The disappearance of Dr. Khan was more troubling. The chubby little man did not have the balls to peddle the viral agent on his own. Roman made certain to put the frighteners on him. Roman was nothing if not a student of human nature and Parviz Khan was a man ruled by his own fears. But that was not to say that the man might not run into a more immediate source of fear that would make him talk.

  No, Roman must move now, during the fragile cease-fire to secure his toxic treasure. Under the cover of Putin’s cynical gesture to keep the manchild American president compromised, Roman would travel himself to Dayr al Zawr.

  The whore exited the bathroom glistening with water that stood on her perfect ebony skin like diamonds. She smiled winningly at Roman. He turned to her, jaw working on the mouthful of bread, and nodded to the table beside the bed where a sheaf of Euros lay. She shrugged and picked up the bills, dressed and left the room without another word.

  Two lives, he thought to himself. We all live two lives. And soon he would live a third or die in the attempt.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HALO

  Woody was falling at over a hundred miles an hour and gaining speed with every foot. The rush of noise through his helmet was the roar of a wind created by his own body surrendering to gravity’s pull.

  Falling below him was Priest, first out of the belly of the modified B-2 Stealth bomber. Woody got the Number Two slot because HALO was one area where he had more experience than the rest of the team. He loved freefall and wangled his way into any jump exercise that would have him. He became known as a drop junkie at Benning and Bragg. Those two minutes of flight were like a week at the beach for him so Priest tagged Woody to follow him into the cold and dark.

  And it was cold.

  At 35,000 feet the temp was fifty below zero. And the air was thin. Throughout the climb to their exit height over the target area they pre-breathed pure oxygen to purge their bloodstream of nitrogen. Without that they risked the bends when the air pressure radically changed as they fell. The same risks that could cripple deep-sea divers could leave them wracked with pain in their joints upon landing and far from combat capable. Each man had an oxygen bottle they breathed until reaching ten thousand feet. Under their jump suits they wore a densely weaved insulating underwear to keep them from frostbite.

  The dark was defeated by the NODs gear worn by each man. Russian-made night vision gear was attached to their visors. They’d hold onto this gear to use on mission.

  Woody glanced to the east to see the curve of the planet lit like a crescent of green fire from the rising sun still an hour away over the horizon. He looked to Priest, a ghostly figure dropping into blackness a hundred yards beneath him. He turned and could see the rest of the team arrayed above him and spaced evenly as though suspended from an invisible strand. Of their delivery plane he could see nothing. The B-2 had vanished as though never there.

  In a High Altitude Low Opening jump the only reference point you had was your fellow jumpers. You minded your place in the row and kept your distance. At 125 mph the most dangerous thing in the sky, after yourself, was one of your own cannoning into you at lethal speed. So, Woody kept eyes on Priest and peripherals on the four other men who seemed to be hanging motionless and stacked above him. They were jumping silent just in case anyone was monitoring frequencies on the ground or in the air. In fact, only Blair had any kind of comm equipment: a satellite phone of Korean manufacture. Not exactly standard issue for the bad guys but not so out there it would draw questions on its own.

  The team was jumping light this time. On a normal combat HALO they might have been burdened with as much as one hundred pounds of gear. Your averagemujahideen wasn’t that well equipped. They were strapped with their rifles, sidearms, blades, ammo, canteens, webbing and undercover clothing. The NODs would be re-purposed. They would feed themselves as they went.

  They’d already eaten cloves of garlic washed down with olive oil to fit in scent-wise. A jihadi who smelled like Dial soap would make himself known faster than a fart in an elevator. The medical supplies they carried were either of a commercial variety available in the region or military issue from any country other than the USA. They had cash secreted on them in case that might be needed. Euros and Egyptian pounds. In total a forty-pound load maximum per man, most of it ammo.

