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“I’m sorry,” the Iraqi stammered. “He scared me. I didn’t—”
“The girls!” Rapp said, adjusting the scarf around his neck to cover his face and head. “Now!”
Mohammed started sprinting toward the back of the building as Rapp wrestled the two bodies into the open classroom. He’d barely gotten the first over the threshold when the naked girl shot past him and ran, sobbing, toward the lobby.
The sound of her slamming through the main doors was accompanied by the shouts of men waking up all over the building. What he didn’t hear, though, was a gunshot. Gaffar was thankfully less easy to startle than Mohammad. The girl would be allowed to disappear into the night.
“Americans!” Rapp shouted in Arabic. “The Americans are attacking!”
He slid the knife back into his waistband and clamped a hand over his thigh, lurching forward as though he’d been shot. A man appeared in the stairwell to his right and Rapp motioned toward the lobby. “The Americans! They’re out front! Hurry!”
More men appeared and ran for the main entrance, checking their weapons, speculating loudly as to the strength of the opposing force, and wondering if the Americans would dare use drones. Rapp’s feigned wound gave him an excuse to hang back. Six men were in front of him, none of whom were looking behind them. He reached for Gaffar’s Smith & Wesson but then heard the sound he’d been dreading: the screams of young girls mixed with a drumroll of running feet.
His sweet setup went to shit in a matter of seconds. The men ahead started looking back and a moment later he was engulfed in a sea of panicked children. They flowed around him and the ISIS men, trapping them in an irresistible current moving toward the front of the building. The terrorist
s faced forward again, shouting angrily and swinging their rifle butts. A few connected and the girls went down, but it was useless. The slave trade was clearly better than Mohammed thought, because there had to be at least a hundred of them.
Shooting was pointless. Rapp would be lucky to hit the ground in this environment. He spotted what he needed just ahead and to his right—a three-foot break in the lockers that lined the wall.
With considerable effort, he managed to fight his way out of the flow of escaping girls. Five men were still visible and he braced himself between the lockers, aiming his pistol at a terrorist about to disappear around the corner.
Rapp went for his upper back, not wanting to cause the mess that tended to accompany a headshot. It worked. He went down, but it looked like he’d just tripped in the melee. The gunshot was loud as hell, but in the concrete corridor, it would be impossible to pinpoint its source.
A tall girl with a blanket wrapped around her bumped Rapp’s gun hand as she ran past, but he recovered quickly and took out a man who was actually slashing at the children around him with a sword. A man a few feet behind saw him fall and looked back at Rapp, but he didn’t have time to raise his weapon before taking a round to the throat.
The last viable target disappeared around the corner just as the tail end of the stampede passed by. Only a few very young girls were left behind, confused and crying.
Mohammed appeared a moment later. Apologizing a little too loudly, but at least not shooting at anything.
“They were already coming through the door when I got there! I tried to push it closed, but it was impossible.”
Rapp didn’t respond, instead starting to run toward the front of the building. When he came to the lobby, he found close to fifteen men firing blind bursts through the windows.
Rapp went straight for the middle of them, slamming his back into the closed doors with Gaffar’s pistol held near his chest. “General Mustafa sent us to warn you that the Americans were planning an attack. But we were too late.”
Completely destroying Mustafa’s teams wasn’t part of his plan, but he needed a few more dead before the night was over.
“We have to get out of here!” Rapp continued. “With the girls gone, the Americans will use their drones. We don’t have much time!”
The men nodded their agreement.
“You have to survive to carry out the general’s plans,” Rapp said. “I’ll go out first and draw the Americans’ fire. Follow a few seconds later and run for the desert.”
He lurched over to Mohammed and grabbed him by the back of the neck. “Come with me.”
They went back to the doors and, with a shout of Allahu Akbar, charged out into the night, firing their weapons into the bottom of the hill that Gaffar was ensconced on. Rapp pulled the scarf from his face and hoped to hell that Gaffar was paying attention.
It appeared that he was, because when the flashes from his rifle started up, they were angled safely away from them.
Rapp sprinted ahead, leaving Mohammed on his own and dropping to his stomach about twenty-five yards outside the gate. He aimed through the gloom, tracking the men trying to escape into the night. One to his two o’clock went down, a victim of Gaffar’s marksmanship. His companion crouched and skirted the fence, looking for an easy way over. Rapp squeezed off a single round as the man leapt onto the wire and began to climb. The tango jerked visibly before his body folded lifelessly over the top.
Mohammed ran past, unaware that Rapp was lying only a few feet away. He’d follow in a moment. By his count, two more needed to go down before the night’s work was over.
CHAPTER 42
EAST OF FUJAIRAH
GULF OF OMAN
