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bald top with a ring of ragged hair blowing in the wind, a Bluetooth headset in his ear.
    Crusty.
    Knuckles looked down the street and saw nothing but the occasional garbage bin. No vehicles or pedestrians. He inched the van forward, saying, “Check our six. Anything?”
    Retro said, “Nothing I can see, but that don’t mean shit.”
    “Good enough for government work.”
    Knuckles floored the van, closing in behind the moped. He broughtthe nose adjacent to its rear tire, then gently swung the bumper over, just enough to kiss the rubber. The contact caused Crusty to panic, jerking the handlebars in an overreaction. The moped skipped onto a pile of trash, he hammered the front brake, and the front wheel locked up. The moped swung sideways, launching the terrorist out of the saddle. They both skittered to a halt twenty feet in front of the van.
    Retro was already out of the door before the bike stopped its slide, Taser at the ready. He hit the juice as Knuckles pulled abreast, the door of the vehicle open and waiting.
    Retro threw him in the van, slamming the door shut and giving Knuckles a look of utter amazement. Knuckles floored the gas, getting out of the area, feeling physically sick.
    He called Blaine in the Ops Center.
    “We took down the moped. But it isn’t Crusty.”

6
    H is true name was Abdul Rahman , but he had not heard it uttered aloud in years. Sometimes, lying on his crude pallet adjacent to the remains of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, surrounded in darkness feebly attacked by a lone candle, he would say the name over and over, as if to prove it still existed.
    He was known by many, many different names. So many that even he had trouble remembering which one to use for a given mission. He took pleasure in knowing that the Lebanese authorities, along with the Zionist dogs in Israel, believed they were tracking four or five different men.
    Another time, another place, and he would have been an educated man. A scholar, perhaps. Or an engineer. He certainly looked the part. He was only five feet four inches tall, and slight of build. His vision was so weak that he was forced to wear glasses with lenses thick enough to distort his eyes when seen from the front.
    Although bordering on physical frailty, he’d been blessed with one thing that had allowed him to survive in the refugee camps as a child, and to thrive as a soldier of God: His intelligence outmatched just about anyone he came across. He had never been formally evaluated, but even as a child he knew that he was smarter than everyone else. Not in a smug or superior way. It was just a fact, like the boys who were stronger. Truth be told, he used to play stupid as a child so as to better fit in with the other boys in the camp, and had found this talent to be helpful when he wanted to be underestimated as a grown man.
    His intelligence had facilitated many successes in the long struggle, but it was his strength of will that set him apart from the average fighter, no matter their skills. He simply would not quit.
    In 2007, the Lebanese Armed Forces captured him in a massive sweep when they invaded the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp to root out the Palestinian terrorist group Fatah al-Islam. He was not a member of that group, and considered it to be just one of many with more brawn and rage than brains. He went to prison anyway, with a dozen others, and was beaten for weeks, but he never gave up any of the aliases he had used in the past. Names that would have sealed his death. Eventually convinced they held a nobody, he was released, and he returned to the camp only to find it had been utterly destroyed in the fighting. A wasteland of shattered concrete and bent metal.
    Infuriated at what had become of his home, he had finished the job of the LAF. Using his Palestinian connections, he hunted down the remaining Fatah al-Islam members who had evaded the Lebanese net. In his mind, they did not understand the struggle, and had brought untold suffering on the