Colonel Maheer Bazzi crawled forward to get a better view of the property. The compound was constructed of stone and ancient beams, built into the cliff behind it. Trees sprouted in front of the stacked rock perimeter wall and vines clung to the gray stone, nearly obscuring it. Through the haze of his night-vision scope, the property looked abandoned, but it was just an illusion created to ward off American drones.
Bazzi swept his scope right and spotted a man creeping up on the empty space where a gate had once been. Four additional armed men were angling in from the north and two more, invisible from his current position, would be coming in from the east. None were from his teams, though. They all belonged to Aali Nassar.
Bazzi had protested to the king, but it had been pointless. Faisal had become a man of compromise in his twilight years. While Bazzi remained in command of the assault, Nassar’s elite ops team would carry it out.
It was true that Nassar treated him with respect, but Bazzi was fully aware that it was only a pretense created to please the king. Nassar dismissed him as inexperienced and hated him for his history of cooperation with the Americans. Further, Nassar believed that he had witnessed and covered up Mitch Rapp’s killing of Saudi Arabia’s former special operations commander.
These suspicions, far from suggesting that Nassar was paranoid, were just another example of his competence. All were in fact true. While the American government was hopeless, Mitch Rapp had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East and what had to be done to tame it.
There was evidence that finally, with so many failures behind them, the politicians were starting to listen to him. As Bazzi saw it, this was the only hope for his country. Left to the backstabbing machinations of Faisal’s successors, the kingdom would descend into an endless civil war that would wipe it from the map.
Nassar, while unquestionably a force of nature, was a fundamentally twisted man. A man of all-consuming ambition and an almost sociopathic lack of patriotism. While he had managed to convince the king of his fealty, it was clear that he cared nothing for the man, the kingdom he ruled, or his thirty million subjects.
And so Bazzi found himself adopting the uncharacteristic strategy of leading from behind. As little as he trusted Aali Nassar, he trusted Nassar’s men even less.
The team was finally in position and Bazzi was about to authorize the assault, but it turned out to be unnecessary. They began without his order. He watched them flood into the compound, losing sight of most as they fanned out behind the wall. The muffled crack of suppressed assault rifles was joined by the undisciplined growl of fully automatic weapons as General al-Omari’s men tried to resist the incursion.
Bazzi started down the loose slope, forcing himself to keep an unconscionably slow pace. His normal practice was to run toward battle, but he suspected that his survival depended on reining in that instinct. In fact, he would have preferred to be relieved of his duties with regard to this operation, but such a request would have been an insult to the king.
The gunfire fell silent when he was still fifty meters from the wall and he activated his throat mike. “Has the courtyard been secured?”
There was no response.
“I repeat. Has the—”
“It’s secure,” came the curt response.
Bazzi moved through the gap in the wall cautiously, scanning the moonlit courtyard. Nassar’s men were in evidence on all sides, having taken control of every strategic position. The bodies of three armed men were facedown in the dirt.
“Any injuries?”
“None.”
The sound of machine-gun fire erupted to Bazzi’s right and he dove headlong to the ground, rolling into a position that allowed him to swing his Heckler & Koch G36 toward muzzle flashes coming from a stand of trees fifteen meters away. He depressed the trigger and felt the buck of his weapon as he returned fire. A shadowy figure burst from cover, using the eruptions of dust created by his bullets to refine his aim. The impacts made it to within five centimeters of Bazzi before he managed to hit the man in the chest and spin him into an ancient well.
The silence descended again and he searched the darkness, seeing no one but Nassar’s men looking down at him. None had fired a single shot.
It was clear that his continued existence depended on learning a whole new set of survival skills. He was no longer a simple special forces captain. He was a favorite of the king and, as such, a reluctant player in the power struggle that was to come.
Bazzi moved toward the men gathering at the front door of the massive house. Again he hung back, waiting for them to enter before he followed. They needed to move quickly. There would be more security men inside and all would be running for defensible positions. Nassar’s team couldn’t afford to get bogged down. They needed to get General al-Omari on a chopper before ISIS reinforcements arrived.
He kept Nassar’s men in front of him but doubted they would do anything overt. Allowing one of General al-Omari’s men to kill him was very different than doing the job themselves. One day it might come to that as Nassar continued to push against the limitations of his low birth, but for now it was unlikely that he was prepared to murder the head of Saudi Arabia’s special forces.
They continued down the hallway, coming to a set of stairs that demanded a split in their forces. It was obvious that he wasn’t really in command, so he didn’t bother to give orders. He wished that he could just retreat back outside of the wall, but King Faisal would want a detailed description of the operation. His duty was clear and he carried it out, choosing to follow the men who continued along the ground floor and letting the other team take the steps.
A sudden flash to their right was followed by the earsplitting shock wave of a grenade. The two lead men crumpled as the two behind them began trading fire with an assailant or assailants in a room ahead. Bazzi instinctively sprinted up behind them, sliding on his hip toward the downed men. One had been hit in the neck by shrapnel and was trying unsuccessfully to speak through blood-spattered lips. Despite his relative youth, Bazzi had seen men in a similar condition before. He wouldn’t live. The other man was still down, but his flak jacket had taken most of the shrapnel. Bazzi dragged him to an empty room, keeping watch behind him more for Nassar’s men than al-Omari’s. It was a situation where friendly-fire casualties could be easily explained away.