“In a leather satchel at my feet. Wait five minutes after I’m gone, then pick it up and take it to your room.”
“Where will he be staying?”
“The Baghdad Hotel where a lot of journalists who don’t care to stay in the Green Zone hang out,” Weiss said. “Give me the photo you got at the airport.”
Kangas had figured Weiss would want it back. He handed it over. “Not a very good likeness.”
Weiss gave them both another appraising look, before he got up. “Stupid bastards.”
As soon as he’d left, Kangas reached under the table for the satchel, then slid out of the booth, Mustapha right behind him, and they left the lounge, holding up just at the entrance to see which way their quartermaster was heading. But Weiss was nowhere to be seen.
“Not bad,” Kangas had to admit. The man might have looked like a poofta but he knew his tradecraft.
FORTY-ONE
Heading north from the border away from the head of the Gulf, toward Basra, the night turned warm, even sultry. This, Hadid explained, was the region of the famous Fertile Crescent, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, near the Garden of Eden.
More oil rigs dotted the horizon, and to McGarvey the area seemed anything but fertile. It was mostly desert now, and when a breeze blew it stank of oil and natural gas.
“We’ll have no trouble until after Basra,” Hadid said, checking his rearview mirror often. “It starts to get bad once we get near An Nasiriyah. The convoys take the route on the west side of the river, but we’ll cross over and take the eastern route. It’s about the same distance, but I know it better.”
“Wouldn’t we be safer traveling in the middle of a couple of convoys?” McGarvey asked.
Hadid glanced at him and shook his head. “No,” he said, and he checked his rearview mirror again.
For the moment they were alone on the road, though in the distance behind them they could make out the lights of an oncoming car or perhaps the convoy that had been directly behind them at the checkpoint. It was time for the weapons.
Hadid pulled over and they all got out and went around to the back of the car where Hadid opened the lid and brought out a Glock 17 for McGarvey with a silencer and three magazines of ammunition plus three AK-47s with the satchel of spare magazines, which went to McGarvey, Saddam, and the woman.
They all piled back inside the car and Hadid pulled away before the oncoming lights had reached them.
Saddam and Miriam both handled the AKs with practiced ease, checking the actions, loading the weapons, and racking rounds into the firing chambers as McGarvey was doing the same.
The woman looked up, catching McGarvey watching her. “Little children know how to use this weapon,” she said.
“Have you ever killed a man?”
Her lips compressed, but she didn’t look away. “More than one,” she said. “I didn’t care for it each time.”
“Most people usually don’t,” McGarvey said.
They had switched positions at the stop; McGarvey now riding shotgun in the front seat with Miriam and her son in the back, watching for trouble on either side of the road and to the rear.
The night was pitch black here, except for the Range Rover’s headlights. And it was beginning to cool down.
Miram said something to her husband in Persian, and Hadid looked in his rearview mirror. “Someone back there seems interested in us, I think.”
McGarvey looked back and he could see that the headlights were moving up on them very fast. “I don’t think it’s the convoy.”
“No, it’s only one maybe two pairs of lights,” Hadid said. He was searching for something on either side of the road.
Miriam said something else, her tone urgent.
“This will do,” Hadid said. “Hold on, it’s time to give them a little surprise.”
He jammed on the brakes suddenly, doused the lights and swerved off the road to the right, across a shallow ditch, and headed for a small concrete block structure, just reaching it as a Toyota heavy-duty pickup truck roared up and without slowing down careened off the road.
“Shoot now,” McGarvey shouted, and he opened fire with the AK-47 at two figures dressed in black braced in the bed of the pickup truck with what looked like an M249 squad automatic weapon, which was a Belgian-made 5.66mm light machine gun mounted on a pedestal. One of the guys was a shooter the other the loader.