HARGATT, IRAQ
THE CITY OF TIKRIT is hemmed in tightly by a dirty necklace of small towns and villages, and in one of them, a tangled little place called Hargatt, a tense meeting was under way. Light razored sharply through the window of a bullet-pocked two-story building, illuminating a husky, bearded man who sat in a worn green chair in the main downstairs room. Guards were at every window and on the roof, and one stood directly behind him. The area commander of the Iraqi insurgency asked, “Why did you do this thing, Juba?”
“I told you. I did not do it. What reason would I have to kill four of your men, who are helping to protect me?” Juba had been staying at the man’s spacious and comfortable home since arriving in Tikrit. He had already secured a new laptop computer and filled it with the data from the disk that al-Shoum had provided in Syria, plus the vital material from the memory stick that he had carried for three days in his rectum. Juba was back in business.
“The townspeople have described in detail that a man wearing our style of garments and carrying a long rifle had the courage to walk down the middle of the street after the murders. He wrote your name in blood-Why?-and then walked away again. Walked, as if he owned the town! No Shiite dog would take that chance, and certainly no American.”
“One would. His name is Kyle Swanson, he is a Marine sniper, and he wants to personally kill me.”
The commander took a few breaths before speaking again. “You did noble things in London and the state of California, Juba, and for that, I have granted you sanctuary. But death follows you like a plague.”
Juba motioned toward the guards and the windows. “How long has this war been going on? You and the people of Tikrit are no strangers to death. I didn’t bring it. It was already here.”
“Why would this Swanson Marine do this thing last night? It was foolhardy. He would be aware of what we do to captured snipers, but his audacity stunned and delayed the fighters who might otherwise have swarmed outside and taken him. That was why many of them thought it was you out there.”
“Swanson was, ah, communicating with me. Telling me he was around here and looking.”
Finally a glimmer came into the man’s eyes. “So he will be back?”
“Yes. No doubt.”
“Are you afraid?”
Juba softly laughed. “No. Of course not. I want him to find me, because I am going to kill him.”
The commander’s mind was suddenly busy with ideas. “Then we shall lure him in close and hope that he brings many friends. You kill him, we kill them.”
“I like that,” said Juba. “Just be sure to leave him for me.” Once he cleared away the Swanson obstacle, he would find a safe haven and resume the auction process. General al-Shoum would not be pleased to learn that he had been swindled, but Juba planned to be a long way from Syria by then. Tahiti and Fiji both sounded good.
“First, let us show the Swanson Marine that what he did will not be tolerated.” The commander smiled. “Go and communicate with him.”
COB SPEICHER
Kyle Swanson was in a bunk, fast asleep after the night’s work. The rest of the Trident strike team was doing the same thing, while beyond their separate building, U.S. Army troops were going about their daily routines.
An armored patrol rumbled out through the front gate of the combat base, large warfighting machines clanking in the lead and helicopters zipping ahead to look for threats along the wide road. A short time later, several smaller patrols went out, spreading to different directions and different roads. Iraqi civilians were also on the move, wary when approaching American roadblocks. Unemployed young men and kids congregated on some corners in the towns as American troops moved through on foot. Shops were open. Business as usual.
Swanson snored peacefully. He had made his move, and now, while sleeping without dreams, he was still at work, a sniper lying in wait for his target. Army psychological operations teams were in high gear all around Tikrit, handing out paper flyers with Juba’s photograph and broadcasting over the radio and loudspeakers mounted on vehicles, promising a five-million-dollar reward to whoever turned him in.
Kyle had nothing to kill but time. It was Juba’s move.
HARGATT
The insurgent commander and Juba stood on the flat roof of the tallest building in town while guards listened for marauding American helicopters that might see them. The advantage of height increased the distance they could see, and they had a good view of the spot where a road crested a small ridge and then came down into a little valley and a bridge under which a canal flowed to the Tigris.
“The Americans always vary their routes of approach, but there are only so many routes they can take. Repetition is inevitable.” The commander pointed toward the ridgeline. “Before they approach our area, they usually stop at the top of that high ground, as you see, and take time to study what is going on before moving forward.”
