Page 75 of Whisper

“You think Zahawi is at that location?”

“We think there’s something bad going on there, yes. It could be Zahawi. It could be another cell of al-Qaeda fighters. Whatever is going on, it’s bad news.” Kris, standing on a coffee table in the middle of the safe house’s living room, met everyone’s gaze. Nearly sixty people stared back at him. Listened to him give orders. “Any questions?”

0155 hours.

They were well into zero dark hundred, the dead of night when Special Forces loved to operate, when the CIA always made their moves. Kris breathed through his mouth, huddled against the privacy fence around Target X-Ray, behind David and in front of Dan. Ryan and Jackson brought up the rear of their breach team.

His body armor tried to pull his shoulders off. The thick ceramic plates weighed at least forty pounds each. He felt tugged toward the ground, like he should just tip forward, let gravity do its thing. His backpack full of gear counterbalanced the weight, just barely.

Zero one fifty-six. At thirteen other sites, breach teams were waiting, following Kris’s plan to the letter. There was no room for error in this. No room for one team to strike early, give a target time to make a phone call or start screaming—or worse, shooting. In Faisalabad in the middle of the night, only the dogs were out. The city was silent, five million people locked in their houses. Unless something went wrong.

Zero one fifty-eight. The check came down the line.All good?David reached behind him, tapped the side of Kris’s leg.All good.He sent the signal back, tapping Dan. Heard Dan reach for Ryan. Then it came back, two taps from Dan on his thigh.All good.He reached forward for David. David intercepted his hand. Squeezed. Kris squeezed back.

Zero one fifty-nine. They’d synchronized their watches to the second. He watched them count down.

Three. Two. One.

Pakistani police at the head of the breach team blew open the lock on the privacy fence and wrenched the heavy metal gate open. Boots slapped concrete and dirt, thundering toward the front door. Kris heard echoes ofboomsacross Faisalabad, bouncing through the warren of the tangled city. He followed behind, running with David and stacking at the fence line as the Pakistanis prepared to break down the front door. Shouts rose inside the villa. Lights flicked on inside the third floor.

Clang.The Pakistani police officer who’d swung the battering ram stumbled backward. Another rushed forward, grabbing the battering ram and trying again.Clang.“It’s reinforced!” he shouted. “They reinforced the door with steel!”

Slap slap slap.Dirt shot up from the ground, geysers from bullets slamming into the dust at their feet. Glass shattered, rained down on their heads. Dark muzzles, the bores of AK-47s, poked out of the upstairs windows.

“Take cover!” David grabbed Kris and hauled him around the side of the house, away from the windows and the shooters above. Ryan and Dan retreated behind the privacy fence.

“Grenade!” one of the police officers shouted. Glass shattered. Athudas the grenade bounced and rolled inside the house. Frantic Arabic, shouts that rose in pitch, until—

Boom.

Scrambling, David poked back around the corner, looking down the barrel of his rifle. The shooters in the upper windows were gone. Police officers were going through a ground-level window into a smoke-filled hallway.

“Open this door! Open this fucking door!” Two FBI agents banged on the front door, their backs flat to the wall. They’d been trapped on the other side of the gunfire from above, totally exposed.

The front door burst out of its frame, kicked open by the largest police officer on the team. Cursing, the FBI agents ran inside. “Hands up! Hands up!”

“They have to say it in Arabic,” Kris growled. “Did they forget?”

“We gotta get in there.” David nodded to the front door. “I’ll cover you.”

Kris ran, David following in his footsteps, his rifle trained on the empty third-floor windows. Whoever had been shooting at them was gone. For now.

Dan, Ryan, and Jackson met them at the door. Shouts barreled through the house. Flashlight beams crisscrossed the smoke. The FBI agents were stuck in the front room, hollering at someone to put their hands up.

Shouting, again, in Arabic. This time, from outside. Kris turned. “The roof. They’re on the roof!”

David and Jackson flattened themselves to the villa’s wall, looking up their rifle scopes at the roofline.

Scuffling, above. Frantic Arabic flew back and forth. Two—no, three voices.

Kris followed David, holding his weapon up, keeping it steady on the roofline. Dan covered him, moving close. Ryan slipped away from the villa’s walls, sliding into the courtyard.

“Hnak hu alan! Ha hu! Ha hu!” There he is now! There he is! There he is!

“Shit!” Bullets peppered the courtyard, the dirt at Ryan’s feet. He ran for the shadows, ducked behind a pillar for cover. The shooter on the roof chased him to the edge.

David slid out of the shadows and squeezed his trigger. Three bullets spat into the night, catching the first man on the roof in the shoulder and jaw. He tumbled forward, limp, spilling over the edge. He hit the ground like a broken doll, headfirst. Kris looked away, flinching.

He’d remember that sound as long as he lived.