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“Ask anyone,” he deadpanned as the hum of the ISIS patrol truck reemerged. “I have a very fine personality.”
“Then let’s put it to use,” Rapp agreed. It was undoubtedly the better strategy, but his knee-jerk reaction was always to take on the most dangerous part of an op.
“Mohammed is armed also,” Gaffar said. “Should we solicit his help?”
“Not a problem for me, but do you really want him shooting in your direction?”
“I suppose not.”
Illumination from a single headlight began reflecting dimly off the buildings to their right, and Gaffar took a deep breath. It shook slightly when he let it out.
“You all right?”
“Of course.”
He’d been Iraqi regular army, trained by the Americans, and was solid in every way. But strolling into a group of heavily armed ISIS psychopaths would be enough to shake anyone.
Rapp dug around in his jacket and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. He held them out along with a pack of matches.
Gaffar grinned. “You are truly a gift from God. May Allah smile on you.”
“And you.”
With that, the big man walked into the middle of the street and held up a hand in greeting, squinting into the glare of the truck bearing down on him. It began to brake
and Gaffar watched with calculated boredom, cupping a hand around a lit match and bringing it to the cigarette in his mouth.
The pickup skidded to a stop about twenty feet in front of him and the men in the back jumped out. All were shouting and all had AKs aimed in Gaffar’s direction.
The men in the cab were slower to abandon the vehicle, but when they did, Rapp was able to get an accurate head count. Seven. They were on.
“What are you doing out here?” the driver demanded. “It’s curfew.”
Gaffar tossed the match casually on the ground before taking a long drag on his cigarette. “General Masri sent me. We had intelligence that Mohammed Qarni and his band were hiding out in the abandoned part of the city. I don’t think it’s true, though. I was able to find no trace of them.”
He started forward, ignoring the weapons trained on him, and shook a cigarette out of the pack for the driver. He accepted and Gaffar lit a match.
“They may have fled the city,” he continued. “If so, I suspect the desert will do my job for me.”
He held the pack out and the men around him approached hesitantly. Rapp watched carefully over his suppressor, taking in how each of them moved, how they handled their weapons, their level of alertness. By the time they all had lit their cigarettes, he’d designated each one with a priority. Of course, the unpredictability of battle would inevitably throw a wrench into his order, but it made sense to go in with some guidelines.
Gaffar was playing it beautifully. Apparently he was serious about being likable. The conversation was flowing nicely, punctuated every few seconds with laughter. Rapp couldn’t make out individual words anymore, but that was by design. Gaffar was speaking quietly enough to force the men to gather in close. A nice tight grouping, but one that was going to put him in the line of fire.
Rapp waited for another burst of laughter and fired two shots in quick succession. He abandoned his normal headshot—too obvious and messy—instead going for center of mass. He’d threaded the first rounds through the men with their backs to him and hit ones on the other side. The third shot was complicated by Gaffar’s position in the group and took longer to line up than he would have liked. The two men he’d shot had nearly hit the ground when he finally squeezed the trigger and struck a man just below where his assault rifle was hanging across his torso.
The driver shouted a warning and Gaffar picked up on what was happening without missing a beat. He screamed something about Mohammed and his gang and pulled his weapon, firing in the wrong direction to reinforce the illusion of a shooter to the south.
They all followed suit, opening up on the windows of the building across the street. Chunks of wood, vaporized concrete, and shattered glass rained down as Rapp lined up on the back of the driver. A quick squeeze of the trigger dropped him. Leadership gone. Next he turned his weapon on a man from the back of the truck who had seemed unusually wary and athletic.
Gaffar suddenly jerked and went down hard. It was violent enough to make Rapp hesitate for a moment, concerned that there was a shooter unaccounted for. He quickly realized it was just for show. Gaffar was now on his back behind the three surviving men.
Rapp returned to his target and dropped the man just as his companion lost the back of his head to a round fired by Gaffar. The last man standing suddenly stopped shooting and looked around him, confused. A moment later Rapp put a bullet into his right temple.
Then everything went silent again.
Rapp motioned to the others before running into the street to gather weapons. “Are you injured?”
“I’m fine,” Gaffar said, getting up and dusting himself off.
