Acts of Vengeance

CHAPTER ONE BETRAYAL

It sounded like a distant storm.

Colonel Jamal Al-Fasr pulled the Land Rover over to the soft shoulder of the highway. He rolled the window down and cocked his head, listening.

There it was again. A familiar rumble. An alarm sounded in Al-Fasr’s mind.

Shakeeb, in the opposite seat, looked over in surprise. “Why are we stopping, Colonel?”

Al-Fasr ignored the sergeant. He opened the door and stepped out on the sand. He peered eastward, in the direction of the sea. Heat waves shimmered from the surface of the desert. The barren landscape seemed devoid of any sign of life.

Then he saw them. A wave of dread swept over Al-Fasr.

They were low, no more than two thousand feet above the desert. They looked like killer angels, flying in a loose combat spread. Al-Fasr tried to count them. A dozen, perhaps more. He recognized the sleek profiles, the canted vertical stabilizers: F/A-18 Hornets. Their long gray noses were pointed toward Abu Dhayed.

Al-Fasr felt his heart beating like a hammer. He squinted against the glare of the low morning sun, scanning the horizon. They wouldn’t send fighters in low unless —

There. In the distance, just crossing the shoreline. He could pick them out, dark blobs pulsating like apparitions in the heat waves. He could hear the faraway beat of the whirling blades reverberating over the sand hummocks.

CH-53s, he guessed, and they would be filled with battle-ready marines. He stared in disbelief. Where had they come from? How did they know?

He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes past seven in the morning, exactly fifty minutes before the overthrow of the Emir’s government. Al-Fasr had planned each minute detail, orchestrated every movement, assigned each duty of his clandestine force. It would be a lightning-quick transition from a feudal administration to a modern Arab state.

Something was wrong. The coup had been compromised. The Americans were in Abu Dhayed, and it could be for only one reason — to save the Emir.

He reached inside the Land Rover and yanked the cell phone out of its cradle. After several rings he heard the voice of his younger brother, Akhmed. In the background he heard the crackle of small-arms fire.

“They have the building surrounded,” said Akhmed.

Al-Fasr muttered a curse. His brother’s forty-man garrison was stationed in a downtown warehouse, poised to move out.

“Who?”

“The Royal Guard. Armored cars, tanks, at least a hundred troops.” Akhmed’s voice sounded desolate. “How did they know?”

“I don’t know. But you must hold out. Naguib will be there soon with his brigade.” There was no point in telling Akhmed the truth — that American troops were in Abu Dhayed. Naguib and his brigade were probably trapped.

For several seconds Akhmed didn’t reply. Al-Fasr heard the sound of his brother’s raspy breathing and, in the background, more gunfire.

Then a succession of explosions. “They’re using grenades,” said Akhmed. “I must go.”

“Fight the bastards. We are on the side of the people.”

“It looks bad, Jamal.”

“You must hold out.”

“Inshallah. If God wills it. Good-bye, brother.”

“Good-bye, Akhmed.”

Al-Fasr stood for a moment beside the Land Rover, stunned by the turn of events. His eyes remained focused on the incoming helicopters. The sound of the beating blades rolled across the desert like drumbeats from hell.

His main force, commanded by his Air Force colleague, Maj. Naguib Shauqi, was bivouacked at the Bu Hasa armory, five kilometers from the downtown headquarters. With armored cars, they were poised to race down the main highway to Abu Dhayed, where they would seize the radio station and the military command headquarters. At the same time the secondary force, led by Akhmed, would smash through the gates of the royal palace and take the Emir and his family into custody. The plan depended on the emirate’s regular army troops perceiving that their position was untenable. They would lay down their arms and offer no resistance. Like most of the populace, the common soldiers had no love for the Emir.

Al-Fasr tried to imagine what had gone wrong. There could be only one possibility. Someone had betrayed them.

He had no doubt that Naguib’s brigade at the armory, like Akhmed’s downtown garrison, was surrounded by the Emir’s soldiers.

He called Naguib’s cell phone. After a dozen rings went unanswered, he replaced the phone in its cradle. Grimly he peered again at the warbirds swooping down on Abu Dhayed. If Naguib and his brigade were cornered or captured, the coup was doomed.

Akhmed was doomed.

They were all doomed.

Al-Fasr wondered how his brother would be treated by the Emir’s soldiers. He shoved the image from his mind. It would be better if Akhmed were killed in battle. The Emir’s Royal Guard was legendary for its viciousness.

Suddenly Al-Fasr remembered his parents.

