He’d never shot one of these rifles, but the trigger worked as he imagined. Too well: He shot up one of the jihadists before he realized what he was doing, ripping open his back and head, spraying blood, brains, and headscarf into the air. The man collapsed, facedown. Adnan felt nothing.
Four soldiers ran away, chased by a lone Waziristani.
Adnan sprinted as hard as he could for the ramp. “Nothing else matters,” Parvez had told him. “You must get on board.”
The short jihadist who’d tackled the fisherman raced into view, shooting at the soldiers who’d already been hit by the grenade. The attack appeared unnecessary; the bodies looked barely intact.
Adnan slipped on the blood seeping across the dock. When he dragged himself to his feet, shirt and pants smeared red, he saw the short jihadist stumble; a bullet had ripped through his neck, fired by a wounded soldier who had seemed dead a moment earlier. Blood arced from the jihadist’s neck, like water from a garden hose. He clutched his wound, staring wildly at Adnan; then he fell, dropping his rifle.
Adnan turned to shoot the soldier; but his head had fallen to the dock, and his dead eyes saw nothing.
“You must get on board.”
Alone, Adnan started up the long ramp.
* * *
The sounds of the soldiers racing toward Birk grew louder. The jihadist couldn’t be far behind. One raggedy-ass headscarf, four soldiers. Why the fuck were they running? But Birk knew the answer: The perverse ratio of religious nutbars to political psychos generally favored the former, even when handily outnumbered. Hey, the afterlife promised gardens full of low-hanging fruit and bubbling streams, fine food and drink, and dozens of virgins—good lookers!—swarming over your loins. Even the most rigorous military training couldn’t compete with that.
Birk abandoned the idea of trying to race twenty-year-old soldiers being chased by a rabid Islamist. Be worse than Pamplona, where a bull almost gored him in the behind in ’73, after Birk had drunk a wee too much courage in his favorite cantina.
The memory had him sucking on his flask, savoring the gin, but he wasn’t drinking courage now—just settling his nerves: He decided against trying to run away from the jihadist and the soldiers—all the brown buggers—after remembering that you never made sudden moves in a firefight that could catch the eyes of jumpy gunmen. For better or worse, the pallet, piled high with heavy-looking crates, provided the only protection, however minimal, on the whole goddamn dock.
All Birk could do was peek out long enough to see the soldiers drawing closer with Mr. Raggedy Ass right on their heels. But the worst part, the fright that made Birk wince and groan and want to stomp his poor fallen arches, was that Raggedy Ass caught his eye.
Oh, fuck a duck.
Birk hadn’t prayed in decades, not since the Tet Offensive when the Vietcong pinned him down near the embassy in Saigon. But he prayed now, if profanities interlaced with “Jesus” and “God”—as in “Jesus fucking God”—could be considered, if but for a second only, as a means of petitioning a higher power. (Not a lot of spiritual belief animated Birk, not after all he’d seen of earthly miseries, but self-interest came into play, and he wasn’t about to bet against the big bully in the sky, not if he could eke out any kind of edge on the theological constructs that turned other men insanely murderous.)
And there they go. The pounding boots of the soldiers. He watched them pass without ever looking over at him. Their backs quickly grew smaller.
And here comes Mr. Raggedy Ass. Birk saw him rear up and start shooting. Oh, Christ alfuckingmighty. All four soldiers fell.
The best Birk could hope for was that the jihadist, having slaughtered the only outright resistance left on the dock, wanted nothing more than to hustle back to whatever nasty business he had planned for the tanker. Or that in the excitement of gunning down four men with a single burst of his dearly beloved Kalashnikov, he’d forgotten about the geezer huddling behind the pallet.
Silence descended, sudden and uneasy. No more bullets, boots, or Raggedy Ass’s bare soles. Birk peered out to see if the jihadist had taken to creeping around. No sign of him. Birk looked behind him. No sign there, either. Then Birk heard him—no question—moving along the far side of the pallet.
He clocked the man’s every step, and tiptoed away. Oh, sweet Jesus. Cat and mouse time.
He had no illusions about which tail-twitching role belonged to