Blood and Grease

Brass on concrete makes a ringing note before the grease swallows it.

Spent nine-millimeter casings roll across the floor of Bay 3. They settle in the shallow trenches cut for hydraulic runoff. Forty-two casings. I count them by the dull glint of copper under the sodium lamps while the smoke clears through the broken corrugated roof.

Four bodies lie in the scrap chute.

None of them are breathing.

Safiya stands three paces to my left. Her back presses against the steel flange of the vertical milling machine. The heavy Turkish over-under shotgun rests against her thigh, barrels pointed at the floor, the walnut stock scratched raw where it struck the catwalk railing. Her palms are smeared with carbon and red grease. Her chest rises and falls in sharp, controlled intervals.

She is twenty-four years old. She just killed a man at twelve yards and watched me butcher three more with an iron pry bar and eight inches of carbon steel.

She does not shake.

Her jaw is locked. Her dark eyes track my hands as I crouch beside the first corpse.

"You took three rounds to the chest plate," she says.

Her voice is flat. The tremor is almost gone, tucked beneath the cold Zerrouki pride she wears like armor.

"Ceramic insert," I say. "It held."

"The jacket is ruined."

"The jacket was forty dinars at the southern market."

I slit the dead man's nylon tactical harness with my utility blade. The strap parts with a clean hiss. I strip the rig from his shoulders, turning the body face down into the dirt with a single shove of my boot.

"Your mother will hear the shooting," I say.

"My mother is in the counting room with four locked steel doors between her and the yard," Safiya says. She steps forward. Her boots crunch on shattered safety glass. "She heard the barge blow at Lock 4. She assumes the perimeter noise is Hakim clearing stragglers."

"Hakim is two miles east at the weigh station," I say. "Chasing a dead lead."

"Then she assumes we are dead."

Safiya stops two feet from me. The smell of her cuts through the copper stench of fresh blood—citrus blossom, cold sweat, and the sharp sulfur of burnt propellant.

"Are you going to stack them?" she asks.

"Not yet."

I pull the dead man's black balaclava up over his chin.

The face underneath is lean, sun-baked, with a jagged white shrapnel scar running from the left orbital bone down to the jawline. His skin has the pale, leathery grain of a man who spent five years under a field helmet in the high plateaus. He is thirty, maybe thirty-two.

Not a street enforcer from the canal slums.

Syndicate muscle does not have garrison calluses on the right index knuckle. They do not wear standardized composite plates stamped with depot serial numbers.

"Do you know him?" Safiya asks.

"No."

"You looked at his jaw twice."

"I was checking for cyanide caps or molar transmitters."

Safiya lets out a short, dry breath through her nose. "The municipal marriage declaration specifically listed 'routine scrap sorting and metal inventory' under our workshop insurance rider."

"We are sorting scrap," I say.

"Four corpses do not fit in the aluminum bin, husband."

"They fit in the engine pit once I strip the hardware."

I reach into the operative's tactical vest. My fingers find the heavy rectangular chassis of a tactical radio seated in the left breast pocket. I pull it free.

It is an AN/PRC-148 handheld transceiver.

The casing is matte olive, scratched down to the bare aluminum at the corners, with a twenty-pin side connector and a reinforced whip antenna wrapped in black electrical tape.

My throat tightens. The muscle behind my collarbone twitches once.

This is not surplus gear sold off by corrupt harbor customs officers. The housing bears the yellow triangle stencil of the Fourth Armored Brigade's logistics depot in Ouled-Nail.

Three years ago, I packed six of these transceivers into crate four of the supply manifest before Captain Bensaad gave the order to burn the civilian transport column.

"Tariq."

Safiya's voice is closer now. She is leaning over my shoulder. Her hand comes down on my forearm, her bare fingers warm and rough against my wrist. She feels the tension in my sinew before I can mask it.

"What is that?" she demands.

"A radio," I say.

"Hadj Meziani uses cheap shortwave walkies from the harbor docks. Hakim intercepted three of them in March. They had plastic housings and range limits under half a mile."

"This is not Meziani's radio."

"It was in his man's vest."

"Then Meziani bought more than scrap iron when he took the northern locks."

I turn the rotary selector knob on the transceiver. The liquid-crystal display flickers green. A five-digit frequency hops across the digital screen in rapid alphanumeric pulses.

Cipher protocol Zulu-Seven.

The rolling frequency algorithm uses a twelve-hour master key. The military units in the southern corridor reset their keys at midnight and noon. It is nine-twenty in the morning. That means this radio will stay locked to the command net for another two hours and forty minutes.

I key the squelch toggle.

Static hisses from the speaker. Then a voice cuts through the white noise—clipped, low, speaking with the hard, flattened vowels of the interior plateau.

—Bravo-Two, report breach status at Grid Four. Over.

Safiya stiffens. Her grip on my arm tightens until her short nails dig through my work shirt into the meat of my forearm.

—Bravo-Two, acknowledge. Lock Six transport is idling. We have sixteen minutes before the canal patrol shifts. Over.

I do not speak. I release the push-to-talk button, let the static settle, and slide the power switch to passive monitoring.

"They have a staging point at Lock Six," Safiya whispers.

"They have a command boat," I correct her. "And a secondary fire team."

"Nadira has eight men left in the main yard," she says, her mind working with the cold speed of a bookkeeper balancing a ledger of violence. "Four on the gate, two at the diesel pumps, two guarding the office stairs. If Meziani hits the south wall while Lock Four is burning, we lose the crushers."

"Your mother will not fight them at Lock Six," I say.

"She will negotiate."

"She will die."

"She will offer forty percent of the canal transit fees and a five-year scrap concession," Safiya snaps. Her face hardens, her jaw jutting forward. "And Hadj Meziani will take the contract, sign the paper, and cut her throat in her sleep three weeks later."

"Then you understand the math."

"I understand my family." She pulls her hand back from my wrist, her eyes narrowing as she looks down at the dead operative. "You knew what that radio was before you turned the dial. You knew the frequency switch without looking at the manual."

"I know engines," I say.

"Do not lie to me in my own bay."

The space between us shrinks to twelve inches. She is breathing the same sulfur-laced air, her dark hair coming loose from the heavy silver clip at the nape of her neck. A smear of engine oil marks her collarbone where her shirt pulled open during the fight.

She wants the truth. She wants to pry the lock off my skull and see the deserter who walked out of the Ouled-Nail fire with blood on his hands and eighty civilians in his truck beds.

She will not get it. Not today.