Tuesday, January 20
Barletta, Italy
The past thirty-six hours had been a nightmare for Riley-or more precisely, a series of nightmares. Dreams filled with betrayal; dreams filled with heartbreak.
Riley is back with the Air Force Special Operations Command. Alpha Team is surrounded. Gunfire pings off the Humvee that is giving him temporary protection. He turns to Scott Ross, his number two, and tells him to order in some air support. But instead of lifting the radio, Scott picks up his Beretta M9, levels it at Riley’s head, and with a twisted grin, pulls the trigger.
Riley half awoke out of that horror into a hazy state. Everything was black; he couldn’t move his arms or legs. His body tried to writhe and twist, but the paralysis kept him locked in place. A gutteral yell escaped his mouth. The throbbing in his head was making him sick, as was the salty sweat dripping into his mouth. The chill on his naked upper body caused him to shiver uncontrollably.
Moments passed, and his mind began to clear. The lack of movement came not from paralysis but from the cords that bound his hands and feet to a chair. The taste in his mouth was not the bitterness of salt but the metallic tang coming from blood that was slowly oozing from where he had bitten his upper lip. His mind rewound, trying to remember how he had gotten to this place.
As he strained to bring clarity to the blurry images in his brain, a door opened and closed. Two sets of footsteps came toward him. Soft Arabic words were exchanged. Riley’s whole body tensed. Then he felt a sharp stab into his arm, and his mind swirled back into blackness.
Riley is back at his parents’ house. It’s Christmas, and earlier in the morning he opened a long package that contained his dream gift-a Crosman 781 pneumatic BB gun. That gift triggered a war that is now taking place on the battlefield of his backyard. For the last three hours, he has been out in the snow, setting up and plinking down his collection of green plastic army men. His boots soaked through a long time ago, and the pain in his toes makes him wince with every step.
“Just one more time and then I’ll go in,” he tells himself. But before he knows it, he finds himself placing the men back up on the soggy, wooden picnic table-targets for another tiny, copper-plated steel ball.
Riley’s post-Christmas morning bliss is suddenly interrupted by a scream from inside the house, followed by two loud pops. Without thinking, Riley runs toward the back door and throws it open. He races through the kitchen without taking off his boots, tracking snow on Mom’s squeaky-clean linoleum floor. He runs through the dining room and grabs the end of the banister, using its stability to reverse his direction. He bounds up the stairs two by two. When he reaches his parents’ bedroom, he stops abruptly in the doorway.
Riley’s mother and father are both lying on the floor, their bodies cocked at strange angles. Standing over them, holding a handgun, is Grandpa Covington. Riley gasps, and the retired airman turns toward him. Grandpa looks at Riley, then nods at his BB gun and smiles. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to bring a little more firepower than that, soldier,” Riley’s childhood hero says as he raises the pistol toward the boy and-
“NO!” Riley screamed as he woke up again. He was shaking all over, and his body was dripping with sweat. “It’s only a dream,” he muttered to himself. “It’s only a dream. It’s only a dream.”
The effects of the drugs gradually wore off. In the darkness behind his blindfolded eyes, he again tried to rewind the tape in his mind to discern how he had gotten here. He made it to the point of the extraction of al-’Aqran. Everything had gone well, hadn’t it? No, there was a problem. Someone-Billy-was missing. He remembered sending the team on its way… Skeeter wasn’t happy… Then there was the house… Billy’s body… a sound-what was it?-glass; footsteps crunching glass, and then… Oh no! Please, no!
The door opened again, and the sound of footsteps echoed in the room-just one set this time. The door closed-a new sound. The footsteps scraped across the cement floor, then stopped. A wooden chair dragged across the hard surface and creaked slightly as someone sat. Silence hung in the air; the only sounds were the visitor’s light breathing and Riley’s own labored breath.
Time stretched on before Riley finally spoke. “Sal? Sal, is that you?”
The question floated without a reply.
“Sal? How could you do it, man?”
The silence of the visitor was exasperating. Riley’s voice began to crescendo with anger and pain. “Answer me, friend. How could you do it? Who are you, Sal? What are you?”
A hand grabbed the blindfold and pulled it violently down around Riley’s neck.
There, twelve inches from Riley’s face, was Sal Ricci. Hate and anger shone in his eyes. “Who am I, friend? I am Hakeem Qasim! What am I? I am an Iraqi! I am a child of Allah! I am a predator, and America is my prey!” Hakeem leaped up out of his chair and began pacing around the room.
Riley’s head dropped over the back of his chair. The room was spinning. He tried to say something but found that no words would come. All he could manage were short bursts of air. What could he say? What possible words would mean anything in this bizarre parallel universe?
