given him something that he carried with him, inside him. It was like she’d given him a piece of her light, her purity, her sweet innocence. And he knew he needed to give her something in return, give her the only thing she’d ever asked of him.
“Just one,” Irene had said the week before he’d left on this Pakistani job. “That’s all I want. Just one. Give me that, Dan. One’s all I want. That’s the only thing I ask of you.”
It had shaken him to hear her ask him that so explicitly, and it was the only sign a woman like Irene would ever give that she was losing her patience, perhaps losing her faith . . . her faith in him. And shit, that had shaken him in a way he didn’t think was possible. Only then had he realized how important she was to him, how her light somehow gave meaning to the darkness of his world, the darkness of his soul. He’d never be a good man, he knew—hell, the CIA didn’t recruit “good” men for this kind of work—but he was a better man because of her.
Now all Dan wanted to do was get home, to Irene. All he wanted was to give her the one thing she wanted. The urge came on so suddenly he almost choked up, tears coming to his eyes as he tried to blink them away.
“Daniel,” the Sheikh called from behind him. “Slow down, brother. It has been warm the past few days, and the top layer of snow has melted and then frozen overnight into a thin sheet of ice. There may be—”
Dan turned his head halfway and snorted as he marched on. “The desert king is teaching me about snow and mountains? You do remember that I’m from Wyoming, buddy. I’m a goddamn snow-cowboy! Yee-haw!”
“Yee-haw all you want,” said the Sheikh, who was moving carefully and deliberately and had fallen a bit behind the galloping cowboy as the chilly wind blew hard down the mountain peaks. “But I am stating a fact. And speaking of facts, Cowboy Dan, I am quite certain that I am a better equestrian than you.”
“A better what?” said Dan, half-turning again, his bearded face twisted in a frozen grin. “Oh, you goddamn over-educated, pompous—”
And then it happened with a crack, and Dan’s heavy right foot went through the thin top layer of new ice and into a small mountain stream that had eked out a shallow gully that was quietly hiding beneath the surface. Dan cursed as his foot crashed into the little channel, and then he screamed as his left foot slid on the ice, forcing all his weight onto his right knee. The knee twisted before he could engage his muscles fully, and as he went down he immediately knew he’d torn a ligament.
“Fuck!” he howled, more in anger than pain, though it hurt like a bitch. He furiously rubbed his knee through his snow pants, wincing and cursing again as Bilaal hurried over and knelt by his friend’s side.
“How bad?” asked the Sheikh in that calm voice.
“I can walk,” said Dan through a grimace. “Gimme a hand up, and—”
But Bilaal suddenly went rigid, and Dan knew the man well enough to respect his almost preternatural ability to sense danger. Like a goddamn animal, Dan thought sometimes, though he never said it out loud—mostly because the Sheikh’s “animal” instincts had saved their asses more than once.
“What?” said Dan in a whisper, trying to listen. But the wind was wailing and the blood was pounding in his ears from the shock of his injury, and Dan couldn’t hear jack.
The Sheikh was looking out over the mountains, his eyes almost glazed over. Then he grunted softly and looked down at Dan, forcing a smile that told Dan something didn’t smell right.
“I can walk,” Dan said again, grabbing the Sheikh’s strong arm and waiting for his help.
“Perhaps. But I do not think you can run. And we need to run.”
A chill passed through Dan when he saw the seriousness in Bilaal’s cool green eyes. And now Dan heard the voices: Four, maybe five men. Two sounded younger—perhaps the teenagers they’d seen? The other voices were deeper, more confident, older . . . and colder.
“You must stand,” said Bilaal quietly. “I will help you. Come.”
Dan bit his lip so hard he could taste the blood as he rose with the Sheikh’s help. His right knee was completely unstable, the combination of the external cold and the internal inflammation rendering the leg almost useless. He sure as hell couldn’t walk very fast, but he could stand. Stand and fight.
“Give me your gun and extra magazines,” said the Sheikh quietly as he unzipped his own jacket and pulled out the black Glock .17 he’d been carrying along with two spare clips.
“What?” said Dan. “Hell, I can’t move much, but I can still shoot straight.”
“There will be no shooting,” said the Sheikh. “There are five of them, and at least two are just boys.”
“Boys with guns,” muttered Dan, grimacing as he reached for his gun beneath his jacket.”
