Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

Throughout the ordeal, not a single bullet was directed at the museum.

In the few thriller novels Khalid had ever finished, he’d read that bullets made a whining sound as they passed close by and that sometimes one could feel their passage disturb the air. However, no author had ever mentioned the intense heat as rounds sped by close enough to burn the skin of his face and neck.

Chunks of concrete were gouged from the sidewalk around him as full-metal jackets tore into the cement, stinging his hands and face and eyes. He rolled as fast as he could, trying to minimize his body as a half dozen gunmen advanced on him, their rifles chattering.

Automatic gunfire was now being returned by the police stationed at the barricade farther up Great Russell Street. A deadly cross fire arrowed just above Khalid’s prone form. There was no cover to be found; the burning wreck of the Daimler was too hot to approach, but the oily smoke rising from the twisted mass offered a thin veil in which to hide. A bullet raked across his back, a fiery furrow running from shoulder to hip, as he scrabbled into the smoke roiling from the limousine. Lunging, he managed to roll back into the street, the six-inch curb feeling like the armor of a battle tank compared to the openness of his earlier position.

His suit began to smolder from the heat of the burning wreck and his left hand, the one closest to the car, started to blister. Khalid dared not move.

Two of the gunmen were down, blown back by the scathing fire from an FN FAL rifle carried by a police sniper, and two others were wounded. The terrorists were about one hundred feet from Khalid, but the smoke and fire hid him enough for their bursts to be off by several yards. The gawkers assembled to watch the gala opening of the special exhibit had fled in panic, stumbling and tripping over one another, heedless of those few unfortunates who fell under the mob’s frantic escape.

None of the journalists flinched when the attack began. Ever since Herb Morrison’s eyewitness account of the Hindenburg disaster made him a household name and forever changed journalism’s impact on the world, every reporter’s dream was a moment like this. All of them were making the most of it. As calmly as spectators watching a tennis volley, they collectively turned from a member of Parliament as he alighted from his car toward the carnage just a hundred yards down the road. And as one, their bovine expressions of boredom changed to sanguineous delight as the bullets started to fly. One journalist actually laughed when the Daimler exploded.

Khalid saw none of this as bullets streaked around him, every moment expecting to feel nothing ever again. His eyes were so tightly closed that squiggles of phantom light danced against the darkness of his eyelids. Yet he remained completely still in the gutter of Great Russell Street. Nothing in his experience could have prepared him for this kind of terror, and even as death sought him out, he was amazed at his composure.

Then, as suddenly as it started, it was over. The blistering fire from the police barricade took down the last two charging terrorists only forty feet from Khalid, one felled by a single bullet through his left eye and the other torn nearly in half by a ten-round burst fired by a young Special Branch agent. The whole scene was captured by motor-driven Nikons and Leicas.

Enough rain had fallen so that a tiny stream poured along the gutter, eddying around leaves and bits of loose cement and the twist-off cap of a cola bottle, washing the grit and dirt from the side of Khalid’s face. Its coolness made him moan, not in fear or pain, which would come later, but in the blessed relief that he was still alive.

Police sirens punctuated the silence after the attack. Ambulances too were on their way, and more soldiers and more reporters and more of everybody. Khalid stayed in the gutter, letting the rain drum against his back and snake along his neck before trickling onto the roadway. It was only when he heard someone approach and say, “Jesus Christ,” that he finally tried to get up.

He managed to lever himself only a few inches before choking waves of pain washed over him. He’d been wounded far worse than he realized.

“He’s alive,” the voice shouted. “Get a bloody doctor here, now.”

A steadying hand touched Khalid’s shoulder, and he gasped.

“You’ll be all right, mate,” the voice said with as much reassurance as the sight of so much blood on one man would allow. “You may have more holes in you than the links at St. Andrews, but you’ll be fine.”

“Any idea who he is?” a paramedic asked the soldier as he began his ministrations.

“Yeah, the luckiest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen.”

Hasaan bin-Rufti slapped the man before him as hard as he could. While the blow contained as much strength as he possessed, the fat hanging like slabs of suet under his arm prevented his hand from swinging naturally, and much of the force was absorbed by his own considerable bulk. The backhanded follow-through was much more effective, especially when a four-carat diamond pinkie ring flayed a strip of flesh from the other man’s cheek. Delighted with the bloody weal, Rufti slapped him again in much the same fashion. This time, the fat on his finger closed over the stone’s sharp table edge, and it was his own flesh that bled. Cursing, he greedily sucked the finger into his mouth as if afraid he’d lose sustenance with the drops of blood oozing from the cut.

“I have always been surrounded by fools,” Rufti cried plaintively to the two men standing behind the man cowering before him. He pulled his finger from his mouth long enough to ingest a piece of caviar-smeared toast. Rufti replaced the bleeding finger with a loud slurp and continued to speak around it.

“How hard is it to fire a missile at a stationary target? You were told to fire as soon as they stopped, but you decided to wait long enough to let Khuddari escape.”

“But please, the driver, he was like my brother — surely you must know this?” the supine Kurdish freedom fighter wailed.

“I’ve given your organization a million dollars in return for the death of one man, and you tell me you’re not willing to make some sort of sacrifice for your cause? The driver was supposed to die, you both knew that. He was supposed to shoot Khuddari and then die in the missile explosion. His martyrdom was the key to the entire operation. How in the name of Allah and his Prophet do you expect to further your cause if no one even knows who you are? For that you need martyrs.” Rage and frustration caused Rufti’s rubbery lips to flap obscenely. “Did you know in English, with only a slight change in spelling, Kurd is a formation of cheese? With a name like that your people are already a laughingstock. Kurdish homeland. It sounds like a home for dairy cows and cheese makers.”

Rufti looked at his watch, one with a special band to encompass his twelve-inch wrist. “In ten minutes the BBC is going to get a letter stating that tonight’s attack was the work of your organization, Kurdistan United, and that the assaults will continue if your demands for an independent nation are not met. After this fiasco, the world will say, ‘Go ahead, keep attacking. Seven Kurds dead and only a little concrete shot up. In enough time you’ll have no fighters left to carry on, so please keep them coming.’

“Our deal,” Rufti continued to rant, his multiple chins quivering, “was money in exchange for the assassination of Khalid Khuddari. I know that you are too stupid to understand how important his death is for me, but don’t grovel at my feet and whine to me about how you had second thoughts at the last moment.”

In these precious moments, Rufti felt exactly as he saw himself. He had power right now, real power. His two aides would kill the Kurd if he said so, which he would, but the thrill of having the freedom fighter at his feet was too intoxicating to let it end quickly. He would stretch this out, savor it, feel the power he felt he deserved, the power of right and wrong, of life and death. Caligula must have felt like this, he thought.