Target America

8

As his head cleared slowly from the effects of the explosion, Gil opened his eyes to see two pairs of feet hurrying past the burning Mohave van. When they paused to grab a pair of MP5s, he knew they had to be Bashwar and Koutry fleeing the scene. He groped around for his .45, finding it beneath him, and began to drag himself from beneath the burning carpet van.

He saw the two disappearing down the alleyway in the dark beyond the flames and forced himself to his feet, hearing the distant wail of European-style high-low sirens. Still shaken, he tucked the .45 inside his jacket and hobbled after them, keeping close to the wall and using the doorways to keep under cover as he shadowed them through the alleyways of the Anfa.

People emerged from their homes but no one moved toward the glow of the flames. Gil could feel their accusatory glances as he passed, but he kept his face hidden as best he could. When the fuel tank of the carpet van erupted behind him, everyone ducked back inside, slamming their doors in fear. He lost sight of Bashwar and Koutry at the end of the alley as they ran across the Boulevard Mohamed El Hansali toward the Café Al Jazeera. His balance returning, he darted across the boulevard after them. He caught sight of the two again as they dashed past the café and down the street into a park dotted with trees. So far nothing about their movements gave Gil reason to believe they were aware of their tail. They didn’t even look back as they hurried to put distance between them and the scene of the crime.

He crouched behind a car and watched through the windows as they stashed the MP5s up in a tree and hurried off toward a slightly crowded area to the north. Gil tailed them up another street, where they ducked inside the Casablanca youth hostel. He checked his watch and decided to give them an hour to get settled before going in after them. Walking back in the direction he’d come, he heard the sirens of fire trucks racing down Boulevard Hansali.

Getting blown up in the street was not Gil’s idea of how to efficiently execute a mission. He found a table at a street-side café with a television on the counter and ordered a mutton sandwich. He was still eating ten minutes later when the BBC reported there had been a possible nuclear event in the southern United States. It went on to report that both US and British military forces were now on alert all around the world.

He took a satellite phone from his jacket and called Pope.

Pope answered after a number of rings. “Typhoon?”

“Yeah,” Gil said. “Hey, I’m watching the BBC. What the hell’s going on back home?”

“We don’t know yet,” Pope said. “But if I had to guess, I’d say there’s been a premature nuclear detonation on or near the Mexican border.

“How did it go with our AQAP friends?” he asked.

“Not good,” Gil answered. “Those jackasses over at Mohave showed up and queered the deal. They tried to cut in on our action and got themselves blown up — the Russian too. I’m still tracking the targets and should be mission complete within a couple of hours. Who’s responsible for the nuke? Any idea?”

“None. But I want you back here as soon as this op concludes.”

“Roger that.”

“Are you compromised?”

“I don’t think so,” Gil said. “A few locals may have seen my face, but it’s dark, so there shouldn’t be anything to worry about it. I’ll fly out ASAP.”

“Are you injured?”

“Mildly concussed, but nothing I can’t handle.”

“You’ve definitely dealt with worse,” Pope remarked. “What happened to the Russian?”

“They were dropping monkey bombs on us from the roof, and he got smashed.”

“You’d better fly out on your Canadian passport,” Pope advised. “You can cross at Niagara Falls. I’ll have a woman there waiting to bring you over.”

“I can bring myself over.”

“Okay. Let me know when our AQAP friends are out of the picture.”

“Roger that. Typhoon out.” Gil put the phone away.

He sat pretending to watch the television for another hour, keeping one eye on the street, and then got up and returned to the youth hostel. He walked through the doorway into an open courtyard, finding the office on the far side behind a sliding glass window. There a bald, unpleasant-looking fellow in his fifties sat watching a soccer game on a tiny television set. When he glanced up to see Gil standing on the other side of the window, his eyes grew wide, and he grabbed for a pistol beneath his shirt.

Gil jerked the suppressed USP .45 and shot him through the glass. The window shattered, and the man pitched over in the chair, landing on the tile floor with his brains blown out the other side of his head.

