CAPTAIN NEWMAN HAD THE Trident team in a tight security perimeter while Kyle Swanson and Sybelle Summers probed through the sniper hide behind the mud wall like crime scene specialists on a TV show. As soon as the attack was reported to the base, orders rocketed back to hold in place, and an uneasy silence engulfed everything up to a mile away on every side. Extra troops were dispatched to bolster the available firepower, and the Trident team hustled in aboard a helicopter.
The mud-wall sniper’s hide was the closest to the landing zone, so they went there first. A trooper had marked the spot with a yellow cloth tied to a stick, and the slash of bright color was stark against the bland brown surroundings. Kyle went in from one side, Sybelle from the other end, looking for booby traps, but they found nothing. Some bushes had been crushed where the sniper had lain on them, and there was a crease in the wall on which he had braced the weapon. Three hefty.50 caliber brass cartridges were scattered off to the right of the position, flipped out by the weapon during the reloads.
“Excellent field of fire,” Sybelle said, looking over the wall to the bloody crossroads, still the center of activity.
“Particularly if you have the enemy looking the other way,” said Kyle, kneeling in the dirt to study the placement of the attacker’s body. He would have had a solid base and fired with an economy of movement. Swanson reached out and touched a dirty piece of cloth that was still in front of where the rifle muzzle had been. Wet, spread there to tamp down the dust, which otherwise would have been thrown up when the weapon fired and given away the position. A thorough pro, taking care of the little things. Boot prints led away from the wall, toes deeper than heels, indicating he was moving fast but not running. Those prints vanished at the small road almost hidden by the wall. A vehicle was waiting for him.
They all walked as a group across the action zone to a destroyed building that had been marked by another yellow flag, and Kyle and Sybelle again went into the sniper’s hide. The canvas curtain had been torn down, and three more.50 caliber brass cartridges blinked in the light. Sybelle turned them over in her fingers.
“Same as the others,” she said. “One punched clean through the armored vest. My guess is it’s an M8 armor-piercing incendiary. He was going for a big wallop.”
Swanson agreed. A velocity of 3,050 feet per second and a range of 6,470 yards. It was overkill to use such a weapon from only seven hundred meters. Was the shooter trying to prove a point? There was a makeshift rest for a rifle in the middle of the room, well back from the opening in the far wall. He went closer to the odd window and looked at the sparse vegetation that had been broken and singed by the muzzle blast.
Rick Newman came into the basement hide. “What do you think, Shake? Was it Juba?”
“No doubt,” Kyle replied. “He left his shell casings behind, which he does as sort of a signature. Then, this double ambush was the work of a single professional, because not even two average shooters would be able to pull it off with perfect coordination. Three shots maximum, then move, that’s standard doctrine.”
Kyle crouched behind the table and aimed along the viewing line that the sniper had. He could almost reach out and touch the men at the crossroads. “Finally, he waited to attack the first responders who came in to help. He did the same thing in San Francisco because it’s such an immense shock to everyone else. For a while, every soldier who comes around here is going to be thinking about snipers, and that will inhibit their freedom of movement.”
“Well, we gotta go. I just had a call from Colonel Withrow. He wants to meet us back at the base pronto,” said Newman.
The three of them walked out into the light, and the entire team went back across the field to a waiting helicopter. “What are you going to tell the colonel?” asked Sybelle. “He’s not going to like sitting around and having this kind of attack on his men without fighting back.”
“But that’s exactly what we have to get him to do, Sybelle. Withrow is no fool, and he realizes that catching this terrorist is the most important mission on his list right now. This mess today was bad, bad shit, but it proves that Juba is right here in this area and is not hiding somewhere in the urban maze. We are getting closer, and the funnel is narrowing. First we tracked him across the United States to Canada, then to Syria and then into Tikrit, which meant we did not have to search the rest of Iraq. Now he is here, for sure. The bottom line is that it is still a fight between the two of us: I called, and he has answered. Now we just have to make a date.”
