Gaffar was playing it beautifully. Apparently he was serious about being likable. The conversation was flowing nicely, punctuated every few seconds with laughter. Rapp couldn’t make out individual words anymore, but that was by design. Gaffar was speaking quietly enough to force the men to gather in close. A nice tight grouping, but one that was going to put him in the line of fire.
Rapp waited for another burst of laughter and fired two shots in quick succession. He abandoned his normal headshot—too obvious and messy—instead going for center of mass. He’d threaded the first rounds through the men with their backs to him and hit ones on the other side. The third shot was complicated by Gaffar’s position in the group and took longer to line up than he would have liked. The two men he’d shot had nearly hit the ground when he finally squeezed the trigger and struck a man just below where his assault rifle was hanging across his torso.
The driver shouted a warning and Gaffar picked up on what was happening without missing a beat. He screamed something about Mohammed and his gang and pulled his weapon, firing in the wrong direction to reinforce the illusion of a shooter to the south.
They all followed suit, opening up on the windows of the building across the street. Chunks of wood, vaporized concrete, and shattered glass rained down as Rapp lined up on the back of the driver. A quick squeeze of the trigger dropped him. Leadership gone. Next he turned his weapon on a man from the back of the truck who had seemed unusually wary and athletic.
Gaffar suddenly jerked and went down hard. It was violent enough to make Rapp hesitate for a moment, concerned that there was a shooter unaccounted for. He quickly realized it was just for show. Gaffar was now on his back behind the three surviving men.
Rapp returned to his target and dropped the man just as his companion lost the back of his head to a round fired by Gaffar. The last man standing suddenly stopped shooting and looked around him, confused. A moment later Rapp put a bullet into his right temple.
Then everything went silent again.
Rapp motioned to the others before running into the street to gather weapons. “Are you injured?”
“I’m fine,” Gaffar said, getting up and dusting himself off.
Rapp tossed him an AK before dumping the other guns into the bed of the pickup. By then Shada was behind him and he helped her over the gate. Gaffar jumped in next to her and began pulling the others over the side. Mohammed helped Yusef in before running for the passenger door of the cab.
By the time Rapp began accelerating up the road, Gaffar had the people in back holding their weapons in a way that would make them look enough like an ISIS patrol to fool the casual observer.
“There,” Mohammed said, pointing through the windshield. “Turn left and swing around. We’ll have a straight path out of the city.”
Rapp did as he suggested but didn’t otherwise acknowledge him. With a little luck, they would be on a chopper in an hour and he would never lay eyes on Mohammed Qarni again.
CHAPTER 4
Rabat
Morocco
HAYK Alghani stood at the edge of the window, looking down on the winding souk below. He’d seen the flash of headlights a few moments ago, but now they’d gone dark. The suddenness of it suggested not a passing vehicle but one that had stopped.
The dizziness he felt began to intensify, causing his stomach to churn nauseatingly. He gagged and was forced to run for the bathroom. Pulling open the cracked toilet lid, he vomited into its stained bowl. Not much longer, he told himself. Soon it would all be over.
Or would it?
There was no question that he had done this to himself, but it seemed like another life now. The arrogant young man who had fled authorities in Sevastopol to join ISIS no longer existed inside him. And perhaps never had.
As always in his life, his current problems had begun with a woman. She was beautiful and impassioned—a devout Muslim who thought about nothing but God and the struggle. Despite having abandoned Islam after leaving home as a teenager, he became infatuated with her unquestioning faith and unwavering sense of purpose. It was she who convinced him to flee into the welcoming arms of jihad. To give up his life of petty crime in favor of a far grander purpose: the creation of a new caliphate.
After a rushed marriage, they used contacts she’d made on the Internet to cross into Syria and then they were taken overland by ISIS representatives. To where, neither of them knew, but it didn’t matter. They were out of the European authorities’ reach and he was under the seductive spell of her beauty and her world of radical Islam. Wherever they ended up, they would fight for God against the evils of the West.
It was a simple matter to pinpoint the moment it had all gone wrong. They had been traveling for days, dodging Assad’s death squads, Russian planes, and American drones. Sleep had consisted of fleeting moments in bombed-out ruins or caves. Finally, they arrived in an ISIS outpost beyond the infidels’ reach. Mira went with a group of women to bathe. There she would have taken off her chador and been seen by them.
Later that day, he and Mira were separated from the rest of the recruits and put in a sweltering SUV that headed west across the desert. He started to become nervous when the driver refused to answer questions, but not Mira. Her certainty was unshakable. She believed that they had been chosen for some special purpose. That her destiny was to change the course of history.
When they were granted a personal audience with Mullah Sayid Halabi, she became even more ecstatic. To be brought before the man who was so loved by Allah. Who struck such terror into the hearts of the Americans. It was an honor that even she had never considered. He remembered her pledging her endless devotion and the amusement in the pale blue eyes that Halabi had been gifted by ancient invaders of his homeland.
Her eyes had been very different. Dark and filled with the glory of God. That quickly turned to horror when she was informed that her role in the struggle would be as a member of Mullah Halabi’s harem. Alghani could still hear her pleading with him to save her as she was dragged from the room. But there was nothing he could do.
Once she was gone, he’d found himself standing alone before the ISIS leader. The amusement was gone from his eyes. They now seemed dead. Like water pooled in the empty sockets of a skull.
He had quickly pledged his own emphatic allegiance to the mullah and expressed how proud he was to provide his young wife to the cause. When Halabi’s men began to close in from behind, Alghani desperately tried to find something that would make those eyes come alive again. He finally struck on it when he mentioned his great skill in financial crimes. The subtle change in the mullah’s expression made him speak even faster, boasting about his expertise in fraud, laundering, and concealing bank transactions from authorities. A motion from the mullah’s hand stopped the advance of his men and changed Alghani’s life forever.