Taylor Smith - Slim To None

Kenner had been infiltrated into Salahuddin’s camp ostensibly to help organize and train the sheikh’s warriors, but really to keep track of his plans and try to turn them in a direction favorable to Washington’s interests in the oil-rich region. Either that, or, if Salahuddin couldn’t be co-opted, eliminate the threat. If the sheikh had known where the mercenary’s true loyalties lay, he would have been far more careful about welcoming him into his proverbial tent.

Sitting on the edge of his cot, Kenner frowned at the sound of dead air in his cell phone. His caller had hung up on him. Typical.

He’d known Dick Stern over a decade now, since long before the ex-CIA deputy had arrived at his current exalted status in the White House inner sanctum as assistant national security advisor. He’d met Stern back in the days when he was running covert operations into Soviet-controlled Afghanistan. Since then, Kenner had carried out several deniable assignments at the CIA operative’s behest, including at least one assassination of a foreign opposition leader—a totally illegal operation that remained to this day unknown to anyone else in the American capital, least of all the dreaded Congressional intelligence oversight committees.

As far as Kenner was concerned, Stern had always been prone to pomposity—seldom in doubt, never wrong. He demanded absolute, unquestioning obedience from his agents and he got it, because to cross him was suicide, professionally and sometimes literally. On the other hand, the man did have a talent for landing on the winning side of domestic bureaucratic skirmishes, which made him a reliable source of lucrative contract dollars to a free agent like Kenner.

Kenner had been asleep when Stern called from Washington. His room in the sheikh’s compound was a private one, closet-sized but infinitely preferable to the overcrowded barracks that the bulk of Salahuddin’s fighters occupied. When his razor-thin cell phone had vibrated in an inner pocket of his shirt, he’d come instantly awake. Salahuddin was paranoid about cell phones, forbidding their use in the compound for fear of overhead satellites that fished through the ether, listening for suspect conversations and using the signal to zero in on enemy targets. Kenner was careful to keep his link to his handlers well hidden from view at all times, and was trusted enough at this point never to be subjected to a body search.

After the short conversation with Stern, Kenner tucked the phone away once more, then sat on the edge of the cot, thinking about the best way to deal with the problem of the American doctor. On the one hand, her capture had inflated Salahuddin’s reputation in this campaign where image was everything. The foreign press was already coming to name him as a power to be reckoned with, which helped attract followers to the sheikh’s camp.

From an American perspective, this kidnapping could be played a number of ways. In a worst-case scenario, if anything were to happen to the doctor, it would cement Salahuddin’s reputation as a power to be feared. If nothing else, it provided a convenient high-profile villain to shore up the American public’s support for the invasion of the country, now that it was becoming clear that the weapons of mass destruction play had been a bluff. On the other hand, if the public outcry over the doctor’s kidnapping became too clamorous, the American military might be tempted to launch a strike against Salahuddin. Kenner couldn’t let that happen. Salahuddin was too useful to him. He’d spent too long working this plan to stand back and see his protégé eliminated.

The rich tapestry of the prayer mat lying in one corner of the room, prearranged so that it was facing toward Mecca, caught his eye, and he scowled. Five times daily, when the muezzin called the pious to prayer, those who could get to the mosque did so in order to pray shoulder-to-shoulder as tradition demanded with their fellow believers. The sheikh accepted that Kenner’s responsibilities often prevented him from praying at the mosque, but he believed the convert made use of the prayer mat. Kenner, however, barely gave the rug a glance.

Reaching over the side of the cot, he grabbed his boots, pulled them on and laced them up, then got to his feet. Approaching his midforties, his short-cropped hair rapidly going from white-blond to pure white, Kenner’s body retained the lean, hungry appearance of an Arctic wolf, with cold blue eyes to match. He strapped on his gun belt and slipped the knife he always carried into the sheath at the small of his back. Then, he stepped outside onto the low veranda surrounding the compound’s open central courtyard.

A mosque stood at one end of the compound. Behind it, a series of rooms ran off a rectangular inner square, open to the sky above. In times of peace, the rooms were used for meetings and for Koranic instruction of the village children. These days, they held an armory and barracks, as well as the makeshift infirmary that Salahuddin had ordered set up after the last shoot-out with American soldiers, in which several of his followers had been wounded.

It wasn’t that Salahuddin spared all that much compassion for the injured, Kenner knew. If they couldn’t fight another day, they would have served the cause better by dying in battle. The sheikh had no problem sending young men out to blow themselves up on suicide bombing missions, especially the less talented among them. It was a win-win situation. They had the reward of paradise, with its forty-two houris, and Salahuddin had holy martyrs to bring in more recruits for the cause. But instead, these men wounded by the Americans were brought back to the compound moaning and groaning about their injuries, and that was just bad for morale. The sheikh had needed a doctor to take care of them and shut them up, and the American girl had turned out to be what he got.

Kenner moved around the edge of the veranda towards the sheikh’s quarters. A wide-branching fig tree stood in the center of the courtyard, silhouetted by the light of a small fire that burned in a brazier at the far end of the yard. The scent of smoke drifted on the warm night air. Except for the occasional spit and crackle of the flames, the compound was silent and dark. Kenner looked up. A twinkling swath of stars blanketed the pitch black sky.

As the sound of a low murmur reached his ears, Kenner turned back to the brazier and noted that two—no, three—of the men who were supposed to be on night guard were instead lolling around the fire on molded plastic chairs. They obviously hadn’t noticed him.

Stepping deeper into the shadows of the overhanging roof, Kenner crept ahead. Silently withdrawing his knife from the leather sheath at his back, he hugged the wall as he padded toward them, silent as a panther. The gleam of the fire danced on their glistening skin. One of the guards, sitting with his back to the veranda, was old enough to sport a thick, black beard and mustache, but the other two were barefaced youths. The younger men’s eyes glittered as they watched the dance of the fire in the brazier. All three were mesmerized by the flames—and blinded by them, Kenner thought contemptuously.

He stole up behind the bearded one, then sprang like a coiled snake, grabbing him by the hair and pulling the head back so that the blade of his matte black knife had clear access to the soft, vulnerable skin beneath the wiry beard. The man’s white plastic chair tipped back on two legs, and he stared up, terrified, into those pale Arctic eyes. The two youths sprang to their feet, tipping over their chairs as well as the Kalashnikov rifles that they’d carelessly propped against the armrests.

“You’re dead,” Kenner growled, as his knife etched a superficial but memorable line in the man’s neck.

Too surprised to remember to reach for their sidearms, the youths stared, open-mouthed, while their bearded comrade whimpered for his life.