His father disapproved of his sons’ political activities, but he had not interfered. Al-Fasr’s father had a special loyalty to the Emir, with whom he had gone to school and under whose protective umbrella the Al-Fasr family had accumulated great wealth.

Which was why Al-Fasr had kept his father ignorant of the approaching coup. Though the family would be exposed to a brief danger, the coup would be a fait accompli before any retribution could be taken against the family.

He cursed himself for his misjudgment.

Al-Fasr jumped back inside the Land Rover. In a flurry of sand he wheeled the vehicle around and sped back down the highway.

He kept the Jet Ranger low, skimming the floor of the desert.

Perched in the left seat, Shakeeb had the AR-15 pointed out the open hatch. For over twenty kilometers they hugged the ground, avoiding the roads that radiated like veins from the center of Abu Dhayed.

The Al-Fasr family compound lay to the west of the city, in an irrigated glade with grass and a palm-covered hillside that sloped behind the main building. Instead of using the helo pad next to the compound, Al-Fasr set the Jet Ranger down on a flat stretch of desert that was shielded from the compound by the hill.

Moving a few steps at a time, they approached the back entrance of the main building. Al-Fasr drew the SIG Sauer semiautomatic from its holster. With a nod of his head, he motioned for Shakeeb to follow. Holding the pistol in front of him, he entered the large hall that extended through the center of the house. The hall was strewn with debris — smashed furniture, paintings torn from the walls, shards of broken vases. The only untouched object in the room was a framed photograph of the Emir, smiling down on the room.

They had already been here. Al-Fasr took a deep breath and forced himself to remain calm. He had long ago forsaken his religious upbringing, but now he wished that he could summon help. Allah, I beseech you…

He opened the door to the family sitting room.

More debris. Carpets, smashed sculptures, broken lamps lay like rubble from an earthquake. His eyes swept the ruins, as he prayed that he wouldn’t find what he most dreaded.

He saw something on the floor — a hand protruding from behind the slashed leather sofa. Al-Fasr scrambled through the rubble, around the sofa. He gazed down on the woman’s body. Her lifeless eyes stared straight upward.

“Mother!” He knelt beside her body. Blood oozed from a single purple hole in her forehead. Her hand was still warm, her fingers clenched in a fist. For nearly a minute he remained with her, his chest heaving in sobs.

He felt Shakeeb’s hand on his shoulder. “They may still be here, Colonel. We must leave.”

He nodded and rose. Shakeeb was right. He could not help her, but the others — his father, his sister Aliyah. Perhaps…

He didn’t have far to look. In the doorway to the kitchen, he nearly stumbled over a body. It was his sister. Like her mother, the young woman had been executed, killed by a single shot to the forehead.

Al-Fasr dropped to his knees, overcome by his grief. He kissed his sister’s dead cheek. He clutched her body, rocking her as if she were a sleeping child.

As through a fog, Shakeeb’s voice came in a low whisper. “I heard something. Someone is in the hall.”

He rose and picked his way through the debris. Around the edge of the kitchen door he saw a man in a camouflage army uniform. He wore the black beret of an officer in the Emir’s Royal Guard. His back was turned, and he seemed to be studying an object on the tiled floor.

The officer sensed their presence behind him. He whirled around.

In a crouch, Al-Fasr held the SIG Sauer in both hands, the sights superimposed over the officer’s chest. He waited. He wanted the man to recognize him.

An expression of alarm spread over the officer’s face, and his hand went for his holstered sidearm.

Al-Fasr waited.

The officer’s pistol was clear of his holster, coming upward —

The nine-millimeter Parabellum round struck the officer in the middle of his chest. He reeled backward, then dropped. His weapon clattered to the floor beside him. Spraddle-legged, he braced himself with one hand, clutching his chest with the other.

Al-Fasr strode over to him. He knelt and picked up the officer’s pistol. The man stared back up at him, his face contorted with pain.

As Al-Fasr rose, he noticed for the first time the object on the floor, three feet away, that had captured the officer’s attention. Around it spread a crimson pool of blood. Al-Fasr’s breath left him in a single gasp.

He was looking into the eyes of his father’s severed head.

In the next instant, Jamal Al-Fasr, the Yale-educated eldest son of a cultured Abu Dhayed family, was transformed into a madman. His lungs filled with a burning fury. A primal scream erupted from him.

He seized the AR-15 assault rifle from the petrified Shakeeb. With his thumb he slid the fire selector to automatic. He shoved the muzzle into the wounded officer’s face.

