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Death was not something the six men talked about. Instead they used phrases like "the job" or "the assignment." They were acquaintances, not friends, just like workers in any industry requiring initiative, independence, and travel.

Each had been at it more than two decades, thriving in a career notorious for high attrition. They were the best. They had never collaborated, until now.

* * *

Night gave Baghdad little relief. Electricity was fitful, garbage rotted along the boulevards, and clean running water was a memory. Gunfire crackled across rooftops as looters carried off computers, chairs, and crates of canned goods. Since the invasion, there was no more dictator and no more law.

In earlier, better times, the country was known as Mesopotamia, a rich land where the wheel and writing were invented. It was all documented in the National Museum of Iraq, which contained priceless antiquities dating back a hundred thousand years.

International law forbade anyone to use cultural sites for military purposes, or to attack them. But the museum was strategically located on eleven acres in the heart of Baghdad, protected by a tall security wall, and dotted with towering turrets perfect for snipers. So the Republican Guard took it over, and when the American soldiers invaded, the Guards blasted them with machine guns and AK-47s. The Americans fired back, and they kept coming. Finally the Guards brought out their big guns-rocket-propelled grenades, RPGs-and sent a firestorm down on the foreign troops.

A U.S. tank responded with a single round from its nosebleed 120-mm main gun, taking out the RPG position but leaving a gaping hole in the façade above one of the museum's reconstructed Assyrian gates. Under the laws of war, the Americans were entitled to defend themselves, but they had also seen how easily they could destroy the museum. So the task force commander ordered the tanks to remain in the intersection in front of the museum-Museum Square-but out of range of the Iraqis.

This was the tense situation near midnight on April 10, 2003, when six international assassins made their way individually through Baghdad's backstreets toward the museum. They were in Baghdad because Saddam Hussein owed them money, and when the Americans won the war, his wealth would be confiscated. This was their last chance to get what was theirs.



Copyright © 2015 by Gayle Lynds