Gil looked around to make sure no one had seen and put the weapon away. He hadn’t counted on the hostel being a safe house. Stepping around the corner and into the office, he switched off the television and squatted down, using the man’s jacket from the back of the chair to wrap up his head, tying it tight with the sleeves to keep what was left of his gray matter from oozing out onto the floor. Then he carried the body across the hall and dumped it in the janitor’s closet.

Within a few minutes, he’d swept the broken glass into a dust bin and mopped up most of the gore. The crime scene was by no means spic and span, but with the light turned off, it would easily pass the cursory inspection of a late-night traveler standing outside the window. He took the ledger and a copy of the floor map into the dining room, where he wouldn’t likely be bothered by anyone looking for the dead man. There were seventy-two beds in the hostel, and just as Gil suspected, there was no record of two males having checked in within the last couple of hours.

He sat studying the map, checking off the occupied beds against the guest ledger. Thirty-three of the beds were occupied, with roughly a fifty-fifty split between males and females, the hostel providing separate dorm rooms for men and women. There were a number of two-bed rooms set apart from the dorms, normally reserved for married couples, and Gil guessed that Bashwar and Koutry would be in one of those.

He put the ledger back on the manager’s desk and made his way up the stairs with his hand inside his jacket. At the landing atop the stairs, he oriented himself with the map and made a right down the hall, deciding to check the most isolated room first. Halfway down the hall, he came to a rusty chain stretched across the corridor where he was supposed to make a left. A battered tin sign hanging from the chain read No Admittance, in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. Light shown beneath the door at the end of the short hallway.

Gil drew the USP and stepped carefully over the chain. A washstand stood against the wall, and a black daypack sat on the floor beneath it. He knelt low in the shadowy light to spot the monofilament line running across the corridor from inside the pack to a rusty screw set knee high in the opposite wall. He knew better than to mess with a booby trap unnecessarily, but he didn’t want his line of retreat obstructed in the event things went bad and he needed to egress in a hurry. Besides, this chintzy black-bag affair looked more to him like a Columbine High cum wannabe warrior booby trap than a device rigged with anything as sensitive or complex as a mercury switch.

So he pulled the bag gently from beneath the washstand to release the tension from the monofilament line. Then he checked to be sure that there was no second line attached to the bag before sliding it across and up against the opposite wall, where both bag and trip line would be clear of his path. He stepped to the door and put his hand on the doorknob, listening for movement or conversation from within the room. Hearing nothing, he turned the knob and stepped smoothly inside with the pistol before him.

Koutry looked up in complete shock from where he lay in bed. Gil shot him dead center between the eyes, blowing blood, brains, and bone fragments all over the white pillowcase.

Bashwar was not in the room. This meant he had either stepped out of the hostel while Gil was eating or had gone to take a shower. Koutry had obviously not been expecting him to return so soon. Gil checked the map and moved out down the hall toward the bathrooms.

The showers were empty, but in the next room he saw a pair of feet beneath one of the stall doors in the lavatory, easily recognizing the same Nike basketball sneakers he had seen from beneath the van. A towel and a bar of soap sat waiting on the sink. Gil put five quick rounds through the stall door. The only sound was that of the pistol cycling the rounds and the 230-grain bullets striking the tiled wall after they passed through Bashwar’s body.

Bashwar toppled off the toilet and his feet sprawled out beneath the door.

Gil kicked the door in to see the young man’s face jammed between the commode and the wall, his eyes open, face frozen in shock, with his gun hand still gripping the CZ-75.

“That’s for Benghazi, cocksucker.” He pulled the door closed.

On his way down the stairs, he met a group of Australian tourists on their way up and pretended to stifle a yawn, covering his face with his hand.

“Hey, mate?” one of them called after him. “Have you seen the manager?”

“No,” Gil said without looking back.

A half mile from the hostel along Boulevard des Almohades, directly in front of a pier lined with Moroccan naval vessels, he ditched the USP down a sewer drain and hailed a cab for the airport. It was time to get home and find out what the hell was going on.