Death Before Dishonor Read online

  Thump-thump-thump. There was a knock at the door.

  Terry and Yuri glanced at it and then each other. One of the women sitting on the nearby couch squeaked. Yuri instantly became intense and raised the barrel of his assault rifle to her forehead, crassly mouthing that she should be silent.

  BAM-BAM-BAM! The knock was much harder this time. Then the door knob rattled. Someone yelled in Arabic for the occupants to open the door.

  Terry swiftly went for the bedroom to find a hiding place. He noticed a pile of laundry on the floor and drew out a hijab and an abaya—a veil and a robe. It was about Yuri’s size, and Yuri’s sun-bronzed complexion could pass for Arab at a glance—albeit, a fair one. Terry tossed the garments to Yuri and then posted inside the door.

  Yuri pulled the hijab over his head and flopped down onto the couch facing the door, straightening the veil on his face and hiding his rifle beneath the material.

  BAM-BAM-BAM! From outside the door, the person shouted that they could hear the occupants and they were going to kick the door down if whoever was there didn’t answer.

  Yuri pointed at the portly, sheet-wrapped man and then indicated the door. The portly man had the same sheepish look as he had in the bedroom. Yuri lifted his rifle from beneath the abaya. The man jumped up and stumbled to the door, pulling the sheet clear of his partner. She let out a startled, embarrassed sound that made Yuri wave vigorously at her to be silent. The portly man unlocked the door and backed up as he opened it. His eyes and mouth opened wide; all the women began to fuss again. Yuri mimicked the reactions of the women as he watched the barrel of a carbine materialize and level against the portly man as the door swung open. Terry could see two shooters through the space adjacent to the hinges from his hiding place behind the bedroom door. They were clad in urban battle gear with western carbines—Israeli Mossad.

  The first one stepped into the room, and the second stacked in the doorway. The operators asked the portly man who lived in the residence. The portly man replied that he and his family did.

  Yuri held his breath. He hoped that he could get his rifle up fast enough if the portly man cracked.

  The first shooter scanned the cramped parlor of ten or so people. He locked Yuri’s eyes when the operator’s scan reached him. Yuri’s eyes burned, betraying his body language—Yuri’s sweaty grip constricted the handle of the rifle harder beneath the abaya—but the shooter dismissed him and moved on. The second shooter demanded that everyone take a seat while they looked around.

  Sweat pooled inside the veil. It was going to be a fight, then. While Yuri could fool them by wearing a hijab, there was no way Israeli counter-terrorist operatives wouldn’t check behind the door and find Terry. Yuri readied himself as he watched them cross the parlor to the bedroom. Terry did the same as he watched them approach through the crack of the door. They both just hoped that they could get the drop on the Israelis. Yuri would jump up and fire as much of his magazine into their backs as he could manage, which would hopefully give Terry enough time to come out from behind the door and catch them in a crossfire.

  Just then, more gunfire broke out on the floor above; there was screaming over the Israelis’ radios. The Israelis immediately turned and sprinted from the apartment, telling the occupants to remain where they were.

  Terry and Yuri got lucky. They used that as their opportunity to escape. Terry left $400 on the table for the occupants’ trouble.

  Payback was going to be a bitch.

  ***

  Yuri sat in the driver’s seat of a geriatric hatchback coupe that had long since outlived its existence. He was accompanied by a cache of weapons in the passenger seat covered by a gray wool blanket, and he entertained himself with an application on his smartphone, occasionally glancing into the rearview.

  A phone call interrupted him. “What?” he answered in Arabic.

  “The convoy is coming,” a surviving mercenary also replied in Arabic. “I can see the helicopter over the buildings.”

  “Take it out when you see the signal,” Yuri said in his rudimentary Arabic—he was more literate than conversational—before hanging up.

  Yuri looked in the rearview again and saw the convoy of modern black SUVs turn down the southbound street and roll past, numbering eight in all. It was the Mossad director’s executive motorcade, and it was practically on-time; one minute late to be exact.

  Terry watched from a third-story window fifty yards to the south of his brother. He timed the lead vehicle’s movement, and when it was in prime position, he hit the send button on a burnout cellphone.

