The last was crouching behind one of the technicals, out of sight. The firing died and stopped. Trying to find a target in the darkness, he popped his head around the front of the engine block. He was unaware his enemies had NVGs; his head was like a green football. Another round blew his brains out.
Then there really was silence. There was no more response from the house with the pirates, but the paras were two short. They needed eight; they had taken down six. They prepared to charge and risk taking casualties, but there was no need. From way behind the village, they heard more shots, three in all, spaced a second apart.
Seeing the village well roused, Barry had abandoned his useless vigil outside the alley and raced around to the back. With his NVGs, he saw three figures running out of the back of the pirate house. Two were in robes, the third, stumbling and pleading, being hustled along with the two Somalis, had a thatch of blond hair.
Barry did not even challenge the runners. He rose from the camel thorn scrub when they were twenty yards away and fired. The one with the Kalashnikov, Duale, of the one eye, went first; the older man, later identified as al-Afrit, the Devil, took two spaced bullets in the chest.
The huge para walked over to his kills. The blond lad was between them, on his side, in the fetal position, crying softly.
“That’s all right, son,” said the veteran sergeant. “It’s over. Time to take you home.”
He tried to raise the teenager to his feet, but his legs had given way. So he picked the lad up like a doll, put him over his shoulder and began to stride back to the village.
The Tracker stared through his goggles at the room where the last of the Marka party had died. All but one. There was a doorway to one side; not a door but a hanging blanket covering the aperture.
He went through it on a rolling dive, staying below the likely firing line of a shooter in the room. Inside, he jumped to one side of the doorway and brought his M4 to bear. There was no shot.
He stared around the room, the last of the house, the best, the headman’s room. There was a bed with a coverlet, but it was empty, the blanket thrown to one side.
There was a fireplace and a cluster of still-glowing embers, painfully white through the goggles. A large armchair, and sitting in it, watching him, an old man. They stared at each other for several seconds. The old man spoke quite calmly.
“You may shoot me. I am old and my time has come.” He spoke in Somali, but, with his Arabic, the Tracker could just understand it. He replied in Arabic.
“I do not want to shoot you, Sheikh. You are not he whom I seek.”
The old man gazed at him without fear. What he saw, of course, was a cammo-uniformed monster with frog’s eyes.
“You are of the kuffar, but you speak the language of the Holy Koran.”
“It is true, and I seek a man. A very bad man. He has killed many. Also Muslims, women and even children.”
“Have I seen him?”
“You have seen him, Sheikh. He was here. He has”—the old man would never have seen amber—“eyes the color of fresh-drawn honey.”
“Ah.” The old man waved a hand dismissively, as one gesturing away something he did not like. “He has gone with the woman’s clothes.”
For a second, the Tracker felt a punch of disappointment. Escaped, swathed in a burqa and hijab, hiding in the desert, impossible to find. Then he noticed the old man was glancing upward, and he understood.
When the women of the hamlet washed their clothes in water from the well, they dared not hang them to dry in the square for the goats, who could feast off camel thorn spines, would tear them to shreds. So they erected frames on the flat roofs.
The Tracker went out the door across the room. There was a set of steps running up the side of the house. He leaned his M4 against the wall and drew his sidearm. His rubber-cleated jump boots made no sound going up the brick steps. He emerged on the roof and looked around. There were six drying frames.
In the half-light, he examined them all. For the women, dishdashas; for the men, white cotton lungis, the sarongs of the Somalis, draped over twig frames to dry. One seemed taller and narrower. It had a long white Pakistani shalwar kameez shirt, a head, a bushy beard, and it moved. Then three things happened so fast they almost cost the Tracker his life.
The moon came out from behind the clouds at last. It was full and dazzlingly white. It destroyed his night vision in a second, blinding him through the light-concentrating NVGs.
The man ahead of him was charging, and the Tracker tore off his goggles and raised his Browning thirteen-shot. The assailant had his right arm raised, and there was something in it that glinted.
He squeezed the Browning’s trigger. The hammer fell—on an empty chamber. A misfire, and, on a second squeeze, another. Very rare but possible. He knew he had a full magazine in there but nothing in the chamber.
With his free left hand, he seized a cotton dishdasha, bunched it into a ball and threw it at the descending blade. The steel hit the fluttering cloth, but the material wrapped itself around the metal so that when it hit his shoulder, it was blunted. With his right hand, he threw down the Browning and from a sheath on his right thigh he drew his U.S. Marine fighting knife, almost the one thing he still had that he had brought from London.
The bearded man was not using a jambiya, the short, curved but mainly ornamental knife of Yemen, but a billao—a big, razor-sharp knife used only by Somalis. Two slashes from a billao will take off an arm; a lunge with the needle point will go through a torso from front to back.
The attacker changed grip, twisting his wrist so the blade was held low for an upward thrust, as a street fighter would hold it. The Tracker had his vision back. He noted the man in front of him was barefoot, which would give him a good grip on the clay-brick roof. But so would his own rubber soles.
The next attack from the billao came fast and low to his left side, rising for the entrails, but that was where he expected it. His own left hand came down on the rising wrist, blocking it, the steel tip three inches from his body. He felt his own right wrist also gripped.