COUPLE OF GUYS RUNNING this way, and they don’t look too happy,” said Sybelle, peering around the edge of the door.
“Right.” Swanson dug a finger into each phone and levered out the batteries and then smashed the instruments with hard stomps of his boots. “Let them come in and we grab them.”
The insurgent commander was the first through the door, and he was allowed to rush into the center of the room, but when the bodyguard crossed the threshold, Sybelle clocked him hard in the mouth with the butt of her M-4. His head snapped back, his feet flew out from beneath him, and he collapsed. At the same time, Swanson launched onto the commander’s back and rode him to the floor, rolled him over, and popped him hard on an ear to daze him. By the time the man collected his senses, a strip of duct tape was across his mouth, plastic flexicuffs ensnared his wrists behind his back, and more duct tape had been wound around his ankles. Between the colors and shapes dancing in his eyes, he saw that the bodyguard was sprawled unconscious, also being wrapped like a mummy in black duct tape.
“You speak English?” Kyle asked, peeling back the tape across the mouth just enough to let the man speak.
“Who are you?” The words came out in a garble, as if he were talking around a cigar.
Kyle slapped him hard. “I ask the questions.”
The commander shook his head. He understood the seriousness of the situation. His attempt to trap the Americans had failed, the town had been penetrated, the remaining explosives would be neutralized, and he had been captured. The plan to bleed the Americans badly and write the name of this village in the annals of resistance had failed. Without his leadership, his fighters would fade to other locations and the village would return to peace.
“I will tell you nothing,” the commander grumbled. “Nothing.”
“Then you are of no value to me.” Kyle stood, took out his pistol, and fired a shot that ripped away part of the man’s ear. The commander jerked at the pain and the impact. “Last chance,” Swanson said.
Sybelle spoke. “Kyle. Hold on. No use wasting more time on him. He may have some intel, but the interrogators will wring it out of him. Let’s just leave them tied up here while we go find Juba.”
The commander looked strangely at them and shook his head vigorously, grunting for attention. Kyle lifted the tape again.
“Now you suddenly got something to tell me?”
The man bounced his head in understanding. “The woman just called you by the name of Kyle. Are you the Swanson Marine?”
“Maybe.” Kyle ripped the gag all the way off with a swift pull that yanked out patches of beard.
“If you are, then I can tell you exactly the location of your enemy, my friend Juba. He wants you to find him, Swanson Marine,” said the commander, a slit of a smile on his bloody face. Here was a chance to repay Juba for calling him a fool. Maybe both of them would die. “He is waiting just down that street.”
JUBA WAS IN A mouse hole. Over the past few days, he had used some of the idle hours in the commander’s home to create a unique sniper’s hide, oriented along the most likely line of approach, and now he crawled into a prone position and made himself comfortable.
The moment was finally approaching, and without realizing it, he had started losing perspective. He was so intent on killing Kyle Swanson that his thoughts rejected anything but that one goal. The smart play was to leave now and fight somewhere else, some other day, but he wanted to finish it here. Never would he have a better opportunity. Swanson had to come up that single road and straight into the crosshairs.
Each decision he made now contained a trade-off, because a defender cannot defend against everything. The situation he had created was imperfect, for a mouse hole opening was so narrow that the shooter could not remain too far back in the darkness. The muzzle of Juba’s rifle was no more than a foot behind the opening.
Nevertheless, arranging a battlefield of his choice had been important, for Swanson would have to be the one risking exposure. The biggest advantage was Juba’s intimate knowledge of his enemy, the operational concepts of a sniper and the combat habits. He could get inside of Swanson’s head and think along with his adversary.
Juba had opened all the windows in the three-story house and pulled the curtains almost closed so they would flap in the air. He chipped out several cinder blocks up high as decoy hides and stacked another dummy emplacement on the roof behind a barricade of loose wood. A sheltered animal pen stood to one side of the house. Swanson would have to be wary of all of them and might make a mistake while doing the recon. Snipers always scan a target house from top to bottom, and the higher the defender’s position, the more it stands out and the more likely it is to draw attention. The mouse hole was only on the fourth row of cinder blocks up from the foundation of the house, below eye level. Juba would be watching for a slight movement of a rifle and a scope as Swanson ranged over the possible hides higher in the building, an advantage of a few microseconds.
An added bonus was the spider hole. Almost every house in Iraq had a small pit in which a family could seek shelter if and when bullets started flying outside. Juba’s position was right beside the hole that had been constructed below the commander’s home, which normally was kept covered by a small door and a rug. Once in the pit, there was a narrow tunnel some twenty feet long that led away to a dry well next door as an emergency escape route.
Juba had rolled away the rug and removed the wooden hatch to leave the hole uncovered. He placed the computer in the backpack and laid it on the far side of the hole. Once again, he had downloaded the important information on the memory stick as a backup, and the small device was in his breast pocket.
It was going to be a one-shot battle, and whoever fired first probably would win-but that shot had to score. Otherwise the advantage, however miniscule, switched to the other sniper. Juba would be patient, take the critical shot, and then grab the backpack, roll into the spider hole, and leave. Shoot and scoot, the Americans snipers called it.
