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  Once, long ago, there had actually been several tanneries on the street. In Muslim folkways, tanneries are unclean, a taint that affects those who work in them. Tanners are held in low esteem by the majority in much the same way that the untouchables of the Hindu caste system are regarded by those who consider themselves their superiors.

  The tanneries had gone out of business and existence several decades earlier, but the taint seemed to hang over the square. Its neighbors viewed it as an undesirable location and were similarly disdainful of its occupants.

  There was a restlessness in the air. The mass meeting at the mosque had stirred up tension. Old Town was working itself up to the boiling point. It hadn’t reached it yet, but soon would, within another day or two. No more.

  The Tanners Square street gang didn’t bother to set out scouts, not tonight or any other. They weren’t that organized. They were a band of mostly cocky local punks with too much firepower. But then, there’s firepower and there’s firepower.

  The scout car came out of the night, closing on the square.

  The barricade was lit by some flickering kerosene lanterns stolen from a long-shuttered construction site. They burned with a grimy yellow light, highlighting the dinginess of the surroundings. Most of the street gang members present were huddled in dugouts, sleeping. The one or two sentries posted were napping in place.

  The first thing the street gang knew of the scout car was its engine noise. They awoke, rousing quickly. The sound of an approaching vehicle could mean opportunity—even loot, plunder. They grabbed their guns and hurried to the barricade.

  The engine noise was loud, industrial strength. It blatted along the dark corridor of the street opening on the square.

  The intruder could be seen now, a dim hulking shape rolling jauntily up the street. Ambling. There was something insolent about its easy, unhesitating advance. Something sure to irk the haughty pride of a gang of arrogant young toughs used to cowing their less well-armed neighbors.

  Angry shouts sounded among the masters of the square. Eyes narrowed. Rifle bolts were thrown back, safeties disengaged. A dozen-plus street gang rowdies lined the inner side of the barricade, facing the oncoming vehicle. They were itching for trouble. That’s when they thought it was a civilian car or truck.

  When they saw it was a military vehicle, their belligerency melted away. So did they. They vacated the barricade, peeling off to the left and right, diving for cover.

  The scout car came on, not slowing, but not hurrying either, steadily advancing. It speared the barrier at midpoint, bulling through it. The barricade came undone.

  The scout car continued onward, wheels milling up clouds of dirt and debris. and dust. It crossed the square and entered a street on the far side of it. The passage led deeper into Old Town, toward the Red Dome Mosque.

  Fourteen

  The Red Dome Mosque lay in the heart of Old Town, in a square from which streets and alleys radiated in a starburst pattern. The building fronted east. It was a large structure, with grounds to match. The square was a vast open space, an oasis of light and air in the midst of an extensive and crowded slum district.

  Many of the blocks of buildings were hundreds of years old—and looked it. The illusion of having traveled back in time to the days of the Ottoman Empire was spoiled by the clusters of television satellite dish receivers on the antique rooftops. Sandwiched within the ancient cityscape were blocks of apartment and tenement housing that had been built during Saddam Hussein’s reign. Saddam had been big on construction schemes.

  The new blocks had the same physical plant as most mass housing built in urban-renewal projects in the second half of the twentieth century. They featured lots of steel, glass, stone, and poured concrete—especially lots of poured concrete. Some of Saddam’s kinsmen and fellow tribalists were heavily represented in the poured-concrete business. Azif was a dusty, gritty location. Buildings that had been built there within the last three decades looked as old and weathered as the ones that had been standing there for centuries.

  Most of the mosque’s surrounding neighborhoods were antique, squalid near-ruins. Builders were discouraged from raising new buildings in the district. Residents and imams alike feared that if the slums were torn down as a prelude to urban renewal, the new buildings would never be built, or if built, would be parceled out to newcomers more loyal to the national regime than to the mosque’s power brokers, thus taking the first, fatal steps toward lessening the imams’ powers by disassembling the hordes of seething poor people who made up its base.

