Marked Man Read Free

until the detonation, which had turned the intersection of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell into a smoking crater. Everywhere, shards of broken glass reflected the sunlight. All of the vendors, customers, and pedestrians had disappeared. Sporadic bursts of gunfire echoed from virtually every direction.
    Corporal Ross climbed free of the wreckage and took cover behind a pillar, pockmarked with bullet holes. He flipped through the stations on his walkie-talkie and tried to establish communication with his base.
    “Command? This is Ross. Are you receiving this?”
    Only a persistent hissing static answered him.
    “This is Charlie Company strike force two. Does anybody copy?”
    The same white noise was playing on every channel. With a curse, Corporal Ross stuffed the radio away and crouched into a squatting position. Without a link to base he had no way of knowing if the Hum-V had simply driven over the wrong piece of road at the wrong time or if their cover was entirely blown. If the IED was a coincidence, there was still a chance he could pull off the mission. There was only one man to grab, after all. But if someone knew they were coming Al-Shahari would be surrounded by a dozen bodyguards, all with equally poor aim to be sure but not even the legendary Corporal Ross could pull that off alone.
    Ross tongued a grain of sand in the back of his mouth by his molars and spit it out. Somewhere nearby a woman with a hoarse smoker’s voice was shouting the old Soviet motto “workers of the world unite” in Arabic for heaven only knew what reason. Not for the first time Ross reflected that the heat must have gotten to everyone in this part of the world’s head and he wondered why we couldn’t just get out and stay out once and for all. Speaking of the heat, Ross realized that since escaping the Hum-V the temperature had dropped twenty five degrees. There must have been a fire in the back of the vehicle somewhere. Corporal Ross peaked out from behind the pillar to take a look, but the Hum-V was not burning.
    Overhead the sky had turned abruptly from overcast and bright to deep gray, threatening heavy rain. The sun behind the clouds was changing to a sickly green. Nothing here was making any sense, even for Iraq.
    Ross was about to abandon the mission when a barrage of small caliber shells rattled the pillar just inches over his head. The plaster crumbled down onto his helmet and fell into his eyes. Blindly, Ross waved the M4 at the opposite end of the street and fired a controlled burst. Wiping at his eyes, Ross pushed himself to his feet and started running north on Pizza Hut, turning occasionally to squeeze off a round.
    The compound Al-Shahari called home was in the same direction, but all of Corporal Ross’s instincts were telling him to run the other way, even though that’s where the fire was coming from. Dozens of small arms and assault rifles were singing together, urging him on to run faster. After sprinting fifty yards Ross took cover again next to a four-door Sedan parked on the east side of the street. Its tires had been shot out. Ross saw a tall shadow creeping up in his peripheral vision. He counted to three, lurched up and around, fired once, and shrank back down into a crouch. The tall shadow dropped its weapon and tumbled into the street, its white robes turning crimson.
    “That was a fucking hall of fame shot,” Corporal Ross bragged to no one in particular. Specialist Wilson was the second best marksman in the unit and could appreciate a shot like that. Only Wilson had no face and he was sleeping upside down in a Hum-V at the bottom of a crater.
    A mortar exploded in the center of the street a few dozen yards back. Clumps of hot sand rained down on Corporal Ross and for a few moments he went deaf. When his hearing came back it sounded like every gun in the region was trained on his position. Shots blistered the small Sedan fro m everywhere, shredding the sky blue metal like a cheese grader. Somehow an entire army of