“But Megan… Alessandra,” he whispered.
Hakeem walked to his chair, turned it around, and straddled it backward. He had regained some of his composure and now seemed almost anxious to speak. But there was still an underlying hiss to his voice. “There is an old Arab proverb: You are in a boat, and your father, your wife, and your child are all drowning. You have room for only one other person. Whom would you save? Not your wife; you can always marry again. Not your child; you can always have more. Would you save your father? Yes. Because you only have one. I have saved my father-or at least I have restored his honor. If it is at the expense of my wife and daughter, so be it.”
Riley shook his head in disbelief. “You can’t mean that. What’s happened to you, Sal?”
His former teammate’s closed fist suddenly exploded across Riley’s left cheek. “I said my name is Hakeem! Sal is dead.”
Riley spit a mouthful of blood onto the cement at the other man’s feet and looked at him with disgust. “Whatever. Hakeem will be dead too, soon enough.”
Slowly, a heart-chilling smile spread across Hakeem’s face. “Right you are, old friend. But I don’t think the circumstances of my demise will be quite what you have in mind.”
“Come on, Sa-Hakeem. What’s left to do? You’ve restored your family honor. Thousands are dead. The PFL is in shambles.”
“The PFL? Oh no, it’s not in shambles… yet,” Hakeem said with that same sickening grin.
“What do you mean ‘yet’?” Riley was trying to keep his wits about him, but he felt like he was right on the edge of a downward psychological slide from which he might not be able to recover.
“You know how it is, Riley. No one really cares about the regular season games. They only care about the big ones.”
The sick feeling that Riley had in his stomach was now becoming a sharp pain. His voice became pleading. “You can’t be serious… Please, man. Leave it alone.”
“Leave it alone? Maybe you should be taking your own advice! Maybe if you’d left it alone you wouldn’t be sitting here bleeding all over yourself. What are you even doing here, Riley?”
“I’m tracking down a murderer. I’m hunting for Hakeem the terrorist.” Riley paused. Then he added softly, “I’m avenging the death of my best friend.”
Silence filled the air.
Hakeem stood up again and circled around Riley. “You weren’t supposed to be here, Riley. You’re supposed to be back in Colorado, taking care of Meg and Alessandra.”
“Funny, I thought that was your job.”
A hand came hard across the back of Riley’s head, rocking him in the chair. “You forget your place, old friend!” Hakeem walked around in front of Riley and slowly shook his head. “Why have you come here? This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Yeah, well, surprise. It did. So are you going to kill me, too?”
Anger flashed in Hakeem’s eyes. “I could have put a bullet in the back of your head in that house. And believe me, I’m the only one that’s keeping you alive right now.”
“What am I supposed to do? Thank you? Hey, I guess Sal’s not such a bad guy after all,” Riley said sarcastically.
A fist struck Riley’s face again. The other man’s mouth moved to within inches of his ear, and he hissed, “I said my name is Hakeem.”
Riley turned his head and the two men stared nose-to-nose. Blood and saliva filled Riley’s mouth. He prepared to spit, then turned at the last moment and shot the bloody liquid to the ground, splashing both their feet.
Hakeem straightened and walked to the single barred window Riley could see at the back of the room. He breathed in deeply, inhaling the salty night air that Riley could catch only a hint of through the scent of the blood coating his face. “I don’t understand you, Pach. You go around Afghanistan killing people. You come here to kill people. No one hits harder than you do on the football field. But you’re soft on the inside. There is no hate in your eyes. I mean, you’ve just found out that your best friend has lived a double life and betrayed you. And what do you do? Rather than dishonor him by spitting in his face, you spit on the ground.”
“You’ve dishonored yourself enough already, Sal. You don’t need my help,” Riley said, the swelling in his cheek causing him to lisp slightly. He noticed that the mention of Sal’s name hadn’t drawn a swing this time. “You kill out of hate. When I have to kill, I do it out of duty. And I don’t kill innocents, only perpetrators.”
“Ah, the higher ethics of murder.”
“My actions are not murder. Bombing a stadium is murder.”
“Then what do you call your actions, O virtuous warrior?”
Riley’s temper went over the edge. “You want to know what I call it every time I kill some button-pushing psycho like you? Preventative medicine!”
Hakeem walked back from the window and straddled his chair again. He was chuckling, and Riley knew his temper had cost him an edge.
“That’s quite the high road, Riley-‘Your killing is bad, but mine is good.’” Hakeem’s smile quickly disappeared. “But what do you call it when your government blows up a house, and a ten-year-old boy watches his family die in front of him? Was my mother a perpetrator? Was my aunt a perpetrator? Your president wiped out my whole family. Am I supposed to sit back and say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. Accidents do happen’?”