He racked a round into the chamber of the M40A1 and settled behind his scope to wait.
THEY WRAPPED BOTH OF the captured men tightly in rings of duct tape. A hand-drawn map of the area had been pulled from the commander’s pocket, and Sybelle and Kyle spread it on the floor, compared it with their own maps, and worked out the grid coordinates of the house where Juba was said to wait.
“I don’t like this High Noon, mano-a-mano bullshit,” Sybelle said. “The guy is too good.”
“Hey, I never said that I want a quick-draw contest. He’s the one fixated on taking my scalp to show he’s the baddest sniper around. That ego is forcing him to stay put instead of hauling ass.” Kyle sat on the floor, with his legs crossed and his M40A1 resting in the crook of his right arm. “I just want to kill the bastard any way we can.”
Sybelle, down on one knee, brushed some hair back from her eyes. She was sweating, and it was still morning. “You’re not going to play fair?”
“Nope. Never happen. As much as I definitely want to personally blow him away, we have a lot of other gadgets in our toolbox.”
When he explained his plan, Sybelle relayed the orders back to the task force.
The big armored force that had been moving awkwardly suddenly fell into exact positions and nosed casually into the village streets, heading in to secure the area, disarm the remaining house lined with explosives, and retrieve the bodies of its dead soldiers. Sporadic small arms fire whanged off the thick armor plate and was answered with booming cannons and machine guns.
Fifty thousand feet overhead, a strange-looking toothpick of an aircraft received new commands from its controller on the ground at Balad Air Base and tipped over to descend to a lower altitude. The MQ-9 Reaper hunter-killer unmanned aerial vehicle had been on station for nine hours and had plenty of fuel left. It wore a pair of GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided six-hundred-pound smart bombs beneath its wings.
“LET’S DO IT,” KYLE said. “You go high and paint the building, and I stay down on the dirt to draw his attention.”
Sybelle gave him a long look. “Take it easy out there, pardner. And remember we have exactly fifteen minutes, not a second more. Do not go in that building.” Then she rolled through a side window and was gone.
Kyle gave her a minute’s head start and then went out the back door, hooked a left, and ran across the road and into a doorway. The rumble of the approaching tanks and Bradleys shook the stones on the surrounding streets, and Kyle used that to mask the noise of breaking windows and jumping to the adjoining house. Juba’s hideout was no more than a thousand yards away, an easy shot for either of them.
As planned, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle suddenly came around a corner on the far side of the building, scraped alongside it in passing, and then screamed down the street at high speed, crunching over an automobile parked in its way. Kyle ran to another building on the right-hand side of the street and dove through the door. Good diversion. Juba had to feel the hard whack of the armored vehicle against the side of his house. Surprise the enemy. Force him to conform to your plan.
As soon as the Bradley passed, Sybelle lobbed a smoke grenade down from the roof of a nearby building, and it bounced once in the street before igniting. Kyle let the gray blossom smolder and spread, then sprinted back across and climbed a low wall. He was about eight hundred yards away now. Close enough. He went inside the building and spent time clearing both floors and checking his watch. He had less than ten minutes left.
He pushed an eating table close to the rear wall opposite the window facing up the street and began stacking up a pile of pillows, then fronting it with overturned furniture to break up any regular lines. The sun was on the back side of the building, at an angle that did neither sniper any good, other than keeping them obscured in darkness.
Kyle pulled up a solid wood chair behind the table, sat down, and found a comfortable and firm rest for his sniper rifle, with the muzzle poking through the latticework of debris. He pulled the weapon back, checked the load, and pushed it forward again. His eye went to the scope.
Sybelle’s progress had been easier. After throwing the smoke grenade, she took a roundabout route over rooftops and through houses, then angled back to the target zone. An Apache gunship hovered a few blocks away, securing her flanks and back. No one shot at her.
She went prone when she reached a rooftop on the left side of Juba’s location, cleared it for safety, and clicked her radio as the helicopter swung into a new protective position.
“Good to go,” she said. A double click meant that Kyle had heard her message and was also in position.
Putting her rifle to her left side and laying her pistol within easy reach on the right, Sybelle removed a small monocular from a rubberized carrying case. Since she had been working as Kyle’s spotter, she had packed along the laser rangefinder, which now had another use.
She edged her eyes above the top of the small revetment running along the edge of the roof and had a clear view of the cream-colored target house. Bringing up the monocular, she focused and pushed the switch to activate an invisible laser beam, which bounced off the sturdy target house and came back to the electronics packet with an exact reading. She secured it into a firm position. “Target is painted,” she reported, and at Balat Air Base, the controller linked the information to the circling Reaper UAV, which then descended another ten thousand feet. From that point on, Sybelle’s laser was married to the Reaper’s guidance system. Where the point of the laser rested, the bombs would hit.
“Confirming that target is lit and weapon is armed,” came the voice from Balat. “Three minutes.”