Through his binoculars, Juba studied the site. A pair of gigantic M1A2 Abrams tanks were on each side of the road, with their 120 mm cannons and array of machine guns having total command of the area. Other armored vehicles, both tracked and wheeled, rolled arrogantly down the main road, occasionally stopping to let a patrol dismount.
The commander had it all figured out. “See? When they stop, you can shoot them.”
“All right,” said Juba, shifting his binoculars around the zone. “See that farmhouse about halfway down the slope? I want your people to clear it out tonight so I can use it tomorrow morning.”
“Of course,” said the commander. “We all look forward to seeing a display of your skill against the Crusaders.”
Juba gave a slight bow of appreciation but said nothing as they went back downstairs and into another building for some lunch. If he took a shot from that farmhouse, those big Abrams would be on him in a heartbeat with a hurricane of plunging fire, then the Humvees, armored personnel carriers, and troops would run over him, unless they decided to let an Apache helicopter gunship take care of the job. He had no intention of telling anyone, including the commander, where he would set up. Not with that five-million-dollar reward on his head.
During the afternoon, he borrowed a car and went out alone. As the commander said, there were only so many roads that the Americans could take into the area. Out of the bleak terrain and houses, an opportunity rose like a mirage at a little crossroads, and Juba stopped the vehicle beneath a few tall palm trees, got out, and walked around. His eyes studied the isolated area and the single Iraqi government traffic policeman on duty. The deep ruts made by the passing of numerous tracked vehicles spiderwebbed the crossing. The Americans came this way often.
Then he restarted the car and drove some more to find the second site he wanted. This was payback for Swanson’s daring raid, and the method in which the challenge would be answered had to be special. The scorecard would be kept in human lives not their own.
Back at the safe house before nightfall, he studied a map, ate only a bite of food, and went shopping for the few supplies he needed for the coming hours. He retired to his room about eight o’clock and spent a long time cleaning the weapon he had chosen from the insurgents’ stockpile, a beautiful HS.50 Steyr Mannlicher long-range, single-shot, bolt-action, precision-fire sniper rifle that could punch right through the body armor worn by the Americans.
A few hours after midnight, he left the house. He had a small backpack that contained some rations and his compact computer.
COB SPREICHER
“He’s out there tonight. I can feel it,” Kyle Swanson told Sybelle Summers as they sat atop a sandbagged bunker and watched a pair of bright flares drift down on small parachutes to the west. A moment later came the chatter of an automatic weapon and the loud booms of a big gun. “He will hit back soon.”
“I don’t know, Kyle. Task Force Hammer has things pretty well buttoned up. Patrols were rolling in and out of the gate all day, and the surrounding bases report nothing unusual.”
Swanson pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, rocking back and forth, feeling the muscles stretch. “Would all that stop you, if you were him?”
She picked at a rip in one of the bags, and the sand beneath was hard. Been there a long time. “No. Just slow down and take my time. Pick my spot.”
“Umm. That’s what he’s doing, too.”
A shadow appeared beside them and Travis Hughes flopped down. “Hey.”
“Hey,” said Sybelle.
“Let me pick your brains here,” said Swanson. “Juba is pissed off and wants to get even, right? But what is going to be his target, and can we stop him?”
“Hell, Shake, we can’t stop the bastard until we know where he is. As for the target, my bet would be that he is going to want to match your number of kills, if not surpass it.” Hughes spit over the side of the bunker.
“Classless jarhead,” said Sybelle, disgusted. “Travis is right. He’s going to want a nice body count, so he will be looking for somewhere that American troops are bunched together.”
Travis laughed quietly. “Hell, maybe he’s going to come in here. Lots of people gathered at the Subway. They’re even giving Latin dance lessons over at the Morale Building. Hell of a war.”
“No. He might be able to get inside the wire, but it’s too dangerous. The man is not stupid.”
Darren Rawls crawled up and joined them. “Just visited a friend for a couple of beers,” he reported. “Man, the buzz is all about what you did last night. That is interesting, because nobody on our team would say anything, which means informants are spreading the word about the badass snipers in town.”
