Chapter One

Kilroy and Vang Bulo were driving east on the Baghdad to Azif highway in East Central Iraq. They were west of Azif, on a ridge overlooking the town. A Coalition truck convoy had been several miles ahead of them. It consisted of a half dozen or so trucks carrying construction supplies and building materials. It was going through the center of town when a bomb went off.

The bomber’s timing was off by a few seconds, and so all of the convoy escaped the blast but the last truck in line. It got smeared.

Its fellows knew better than to stop and try to help. There was no help for the straggler. It was gone. Besides, the would-be rescuers would only have ridden into an ambush. The rest of the convoy speeded up and raced out of Azif, east along the highway toward Greentown.

Kilroy pulled over to the side of the road and drove off it, sheltering behind a farmhouse wall. “Bullets, bombs, beheadings—that’s Iraq today,” Kilroy said, adding, “My kind of place.”

Vang Bulo made no reply. None was needed for so patently obvious a statement of fact. Kilroy was made for the boiling pot that was contemporary Iraq. So was Vang Bulo. They were killers, both of them. But not any ordinary, everyday killers. They were Dog Team assassins—a killer elite.

They were in a dark tan SUV. Even idling, the engine had a heavy sound that spoke of plenty of automotive muscle. The windows were rolled up, and the air conditioner was blasting. It was midafternoon of a November day. The rainy season had begun, though it was dry now. Dry and hot.

Kilroy said, “Let’s let things settle out before making our run.”

Vang Bulo said, “All right.”

Kilroy sat behind the wheel, Vang Bulo occupied the passenger seat. Kilroy, an American in his early forties, was raw boned and rangy, with a long, narrow face and eagle-beaked nose. Vang Bulo was a Ugandan, a big black guy, huge, hulking, bald, with a soccer ball–shaped head.

Both men wore sunglasses and civilian clothes, khakis, and hiking boots. They were outfitted with flak jackets and sidearms. Assault weapons and grenades lay near at hand, squirreled away in various places in the vehicle’s front compartment. Plenty more weapons lay stowed in the rear, a mini-arsenal’s worth.

Those who go forth in Iraq today had better go well armed. Especially a pair of infidel outlanders such as Kilroy and Vang Bulo.

This part of the country was better watered than most of Iraq, brightening the tableland’s browns, tans, and grays with welcome flashes of green: a line of palm trees, a weedy field, a trickling stream. The overcast sky was hazy, yellow-white. Hot.

The town of Azif lay in a shallow, saddle-shaped hollow several miles long that dipped between a pair of low, gently rounded ridges running north- south. The SUV stood just below the inside crest of the west ridge.

Not all the wall they sheltered behind was intact. Parts of it had been chewed up, allowing the two men to see through the gaps to the town below, while affording them and their vehicle some cover. Up on the ridge where they were, the landscape was empty of all but a few scattered ruins, some boulders, and trees. No people. There were plenty of people down in town, out on the streets, but their attention was focused near at hand and not on the remote slopes beyond the city limits.

The center of town lay north of the highway. A commercial area of several square city blocks was clustered with two- and three-story concrete buildings that had been built mostly during the reign of Saddam Hussein. Saddam was a Sunni, and Azif was a Sunni stronghold.

The two great branches of Islam are Sunni and Shia. They stand in about the same relationship to each other today as the Catholic and Protestant faiths held toward their opposite numbers during the Hundred Years’ War. Most Arabs are Sunni. Most Iranians are Shiites.

Modern-day Iraq was created after World War I by the British—by Winston Churchill, in fact. It is a Frankenstein monster stitched together from three separate and mutually antagonistic groups: the Kurds in the north; the Sunni Arabs in midcountry; and the Shiites in the south.

The Sunnis make up less than twenty percent of the population, yet have dominated the country (and their countrymen) for the last thirty years— three hundred, if you count back to the Ottoman Empire. The Shiites make up over sixty percent of the population. Now, in any democratic election, the majority Shiites would wield the lion’s share of power, a reversal that the once-dominant Sunnis can only regret. The Kurds in the north had a big hurting put on them by Saddam Hussein. They hate the Sunnis, but are willing to form alliances with the Iraqi Shiites.

Next door to Iraq is Iran, a Shiite state ruled by the ayatollahs in the holy city of Qom. Iraq and Iran had a hot war during the 1980s, featuring World War I–style trench warfare and megacasualties on both sides, poison gas attacks, minefields cleared by squads of boy martyrs, and various other horrors.

Sunni Azif was located about thirty miles east of the border with Iran and was of strategic importance in the region. So was nearby Quusaah, a Shiite town located several miles northeast of Azif.

Iraqi democracy’s rough rise found the minority Sunnis mounting the most violent insurgent attacks against the American-led coalition. The Shiites hated the Americans, too, but were willing for now to lay back and let the Americans knock off the even more hated Sunnis.

Such a tangle of hostilities can sometimes yield strange alliances. A sinister combine of radical Sunni militiamen, criminal gangs, and even more shadowy Iranian elements had come into being in the Azif border zone and was making itself objectionable in various underground ways. The Dog Team’s Top Dog had sent Kilroy and Vang Bulo to nip it in the bud. Exterminate it, root and branch.

Beyond the handful of city blocks’ worth of commercial district lay Old Town, the real center of Azif. It looked like a mound of yellowed sugar cubes. Many of its buildings had been continuously occupied since first being built several hundred years before.

The heart of Old Town was the Red Dome Mosque. Its pointed dome was actually more reddish brown than red. It had three minaret towers and dominated the town’s skyline. The mosque’s spiritual leader, fiery radical Sunni fundamentalist preacher Imam Hamdi, dominated the region’s politics.

The district’s slums seethed with thousands of men, women, and children who would have liked nothing better than to see the Shiite-dominated interim government, and especially its American enablers and advisors, boiled in oil. Gangs of violent young males trembled in eager anticipation of the day when the Imam would give them the word to rise up in jihad, or holy war, against the occupying infidels.

Until then, there was still plenty of hell for them to raise against the hated invaders: kidnappings, assassinations, bombings, and other fun and games. Such as this most recent bombing.

A column of smoke rose into the sky. The smoke was oily black, greasy. It climbed up and up, forming a spindly black funnel. It came from the bombed- out truck that lay on its side in the middle of the road. The gas tank had gone up, and the vehicle had burned quickly, becoming a charred, gutted hulk.

The fire had peaked but was still burning. It must have still been pretty hot, because the crowd ringing it was keeping their distance. Scores of people were massed on the roadway around the blazing wreck. From the ridgetop vantage point, they were blurred, antlike figures. The swarm was restless, agitated, its members streaming back and forth in constant motion around the blast site.

“Party time,” Kilroy said, indicating the crowd at the bomb site. “They haven’t had this much fun since the last time they blew up the U.S. embassy.”

“There’s no U.S. embassy in Azif,” Vang Bulo pointed out.

“Uncle Sam will have to build one, then, so they can blow it up.”