  The mosque’s broad, flat liver-colored brick dome was topped by a black iron cupola, a hexagonal structure that was topped in turn by a peaked roof and bordered at the base by a square iron platform. Tonight wind buffeted it, rattling the cupola and making the rigging that wired it in place sing.

  The building had three slim minaret towers, positioned at the northwest, northeast, and southeast corners. There was no southwest tower; it had toppled in 1847 and had never been rebuilt. The northeast tower was weak and decrepit, unsafe and likely to collapse. It was sealed off, and no one had entered it to climb its winding stone staircase for years, if not decades.

  The muezzin made the five-times-daily call to prayer from the top of the southeast minaret. Clumps of horn-shaped speakers were attached to the underside of the circular black-iron observation platform ringing the tower room. They ensured that the call was heard throughout the district, as well as throughout much of the rest of the city.

  The square wasn’t as open and airy as it used to be. Not lately. A good part of it was taken up by the parked cars and trucks of militiamen. The vehicles did double duty by serving as an outer barrier against car and truck bombers.

  The square was usually the scene of a fair amount of activity until late into the night. Squads of militiamen came and went during the hours of darkness, going out on errands of violence, intimidation, and destruction in Azif and outlying areas and returning. The imam’s followers did some of their best work at night.

  The militants were mostly town dwellers, products of the slums and outlying districts. They were Sunnis and Saddam Hussein loyalists. Former loyalists. Even the most fanatical Saddamites realized the chances of their leader making a comeback were virtually nil. This realization had caused many former members of the dictator’s Ba’ath party to declare their new allegiance to Imam Hamdi’s fiery brand of Islamic fundamentalism.

  The mosque was the spiritual center of the insurgency in Azif, but Imam Hamdi was too canny to overplay his hand. Coalition forces were leery of moving against religious personalities. Mosques were the third rail of Iraqi society, not to be touched by the infidel on pain of receiving a potentially lethal shock.

  Should things get too out of hand, the Americans would get their Iraqi government partners to pressure radical mosques and even search them should need be, but the Iraqis themselves were skittish about tangling with the powerful clerics.

  The Red Dome Mosque had been built during the age of armed sieges, its thick stone walls designed to resist the artillery of several hundred years ago. Many times in its history, it had served as an arsenal and military strongpoint.

  Coalition investigators had charged that it was being used for that purpose again, as a storehouse to maintain a ready supply of guns, ammo, and bombs for the militiamen. A spokesman for Imam Hamdi had recently condescended to issue a statement to the Arab news media indignantly denying the charge that the mosque had been turned into a fort by militia militants.

  “This is a false, base, lying canard,” he had said, “not only against a pious religious teacher, our revered Imam Hamdi, but also as a vicious slur on all Believers. The slander serves a more sinister purpose, providing a pretext for the occupiers to invade, overthrow, and defile the holy sanctuary of the mosque.” The Coalition suspected otherwise, but so far had lacked the will to force an investigation or search, or even to send the imam a stiff note of protest.

  Imam Hamdi maintained a cadre of
anywhere from seventy-five to a hundred hardcore militiamen as a permanent party established on the mosque grounds. This group served him as an effective combination of bodyguards and palace guards. He had no fear of Coalition troops coming for him. A word from him would fetch hundreds of armed supporters and thousands of men, women, and children from the district rallying to defend the mosque, and quickly.

  The northwest minaret’s tower room held a heavily armed guardhouse. It had served as the launching platform for the rockets that had been fired at the U.S. helicopter gunship several days earlier. Militia leader Waleed Tewfiq liked to lob a rocket into one or another quarter of the city every so often, just to remind everyone that he was there.

  The southeast minaret, used for the muezzin’s call to prayer, also doubled as a weapons platform.

  It was late now, midway between midnight and dawn. Inside the building, several score of militiamen slept on blankets and bedrolls on the mosque’s stone floor under the central dome. Their weapons were stacked beside them. They were veteran fighters, and the first alarm would rouse them into action.

