Sarah loved burqas.

For other females, it was a sign of male dominance over the female body and a symbol of patriarchy, or a uniform that liberated them from the constant gaze of male eyes, in accordance with Sharia law and the.. blabbity blabbity blah.

For Sarah, it was a free pass to Arsenalville by way of Concealed Weapons Parkway, with even her face completely hidden beneath ostensibly thick fabric. She'd be too tall for this in a year or two- she was almost too tall now, at a bit over six feet- but with the correct hunching and demeanor she got no more than a handful of glances as they drove down Pakistani roads in an uncovered jeep, despite the arsenal she carried. And, as a bonus, women in this culture were expected to be silent and walk behind men, meaning that she didn't have to do more than take a quick in-flight crash course on Pashto. For escorts she brought two experienced men from her ranks, one posing as her husband, the other her brother.

Despite their professionalism and long service, they were extremely worried, and would much rather have had Sarah use Enforcers. As genetic normals it would be unbelievably easy for them to get hammered in the crossfire. Both of them were Pakistani by birth, and both had lived long enough there before being recruited to have a native's grasp of the culture and language. They were also amazing actors, liars, and diplomats, with distinct combat skill- but in a battle between an absurdly heavily armed engineered and a crowd of al Qaeda, they had a tacit agreement to stay out of the way when the bullets inevitably started flying.

She had considered not bringing them. There were arguments for and against. If she had done a strictly by-the-book infiltration, she could be looking through a lot of caves for a very long time; driving along in this uncovered normal jeep risked them having to fight in from the guard area during the daytime if they couldn't lie their way in. Sarah considered her operatives' ability to lie versus the stupidity and stubbornness of towelheads, weighed in the burqa, and the choice became clear.

As a mere female, she sat in the back seat as one of her men drove down a winding, unmarked path in a narrow valley in the southeast Tora Bora mountain range. Her six perimeter Enforcers had already spread out around the area, hiding themselves deep in the local crags and crevices, their unminds finding far better concealment than the inhabitants ever could. She had brought six for a minimal, spread-out defense against unexpected incursion and escape, and mentally kicked herself for it. In this kind of landscape she could have brought dozens. Most normal Western forces found the terrain to be a barely-habitable treacherous maze of rock. Sarah thought it would make a nice playground.

They came upon a flimsy shack, like a treehouse with no tree, made of old wood and tin. Wait, there were men nearby yelling at them to stop; was this supposed to be a guardhouse? Apparently al Qaeda's construction specs were not on par with Fisher-Price's.

There was some back and forth; the guards were very belligerent from square one and Sarah wondered if she'd have to resort to Plan B right away. Some words in English were shouted: "CIA", "American", countered with her agents' vehement denial and gesturing to their own faces, bellowing assurances of their Islamic fidelity. The hair-growth substance applied to their chins and the turbans on their heads helped quite a bit, apparently. One of the men then gestured to Sarah and said something; immediately one of his men shouted something loud, to defend her honor, and the guards reached for their guns.

"Hey, hey!" the other agent shouted, ostensibly restraining his friend by the shoulder. He then said something else, using the word 'Allah' more than once, slowly produced a gold coin from his pocket (Real gold, probably; no one in the Illuminati cared), and held it out to the guard, folding the man's fingers around it. He then gave the other guard the same treatment. He apologized for his friend's behavior, and he and the guard talked for a bit, the guard, more pleased now, stepping aside. Then the good-cop agent gestured, and both agents got into the car with an impressive facsimile of restrained, ebbing rage on one side and fear on the other, the good-cop saying that he could have gotten them both shot. They even continued talking as they left the guard house and continued to the clearing, in a truly excellent display of showmanship.

When they turned the corner, they were greeted by merriment; rowdy voices filled the air between the hedged-in mountains, echoing between the hardscrabble and scree. They had apparently been having a long party, inasmuch as fundamentalists with no electricity can party, coffee instead of alcohol flowing freely. Some old, some young, some really too young for normals. How many explosives did they plan to strap on a ten year old?

