Page 128 of Whisper

Was he to be Saqqaf’s executioner, too?

“Sir, there’s movement in the house.” An operator zoomed in on the thermal scan. Two figures inside. One was moving toward the door.

“We need to go. Now.” Carter’s eyes blazed. “Caldera. What’s your call?”

He breathed in. Sounds faded, blurred together, smeared. He stared at the monitors, but all he saw was David.There is no Allah, not anymore. “Get the fighters. Bomb the son of a bitch.”

Carter gave the order, an immediate redirect for the fighter pilots on standby to the tiny village. The pilot’s voice crackled over the command center’s speaker. “ETA, three minutes,” she said. She repeated the coordinates of the house. “Confirming target.”

“Target confirmed.”

The house wove in and out of the palms, circled on the monitors. Kris held his breath. Everyone leaned forward, eyes peeled to the screen. No one spoke. No one moved.

The radio crackled. “Bombs away.”

Drones didn’t transmit sound. One minute the house was there, between two palm fronds. The next moment, it was a plume of dust, shattered concrete and broken trees, a cloud of debris rising and rising into the sky.

“Target destroyed.”

Cheers erupted, soldiers and analysts bursting from their seats, pumping their fists and screaming. In the center of it all, Carter stared at the monitors, his jaw clenching, his arms crossed over his chest. Kris sagged, bracing his hands on the table in front of him before he collapsed.

“Sir! The strike team is ready to go!”

“Get them to the location right away. We need to confirm it was him.”

Dust choked the air, miles outside of Hibhib. David and the others pulled their scarves up, checkered keffiyehs worn around their necks. Iraqi police from Baqubah were on the way to the destroyed house, police sirens wailing as the chopper overtook their convoy.

They set down at the end of the gravel drive. Where the house had been, only a crater remained. Palms that had encircled the house had toppled, shattered in half and splintered apart like broken toothpicks. A thousand years of sand and dust hung in the air, upturned by the fighter’s twin bombs.

“Start searching. Gotta find the body.”

They sifted through the rubble, stamping out fires as they turned over broken chunks of concrete. Smoke made David’s eyes water. Six Iraqi policemen showed up, but hung back at the driveway. No one wanted to interfere with the Americans sifting through the rubble of a bombed house. No good came from that.

David saw it first. A hand poking out of the ruins, blackened by soot. “Over here!”

They flipped concrete like they were flipping Lego bricks, cleared the debris from Saqqaf in under a minute. He lay half buried in the crater, covered in dirt. Soot and burns painted his face, his body. Blood poured from his ears, his nose, his mouth. The bombs’ pressure wave had ripped apart his internal organs, liquefied them inside his bones.

Saqqaf’s eyes flickered open. His gaze landed on thirteen American Special Forces soldiers standing in a circle over him. He mumbled something. Blood trickled past his lips.

David crouched next to him. “Nam?”

Saqqaf reached for David, his hand trembling. He shuddered, coughed blood. David leaned closer. An observant Muslim would whisper theshahadabefore they died, the statement of faith.Allah is the one God, and Muhammad is his messenger. It was supposed to unite the faithful’s soul to Allah at the moment of death. Would Saqqaf speak the words? Did he imagine, somewhere in that twisted brain, that he was on the way to eternal Paradise?

“Ayree feek,” Saqqaf bubbled. He coughed again and went limp. His last breath shuddered form his chest.

David shook off Saqqaf’s hand and stood. No Paradise for Saqqaf. But David had already known that.

The strike team’s sergeant frowned. “What’d he say?”

David snorted. “He said, ‘Fuck you’.”

When the team got back, they brought Saqqaf’s body bag into the operations center. A gurney waited, and the strike force’s medical staff.

General Carter and Kris waited while the captain of the team unzipped the bag. Carter had a sat phone in one hand, connected to the Situation Room. The president, Director Edwards, the national security advisor and the secretary of defense hovered on the other end of the line.

“It’s him.” Kris nodded. “It’s him.”

He thought he’d feel something. Anything. The satisfaction of a job well done. The joy of removing a mass murderer, a butcher, from the world. Revulsion, finally seeing him face to face. He thought he’d feel a hundred different things.