“Well, we don’t have the explosive ord to knock down armor, bro!”

  “Don’t we?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  TO PARADISE AND BEYOND

  Ma’ruf Haddad, The Fist, the Lion of Allah, the Scourge of the Infidel and Wolf of Herat lay in the rubble; the light dying from his eyes. His final sight, before his broken shell breathed its last, was the sight of his own men running over his body in terror. Their hate was forgotten and his grip on them was gone. They became cowardly goatherds once more. They even bleated as goats do in a mountain lightning storm.

  Haddad thought he could hear the thunder but his eyes saw no streaks of electricity as all around him dimmed. He felt a cold wind across his flesh that threatened to carry him away. He waited for the soft touch of rain but it would not come. Then the storm passed and took him with it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  BREAKING AND ENTERING

  “Pull up! Pull up! Stop at the bank!”

  Roman was back down inside the armored truck calling orders to the driver. Bullets rattled on the armor outside. Someone, no, more than two or three someones, was firing small arms at him. He would not risk full exposure in the turret hatch until it was needed.

  “Bank? Which is bank?” The driver turned to him, eyes wide as goose eggs.

  Roman joined him in the driver compartment. He worked a lever to open the steel vents on a viewport wider.

  “Little more! Pull up a little more!” Roman said, gesturing with his hand.

  “I think is far enough. Okay?” the driver stammered.

  “I say when we stop, govnosos!” Roman shouted at him.

  As terrified as the driver was of what was outside the truck, he feared the Russian more. Even the promise of his share of the contents of a bank vault was not enough to quell the liquid rumble in his guts. He clamped his sphincter tighter and put his foot down on the accelerator.

  “Here! Here we are! Stop! Stoy!” Roman shouted. Through the vents he could see the bullet-riddled, nondescript face of the Saudi bank. The street number was still readable. This was where the chimera lay. It was a simple thing to walk inside and claim it for his own.

  But he would not leave the shelter of his steel cocoon until he was certain of his surroundings.

  Roman left the driver and lifted up the body armor vests he’d stripped from the bodies following the ambush at Palmyra. They were smeared with a mess of crusted blood and hair. It did not matter. He slipped into one and strapped it tight about his chest. He dropped another over his head and wore it sideways; the chest and back panels acting to protect his shoulders and arms from above. To complete the ensemble he dropped a helmet atop his head and strapped it tight under his chin. He imagined he resembled a samurai from a costume drama with his layers of armor and bare legs.

  “You will stay! You will not move!” he called to the driver.

  The driver nodded, sweat spraying from his hair.

  “No matter what happens!”

  The driver nodded with a good deal less enthusiasm. But the fear of Roman was clearly visible in his eyes.

  The doubled armor was heavy and awkward. It took a great deal of effort to squeeze up through the hatch to the cannon. Roman stood with his booted feet on the circular foot bar and pulled the charging lever to rack a fresh round into the weapon. He turned the turret to bring the guns to bear on the face of the bank. A rifle round struck sparks off the hatch lid near his head. A second punched him hard in the armor pad resting on his arm. It hurt like a bitch but the ceramic slab at the pad’s center took the brunt of the force. Between the angled shields built onto the gun and his added armor, very little of Roman was exposed to fire. He leaned into the padded shoulder stabilizers, gripped the trigger handles and pressed the levers home.

  At near point-blank range and aimed at a flat trajectory, the 20mm shells drilled through the front of the bank fracturing brick and concrete and reducing any glass still left in the frames to powder. The steel barred grids over the windows came away from where they were bolted in the mortar. They dropped to the rubble with a clank. Roman swept the gun back and forth in a tight arc until the hammer clacked on an empty chamber.

  He slid back down into the truck and slammed the hatch after him. Bullets struck all around the hatch as he dogged it shut. He sat by the driver and flipped open a door on the console revealing a row of toggles.

