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  Kilroy fired into the doors. Rounds chewed at the door panels, churning up a spray of splinters and wood chips and a cloud of sawdust. The doors were full of holes but held.

  Kilroy’s focus had been on the front of the mosque. Those on its flanks had not been idle. They’d taken advantage of their respite from being targets to move up in groups of twos of threes, stealthily advancing on the scout car.

  Kilroy switched from the machine gun to the minicannon. He worked the controls, adjusting them to bring the big gun into line with the front doors. They were in his sights.

  He fired, the cannon bucking, spewing out a shrieking shell that streaked across the square to the double doors. The shell detonated in a massive explosion that obliterated the doors and much of the surrounding stonework of the doorway and façade.

  Groans and cries of outrage and dismay sounded from some of the militiamen in the square. Smoke poured out of the archway. Kilroy fired again. The shell zoomed into the mosque and exploded. It triggered an even more massive response, a series of booming blasts that followed one after the other.

  All remaining doors and windows in the structure were instantly blown out. The interior of the building filled with cascading fireballs. Monster tentacles of flame thrust out of empty window and door frames, unfurling across the square.

  A pillar of fire leaped up to pierce the vent in the center of the dome. It blew the iron cupola skyward, up and up, like a cork tossed by a fountain. Blew it sky high.

  A fireball vomited out of the front archway, trailing mountains of oily black smoke. The heat was awesome. Heat waves distorted the air, so that it rippled like running water.

  Kilroy could feel the heat sucking all the moisture out of him. The cold sweat beaded on his flesh dried up in a breath. He felt as parched as a lizard on a rock in Death Valley at high noon. For an instant, he feared that the fireball would reach all the way across the square to engulf the scout car. It did not, its horizontal motion arrested as its leading edge curled in on itself and up, blossoming into a pillar of fire that enveloped the mosque.

  That was the main blast. There were lots of little blasts, too, as a storehouse of explosives went off—grenades, mines, rockets, and crates of bullets.

  By now the structure had become partially disassembled. Blasts were taking it apart from the inside. Rockets arched skyward in a spectacular fireworks display that lit up the night sky over Azif.

  Kilroy said, “I guess they were using it as an ammo dump after all.”

  Something fell out of the sky, landing in the street in front of the scout car. A yellow turban.

  The scout car started forward, rolling over the turban as it made its way toward the northeast corner of the square, where it entered a street and drove away. The sky was red over Old Town.

  The next day, a wrecked scout car was found on the outskirts of town. It appeared to have struck a land mine, blown up, and burned. No other mines were found in the area where the wreck lay.

  Inside the wreck were two bodies, so badly burned and charred that they were just barely recognizable as human.

  The scout car had been badly burned, too, but certain portions had escaped the damage, most notably those that featured flag stencils, serial numbers, and other nomenclature testifying to the machine’s Iranian origins.

  Fifteen

  Two days passed. Azif was in a state of unrest. The mosque itself was a still-smoldering ruin. The dome that had given the mosque its name had completely collapsed. Many had died in its fall, not the least being Waleed Tewfiq, leader of the Red Dome militiamen.

  Imam Hamdi had escaped destruction, however. He’d managed to get out by a side exit before the building had come down. His loyalists were already hailing it as a miracle. He had not escaped unharmed, having several broken bones. Also, most of the hair on his body, including his eyebrows and beard, had been singed off by a blast wave. He had gone into seclusion for an indefinite period of time. He gave no reason for the withdrawal, though popular opinion held that he wanted to give thanks for his miraculous escape with an extended session of prayer and meditation. The real reason was that he refused to show himself in public until his beard had grown back, to avoid making himself a figure of fun.

  Old Town was wracked with grief and near-hysterical outbursts of mourning. Thousands attended a mass funeral for several score militiamen. Streets were thronged with a sea of black-clad mourners.

  The funeral procession triggered a near riot, causing scores to be trampled underfoot. Seeing the results, Imam Hamdi was thoroughly glad that he’d avoided having to preside over the funerary rites.