  A nondescript sedan parked along the southbound side of the road erupted in a deafening fireball, blowing out windows of cars and buildings for fifty feet. It pulverized the lead vehicle, stripping it of panels and doors and mangling the left side of the frame. The vehicle behind it was shredded by shrapnel but left mostly intact. The lightweight helicopter rattled from the shock. The pilot stirred the controls to keep the aircraft under saddle.

  How much reactant did Yuri use? Terry thought. The shockwave was more intense than he had expected. Yuri, for his part, had wanted to make sure that the bomb did its job and stopped the convoy in its tracks.

  The helicopter banked hard to loop around and try to get on top of the convoy to provide support. Terry watched it turn and then saw the contrail of a stinger missile rocket from the artificial horizon that the roofs across the street created. The helicopter didn’t stand a chance; its tail was blown clean off, and huge pieces of its fuselage were launched through the main rotor, tearing it apart and causing the aircraft to smack into the side of a low-rise building about two hundred yards to the north and then tumble catastrophically to the street below.

  Each vehicle in the motorcade began to react to the attack. The rearmost vehicle slammed its gearshift into reverse and squealed its tires backing up. The other vehicles began to follow.

  Yuri threw back the blanket, drew up an RPG from a pile of assault weapons, and climbed out of the car. He watched the rearmost SUV weave through uninvolved cars towards him as fast as the driver could manage in reverse. Yuri took aim over the roof of his car and fired. The grenade struck the SUV broadside on the left and practically capsized it.

  The road was now blocked; the trap was set.

  Yuri tossed the launcher to the ground, grabbed an assault rifle and a satchel-style backpack, and circled around the back of his vehicle. He raised the barrel once he was onto the road and began unloading the magazine downrange into the trapped convoy.

  Terry watched his brother obliterate the last vehicle and then return to the vehicle for another weapon. Terry stabilized his machine gun against a windowsill in which he perched and racked the charging handle, chambering a round. Once Yuri began opening fire, so did Terry, raining slugs onto the convoy from the second story.

  Yuri moved south along the road, hugging the vehicles to his left in the event he needed cover, and continued to fire his rifle in bursts while Terry riddled the vehicles with armor-piercing shells. Terry laid the fire on heavy as his brother approached the seventh SUV in the line. Terry backed his coverage off and laid into the fifth and sixth vehicles before starting a reload.

  Yuri came up to the vehicle and slammed the butt of his rifle into its machine-gun-riddled window, puncturing a hole in the bullet-resistant glass big enough for him to toss in the grenade that he had pulled from his backpack. He rounded the back of the SUV and ducked beneath its tailgate; the grenade went off just as someone on the right side opened the door to escape. The blast slung the man ten feet clear of the car and bowed all the windows outward. Smoke billowed out in a cone to the west.

  Terry spotted three occupants from the second vehicle trying to escape to the west of the street and trained his muzzle on them, opening up on them with several short bursts. Two of them fell instantly. The third returned fire. Terry took cover but kept the man in sight the best he could. When the man turned to run again, Terry resumed firing, dropping the man just before he reached
the sidewalk. Terry then began hammering the third vehicle. His ammunition was getting low, so he would need to dismount soon.

  Yuri pushed down the southbound side of the road now. He stayed low, going through a cloud of smoke. As he emerged, he caught a man climbing from a sixth porous vehicle rubbing smoke-irritated eyes; he couldn’t see Yuri coming. Yuri drew his ninjatō from its sheath, came in close, and slammed the blade into the man’s back, the tip punching through the other side.

  Another Israeli stumbled out of the thick smoke at the back end. Yuri snatched his ninjatō back and swung it in a swift arc, lacerating the man from hip to shoulder, and then Yuri plunged the blade into the man’s chest. The man retched, and then he toppled.

  Terry saw several flashes out of the corner of his eye from the cars that lined the street to the west of Yuri; someone was firing at him. Yuri disappeared behind the back end. Terry focused through the smoke and saw a shooter firing on Yuri from the cover of a parked car. Terry lined him up with the machine gun and emptied the last of his ammunition into the shooter, killing him and destroying the car in the hail.