“All the more reason not to start a gunfight,” the Sheikh said, smoothly taking Dan’s gun from him. “This is not the OK Corral, American Cowboy.”
“Says the Arabian psycho I’ve watched kill over a dozen men in the most creative of ways,” said Dan as he handed over his spare magazines as well. “So you’re going to talk our way out of this, great Sheikh? Good luck. And when we’re on our knees getting our heads sawed off, my last words are gonna be ‘I told you so’!”
The Sheikh flashed a sparkling grin of perfectly aligned white teeth as the Urdu-speaking voices drew nearer. Quickly the Sheikh stepped off the path and buried their weapons in a pure white snow bank, patting down the snow and then heaping fresh powder until it looked pristine again. “We? My brother, if things go bad I will simply say I am your prisoner!” The grin faded, signaling that the time for jokes had passed. “This is our only chance and you know it. We let them search us, and when they see we are unarmed, they will be more likely to believe that I am simply here with an old college friend on a low-key macho vacation. If we start shooting, yes, we might kill all five of them without being injured. But then what? Gunshots will carry, and soon there could be a hundred more men on our tails. You cannot run, and perhaps you cannot even walk. I can carry you, but . . .”
Dan snorted and nodded, knowing the Sheikh was right. They might win a battle against five people, but they’d never outrun the next wave, not with a gimpy knee. He took a breath as he felt the tension electrify the cold dry air around the two of them, and now the five men were visible about forty yards away. Two of the teenagers from the village, and three older men with heavy beards, purple and black flowing pathani robes half-covered with well-worn down jackets and a miscellany of scarves and shawls. No AK-47s, but . . . wait, were those . . . swords?! Who the hell carried long, curved swords all sheathed in leather?
“Ya Allah, these are bandits, not terrorists. And perhaps more dangerous,” muttered the Sheikh under his breath, and for the first time in as long as he’d know him, Dan saw this unflappable king of the desert actually shaken. “This will be tricky. Just stay calm and let me do the talking.”
“Who the fuck are these clowns,” whispered Dan as he tried to stay unmoved.
“Allah taetini alqua,” said the Sheikh, almost to himself as he took a step forward. Dan could see how narrow Bilaal’s eyes were now, and he could tell there was something about these men that unsettled the mighty king. Maybe the swords. Maybe the purpose in their eyes. Either way, it looked like they had put things together already and guessed that the Sheikh was not here sightseeing. “Taetini alqua.”
“Sheikh Bilaal Al-Khiyani,” one of the bearded men called out as they approached. He smiled through his gray-flecked beard, his dark eyes riveted on Bilaal. He barked out an order in Urdu, and immediately the two teenagers took off like mountain goats back down the path towards the village. “Samiet alshshayieat,” the man said, his gaze never leaving the Sheikh, his hand resting on the hilt of a sword that—from the scabbard at least—looked like it had been well used. These men had killed before. Dan knew it in the way any killer knows another. The Sheikh had to know it too.
“I think perhaps the O.K. Corral gives us a better chance,” Dan grunted, feeling himself lose his nerve as he looked over at where Bilaal had hidden their guns. He took an uncertain step towards it, testing his knee as his mind raced. He’d never be able to run there, bend down, and straighten back up firing before the men got to him with their ridiculous but ominous-looking curved swords. But Bilaal could get there. Bilaal could yank out the guns, toss Dan’s over to him, and get this showdown started. Yee haw, right?
“Do not even think about it,” said Bilaal without turning to him. Clearly the Sheikh had noticed Dan staring down that spot in the snow. “Look straight ahead and—”
But Dan’s head was buzzing with pain and adrenaline, and all he could think of was that warm gun in his hands, the power of the kick when he pulled the trigger, the relief that would wash over him when he put down those Arab dogs like the animals they were.
“Fuck it,” Dan muttered, and he took one step and dived into the snow just as his knee buckled. He crawled desperately towards the freshly heaped snow, getting there even as he heard the men shout out, heard the sound of steel sliding across leather as they drew their swords, heard the Sheikh shout something in Urdu . . .
Now he had his gun, and with a yell Dan turned onto his side and fired. He heard Bilaal shout in surprise, and Dan fired again even as the horror sunk in that his first shot had struck the Sheikh in the left shoulder, sending a spray of the man’s royal blood into the clean snow!
“Ya Allah!” shouted the Sheikh, and Dan watched as Bilaal hurled himself at the onrushing men, swinging his right arm and connecting with one of the men’s jaw in a crushing blow that Dan could tell had cracked a jawbone.