  Azif opinion ran hot and high against the local Shiite minority. The Coalition posted a large force of combat troops to guard the Shiite neighborhood.

  On the morning of the third day after the raid on the mosque massacre—what U.S. tabloids were calling the “Mosque-acre”—ODA 586 left Border Base Foxtrot on a joint CIA/Special Forces mission.

  With them were Albin Prester and Debbie Lynn Hawley. Prester had been their CIA liasion for the farmhouse operation. Debbie Lynn Hawley was introduced to the unit as the Weapons of Mass Destruction expert that she was. Prester never identified her as CIA. The Special Forces members could think what they liked. All they needed to know was that her expertise was vital to one component of their mission.

  Intelligence sources had received a tip that the radical fundamentalists in the Shiite town of Quusaah were planning to send arms and fighters to assist their coreligionists in Azif’s minority Shiite community.

  It was said that the Shiite militias had established their own pipeline, one that funneled men and material back and forth between Azif and Quusaah, and from Quusaah into Iran.

  Radioactive material, looted from Iraqi hospitals during the war, was alleged to have recently been shipped east along the Shiite corridor into Iran. Such material was prime stock to make a dirty bomb, one that would use conventional explosives to scatter a cloud of toxic radium dust, any particle of which could be potentially lethal.

  Prester and the Special Forces unit would investigate a site identified as a way station on the Shiite corridor, while Debbie Lynn Hawley would scan it for any traces of radioactive contaminants. It was typical of the unorthodox assignments that the pairing of Army trigger-pullers and CIA spies had resulted in.

  The men of ODA 586 did not object. The spy gal was easy on the eyes. Debbie Lynn had that girl-next-door quality, except that she was here. All the other girls next door had stayed back home.

  The group left Border Base Foxtrot in predawn darkness to get the jump on early-bird snipers and car bombers working the region. All of ODA 586 was present but Ernie Greco, The Greek, as he was known, was still recovering from the wound he’d received during the farmhouse venture. He said he was ready for action, but the medics wanted him to take it easy for a couple of days yet.

  The unit traveled in a three-Humvee convoy that went to an abandoned pumping station northeast of Azif. The site was on a flat-topped hill north of a watercourse that ran roughly from east to west, a tributary to the Tigris.

  There had once been a canal here when the river had been high and wide enough to serve as a highway for boats and barges. The pumping station had supplied water to irrigate a farm belt running between Quusaah and Azif. During the war with Iran, Saddam Hussein had diverted the river at its head, channeling it into another watercourse to serve his grand strategic design.

  The war was long over, Saddam was defunct, but the river was no more. With no river, the pumphouse could not function and so was abandoned. The farms it had supplied dried up and blew away for lack of water with which to irrigate their crops. The whole area had an abandoned, dismal air to it.

  The channel was enough of a natural watercourse to support a modest stream that ran through it year-round. The oncoming rainy season had quickened it, but it still was a long way from even rivulet status.

  The north bank of the channel was ten to twelve feet high, its edge abruptly sh
eered off like a cliff. The channel bed below was covered with extensive mud flats, along whose center ran a lazy thread of stream water.

  The pumping station was a big, warehouse-sized concrete building. Its long axis ran east-west, parallel to the edge of the north bank where it was sited.

  On the inland side of the building, the ground sloped easily into a wide, saucer-shaped hollow ringed by low, broken ridges and lines of trees. The three Humvees were ranged in the hollow along the base of the hill.

  It was early in the morning, so early that the hollow was a bowl of shade as yet untouched by the sun’s direct rays. The day was already warm, though. Debbie Lynn wore a flat-crowned straw planter’s hat with a flowered hatband to protect against the sun. It looked cute and sassy, as did she. Prester wore an olive drab duckbilled baseball cap. On him, not so cute.

  They stayed with the vehicles while the Special Forces team went uphill and cleared the site. The unit had already cleared the hollow and the area around it, making sure that no ambushers lurked. All seemed quiet and unthreatening.

