Busted Flush

The rear door yawned; a squad of blue helmets jumped out, ducking their heads against the rotor wash and running across the sand with weapons ready. Alongside him, Rusty coughed in the gritty air. “Cripes,” he muttered. More troops tumbled out. Michael checked the two M-16s he carried—still leaving his upper set of hands free—and lurched to his feet. “Let’s go,” he said to Rusty.

“Why don’cha stay behind me, fella?” Rusty suggested. “Just in case.” Michael thought that an excellent idea.

They lumbered down the ramp and onto the sand at a jog.

Their Chinook had landed alongside the administration building for the facility—Lieutenant Bedeau was leading the first set of blue helmets, and had already kicked open the doors of the building and gone in. As with all the wellheads they’d taken, there didn’t seem to be anyone around: no cars in the parking lots, no one near the storage tanks or near the oil derricks set in a mile-long arc just to the east, no one moving in the village five hundred or so yards away to the west near the main road. The pipeline-linked refinery a half mile to the south looked equally deserted. The Tigre choppers hovered overhead menacingly, loud in the sunlight, but their guns were silent.

Maybe, he thought, maybe Jayewardene and Fortune were going to get what they’d hoped. He rubbed the bruise under his Kevlar again and crouched behind Rusty, scanning the rooftops and half expecting to feel the kick of a slug against his jacket.

“We’re secure here,” he heard Bedeau say in his headset in French-accented English. “Aucun problème.” The relief in the man’s voice was palpable. Someone laughed nearby; he saw the closest soldiers let the tips of their weapons drop slightly.

These assignments were already becoming routine. They were beginning to expect it to be easy. That worried Michael more than anything.

“Nobody home again,” Rusty said. In the midst of the pipes and derricks, he looked like a piece of old equipment that had decided to become ambulatory. “Good deal.”

They swept the facility closely and made certain that the employees had indeed abandoned the place, that there were no soldiers of the Caliphate or snipers hidden about, and that the facility hadn’t been either sabotaged or booby-trapped. Rusty had been given the task of using the metal detector on the grounds, with two demolition experts a careful dozen steps behind him, checking any hits he found. He grinned at Michael with the earphones stretching dangerously around his orange-red head. “I found lots of pieces of old pipe, and a whole buncha coins.” He held out a large palm, and Michael saw several silver and bronze-colored coins there, adorned with Arabic lettering. “Souvenir, fella?”

Michael took one. He brushed the sand from it and stuck it in his pocket.

A few hours later, Michael, Lieutenant Bedeau, and a six-member squad of blue helmets trudged out to a small village along the narrow paved road passing the complex, while Rusty and the others continued to sweep for mines and booby traps. The village was a collection of small houses huddled together in the sand with a few stores and a petrol station. All the houses looked the same: prefab, cheap company housing. The veiled faces of women watched them from behind shuttered windows as they approached.

There were children—a dozen or more, their ages seeming to range from maybe seven to perhaps fourteen—playing soccer between the houses. Usually, no matter where he went, the strangeness of Michael’s spidery figure would bring them running and chattering toward him, but these only stopped their game and stared as they approached before melting away into the bright shadows between the buildings. “. . . Djinn . . .” He heard the word in the midst of the stream of whispered Arabic, and it gave him a chill. He began to watch the windows of the houses carefully, half expecting the muzzle of a rifle to appear. The children vanished, the soccer ball abandoned on the sand. The village seemed preternaturally quiet; it made the small hairs stand up on Michael’s arms. His lowest set of hands clutched the single M-16 he was holding tighter, his finger sliding close to the trigger.

It’s all kids, women, and old men here, he reminded himself, but that gave him little comfort. Any of them could just as easily press a trigger.