  “Put on your mask,” Roman growled. He removed his helmet and slid a rubber gas mask over his sweat-slick head. The driver did the same. Roman flipped all the toggles up.

  All at once, projectiles flew from the tubes atop the armored car to ricochet from the walls of the buildings along the street and scatter along the street in either direction.

  The Russian had loaded the tubes with canisters of a very nasty gas. It was a noxious cocktail created exclusively by Assad’s weaponeers: a combined asphyxiant and regurgitant. The victim simultaneously choked to death and vomited. It was technically non-lethal but effectively deadly to targets more than half the time.

  The street filled like a bowl with a thick, cloying gas.

  Roman exited the armored car through the bay hatchway. In his body armor, boxers and boots, he walked through the toxic fog and into the bank unopposed.

  ****

  Heath loped from the garage toward what he prayed was the armored truck’s blind side. He held the tricked-out artillery shell in his arms. It trailed wire behind it back into the garage. Pig covered him from the opening, an AK trained on the man under the heap of body armor up atop the truck.

  The mental patient in the turret was working the cannon and tearing the business block a new asshole. He seemed consumed with the task.

  The SEAL moved along the side of the armored truck out of sight of the driver. The deafening noise and falling dust covered his approach. There were frames for camper-sized side-view mirrors mounted on the driver-side hatch but the glass had been long ago shot or blown away. Heath stopped at the big knobby rear tires and wedged the 122mm between two of them. The gun above stopped him and the street went silent but for the rumbling engine in the guts of the truck. The next sound was the top hatch clanging shut and the squeak of locking levers being pulled in place.

  Heath checked that the wires were secure around the body of the shell and on the detonator hub exposed inside the warhead. He ducked at a series of sharp detonations going off in sequence over his head. Metal canisters clanked and clonked off the walls on either side of the street. Billows of dense green smoke sprayed from them as they tumbled through the air and fell to the street spinning. A sharp chemical sting reached his nose. He felt his eyes burning and his throat closing.

  Son of a bitch! The green gas closed around him, blinding him. He gripped the cable leading from the arty shell and felt an answering tug. Pig was leading him home. Fighting down the urge to spew his guts out, Heath hand-over-handed along the cable until he felt fingers grip his shoulder.

  “Battery,” Heath croaked.

  “Gharib has it! Come on!” Pig shoved him into the garage keeping a grip on the back of his neck. Together they ran stumbling into the shadows of the garage with tendrils of the sickening fog reaching for them. Pig kept a loose grip on the loop of the cable and fed it out behind him. They followed the boy trotting before them with the weight of the car battery in his hands.

  ****

  The 20mm rounds had savaged the offices in the bank’s interior. Walls had been chewed down as though by an enormous beast until it was impossible to tell where a room once ended and another began. Furniture was reduced to jagged flinders. Water sprayed from a sundered line in the ceiling. Nothing could have survived the dozens of HE rounds and countless fragmentation pellets that ripped through the building’s lower floors from front to back.

  Roman picked his way carefully through the wreckage. There was glass everywhere. The floor was covered in a thick carpet of plaster and concrete chunks as well as metal rods with pointed javelins of lumber sticking up from the mess like spear points. He used the butt of the rifle to knock them aside. His visibility was limited to the view through the greasy lenses of the gas mask. No matter. He knew his way from schematics he downloaded from FIS files. He knew much more than that. It would be the work of moments to open the vault and remove his hard-won prize.

  He was suddenly heaved from his feet and hurled over the scree of rubble by a scorching wind. The Russian caromed off a heap of fallen debris. He came to rest against what was left of a decorative malachite-topped table. On the street, the armored car had flipped on its side. A choking pall of black smoke joined the verdant haze as the tires melted in the flames created by leaking diesel.

  So, he would walk from this place. No matter. The truck and driver had served its purpose. It would be more time consuming to make his way out of here on foot, true. But, in the end, it might be the better option. He would join the ragged stream of refugees, an unfortunate soul seeking respite from the fighting and carrying only his meager possessions along with him. Yes, it would be best to walk.