“Get over yourself, Sal. There’re a lot of people who have had horrible things happen in their lives, but they don’t go turning themselves into a walking mass of C- 4.”
Hakeem started to reach across to hit Riley again but pulled his arm back and stared at him.
Riley realized his temper was about to cost him any influence he might have on his old friend. He forced himself to dial the rhetoric back a notch. “Listen, I’m sorry you lost your family. I can’t imagine what you went through. But this-what you’re doing-it’s just plain whacked.”
“See, there-right there!” Hakeem cried, poking Riley on his bare shoulder. “That’s why I say you’re soft. If you hit me, I’ll hit you back-only harder. That is the answer! If I hit you, what do you do? You just sit there and do nothing. Or you look for ‘alternatives’ or ‘understanding.’ And please spare me your ‘turn the other cheek’ drivel.”
“Wait a second; get your facts straight! If you hit someone close to me-someone I love-trust me, you won’t be doing it again. But if you hit me? Yeah, I’ll ‘turn the other cheek’ or ‘take one for the team’ or whatever you want to call it.”
Hakeem laughed derisively. “Well, I’ll tell you what. According to your beliefs, Jesus ended up on the cross because He turned the other cheek. But Muhammad is a warrior; he struck the other cheek. One day Islam will dominate the earth because we fight back. It’s the way of the world-the strong take over the weak. Face it-my religion is one of strength; yours, of weakness.”
“Your religion? What religion do you have? I’ve read your file, Hakeem. You’re a Ba’athist-a worshiper of Saddam Hussein. I’ve got bad news for you, friend. Your god died at the end of a rope in 2006. Don’t go talking to me about religion. You have no more love for Allah than I do.”
Color flushed across Hakeem’s face, but his voice remained steady. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’m no Ba’athist. Saddam was a strong leader, but he was not my god. I am a follower of Allah, the one true God. And I am a follower of Muhammad, his prophet. What I do, I do for Islam and in the name of Allah.”
Riley gave a bitter laugh at this religious declaration. “Maybe your own twisted brand of Islam. Most Muslims hate what you’re doing, but they won’t say anything out of fear one of you whack-jobs is going to plant a bomb in their mailbox.”
Hakeem dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “Interpretation of the Koran has been watered down in the name of political correctness and world opinion. Tell me, what do these weak vessels do with Surah 5:33, where we are told that the only punishment for those who wage war against Allah and his prophet is that they should be killed or crucified or have their hands and feet chopped off? Why, in Surah 4:74, does Allah promise reward for those who sell this world’s life for the hereafter and die fighting for him?
“You look surprised that I can quote from the Holy Book. Well, all those nights in the hotel rooms on the road while you were studying your Gideon Bible, I was learning the true words of the Prophet. That’s why I know my calling to be true. I fight the infidel, and I wage jihad against those who try to take what belongs to Allah because that is what I am commanded to do!”
“So, it’s a religion of hate.”
Hakeem was on his feet again. “You’re not listening! It’s not a religion of hate! It’s a religion that takes care of its own. It’s a religion whose followers are commanded to expand its borders. Think about it, Riley. How is it any different than Christianity? What were the Crusades? How many people over the centuries were forced to convert to your supposedly crucified Jesus at the end of a sword?”
“C’mon, Sal, you’re smart enough to know that just because someone slaps a cross on their uniform doesn’t mean they’re on God’s team. The difference between you guys and us is that we condemn those who do evil in the name of our God.” Riley shifted in his chair to try to get the blood flowing into his legs again. Some words that Pastor Tim had told him a few months ago flooded into his mind, and he said, “We’re not trying to force people into some sharia thing. We’re not the ones holding the swords anymore. We’re trying to do what we should have been doing all along-sacrificing ourselves to show people a better way. That’s what Jesus did.”
Hakeem laughed mockingly as he paced around the room. “‘That’s what Jesus did’-oh, please. There you go again with your ‘sacrificial Jesus’ talk. Did you know that Surah 4 of the Koran makes it perfectly clear that Jesus was not the person crucified on the cross? He was simply a prophet like Moses or Abraham. But you Christians have taken this holy man and turned Him into a god. That is the ultimate blasphemy!”
Riley’s temper got the best of him again. “Buddy, your whole life is a blasphemy right now! And just because you point to some Surah, am I supposed to believe it’s true? I can point to Philippians 2 and John 19 and 20 that make it clear that Jesus is God and that He died and that He rose again! But what good would it do? No doubt you’ll write off those Scriptures just as quickly as I’ll write off yours!”
