Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran by Bryce Adams

elbows so that his arms stretched in front of him at a supine angle, like invisible shackles bound him, “And I will stay like this, unmoving, until I am seized and escorted out.”
    “We’re taking him alive,” Ambrose said in English. All four marines said something in protest or surprise, but not even Malik tried to dissuade him. Something in Ambrose’s voice sounded productively crazy.
    Malik spoke quietly, the verbal equivalent of a man moving his hand incrementally forward so as not to disturb a fly before he swatted it, “Tesoro, get the jeep moving and put it right in front of the loading dock, ready to receive five passengers. Young, cover me while I put zip ties on this asshole. You other two, follow behind us with your guns ready, and if things go south, take whatever shot you have.”
    All four of them agreed to Malik’s orders. While Tesoro loped away to get the car, the others proceeded toward the center aisle of shelves. Sorcerer was thirty feet away.
    Ambrose barked a last order in Farsi, his voice cracking with anticipation, “Two of them will collect you now. If you try anything, we’ll cut you down.”
    Sorcerer didn’t respond. Instead, he took a deep inhalation. Ambrose thought it might have been resignation showing itself, but that didn’t jive with the rest of Sorcerer’s demeanor. It reminded him more of the gasp a diver took before descending.
    “No, wait—” Ambrose said, too quietly to do any good.
    Something taut and artificial went snap at Young’s feet, and all of the team stopped as they heard a sound like aerosol hairspray going off. Now the air smelled like almonds.
    “What…” Young said before dropping to his knees. Froth formed on his chin as he tried to keep speaking, but nothing came out except a strangled sound like a balloon deflating from a pinprick.
    Laurence had the presence of mind to raise his rifle and aim at Sorcerer, but the man had almost vanished into the darkness at the end of the shelving where the red light ended. Laurence pulled his trigger with a limp hand guided by eyes that looked incapable of focusing. Ambrose watched one round clip Young in the side of his head, while another blew apart Malik’s shoulder. The third round of his three-round burst was a tracer shell that shot down the aisle to be eaten by shadow. Then Laurence fell next to Young, with his feet doing a little dance like a hanged man.
    Malik didn’t seem to notice the hole where his shoulder had been, or the related fact that negative space now kept his left arm connected to his torso purely via exposed sinews. He held himself up against the shelves with his right arm wrapped around an upright metal support beam. Malik’s eyelids fluttered like moth wings while the muscles at the sides of his face repeatedly pulled back his lips into a manic smile made of nothing but teeth and gums. Then his feet gave out. He couldn’t unwrap his arm from its support pillar, so the fall dislocated his remaining shoulder and left him dangling like a scarecrow only half-crucified. He made a little sound like gah-gah-gah as his brain tried to process why it was dying.
    Ambrose was furthest from the entrance to the aisle, and had time to throw himself away from the carnage, making it almost to the loading dock before his legs crumpled under him. He hit the concrete floor chin-first, certain that those were his own teeth he heard rattling on the floor beside him. He intended to make it further, to find clean air instead of being locked in a concrete box with whatever had been in that aerosol they heard. The faint warm breeze that trickled in through the loading door told him that he’d found the air he needed, but his legs reminded him that he’d only found the breeze after wading through a sea of gas.
    Ambrose knew he was going to die with a broken chin, missing most of his teeth. He was also missing four marines and a sorcerer.

Chapter Eleven
     
    Ambrose woke up in a hospital bed with tubes in his