Chapter 32: Excess

The Agent that was Shahim Al Khazar laughed to himself at the paltry force that had been assigned to the mission. To say that these men were inadequate to the task of effectively making an attempt on the prime minister’s life would have been a gross understatement. The twenty-six men were nearly all new recruits, the remainder being once-great warriors, now too blind, too slow, or too fanatically insane to be of use to the cleric who had dispatched them.

In the days since his orders had been handed down to him Agent Shahim had requested that the AIs convene his peers for a Council. When they had met in the virtual void they had discussed at length what he should do. While there was no doubt he could accomplish the mission, even with the poor tools he had been given, the thought of destabilizing his nation’s government at this early stage in their time here had been far from ideal.

But neither could he return to the mountains unsuccessful, for he would be an outcast. The remaining option, killing the cleric that had ordered the attack, was also fraught with risks and uncertain outcomes, the only certainty being that it would gain him a reputation for disloyalty, not ideal, by any means. No, taking the mission had been the lesser of three evils. And so he had accepted, feigning stoic bravery in the face of what the cleric assumed was certain death, or worse, capture and ignominy.

Once in the capital city, Shahim had fought the urge to simply forge onward and get it done. Instead he had maintained the guise of needing this sham of a team, and after two days of improvised strategizing and planning with them, Shahim had laid out an empty husk of an attack plan for his men to follow, knowing full well the futility of everyone’s part in it but his own.

With orders set, they had left their staging base, a disused warehouse in the old part of Islamabad, an hour ago. Shahim had ordered several of the most useless of the older warriors to stay behind, seeing that they would actually limit the already minimal efficacy of the team he had.

He had then split his remaining force into three groups. The majority of his forces had been concentrated into two groups that would attack the main gates of the prime minister’s compound. Their mission had been clear, distract the bulk of the guards, and take down the transformers powering the deadly electrified razorwire that capped the wall around the remainder of the complex.

Now he sat, waiting in silence, in an old battered Morris Minor they had stolen earlier that day. He had taken three men with him to form the third, much smaller force. He would not need them, but it would have seemed strange for him to go alone.