there was a gunship!” Khahari added.
Daei privately admitted to himself that in his own experience gunships could qualify as mitigating circumstances.
“And Omar Ous!” Khahari cried.
“Omar Ous, indeed?” Gholam grunted at this news. “Indeed, brother!”
“You and your brother are aware that a fatwa has been issued against Omar Ous?”
The brothers looked down at the ground. “Yes, brother.”
“And that it is your holy obligation to kill him?”
“Yes, brother.”
Daei looked for the silver lining. “And what were the civilian casualties of this assault?”
“A few broken bones, as some were trampled fleeing or injured throwing themselves out of harm’s way.”
Daei felt his anger beginning to rise. “Tell me at least this amorous Marine is dead.”
“Yes, Zurisaday herself took his head from his body.”
“Well, at least that is something. Tell me the other bad news.”
“The teashop owner, Abdullah, and his son Razi were both arrested. The tunnel between the tea shop and the bazaar has been compromised.”
“So, during the, abduction, I gather you held back and observed?”
“Yes, brother, we held back, waiting for the crowd to attack them so that our own attack would blend in,” Azimi stated.
It wasn’t the worst of plans. “And then the gunship descended and drove the crowd away?”
“Yes, brother, so we observed.”
“What did you observe?” Daei queried.
Azimi and Khahari both took out their cell phones. Daei took them and examined the video files. He watched the jerky film several times without comment. There were several decent shots of the American except that all Daei could make out was that the man was from the West, wearing a ball cap pulled low and sunglasses that hid his eyes. Daei switched to Khahari’s phone. His device clearly showed Ous knocking down one of Zurisaday’s escorts. Then the helicopter descended and turned the world into a confused maelstrom. He had some very bad footage of the pickup pulling away and Azimi taking several potshots at it.
Daei considered what he had seen.
Omar Ous was a hero among mujahideen veterans and considered a lion of the Northern Alliance. He was also ethnically Tajik. He had no use for southerners, less for Pashtuns, and considered the Taliban and their creed of Islam an abomination to be crushed. Such a man would have no compunction about shooting up the Sangin bazaar, much less gunning down female assassins in burkas. It was also well-known that he didn’t like Westerners and that he considered accepting their soldiers and their assistance a necessary evil. Yet here, digitally captured, he was following the American’s nearly suicidal rules of engagement.
Daei had been fully prepared, even expecting the escaping Marine to be a trap. He had been well prepared in the village, and he had believed so yet here again in the Marine forward base. It was an unprecedented, indeed, anomalous string of failures, one after the other, blowing up in his face like a string of firecrackers. They all had one thing in common.
The same, unknown, American operator.
He watched the video of the big American again, whirling among the living martyrs like a dervish. He was fairly sure he could take the man in hand-to-hand combat, and part of him yearned to lock horns with the American, lock him up and choke him out, only to have him awake, mewling and screaming to the final sensations of having his head sawed from his body with knife. For the moment he was invulnerable. He was surrounded by several thousand United States Marines, had Omar Ous to warn him of dangers Westerners normally couldn’t see, and had the United States Navy and God knew whom else backing his play. The situation was quite simple. Omar Ous needed to be shown the error of his ways, and the American operator needed to be cut from the herd.
Daei’s huge teeth split his black beard.
It was always good when one could kill two birds with one stone.
Sangin Base, Suspect Unit
ZURISADAY’S SKETCHES did her no justice. Even with the left side of her face swollen she was mind-emptyingly erotic. The push into Helmand Province had provided some of the heaviest fighting of the Afghanistan conflict and had provided a great number of enemy captures. The Sangin base had its own unit for processing terror suspects before shipping them out to the Kabul facilities or the United States. Zurisaday sat in a prefab holding cell complete with one-way glass. She sat staring at the glass, unblinking, with an almost reptilian hatred. Bolan had seen such looks many times before. He could feel her eyes on the other side of the glass, and he knew she could feel his. The woman was much more than a religious fanatic.
She was a sociopath.
“She said anything?” Bolan asked.
Keller looked up from a file she was amending on her laptop. “Not a peep since we brought her in.”
Bolan nodded. It would take very advanced interrogation techniques and time they didn’t have to get anything out of her. “What do we know about her escorts?”
“They’ve clammed up. Farkas suggested we leave them together for about an hour before separating them.”
“And?”
“A little bit of pay dirt. They were just dumb enough to whisper to each other. They didn’t say much except ‘say nothing’ and ‘remember your duty,’ but that was enough to determine that they’re Afghani, Pashtun and local.”
“Anything else?”
Keller clicked on the file. “They were armed with cheap-ass, copies of Russian Borz submachine guns. The knife one them attacked you with was the same knife used to murder Corporal Convertino. Zurisaday’s prints were on it, as well. I’m predicting she was the one who actually did the decapitation.”
Bolan looked into the unblinking, inhuman eyes on the other side of the glass. “I’ll buy that.”
“Yeah, but the part I don’t get? You’d think the Taliban would just put some men under burkas and be done with it.”
“For one, even though he was unarmed, Corporal Convertino was a U.S. Marine and a dangerous individual. If he found Zurisaday with only a couple of apparently helpless women with her, he would have let his guard down.” Bolan smiled faintly. “You heard Ous. You can tell a lot about a woman by how she moves in a burka. Practiced eyes, and just about every Afghan male’s eyes seem practiced, would probably spot a man beneath that garment almost instantly, and they wanted to get her and the head to an extraction point.”
“Okay, you got me, but it’s still kinda odd. The Taliban hardly ever uses women for anything except punching bags.” She cocked her head at Bolan. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking about suicide bombers in Moscow.”
Keller
