Sparks in the Dark

Twenty-two minutes.

That is how long it takes a four-man breach team to deploy from the north canal after an industrial demolition. They need four minutes to ditch the speedboat under the iron bridge. Six minutes to cut through the rail drainage culvert. Twelve minutes to cross the dead ground between the switch tracks and our northern fence line.

I know this timing. I wrote the manual their contractors stole it from.

"Move the oxygen tanks," I say.

My voice does not rise. Sound travels through corrugated zinc when the wind drops.

Safiya does not ask why. She drags the twin steel cylinders behind the workbench, her boots scraping the oily floor. Her knuckles are white on the iron cart handle. She wears her black field jacket zipped to the throat, her revolver holstered on her right hip, two spare speedloaders tucked into her belt.

She smells of sulfur, cold brass, and sharp clove.

"Hakim took six men to the east docks," Safiya says. Her breath comes fast, shallow and tight. "My mother has four older guards locked in the main office. That leaves you, me, and two yard hands by the gate."

"Two yard hands are useless," I say.

"They have shotguns."

"They have twelve-gauge birdshot meant for canal rats. Against suppressed carbines, birdshot is just a polite way to die."

I do not look at her while I work.

I strip the insulation from a heavy copper ground lead with my wire cutters. The rubber smells of brine and bitter graphite. I wrap the bare copper around the steel frame of the overhead gantry hoist, then dog the clamp down with a ten-millimeter box wrench until the bolt bites into bare metal.

The hoist cable hangs forty feet down into the northern trench.

In the dark, that cable looks like ordinary scrap rigging. Under four hundred and eighty volts from the shop's three-phase capacitor bank, it will turn the entire steel fence line into an arc furnace.

"You've done this before," Safiya says.

She stands two paces back. She is watching my wrists, the economy of my turns, the way my tools stay laid out in a flat row on the oilcloth. She is not stupid. She knows no mechanic learns high-voltage perimeter denial in a commercial garage.

"Everyone has an old job," I say.

"Your old job had a uniform."

"My old job had an obituary." I toss the wrench into the tray. "Get up to the crane catwalk."

She stiffens. "I'm not hiding in the rafters while you take the floor."

"You are not hiding. You are the bait."

I turn around and face her.

The shop light hangs low between us, throwing sharp diagonal shadows across her cheekbones. She is pale, but her chin stays up. Her dark eyes burn with that stubborn, furious pride that belongs only to the Zerrouki bloodline. Everything in her posture says she refuses to yield an inch of this yard. She is ready to stand in the open and trade lead with men who kill for a weekly wage.

I step into her space.

One pace.

The distance between our boots disappears. She does not step back. Her chin tilts, her jaw locking as my chest brushes the canvas of her jacket. She holds her chin high, refusing to show fear. I want her breathing when this morning ends.

"Listen to me, Safiya," I say, my voice dropping to a gravel rasp. "You saw the blueprint they drew. You know what they plan to do to you. If you stay on this concrete, four men will suppress you with automatic fire, zip-tie your wrists, and drag you through the culvert before you clear leather."

Her throat moves as she swallows. "And from the crane?"

"From the crane, you have thirty feet of elevation and an iron railing. You wait until all four enter the scrap chute. You fire two rounds into the lead man's chest. Not to kill him. To stop him."

"And then?"

"Then they look up." I reach out, my thumb brushing the hard line of her jawline. The skin is hot beneath my calloused skin. "And I take them from behind."

Her gaze locks on mine.

There is terror in her pupils, dark and dilated. But behind the terror is something else. Something raw, dangerous, and intoxicating. She feels the shift. She knows the paper husband who fixed her diesel pumps yesterday is about to paint her scrap yard in arterial blood.

And she does not pull away.

"Don't miss, Tariq," she whispers.

"I never miss."

I drop my hand. "Climb."

She turns and takes the iron ladder rung by rung, her boots silent on the rusted rungs. She reaches the high crane gantry, steps out onto the steel mesh walkway, and crouches behind the heavy motor housing. The shadow swallows her completely.

Only the cold glint of her revolver cylinder shows in the gloom.

I turn off the hanging shop light.

Deep shadow settles over Bay 3.

·  ·  ·

The wind off the river brings the smell of burning diesel from Lock 4.

Two miles north, the Al-Bahr is still sinking in the canal channel, its ruptured hull spewing black smoke across the industrial basin. The diversion worked. The district marshals and the port fireboats are concentrated on the waterway, sirens wailing in the distance like dying gulls.

The yard is dead quiet.

I stand inside the narrow shadow of a crushed shipping container, forty feet from the northern scrap chute.

My palms are dry. My pulse sits at fifty-two beats a minute. In the Ouled-Nail corridor, waiting for the column to hit the kill box was always the hardest part. The silence stretches until the iron in your blood begins to hum.

A sharp snip echoes through the fog.

High-tensile wire cutters.

Fifty yards away, at the corner of post six, the chain-link fence groans. A three-foot section of wire mesh folds inward with a faint, metallic hiss.

They are right on time.

Eighteen minutes since the blast.

Four shadows slide through the breach.

They move in a tight, low stack. Black tactical raincoats, rubberized boots, balaclavas pulled over their noses. The point man carries a suppressed nine-millimeter submachine gun with an extended magazine, sweeping his muzzle in short, ninety-degree arcs. The second man carries an iron breaching bar and heavy plastic zip-ties looped through his vest. The third holds a short-barreled automatic shotgun, and the fourth carries a suppressed carbine, scanning the high scrap heaps.

Meziani's inner-circle enforcers.

These are not street thugs with revolvers. They have training. They move with their weight forward, rolling their heels to keep the gravel silent beneath their soles.

They step into the northern trench.

The trench is seven feet wide, bordered on both sides by ten-ton stacks of compressed automotive chassis. It is the only direct path between the fence breach and the mezzanine stairs leading to Safiya's bedroom balcony.

Exactly as I channeled it yesterday.

The point man halts at the first corner. He raises a gloved fist.

The stack freezes.

He looks down. His optic catches the faint gleam of the spring-tensioned razor wire I strung three inches off the mud. He points his finger, signaling his team to step high over the trip line.

Smart. But predictable.

When a man steps high over a low wire, his center of gravity lifts. His eyes drop to his boots for a quarter of a second. His neck extends.

The four men step over the wire, one by one.

They enter the central kill zone.

Above them, thirty feet up on the gantry catwalk, the hammer of a revolver clicks back.

The sound is tiny, but in the enclosed scrap canyon, it lands like a dropped wrench.

The point man snaps his head up. "Up—"

CRACK.

A muzzle flash blooms from the crane catwalk, illuminating the rusted roof beams in a brilliant burst of orange.

The lead enforcer takes the .38 slug in the center of his chest plate. The impact knocks him back two paces, his boots skidding across the wet shale. His weapon clatters against the steel container wall.

CRACK.

Safiya's second shot punches through the second man's shoulder. He grunts, spinning half a circle into the mud, his breaching bar clattering down.

"Catwalk! Catwalk!" the third man screams, raising his short-barreled shotgun.

Automatic fire rips through the bay.

The fourth man opens up with his suppressed carbine, spraying a three-second burst into the underside of the crane platform. Steel sparks spray across the darkness like molten glass. The bullets tear through the tin siding, deafening, violent, chewing the iron mesh where Safiya crouches.

Safiya is pinned.

She cannot lean out without taking a nine-millimeter burst through the skull.