Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“Like you had a prayer,” Jaws grumbled.

“That’s your trouble, Alex,” Cortez came back. “No optimism.”

“Suck on it,” the blindfolded girl heard the stinking man say, inhaling his foul breath in her face as he grunted out the Arabic words in a thick Palestinian accent. Then she felt the muzzle of his Makarov PMM nine-millimeter pistol press against her lips.

Terrified, she obediently opened her mouth, and he shoved his gun inside it, the oily steel cutting her tongue and lips against her teeth. Simultaneously, he pressed his stiff cock inside her vagina, carelessly tearing her hymen, and immediately began fucking her rough, fast, and hard.

Helpless, the young virgin, more child than woman, lay tied naked, spread-eagle on a filthy cotton ticking mattress atop rusty wire springs on a wrought-iron bed in a house in the far countryside west of Haditha. The gun pushed to the back of her throat gagged her, muffling her cries. She prayed as tears flooded from her eyes, soaking the blindfold, asking God to please take her life without delay.

On the other side of a blanket nailed over the otherwise-open doorway to the room where the man raped the girl, Giti Sadiq and her two fellow Christian slaves taken from Al-Shirqat huddled on the floor, against the wall. Holding tight to each other, they shut their eyes and prayed for God’s mercy, hearing the grunting of the man and the whimpers of his victim as the metal bed banged and squeaked.

Giti and her captive sisters had met the child only briefly in the kitchen an hour earlier, a thirteen-year-old Greek Orthodox girl kidnapped in the Syrian city of Deir az-Zur and spirited to Iraq with one of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda Iraq recruiting teams. Her captors had taken this girl, who had introduced herself to Giti as Lina, along with five others. The terrorist soldiers had raped and killed four of them during their journey to Haditha but had saved the barely teen virgin, Lina, as a gift for their leader.

The sixth Syrian girl, a heavyset sixteen-year-old Alawi Shia called Sabeen, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in Deir az-Zur, had somehow survived repeated raping and now worked as a kitchen maid between rounds of abuse. She prayed with Giti and the other two Christian slaves, and asked Jesus to save her, too, even if she was a Muslim.

“That is Zarqawi in there raping Lina,” the sister called Amira whispered to Giti. “I saw him. It is Zarqawi.”

Giti put her hands over Amira’s mouth. “Do not say this. Not to anyone. Never again. They will kill you. We cannot know such things, or we, too, will surely die.”

Then came the gunshot. A single pop.

All three girls flinched at the bang. Giti blinked at Amira, and their third sister, Miriam. At the same time, dishes crashed in the kitchen, followed by Sabeen’s shrieks, then unrelenting sobbing for her young friend Lina.

Giti and her slave sisters huddled together, holding each other tight, crying and praying, terrified. “Perhaps Jesus has blessed poor Lina,” Giti thought, “taking her from this evil place. Perhaps that is how He will take me, too.”

“Get in here! Clean this mess!” the old graybeard Abu Omar Bakr al-Nasser bellowed from the doorway at the three frightened girls. Men quickly hustled out the body of little Lina and left the mess of brains and blood for the maids.

“You!” Abu Omar said, pointing at Giti. “Get in the kitchen and help that mindless fat fool clean up the broken plates she dropped. We have important guests dining with us tonight, so you make sure this meal is fit for them.”

Giti bowed low and gladly hurried from the murder room and its bloody mess, which Amira and Miriam had to clean up.

Cesare Alosi had waited late for his executive assistant, Irene, to leave for the day before he took the stolen First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment operation plan from its hiding place, between the pages of the New York Times newspaper that he had carried in the office that morning and laid on the bookshelf behind his desk. He ate his lunch in the office, just to make sure that Irene did not snoop through his stuff, as he suspected that she often did when he was out.

Irene acted suspicious when she left because Cesare never stayed late. She always locked up. Reluctantly, she finally left, irritatingly curious, asking all sorts of questions but trying to sound casual asking them.

Tempted to rush Irene out the door, Cesare bided his time and painfully let the clock tick. He sat at his desk, feet up, sipping a Coke, thumbing through a Sergeant Grit catalog, his nerves gnawing through every second.

When she had finally gone, he huddled over the combination color printer, scanner, and copy machine, carefully making both a paper duplicate and digital scan of the operation plan without removing the staples and not creasing any pages. He took the paper copy, fastened the pages together, and put it in his desk’s locking file drawer. He then bumped off the PDF scan to a thumb drive and secured the little USB data-storage device with the paper copy. Last, he wiped all traces of the document from the scanner and computer tied to it.

He took the original operation plan in its top secret envelope, tucked the package back between the pages of his New York Times , folded so that the crossword puzzle showed on the outside, and drove to Baghdad International Airport. A daily visitor there morning and evening, Cesare slid right past the US and Iraqi security forces’ checkpoints leading into and through Camp Victory with the newspaper lying casually on his Escalade’s front passenger seat.

Inside the busy compound, he drove to the operations building, where he made his regular morning and evening visits, parked, and walked toward the guarded entrance with the newspaper under his arm. A quartet of US Army sentries at the door watched him as he stopped at a trash barrel, took the Times from under his arm, dropped it in the can, and walked away. A few steps toward the door, he stopped as if he had changed his mind, went back to the trash, and retrieved his newspaper, but slid the top secret operation plan out and buried it under a collection of odd paper, candy wrappers, lunch sacks, soda cups, and drink bottles.

As he walked through the secure entrance, a familiar face to the men who stood guard, he smiled as he handed the sentry his identification. “You know, I almost tossed out my Times without doing the crossword puzzle. Can you imagine? It’s the best part of the paper!” And showed the soldiers the page with the squares left blank. He laughed. “It’s been one of those days.”

All four soldiers smiled and nodded politely, as if they gave a rat’s ass, while the sergeant in charge logged Mr. Alosi in the building and sent him on his way.

Cesare made his evening rounds with his usual joint forces operations, intelligence, and security liaisons, and departed a little more than an hour later. He raised no eyebrows, just another step in his mundane daily routine.

As he drove out the gate and headed to his apartment, he felt proud of himself. Got rid of the incriminating evidence right under their noses. With them watching!

At his apartment, he dialed Victor Malone’s private line on his secure company sat-link phone.

“You took care of it?” Malone said without even saying hello but going straight to the point as he answered the call.

“Done,” Cesare said.

“Good work on grabbing that CIA contract,” Malone said. Then asked, “This help us lock down that DOD security deal?”

“Closed it right after I sent out our CIA contract team,” Alosi said. “Very fortunate timing. Literally doubled our business with two strokes of the pen.”