“We wanted the word to spread,” Sybelle commented. “Part of the game. What we don’t want is for the whole of Task Force Hammer to go charging out, trying to track Juba down, because he will take off and we will have to find him all over again.”
“They won’t,” said Kyle. “Remember, Sybelle, that you and I specifically let Colonel Withrow know during our introductory briefing that Juba and the poison gas formula was our assignment.”
“So where the hell is he, Shake?” Hughes asked.
Kyle laid back on the bunker and stared up at the stars. “I don’t know. He’s out there somewhere. I can feel it.”
HARGATT
Juba had no way to really know if an American patrol would come through that crossroads seven hundred yards away from his hide today, but all those track trails and torn berms and crushed vegetation indicated that it was frequently used. Just like animals create paths through a thick jungle by padding along the same route, the steel animals of the American tanks and other vehicles were following a familiar pattern, apparently thinking the lone Iraqi cop directing traffic there was adequate security. After all, it was just a way station; the fighting forces were just passing through.
He had a position in the rubble of a destroyed shop that had collapsed upon itself in a jumble of timbers and stones. Many of the cement blocks were painted white on two sides, the outside and inside walls before it all came crashing down. During his scouting, he had found a narrow entrance that dropped into the shop’s storage basement, and by moving aside a few big rocks, he had opened a good view down to the crossroads. He had put the rocks back in place when he left, returning with his gear a few hours ago.
Working in the narrow beam of a flashlight, Juba built a sturdy hide that provided maximum protection on top and to all sides. Stacking stones and wood, he created a firm platform on which to rest the Steyr Mannlicher. The tip of the muzzle would be four feet back in the room. Turning off the light, he practiced his escape route several times, returned, and walked around the devastated shop to rearrange more debris. A dirty piece of blue and white canvas that had once been an awning was spread across the rear opening and anchored in place with loose rocks.
Dawn was coming, and, with luck, so were the Americans. After planning and prayers, luck helped. At first light, Juba slowly removed the loose stones that would create a ragged window facing the crossroads, one by one, inch by inch, until the hole was about two feet wide and two feet high, just behind some scraggly underbrush outside. When a sniper fires, it is an automatic response for the people in his target zone to look up in order to sweep the rooftops, where the attacker may have the height advantage. Juba had chosen a place with a two-story building nearby. That was where he expected them to concentrate during the critical moments that he was firing three shots, no more, following standard doctrine that shooting more than three times from the same place allowed the enemy to pinpoint your position. And kill you. Three and out.
The previous day, during his scouting ride, he had noticed that the children in the neighborhood were eating candy from America, scribbling in notebooks with ballpoint pens, and playing with silly plastic toys. Gifts from U.S. soldiers. A relationship was being built. Good.
There was a distant grinding rumble, and as he expected, his juvenile early warning system began to shriek as a dozen kids took off running toward the intersection. A pair of bulky M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles surged down the road, raising big roostertails of dust behind them, where three up-armored Humvees trailed. Juba made a mental note that the 25 mm Bushmaster chain guns on the Bradleys were his biggest threat. Don’t give them a chance to engage.
The kids were running alongside the vehicles, dodging the tracks and the wheels with ease and calling up to the soldiers in broken English. Sure enough, little packages of gaily wrapped candy showered down on them. The convoy pulled into the crossroads and into a line along one axis. The policeman steered traffic around them. Everyone was relaxed, and Juba focused his rifle on the second Bradley, which had a number of aerials sticking up from it, clearly the command track. The turrets were open, but the gunners were at ease, bantering with the kids. Then the soldiers got out, their rifles hanging loosely, some squatting down to the children’s level. They came here often to rendezvous with other convoys before heading out on individual missions. Only two troopers took sentry positions, one at each end of the convoy. Iraqi adults stayed away, clustering in doorways or just going about their business.
