Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

Cesare kept punching the speed dial on his built-in car phone as he raced to the Baghdad Country Club. “Come on, Blevins! Answer!” he yelled, dodging between traffic.

Just then, a slurry Ray-Dean finally got tired of hearing his smartphone buzz on the saloon table and picked it up. “What the fuck now? You piece of shit!”

“Thank God!” Alosi said. “We’ve had our differences, Ray, but I’m warning you. Get out of there now! I’ll explain later. You have to leave right this second!”

“What the fuck are you babbling about, you greasy maggot,” Ray-Dean said.

“Yeah, you’re a fucking piece of shit off the bottom of the shit pond, Alosi,” a good and drunk Fred Stein added.

Gary Frank sat there silent. He thought he might wangle his job back. After all, he persisted on telling everyone, he had only followed orders. Just drove the car. He never fired a shot.

“You’ve got a crew of FBI agents maybe three minutes from the club!” Cesare yelled on his speaker as he drove his Escalade several cars behind Liberty and Gray, spotting them now and keeping them both in sight.

“What for?” Ray-Dean said.

“To arrest your dumb ass!” Cesare shouted, his face beet red and the blood veins bulging on his forehead.

“They got no jurisdiction,” Blevins argued.

“They do for treason,” Alosi came back.

Freddie Stein heard the word “treason,” and it sent him running out of the club. He jumped in the backseat of their team’s Escalade and locked the doors.

“Let me in!” Gary Frank screamed outside, yanking on the door handle. He had bolted on Stein’s heels. Then he saw the FBI Denali jump the curb outside the outer garden that surrounded the Baghdad Country Club and watched it slide sideways on the edge of the parking lot.

Chris Gray came in behind them, skidding to a stop, too.

Cesare Alosi guided his Cadillac carefully over the curb and parked behind the two embassy cars, well away from where Ray-Dean had left the Malone-Leyva Escalade, just a few feet from the blue-stucco building with the big darkened plate-glass picture window and blue neon sign in it.

Gary Frank took off running, heading for the trees and hedges that hid Baghdad Country Club from the Islamic society offices next door.

Ray-Dean made a dash for his car but had only made two steps out of the country club’s front door when his Escalade exploded in a mushroom of orange-and-white fire.

Car doors flew two directions, and the roof went straight up. The hood was torn off its hinges and sailed through the blue-stucco building’s picture window, destroying the blue neon sign and taking out most of the tables and chairs across the center of the nightclub.

Luckily, no one inside died. They had all hit the floor when Freddie and Gary tore out of the room and on their heels Ray-Dean screamed on the phone at Alosi, “You double-crossing son of a bitch! I’ll make you pay!”

When Ray-Dean had run out of the bar, he caught a faceful of energy from the explosion, blowing him off his feet and sending him skidding across the gravel parking area.

Gary Frank had made it to the trees, successfully pissed his pants, then instantly died when the first sniper shot split his head in half.

Ray-Dean staggered to his feet, saw Cesare Alosi running toward him, behind Liberty Cruz and Chris Gray. He tried to run to them as well, but Ken with the face tattoo put a Russian-made bullet into his heart.

His third and fourth shots just missed Cesare, Chris, and Liberty. They ran for cover while George and Ken gathered their gear and left the rimmed Russian sniper-rifle shell casings behind.

Midafternoon, Jack awoke, stewing in his own sweat. The camouflage sheet he had spread over his hiding hole, blending him with the rocks and the Alhagi camelthorns, made him invisible unless a person walked directly over him, but it also trapped the heat. Not a breath of a breeze stirred in the sweltering afternoon, and that just made things worse.

He took out his second bottle of water since he had lain down and emptied it in his mouth.

“I hope I don’t end up having to drink my own piss,” he said to himself, saving the empty bottle with two others.

Jack knew not to starve himself on food or water. He needed to keep his energy and vitality at a high peak if he expected to survive the long walk through the desert. When people trying to survive limit their water and food intake to below minimums, they fall weak and die. One thing he learned in survival training, focus on finding food and water at all times while pressing onward to the objective. He counted on finding water and food sources along the trek and taking what he needed from them. They were out here. He just had to see them. If the travelers of old could do it, so could Jack Valentine.

Just as he had started to pull out some food to nibble from an open package of Meals Ready to Eat, Jack heard the roar of a truck engine. When he raised his head to see, a tire spun by his face, and the greasy underbody of a Toyota pickup truck went flying over his head.

“Shit!” he said, putting his head out to see if the passing vehicle simply had run past him or its riders had seen him.

A quarter mile away, the blue pickup truck with a gunman in the back, carrying an AK rifle, made a spinning donut turn, shooting dirt sky-high as he came back around.

“They saw me,” Jack grumbled to himself, taking his Vigilance rifle and putting the crosshairs on the driver, now bearing down on him. “I shouldn’t have looked. They saw me when I stuck my head out. They were going away, and dumb-ass me, I had to look.”

At a hundred yards and closing, Jack’s shot killed the driver, and the truck turned sideways. It shot up in the air, flipping like a football kicked for a field goal. The passenger managed to stay inside, but the rider in the back went bouncing across the world, his arms and legs snapping and his head twisted on his neck like a rag.

The tumbling wreck came straight at Jack, and he lay flat in his hole as it passed overhead and stopped rolling fifty feet behind him.

Somehow, the passenger inside managed to survive it all. He crawled from the wreck moaning. Then he saw Gunny Valentine standing, his hand reaching down his leg for the pistol strapped there.

The Haji had a broken leg. When he tried to stand and aim his AK rifle at the Marine, the bone folded below the knee. He went down hard but still kept going for his gun.

“Fuck, dude,” Jack said, pulling out his Lippard .45 and taking aim. He squeezed off a 230-grain flat-nose hardball into the guy’s head. “It just ain’t your day.”

“You’re free to go,” Liberty Cruz told a haggard, disheveled, stinking-body-odor, dirty-underwear, ragged-out Cesare Alosi as she took manacles from his hands and feet that chained him to a chair bolted to the gray-concrete floor with a curious drain in the center. There were no water faucets in here, nor a showerhead.

Chris Gray typed in the unlock code on the keypad outside that opened the steel door to the secure interview room at Camp Liberty, on the north side of Camp Victory joint military headquarters, letting Cesare walk out with Liberty and Bob Hartley behind him. Tucked among rows of hundreds of similar nondescript block-shaped white modular buildings, the CIA took interesting people here for long, often persuasive periods of discussion about all they knew.

A tight-lipped secret, the place had no flags or signs nor anything else to set the CIA annex apart from all the other hundreds of identical refrigerator-like modules, except for the number stenciled in black paint on each corner, and some bombproof steel doors with special locks. The Camp Liberty complex provided Chris Gray and Speedy Espinoza a snug place outside prying eyes and ears to do their dirty work and prepare for other dark jobs. Their CIA teams could also come here unnoticed, store gear, shower, hit the rack in the dozen adjoining sleeping modules, watch television, relax, or drink a beer or two undisturbed. Iraqi counterparts could also bring clients here with black bags on their heads, and no one paid attention or cared.