The Open Furnace

"I need three items from the tool bench," I say.

"You are not my foreman, Tariq."

"I am the man who kept you alive twenty minutes ago."

Her lips press into a thin, furious line. She does not deny it. She turns on her heel, her heavy boots taking four brisk paces to the workbench beneath the tool shadowboard.

"What do you want?" she asks.

"The heavy wire snips. The roll of two-inch duct tape. And the three-ton hydraulic floor jack."

She grabs the snips from the peg and tosses them onto the steel table with a sharp clatter. "You are preparing to leave."

"I am preparing the ground."

"You are packing your kit." Her voice drops an octave, dark and serrated. "I watched you strip the submachine gun before you touched the radio. You loaded four thirty-round magazines into your shoulder satchel. You took their tactical knives and their tourniquets."

I do not stop moving. I roll the second corpse over, checking his boots. Standard-issue combat leather, reinforced steel toes, Vibram lugs. I pull the spare magazines from his side pouches and drop them into my canvas bag.

Eighty-four rounds of nine-millimeter armor-piercing ammunition. Stamped with the factory code of the central ordnance depot.

"If I stay inside this fence," I say, "they bring heavy mortars to the rail embankment. A four-inch pipe mortar on the high ridge turns Bay 3 into an open furnace in six minutes. Your corrugated iron will not stop forty-millimeter frag."

"Then we reinforce the south gate."

"A wall is a grave if you do not control the ditch outside it."

I stand up to my full height. I have four inches on her, sixty pounds of muscle forged in field workshops and artillery pits. She does not step back. She plants her boots in the grease, her chin tilted up, defying the distance between us.

"You took an oath on the municipal paper," she says.

"The paper was for the transport license."

"The paper makes you mine under the law."

The word sits between us in the cold grease.

Mine.

She says it not like a frightened bride seeking shelter, but like a cartel heir asserting title over an iron lathe or a six-ton hauler. I see it in her stance. She does not want a paper husband. She wants the weapon I represent, the lethal competence that just tore four professional killers apart while her own men were chasing shadows.

A dangerous heat flares behind my ribs.

I take one step toward her. The toe of my boot meets the toe of hers.

"Your mother thinks I am a stray dog who fixes carburetors," I say, my voice dropping until it vibrates in the iron framing of the bay. "Hakim thinks I am a deserter he can break with a tire iron. What do you think I am, Safiya?"

She does not blink. Her hand rises, her calloused fingers coming to rest flat against the center of my chest, directly over the cracked ceramic plate that saved my life.

"I think you are a wolf," she whispers. "And I think if I open the gate, you will slaughter Hadj Meziani's men before they reach the canal."

"And if I do not come back?"

"You will come back."

"Why?"

"Because you have nowhere else to hide."

Her fingers curl into the torn cotton of my shirt. She pulls me down half an inch, her gaze locking onto mine with an intensity that tastes like copper and lightning.

"You killed them for me," she says.

"I killed them because they were in my lane."

"Liar."

She lets go of my shirt, but her eyes stay fixed on my face. She points toward the rear bay door that leads to the northern drainage ditch.

"Lock Six is three miles down the canal berm," she says. "There is an old pumping station half a mile before the weir. The Meziani syndicate uses the concrete intake basin to hide fuel skiffs. If they have a staging boat, it is tied to the rust pipes beneath the sluice gate."

I pick up the captured suppressed carbine. I check the bolt carrier, wipe the extractor claw with an oily rag, and slide the charging handle back. The round chambers with a slick, mechanical snap.

"Hakim's men will not see you leave if you take the culvert under the rail spur," she adds.

"I know the culvert."

"Take my spare radio." She reaches to her belt and detaches the Zerrouki compound Motorola. "Channel Three. I keep the base receiver on my hip."

I take the radio from her fingers. Our skin brushes—rough, hot, electric.

"If my mother asks," Safiya says, "I will tell her you are securing the outer transformer."

"She will not believe you."

"She does not have to believe me. She only has to count the bodies when you are done."

I step around the four corpses in the chute. I slide the heavy steel bolt of the bay's northern exit door, easing it open three inches to check the dead ground between the scrap piles and the rail embankment.

The morning air is damp, carrying the smell of burning diesel from the destroyed barge at Lock 4. Gray smoke drifts low over the canal water.

I pull the high-magnification optic from the lead operative's assault pack and rest the rubber eye-cup against my right brow.

I scan the rail line.

Clear.

I scan the gravel berm running along the northern water channel. Two hundred yards out, the scrub brush is trampled flat where the breach squad cut through the chain-link fence.

Beyond that, half a mile down the gray expanse of the canal, a twin-engine diesel surveillance skiff sits low in the brown water. Its hull is camouflaged with black and ochre marine paint, idling against the concrete pilings of the Lock 5 overflow weir.

Two men stand on the aft deck.

One is holding the throttle lever, his face hidden beneath a canvas hooded smock.

The second man stands on the engine housing, holding a pair of military-issue rangefinder binoculars. He is not wearing syndicate leathers. He wears a faded sand-colored field jacket with the shoulder epaulets torn off.

He lowers the binoculars.

He turns his profile toward the morning sun to check the wind drift across the canal channel.

The scar on his left temple is shaped like a crescent wrench—the burn mark from a ruptured breechblock on an eighty-two-millimeter field mortar.

Lieutenant Larbi Sayah.

My point marksman from the Ouled-Nail corridor.

The man I watched take three heavy machine-gun rounds through his torso before our command vehicle went off the bridge into the dry wadi three years ago.

The optic trembles once against my brow.

My heart hits my ribs like an iron hammer against a diesel block.

Larbi is not dead.

He is working the canal line for Hadj Meziani.

Or Hadj Meziani is working for the military intelligence bureau that has been hunting me across five provinces.

I lower the glass. I slide the carbine's safety off with a single click of my thumb.

They did not come for the scrap yard.

They came for me.

And I will kill them before they reach this gate.