  Through the NODs, Woody saw the field below Priest turn from black to sea green to a luminescent shade of lime. Woody spit the oxy intake from his mouth. Priest’s chute bloomed black. Their gear was manual. Woody jerked his pull ring and was suddenly yanked upwards with a gonad-clanging sensation. He gripped and tucked as his descent slowed radically and then he was boots-down and tumbling before drawing himself to a stop and rushing back to crush the gathered air from the chute.

  Time aloft: under two minutes. Blink and you miss ’em. Anyone on the ground would have to have been looking for them with the eyes of an owl. The section of desert they dropped into was an empty quarter east of the Euphrates but an easy hike of thirty miles to Dayr al Zawr. They’d be there by morning.

  The team landed remarkably close to one another; a tight jump had its risks but saved them the time of locating their company before moving on. They worked with entrenching tools to make a hole against the wall of a dry wash and bury their jumpsuits, helmets, underwear, chutes, packs and lines. The equipment buried, they worked to spread stones and earth over the spot until it blended into the landscape.

  They dressed in layers of their new clothing. Mix-matched BDUs from a variety of Arab states and civilian dress. T-shirts, loose-fitting pullovers found at any souk or mall in the region. Keffiyeh cloths worn as scarves or headdress. They adjusted webbing and packs and did a quick but through weapons check. They all carried what looked like regular issue AKs except for Chili who was humping a Dragunov sniper rifle with a collapsing stock. They kept hideaway pistols concealed in pockets or belt pouches. Berettas and Brownings that could have been picked up anywhere on their adventures or purchased in the border gun markets that sprang up all over the region wherever the fighting was ripe.

  The team performed a radio check. Each man was equipped with a satellite-linked radio set and wireless earbud. Their every utterance was picked up by an agency transponder piggybacking inside a TerraStar satellite in geo-stat orbit above them. The transmissions were encrypted using a US Navy code that was a variation of the A5/2 algorithm used by commercial phone companies. Even if someone picked up their transmissions they would be heard as electronic noise and most probably mistaken for chatter between aircraft. The radios themselves were disguised as pagers of South Korean manufacture and common enough in the region to escape special attention.

  Before setting out they ate cold lamb, bread and figs from foil wrappers they packed along; all food laced with garlic, of course. They drank water from plastic bottles they’d carried along in addition to the contents of their canteens. Every man on the team was starving. Boyle's Law of Gases, familiar to all of them, applied to all liquids, solids and gases. Jumping with a full belly would be incapacitating and even deadly in the brutal conditions of freefall from the edge of space. They’d gone hungry since Aviano and were restoring calories for the route march ahead of them.

  The bottles were crushed and buried along with the foil wrappers. Even if found, they’d just be more of the astonishing amount of trash to be found in the Syrian Desert. They were near the hot border with Iraq. As abandoned as this country would appear, it was a high traffic zone for jihad, smuggling and nomadic migration.

  “You mentioned a contact when we were in the air to Aviano,” Priest said to Blair.

  “A man on the ground that we can trust,” Blair answered.

  “Your basis for that is what?” Priest said. The others were content to listen.

  “The sacrifices he’s made. The risks he’s taken. He’s an Armenian Christian and he’s kept us updated on conditions on the ground since this fell into my lap.”

  “You know him? You vouch for him?”

  “He’s solid. I’ve worked with him before. He’s provided hum-int on Chechen militias and a few Alawite militias. The guy is an active anti-jihadist on the agency payroll. He was born in Dayr al Zawr and agreed to go home to work with us,” Blair said. "Hum-int" was human intelligence. That was a fancy term for an actual person on the ground doing what was once referred to as spying.

  “We’re all going to need the contact’s name, Freeman.” It was Priest again.

  “Why? He’s my guy. He doesn’t know you.”

  “You might get killed or wounded. That would leave us up shit creek.”

  Blair rubbed fingers through his beard.

  “Hagop Sibrian,” he said finally.

  “We good?” Priest said.

  All responded with one word answers.

  “No English from here on,” Priest said.

  Affirmations in Arab and Farsi.

