The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) (60 page)

He was a baker, his shop a prosperous one in the southeast fringe of Baghdad. He owed much to the Muslim Brotherhood, including his bakery. But he was annoyed at being pulled away from his work and his family for this “emergency.” At times he wondered if he had bargained with the devil.

The concrete was hot under his feet. Two of his men were on the far side of the road, inspecting the unpaved track that crossed this unnamed highway at right angles and continued into the western desert. He and his men had chased the Land Rovers from the bridge. He feared they had lost the trail at the Najaf Road, but after much delay, one of his men noticed the tire marks in a desolate, unpaved track that led into the desert. Whether by intuition, experience, or the will of Allah, they had followed this far and he had stopped the Jeeps short of the road. On foot, they found the faint residue of desert grit, a number of tire tracks turning off the unpaved east-west trail onto the north-south road.

His driver walked quickly across the road. “There are no tire tracks on the other side, sir.”

“They turned north.”

“Why would they do that? If these men were taking the Americans across the desert, why turn north?” asked the driver. “There is no benefit to that.”

“Unless their destination is in the north. Their way of escape is in the north.”

The two men looked up the long ribbon of road. They had worked side by side for nearly three years, occasionally fighting together, and knew each other well. “There is nothing north,” said the driver, “except …” He looked at his commander. “Al Asad?”

“I don’t know,” said the commander. “But if I were trying to escape the country, escape detection, this would be a good plan. West is a thousand kilometers of wasteland. South the same. They are not traveling to Fallujah or Ramadi, and they must know they can no longer leave from Baghdad. What does that leave them?”

“But I would not drive on this road past Ramadi,” said the driver. “It would be foolish.”

“Perhaps. Gashur!”

The driver of the second Jeep trotted up to the road. “It appears that their destination is not west through the desert, after all. We believe they run for Al Asad. Take your Jeep and one of your men and drive quickly to Karbala. Contact Baghdad and tell the leader what we believe. Have him dispatch as many units as possible from Ramadi, some up the Euphrates road, some the interior road, and others into the desert along the wadis. Have some units go directly to Al Asad. Try to reach the air base before them. We may have them in a trap. Go. Quickly.”

4:05 p.m., north of Ramadi, Iraq

The lead vehicle on the interior road west of the Euphrates was a well-worn, four-wheel-drive Subaru station wagon with 267,000 miles on its odometer, a hole ripped in the roof above its rear cargo compartment, a heavy-caliber machine gun mounted on the floor and protruding through the hole in the roof.

Kalil Unifa was small and dark, an enigma to his men and a terror to his enemies. An ISIS cell leader from its infancy in Syria, he read the Quran morning and evening and Tom Clancy novels before he went to sleep. He preached benevolence to the poor and death to the infidel with the same passion. And he was fiercely loyal, obedient to death.

“If you were trying to reach Al Asad undetected,” Unifa asked his driver, “which way would you go?”

“Wadi Al-Ubayyid,” the driver answered without hesitation. “Dry, flat, off the road. It reaches nearly all the way to Al Asad. It would be the best way.”

“And if you wanted to intercept these people in the wadi?”

“There is a good place to the north where a rocky hill reaches into, and over, the wadi below. We would see them coming—have good lines of fire,” said the driver.

“Excellent. Quickly.”

5:44 p.m., Wadi Al-Ubayyid, Iraq

The Subaru pulled onto the low promontory that hung like a nose over the Wadi Al-Ubayyid and stopped well short of the edge. The other two cars came up on his flanks and came to a halt. They held eight men, and only a cursory glance would reveal they were fighters. Green fatigue jackets bleached by the sun barely covered massive shoulders and biceps. They all wore cargo pants of differing hues of gray and boots so battered by the desert and their duty that they were more scuff and scratch than shoes. They wore no hats, but their heads were covered with thick, curly masses of hair, dusted with the residue of the dunes.

Unifa pulled a night-vision scope from his gun bag and surveyed the wadi below. It would be dark soon. He put his hand on the left shoulder of Varun and passed the scope to him. “Do you see that place where the wadi narrows and the large mound is in the middle? Cross the wadi to the far side. Take some of the dynamite and the RPG launcher. Set your charges along the far-side track. Your task is not to harm them or their vehicles, but to chase them to us.”

Two men followed Varun as he gathered up the gear and disappeared into the wadi.

He turned to his muscled driver. “Uncouple the fifty. Take it about halfway down the hill. Don’t open up until Varun sets off his charges. If they refuse to stop or get through our blockade, destroy the engine of the first vehicle, not the people inside. Be very careful. Do not incur the wrath of the leader.”

His mind visualizing the coming encounter, Unifa retraced his steps to the Subaru and opened the rear door. He unloaded three Swiss-made machine pistols and handed those to the men behind him, then pulled out a long, heavy sniper rifle, affixed the 10X scope onto its stock, and lifted it onto his shoulder.

“Scour the hillside. Find any large stones or wild brush and bring them to the floor of the wadi. We will build a barricade on the near side. We will stop them and hold them until the leader arrives. Go.”

6:10 p.m., Abraham’s Oasis, Iraq

Tom jumped out of his sleep, wrestling to find a way out of the blackness. Fear ripped through him. Memories of the cave crashed through his mind.

“It’s okay.” Joe’s voice. “We’re just slowing down.”

