On Scope: A Sniper Novel

by Jack Coughlin

  Djahid closed his eyes. “Would Spain really do it? Drop out of the Eurozone?”

  “The Spanish state is beyond the edge of economic crisis; it is now facing slow suicide if something is not done. We offer salvation and a chance to get out from under the greedy thumbs of the interfering Europeans who are telling them how to run their own country.”

  “By offering them thirty pieces of silver and Muslim rule.”

  “Yes,” said his father. “The government was already under plenty of pressure to get its economy in order, and then the United States openly stepped in to help the Europeans. Washington abandoned neutrality and snubbed its old friend by coming publicly off the sidelines and getting in the game. That is the reason, as you know, that the Six decided during a meeting in Geneva to give them a stern warning of the consequences for such arrogant interference.”

  “You assume that the United States will abandon its opposition to any withdrawal by Spain from the European Union because of our single attack? That is a dangerous assumption, Father.”

  “Perhaps,” said the older man. “Perhaps not. They probably will need some further persuasion.”

  ROTA, SPAIN

  THE MARINE BODIES had been transferred from the civilian facilities in Barcelona to U.S. military jurisdiction in Rota to be readied for the long journey back to Washington in individual gunmetal gray caskets draped in American flags. Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson, the official escort who signed the necessary papers, stayed to himself, a quiet man on a somber mission, stoic and enduring. Rain and wind pounded the big hangar that protected a mammoth C-5M of the U.S. Air Mobility Command that had been selected to fly the Atlantic with the grim cargo. The Super Galaxy was too much plane for such a small airlift, but was a token of respect. The bodies would be unloaded with utmost honors at Andrews.

  Swanson had a quick dinner alone at the NCO club, a bland steak and tasteless vegetables, then locked himself away in the assigned guest quarters and read all of the personnel files again before putting the folders on a table and climbing into bed. The weather around the Med was to clear tomorrow, but it did not really matter, for the Super Galaxy would take off at 0900, storm or no storm. He felt hollow and empty inside, and after the visit with Becky, he had no emotions left for anyone else, particularly none for himself. He tossed in the bed and pounded the pillows in failed attempts to get comfortable enough to trap some sleep, only to awake in the darkness when a drum roll of thunder shook the thin walls of the building. He got out of bed, sat at a table, and stared through the window at blinding slashes of lightning and a sky that churned with clouds, and in the early morning hours, he saw a figure looking back at him while standing easily in a narrow little boat that was immobile in the tempest.

  “I was wondering if you would show up,” Swanson said.

  The arms and grinning skull-like face were streaked with blood, and the dark robe flapped open in the wind, exposing the yellowed skeleton of the image Swanson’s imagination seemed to always thrust forward when crises neared. He called him the Boatman. “And here I am.”

  There were six figures seated in the boat, and Kyle recognized the faces of the dead Marines. “I don’t understand what is happening.”

  “You don’t have to understand,” replied the Boatman. “You just have to kill.”

  “But who? And why?”

  The Boatman gestured easily at the half-dozen bodies. “Here are six good reasons why you must carry out your next mission. I do not have to explain everything to you. I just dropped by to pick up this lifeless cargo.”

  Behind the shimmering image, Kyle saw a break in the storm clouds, and through that he glimpsed a distant fiery shore. The foul reek of sulphur came to him. “Are you taking them to hell? They don’t deserve that.”

  “No. I am just the ferry service. Others make those Doomsday decisions. Do you want to come along tonight? I see the pistol on the table beside your milk. Were you thinking of it? Plenty of room.”

  “I always keep my weapon handy, so, no, I’m not going to commit suicide. Someday I might have to ride with you, but I will not make it easy.”

  The shrill laugh painted over the noise of a thunderclap. “Yes. Sooner or later, you must. Everybody does. But now to this vexatious uncertainty about what lies ahead for you. My six souls tonight represent a debt that you have been chosen to repay. It is a serious obligation, and you may not emerge from this experience as the same man you are tonight.”

  “I have been through a lot, but I am still here. I follow orders.”

  “Just my point,” said the Boatman, showing the upper bridge of rotten teeth. “Suppose you must step beyond that safety point of being under the protective wing of your government? A very thin line separates defending your country from outright murder.”

  “Is that what they want me to do?”

  The Boatman stirred his long oar, and the skiff began to move away. “Your enemies do not care about murdering innocent people. Do you?” He laughed again. “Of course you don’t. You are my trusted stone killer, and I will be back soon to harvest your new victims.”

  “I’m no murderer. Fuck off!”

  Continuing to look back at Kyle over his shoulder, the Boatman glided from sight as the storm closed tight, evil laughter trilling behind him.

  5

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  THE TRIP FROM SPAIN seemed the longest in Kyle Swanson’s career, achingly alone in the giant cargo compartment of the C-5M with the flag-draped coffins strapped down in two rows of three each. He sat or he paced, drank coffee or rubbed a hand over the fields of white stars at the left-shoulder positions of the caskets, but he never dozed off, for he was keeping vigil, and the clock stood still. By the time the plane landed at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, Swanson was furious with the people who had killed these men, and almost as angry at the man who had forced him on this terrible solitary assignment. He had never felt so alone and had worked himself into a black mood.

