Page 2

Thankfully, one of the boys—for they were little more than boys, really, toy soldiers—understood him.

“Let him through,” the young man said to the others.

Their harsh grips became a rough shove forward. And he was through.

The carnage was hideous. He pulled the sleeve of his shirt across Salima’s eyes. She protested, but he ignored her. There was blood everywhere. And specks of pink, shiny stuff, anywhere from fingernail to fist-sized. He staggered forward, dodging a burning car and chunks of concrete. He spied a dismembered foot, still in its sock and shoe.

Bloody people were beginning to stagger away from the burning carcass of the bus, helped by other bloody people. He looked around, scanning faces beneath thick coatings of dustand blood. Marta. He had to find Marta. He and Salima needed her.

He saw a bloody purse.

An arm.

A pair of pants with the lower torso of a man in them.

They were objects. Odd things disconnected from their owners. Not people. Vaguely he registered that he must be going into shock. But who wouldn’t at the sight of this monstrosity? Belatedly, it occurred to him what the pink chunks were. Human flesh. Cooked until it lost its red, raw meat color.

And then he saw her.

She was lying on the ground. Her eyes were closed and one side of her face was black—charred-paper, black skin peeling away from the red flesh below—but it was his Marta. He pushed past the small crowd gathered around her. A Hasidic Jew with a broad-brimmed hat and longpayothsideburns crouched beside her, gazing down at the caved in place where the left half of her chest used to be.

“Dead,” the Jew announced emotionlessly. “Somebody cover up the corpse.”

She had a name. Shehad a name,god damn it! She was not a thing! She was a human being! A wife. A mother—God, a mother.

The diamond of rage within his breast exploded, sending agonizingly sharp shards coursing through his veins, cutting him from within until everything he knew, everything he was, bled out beneath his skin. And when the anguish had consumed him completely, the crystals of rage turned to ice and he froze inside. He became a white, Antarctic void.

He clutched his bleeding child to his breast while he stood over the body of his dead wife. And he could not cry. He could not cry.

After a long time, a single thought formed out of the blood and ice and rage.

I am Yusef Abahdi. I am the wrath of God.

2

A hot breath of air wafted across Ian McCloud’s left cheek, carrying with it grit and a hint of death. The metal plate beside his face, almost too hot to touch, made his right cheek sweat. He eased his left hand forward, reaching up awkwardly from his prone position to dial in a minute windage adjustment to his tricked-out Barrett XM 500 sniper rifle’s scope.

He scanned the street below, beige on beige, sand blowing across dirt, dust devils rising from shimmering waves of heat. Khartoum. Once a great city straddling the vast Nubian plains of the Sudan, now a certified armpit of the universe. Abandoned by the civilized world to wallow in its atrocities of violence and filth of body and soul. He looked out across the skyline, dirty brown in the morning sun—brown mud buildings that had long since lost their stucco, a few brown stunted trees coated with dust like skeletal ghosts. Brown people in streets brown with crusted clay. But beneath the brown surface lay a black hole of the human soul.

The broad street before him was a particularly grim little corner of Khartoum’s worst slum, trampled by warring gangs, bled on and suffered on, ignored by the rest of the world. Except, of course, by El Noor. He was the new warlord in town andhad his eye on capturing this worthless strip of real estate in a meaningless gesture of dominance over his neighbor.

Ian’s soon to be brother-in-law, a double agent for the CIA and FSB—both agencies knew about it and used Alex as a conduit to pass information back and forth under the table—had passed along a message from the Russians that a possible terrorist plot might be cooking in this happy little corner of Purgatory. El Noor was rumored to be meeting with an up-and-coming Palestinian terrorist. The guess was that El Noor was planning to finance an attack of some kind. And Russian intel placed the target inside the United States.

Which was why Ian was parked on this roof doing surveillance, sweltering under a scrap wood shelter in hundred-degree heat with sweat pouring down his forehead and flies viciously biting the exposed backs of his hands. And it was barely eight o’clock in the morning. Welcome to K-town.Jesus, what a hellhole.

A loud rat-a-tat erupted nearby.Gunfire. He went utterly still, abruptly a predator on the hunt. Semi-automatic machine gun fire interspersed with single-shot rifle shots. Eight, maybe ten, weapons firing. Roughly two hundred yards to his left. He swung his rifle toward the noise, scanning methodically through his telescopic scope for its source. Armed men poured out of an ancient Land Rover, firing clumsily as they went. But the amount of lead they were laying down more than compensated for their lousy execution.

The street emptied as the locals melted into surrounding buildings. A motor revved and tires squealed. Closing in fast. From the other direction.Hello. He went on full battle alert as his position abruptly looked to be ground zero for some serious action. Another Jeep loaded with thugs careened around the corner. It screeched to a sideways stop, blocking the street.

Minions of Dharwani, this street’s warlord, fired sporadically out of doorways and windows at the intruders. They couldn’t match El Noor’s AK-47’s with their World War Two surplus M-1’s.One lopsided rout, coming up.

Quick head count to his left…four, five, six. All wearing the distinctive black beret of Marak El Noor pulled down ominously over their right eyebrows. Four more El Noor gunmen plus a driver on the right. Late teens to early twenties. Ian mentally groaned. Put a gun in the hands of kids that age, and they abruptly had the brains of codfish.

Worse, they’d cut off his primary and secondary escape routes out of his hide. Plan C—admittedly shaky at best—involved exiting down the bombed-out street behind him, a den of drugs- and arms-dealers and killers-for-hire who’d gun down a white man as soon as talk to one. He’d better sit tight for now. He had good camouflage, the high ground, and he could shoot circles around any of the boys below. Not that he intended to get himself noticed in the first place. He was just the lousy observer, here, underpaid and overexposed, with orders only to watch and report.

Glass shattered in front of him. He eased his right eye to the rubber cup on the end of the scope. One of El Noor’s boys was using his rifle butt to knock out the lone, remaining window in an otherwise boarded up storefront. The youth and two of his compatriots leaped through the gap, disappearing inside the building.

El Noor’s thugs dragged a guy out into the street. Three women garbed in traditional black robes calledabeyasfollowed, wailing and screaming and pulling at the intruders’ belts. A thug swatted the most aggressive woman—probably the wife—away like a gnat, backhanding her to the ground. Blood sprang from her mouth. She crawled back toward the building on her hands and knees, silent now.