remember thinking that John Wayne and Robert Mitchum never pissed themselves in this kind of situation. At least not in the movies. I felt I was regressing to infancy in the presence of men who already despised me. I suppose I was. I thought of my mother and how she would mourn me, her second son, who had also died before his time. I also wondered what my father would feel, hearing of my death while on assignment. Would he finally respect me? For dying in pursuit of our shared profession?
I never found out.
As I lay there grieving the brief flicker of warmth and light that had been my mortal existence, Paul and an ex-Ranger named Gary Inman hurled two flash-bang grenades into the room, blinding and deafening everyone in it. Five seconds later, every man but me had been shot through the head.
“CANYOUWALK?” Paul shouted in my ear.
“Paul?” I blubbered, tears streaming from my eyes.
He jerked me to my feet. “Come on, Goose! MOVE!”
“Where?” I gasped, staggering like a blind drunk.
“Grab my fucking belt and stay on my ass!”
I jammed my hand into his pants and hung on like a baby monkey clinging to its mother. The gunshots had triggered pandemonium in the house. No Iraqi was sure who was shooting or why. In the midst of this chaos, the skill set possessed by Paul and his buddy proved to be a force multiplier of astonishing lethality. I saw Paul shoot two men in the face while they tried to figure out who he was and where he’d come from. When another insurgent threw up his hands in defense, Paul shot him through his hands. Barely functioning, I hung on to Paul’s belt as he swept through the house, killing all before him.
Inman kicked open a door that led into a narrow alley I remembered from our previous life, which seemed a thousand years ago. We darted left first, but a Toyota pickup with a bed-mounted machine gun shrieked to a stop just past the opening. That armed Toyota—known as a “technical”—would back up any second to finish us off.
Paul veered right and charged down the alley. We’d almost reached the other end when the technical opened up. Heavy-caliber bullets ripped into the masonry wall to my right, and either a bullet or stone shrapnel knocked down Gary Inman.
“LEAVE HIM!” Paul shouted, after a momentary glance.
I did.
The next street was hardly more than an alley itself. Paul started left again (as though he had a specific destination), but the familiar whine of an engine told us the Toyota was coming back to head us off. Paul skidded to a stop, jerked my arm, and led me back the other way.
Twenty yards up the alley, a Honda Accord had stopped, facing us. It sat idling, headlights off, as if waiting for us to commit to a move. The street was so narrow that we couldn’t slip around the car. I tried to see through the dark windshield. A bearded man sat behind the wheel, and beside him I discerned what looked like a white hijab.
The squeal of brakes sounded behind us. The Toyota—
The driver of the Accord screamed, and the hijab beside him flared white. Then their windshield exploded in a hail of bullets. I whirled left. Paul had raised his M4 and was riddling the car. The sight of that windshield shattering into a hail of glass and blood paralyzed me.
“FOLLOW ME!” he shouted.
Paul ran right over the hood and roof of the Accord, his boots smashing dents in the holed metal, then dived onto the cobblestones beyond the trunk. I know I followed him, because I looked down through the missing windshield as I climbed over the car. Inside lay a man and woman. The man had jerked the woman into his lap to shield her with his body, but his effort had gone in vain. Both bodies were covered in bright red blood. The man’s head had been smashed wide open by a bullet.
As I leaped off the trunk, I heard a child crying behind me. I started to turn back, but Paul dragged me to the ground as the technical opened up again. While the machine gun chewed the Honda into scrap metal, we belly-crawled to the end of that alley.
Waiting in the next street like a golden chariot was the Mamba belonging to Paul’s Alpha team. Beside it a ShieldCorp contractor named Evans stood like a bored chauffeur. “Does this complete your party, sir?” he