She waited.
He took a deep swig of his beer, as if he needed to shore up the courage to proceed with his narrative.
“Three years ago my platoon was tasked to conduct a body snatch, which is an operation to kidnap high-value enemy personnel. Our target was a Muslim cleric I’ll call Jaffar. He had ties to a terrorist cell that was plotting to attack several U.S. embassies and navy warships. But Jaffar wanted no parts of the plan. He’d had some sort of spiritual reawakening, and he wanted to defect from the group. But by doing so, he would have signed his own death warrant and endangered his family. So my team was sent to Fallujah to extract him. We weren’t supposed to kill him. He was wanted alive. Like I said, he was a high-value target, and we needed the intel he could provide about the terror plot.”
As Remy paused to down the rest of his beer, Zandra could sense his growing tension. She braced herself for what he would reveal next.
He set the empty bottle on the floor, leaned back against the chair and started bouncing one leg up and down, an agitated gesture he probably wasn’t even aware of doing. “That night we were inserted by helicopter into Jaffar’s residential compound. We’d executed these kinds of operations so many times before, we could do them in our sleep. But not that night. After we dropped in from the roof of Jaffar’s house, all hell broke loose.”
Zandra stared at Remy’s grim face, every muscle stretched taut. “What happened?”
His eyes hardened. “Shaughnessy went way off course. After we secured the target, we should have gotten the hell out. But Shaughnessy insisted on rounding up Jaffar’s family members and putting them in one room. Jaffar had a pregnant wife, five children and an elderly mother. None of them were armed. By this time some of my other teammates were engaged in a gunfight with Jaffar’s guards outside.”
Remy shook his head. “Everything happened so damn fast. One moment I was in another room guarding Jaffar. He was rambling in Arabic, talking about Allah and the gift of redemption and second chances. He was scared, but not because I was holding a machine gun to his head. He was worried for his family, and I assured him that they wouldn’t be harmed. No sooner had the words left my mouth than I heard gunshots down the hall. I put a man on Jaffar and ran to the room—” Remy broke off, rubbing his face with trembling hands.
Zandra waited, her heart pounding with dread.
He swallowed tightly. “Shaughnessy had shot and killed Jaffar’s family members. All of them, including the youngest child. A four-year-old.”
“Oh, my God,” Zandra breathed in shock.
Remy’s nostrils flared, his eyes burning with raw emotion. “I lost it. I stormed over to Shaughnessy and cracked him on the jaw with the butt of my gun. When I asked him what the fuck had happened, he said that Jaffar’s family had been whispering to one another, plotting to kill him. He said the oldest son rushed him with a knife, and he was just defending himself.” Remy snorted bitterly. “The kid was fourteen years old. Fourteen. I’d seen Shaughnessy dismantle a three-hundred-pound, AK-47–toting tango without breaking a fucking sweat, and here he wanted me to believe he’d felt threatened by a skinny teenager wielding a butter knife. I was furious. We started yelling at each other, and then I heard a scream from the doorway. An anguished, bloodcurdling scream I will never forget for as long as I live.
“Jaffar had overpowered the man guarding him and run down the hall. When he saw his family members sprawled across the floor...his pregnant wife...his children...all the blood... Jesus,” Remy whispered hoarsely, closing his eyes with a hard shudder.