SEARCH. EVALUATE. LISTEN. The game had begun. Swanson had to cover about the length of one and a half football fields, and while speed was important, doing it right was more important. He was out in the open for God and everybody to see, slithering forward, his heartbeat slow and his eyes constantly moving.
Just because the village was quiet did not mean that no one would be up and around. It could all change in an instant, but for now the only sounds were the scuffling of animals within the walls around the houses. Rocks slid beneath him as he crawled, and the weight of his pack pressed him down. The M-16 was cradled in his arms, and Excalibur was in its drag bag, sliding along behind him, attached to a D-ring on his web gear.
It took twelve minutes to cross the open space and reach the body, where he stopped to take a careful look around, checking likely places where danger might hide, points from which a threat might emerge. He had to be lucky every time he moved. The enemy only had to be lucky once to detect him. He was burning minutes, but not wasting them.
The glazed eyes of the guard pointed up at the night sky, but Swanson checked the pulse anyway and found none. It was a boy, no more than sixteen, probably a product of the radical religious schools who had joined the war for his true faith and paid with his short life, the end coming so fast that he had not even felt the shock. Tough shit, kid. Kyle jerked the corpse into a sitting position, stood, and pulled the guard upright against the side of the Zeus.
Propping him up with one hand, he peeled off the long strips of duct tape pressed along his uniform and secured the body to the hooks, rails, and protrusions on the big weapon. A belt of tape went around the waist and was tied to a heavy ammunition box. With the tape taking the weight, he crossed the ankles and taped them in place, crossed the dangling arms, and tied them at wrists. Swanson draped the AK-47 over the boy’s shoulders. The head lolled forward, which was fine, and he made a few adjustments to the clothes so as to obscure the bloodstains. Swanson took two steps back. To any distant passerby, the kid would appear to be dozing on the job, standing but sleeping.
The sniper checked the area again. Still cool. He knelt on the ground, reached into his pack, and pulled out a claymore mine, then carefully broke it open to get at the small ball bearings packed inside. He gathered a handful and rolled them, one by one, down a barrel of the Zeus, repeating the procedure until all four barrels were packed with dozens of tiny steel balls. Then he inserted the little rolls of C-4 explosive he had molded earlier. Each roll had a detonator. He opened the butt of his M-16 and took out the four-piece cleaning rod, which he twisted together into a single long, thin shaft that he thrust into each barrel to compact the mixture.
Time. Time. Tick-tock. Keep going. The voice was insistent. Swanson’s senses were honed to the rhythms of the sleeping village. This was their everyday life. Nothing was supposed to happen here, particularly at night. It was like a base camp for the jihad fighters, and routine gave them an illusion of safety. Many people had washed their clothes to get rid of the day’s dirt, and now the various shapes of cloth hung on lines behind the houses to dry overnight, shifting slowly in the low breeze and providing Swanson with an extra shield from sight.
He moved into the village, to the little store he had watched throughout the day. A low wall surrounded most of the two-story building, with a rollaway gate locked across the front. When open for business, the gate was pushed back to allow customers to wander in and out. The owners lived upstairs.
Kyle went over the rear wall and dropped into a crouch, pausing long enough to drop his pack and rifles inside the yard. From a lightweight vinyl holster near his left shoulder, he pulled a silenced match-grade.45-caliber pistol with an infrared laser scope, a competition-class weapon that carried an expanded magazine of fifteen rounds.
The front door of the store was locked, but a side window stood open to catch the night coolness. Swanson looked inside with his night vision goggles to avoid kicking anything, and then went over the windowsill. The pungent smell of spices was overwhelming. He did a 360-degree check of the room, holding his pistol in a firing position. Shelves, crates, a table with two chairs, a cooler in the corner, where an electric motor hummed. A stove was along the back wall beside a big cutting board on some cabinets. A carcass hung from a hook, waiting to be butchered. Cans were stacked in neat rows.
A plate of small cakes sat in a bowl on the main counter and Swanson wolfed some down, and it was the best food in the world, although he had no idea what it was. Taking a chance, he moved to the cooler and lifted the lid only a millimeter at a time to avoid making it creak, and a wave of chilly air rose into his face. Bottles of juice, water, and soft drinks were lined up like little soldiers and he pulled one out. The cold water went down better than the cakes, and he drank until he was ready to puke. After hydrating himself, he topped off his canteens. Water came first. He could not live without it. Then he grabbed an orange juice drink and gulped it down for the electrolytes, vitamins, and nutrients. It ain’t Florida OJ, but it’s better than nothing.
With his thirst slaked, he checked the available food, still able to read labels in the crisp green light of the night vision glasses. The shopping list was short but definite, and he fought the urge to belly-up on food. He had a roll of Ziploc bags in a pocket and loaded them with things that were small, easy to carry, and required no preparation. Dried figs and dates were in trays, in measured little plastic bags with twist ties, and he stuffed some into his Ziplocs, the sides of which had been strengthened with duct tape. He hated dates, but fruit was fuel. Flat cakes of day-old pita bread were taken for their starch, along with the peculiarly Middle East favorite, the ever-present Mars bars, with chocolate to provide sugar and energy. Finally, he grabbed a few boxes of unscented baby wipe tissues, one of the best things going for desert hygiene. One more look around and he decided that was enough. I’m not packing for a vacation, for cryin’ out loud.
The luminous dial of his watch showed that eleven more minutes had elapsed, so he packed his goodies and went back out through the window. He gathered the rest of his gear and scaled the wall. Slow, warned the voice. But go!
Swanson reassembled everything, took some deep breaths, and turned the NVGs to his next target, the house where the fighters nested. Nothing stirred, not even a fucking mouse.
He crossed the street and stalked completely around the wall of the house, peering over the wall and into the shadows. Nothing. He hoisted himself onto the barrier and spider-dropped down the other side into the space between the wall and the right side of the house. A window was open, and he could hear the grunts of sleeping men. At least two were snoring. He had counted at least eight men going into the house, and guessed there were probably a few more, each having a gun within reach, and he planned to kill them all.
His first move was to check the inner perimeter, and he again stashed the pack and took out the pistol. Holding it in his right hand, Swanson flattened against the wall of the house and slid in a sidestep to the first corner on his right. He did a quick peek around and saw the dark backyard, crisscrossed by clotheslines laden with tunics and robes. With careful strides, he turned that corner and stepped along the rear wall to the next one, where he again stopped and slowly leaned his face around the edge.
A guard with an AK-47 on a shoulder strap, who had been obscured by the drying clothes when Kyle had studied the place, was staring straight back at him, face-to-face, within a foot of each other. The guard’s eyes went wide with surprise at the goggle-eyed creature that had appeared before him out of the night. He had one hand on the stock of his AK-47 and started to raise it at the same time Kyle brought up his pistol and pulled the trigger. The gunfire sounded like the explosion of an ammunition dump to Swanson, and he felt and smelled the heavy warmth of blood wash on his head and chest, and pieces of flesh and bone plaster his arms and face. I’m hit! It’s over! I failed! Kyle Swanson staggered backward and fell to the ground.