Tom drew in a hot breath of the desert, drying his mouth even more, and tried to focus his eyes. The Rovers were covered by the false twilight cast by a sharp narrowing of the wadi’s walls, the dry riverbed twisting through a series of tight turns. He must have dozed somewhere after they turned off the road. The Rovers pulled to stop, tightly hugging one of the walls. Bohannon opened the door and stepped out. He was so sore, even his eyes hurt. He leaned over, his hands on his knees, and tried to stretch out the aches.

“Where are we?”

Whalen’s voice to his left.

“Just below the oasis.”

Curiosity gnawed at Tom. Above them was Abraham’s Oasis, a long, thin ribbon of green grasses, palm trees, and marshland surrounding a small, still lake. Kabir provided the oasis’s history, an unproven legend of speculation that Abraham and his family—at that time more than three hundred trained fighting men, along with camels, goats, dogs, and women, children, and elderly—had stopped at this oasis on their journey from Ur of the Chaldees to Canaan. This oasis sat astride the main caravan route from Ur and was one of the few known oases between Ur and Haran, making it a likely resting place for any travelers heading west.

Perhaps fanciful conjecture, but the local Bedouins believed the legend and passed it down as gospel from generation to generation.

Whether Abram ever drank from this pond or rested under its palm trees was less critical than discovering what occupied the space now.

“Let’s take a look.”

Tom pushed his body upright, stretching out the hurts. “I’m going, too.”

They climbed the steep sides of the wadi along a track that was more likely intended for goats. Below the summit, Kabir stopped and peeked over the edge. Tom watched as Kabir’s body visibly tensed. He waved them forward with exaggerated caution, which is when Tom noticed that Rizzo was right on his heels.

“I’m not going to miss this,” Rizzo whispered.

Tom raised his head above the lip of the desert floor and was surprised that the sky was purpling in the west, the sun gashes of orange behind low clouds. Maybe it was because he slept, but he thought it was early to be getting dark.

Kabir pointed off into the distance and passed the binoculars to Whalen.

“Three vehicles … I could see only two men,” said Kabir.

“There must be others waiting for us,” said Whalen. “Where would they be hiding?”

“They would expect us to come along the main channel of the Wadi Al-Ubayyid, over there to the west where they are.”

“Can we get around them?”

Kabir touched Whalen on his left shoulder and pointed farther south. “The militia is not our only problem.”

Bohannon looked to the south. The low clouds he had noticed to the west obscured the sun. Then he looked closer. The clouds were boiling along the surface of the desert, not dipping from the sky. They covered the horizon, left and right, for as far as he could see in either direction. They were brown. And they were advancing.

“The Great Anbar Storm. The last one I encountered was fifteen hundred kilometers high, almost a mile,” said Kabir.

Tom’s eyes could not break from the roiling mass rolling in their direction.

“Sandstorm.” Rizzo was by his side. “I saw one, almost got eaten by it, in Egypt. This one looks pretty ticked.”

“How far away?” asked Whalen.

“Thirty minutes, perhaps less,” said Kabir.

“Looks like a brown ocean. Can we outrun it?”

“No.”

“Commander!”

“Yes, I see it. A little sand. Tell the men to stand fast.”

Kabir’s men, the two drivers, were quick and precise, wrapping the two engines in rugs that had been strapped to the cars. Kabir and Whalen’s men rigged the tents to extend from the wadi’s walls, over the Rovers, and down the far side. Tom, Annie, Joe, and Rizzo had sparingly used their precious water to wet down torn cloth and then stuffed it into every vent and over every window, which were cranked up tight. Not impervious to the coming sandstorm, but better protected. The wind was growing in ferocity, and they could hear a thick rumble coming closer and closer as they piled into the vehicles and took cover.

Their driver, silent most of the trip, climbed in last, took a length of cloth, and wrapped it over his nose and mouth, motioning for each of them to follow suit.

“Hey, Lone Ranger, are the masks necessary?” Rizzo wrapped his cloth strip around his forehead. “Yo, I’m Rambo!”

The driver looked at Rizzo in the rearview mirror. “The sand will suck the oxygen out of the air and out of your body. Be careful, or you may turn to stone.”

“I’ve always wanted to be immortalized,” said Rizzo. But he quickly pulled the strip off his forehead to cover his mouth. “Hey, Abdul, how many—”

The wind-driven sand slammed into the far wall of the wadi with the thunder of a passing freight train, rolled back over the floor of the gorge, and rocked the Rover with such force that the left side of the vehicle was thrown into the wadi’s bank. The desert’s brown grit pummeled the Land Rover on three sides, invading the Rover’s interior through unknown openings. Soon, the silt-like particles were falling like rain inside the car.

Tom had taken off his chamois shirt and draped it over Annie’s head, supplementing the robe and veil she had worn through most of the trip, and now had his arms wrapped around her shoulders, trying to protect her in any way possible. He figured his wife must be getting awfully hot under there as the temperature in the car continued to climb.

“Does it always get hotter inside a sandstorm?” Joe asked.

“Never,” mumbled the driver, barely audible beneath the deafening din.

“Then why does it feel like a sauna in here? The heat is just pouring out from the back of the car.”

Tom could feel the temperature rise dramatically on the back of his neck, like the heat of a sunburn. He put one hand at the base of his skull and was assailed by the acrid smell as the hair on his fingers was singed. He pulled Annie away from the back of the seat, fearful that a fire had erupted in the rear of the Land Rover. “Hey—”

The sandstorm stopped.

And the heat disappeared.