  “Sehr gut,” Woody grinned. All but Priest laughed. But Woody could have sworn he saw a smile come and go in a second on that wooden Indian face. But it was probably just a trick of the light.

  Priest took the lead and walked out of the wash into the dark.

  Rucked up and armed for a fight, the SEALs and their agency handler formed a spaced-line and moved south and west for the banks of the most ancient of rivers.

  ****

  The sun was at their backs as they reached the hills sloping down to the Euphrates. There was no outward sign that this was a country at war. The ground leveled and turned from dead sand and rock to green. They made their way down a lane between almond trees to the first inhabited buildings they’d seen since dropping from the sky. Goats skipped out of their way and kids peeped at them from windows. Not an adult in sight but the SEALs could feel eyes on them all the way to the river road. They imagined the silent prayers of the unseen farmers as these rough men crossed their orchards.

  “Please, Lord, let them pass.”

  The west river road was a two-lane that snaked along the river. Light traffic of overloaded trucks and mopeds zipped past along the shoulders. Some armed men waved greetings as their technicals rolled past. Others glowered sullenly while leaning on their AAA guns. No one offered a ride, which suited the infidels just fine.

  The road looped around a stretch of the river that broadened to the size of a lake before hooking away from the river past alfalfa fields on one side and hills dotted with grape arbors on the other. They came to the first collection of buildings of more than two stories in height. It was the campus of a medical school. Here they turned right to follow a road that led to the Al Muallaq Bridge, which spanned the river to the city of Dayr al Zawr proper.

  They were in the city now and saw their first signs of war. Buildings had collapsed to block streets all around. Many buildings had boarded up windows. Stacks of sand bags and cinder blocks formed barriers in front of doorways to what looked like hotels, apartment buildings and storefronts. Flags and banners hung from buildings with Al Qaeda’s black flag in evidence as much as was the flag of the FSA. Every vertical surface was covered in revolutionary or religious imprecations in spray painted Arabic. Guns were everywhere. Anti-aircraft cannons mounted in the beds of Toyotas and Fords were as common as minivans in a mall parking lot on Saturday. Machine gun emplacements ringed with sand-filled barrels stood at major intersections. Men sat smoking and talking in the shade of awnings. They might be part of a lunch hour crowd in any city in the world but for the AKs and RPGs at hand. There were no women visible anywhere.

  No one paid attention to the SEALs other than the fruit juice vendors and some children. The vendors waved bagged juices and held hands out for coins before hustling back to their carts. A pack of kids trotted alongside for a few blocks followed by yapping dogs. They seemed particularly fascinated with Heath. Black men, Sub-Saharan Africans, were not unknown among jihadis but still rare enough to be remarked upon. After Khadafi’s fall in Libya, whole segments of black African Muslims had fallen from favor in the terror world. Bejas and other tribes were his most loyal followers and so suffered the wrath of al Shabaab and other groups. But with the rise of Al Qaeda forces in Mali, Nigeria, Somalia and other countries under black leadership, the face of the world of terror was changing. The brothers were being accepted again.

  Heath ignored the kids and they finally petered away with the dogs following them, the last of the hounds encouraged by a kick from Pig. The SEALs came to another bridge that spanned a narrow branch of the Euphrates and intersected River Street, a north-south avenue that curved with the river bank and was lined with ranks of sun-bleached apartment buildings. This road took them through a section of the city marked by storefronts in Armenian. Many of these were shuttered with rude phrases in Arabic painted across the plywood. A few were burnt out with walls scorched black and sunlight showing through holes in the rooftops. These were not the result of war. This was persecution. The Armenians were Christians. Though the stated goal of the uprising was to oust Assad and restore freedom to the land, many took advantage of the chaos to settle old scores. Orthodox Armenians who had lived here in peace for centuries were now a targeted minority. They might wear FSA colors and still be condemned for the crosses about their necks.