  Lights were low beneath the dome. The interior space was dark and gloomy even in broad daylight. There was some small amount of electric lighting, not much, used mostly to indicate doors or corridor entrances or stairwells.

  Most of the militiamen inside were sleeping, but not all. Some insomniacs and restless types lay awake on their bunks, staring into space or reading prayer-books or talking to each other in low, hushed tones. Voices tended to sound muted in the booming cavernous space of the mosque.

  Not Imam Hamdi’s, though. The leather-lunged cleric knew how to use the space’s echo chamber to great effect when he was preaching a sermon.

  But for now it was mostly quiet, though never still. There was the slow deep breathing of ranked rows of massed sleepers. Occasionally someone would groan or cry out in his sleep. There were motion sounds, the sound of the mosque itself settling on its foundation, its looming structure shot through with phantom groanings and creakings.

  Sentries were posted in the northwest and southeast tower rooms. Spotlights and searchlights, their lens disks diamond hard and bright, shone from the two towers. A couple of banks of floodlights clung to the upper corners of the mosque’s eastern face, shining down and lighting up the front of the structure and the broad, shallow stone stairs descending from it to the stones of the square. Other, lesser lights were placed along the perimeter of the square.

  The south side of the square was perhaps less well lit than other areas. The street opening out from it ran between the backs of two separate blocks of buildings. It was narrow, ill kept, and little used, being generally deserted. In this district, the wise traveler kept to the broad, well-lighted avenues and shunned the dark places, the haunts of derelicts and thieves.

  Guards were posted along the perimeter. One of the guards during the midnight-to-dawn shift was one Bashir, whose head was shaped like a keg of nails and whose torso was barrel shaped. He was making the rounds with a squad of a half-dozen men when he froze, tilting his head toward the square’s south border. There was something canine about the gesture, like a dog cocking an ear to pin down a vagrant sound. He motioned to the others. “Quiet! I hear something.”

  The rest of the squad fell silent. They and he stood motionless for a moment, listening. One, impatient, began, “I don’t hear anything—”

  “Shh!” said Bashir.

  Abruptly he stalked off, one hand gripping the top of the sling that held a rifle strapped across his shoulder. He strode heavy footed to the south end of the square, the others following. He halted at the square’s edge, facing the mouth of the dim, shadowy street.

  Frowning, he leaned forward, peering down the street. Machine noises emanated from the darkness somewhere deeper into it. Suddenly, a shape moved into view, rolling towards him.

  It was the scout car. The armored vehicle had followed a twisty path through the mazelike alleys and byways of the south side with its weedy lots, concrete block buildings, and whitewashed stone walls. Now it came on toward mosque square.

  The militia had no armored scout cars. Of that, Bashir was sure. The vehicle now approaching could only belong to someone else: an enemy. It surely intended hostile action, coming as it did stealthily and with its lights dark.

  Its origin was puzzling, though. Bashir knew all the vehicles of the Coalition and the Iraqi interim government, and this was none that he recognized. He wondered what devil’s spawn had sent it.

  Not letting his questions interfere with direct action, Bashir unslung his weapon and opened fire. He had only to point his rifle and shoot without aiming to hit the machine. That’s how close it already was. Slugs spanged off the machine’s armored front. The rest of the squad opened fire at it, too. Gunfire roused the mosque’s defenders, sounding the alert.

  Vang Bulo drove the scout car, and Kilroy manned the turret guns. Kilroy pointed a heavy machine gun at Bashir and his squad and squeezed off several bursts, pulping them.

  The guards in the southeast tower room were quick to react. They spilled out onto the observation platform, crowding the curved waist-high guardrail. They aimed their weapons down at the scout car and opened fire.

  It was a tough shoot, an extreme downward angle. None of them had the range yet. Their bullets streamed overhead, passing harmlessly above the vehicle and tearing up the pavement around it. Not too close around it, either.