  He stepped down when the ramp was dropped and blinked in the bright sunlight, facing an assembly of Marines drawn up at attention—the body-bearer teams from the Headquarters Barracks at Eighth and I in Washington. Help at last. Crisp in dress blues, with white covers and gloves, the ceremonial experts would transfer the remains into the military mortuary, where the victims would be officially identified through dental records and fingerprints and prepared for burial. He traded salutes with the officer in charge, who said, “Sorry for our loss.” Kyle moved aside, and they filed aboard.

  The voice of a woman cut through the fog in his head. “This was cruel, to make you do this. An entire honor guard should have pulled this duty. Our general can be such an asshole.” The small figure pulled him to her and forced his head down to her shoulder with a gentle lock of her right arm, knocking his utility cover askew.

  “Coastie,” he said and managed a slight smile. He had not seen Beth Ledford since she had begun the rigorous training needed to qualify as a member of Task Force Trident. She had come out of nowhere as a low-level U.S. Coast Guard shooter and had been his unwanted partner on a tricky mission into a secret underground fortress in Pakistan. Although pint-sized and weighing only 115 pounds, Beth had proven herself to be the best natural shooter that Kyle had ever seen. She could be as mean as a Rottweiler with a sore tooth, and he had watched her kill terrorists without hesitation. Not to mention that she had saved his life. Swanson had a lot of time for Ledford, known as “Coastie” within Trident. Back in those days, she had been a petty officer second class, but now she wore the blue Air Force uniform, with the silver railroad tracks of a captain on her shoulders and the garrison cap tilted on her head.

  She disengaged and straightened her jacket. “General Middleton sent me out to pick you up. The fake uniform is my cover to help things run smoothly around here; part of my training, you know, learn to lie like a thief? Get in the car and I’ll take you in. It’s good to see you back home, Kyle. Must have been a hell of a trip.”

  She drove the
sedan with her seat all the way forward and raised high, and kept up a steady patter about her adventures as a little blonde trying to fit in among tough-guy warriors in the classroom and out on the training field. “I finished the explosives course, then they bumped me for a while into the Marine Corps Officer Candidates School at Quantico, which was boring. Running around the woods with the snake-eaters down at Benning in Ranger training was exhausting, but I didn’t have to finish first, I just had to finish an abbreviated version, just like with the OCS.”

  “Sounds about right. Nobody can live long enough to go through all of the schools,” Kyle said, leaning back, closing his eyes. “Our people just take the cream. On-the-job training is the best for us, but you have to learn the basics.”

  Once on the Beltway, she opened up the speed and charged into the fast lane. “The one thing that set me apart from making friends with the other troops was that I wasn’t allowed to shoot with the rest of them. I put in some range time with private instructors, but never with others around. Caught a lot of crap from my classmates.”

  That brought a laugh from Swanson. “You are bad enough for morale among the hoo-ah boys just being in their midst, Coastie. They paint by numbers and you are an artist. Watching you shoot would have crushed too many egos. Anyway, you don’t have to prove anything to anyone, and it’s better for people not to know about your skill sets. You are a secret weapon, and those other guys don’t yet have the clearance to learn anything about you. You have an official rank yet?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know what I am anymore. I have a closet full of different uniforms and a box of insignia and another box of false identities, and they make me wear something different to pretend to be somebody else almost every day. Master Gunny Dawkins claims I should be a Marine second lieutenant because nothing is as useless and expendable as a butterbar. I don’t know what the pay scale is, but the checks are pretty generous, better than a lieutenant and much better than what I got in the Coast Guard. Right now I’m on office duty to learn what they do back here. Dawkins takes me shooting three times a week, and I enjoy hanging out with Sybelle, but I want some real field work, Kyle. I am not an office intern.”

  Kyle yawned and stretched. “Careful what you wish for, Coastie. This whole thing, with me bringing the bodies back? Something is coming up.” He closed his eyes and fell asleep while Coastie charged on around the Interstate 495 loop, following a narrowing complex of routes until she was crossing the Key Bridge.

  “Wake up, Gunny Swanson,” she said quietly. She had seen how Swanson could go from sound asleep to a fighting posture in a blink. In the tripwire mood he was locked in right now, it would not be wise to make him even jumpier. “We’re in Georgetown, and your place is two blocks ahead.”

  He came awake, and the eyes were still cold. “Yeah. Got it. What’s the drill from here?”

  “You rest up. A briefing is set for tomorrow morning at nine o’clock in the Trident office with the general and some other people.”

  “Who?”

  “I dunno. I’m just a dumb lieutenant, or something.”

  “You are a spook now, Coastie, so you will be whatever we need you to be. Lose the attitude. You will get more than your share of action when the time is right.”

  * * *

  A FIVE-MILE RUN shortly after getting up at seven helped burn away the cobwebs, but not the feeling of being used. At first, he ran at an easy pace, winding among other early birds, men jogging in baggy shorts, and women in colorful spandex with their hair up in ponytails that swished with the motion of their hips, everybody out getting healthy along the avenues where the cherry trees were in riotous bloom. It was another exciting day in which they could put plastic-coated credentials around their necks and go be somebody and pull the levers that operate the United States of America.