Juba let his breathing slow and felt his heart beating normally in his chest, not thumping with excitement. This was his house. This was his safe zone. And he was Juba! He was the Sword of the Prophet, and he intended to become an even sharper sword by brewing the terrible poison gas! He let the scope run down the street to where the American troops and vehicles surrounded the other house of explosives. They had gone in and nothing had happened, so the trap had not been sprung. Both the triggerman and the commander were probably dead by now, but that was beside the point.
Kyle Swanson might be somewhere in that milling crowd of American soldiers, and while Juba could have shot several of them with ease, the only person he wanted in his crosshairs was his old nemesis, Shake. Since Swanson always liked to be in on the action, maybe he was down there checking out the strange bomb.
Juba’s trigger finger tightened momentarily when a figure in black walked across the scope, but it wasn’t Swanson. He eased off and kept searching, facing the target zone, in his hide, waiting like a patient spider.
No, Swanson would not be down there. He was stalking, coming closer. The unexpected, noisy passing of the Bradley and then the smoke grenade was enough confirmation. Up in one of those many windows facing him on a street filled with buildings and homes? Low on the ground beneath a bunch of junk? A doorway? A shadow? He moved the scope slowly across the most likely danger zones.
Swanson studied the various openings in the Juba building. The shit-bird knew his business and could be in any one of those places except on the roof, where the helicopter would have taken him out. Slow and steady scan, top to bottom, left to right. He couldn’t fire without a target because the first shot would give away his position and draw a return bullet in instant retaliation.
The radio spoke to him again. “One minute.” Out of time. He could put down the rifle and let the bomb take care of it, but hell, he did have some pride invested in this hunt to the death. He cursed himself for even thinking about something that ridiculous. Who is the better sniper? Horseshit. Nobody cares. Whoever walks away is better. Keep the scope moving. Nothing. Nothing.
Juba thought about saying a prayer. No. Stay focused. The butt stock of the rifle was cool against his right cheek. Plenty of time to pray later. Where would I be hiding if I was Shake? That window looked a bit curious. The others had ordinary lines in the rooms behind them. The shadows in this one seemed jagged and jumbled, as if a storm had passed through. A hide?
The impersonal voice in Kyle’s headset said, “Weapon free. Weapon released.” The big GBU-12 fell away, and the Reaper jumped higher at the sudden subtraction of weight and then curled back onto its course. There was no pilot getting tired, and the controllers at the base would simply swap off to a fresh shift as soon as this job was done and the UAV would perform some other job, somewhere else.
The bomb was in free fall, with big fins on the rear providing lift and the four smaller fins on the front allowing the guidance unit to steer it. The internal guidance system locked on to the laser beam that Sybelle had affixed to the side of the house and transitioned the control services from simple ballistics into a precise line-of-sight flight path. The bomb twisted into a smooth spiral motion, gaining speed as it plummeted nose down toward the target.
Kyle took up the slack on the trigger and held it so as not to require that extra fraction of a second if he found the target. Then he saw dark against darker in the small hole left by a missing cinder block almost at ground level. There! A movement! A rifle muzzle was on him!
Their rifles fired at almost the same moment, but Kyle had been a hair faster.
His 7.62 mm bullet went through the mouse hole opening and struck Juba in the left cheek just as the terrorist pulled the trigger of his own weapon. Kyle’s round bored in straight along the jawline, taking out a line of teeth and a chunk of the left side of Juba’s face before shattering the jawbone and exiting.
The return shot had been deflected at the moment of firing, and Juba’s bullet crashed into the wall just above Kyle’s head.
In the mouse hole, Juba rolled away from the jarring pain, feeling as if his head had been torn off. Kill shot, he thought. He toppled into the spider hole, fighting to remain conscious to pull the wooden door into position. When it fell into place, he lay back with his hands holding his destroyed face and agony racking his body as blood rushed through his open wound. He could see the light of the tunnel beckoning, and began to crawl.
The heavy, speeding bomb smashed through the roof and penetrated the ceilings before the warhead detonated in the kitchen. Everything in the immediate vicinity was vaporized in a gigantic explosion, and the concussion blew the walls apart. Support beams and interior walls were torn to pieces, and the house collapsed into rubble, with thick layers of wood and dirt and junk piling up over the spider hole, sealing it shut and totally obscuring it from view. At the bottom lay a shredded computer.
Juba, bleeding heavily, was thrown against the walls of the narrow tunnel like a doll by the explosion. His head, already savaged, now felt like it was being kicked from his body, and his eardrums ruptured and began to bleed. His mouth and eyes filled with dirt, and when he cleared his vision, he saw that the frail walls of the tunnel were giving way and the light was disappearing. He put a hand to his breast and felt the slight bump of the memory stick secure in the pocket as the world collapsed about him.
Down the street, Kyle had been rocked from his chair by the explosion but quickly got up and went to the window. Fire had broken out in the wreckage of the house, and flames licked out of the mouse hole as a curtain of smoke climbed out of the rubble. He was satisfied. If he had not killed Juba, then the bomb had obliterated him. And with Juba gone, so was the formula and the overwhelming threat of the poison gas. Probably. He had to believe that.
Kyle put down his rifle and took a deep breath, staring at the scene of destruction. “Burn in hell, motherfucker,” he said.