The Saint Of Baghdad Read online

  DANGER

  UNSAFE MINE

  KEEP OUT

  KEEP ALIVE

  It was a somber message, rendered all the more dramatic by its punctuation with bullet holes. There was a platform close to this adit, a rusted steel grid mounted on two timbers laid flat on the ground, a staging point for loading ore.

  CJ was sizing it all up. Three adits and extensive infrastructure meant that it had once been a big mine. An easy place to get lost in. An easy place to lose someone. Successful in its day, but dangerous. With lots of ways to die even in its prime. Add to that decades of decrepitude and a pack of heavily armed killers, and dangerous turned into insane. But compared to the open country, it was the right choice. The open country was suicidal. Insane versus Suicidal. There was only one way to call it.

  CJ banged the roof of the car, and Enya and Leila hopped out as he fetched the ammo bucket from the trunk. The pitch and fall of Tratfors’ V-8s as they whipped around bends along the trail were getting ever closer. Enya and Leila followed CJ towards the main adit, clawing their way through the matchstick pile of debris. All the wood was rotten, and all the metal was rusted. Nothing to stop a bullet. CJ tossed aside some beams and kicked open a broken door sealing off the adit. Beyond it, the tunnel was big enough to stand up in and braced with heavy timbers and crossbeams. It was inclined, rising gently, just enough for water to drain out. CJ filled his pockets with bullets and gave Leila the range bucket.

  “Head down the tunnel,” he said. “They’re going to blow the hell out of this entrance”—he waved his arm back at the woodpile—“so you need to be a good way down. But don’t get lost. I need to find you when I get back.”

  “What if you don’t?” Enya blurted it out. “Come back, I mean.”

  “I’ll be okay,” he said. “We were lucky back there on the trail. You never know. Maybe we’ve got someone special looking after us.”

  Enya’s face fell. “That sounds like Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George? When Brits start calling on their patron saint, you know you’re up shit creek.”

  He pulled her close and kissed her lips.

  “Take it easy. My saint’s a US Marine Corps sniper.”

  She mouthed another protest, but he was already gone.

  He grabbed the grenade from inside the Range Rover and ran back towards the trail, rehearsing Kowalski’s arrival in his head. The first thing he’d see was the Rover parked near the headframe and that was as far as they’d go. They’d take cover behind the concrete blocks and pound the whole arena with lead before taking a closer look.

  CJ stood by the trailhead figuring it all out. Orchestrating the battlefield is half the victory. One grenade. An M67 with an injury radius of fifteen meters and a fatality radius of five. He secreted it in a creosote bush on the slope behind the concrete blocks. Then he dashed to the steel platform by the boarded-up adit on the northern slope and crawled underneath it. It was a tight fit with not much more than a foot of clearance, but enough for him to raise his head and target a pistol over the thick timbers it was mounted on.

  The Tratfors lead truck made the same emergency maneuver he’d made, taking the bend too fast, seeing the concrete blocks at the last minute and skidding to a halt. But those concrete blocks were the last of their problems. CJ took out the guy in the front passenger seat with a head shot and picked off the driver of the SUV behind it as he swerved to avoid the truck and crashed into a rock. Two down. Kowalski and the rest of them were out of their vehicles, taking cover and laying down fire in his direction, with two guys sneaking behind the concrete blocks. Intense fire. Full auto. Sheets of it all around him. CJ was grateful for the foot-thick timber between him and the bullets and the narrow slit under the steel grid he was shooting through. The automatic fire was good news too. Seamless sound. Just what he needed. If they heard the Mason jar breaking, they’d do the math like a supercomputer and take cover before the explosion.