ARMY COLONEL NEIL WITHROW, commander of Task Force Hammer, was standing with his executive officer before a large plastic-covered grid map of the town of Hargatt. Black and red marking pens had slashed and stabbed to mark positions and events. “Two days ago, this area was quiet. Real progress had been made both politically and militarily.” He turned to face Kyle and the flinty blue eyes bore into the sniper. “Now it looks like World War III outside my front gate again.”
The XO pointed to marks on the maps. “Here’s the ambush site this morning. Since then, we’ve had two IEDs take out vehicles, with one man KIA, four wounded. An ambush by a militia organization we thought had been tamed left another two of our troopers wounded. Sectarian violence has flared in one part of the town, and a suicide bomber hit a market street. Two mortar rounds came into the camp but caused no damage. All this in broad daylight. It’s getting hot.”
The colonel ran a hand flat across his crew-cut hair, then crossed his arms. “We’re going to have to go in there and settle things down, sooner rather than later, if we want to keep a lid on. How much longer do you people think you will need?”
Kyle saw the dilemma facing the colonel. The job of catching Juba was undoing a lot of good work. “Sir, I have to ask you to hold back for two more days.”
Withrow groaned aloud. “Look, Mr. Swanson, I have followed the orders in your letter of special authorization and provided your team with maximum cooperation here. Unfortunately, you have ignited a powder keg.” He pointed toward the window of his office. “My soldiers died out there today, and morale is sinking because we have all of this power at our fingertips but are not responding. Your mission is hampering my ability to protect my force.”
“Yes, sir. I understand that completely and feel just as strongly as you about the loss of life, and that the best defense is a good offense. Unfortunately, our job still remains more important right now. The key to how he pulled off the San Francisco attack is with him, and if you throw a bunch of Abrams tanks and Bradleys into the game, Juba could just fade back into Tikrit or possibly return to Baghdad and we will lose him. I’m sorry, sir, but we need that material, and the only way we get it is to get him. We need two more days before you turn loose Task Force Hammer.”
Withrow looked back at the map. “This one asshole killed six people out there today in a matter of minutes, but he killed thousands more innocent Americans before he even got here. The most dangerous terrorist in the world is in my sandbox. Do me a big favor when you find him, Mr. Swanson: Don’t arrest him.”
“Oh, hell no, sir. I’m going to blow his fucking head off.”
The colonel exchanged glances with his XO. “Very well. We will keep the troops on a short leash for another two days. Meanwhile, what can we do to help?”
Kyle moved to the map, picked up the red marker, and drew a great circle around Hargatt. “Close it all off. Roadblocks on all major highways, secondary roads, and cowpaths, and put roving patrols in the open fields. Nobody in or out for the next day, no passes honored for any reason. Iraqi police and troops will work only within the task force perimeter. Juba is somewhere in that circle, and I want to keep him there.”
Withrow said, “You got it…for forty-eight hours, and then we have to reevaluate the battlefield. But our hand may be forced if the violence continues to increase. We may have to start kicking in doors.”
“Yes, sir. Agreed. We will keep each other informed.”
Sybelle and Rick Newman flanked Swanson as they left the headquarters building and walked down the neatly kept road. “Can we do this in only another two days?” Rick asked.
Kyle Swanson looked up at the sky and adjusted his cap against the hot afternoon sun. “I don’t know. I had to tell him something to give him some hope, and he is right that his task force cannot sit on the sideline forever. We can try. See what happens.”
HARGATT
The commander of the insurgents smelled opportunity. A few minor attacks during the day had drawn some American blood, but they had not responded in force as usual. The presence of Juba made a difference.
Juba, however, just wanted to kill the Swanson Marine, while the commander had a much wider agenda. The big force stationed at the camp three kilometers southeast of Tikrit had enforced the uneasy peace, allowing the time and space needed for the political process to move forward. The residents of the villages and towns in the entire area were feeling safe beneath the umbrella of tanks and helicopters and soldiers. They were imagining what peace might be like, and for the commander, that was the most dangerous thing of all.