  Lookouts were posted on the hilltop to keep watch on the surrounding countryside. The landscape was empty of all other traffic or signs of human life. The troubles in Azif and on the border had suppressed routine transportation movement in the region. Few dared to venture out on the roads for fear of becoming a target.

  Next, the site had to be cleared in a somewhat different way. Radiologically.

  Debbie Lynn Hawley was outfitted with something that looked like a camera case. It hung by a shoulder strap around her neck. She opened the lid and took out an object about the size and shape of a brick. It was a piece of sophisticated hardware whose upper face was covered with gauges and dials. Buttons and switches for manipulating it lay inset on the long, narrow sides.

  She explained, “This is a rad detector. It’s like an old-fashioned Geiger counter, only a thousand times more sensitive, and it doesn’t rely on clicking noises to alert the operator to the presence of radioactive material. The data feed shows on the readout gauges. It’ll sing out if I get a positive reading.”

  She climbed the hill to the pumping station. She was light on her feet, alert. Steve Ireland watched her go. So did every other male in the outfit. Steve thought she was cute as a button. Sexy in a sweet, wholesome way.

  The pumping station building was a shell, with not a door left standing or a pane of glass left intact. The walls were high, like those of an airplane hangar. Several skylights pierced the roof, letting in light.

  The structure was one huge, unbroken space. It had not been partitioned into rooms and halls. The floor was dotted with tanks and pools that had once been integral to the operation of the pumphouse. There were drum-shaped tanks, and tanks that looked like giant hot-water heaters, all wrapped in a web of sampling pipes and conduits worming through rusted metal scaffolding. The tanks were empty now, except for where several inches of rainwater and runoff had collected in the bottom of the containers.

  Debbie Lynn walked the site, prowling both the inside and the outside. Wherever she went, her rad detector went with her. Steve Ireland was pleased to note that it remained blissfully silent. McBane asked, “Find anything?”

  “No, it all comes up clean,” Debbie Lynn said.

  “Too bad you had to come all the way out here for nothing.”

  She shrugged prettily. “That’s all right. There’s no such thing as wasted effort in a search like this. Even a negative read is useful. It tells us that no radioactive waste has passed this way.

  “Some radioactive material went missing during the early days of the war. We’re not talking about any of Saddam’s atomic projects, although we can’t rule that out, either. I’m talking about radioactive material used in hospitals and labs and industry. It could be used to make dirty bombs. It wouldn’t explode in a nuclear reaction, but a conventional explosive could send radioactive dust in the air and contaminate a large part of a city and make in uninhabitable.

  “So, it’s a relief to be able to find another site clear. If there were traces of radioactivity, we’d really have something to worry about.”

  Debbie Lynn’s part of the mission was over. ODA 586’s was just beginning. The unit would occupy the pumphouse and its surroundings, laying in wait for any Shiite insurgents who might want to use it as a way station en route to Azif. The tip was that insurgents would pass this way tonight.

  McBane didn’t want the woman present in case there should be a firefight later with hostile elements. He didn’t want Prester around, either. Soldiers were soldiers and spies were spies, and it could be dangerous to both to let the rules blur. Prester could take care of himself, McBane knew. And he suspected that Debbie Lynn Hawley could, too. The agency didn’t field incapables in this hot zone. But they weren’t Special Forces. McBane knew by experience that he could trust his life to any of the members of his unit. The spies were an unknown quantity. But Prester was in. It was his operation, his informants who’d furnished the tip.

  Earlier, back at the base, he’d told McBane, “Azif is boiling. We’ve learned that a Shiite terror cell plans to use the canal to infiltrate into Azif and help out the Shia there. They’re supposed to be coming through tonight after dark. They might send out scouts earlier on, so we want to be fully established before they arrive.”

  McBane told himself that at least he wouldn’t have to worry about the woman for too much longer. Now that her job here was done, she could return to base. Presently, he’d send a couple of men in one of the Humvees to drive her to a spot where she could be airlifted out by helicopter to Foxtrot.