  He took his shot and saw the grenade roll out of the bush and tumble down the slope towards the shooters behind the concrete blocks. He ducked down and crawled under the steel grid the other way with one of two scenarios about to unfold. The worst case was tits up. They’d see the grenade and take cover. No fatalities and barely a pause in the storm of lead raining down on him. In that case, he’d dive into the barb-wired adit nearby and hope it connected with the main adit where Enya and Leila were waiting. The best case was that the shooters got caught in the explosion and their numbers diminished. He’d killed two already. He’d counted eight. So if he could kill a few more and interrupt their firestorm long enough to get back to the woodpile, then the odds would switch in their favor.

  He rolled out from under the platform as the grenade blew and sprinted across the clearing. It worked. Even the Tratfors crew who escaped the blast were shocked and disoriented, and he was already scurrying through the wood and debris around the headframe when their first wild shots rang out. He made it into the main adit and was soon out of range, the sound of their gunfire ever fainter as he went deeper into the mountain. He made quick progress at first with the light from the entrance to guide him, but as that faded to dark he had to slow down. Forty to fifty yards from the entrance, there was evidence of a cave-in. The tunnel wasn’t blocked, but there was a pile of rocks big enough to force him down on all fours to clamber over it. The light was even dimmer beyond it, barely a glimmer.

  “Enya,” he called out. This was a perfect place for them to hide. Even full-auto bursts directly into the mouth of the tunnel wouldn’t get past these rocks.

  He listened. Tuning out the torrent of muffled sound from outside as the Tratfors survivors demolished what was left of the headframe.

  “Enya.”

  He called it out once more before heading into the darkness.

  Twenty-Four

  Enya had the phone, and she’d obviously used its light to go deep inside the mine. But where? There should be a glow up ahead, but there was nothing but blackness. CJ continued, finding his way with his feet, his ears tracking scurrying rats and the fluttering wings of bats as they swerved to avoid this unexpected obstacle. The risk was holes, cave-outs where the floor had collapsed through to another tunnel or a water channel. One wrong step and he could end up at the bottom of a hole, nursing a broken neck and looking back on the good old days when he was an Al-Qaeda hostage. As he got deeper into the adit, the gunfire eased off. The survivors of the ambush would be taking a closer look. They’d find the entrance and they wouldn’t stumble through it blind like CJ. They’d have flashlights or night vision. They’d soon make up for lost time. There could only be three or four of them left, and Kowalski was sure to split them up. Two outside. A spotter and a shooter. Then one or two to search the adit and flush them out.

  “Enya,” he shouted.

  Still nothing.

  He pushed onward and found a stick with his probing foot. He picked it up and used it like an ant’s feelers to scrape the dirt in front of him so he could make better progress.

  At last, he picked up a light. Faint. More of a shift in the tone of blackness. He heard something too. Not voices, but sibilance. Distant words bouncing off rocks and trickling around bends in the tunnel. He hurried towards its source, finding a pool of light with an island of rocks shimmering at its center. The rocks were studded with cracked wood and rusted wheels, bits of a broken cart that had once ferried ore out of the adit. He looked up towards the source of the light. There was a vertical shaft above the rocks, a passage heading up from the roof of the adit.

  “CJ?” Enya’s voice was hushed, urgent.

  “Are you okay?” he called out.

  “There’s a ladder,” she said. “Climb on the rocks and you can reach it.”

  He scrambled up the rock pile and reached into the shaft.

  “Be careful,” she said. “Some of the rungs are missing and we broke some more. It was scary. But we both made it.”

  He nodded, although there was no one to see it. More of an ack
nowledgment to himself. A rotten wood ladder. It had survived Enya and Leila. But neither of them weighed over one-forty. CJ tipped the scales at two hundred, and that was before he’d flown west and discovered burritos and all-you-can-eat diners.

  He pulled himself up into the shaft and used his arms to haul his body from rung to rung. When his feet finally reached a rung, he tested it with one foot before committing any weight to it. From there, he worked his way up with extreme caution. The trick was to make sure his entire weight was never placed on a single rung, but always spread over at least three. That meant moving one limb at a time. Slow progress. But the image of his body broken on a pile of rocks waiting for his executioners was a powerful incentive. Enya grabbed his arms as he reached the top, and Leila held the light as he clambered out.

