LITMIR.BIZ

      PROLOGUE

      They knew.

      He couldn’t nail down, of course, the when and where he suspected he’d been found out, but Reza Nahru sensed the angry heat of a killing mood in the barracks as soon as he was roused from sleep.

      “Get up! On your feet! The general wishes to speak with us!”

      There was real menace, he thought, in the way his brother Iranians glanced at him, then turned away, a few of them wrinkling noses as if they were in a hurry to clear a bad stench. He was on his feet, reaching for his assault rifle when Bahruz Fhalid growled, “Leave it.”

      And then he knew he was a dead man, beyond any scintilla of a doubt.

      Time seemed suspended, and he found it strange to the point of some peaceful, easy feeling how he could so calmly accept the inevitable, go and face down his own death. At least, he told himself, he wouldn’t die alone, since he heard both men were likewise told to leave their AK-47s where they were leaned up against respective edges of their cots.

      Small comfort. Dead was dead.

      A moment stolen to look at Tabriz and al-Hammud, rising now from their cots under the dark scowls and black eyes of AK-47s, and he still couldn’t help but wonder how his treachery had been uncovered.

      It had to have been his CIA contact in Port Sudan or perhaps Khartoum. The secret meetings, accepting the envelopes of cash from the CIA’s contract agent in Sudan, had been spied out somehow, by someone. Sudan, he knew, was crawling with Iranian agents, all manner of former SAVAK thugs, and he could have cursed himself for not being more careful in watching his back. Too late to kick himself now—clearly word of his deceit and betrayal had trailed him all the way down to Madagascar.

      The sweeping courtyard was just beyond the door. The massive stone walls of the garrison, once home to French soldiers, would be smeared with his blood when he was marched out there to be shot.

      Death at the hands of his own. Shot down like a mad dog in the street. A sorry testament, he decided, to a bad life.

      A fitting end.

      “A moment to pray?” he asked Fhalid.

      “Be quick about it.”

      He slumped to his knees, shut his eyes, clasped his hands. As a Muslim, once devoted to God and his will, committed to prayer and to his faith, he had somehow, somewhere lost that faith, his belief in right and wrong, stripping himself of any sense of humanity. No, he wasn’t one hundred percent certain on exactly where and when he had stopped believing in God, but supposed it had begun when he had left—abandoned—his wife and three children in Tehran, right after the way with the Iraqis. From there, a pit stop in Beirut, beefing up on weapons and intel. There, rallying an elite corps of freedom fighters, mapping out strategy against the infidels. Then on the Gaza Strip, where he’d recruited the poor, the angry and the desperate out of Palestinian refugee camps to blow themselves up in Tel Aviv, martyrs for God. There was also an American diplomatic entourage wiped out in Pakistan not long ago that he had played no small role in arranging. At least twenty of the men gathered in the barracks had also been part of creating slaughterhouses in six different countries.

      And it was his knowledge of these incidents that had brought the CIA to his doorstep in Port Sudan, dark shadow men picking his brain, putting the ultimatum to him. Play ball or else.

      They wanted names and whereabouts of his fellow brothers in jihad. They wanted to know from where recent shipments of high-tech weapons were coming from, to find their way into the hands of his fellow Iranians.

      So be it. A change was long since coming anyway. Sometimes, he thought, conversion of the soul just came to a man, a virgin bride eager to marry the one she loved, or sometimes the man actively and with passion he had never before known sought out the inner cleansing. Who could say?

      But for some time Nahru had questioned the morality of the so-called holy way against the Great Satan. He asked himself if God was the creator of all men, why, then, would he want the blood of the innocent on his divine hands?

      Silently Nahru asked God to have mercy on his wretched soul.

      “Up!”

      “We had a deal!”

      Rising, eyes wide open, Nahru nearly laughed out loud when the moment of truth was revealed. The old Nahru would have unleashed a torrent of vicious cursing on al-Hammud. The new man simply felt a sense of curious relief sweeping over him. If nothing else, his own Judas would die beside him.

      Al-Hammud began blubbering for his life to be spared. “You told me—”

      Fhalid stung the man’s face with a backhand that slapped flesh with the sound of a pistol shot. “Get these jackals out of my face!”

      Nahru allowed himself to be shoved and manhandled through the door. He winced into the beam of white light striking him in the face as he stumbled into the courtyard. He was thinking to be shot couldn’t be such a bad way to go. Quick, clean, fairly painless. One well-placed bullet through the heart…

      The stench nearly knocked him off his feet. He heard al-Hammud scream out his terror next when he was pushed toward the trio of Madagascan soldiers. It was all he could do to keep the vomit from spewing out. The cattle carcass was still being gutted, long strands of intestines dug out by the soldiers with machetes ripping away, the dripping gore getting smeared up and down the long thin stakes.

      Greasing the way.

      Nahru felt knees buckle, his limbs turning to boneless mass when Fhalid bellowed the order to strip them down. The blows pummeled his head next, bringing on the stars and the white-hot pain. He was falling hard and fast, then became aware he was on the ground, face plastered in the red earth, hands like claws shredding his clothes.

      Reza Nahru offered up one last silent prayer. He asked God to avenge the obscenity of his coming death.

      GENERAL FATEH ARAKKHAN was a man without a country. It angered him to no end, this knowledge he was unwelcomed, unwanted in his homeland, not to mention he was a soldier being hunted for alleged war crimes. The rumor floating his way from Khartoum went that his own people, in their greed and hunger to become a prominent oil-developing and -exporting country, were ready and willing to hand his head over to the infidels.

      The Arab-controlled north Sudan might be his home of birth, but a few circumstances had recently dictated he find comfortable lodging someplace far away from Khartoum. One, the military and intelligence bastards and whores of the evil Western empires, he thought, had proclaimed him the Butcher of Southern Sudan, and before the United Nations for five years running. Second, a number of upper-echelon two-faced thieves in the intelligence arm of the National Islamic Front were more than irked that he had helped himself to what they claimed was more than his rightful share of Red Cross and UN planeloads of food and medicine, shipped to southern Sudan under some shaky international-relief agreement.

      Yes, it was true enough he had strongarmed enough supplies, reselling them to Somalia—not to mention helping himself to a vast pool of oil money—and mounted a fat numbered back account in Switzerland. But how could a leader, he reasoned, ever hope to lead unless he could feed, clothe, arm and pay his own men properly? A soldier with an empty belly, with no money in his pocket to throw around on R and R… Well, a soldier stirred up with bitter malcontent meant mass mutiny could be as close as tomorrow’s kneel to Mecca.

      But the former number-two man of the National Salvation Revolutionary

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