  A lancing pain in his leg made him gasp aloud. The air exploding from him caused the gas mask to expand and then retract when he sucked in a breath and held it against the abrupt agony. His calf was pierced through by a length of steel rod that might have been part of a chair or desk the day before. The two-foot rod impaled him through the muscle at the back of his only leg. There was surprisingly little blood. It had missed the bone. Small favors. Small miracles.

  Roman lifted the heavy armored vests from his shoulders. He settled back against an intact section of wall to take weight off the leg. Roman tore lengths of nylon strap from the vests and tied them together then wrapped the combined length around his leg above the knee and knotted it tight. The rubber of his mask was working like a bellows. He gripped the longest end of the steel rod. He forced himself to slow his breathing and relax. Tensed muscles would actually grip the steel rod and create a suction to hold it in place against his strongest efforts to remove it.

  Roman pictured a beach of sand as white and fine as sugar. All around him, dusky maidens with breasts high and full waited to answer his slightest whim. Gentle banks of waves marched shoreward topped with creamy foam.

  He pulled hard and the steel came free with a pain that made his vision spin. He fought down a rush of nausea. No, not a good idea to puke inside a gas mask. He pulled the strap tight around his thigh. There was little blood. The rod had torn through muscle but missed a major vessel. He stood, putting weight on the leg. It was enough to make sweat stand out on him. He could bear it. He had no choice.

  Maintaining a grip on the end of the nylon strap, he hobbled further in the bank. His rifle was nowhere to be found; lost in the disorder he created. No matter. He’d find another somewhere in his journey. And one day he’d have no need of a gun. A warrior all his adult life, he longed for the time when this was all behind him and he’d never again think of war. What did it matter to him that the price for that peace was potentially the deaths of millions?

  The vault was scarred but inviolate. It stood stout and impregnable despite the film of dust on its polished metal surface and the drift of rubbish lying against the door. He used a length of timber to clear it all away then leaned his weight against the cool steel to relieve the pressure pulsing from the wound in his calf. He loosened his tourniquet a twist or two and saw that the blood flow from the wound only increased by a trickle. He’d need to clean it as soon as possible. He’d need to have it packed and copious amounts of antibiotics and painkillers pumped into his hide. That was later. That was after he had his prize in his hands once more.

  The combination to the vault was something he paid dearly for in cash and favors and shared intelligence. It was a twenty-digit code that he committed to memory. He pulled the cover from the keypad set in the face of the vault door and entered the code. The keypad was powered, in the event of an electrical failure, by a battery with a ninety-day life. It was nearing the end of that life. He’d come just in time.

  The last digit entered, Roman was rewarded by sound and movement within the heart of the vault door. He could feel it against the skin of his cheek through the metal. The perfect symbiosis of machine and electronics as gears rotated and latches caught and released and the mechanisms that secured this real-life Aladdin’s cave from the thieves of the world spun and acted to reverse the locks. In spite of the torture from his wounded leg, Roman laughed; his mirth taking the form of a stuttering hiss between clenched teeth amplified by the enclosing mask.

  He hopped back, favoring his prosthetic leg, pulling the massive lever with him until the vault door was open enough for him to enter. The lights did not come on within the vault. As Roman limped into the gap a figure emerged from the gloom. A tall man with gray eyes stepped up close and simultaneously gripped the back of Roman’s head with one hand and drove the tip of a knife just behind the point of his chin and up and into his skull. The Russian knew nothing else.

  Priest turned the blade in the wound to release it from where it lodged in the sinus cavities and withdrew it. He dropped the corpse, pulling the gas mask from its head as it fell. Priest secured the mask to his own face and took a deep breath that was tinged with the smell of strange sweat.

