. .” Halabi said.
Attia pulled a pistol from the holster on his hip and fired a single round into the German nurse’s chest.
Victoria Schaefer managed to catch him before he hit the floor and Halabi watched a scene play out that was identical to the one with her translator. She tore open Vogel’s shirt, looked at the wound over his heart, and realized that she was powerless.
This time, instead of running, she lunged with surprising force and speed. It wasn’t enough, though. Attia caught her and dragged her toward the door at the back of the room. She screamed obscenities and fought violently enough that Attia was struggling to keep hold of her as he slid an ancient key into the lock. She actually managed to inflict a superficial wound on his neck before they disappeared across the threshold.
Her shouts and the sound of her beating futilely against Attia continued and Halabi examined Bertrand’s reaction. The Frenchman’s eyes flicked back and forth from the body on the floor to the open door the woman had been forced through. He was a surprisingly simple and transparent man. He showed no more empathy for his comrades than he had for patients. Instead, he seemed entirely focused on calculating how this affected his own situation.
The sounds of struggling faded and finally went silent. The woman, just out of sight in the room, would now be secured to the table at its edge. She managed to shout a few more epithets, but then her words became screams. Within a minute, there seemed to be nothing but her terror, pain, and hopelessness bouncing off the stone walls.
“How can you stand there and do nothing to stop this?” Halabi asked Bertrand. “What was it you said earlier? Anthrax isn’t even dangerous. And, as you suspected, I’ve released videos with my plans. The Americans will know what’s coming and be vigilant.”
Bertrand didn’t respond. He seemed to be slipping into shock as the screams of the woman echoed around them.
“I need to generate fear, Doctor. That’s all. My goal is to convince the Americans that there’s a price to be paid for continuing to create instability and suffering in the Middle East. We don’t want to be murdered for our oil. We don’t want our democratically elected governments to be overthrown and violent dictators to be inserted. In short, we don’t want to live like you and we don’t want to be your slaves. We just want to be left alone to find our own path.”
It was a sentiment that he would undoubtedly be sympathetic to, because it had largely been gleaned from his own naïve political posts on Facebook. Still, he didn’t answer immediately, holding out until the woman’s screams took on a gurgling quality.
“I’ll do it.”
Halabi nodded and shouted to Attia in Arabic. “Finish her!”
A gunshot sounded and Halabi put a comforting hand on Bertrand’s shoulder. “I’m sure she appreciated your mercy.”
CHAPTER 12
AL HUDAYDAH
YEMEN
“THESE images are garbage, Irene!”
Scott Coleman had recon photos that covered a radius of twenty miles around the place where he’d split from Rapp, but they looked like they’d been taken through the bottom of a dirty Coke bottle.
“The wind’s kicking up and the satellite can’t penetrate the dust,” Kennedy explained.
He ran a hand over the hazy eight-by-tens arranged on Shamir Karman’s desk, leaving a streak of blood across them. The bandage on his forearm was so tight he could barely feel his fingers, but the wound just wouldn’t stop seeping. It was hard to complain, though. He was lucky his arm was still attached. The fight to get back to Al Hudaydah had been nastier than he’d counted on.
Rapp had been right about most of the ISIS forces focusing on him, but that still left three vehicles full of terrorist pricks to come after Coleman’s team. The climbing had been steeper and looser than it looked and they’d gotten pinned down in a cliff band about thirty yards up the slope.
With the crack troops concentrating on Rapp, the less disciplined fighters had unleashed as much ammo as they could in his team’s general direction, underestimating how good their cover was. After ten minutes of setup, his guys had started to return fire—single rounds aimed at carefully selected targets. About half the ISIS force went down in the first two minutes, but then the rest got wise. After that, the skirmish had turned into a stalemate that wasn’t broken until well after sunset. The injury to his arm, a set of bruised ribs,