The Gray Man (3 page)
It was going to suck.
Still, he reasoned as he slammed the third and final magazine into the smoking rifle, his poor decision did serve some benefit. A half dozen dead shitheads
are
, after all, a half dozen dead shitheads.
are
, after all, a half dozen dead shitheads.
TWO
Four minutes after the sniper’s last volley, one of the Al Qaeda survivors warily leaned his head out the doorway of the tire repair shop where he had taken cover. After a few moments, each second giving him increased confidence that his head would remain affixed to his neck, the thirty-six-year-old Yemeni stepped fully into the street. Soon he was followed by others and stood with his compatriots around the carnage. He counted seven dead, made this tabulation by determining the number of lower appendages lying twisted in the bloody muck and dividing by two, because there were so few identifiable heads and trunks remaining on the corpses.
Five of the dead were his AQ brethren, including the senior man in the cell and his top lieutenant. Two others were locals.
The Chinook continued to smolder off to his left. He walked towards it, passing men hiding behind cars and garbage cans, their pupils dilated from shock. One local had lost control of his bowels in terror; now he lay soiled and writhing on the pavement like a madman.
“Get up, fool!” shouted the masked Yemeni. He kicked the man in the side and continued on to the helicopter. Four more of his colleagues were behind one of their pickup trucks, standing with the Al Jazeera film crew. The videographer was smoking with a hand that trembled as if from advanced-stage Parkinson’s. His camera hung down at his side.
“Get everyone alive into the trucks. We’ll find the sniper.” He looked out to the expanse of fields, dry hillocks, and roadways off to the south. A dust cloud hung over a rise nearly a mile away.
“There!” The Yemeni pointed.
“We . . . we are going out there?” asked the Al Jazeera audio technician.
“Inshallah.” If Allah wills it.
Just then a local boy called out to the AQ contingent, asking them to come and look. The boy had taken cover in a tea stand, not fifteen meters from the crumpled nose cone of the chopper. The Yemeni and two of his men stepped over a bloody torso held together only by a torn black tunic. This had been the Jorda nian, their leader. There was a splatter path of blood from where he’d fallen to the outer walls and window of the tea stand, all but repainting the establishment in crimson.
“What is it, boy?” shouted the Yemeni in an angry rush.
The kid spoke through gasps as he hyperventilated. Still, he answered, “I found something.”
The Yemeni and his two men followed the boy into the little café, stepped through the blood, looked around a fallen table and back behind the counter. There, on the floor with his back to the wall, sat a young American soldier. His eyes were open and blinking rapidly. Cradled in his arms was a second infidel. This man was black and appeared either unconscious or dead. There were no weapons apparent.
The Yemeni smiled and patted the boy on the shoulder. He turned and shouted to those outside. “Bring the truck!”
A dozen minutes later the three AQ pickups split at a crossroads. Nine men headed to the south in two trucks. They worked their mobile phones for local help to assist them as they went to scour the landscape for the lone sniper. The Yemeni and two other AQ drove the two wounded American prisoners towards to a safe house in nearby Hatra. There the Yemeni would call his leadership to see how best to exploit his newfound bounty.
The Yemeni was behind the wheel, a young Syrian rode in the passenger seat, and an Egyptian guarded the near-catatonic soldier and his dying partner in the bed of the truck.
Twenty-year-old Ricky Bayliss had recovered some from the shock of the crash. He knew this because the dull throbbing in his broken shin bone had turned into molten-hot jolts of pain. He looked down to his leg and could see only torn and scorched BDU pants and a boot that hung obscenely off to the right. Beyond this boot lay the other soldier. Bayliss didn’t know the black GI, but his name tape identified him as Cleveland. Cleveland was unconscious. Bayliss would have presumed him dead except his chest heaved a bit under his body armor. In a moment of instinct and adrenaline, Ricky had dragged the man free of the wreck as he crawled into a shop next to the crash, only to be discovered by wide-eyed Iraqi kids a minute later.
He thought for a moment about his friends who had died in the Chinook and felt a sadness muted by disbelief. The sadness dissipated quickly as he looked up at the man sitting above him in the truck bed. Ricky’s dead friends were the lucky bastards.
He
was the unfortunate one. He and Cleveland, if the dude ever woke up, were going to get their goddamn heads chopped off on TV.
He
was the unfortunate one. He and Cleveland, if the dude ever woke up, were going to get their goddamn heads chopped off on TV.
The terrorist looked down at Bayliss and put his tennis shoe on the young man’s shattered leg. He pressed down slowly with a wild grin that exposed teeth broken like fangs.
Ricky screamed.
