Vince Flynn: American Assassin

Officially, he’d spent the last twenty-one years darting in and out of war-torn countries and doing his part to create a few wars, too. Unofficially, it had been longer than that. He’d been on the very edge of the conflict between the Soviets and America and had no illusions about which side was the more noble of the two. All a person had to do was spend a little time in Berlin to understand the effects of communism and capitalism. Talk about a tale of two cities, East Berlin and West Berlin were living, breathing examples. Posters for the governments who had run them since the end of World War II. One side was a vivid Kodachrome film and the other a grainy old black-and-white pile of crap.

Hurley had never been more proud than when that damn wall came tumbling down. He’d spilled his own blood in the battle and had lost a few friends and more sources than he could count or wanted to remember, but they’d won. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of time to enjoy their victory. Hurley and a few others already had their eyes on the jihadists. He’d come across them when he was helping bleed the Soviet Union of cash, equipment, manpower, and eventually the will to continue its despotic experiment. It had been in the Khyber Pass, and at first he saw nothing that made him nervous. These people wanted their land back and the Soviets out. The problem started with the religious zealots who were being shipped in from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and a handful of other crappy little countries.

Hurley loved to swear, drink, and chase women, which put him on a collision course with the puritan, fun-sucking, Wahhabi jihadists from Saudi Arabia. He almost instantly developed a special dislike for them, but didn’t understand back then that they would want to spread their jihad beyond the jerkwater mountains of Southwest Asia. That came later, when he started to see them meddling in the affairs of the Palestinians. It was starting all over again. The Soviets had been contained and beaten, and now this new enemy was out pushing its agenda. Hurley had a bad feeling about where it was headed, and on top of that, for the first time in his life he felt tired. This threat was not going away, and he suddenly wasn’t sure he could find, let alone train, the next batch of kids who would be needed to meet the threat. He needed help. Unfortunately, asking for help was not something Hurley was good at.

He heard one of the dogs bark and then the sound of a motorcycle drifted through the pines. It was not the rumble of an American-made motorcycle, rather the purr of a Japanese or German bike. Hurley breathed a small sigh that was part relief, part resignation. It was the doc. He realized Kennedy must have called him.

A single beam of light slashed through the trees and a moment later the motorcycle coasted round the corner. The bike was so quiet, Hurley could hear the tires on the gravel driveway. The bike rolled its way up to the house and the rider eased the kickstand into the down position and then killed the engine. After retrieving a flat piece of wood from one of the molded saddlebags, he put it under the kickstand and then took off his helmet.

Thomas Lewis ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair and looked up at Hurley. He immediately noticed the swelling over the eye, but he was more concerned with a look on the man’s face that he had only recently grown to understand. “Tough day?”

Hurley tried to laugh it off. “No easy days in this line of work. You know that.”

Lewis nodded. He knew all too well the toll that their business could inflict on a person, and not just the body. The physical injuries were fairly straightforward. They could either be mended or not. The assaults on the mind and soul were an entirely different matter.

THE battered, dusty, Peugeot slowed to a crawl. The driver leaned out over the steering wheel and looked left and then right down the length of Hamra Street. His friend in the passenger seat did the same, but in a more halfhearted fashion. There was no stop light, nor was there a stop sign, but habits formed during war died hard. Samir was the youngest of four brothers. Three of them had died in the civil war that had destroyed this once-beautiful city. His closest brother, only thirteen months his senior, had been killed by an RPG while crossing this very intersection. To the Westerners who covered the bloody civil war, Hamra Street was better known as the Green Line. Ali and his friends called it no-man’s-land.

It was the street that divided East and West Beirut and, to a certain degree, the Muslims from the Christians, or more accurately the Shiite Muslims from the Maronite Christians. There were neighborhoods on each side of the line where you could find pockets of Sunnis, Armenians, Greek Orthodox, and Druze. Some of these outposts were more exposed than others, and they had all but disappeared during the lengthy and savage civil war, while a few of the more entrenched ones were now rebuilding. The civil war in many respects resembled the mob warfare of Chicago in the 1920s, but with much bigger guns.

With the war officially over for almost two years, virtually every part of the city was showing signs of life. The Christians to the east were rebuilding at a blistering pace, and the Muslims to the west were struggling to keep pace. Construction cranes dotted the skyline, and you were now more likely to get killed by a dump truck or a bulldozer than a sniper. At least in certain areas. Hamra Street was not one of those areas. The buildings were still gutted shells, perfectly suited for a sniper to lie in wait.

Samir scanned the building across the street to his left while his friend Ali, who was sitting next to him, did the same thing to their right.

“Still cautious,” the man in the backseat said in a coarse voice.

Samir looked sheepishly in the rearview mirror. “Sorry.”

Assef Sayyed nodded and took another drag from his cigarette. He remembered that Samir’s brother had been killed not far from here. A lot of good men had been killed along this godforsaken stretch of road. Sayyed, however, did not make small talk with his men. Such familiarity led to their getting ideas. Ideas were not good. They only needed to follow orders. He also had no desire to get too close to the all-but-disposable men who worked for him. It was far easier to mourn the loss of someone you didn’t know well than the loss of a close friend.

Once Samir received the go-ahead from Ali, he gunned the engine and tore across the broad street, over the abandoned trolley tracks, and into a canyon of half-demolished buildings on the other side. A year or two earlier he would have never dreamed of taking this shortcut. The car continued for two blocks, dodging piles of rubble, and then hung a sharp left turn. Building by building, block by block, things got better. The first sign was that the roads were clear of debris. Scaffolding and cement mixers were the next positive sign, and then finally they came upon a row of buildings that actually had windows, although the stone facades were pockmarked from artillery shells and small-arms fire.

Two young men stood in front of a roadblock, AK-47 assault rifles at the ready. Samir slowed the car to a stop and looked at the young face of the man who was pointing the barrel of his rifle at his head. They were all young these days, or old, but there were very few in between. An entire generation had either fled the country or been killed. Samir jerked his thumb toward the backseat and watched the guard’s eyes open wide as he recognized the ruthless Assef Sayyed. The young man gave a quick bow of respect, and then ordered his colleague to move the barricade.

The block was sealed at both ends. Some had started to question the manpower and effort that went into this, but all Sayyed had to do was flash them one of his withering stares and they were silenced. The Syrian intelligence colonel was of the mind that this peace was more of a lull in the fighting, and the second they let their guard down they would pay for it dearly. He continually advised the other militias to reconstitute, to find new recruits and to train them diligently, and to use this lull in the fighting to stockpile arms and ammunition. With each passing month it was becoming increasingly difficult to convince them to direct their resources to the next battle. To the men under his command, however, there was no questioning his orders. Sayyed had made certain of that by putting a bullet through the forehead of one of his aides at a staff meeting just two months earlier.