“Are those houses ready?” he asked the man in charge of helping plan attacks.
“Almost. The people have been removed, and we have begun the storage.”
“How long?”
“Transporting and placing the gasoline, the explosive plastics, the propane tanks, and artillery shells require caution and skill. We should be finished in a few hours,” said the aide.
“Let me know as soon as you are done. We don’t have much time.” This would be a fine operation and should not interfere at all with Juba’s own personal vendetta. The commander had a war to fight, and he would ask a favor of Juba tonight.
It was a fine day outside, the temperature holding around one hundred degrees, but dropping as evening approached. He wondered where Juba was.
Juba had carefully cleaned the Styer Mannlicher rifle during the long afternoon hours, caught a power nap during the hottest part of the day, and then went back on the prowl. It was cooling off, and he was ready to work again, far across town from where he had been that morning.
Hargatt was not a large city, but big enough to draw in potential customers from the surrounding area, and many of the buildings remained in surprisingly good condition. He drove down the broad main avenue, an unremarkable presence in the late afternoon crowd of pedestrians, cars, and trucks. There was a tension in the air, and people in the shops were talking about the growing violence. There was some confidence, too, that the Americans and the police would bring things back under control.
The symbol of that confidence stood at the end of the wide boulevard, the blocky new police station that had been built with a $3.4 million grant from the United States government. The location obviously had been chosen carefully to show that the Iraqi police force had come of age as a trained unit and was present, ready to help. It was a point of pride for the emerging new government, and Juba considered it a worthy target. He could crush that rising spirit of safety.
A three-story building was on a corner about a thousand meters away, a place of shops and small offices. He parked around back and jogged up the steps and into the building. The doors were unlocked because the merchants were begging for work and did not want locks to keep customers out.
The door to the sewing shop on the top floor was not only unlocked but slightly open, too, to create a cross-draft through the stuffy rooms. A middle-aged woman with a wrinkled face was at a sewing machine, a round cushion full of needles and pins pushed high on her arm. Juba smiled in greeting, closed the door, turned, and shot her twice in the head with a silenced pistol. He spun the CLOSED sign around, locked the door, dumped the body out of sight, and arranged multicolored bolts of cloth into a crude rifle rest away from the open window. He retrieved the Steyr from his car, settled into the back of the room, and checked the scope; a clear view of the police station. Several American Humvees were parked out front, indicating that there were some discussions going on, probably about him.
He studied the building at the end of the street and sketched a range card while he waited. After an hour, he drank some water, then returned his eye to the scope, watching people go in and out of the ornate main entrance of the station. Some American soldiers, probably the drivers, were talking with some Iraqi policemen. Laughing. Cordial. Friends.
A stir rustled the small crowd. The soldiers shook hands with the cops and climbed behind the steering wheels of the Humvees. Two men were at the door, then at the top of the steps. Juba focused on the Iraqi officer dressed in dark blue trousers and a light blue shirt with rank epaulets on his shoulders. He was squaring away a blue beret on his head. A final check of the range card, eye back to the scope, a squeeze of the trigger, and the explosion of the shot filled the small room as the big gun kicked back against his shoulder.
Without waiting to see the fate of the policeman, Juba worked the bolt smoothly to rack in a second round and shifted his aim to the U.S. Army officer. He was wearing a vest, but that would not matter, and Juba brought the scope to center mass and fired. Two targets down.
The third round was fed into the chamber, and he looked for one more victim. The bodyguard with the sunglasses? The young sentry in the guard post? One of the Americans rushing out of the building with their weapons ready, searching for the sniper? He paused a few seconds to let the scene develop, like the image on a photograph in a darkroom. One American was pulling the fallen officer back inside, his weapon dangling uselessly as he hauled with a hand on each of the man’s wrists. A medic? Juba shot him in the heart.
This time, he left the rifle in the room as he walked away. The military and the police would be looking for anyone carrying anything suspicious, and Juba had access to other rifles to use in the future. He disappeared into the crowd that was running away, scurrying for their homes.