Her driver stepped out of the car and introduced himself nervously. He intentionally sounded rehearsed, using the most polite forms of address, and tripping over himself a couple of times. A few of the men gestured to him, and laughed. One or two of them looked wary and kept their guns close. A couple of them looked Sarah's way and grunted. How twisted were these men, that females invisible were somehow more desirable than females uncovered? If they really wanted to know what she was wearing under that burqa, they had only to wait. One of the boys ran inside the cave and there was a couple minutes of small talk before an old man walked out.

Not only did he look horrible, decrepit, and diseased, he reeked like hell, his stench even more cloying than the rest of them. Sarah did a double-take; was this Osama's older, dirtier brother or was it him? He obviously hadn't had any kind of bath in weeks. No, scratch that; he had been washing, but in nasty water, a thin film of filth covering his pores.

He addressed his guests in nearly-perfect Standard Arabic, which was a pleasant surprise for Sarah; although it had been many years and she was rusty as hell, she could figure out ninety percent of what he was saying, his Pashto translator a trivial distraction. Greetings, salutations, and after a brief exchange, expectations that more people like them would come from around the world to join the fight. He led them and some of his men into the small entrance and an excavated, larger cave mouth, Sarah shuffling with her head low and five paces behind- there was a brief discussion on whether to let her in, but Osama used the words 'mothers of Jihad'- and they sat down in what Sarah could only guess was a traditional sort of palaver, Osama sitting on a chair with men sitting on carpets near him. (And her men gestured for her to sit in the corner, away from them- where she was utterly, pointedly ignored and could see everyone in the entire cave mouth.) He was clearly ready to discuss strategy- no, he decided to start with a rousing lecture, an exhortation for these rich men to spend their money, their very lives, with a call to Jihad.

And.. it wasn't much.

Sarah knew that power could be exercised from anywhere in any setting- but really, this was a perfect metaphor. One guy in a cave sitting above other guys in a cave. Even hiding in a sewer smelled better than this. And Osama was... nothing. He hadn't just been pretending to be closer to people, he really was a caveman. He kept up a stately bearing and he portrayed the image of a sheikh very well, but there was no real leadership here, nothing but empty platitudes and vague promises of Islamic society interspersed with declarations of removing the Great Satan and the elimination of Israel, none of which he could make good on in any sane world. Maybe it sounded better to native Arabic speakers than it did to Sarah, but it was rambling, long, and wholly unworthy of remembering in detail. Why the fuck do they follow him? Her own servants, however, knew and followed the mentality superbly, their subtle cues and body language indicating that they were eager to join the fight against the decadent West. She'd have to reward them for their skills.

But she wasn't personally interested in his ill-conceived gibberish; he'd be talking about entirely different things later and she had video games to play. Her touchscreen PDA had an Orbital Infrared scan of the whole area, another good reason to do this on a clear morning, the warm bodies contrasting nicely with the cold ground. Apparently Osama was so entrancing to the rest of them that they clustered within hearing distance of the cave mouth. Good. Well, except for a few watchmen in high places and those two at the gate, the bend keeping them out of line-of-sight of their fellows. That worked for her. She gently dragged her razor fingernail, Starcraft-like, on two of the green-tinted dots representing her perimeter Enforcers, tapped the icon for silent-kill, tapped between the men guarding the gate, and paid them no further attention, doing the same to the others in rapid succession. Using a burqa felt like cheating. She could casually text the Duumvirate if she wanted: "Hey guys, in a cave atm w/Osama, killing starts soon, bbiab". It was tempting, but she had her professionalism to preserve.

Finally Osama said something about women, and used the phrase "mothers of Jihad" again, looking past her escorts at Sarah.

All too often, her job was like being a chess grandmaster with no opponents but patzers.

