KYLE SNAPPED BACK INTO consciousness, flat on his back. He took a deep breath, surprised that he wasn’t dead. The air he pulled into his lungs was fresh and cool and reviving, and he lay still as his brain stitched together wisps of memories about what the hell had just happened. Being right-handed saved his life.
The brief, deadly confrontation was nothing but a quick-draw contest. The guard had been holding the stock of the AK-47, but not with his finger on the trigger, and hesitated for a heartbeat before trying to bring it to bear on Swanson. Professionals do not hesitate, and Kyle put the barrel of his pistol right against the man’s eye and double-tapped him. Two big bullets at point-blank range totally destroyed the head.
Swanson roamed his hands across his own body and felt no pain, no wounds. The gore covering his face and chest was the blood, brains, and bone fragments of the other man, whose skull had exploded, and the unexpected concussion had scrambled Kyle’s senses for a few seconds. He pushed onto his elbows and wiped his face. The guard lay dead at his feet.
Where are the others? The whole village had to be awakened by those explosions! He grabbed the pistol that had fallen by his side while his befuddled mind realized the guard had not shouted, had not fired his rifle, and Kyle’s own silenced pistol had spoken with only two burps, quick and quiet except for the weapon recycling. There had been no detonations at all, and the great sounds he imagined that had been heard by everyone were only his gun firing almost next to his ear. He and the guard had both fallen where they stood, but everyone else slept on. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and poured water from a canteen over his face for a quick cleaning while he caught his breath.
Enough of this recovering shit! Get back to work! The inner voice, immune from physical hurt, was pissed, and the minutes were slipping by like desert sand.
The shadow of the house loomed like a big castle, and Swanson dropped the pack and stuffed eight blocks of C-4 into his pockets. He had guessed right back at the helicopter crash by topping off with C-4. Before the night was over, he would need a lot of explosives to help him survive.
He found a handful of pencil-thin detonators that had small timers like a digital watch and spent a moment activating them all to blow at exactly the same time. He needed at least an hour, with extra time for unforeseen circumstances, but he wanted to keep as much darkness as possible to help his escape. He set all of the timers to go off at exactly 0300.
He attached the first of the six-inch-long blocks of gummy explosive to the corner of the house where he had had the shootout, pushing the clay tight, like a kid playing with Silly Putty, and sticking in two of the detonators, just to be sure. The second block was placed just below the single window on the left side of the house, and he repeated the pattern all the way around until C-4 was in place on each corner and in the middle of each wall, all molded to force the explosions inward. The detonators blinked silently, and Kyle was sweating hard by the time he was finished, drops of water falling into his eyes. He struggled back into his pack, gathered his weapons, and stole enough laundry from the clothesline to outfit himself and the general.
This was going to be overkill. The simultaneous explosions would destroy the supports of the house and collapse it on the sleeping men, then the surrounding outer wall would bounce the concussion wave right back toward the house instead of letting the blast effect roll away. It was time-consuming, but the house was the roost of his biggest source of potential opposition, the jihadists, and to wipe them out in a single attack was worth the risk of time.
It would also be a hell of a diversion, and Swanson had to be gone before the place lit up like a space shuttle launch.
It had taken him another eight minutes to plant the C-4, and he was at the wall at 0153. That left only another hour and seven minutes to do what he had to do and get the hell out of Dodge, including the ten minutes he had built into the timetable for the inevitable visit by that black cloud asshole Mr. Murphy. He ran through a mental checklist: The guard. The Zeus. The groceries. The fighters. Time to go.
He pulled himself onto the wall, rolled over, and almost landed on a goat. It jumped back, then stood facing him, shaggy and white, big ears, the lower jaw chewing something and the dark eyes staring without curiosity or fright. Two stubby horns had been cut off. Behind it was another goat that looked exactly the same. If they panicked, they might awaken somebody, and he couldn’t shoot both of them at the same time. Swanson stood stone still and let the animals take a good look at him. They walked away.
Kyle headed the other way, down the street, sticking close to the walls. Time to parlez-vous with a Frenchman.