Homeland: Saul’s Game. Andrew Kaplan

in the whole world like I hate that son of a bitch. I want him dead. It’s the only way out for my mom and me. I came close, Jess. I started to squeeze the trigger. I swear to God. My hand was shaking and I squeezed. Another fraction of an ounce of pressure and it would have gone off. Only I couldn’t do it. And I don’t know why!” he screamed, running down the street as hard as he could toward the river, Jessica running after him, yelling, “Brody, wait! Wait!”

      A block or two later, he just stopped, standing on the sidewalk outside somebody’s house. A real house with a lawn and white columns like it had been plunked down there from a different world, but he wouldn’t look at her.

      “I’m a coward,” he said, knowing it was true. He should have pulled the trigger. A chance like that wouldn’t come again.

      “It’s because you’re a good person, Brody. Because you didn’t want to ruin your life. You were only twelve. A kid,” she said, holding him close.

      She took his hand and they walked down toward the tree-­lined path beside the Lehigh River. He loved that she thought he was good, but he knew it wasn’t true.

      What was true were the nine minutes.

      But Afsal Hamid, that al-­Qaeda piece of shit, he knew, Brody thought, lying there, his hands tied, head covered with the hood in the back of the SUV. Dizzy from the ride and being hit, for a moment it was as if he had lost all sense of reality because he heard a distant sound of helicopters, and for one crazy second, he could’ve sworn they sounded like U.S. Black Hawks. But that was impossible.

      He must be hallucinating, Brody thought inside his hood in the SUV. He tried to think. They’re on the move. Why? Had to get out of Dodge. Must be a long trip, though. It seemed like it was taking forever.

      He froze. They were talking about him.

      “What about the American, Afsal?”

      “Shut up, brother.”

      “He’s a Muslim. He prays with us.”

      “Your mother! He’s an American. A Chris­tian crusader. He only pretends to be a Muslim.”

      “Why’d we keep him so long?”

      “He has his reasons,” Afsal said, and Brody knew they meant Abu Nazir. “He always has his reasons.”

      Now he understood. Afsal meant what he said. This time they were going to kill him. So why did they take him with them?

      Because they didn’t want to leave the body behind. Not with his red hair and pale white skin and Made in America face. Might raise too many questions. Better to bury the body out in the desert where it would never be found. Like Tom Walker. His Marine Corps buddy, his scout sniper teammate. Oh God, Tom. I didn’t mean it. At first, they just said, “Hit him!” Hit him again. And again. And again. Crying as he did it, shouting, “I’m sorry, Tom. I’m sorry. Jesus. Help me, Jesus.” Until his hands felt like they were broken and he couldn’t hit anymore and Tom Walker was dead.

      Now finally, they were going to kill him too, Brody thought, lying there in the back of the SUV. Something else he learned on that ride, along with the endless bumping and heat and smell of gasoline. You can doze off, even in your last few precious hours on earth. Because he only woke up when they stopped moving. His last thought as he heard them open the back of the SUV was: I’m sorry, Jess. I tried. Six years a prisoner of war. I really tried.

      “Get out!” Afsal barked.

      Hands grabbed him and Brody stumbled out. He fell to his knees and they lifted him up and pulled off his hood. He was blinded by the light and had to squint to see.

      It was no longer night. The SUV had pulled about two hundred yards off a concrete road through a sandy desert. The convoy was gone; their SUV the only vehicle in sight.

      Afsal pushed Brody to his knees and took out his pistol.

      “Now we finish. Finally,” he said.

      “Can I say the shahadah?” Brody said, looking up. The desert was utterly empty. The early-­morning sun was just rising over a distant dune, turning the sand and everything to gold, even the faces of the men who were about to kill him. O Allah, this world is so beautiful, he thought.

      “Let him. It is required,” Daleel said as Afsal stepped behind Brody and pointed the pistol at the back of his head.

      “Ash-­hadu an laa ilaaha illallah.” I bear witness there is no God but Allah. “Wa ash-­hadu anna Muhammadan rasulullah,” Brody said. I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.

      He braced for the shot, his eyes open, aching to see the beauty of the sunrise till the last instant.

       CHAPTER 4

      Damascus, Syria

      12 April 2009

      02:09 hours

      The compound in Otaibah was deserted. As the SOG team searched, it was clear that athough it had been recently occupied, everyone was gone. Left behind were the odds and ends of hasty departure: bits of food, crumpled clothes, empty AK-­47 magazines.

      “Mingus, look,” Little D, a six-­foot-­four Texan, said, leading Carrie to what looked like the main dining room, with two long wooden tables. He handed her a crumpled Arabic newspaper they found on the floor. Although most of them could speak some Arabic, she was the only one on the team who could read it. She held it up to the light. Al Bawaba, a Damascus newspaper that only came out in the afternoon, she remembered. It had yesterday’s date. So at a minimum, Abu Nazir or at least some of his ­people had still been here as of yesterday afternoon.

      Glenn came out of the kitchen.

      “Check this out,” he told her, and touched her hand to the teapot. It was still a little warm, as was the kitchen stove. “We just missed them.”

      “By how much?”

      “Two, three hours.”

      “Of course. It was dark. They left the damn lights on,” she said. “Let’s get airborne. There’s at least fifteen, twenty of them, plus women and children. There has to be cars, SUVs, pickup trucks. They’d stay together. A convoy. Maybe we could spot them from the air.”

      “We can’t,” Glenn said, shaking his head. “For all I know, somebody in a house across the street is on the phone calling the local cops right this second. Clock’s ticking, Mingus. We go airborne to look for these guys, I’ve got to get high enough to spot them. We light up the radar—­we’re just sitting ducks for the Syrian Air Force. They scramble jets, and in a ­couple of minutes, bam, every last one of us is dead. And Washington has to pick up the pieces.”

      Carrie didn’t say anything. The mission had failed. She felt nauseous.

      “Anybody find anything?” she asked.

      “Just some clothes and stuff. Ammo magazines. What looks like Muslim Brotherhood and al-­Qaeda propaganda.”

      “Take all of it.”

      “Already taken care of. We’ll fine-­tooth-­comb it,” Glenn said.

      Time was becoming critical, so he didn’t mention the underground concrete cell he’d found. The spot from the satellite recon. A six-­foot enclosure with an iron door and chain shackles where they had obviously kept a prisoner. He’d make a note in his report. At the moment, all he could think about was getting his men out of Syria.

      “Time to perform the classic military maneuver of getting the hell out of here,” he added.

      Lousy way to end my career, Carrie thought, standing there in a dimly lit al-­Qaeda kitchen, feeling like she’d been kicked in the stomach, her brain ping-­ponging a million miles all over the place. She wasn’t sure whether it was because of what was happening in front of her or because she hadn’t taken her meds,