They misregarded her movement as her burqa flew open, but by the time they could figure out what that movement was, they were already dead, not one of them being able to so much as reach for his weapon. With the kind of caliber coming from her pistols, she could have hit anywhere on their upper body for kills; she intuitively took head shots anyway, splattering the walls and giving the appearance of a sudden mass decapitation. She casually tossed Osama a drugged shuriken from between her pinky and ring fingers, catching him in the shoulder and knocking him out within seconds. She gestured to her agents, who distinctly did not say "You're the one with super strength, you carry him." in response.

Now there were men outside and deep inside the cave to deal with, none of which could be allowed to see her and survive; letting any of them survive was a poor choice anyway as it put secrecy limits on future plans. OIR had shown only the single entrance as a night radiator; Sarah opted to remove it completely, setting the timer on a football-sized device for one minute and lobbing it to the ceiling where it stuck. The agents looked at it with wide eyes and cooperated in hustling Osama out as fast as they could. She ducked out first, killing four before the rest could begin to squeeze the triggers on their AK-47's. Two more died before the bullets actually started coming out.

Satan's bowels, did she ever hate normal weapons, with their large cones of fire. These bozos sprayed and prayed, which, paradoxically enough, was more dangerous to engineereds than aiming Enforcers. She watched their barrels as she killed, zipping away from the handful that would hit her, her agents staying inside with cover. She stuck with the dual pistols, even bothering to reload each one (pocketing the spent mag- can't leave it lying around) while still shooting with the other; she'd probably use them the whole way though despite the variety she carried. She almost wished for a decent sniper among the lot of them, or someone with the wit to at least try to throw a grenade from cover, or some tactic other than 'get in the engineered's line of sight and get a headshot'.

Oh, there was a grenade, but not thrown from cover. She shot it before it left his hand, and the fourteen-year-old boy holding it screamed, his forearm and a section of his scalp gone. The scream distracted the last couple of allies he had left, who died like sheep. Sarah looked around her with equal parts contempt and wariness. "If I were not who I am, and we met in the open, what would you have done to me?" she asked the boy in stilted, quick Standard Arabic, while rushing him and flinging him thirty feet to the cave mouth.

Was that it? Did Osama really only have two dozen fighters with him? Wait, no- there were guys still in the cave- but they were choking their guts out, their coughs heavy with blood. Apparently one of her agents had the foresight to toss in a gas grenade. She smiled, and hustled back to the jeep, just noticing a figure fleeing the scene several hundred yards away. She instantly unfolded the sniper rifle she had on her back, and in less than half a second, the man's head flew up in the air from the hole between his shoulders. She checked her PDA. No moving man-sized blobs, none she didn't see or already deal with. Good. But what was that smaller blob?

Sarah ran fifty feet to some rocks. A six year old boy, having pissed his pants, looked at her and tried to run; she grabbed him, splattered his head on the biggest rock he was hiding behind, and heaved his small corpse into the air, to the general area of the rest of the bodies. And then she ran- faster this time, with a silent plea from her agents to hurry the hell up as it had been almost 20 seconds already and they were really running out of time here- dived into the jeep, and the agent driving it slammed on the gas.

The agent did not even slow down for the two Enforcers who had eliminated the road guards, and they jumped into the back anyway, to either side of Sarah. They had to get the hell out of there before-

BOOM

The football-sized device Sarah had used had a tiny fusion component, entirely imploding the side of the mountain. The jeep fishtailed from the force of the blast, tiny pebbles coming down among them like rain, the agent driving regaining control after a brief struggle. There was additional rumbling as tons of cracked and pulverized rock fell in upon itself. Anyone still inside the cave who survived the blast and the rockfall would inevitably suffocate. Granted, it could become cloudy, or there could be a secondary passage- but this was the best of all possible choices of evidence destruction, and could be chalked up to American firepower without the need to actually use a high-altitude bomber or UAV. She checked her other Enforcers; they had all been well out of range of the explosion, and would exfil easily after (clickety-click) obliterating the corpse of the one Sarah had sniped. Everything else now- additional secrecy concerns, replacing Taliban leadership, etc- was now officially Karl and Mohammed's business.

Sarah smiled as she folded her burqa back over her head. That was a way to end a mission.