Free Greed: A Detective John Lynch Thriller by Dan O'Shea Page A

Koran. And my wages are late. Stein is dead. Heinz is dead. I have your devices. Yet Tehran has my money and I do not.”
    Javadi smiled an ironic smile. “You quibble over money? Now? On the brink of a triumph that will forever secure in legend the name of Husam al Din?”
    Al Din scowled. He had no use for legends and less for names.
    He’d only been a few weeks old in 1978 when the Israelis bombed the refugee camp in Lebanon. His parents were killed, and he was just another orphan raised by the PLO. In the camp, they called him Ahmad, but his parents must have called him something. So far as Husam was concerned, Ahmad was just his first cover. A name was just another tool. In New Mexico, he had been Ricardo Orendain. Since arriving in Chicago, he had been Marco Pelligrino and then Dmitri Stavapopolus. With his fine features, light olive skin, and brown eyes, he could pass for everything from a Spaniard to an Indian.
    In reality, he was Palestinian. He’d had the religious indoctrination as a boy, the feeble mullahs and their nonsense. There is no God but Allah, and Mohammad is his prophet, the United States is the Great Satan, all the rest of it. But Husam believed that reality was the best teacher.
    And reality was this: Any time Israel wanted, the jets came and bombed the camps, and the Palestinians had to hide in the rubble like roaches. If Israel decided to destroy Beirut, they destroyed Beirut. If there was no God but Allah, why then did Yahweh get the F-16s and Abrams battle tanks, leaving Allah’s people to fight them with AK-47s and stones? Husam had no more faith in gods than he had in names.
    But he had a talent for killing. He had been a very bright student, the brightest boy in any of the classes in the camp. And so the men in the keffiyehs had taught him as well. Pistols, rifles, explosives. How to fight with his hands and with knives. A Kalashnikov – this was a god he could believe in.
    When he was fourteen, he had his first exam. He remembered crawling forward in the dark toward the Israeli roadblock. Watching for a long time to be sure. Two soldiers outside the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the armored personnel carrier that was another gift to Yahweh from America, Israel’s real god. After an hour, the doors to the Bradley opened, and the two soldiers traded places with two others inside. Four soldiers in all.
    The instructions for this initiation were simple: Leave the camp, kill at least one Israeli, and return alive. The other boys had all chosen civilians, random killings of unsuspecting targets. And when they had returned to the camp after emptying a clip into some old woman driving back to some kibbutz, he would join in the celebration of their heroic acts. In truth, these cowards disgusted him with their weakness. He was determined to do better.
    At any time, he could kill the two outside the Bradley, but the muzzle flash would give away his position. He was not interested in learning how good the soldiers inside the Bradley were with the 20mm cannon and 50mm machine gun. But these Israelis were complacent. It was a quiet sector, routine duty. He watched for an opportunity. It took him more than three hours to move to a slightly elevated position behind the Bradley, giving him a clear line of sight into the vehicle when the doors opened. At the next shift change, all four soldiers were within a narrow field of fire, the door to the vehicle directly in front of him. Ahmad was calm. Many of those he trained with would have cut loose with a long burst of automatic fire, sweeping the weapon back and forth. But Ahmad flicked the selector switch to semi-automatic. Three-round bursts, twenty rounds in the magazine, one spare magazine. Ahmad knew that if he had to switch magazines before the Israelis were down, he was as good as dead. Ahmad sighted on the Israeli standing in the door of the Bradley. If he could drop him in the doorway, the others might trip over him trying to get inside.
    Ahmad fired, all