The man was unconscious before he hit the ground, and Bilaal, his left arm soaked in his own blood, grabbed the fallen man’s sword with his right arm and dropped into a crouch, spinning and slicing with the curved steel, taking out another man’s leg clean above the knee with the strike.
Dan watched in shock as the second man crumpled into the snow, a grotesque stump where his right leg had been, his eyes rolling up in his head as he passed out from shock. He pulled the trigger again, no longer sure what he was even shooting at. The teenagers were long gone, and there was one attacker left, the man with the dark eyes and the gray-flecked beard, the one who had called the Sheikh by name. But where was he, Dan wondered in a haze as he blinked away the frosty tears from his eyes and looked around. The man Bilaal had knocked out was coming around, broken jaw and all, and Dan watched as the Sheikh kicked him in the face, shattering his nose and probably his cheekbones. The legless man had come to as well, but he was writhing and screaming, grabbing his thigh and staring at his bleeding stump that ended just above the knee.
Damn, those swords are sharp, came the strange thought as Dan watched the Sheikh turn wide-eyed toward him and break into a run. But before the Sheikh could get to him, Dan felt the movement of air, the swish of steel, the sharpness of the strike. It was the third man, the older one, and he’d somehow circled around Dan and had brought his sword down swift and clean.
Dan heard himself scream as he saw his own gun suddenly in the snow, his hand still clutching it, his fingers still coiled around it. He blinked in shock as he tried to understand how his hand could be all the way over there in the snow when he was over here. He looked at his right arm and felt himself choking when he saw the bleeding stump. Then he felt the air move again, and he saw the bearded man slice down across his belly, opening up a long gash down Dan’s midriff, splitting him wide open.
Dan was already coughing up blood when he saw the Sheikh, himself bleeding, step in with a roar and take off the third man’s head with a powerful sword-strike that must have surely used up the last of Bilaal’s energy. Sure enough, the Sheikh dropped to his knees even as the third man’s head hit the snow, those dark eyes still open.
“Come,” gasped the Sheikh as he reached for Dan’s arm. “I will carry you. We will make it.”
Dan just grinned as he felt the warm blood pour from what seemed like everywhere. Things seemed so clear now. He felt warm and relaxed as he felt life slip away from him as his blood turned the snow into red ice. It looks like a gas-station Icee, he thought as he felt a peace he’d never known, a sense of love for everyone and everything. He looked at Bilaal and spat out some blood so he could talk.
“I think I shot you,” he gurgled.
“It is just a scratch,” said the Sheikh, grinning even though Dan could see that Bilaal knew it was over, that Dan wasn’t going anywhere, that perhaps the Sheikh himself wasn’t going to make it out of these mountains.
And then Dan felt a surge of desperation, a feeling that the Sheikh had to make it out of these mountains! An image floated to him with the cold air, and Dan could see Irene now, standing there plain as day, her face full and flush, her brown eyes wide with expectation, her belly round and expecting . . .
“My wife,” Dan rasped, the words coming from he knew not where. “Bilaal, you need to make sure she . . . she . . .”
“Do not try to speak, my friend,” said Bilaal, looking down at Dan’s ravaged stomach and then quickly looking back up into his eyes. “I will use my jacket to stop your bleeding, and then you—”
“Don’t make me waste my last breath arguing,” gasped Dan. “I’m not going anywhere, and we both know it. So just fucking listen. You need to do something for me. Just one thing. My wife, she . . .”
“Of course,” said the Sheikh. “Your wife and family will never want for anything. I give you my word. I—”
“I don’t want your word. I want your . . . I mean, she wants . . . she needs your . . .” Dan blinked away the tears of confusion as he saw that image of Irene again, glowing and pregnant, pregnant with a child that he’d sent to her . . .
And then it made perfect sense. Of course it did. The failed pregnancies, her yearning for a child, his own lack of desire for her . . . and her strange, almost out of character request just before he’d left on this job. He’d never believed in fate or destiny, but it seemed so obvious now. She’d always been too good for him, and he’d proved it by fucking every whore he could find. Irene was too good to carry his child. She was royalty, wasn’t she?
“A child,” he whispered as the Sheikh’s face grew hazy and began to swirl as Dan felt himself slip away. “Give her a child, Bilaal. Give my wife a child.”