for the small-time hood. Only six months later, in the hard, tense weeks leading up to the American invasion, Mustafa found himself dumped back onto the streets along with all the other crooks, pimps, and kidnappers—a gift from Saddam for the Americans.
They might win, but they would regret it.
Mustafa emerged a new man. A reformed man. Amazing what a few brief months could accomplish. He now sported a thick black beard and called himself an Islamic warrior, a patriot, a freedom fighter dedicated to ridding Iraq of its loathsome invaders. He took to carrying around the Koran though it was well-known that he couldn’t read a whit. Turned out Mustafa had met new friends in prison, generous sorts, men who weren’t picky and happily paid three thousand American bucks for every American he killed. Five thousand if the corpse happened to be an officer.
Mustafa wasn’t into the killing game himself. Subcontracting was his preferred method—in truth, his only method—primarily using small kids to handle the dirty work. He was particularly partial to street orphans, like Abdallah and Hadi, who brought along a few big advantages. They were poor and indescribably desperate, for one thing. They came without baggage, for another—no pissed-off parents, no angry brothers, no vengeful uncles or clans to worry about when things went wrong.
And in Mustafa’s case, things often went wrong.
Abdallah glanced up. Hadi was furiously waving with one hand, pointing wildly to his left with the other. This wasn’t the signal they had agreed to, not even close. Hadi, though, was only twelve, small for his age, slightly daft, and tended to get carried away at moments like this. At thirteen, Abdallah was far the more seasoned, cooler, and ambitious of the pair. It was he who had talked Hadi into this little job. Hadi put on a good front, though it was obvious he was scared out of his wits and well over his head. Abdallah had to keep reminding him that Mustafa had promised five hundred dollars if they pulled this off, a fortune they would split fifty-fifty.
The bounty for dead Americans was six hundred, Mustafa swore, and out of fairness—he was a religious man after all—he would limit his own share to a paltry one hundred. But five hundred, theirs to keep, all for squeezing the tiny device in his hand. Easy money.
A few local boys warned them that Mustafa was a notorious cheat and was getting much more than that. Who cared? Five hundred was a fortune. They would eat well for a year.
Captain Bill Forrest munched loudly from a bag of Lay’s barbecue potato chips. He washed them down with deep sips from a bottled water that, over the past twenty minutes, had gone from lukewarm to nearly a boil. The day was a scorcher, never dipping below 115 degrees. He was aching to get out of the body armor, aching to catch up on his sleep, aching for the tour to be over. He dreamed of air-conditioning, of cold ice cream, of long walks in cool woods without anybody shooting or trying their damnedest to blow him up.
The idea of a week without sweat—or explosions—was almost more than he could imagine. He was trying his best, however.
“Two more weeks of this crap,” his driver, Private Teddy Davis, loudly complained, banging a hand hard off the steering wheel. “Know what I’m gonna do the second I get back to the world?”
“Pretty sure I do.” Forrest crunched loudly on another chip. Why ask? Same thing every single guy in the unit was swearing to do. Look for naked ladies. Fat, ugly, skinny, didn’t matter—female and disrobed in any shape or form would do the trick. “Keep your eyes on the roadsides, Davis.”
The driver stared straight ahead, and so did his brain. “There’s this girly house, sir. Just three short blocks from the front gate. Gorgeous ladies. They strip down to nothin’, I hear.”
“Sounds promising. Then what?”
“Then, well, I dunno.” Good question, he realized. “What’re you gonna do?”
“I’m married, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So first I’m gonna spend a few minutes playing with my two pretty little girls.”
“Sounds fun,” Davis commented, not meaning a word of it.
“Then, well, then I’m gonna take their pretty momma upstairs, lock the bedroom door, and play with her, too.” The captain smiled and Davis couldn’t resist joining him.
Bill Forrest was twenty-nine, a big man with broad dark features and thick dark hair, who had played linebacker in college, at Notre Dame, a fact that thoroughly impressed his men. On a