  He wiped his blade on his pant leg and re-sheathed it. Priest looked down at the nearly naked, one-legged man lying at his feet and wondered for a moment who he might be. The man wore no clothes and therefore no identification and even that would probably prove false. The corpse was a European, probably sent here on the same mission as the SEALs. The false leg wasn’t of US manufacture. There were a few tattoos on the dead man with Cyrillic letters including one of a map of Afghanistan under crossed daggers. A Russian then.

  Priest stepped back into the vault and exited with a plastic container that looked like nothing more than a cooler that one might take to a picnic or tailgate party. Except that this cooler was bright yellow and covered in stickers featuring the biohazard symbol of three conjoined crescents against a circle in the center. There were other labels in Arabic. The cooler matched the descriptions given them in the mission briefs. This was what they came for, what they killed for, what they still might die for.

  The lone SEAL stepped out into the killer fog to find his teammates and begin the exfiltration phase of the operation.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  MEANWHILE IN BELGIUM

  A third alarm went off in the Brussels office of Sarchannes-Osito Securitech, EU.

  This one closed down the game just as the security operator had discovered the sexy witch lounging naked on a bed inside the keep of Castle Dread. The screen filled with block letters in French, Dutch, English, Arabic and Japanese. A flashing red border surrounded the alert. A squawking claxon rang in his headphones painfully.

  “Salope!” the security operator cried and tore off the headphones.

  “What is it, Andre?” The neighbor at the next station interrupted an online chat with his other mistress.

  “Dayr al Zawr! It says that someone opened the vault!”

  It was five in the morning in Brussels. An ungodly hour, but this would require more than another Post-It.

  The security operator reached for the phone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  THE GOOD NEIGHBOR

  The horde of refugees moving north toward the Turkish border was pinched to a narrow strand to follow a two-lane dirt road. The road lead to the town of Nusaybin on the Turkish side and was lined on either side by barbed wire fencing posted with warnings about the mines planted in the brushy land beyond the wire. The miles-long snake of human traffic moved at a crawl toward the border station manned by the army. On the Syrian side there were no such signs of authority. Bashar Assad was only too pleased to see the backs of the human trash fleeing like rats from a burning house. He would not lift a hand to slow their progress.

  Yuxbashi Karamat Ekmekçi, a captain in the Turkish 4th Mechanized Infantry Brigade, shared the Syrian strongman’s opinion. He stood on the hood of a transport and scanned the mob of cowards streaming toward his homeland with all they could carry. The captain shaded his eyes with a gloved hand and regarded the collection of Kurds, Armenians, Druze, Arabs and Sunni filth packing the road. He wrinkled his nose. He could smell them. If he had his way they would plant mines on the roadways as well and set up machine gun towers working night and day to mow down anyone trying to enter from the south.

  “Even the women and children?” his sergeant said from the driver’s seat after one of Ekmekçi’s more colorful rants.

  “Especially them,” the captain snorted. “The bitches just whelp more of the little bastards. From pups grow hounds. The smallest baby sucking at its mother’s tit will grow up to be a rabid dog one day. We have enough of these animals within our borders now.”

  The captain looked down to see his brand new boots covered with a layer of dust. He was used to being able to see his reflection in the highly polished leather. Now they were powdered with the grimy cloud raised by these miserable wretches. This was no place for a soldier. That is, no place for a soldier unless the order was to direct artillery and air strikes down on this rabble to turn them back.

  Still, orders were orders. Captain Ekmekçi was tasked this morning to watch for six Americans expected along this way, mixed in with the sluggish flow of refugees. Their presence here was classified. His superior told him that their NATO ally requested that the returning team of men be met by Turkish authorities. This was a courtesy to the government in Ankara. It was also a precaution. The Americans did not wish to make their presence known here in any way.

  And so, the captain stood atop the hood of the truck while his boots and uniform became ever more soiled. He was not told exactly when these Americans would arrive or by what means or even what they might look like. He only knew there would be six and that they would have a prearranged countersign in answer to his challenge.