  Yuri pulled a grenade from the bag and lobbed it over the SUV he was using as cover. Seconds later, the blast rained dirt. It was a waste of a grenade, but Yuri’s eyes were beginning to burn from the smoke. He was just trying to make sure that he was clear when he decided to move again. He needed to take a moment to clear his eyes.

  Terry dismounted, jumping from the window down to the back of a mid-sized truck, then down to the roof of its cab, the hood, and then the ground. He made his way onto the street with his assault rifle readied. The director was in the third, fourth, or fifth vehicle, and Terry wanted to confirm that he was dead. He came onto the street near the third SUV and hammered its left side windows with half of the contents of his magazine just to be prudent. He didn’t slow his stride and kept moving north towards his brother.

  An injured man fired at Terry with a submachine gun from the backseat of the fourth vehicle. Terry took cover behind a car and pulled a grenade from his bag. He pulled its pin, allowed it to cook for a couple of seconds, and then beamed it like a baseball. The grenade exploded as it went through the window, fragging everything in a five-foot sphere.

  Terry popped up and made a beeline for the fifth SUV, firing three short bursts into its mangled windshield as he approached. He drew another grenade, rolled it under the vehicle, and sprinted for cover again. The grenade click-clacked to a stop, and then the explosion lifted the front end of the SUV off the ground about six inches. Smoke billowed out of the shattered window. Terry emptied his magazine into the left side, reloaded, and then laid into it some more.

  He ran up and slammed the butt of his rifle through the window several times until he could see into the vehicle—until he could see the most horrible sight he had ever seen. Terry froze.

  Yuri cleared his eyes the best that he could. They burned, but he’d manage. He checked his rifle; the magazine was empty. He slung it around to his back and pulled his pistol from its holster. With it and his ninjatō still in his hand, he rounded the driver’s side of the SUV. He could see his brother standing at the driver’s side passenger door of the fifth vehicle. Yuri looked into the windows of the SUV that was next to him. Everyone was dead, and not a single corpse was the director.

  Why is Terry standing there like a goddamn idiot? Yuri wondered.

  Yuri sprinted towards his brother. “Terry!” Yuri yelled. “Terry, what’re you doing?” Yuri came up next to his brother, panting. Terry was sheet white, and his eyes were unfocused as he stared blankly into the fifth SUV. Yuri looked in—a wave of disappointment washed over his body. They hadn’t hit the director—they had hit his family. They were all slumped in the back seats of the SUV, hemorrhaging, gasping, or dead.

  Their intelligence had been wrong. The director was supposed to be in this motorcade, but he wasn’t. Terry overflowed with regret. How could this have happened? How could they have done this?

  “Terry,” Yuri said, trying to get his brother’s attention.

  Terry stared into the cab of the SUV.

  Yuri lifted his pistol and euthanized them one at a time. The last one was a bit difficult—those eyes were so innocent. But he put that away.

  “Terry, snap out of it! We got to go!” Yuri yanked his brother by the nape of his jacket. Terry came to, and the two brothers sprinted away from the burning scene.

  Chapter One: Fortunately Born

  Medical. Camp Zama. Tokyo, Japan. Twenty-seven years ago.

  The feeling had returned, that feeling of desperation that preceded hopelessness. It was overtaking Francesca again.

  She felt nauseous and miserable, sitting there in an office chair that felt more like a boat caught in the middle of a hurricane.

  For the third time in a week, her husband, Pat, and she were meeting with their obstetrician to discuss fertility further. With each meeting, however, the possibility of pregnancy seemed more and more bleak.

  Francesca was frustrated and queasy. She tore her attention away from her husband and the doctor, trying desperately to train her focus elsewhere to calm her nerves, if just for a moment. The doctor’s nameplate, which read: MAJOR IMRAN A. YUSEF, MD, caught her eye, and she focused on it, attempting to find a moment of solace away from the hopelessness of pregnancy.

  She couldn’t afford the luxury of comfort in a hospital; she hated hospitals. Their smells, their bleach-white walls, and the colors of the staff’s bland clothing were creepy and unsettling. She couldn’t escape her personal torment here, try as she may.