  “We voted to explore and use our initiative instead of waiting for you,” Enya said. “Since we had the light.”

  “You did good,” he said, taking it all in. They were in a chamber with passages leading off. Most of them were small—just big enough for a miner to crawl into on all fours—all except one that was roomy enough for even CJ to stand erect. That had to be the adit they’d seen in the rocks up the hill above the main entrance. The chamber was littered with rusted metal objects, fossils of ancient tools, empty cans and lamps whose flames had long ago died like the miners whose labors had cut this mausoleum out of the rock. Next to the top of the shaft he’d come up through, there was a crude bin held together by wooden stakes. It was piled with rocks waiting to get shipped outside and processed. Copper, zinc, silver whatever they were mining, they must have found another seam up here, and digging a shaft between the two finds was the easiest way to get the ore out. They could lower it down the shaft in buckets, then use a cart to haul it out of the main adit. CJ checked the bin. The wood was rotten and the rocks inside it were threatening to burst its walls. He picked up a rock and dropped it down the shaft. It bounced off the ladder onto the wall, then hit the rock pile below.

  “In fact, you did great,” he said.

  “Why don’t we use these rocks to break the ladder?” Leila said. “Then they can’t follow us.”

  “They’d climb up the mountain and get to us via the upper adit,” CJ said, still checking the wood of the bin, testing its soundness. “We got lucky. This could have gone at any moment.”

  “So we dump it on them instead,” Enya said.

  “That’s the idea. They’re down to just three or four men. They can’t check all the tunnels. And they can’t wait us out. We’re not so far off the beaten track here. Four-wheelers. Hikers. Recreational users. Someone will turn up soon. Maybe in the morning. They’ll want to clean this all up before dawn. They know I disappeared into the main tunnel, so that’s where they’ll go looking. They won’t know about this connecting shaft. They’ll send in one or two guys to flush us out.”

  He looked around, finding a stout stick. He jammed it into the bin between the rocks and the wall of boards and levered it back and forth, and several rocks spilled off the top and fell into the shaft. Then he set it aside and hid behind the bin.

  “Can you see me from the top of the shaft?”

  Enya shuffled back and forth and stood on tiptoe.

  “No,” she said. “But what about us? Where do we hide?”

  “You head back along this big tunnel,” he said, pulling himself back up on his feet. “But don’t go anywhere near the entrance. They’ll have a sniper covering all the adits.”

  Enya and Leila left him, Enya lighting the way with her phone and Leila scanning the tunnel ahead with her Sig. CJ used the last of its light to take cover behind the rock bin. He made himself comfortable, still figuring out his plan. Dumping the rocks as soon as he heard someone below was like a random shot in the dark. It had to be more subtle than that. If there was more than one down there, he had to nail them both. Otherwise he’d be giving away his location and losing the element of surprise. When he was satisfied with his plan, he made himself comfortable and let the darkness take him back to Iraq. He’d spent years in blindfolds, so darkness was like an old acquaintance he’d never really taken to, but finally learned to live with. Alex had been his lifeline back then. They’d lain side by side—blindfolded, shackled and gagged—feeding each other’s spirits simply by their presence.

  The stillness was broken by the sound of slow-motion steps. There were two men and they were good. Not a word. Hand signals. Or well-drilled teamwork. A light flickered shadows on the roof above him. CJ waited, poised, transforming the soundtrack he was getting into a video. One was staying below holding a flashlight while the other was making the climb. CJ could see his shadow projected on the roof of the chamber as he navigated the latticework of ladders. The climber switched on his own light when he reached the chamber, its beam probing the tunnels leading off it and various objects strewn about the floor.

  Then he spoke.

  Quiet. No hollering down the shaft. Using some off-the-grid, ad hoc Wi-Fi system.

  “Room up here with passages. Tracks in the dust. They’re up here somewhere. Come on up.”