  The RZ site was far enough away from here to avoid having any Coalition helicopters overflying the pumphouse zone and so alerting insurgents that they were entering an area of interest.

  McBane decided that he’d better send a couple of married men to escort Debbie Lynn. They could protect her and keep an eye on each other.

  Later Debbie Lynn Hawley and Prester walked downhill to where the Humvees were parked. Steve Ireland paused to watch her, admiring the way her shapely rear filled out the seat of her khaki pants. He was so distracted that he failed to notice McBane coming up behind him.

  McBane thumped his palm against the top of Steve’s helmet. “Hey! Wake up, Irish. Make yourself useful, and go keep watch on the south.”

  Steve circled around to the south side of the pumping station. A cracked concrete apron extended about twenty feet beyond the wall. Knee-high weeds grew in the cracks in the walkway. Where the pavement ended lay another two dozen or so feet of flat ground. Mostly rocks and dirt grew there, along with a scattering of stunted shrubs.

  Beyond that, the hilltop just ended, fronting on empty air. Steve went out toward the edge. The earthen bank ended here, just dropping off. It wasn’t much of a drop, only about ten feet or so. Still, he kept from going too close to the edge for fear that it would give way under him. He tested the ground with his weight, feeling around with his feet. It felt solid enough, but why take chances? He halted about five feet from the rim.

  The sky was gray with a yellow band at the south horizon. Below, after that ten-foot drop, the ground was flat, stretching unbroken to the south as far as the eye could see.

  Starting from the north bank’s base, a muddy expanse stretched out for a hundred yards or so. The mud was mustard brown. It stank, too, a pungent smell of decaying organic matter and mucky ooze. A stream crept through the center of the mud flats. Broad and shallow, the putty-colored waters unrolled sluggishly through swampy lowlands.

  A desolate scene. A wasteland: no single human structure rose to break the monotony of the flat. It was marshland, and nothing would be built on its boggy, oozing soil. Clumps of reeds and cattails grew along the water’s edge. There were a lot of birds flying back and forth across the flat.

  Steve Ireland looked around for a place to set up a vantage point. He ran the risk of being skylined if he stood too near to the edge. He wanted to keep the pumphouse behind him to minimize his ou
tline.

  He glanced back at the station. Through empty windows and doors and bays in the south wall, he could see inside. Special Forces team members moved purposefully about the site. Shadows fell on those in the building, preventing Steve from making out their faces. The pumphouse and hilltop were thick with troops. It looked like the whole unit was up here.

  Two shots sounded, then after a pause, a third. Then a whole bunch of shots, popping away. They sounded distant, but not too distant.

  Steve said to himself, That can’t be good. Somebody on the hill shouted something indistinguishable. A flash showed inside the pumphouse, filling it with light. White-hot light that obliterated all else within.

  The pumphouse came undone, fragmenting into a million pieces. The glare expanded, engulfing the entire hilltop in the space of an eyeblink. The hilltop came undone, picking up Steve Ireland and flinging him bodily outward into space.

  A few minutes earlier, Debbie Lynn Hawley and Prester had gone to the bottom of the hill, in a place at the rim of the hollow, under some shady trees. The figures moving around on the hilltop were antlike blurs.

  Debbie Lynn went around to the far side of one of the Humvees, so that it stood between her and the hill. Prester followed, trotting several paces behind. Debbie Lynn stopped short and turned suddenly, facing him. Smiling. Prester remembered that he’d always thought she had a lovely smile.

  She held something in each hand. In the right, a gun. It was pointing at him. In the left, a device that looked something like a cell phone. Her eyes were clear, her expression serene. There was no malice there, no gloating. Prester would have sworn to that. A great wave of body terror seized him, filling him with mortal fear. He recoiled, shouting, throwing up his hands in front of him. “No! Don’t!”

  At the same time, he was throwing himself to the side, trying to get behind the rear of the vehicle before she opened fire, knowing it was too late.