Page 121 of Whisper

Joint Strike Force

Sunni Triangle, Iraq

March 2006

2100 hours. Time for last checks, tightening the straps and checking gear. Jackson and Warrick, Special Forces guys from David’s old team, smoked their last cigarettes alongside David.

Kris had briefed the team an hour before. For months, their Special Forces strike force, with David attached, had hit Saqqaf and his fighters and hit them hard, crushing blows to his burgeoning Islamic State.

Most of the jihadis were now on the run.

Every night, they swooped in on another safe house, another location uncovered by meticulous hunting through emails, text messages, and cell phone calls. Every night, Kris stripped the jihadis they arrested of all their belongings, taking the pocket litter and the safe house computers and the jihadis’ notebooks, and spent the next twelve hours perusing everything, combining it with intercepts and drone overheads and human intelligence from on the ground. By afternoon, Kris had another list of targets, another night of work for David and the strike team.

General Carter and Kris had turned out to be a potent, formidable pair.

Tonight, Kris had told them to “expect resistance”, which meant “expect a firefight”.

Everything in David raced. His mind, his heart, the tapping of his finger against his rifle. Details thundered through his mind. The sequence of events, the breach order. The call signs, the signal to go. Where to set up perimeter locations. The targets.

Cool professionalism warred with nervousness. He’d been on a hundred raids, had been on a hundred different missions. But today, his skin was too small, his bones too large. Everything was ultracrisp, like the world had been sharpened before his eyes.

Kris stamped out his last cigarette and stood before David. His eyes ran over David’s blacked-out face, his black fatigues. A few hours ago, they’d woken up in Kris’s cot beneath his plywood table-turned-desk in a curtained-off section of the warehouse the strike team used as a base. The sun set and they ate breakfast for dinner, sitting side by side on the cot. Their workday started at sundown.

“You’ve got this.” Kris smiled. “You’ll get him.”

David nodded. They were going after Saqqaf’s senior lieutenant, a man named Mousa. A month before, Mousa and Saqqaf had ordered a pre-dawn raid on the Askari Shrine in Samarra, one of the most revered mosques in the Shia faith.

At dawn, as the sun splintered the sky, explosives planted by the fighters had ripped the mosque apart. The golden dome, a shrine in the hearts of millions, lay in a pile of rubble and dust, and all that remained was broken concrete, twisted rebar, and screams.

Blind rage followed, fury and anguish that split the city and the country. Reprisal killings rolled in wave after wave, bands of Sunni and Shia gangs murdering and beheading their way across the country.

Thousands were killed. Morgues started turning away the dead. There was no more room.

Bodies were left in the streets. Severed heads rolled in gutters, lay on their side next to piles of trash and bloodstained mud.

David wondered if the end times were upon the world. If the Apocalypse had truly come. Months of decimating cell after cell after cell, flipping low-level and mid-level fighters. Siphoning all phone calls, all emails. Everything they could scrape from any of Saqqaf’s associates. They’d choked off his ratlines into Syria, choked his supply routes. And yet, Saqqaf had managed to throw jet fuel on the bonfire of Iraq’s sectarian tensions. The end truly did seem nigh.

The radio crackled. General Carter’s voice rang out in David’s ear. “Everyone, form up. Prepare to move out.”

Kris grasped his hand. David squeezed his fingers. It was the most they allowed each other around everyone. Neither in nor out, they existed in the in-between space. Neither acknowledging nor denying it. Hiding, and yet not. Sharing a room, but never holding hands, never kissing in public. “See you in a few hours,” Kris said softly. He smiled, the same smile David saw in his dreams when they were separated, the same smile that lived in the center of his heart.

“Ya rouhi.”

Joint Strike Force

Sunni Triangle, Iraq

0230 hours

Mousa sat in a cell, hands bound behind his back, hood covering his head. Halogen lights burned down onto him, turning the night to the brightest day. David stood outside the cellblock, watching.

“You okay?” Kris frowned. He sucked down the last of his cigarette, blew out the smoke quickly. David had been quiet since the team had come back, since they’d dragged Mousa in, screaming curses and raging about hellfire and infidels.

David couldn’t tear his eyes from Mousa. “I’m fine.”

“You sure you want to do this?”

“I have to do this.”