  CJ followed the man’s movements with his ears as he clambered out of the shaft. He had to wait to make sure that the other man was already on his way up before making a move. But not too long. The first man was sure to check the bin. And that was what he was doing, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, when CJ shot him in the head. He keeled over and disappeared down the shaft.

  Clatter and bounce. Ladders and walls. Yelps and groans.

  CJ was already at the rowing station pulling on the timber he’d jammed into the bin wall. He braced his feet on a ridge of rock and heaved it like an oar. The bin stakes cowed under the strain, and rocks rumbled. One more stroke and a stake gave way, snapping in a spray of splinters. It was like a dam busting in a flood. Once breached, it was all over, rocks sweeping aside rotten boards and cascading down the shaft. There was a scream, short-lived and lost in a thunderous crash. CJ picked the flashlight off the floor and checked the shaft. No more ladders. No more men. Just a pile of rocks at the bottom with a leg sticking out of it.

  He found Enya and Leila waiting down the tunnel. Enya was holding her satchel at her chest like a breastplate, the phone stuck in a side pocket so its flashlight was peeking out the top. The .38 was in her other hand, its barrel roaming wildly. Leila was in full combat mode, braced against the opposite wall, both hands on her gun. They’d heard the gunfire, the screams and the crash of rocks. Now someone large was looming out of the darkness, heading towards them, and everything they had was aimed at him. The blue-on-blue disaster was averted at the last moment when CJ called out.

  After a brief update, they continued on towards the entrance with CJ lighting the way with his newly acquired flashlight. With some way to go, they pulled over to the rock walls and CJ edged forward alone. He could tell by the light from the approaching entrance that the sun was almost gone. That was an event that triggered a timer. He had to use what little light was left. After nightfall, the odds would shift back to the team with night vision. He had to find out where Kowalski was holed up. He was out there somewhere with telescopic sights, scoping out the main entrance and checking the other two from time to time. By CJ’s count, there were two men left now, Kowalski and one other. He couldn’t say for sure that the second man of the tunnel team, the guy on the ladder, hadn’t been Kowalski, but it was a safe bet. Kowalski was most unlikely to have volunteered his own services to sniff CJ out of the tunnel. Besides, he was a trained sniper, a standout even amongst the accomplished shooters in the Ranger Regiment. He’d be out there somewhere, squinting through the eyepiece of a telescopic sight with the last member of his troop watching his back and scanning the adits with field glasses. Their most likely location was somewhere amongst those concrete blocks. Kowalski might have traded elevation for the security of concrete, but CJ was doubtful. The bare hills offered little in the way of cover.

  CJ stood back from the entrance of the adit, still
in the safety of the tunnel, and scoped out the area just outside it. There was a flat crawl space, then a mound of boulders that obscured his view of the clearing but also offered protection from snipers below. He crawled out on his belly as far as the boulders. The spotter would be scanning all three mine entrances plus any others they’d found. CJ had just seconds to stick his head above the boulders, figure out where they were and duck back down again before his head was blown off.

  “He’s down there somewhere, boy.” The voice was accompanied by the sound of a gun cocking. “But I’m up here. So toss it.”

  CJ skidded his pistol off to one side.

  There was the thump of feet landing behind him.

  “Hands on the back of your head. Face in the dirt.”

  “I got him.” He paused, waiting for instructions back through his headset.

  CJ was cursing his mistake. Sure. With two men left, the sniper team was the best play. But he hadn’t factored their radio link into the equation. Kowalski was the lone sniper. He’d gotten that right. But he’d deployed his last man as a remote spotter and offensive scout, and the guy had earned his keep by scaling the bluff in double time and hiding in bushes directly above the upper adit. That gave him control of that entrance and a direct line of sight down the slope and across the clearing to the adit on the north slope. With Kowalski’s sights on the main adit, they had all three entrances to the mine locked down tight. The man turned his attention back to the tunnel, never taking his eyes off CJ for more than a split second, waving his M16 and flashlight into its darkness.