  Why was this so difficult? The human body had been giving birth since the dawn of time. Why did her body have to be the exception?

  Considered to have a perfect bill of health, Francesca was the ideal specimen of Italian lineage. She stood an easy five feet nine inches, with raven hair, olive skin, and a pair of icy blue eyes. She kept her body fit by attending the military base’s gym five days a week and by participating on the military dependents’ intramural volleyball and softball teams. Francesca was the furthest thing from a struggling twenty-something-year-old, but rather a very healthy thirty-five-year-old woman with a body more than capable of handling pregnancy.

  Francesca also wasn’t some young military wife trying to get her life together while attached to the hip of her overworked husband. No, she had been married to Pat, the newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Patrizio Ciccone, for fifteen years; they had been together since grade school, minus a few adolescent arguments.

  Pat was Francesca’s opposite. He was of average height, standing five feet ten inches and of average build. Although born of hardy Italian stock, he didn’t maintain the definitive characteristics that his wife did. He had close-cut, dirty blonde hair, fair skin, and dark brown eyes. Despite his lack of pedigree, Pat’s grandfather, father, and uncles swore that they were descended from Roman Gladiators.

  Before attending college at Rutgers in New Jersey, and its Army Reserve Officer Training Corps, he had competed in the amateur boxing circuit in Jersey City at the urging of his grandfather Estefano.

  Estefano had assured Pat that he could be a champion boxer because of his legendary Italian ancestry and encouraged him to fight often. For all the hard work, Pat eventually decided that life in Jersey City may have fulfilled the older Ciccone men, but it didn’t fulfill him. For Pat, boxing wasn’t healthy anymore and wasn’t the honorable exit that he needed. In spite of his retirement from boxing, Pat maintained his classic cruiserweight physique but placed his energy in other venues—namely, the Army.

  Francesca and Pat were a perfect union; they would make beautiful, intelligent children. Why, indeed, was this so difficult?

  “Francesca?”

  She snapped back to reality when she heard her name. Dr. Yusef had been trying to get her attention for several seconds before Pat said something.

  Dr. Yusef was a short, stiff, balding male of mixed-Arabic descent who spoke superbly with the faintest hint of a British ac
cent. According to the accolades present on his shelves and walls, he had graduated from the University of Oxford in Britain, received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins, specializing in obstetrics, and then conducted his residency at Baylor Hospital in Dallas, all before receiving a commission as a medical practitioner in the United States Army.

  “Honey, are you okay?” Pat asked tenderly.

  “Yeah—yeah, I’m fine. I was drifting.”

  “Mrs. Ciccone,” said Dr. Yusef, “I can assure you that we are doing everything within our power to find a solution. I do need you, however, to be as patient as possible. This may take some time.”

  Frustration boiled in her blue eyes. She was sure Dr. Yusef could see it—how she was feeling was never a surprise to anyone; she wore her emotions on her sleeve. If one more person tells me to be patient, I’m going to scream, Francesca thought to herself. Ugh, my mother tells me that constantly.

  Her mother, Marcella, always advised patience. Marcella’s advice drove Francesca up the wall. Now she had to hear it from the doctor too? How could the doctor caution patience, anyway? He wasn’t having the slightest problem with fertility, judging by the pictures that decorated his office. He had a ton of rowdy children equipped with missing teeth, drooling fits, and T-Ball games. And his wife was pregnant again.

  Francesca didn’t want to hear it.

  Dr. Yusef continued, “There is quite an extensive build-up that must be undergone to determine the best course of action. Perish the thought that we act impulsively and the effects are anything short of stellar.”

  “We understand, Doc,” Pat said.

  Francesca nodded feebly.

  Pat sat back in his chair, feigning concern to give his wife peace of mind. He wanted a child of his own just as bad as Francesca, but he wasn’t willing to sacrifice his wife’s health in the process. In fact, he was willing to forgo children altogether if it meant keeping his wife healthy. He had loved her as far back as he could remember and didn’t want to jeopardize that.