Hakeem circled around, yanked Riley’s head back by the hair, and got right in his face. “Yes, I’ll write off your Scriptures! I write off anything that is blasphemous! And saying there is more than one god is a blasphemy worthy of death! THERE IS NO GOD BUT ALLAH!”
“Take your hands off me,” Riley said slowly, his eyes burning into Hakeem’s. The standoff was broken when Hakeem gave Riley’s forehead a final push and then walked back to the window.
Riley struggled to control his anger with little success. With each word he spoke, his volume increased. “I’m not getting into some ‘Who is God?’ argument with you, Sal, because it won’t get us anywhere! If I say Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit make up one God, you’re still going to hear three gods. So, where do we go from there? And as for your version of Allah-you can keep him! My God lays down His life; your Allah blows up stadiums!”
The fervor of Riley’s words echoed off the cement walls. Dust floated around the room’s single lightbulb, which hung above their heads.
Hakeem leaned in close to Riley again. “Okay, just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that what you say is true. Then you serve a god who lets people kick Him when He’s down. Is that really the kind of god you want? As for me, I would rather go it on my own than serve such a wounded puppy of a god. Allah is strong! You know what strength is?” Hakeem placed his fist in front of Riley’s face. “This! This is strength!”
Riley waited for Hakeem to remove his hand before he answered. “Unfortunately, like everything else, you’ve got your definition of strength all backward. It takes a lot more strength to turn the other cheek than it does to strike back. It takes a lot more courage to try to save your enemy than it does to kill him. And it takes a lot more character to forgive than it does to seek revenge.”
Hakeem sat down and slid his reversed chair forward until it was inches away from Riley’s. He leaned his head forward. “And what about me, Riley? Do you forgive me? And before you answer, let me tell you a little secret: I’m not done yet. I’ve got one more big party to crash. So, what do you say, pal? Is all forgiven?”
The smell of Hakeem’s coffee-laden breath added to the repulsiveness of the choice that stood before Riley. He lowered his head. Lord, every fiber of my being wants to crush this man’s nose with my forehead. But I remember You forgiving the people who crucified You even while You were still hanging on the cross. Help me to do the right thing.
Slowly, Riley lifted his gaze to meet Hakeem’s. “Sal, I forgive you; I truly do. You are a sick, brainwashed man who doesn’t have the moral understanding to know that what he’s doing is so very wrong. But know this: just because I forgive you doesn’t mean that I’m not going to do everything I can to stop you before you hurt anyone else-even if that means putting a bullet in you.”
At the last phrase, something registered in Hakeem’s eyes-maybe fear, maybe uncertainty. But just that quickly it was gone.
Hakeem burst into laughter as he stood. “Exactly what I would have expected you to say.” He walked over to the window again and looked out. The cry of a gull echoed in the silent room. “Riley, your friends have taken our leader and my mentor, al-’Aqran. You are going to be told to make a video to your people suggesting a prisoner swap. Say what you are asked to say. Then, when the video is complete, you are going to be asked by the men holding you for information about your friends’ whereabouts and about how many and how well equipped they are. Tell them what they want to know.”
Hakeem stepped in front of Riley and looked down at him. “Before tomorrow is over, I will have left Italy to go play my endgame. When I’m gone, I can no longer protect you. I know you. I know your stubbornness. But I advise you to do what they ask of you. Because of my status as a hero, I still hold some sway over them. I can ask them to spare your life, and they will grant me that wish. However, anything short of killing you will be fair game.” Hakeem squatted down in front of Riley. “Please, Pach, spare yourself the pain. They’re going to break you eventually anyway.”
Riley’s mouth rose into a weak smile. “Tell your boys that I’ll make their video. But as far as telling them anything about my team… well, like you said, I guess I’m just a stubborn man.”
Hakeem shook his head, then popped up. “So be it.” He spun and walked toward the door. When his hand touched the handle, he turned around. “Good-bye, Riley. It has truly been an honor knowing you.”
With that, he pulled the door open and exited into the hall. Before the door had a chance to close, a hand stopped it. As it pushed back open, four men wearing black nylon masks came in. One man was carrying a video camera on a tripod. Another man had several sheets of paper, presumably a script for Riley. The third man held a small generator with two protruding cables that ended in copper clips. The fourth man brought in an old, scratched aluminum Louisville Slugger.
The man with the script picked up the chair Hakeem had been sitting in and brought it near where the camera was being set up. He sat down and began shuffling through the papers. When he got them into the proper order, he looked up and said in a heavily accented voice, “Well, Mr. Covington, shall we begin?”