  The same thing was true across this Arab Spring. Democratic revolts turned into purges for minorities. Kurds suffered in Iraq. Coptics and Sufis in Egypt. Blacks in Libya. And Jews? Well, if you were a Jew in any of these countries you got while the getting as good. In each case the populace may have suffered under a brutal strongman but that same tyrant’s laws provided protection for smaller groups as well as keeping the Sunnis and Shias from each other’s throats. Now all bets were off and it was open season on your neighbor. Maybe he worshipped Christ. Maybe he also worshipped Allah but not in the “right” way. Maybe he cheated someone in a deal for a car. Maybe he hit on the wrong guy’s sister or his dog pissed on someone’s front step. For whatever reason, once the Assad regime was made irrelevant across much of Syria, all bets were off and the Thunderdome opened for business.

  Priest stopped before what appeared to have been a bakery once. The glass front was gone and iron bars torn off. The interior was trashed. Display cases and furniture were broken and lay in heaps against the walls. Something approximating “Jesus wed a whore” was scrawled across one wall in poorly drawn Arabic.

  Blair caught up with him as the others walked on north along the road. They picked Uzbeki as the language they both spoke but would discourage listeners. The streets were empty but for truck and moped traffic and the armed men who loitered around technicals parked at every intersection. The SEALs drew no special interest as they continued past. Priest and Blair brought up the rear and reassessed as they walked.

  “Our contact, this Armenian, you can still find him?” Priest said.

  “Yes,” Blair said. “All of this happened since our last communication. But he anticipated it.”

  “If we go poking around here looking for him we will draw heat.”

  “We arranged a fallback contact point. It’s ahead and to the left. Not far.”

  “If it’s still there.”

  “It will be there. It’s been there for a few hundred years.”

  “A church?” Priest said.

  “Yes. Armenian Holy Martyrs Church,” Blair said and suppressed a wince.

  “Beautiful.”

  ****

  They found the church nestled in a block with apartments close all around. It was a fine structure faced with peach-colored marble and virtually untouched but for the removal of the cross from the peak of its tiled rooftop. In its place was the black flag of Al Qaeda emblazoned with the Shahada in swirling Arabic:

  There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God.

  A battered and rusty Subaru with an anti-tank gun bolted down on its bed sat at the foot of the church steps. A man sat smoking on the running board. More men were visible in the shade of the church balcony. They silently watched the new group walking down the center of the rubble-strewn street.

  Across from the church a cable was slung between utility poles. Dangling from the cable were the bodies of a half dozen men. They hung unmoving by the neck. Their bodies were surrounded by clouds of black flies. Each wore signs draped about their necks scrawled with Arabic for “infidel” and “apostate” and “enemy of God.” Priest spoke low to tell the others to keep moving. They did not slow. The SEALs kept up their deliberate pace as though their destination were further along the roadway and deeper into the Abu Abed Quarter.

  “Where do we look now?” Priest said when they had left the church and its watchful occupants behind.

  “I’m out of ideas. But I have a suspicion where Sibrian might be,” Blair answered without turning.

  “Is he far?”

  “He’s behind us. He’s back there swinging from a noose.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE BOY

  Gharib watched the six men walking away from the Martyrs Church. They moved easy down the center of the street never looking from side to side. The men did not speak to one another but for two men in the center of the pack who spoke low. Gharib could catch some of the conversation but it was in a tongue he could not follow. He sensed tension in the voice of one of the men. The words were unknown to Gharib but the tone was plain.

  The group could be any foreign fighters drawn to Syria’s misery. They carried themselves with the sullen arrogance of the mujahideen. Gharib watched from the cellar window of a looted butcher shop. At twelve years old, Gharib was an experienced watcher. Knowing how to watch was the difference between life and death. Every man was assessed for the level of danger he presented. All foreigners were bitter and armed and prone to sudden violence. Staying alert for the portents, when that bitterness would turn to anger and then to murder, was important. The signs were there for all who knew what to look for.