The truck sped down the road, crested a rise just outside of al Ba’aj, and then quickly slowed before a roadblock at the edge of town, a standard local insurgency setup. A heavy chain wrapped to two posts hung low across the dusty pavement. Two militiamen were visible. One sat lazily on a plastic chair, his head leaning back against the wall of a grammar school’s playground. The other stood by one end of the chain, next to his resting partner. A Kalashnikov hung over his back, muzzle down, and there was a plate of hummus and flatbread in his hands, food hanging off his beard. An old goat herder urged his pitiful flock along the sidewalk on the far side of the roadblock.
The Al Qaeda man cursed the weak resolve of the insurgency here in northwestern Iraq. Two lazy men were all they could muster for a checkpoint? With such idiocy the Sunnis might as well just hand over control to the Kurds and the Yejezi.
The Yemeni slowed his truck, rolled down the window, and shouted to the standing Iraqi, “Open this gate, fool! There is a sniper to the south!”
The militiaman put down his lunch. He walked purposefully towards the pickup truck in the middle of the road. He put a hand up to his ear as if he did not hear the Yemeni’s shout.
“Open the gate, or I will—”
The Yemeni’s head swiveled away from the insurgent nearing his truck and to the one seated against the wall. The seated man’s head had slumped over to the side, and it hung there. An instant later, the body rolled forward and fell out of the chair and onto the ground. It was clear the militiaman was dead, his neck snapped at a lower cervical vertebra.
The gunman in the back of the truck noticed this as well. He stood quickly in the bed, sensing a threat but confused by the situation. Like his new leader in the driver’s seat, he looked back to the local man in the road.
The bearded militiaman approaching the truck raised his right arm in front of him. A black pistol appeared from the sleeve of his flowing robe.
Two quick shots, not a moment’s hesitation between them, dropped the Egyptian in the truck bed.
Bayliss lay on his back, looking up at the scorching noontime sun. He felt the vehicle slow and stop, heard the shouting from the driver, the impossibly rapid gunshots, and watched the masked man above him fall straight down dead.
He heard another volley of pistol rounds cracking around him, heard glass shatter, a brief cry in Arabic, and then all was still.
Ricky thrashed and shrieked, frantic to get the bloody corpse off of him. His struggle ended when the dead terrorist was lifted away, out of the truck bed, and dumped onto the street. A bearded man dressed in a gray dishdasha grabbed Ricky by his body armor and pulled him up and into a seated position.
The brutal sun blurred Bayliss’s view of the stranger’s face.
“Can you walk?”
Ricky thought it some sort of shock-induced vision. The man had spoken English with an American accent. The stranger repeated himself in a shout. “Hey! Kid! You with me? Can you walk?”
Slowly Bayliss spoke back to the vision. “My . . . my leg’s broken, and this dude is hurt bad.”
The stranger examined Ricky’s injured leg and diagnosed, “Tib-fib fracture. You’ll live.” Then he put his hand on the unconscious man’s neck and delivered a grim prognosis. “Not a chance.”
He looked around quickly. Still, the young Mississip pian could not see the man’s face.
The stranger said, “Leave him back here. We’ll do what we can for him, but I need you to get up in the passenger seat. Wrap this around your face.”
The bearded man pulled the keffiyeh head wrap from the neck of the dead terrorist and handed it to Bayliss.
“I can’t walk on this leg—”
“Suck it up. We’ve got to go. I’ll grab my gear. Move!” The stranger turned and ran down into a shaded alleyway. Bayliss dropped his Kevlar helmet in the cab, wrapped the headdress into place, climbed out of the bed and onto his good leg. Excruciating pain jolted from his right shin to his brain. The street was filling with civilians of all ages, keeping their distance, watching as if an audience to a violent play.
Bayliss hopped to the passenger door, opened it, and a masked Arab in a black dress shirt fell out into the street. There was a single bullet wound above his left eye. A second terrorist lay slumped over the steering wheel. Bloody foam dripped from his lips with his soft wheezes. Ricky had just shut his door when the American stranger opened the driver’s side, pulled the man out, and let him drop to the asphalt. He drew his pistol again and, without so much as a glance, fired one round into the man in the street. He then turned his attention to the pickup, tossed in a brown gear bag, an AK-47, and an M4 rifle. He climbed behind the wheel, and the truck lurched forward and over the lowered chain of the roadblock.
Ricky spoke softly, his brain still trying to catch up with the action around him. “We’ve got to go back. There might be others alive.”
“There aren’t. You’re it.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
Ricky hesitated, then said, “Because you were with the sniper team that fragged those dudes at the crash site?”
“Maybe.”
For nearly a minute they drove in silence. Bayliss looked ahead through the windshield at the mountains, then down at his shaking hands. Soon the young soldier turned his attention to the driver.
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