Luck. Juba let his mind wash itself clean of outside noise. The command track was a tempting and militarily significant target, the place where the officers lurked. Kill the officers, tilt the battlefield. No. That was not what he wanted today. Just take the easy ones and go before they knew what hit them. Give them something to remember, to enrage them, to drive them crazy with rage. He brought the Steyr rifle to him like a lover and remembered his schoolboy Shakespeare, a line from Julius Caesar, “This foul deed shall smell above the earth.”
The scope was on a small boy, about seven years old, with dark hair and a smiling face, all white teeth and dirt, who stood beside a kneeling American soldier, talking to him. The rifle stilled its movement. The boy turned enough for a back shot, and Juba pressed the trigger with four pounds of pressure. The snap of the gunshot was loud inside the hide but was barely heard on the outside, and the big bullet smashed hard into the child, knocking him in a bloody heap onto the American soldier, who grabbed the boy and fell atop him to shield him from further harm. He was already dead. One!
The moment of frozen realization that danger was upon them occurred when Juba squeezed the trigger the second time and brought down an American who had been smoking a cigarette, the bullet ramming through his armored vest and into his vital organs. The man staggered, a look of disbelief on his face, and fell. Two!
Now came the chaos of children screaming, soldiers yelling and getting their weapons up, and the ugly Bushmaster cannon looking for somebody to shoot. Sniper! Where?
Now he wanted a good shot, a difficult shot, to put his seal on this attack, and he found it with the soldier who had made the mistake of grabbing a telephone handset from a radioman. The officer, calling in for help with this ambush. He was on his belly beside one of the Bradleys, peering out around the track, searching for the threat, just enough for Juba to see his eyes beneath his helmet. Easy, smooth trigger squeeze and the Steyr snapped again. Three!
The firing began in his general direction, but there was no target. The bullets were just chewing dirt and rearranging rocks. The soldiers and the Bradleys would be on the move in seconds. Juba wrapped his rifle beneath his loose robe, tore away the old awning, and walked into the morning sun, down the alley and around the corner. No one was on the streets because of the sudden eruption of gunfire. He got into his car and drove away.
Fifteen minutes later, he was snuggled beneath some bushes that lined the top of a hard mud fence some four feet high at the edge of an irrigation ditch. He peered over the berm and saw the crossroads, which had become a beehive of activity as the Americans swept into the neighborhood he had just left. It was hard for them to keep their professionalism, for the murder of a child does something to the American psyche. Snipers have to know about emotions. They were after the shooter who killed the kid, and he was somewhere in that neighborhood. Even their new defense perimeter was oriented toward the original hide, the place of the perceived threat, and not toward his new location behind them.
He had a plain view of the medical personnel working frantically with the three victims, who were laid side by side, trying somehow to keep them alive long enough to get them back to the aid station at COB Baharia. Juba was not depending on luck now but on expected responses. Suppress the threat and evac the wounded. The troops were in the village, and no more shots had been fired, so a medevac chopper was coming in.
He heard it before he saw it. Then the helicopter zoomed in low toward the battle site, flared to a stop in the air, and settled to the ground, the rotor wash throwing up a blizzard of dirt. Red crosses were painted in large white squares on the green chopper. Mercy flight. Juba aimed.
Two soldiers picked up a stretcher that carried one of his earlier victims. A medic leaped from the helicopter to give them a hand, and Juba shot him in the stomach to tear out the liver and a kidney. One!
The Bushmaster gunner atop one of the Bradleys was facing toward the village, exposing his back. Juba put the scope on him and fired a bullet that hit center mass. The soldier threw his hands up on impact and fell straight down into the vehicle. Two!
The medevac pilot had realized they were under attack and started winding up his bird for an emergency takeoff, but Juba had a clear view through the side window. Tight head shot. The pilot turned his head, and Juba, using the dark sunglasses as his aiming point, once again gently squeezed the trigger. The bullet crashed through the pilot’s helmet and destroyed his head. Immediately, the helicopter began to power down while the stunned copilot took command. Three!
Juba ducked away behind the wall, carried his rifle back to the car, and quickly vanished into the streets again. I am here, Shake. Come and get me!