the Russkies gave them away like stuffed cabbages.
Birk ducked behind a pallet of crates stamped with inky Chinese characters, moving so fast that his media laminates, hanging from his neck on a beaded chain, swung up and smacked him in the face. Least of his worries. There were brown buggers in headscarves down the dock to his left, and brown buggers in uniforms down the dock to his right; the ones in uniform were guarding the gangplank to Senator Gayle Higgens’s supertanker, the Dick fucking Cheney.
All the brown buggers had Kalashnikovs. The guys in headscarves looked like Al Qaeda wannabes and were trying to shoot their way onto the tanker. The soldier boys had been searching bags by the gangplank. Duffels had been left open and unattended; Birk assumed their owners had fled. The uniforms had behaved like smart soldiers everywhere and taken cover. Who wants to die for iron oxide? Helluva legacy. But why would anyone kill for it? This has got to be a first.
Birk figured this skirmish—they were still firing at one another, mostly blindly—would last about two more minutes, until army reinforcements arrived and picked off the headscarves from behind. The wannabes had no plan, apparently, beyond playing shoot ’em up. Amateurs. They should take some lessons from their brothers-in-arms in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those guys were ferocious kick-ass fighters. Birk hated their guts but they knew war. Not this piddly shit. He could take on these bozos.
One of them had an RPG, and Birk wondered why. If they used rockets, they risked blowing up the gangplank and damaging the boat, which they appeared to want to hijack. Bring it on, Birk thought. Rockets made for terrific bang-bang, and show producers adored them. Where’s my cameraman?
Birk and his photographer had come to the docks to catch the water taxi to Dhiggaru, where Birk intended to flush out Jenna Withers’s old boyfriend. Then the shooting had started and the cameraman had bolted. Birk hoped that the chickenshit had holed up somewhere to shoot the entire scene, especially since he was in the middle of it. The “veteran correspondent,” the anchors at all the networks would call him. A dashing figure, a stalwart observer caught between opposing forces of evil. Might even save him from the next round of layoffs.
Come on, come on, Birk mumbled impatiently, sweating through his fine Egyptian cotton shirt. Can we have some sirens? The cavalry? Give me “bang-bang” for the viewers at home. Something, for God’s sake.
He took out his cell and grabbed video of the five jihadists, assuming they had the shortest lease on life. Once the reinforcements arrived, he’d have to try to capture the bloodletting with the phone’s crappy little lens. No telling what chickenshit was doing.
He’d no sooner settled back behind the pallet when a fusillade riddled the sweltering air. Birk peeked out in time to see a headscarf rise up dramatically from behind the covering fire and lob a grenade.
Holy fucking shit.
The grenade exploded. Shrapnel tore into soldiers, the gangplank, and the shipping crates. Birk glanced out and saw all five jihadists racing toward the ramp, which appeared intact. The same could not be said for three bodies that, until seconds earlier, had worn the unshredded uniform of this beleaguered nation. The surviving soldiers, seeing themselves about to be overrun, fled right toward Birk, who registered this development with dismay and more profanity. He also noticed that one of the jihadists heading toward the gangplank was armed with only a pistol.
Christ, he’s fat.
You didn’t see many fatties in the Maldives. But then a suspicion seized Birk and sent waves of fear washing through him: that the fat guy was wearing a suicide belt, or vest. Birk wanted to run, too, but didn’t risk any exposure, not with armed men racing toward the crates that he hoped would hide him.
* * *
In seconds, Adnan was glad he was lagging behind the other four Islamists: The one with the long beard was mowed down by automatic weapons fire and went sprawling on the pier. Adnan, thirty feet behind him, froze and watched the wiry leader of the Waziristanis open fire on the enemy, who was trying to take cover behind the leg of a massive red crane. The jihadist cut him down, leaving his dead eyes fixed on the steel structure that towered above him.
Adnan ran to the jihadist with the long beard, shaking him. No life. He stuffed the Mauser into his pants and grabbed the other man’s Kalashnikov.