CHAPTER 6

Al-Hasakah, Syria

November

A NEW DATSUN HATCHBACK stopped at the curb in front of President Hadad’s home, and two camouflage-clad figures holding Kalashnikovs climbed out while a third stayed behind the wheel of the idling car. The one closest to Nizar’s sniper hide was a female, her dark hair hanging down the back of her uniform in a neat ponytail. He had planned on shooting only the president but then decided that it was her day to die as well. Despite carrying assault rifles made in Eastern Europe, the president’s bodyguards wore surplus American chest rigs to hold their ammunition, no doubt provided by the CIA. Neither the male nor female YPG troops wore any headgear and there was no sign of body armor.

The male soldier stopped in front of the iron gate and turned to cover the road while the female was buzzed through and approached the home’s front door. Within moments, a man in his sixties wearing a tan business suit stepped from the home and nodded to the female bodyguard. He was balding with white hair and a beard that he wore neatly trimmed. He looked like many other men in this city of nearly a quarter million, but Nizar had been studying his photo and recognized the face immediately as that of President Masour Hadad. His finger moved to the curved steel trigger.

Nizar’s view of the target was obscured by the female soldier who walked directly in front of Hadad. Both she and the closer guard searched for threats as their principal crossed his small front yard toward the gate. They were well trained and dedicated but oblivious to the deadly sniper poised to strike. The female opened the gate and stood aside to let Hadad pass through, giving Nizar a clear shot. He reacted quickly, firing a 9x39mm round as soon as the scope’s reticle settled on the president’s face.

Even suppressed and subsonic, the shot was loud inside the confined space of the truck. Because Nizar didn’t want the muzzle of his rifle to be visible from the outside, he kept it well behind the opening in the block, which contained most of the sound inside his makeshift hide. The soldiers one hundred meters away heard nothing but the sickening sound of a heavy bullet slapping flesh as Nizar’s shot found its mark. The full-metal-jacket SP-5 bullet passed through President Hadad’s eye and exited the back of his skull, taking a sizable amount of brain matter with it.

Nizar didn’t pause to admire his shot, since he knew where it had gone the moment the trigger broke. He moved the selector switch on the odd-looking rifle to full auto and put a burst of rounds into the female soldier before moving to engage the male. The president was barely on the ground before his loyal bodyguards joined him, both writhing in agony as they quickly bled to death from the significant trauma to their vital organs. Nizar shifted his body to the right to allow him a better angle on the driver, who was stepping out of the Datsun to help his wounded comrades and their principal. Another suppressed full-auto burst from the Russian weapon put him down, too, though he was able to crawl behind his vehicle before drowning in his own blood.

Nizar repeated a command three times into the Russian-made R-187P1 handheld radio. Communications were shit in most of Syria but the Interior Ministry saw to it that his unit had the finest gear that their benefactor nation could provide. Seconds later, he heard a series of violent explosions. Assets had driven car bombs to strategic locations around the city and detonated them on his command. Not only had these explosions caused significant casualties among both the local civilian and military populations, but they also would provide a chaotic diversion and give Nizar a chance to escape the city.

He pushed his way through the false wall at the back of the truck, sending concrete blocks tumbling to the ground in front of him. He had loaded a fresh magazine into his rifle and held it at the ready as he climbed from the truck and moved toward the cab. With blasts still rocking the city around him, Nizar unlocked the truck, stashed his rifle muzzle down on the seat next to him, and fired up the Kia.

He watched Al-Hasakah erupt from peace into panic in real time, like a beehive that had been poked. Sirens wailed, cars honked and drove wildly both toward and away from the blasts, and pedestrians, many of them refugees from embattled cities to the south, darted in every direction. Their little democratic utopia had been shattered.

Nizar steered around the cars and crowds carefully, not because he cared for them, but so as not to disable his only means of transportation. The farther he moved from the center of the city, where the blasts were concentrated, the calmer the situation became, people’s faces expressing more curiosity than fear by the time he reached the roundabout that connected to the highway. He tensed up as he saw what looked like a military roadblock ahead, but he relaxed once he saw that they were only stopping traffic heading into the city.

Leaving the narrow streets behind, he accelerated past the roadblock on the No. 7 highway, and drove south, out of town.

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