The man’s eyes widened. “Please, have mercy…”

Al-Fasr held the trigger down. The officer’s head exploded in a gelatinous spray of bone and brain matter. Al-Fasr kept the trigger depressed. He continued firing until the magazine was empty.

Smoke spewed from the heated barrel. Al-Fasr’s chest heaved up and down, his breath coming in hoarse gasps. His trousers and boots were splattered with blood and bits of flesh. On the floor the Royal Guard officer’s body jerked and twitched. The remains of his skull looked like a shattered melon.

Gently, Shakeeb removed the weapon from Al-Fasr’s hands. He extracted the empty magazine and shoved in a fresh one. “They heard the gunfire, Colonel. We must leave.”

Al-Fasr remained for another moment, staring at his father’s head. The sightless eyes gazed back at him.

The Jet Ranger dipped its nose and skimmed over the hill behind the compound. Al-Fasr saw a vehicle coming — a desert-camouflaged four-wheeler, not a Rover like those used by the Emirate Defense Force. This was a larger vehicle, wider and lower to the ground.

An HMMWV — a Hummer — not more than fifty meters away.

Americans. Too late to avoid them. Would they open fire?

Al-Fasr hunched in his seat, braced for a burst of machine-gun fire.

None came. As the helo swept past the Hummer, Al-Fasr locked gazes with the occupant of the right seat. The man wore full battle gear, including the Wehrmacht — looking helmet and a sidearm. He was an officer, Al-Fasr guessed, probably Marine Corps. They had come not to lead the assault, just to support the Emir’s cowardly Royal Guard troops.

Al-Fasr felt a wave of hate overcome him. They helped kill my family. For an instant he considered swinging back, ordering Shakeeb to open fire with the AR-15.

No, the helicopter was too easy a target. He would take his revenge at another time. Another way.

He pointed the nose of the Jet Ranger southeastward, toward the coast. They would remain inland from the shoreline and fly over the mountainous southern border of the emirate. During his planning he had established a contingency base in the high country of Yemen. That was where he and the Sherji — his militia of freedom fighters — would go if the coup somehow failed.

Now the coup had failed.

As the Jet Ranger sped across the low plateau, Al-Fasr tried to assemble the pieces of his shattered plan. One persistent thought burned in his mind like an ember. Someone had betrayed them. No matter how long it took, he would find the traitors. When he did, he would know how to deal with them.

Someone had summoned the Americans. Who? It had to be the Emir himself. Sheik Al-Fatiyah, the fat old Emir, was a man of meager intelligence whose appointed successor, his son, was even fatter and more unintelligent. Though the emirate possessed vast oil reserves, the Al-Fatiyah family’s idea of governance had been consistent. Squander every dinar on family palaces in Abu Dhayed, villas in Switzerland, yachts in Cannes. And ignore the discontented masses who hated them.

As an Air Force officer, Al-Fasr felt a burning desire to restore the emirate’s military. Under the Emir, the defense force had become flabby and obsolete, dependent on the benevolent shield of the American military. He intended to devote some of the nation’s wealth to modern weapons, freeing the country from the onerous patronage of the United States.

The Americans. Where had they come from? Saudi Arabia? Oman? How had they entered the emirate without his intelligence sources reporting their presence?

As he thought about it, he realized it should be no surprise that the Americans would support the Emir. They were addicted to cheap gasoline. Stupid and corrupt as the Emir was, he could be counted on to maintain the flow of oil.

Five miles from the shoreline, Al-Fasr banked the Jet Ranger to the west and headed for the high mountainous ridge that defined the emirate’s southern border. The vegetation became more sparse. The moonlike mountain-scape showed only sprigs of sage, an occasional scrawny shrub.

The turbine engine of the helicopter labored as they ascended the barren ridge. At the summit, fifteen hundred meters above sea level, they had a view that extended a hundred kilometers into the sprawling desert plateau of Yemen. To the left, far below, the rocky salient of the Arabian peninsula jutted into the sea.

Out in the Gulf, an object caught his eye.

Thirty miles distant. There was no mistaking the distinctive gray flat-topped silhouette.

An aircraft carrier.

In a flash, it came to him. The helicopters, the marines, the Hornet fighters. He knew where they had come from.

He stared at the great death ship on the horizon. He thought of his father, beheaded for no reason except that his son was the Emir’s enemy. His mother and sister, slaughtered like cattle.

A hatred more profound than anything he had ever felt took possession of Jamal Al-Fasr. He gazed at the ghostly form of the warship. In a voice too low to be heard over the thrum of the helicopter, he said, “I promise, Father. I will kill them.”