  Kilroy wasn’t waiting for them to wrestle any rocket launchers into position and get the scout car in their sights. He wrestled the heavy machine gun around, uptilting and elevating it to get a bead on the tower room. It was a sharp angle, and he had to hunch down into the armored turret well to properly sight the machine gun on the target.

  The long, lofty spire with its round tower room reminded him of a lighthouse. The tower room was alive with lights and figures in blurred, frantic motion. Kilroy pointed the machine gun at the top of the tower and fired. The weapon produced an impressive industrial clamor, like a factory milling or stamping machine. It milled out streams of high-velocity slugs, hammering the tower like a pavement breaker. Kilroy stitched a line up the side of the spire until he reached the observation platform and tower room. He battened on them, pouring lead up into them like a fireman working a high-pressure water hose on a burning building. But he was there not to put out fires, but to start them.

  Rounds sieved the black iron platform and those standing on top of it. Metal framework tore like paper, coming apart in scalloped ruffles, spilling screaming men off it to hurl them to the hard pavement a hundred feet below. They hit with a splat that was as much felt as heard, a nasty sound.

  Kilroy poured another stream of lead at the tower room. Curved glass viewport panels disintegrated. He streamed the slugs into the round room. Lights flashed, crashed, sparked and went out. The tower room went dark.

  At the northwest tower, the guards were desperate to get into action. They could see the guard post being shot out of the tower opposite them, but there was nothing they could do about it. The bulk of the dome and mosque screened them from seeing the attackers on the south side of the square. What they could not see, they could not shoot. The southeast tower guard now extinguished, the scout car once more resumed motion.

  Vang Bulo didn’t try to break through the barrier into the square. He made a right turn, heading east along the south side of the square until he came to the end, then turning left and rolling up to the north side.

  The vehicle came abreast of the mosque’s front entrance and halted. Some guards charged the scout car, shooting as they came. Kilroy pointed the machine gun at them and fired, turning them into bursting blood bags.

  The mosque was a hornet’s nest. The palace guard was up and rushing to battle stations. Streams of militiamen scrambled across the stones of the square, making for the scout car. Many shot as they ran. That doesn’t make for much accuracy, so most of their bullets flew wild of the target, peppering the row of buildings acros
s the street. Hits bounced harmlessly off armor plate.

  The mosque’s grand entrance was a pointed arch twenty feet high, inset with a pair of double doors. The doors were made of thick, iron-banded wooden timbers, blackened with age.

  Now, they were opened from the inside, swinging open and out as they were flung back on their hinges. Through the high, vaulting doorway poured a mob of angry, well-armed militiamen, streaming down the stone front stairs.

  Kilroy pointed the machine gun at them and opened up, mowing them down. They fell in rows. He swung the machine gun barrel from left to right and back again, raking lead across the ranks. The machine gun stuttered, firing not continuously but in bursts. Falling bodies tumbled down the stairs, sprawling on the stones of the square.

  The advance checked, hung fire for a few beats, then broke. Some militiamen peeled off to the sides, seeking cover. Those already on the sides, outside the kill zone, stayed out of it. They flattened, took cover, or retreated.

  Militiamen stopped pouring out of the front entrance into the meat grinder of the machine gun. Light from the front-mounted floodlights fell on them. One man wore a yellow turban. It was unmistakable. Kilroy could make it out clear from the opposite end of the square. In this bunch, one man held the exclusive franchise on wearing a yellow turban, and that was Waleed Tewfiq. It was more than a signature trademark, it was a kind of badge of office, signifying his exalted status as militia leader.

  That was one head Kilroy wanted for his trophy room. He worked to bring the machine gun to bear on Waleed Tewfiq, but he was too late. Waleed had already ducked back inside the mosque, sheltering behind the foot-thick stone wall beside the archway.

  Others were falling back, too, withdrawing into the mosque. Some of those in the front ranks grabbed the oversized iron rings that served as door handles and began hauling and tugging the doors closed. They shut with a thud.