Frederick Forsyth - The Kill List

He went through it on a rolling dive, staying below the likely firing line of a shooter in the room. Inside, he jumped to one side of the doorway and brought his M4 to bear. There was no shot.

He stared around the room, the last of the house, the best, the headman’s room. There was a bed with a coverlet, but it was empty, the blanket thrown to one side.

There was a fireplace and a cluster of still-glowing embers, painfully white through the goggles. A large armchair, and sitting in it, watching him, an old man. They stared at each other for several seconds. The old man spoke quite calmly.

“You may shoot me. I am old and my time has come.” He spoke in Somali, but, with his Arabic, the Tracker could just understand it. He replied in Arabic.

“I do not want to shoot you, Sheikh. You are not he whom I seek.”

The old man gazed at him without fear. What he saw, of course, was a cammo-uniformed monster with frog’s eyes.

“You are of the kuffar , but you speak the language of the Holy Koran.”

“It is true, and I seek a man. A very bad man. He has killed many. Also Muslims, women and even children.”

“Have I seen him?”

“You have seen him, Sheikh. He was here. He has”—the old man would never have seen amber—“eyes the color of fresh-drawn honey.”

“Ah.” The old man waved a hand dismissively, as one gesturing away something he did not like. “He has gone with the woman’s clothes.”

For a second, the Tracker felt a punch of disappointment. Escaped, swathed in a burqa and hijab, hiding in the desert, impossible to find. Then he noticed the old man was glancing upward, and he understood.

When the women of the hamlet washed their clothes in water from the well, they dared not hang them to dry in the square for the goats, who could feast off camel thorn spines, would tear them to shreds. So they erected frames on the flat roofs.

The Tracker went out the door across the room. There was a set of steps running up the side of the house. He leaned his M4 against the wall and drew his sidearm. His rubber-cleated jump boots made no sound going up the brick steps. He emerged on the roof and looked around. There were six drying frames.

In the half-light, he examined them all. For the women, dishdashas; for the men, white cotton lungi s, the sarongs of the Somalis, draped over twig frames to dry. One seemed taller and narrower. It had a long white Pakistani shalwar kameez shirt, a head, a bushy beard, and it moved. Then three things happened so fast they almost cost the Tracker his life.

The moon came out from behind the clouds at last. It was full and dazzlingly white. It destroyed his night vision in a second, blinding him through the light-concentrating NVGs.

The man ahead of him was charging, and the Tracker tore off his goggles and raised his Browning thirteen-shot. The assailant had his right arm raised, and there was something in it that glinted.

He squeezed the Browning’s trigger. The hammer fell — on an empty chamber. A misfire, and, on a second squeeze, another. Very rare but possible. He knew he had a full magazine in there but nothing in the chamber.

With his free left hand, he seized a cotton dishdasha, bunched it into a ball and threw it at the descending blade. The steel hit the fluttering cloth, but the material wrapped itself around the metal so that when it hit his shoulder, it was blunted. With his right hand, he threw down the Browning and from a sheath on his right thigh he drew his U.S. Marine fighting knife, almost the one thing he still had that he had brought from London.

The bearded man was not using a jambiya , the short, curved but mainly ornamental knife of Yemen, but a billao —a big, razor-sharp knife used only by Somalis. Two slashes from a billao will take off an arm; a lunge with the needle point will go through a torso from front to back.

The attacker changed grip, twisting his wrist so the blade was held low for an upward thrust, as a street fighter would hold it. The Tracker had his vision back. He noted the man in front of him was barefoot, which would give him a good grip on the clay-brick roof. But so would his own rubber soles.

The next attack from the billao came fast and low to his left side, rising for the entrails, but that was where he expected it. His own left hand came down on the rising wrist, blocking it, the steel tip three inches from his body. He felt his own right wrist also gripped.

The Preacher was twelve years younger and hard from a life of asceticism in the mountains. In a trial of brute strength, he might win. The billao point advanced an inch toward his midriff. He remembered his parachute instructor at Fort Bragg, a seasoned fighting man apart from teaching free fall.

“East of Suez and south of Tripoli, they’re not good street fighters,” he explained once over a beer or three at the sergeants’ club. “They rely on their blades. They ignore the balls and the bridge.”

He meant the bridge of the nose. The Tracker pulled back his head and snapped it forward. He took his own pain on the top of the forehead and knew he would have a bump; but he felt the crack as the other man’s septum shattered.

So also did the grip of the hand holding his wrist. He tore his hand free, drew back and lunged. His blade went clear between the fifth and sixth ribs on the left side. A few inches away from his face, he saw the hate-filled amber eyes, the slow expression of disbelief as his steel drove into the heart, the light of life fading away.

He saw the amber fade away to black under the moon and felt the weight sag against his knife. He thought of his father on the bed in the ICU and leaned forward until his lips were just above the full dark beard. And he whispered: “Semper Fi, Preacher.”

The Pathfinders formed a defensive ring to wait out the hour until dawn, but the watchers in Tampa were able to reassure them there was no hostile intervention heading their way. The desert was the province of only the jackal.

All the Bergens were recovered from the desert, including Pete’s medical pack. He tended the rescued cadet Ove Carlsson. The lad was infected with parasites from his weeks in the dungeon in Garacad, undernourished and traumatized. Pete attended to what he could, including a shot of morphine. The cadet went into a deep sleep, his first in weeks, on a bed in front of the stoked-up fire.

Curly examined all three technicals in the square by torch light. One was riddled with M4 and Kalashnikov fire and would clearly not roll again. The other two were roadworthy when he had finished with them and contained petrol-filled jerrycans, enough for several hundred miles.

At first light, David talked with Djibouti and assured them the patrol could use the two technicals to drive west to the Ethiopian border. Just across it was the desert airstrip they had designated as their best extraction point, if they could make it. Curly estimated two hundred miles, or ten hours’ driving, accounting for fuel stops, some tire changes and presuming no hostile action. They were assured the C-130 Hercules, long back at Djibouti, would be waiting for them.

Agent Opal, the jet-black Ethiopian, was hugely relieved to be free of his increasingly dangerous masquerade. The paras broke open their food packs and made a passable breakfast, of which the highlight and center point was a blazing fire in the grate and several mugs of strong, sweet milky tea.

The bodies were dragged out to the square and left for the villagers to bury. A large wad of local Somali currency was found on the body of the Preacher and donated to the headman for all his trouble.

The case containing one million dollars in cash was found under the bed from which the Preacher had fled to the roof. The para captain made the point that, as they had abandoned half a million dollars of parachutes and para packs in the desert, and as going back in the wrong direction to look for them would not be a good idea, could they not reimburse the regiment from the booty? Point conceded.