  Kyle stepped up the stride, and his ankles and knees took the added pressure, making the burn. He didn’t need this bureaucratic bullshit and thought that maybe it was the general’s way of finally making him want out of Trident. Middleton had disliked him from the first day they had met, even before the Syria incident, and he had discovered Kyle’s secret habit of decompressing after a firefight by going off on his own to endure a brief case of nervousness, thinking about the carnage he had wrought. Swanson had been known during his sniper days as “Shaky” by his friends, and Middleton tried to get him cashiered out of the Corps for being unfit to fight. It was one of the ultimate ironies that Kyle and Middleton had partnered to help create Trident. Swanson had thought they had become friends along the way. Tension knotted his shoulders as he ran.

  So he thinks I’m over the hill? Can’t handle the pressure anymore? Was the plane ride his way of breaking me by making me unable to separate my personal feelings from my professional job? Is Coastie the new go-to shooter? Did I do something to piss off the Joint Chiefs and the White House? He can fire me from Trident, but not out of the Corps. I’ll quit if he tries.

  A long shower followed the run, then a slow breakfast and a careful reading of the Washington Post—very little space given to the deathly situation in Spain, yesterday’s news—and Swanson decided to give the full treatment to the meeting and state his case boldly and defend himself with everything he had. Angrily, he gave his black shoes a buff, put on a fresh green-and-khaki service uniform, and clipped the rack of ribbons to his chest, including the pale blue Congressional Medal of Honor. There was no longer any need to be subtle.

  He was out the door and once again into the scurrying crush of Washingtonians. Nobody noticed him as he sidestepped through GWU students texting as they walked blindly, then caught the Metro in the clean and cavernous bowels of the Foggy Bottom station and was hauled past the Rosslyn and Arlington Cemetery stops, rocking with the motion of the car and the synchronized lurching of passengers.

  The best subway system in America never had to worry about funding, because almost every rider aboard lived on the dime of the federal taxpayer, in posts from the White House to Capitol Hill and the lobbyland of K Street. The result of having the influential commuters meant that the Metro was not only clean, cheap, safe, and convenient, eliminating the need to fight traffic and accomplish the almost impossible task of finding a parking place. I don’t have to worry about funding either. I have options other than being a pawn in some of Middleton’s games. Boy, do I have options.

  All the way over, the feeling stayed with Swanson that he was among a lot of people but was not part of them. This time yesterday, he was alone in an airplane with a half-dozen bodies. These commuters were riding the subway to work, thinking nothing had changed in the world. Get a grip, Swanson demanded of himself. Emotion is not your friend.

  He surfaced at the Pentagon and made his way into the section that was renovated after the 9/11 terrorist attack. The Trident office showed nothing unusual on the outside, but a retina scan was needed to get through the locked titanium door, and the whole place was encased in steel beams, with blast-resistant windows two inches thick that looked out onto the Rotary Road memorial park.

  * * *

  KYLE’S ARRIVAL in the offices of Task Force Trident was no cause for excitement, for Swanson did not work on a leash. He would go away for a while, then come back, again and again, sometimes little more than a visiting and somewhat menacing shadow. He gave brief hellos to the rest of the Trident team of Freedman, Summers, and Dawkins and saw Coastie working at a computer terminal. She was in the uniform of an Army Spec-5, the BDU sleeves rolled up, and she rolled her eyes with a look that said, “Don’t even ask.”

  He knocked once, stepped into Middleton’s private office and closed the door, and came to attention, but ready to jump all over his commanding general. “Permission to speak freely, sir.” The voice was hard.

  “Denied. Pull up a chair, Gunny, and tell me what you know about scrimshaw.” The two-star general was totally relaxed in his own chair.

  “Sir. If I may—”

  “Denied, I said. Now listen up. Back in the
day, much of the world was lit by fires fueled by whale oil. Those whaler-sailors would go out for months in frail ships, stick some harpoons in Moby-Dick, and boil the blubber to extract the oil. It was a big business at the time. Some of those old whale bones in museums still leak oil today.”

  Swanson’s face was red with impatience. “I want to tell you, General—”

  “Then some of the sailormen would take the teeth and spend months carving them with their knives, turning ordinary chunks of bone into incredible pieces of art. That’s scrimshaw. It is expensive.” He settled back in his chair. “You’re all dressed up like you’re going to a party. What’s on your mind?”

  “You want me out of Trident, don’t you?”

  Middleton dodged the question with a question of his own. “Do you trust me, Gunny?”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  “Do you like me?”

  “That’s different. You want honest or bullshit?”

  “Do you believe I would give you an unlawful order?”

  “The law is an awfully fuzzy area, sir, and can be bent like a twig. No, you wouldn’t do that.”

  “My grandchildren like me. My wife still likes me.”

  “They don’t know you like I do, and you didn’t make them bring six dead Marines across the Atlantic. If you want to fire me, go ahead and quit playing around.”

  “And why did I do that, Gunny Swanson? Why did I get your sorry ass down from Germany and to the still-smoldering crime scene and then onto that plane?”