On Scope: A Sniper Novel

by Jack Coughlin

  Real tests lay ahead. Security rings around the remaining three targets would be tightened, and those principals would never again be as foolish as Bourihane by taking time for unguarded relaxation.

  The news of the Bourihane takedown was smeared all over the Internet. Aboard the Vagabond, Kyle clicked through the links one by one while a large flat-screen television recessed into the bulkhead showed live stand-up reporting from grim newsies in Paris. Pictures of the victim were shown frequently: a stylish female financier who had engineered billions of dollars in deals around the globe during a meteoric career that had been cut short by murder in a ladies’ bathroom. Two bodyguards were also brutally slain, and the suspects were beautiful women.

  “Seems you lot have swatted quite the hornet’s nest,” observed Sir Jeff. “People appear quite upset. Biggest thing in Paris since the unfortunate automobile accident that took our lovely Princess Diana.”

  “Bourihane was nothing but a killer who wore lipstick,” replied Swanson.

  “Yes. But she was also an important economist, although her political views were radical Islamist. All geniuses have flaws. The Muslim attempt to take over Spain is an ambitious project, and her brainpower was crucial.”

  “Lucky for us, the newspeople are interviewing mostly European economists, who are boring. The story doesn’t have attention-grabbing names, and the audiences in America will click away from it after two minutes unless it can be carried by the mystery models and rumors of fashion wars. The publicity storm won’t last long if it is confined to the BBC and Al Jazeera.” Kyle glanced at another story.

  Jeff picked a triangle of toast and stuck it into a bowl of spicy artichoke dip. “Interpol won’t be distracted, and neither will the French police, nor the Spaniards. Three members of the Group of Six being killed will not be considered a coincidence, and will be laid at America’s doorstep no matter what. You can wager that the intelligence services in all of the Muslim nations are paying attention.”

  Swanson closed the laptop computer. “It doesn’t matter. The mission from the start has been to take out six targets. We’re halfway there.”

  “Any worries, Kyle, knowing the desk is stacked against you from here on out?” Jeff crunched the toast thoroughly, then had a sip of wine.

  “No. As far as I’m concerned, those next three are already dead.”

  “Don’t forget your basic infantry training, Kyle. You have already taken an important objective, so what still needs to be done? Do you think the other side is just going to sit there and let you roll over them?”

  “We have the momentum, Jeff. They can guess, but as of right now they don’t know who we are, and have no proof. Therefore, they have no choice but to play defense.”

  “Do not let your personal feelings for your fallen comrades cloud your tactical mind,” Jeff warned. “You are in a holding pattern right now, regrouping and planning another strike. All of the potential targets will be on high alert. Do … not … rush.”

  He rose with the help of his polished mahogany cane and hobbled across the room and out the door. “You stay here and think about it. I’m going to join the ladies on deck, where I understand that Coastie is wearing a scandalously tiny bikini.”

  Swanson took a pull on his beer, kicked back in a soft leather recliner, and closed his eyes and pondered Jeff’s caution. The old guy had been through a lot of fights and knew what he was talking about. This mission had reached beyond the anticipated and normal eye-for-an-eye style of retribution on terrorism. In that, Trident had been spectacularly successful. The people who called the signals now found themselves on scope and had every reason to be worried.

  Both sides were committed. Swanson and Task Force Trident would remain as invisible as possible and continue the attack, while the Muslim investment schemers would rally their own forces, continue to present innocent faces to the public, and go about their bloody business of taking over a European nation.

  Battle was often like a ballet, with moves that had been honed by eons of war and were common to every fight. Prepare your forces, pick your point of attack, capture the objective, and immediately consolidate to meet a counterattack. The enemy would undoubtedly want to respond, but where? Against whom? How? Right now all they had was anger and a faceless enemy, terrorism in reverse. Trident had its shields up. Kyle slipped into a doze with a half-smile on his face.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  BRIGADIER GENERAL Alfred Coleman was back on Capitol Hill because Senator Jordan Monroe had demanded another meeting after Mademoiselle Bourihane was shot. Coleman sent a memo up the chain and received permission to go over and listen to the United States senator. Naturally, the general was to disclose nothing and report back. Wary of the second meeting, the one-star decided to take along a legal adviser from the Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps. A driver picked up Coleman and Captain Howell Andrews at the Pentagon, and the general briefed the captain as the driver dodged heavy tourist traffic by choosing the Arlington Memorial Bridge. He eventually deposited them at the southwest entrance of the Russell Senate Office Building.

  Douglas Jimenez, the senator’s chief of staff, was there to meet them on the stone stairs outside, and although he shook hands, his greeting was icy. “Senator Monroe is upset because he believes that you lied to him, General Coleman, and declines to meet with you again personally. So if you would dismiss your driver, we can just talk in the privacy of your car.”

  General Coleman’s normally placid face colored pink at the accusation and the brusque manner of the aide. Being called a liar and told to deal with an underling was a direct affront to his integrity, his rank, and his position, and he would not condone it. “Negative. I think I’ll just go back to the Pentagon. Tell your senator that I remain available at his convenience, and in the meantime, you can explain whatever the problem is to Captain Andrews here.”

  “Very well,” said Jimenez, seeing the fury and delighted to know that he had gotten under the general’s skin.

  Coleman stepped into the vehicle and told the driver to head back to the barn.

  “Nobody left here but us chickens, huh, Captain?” Jimenez laughed. “Come on. I’ll buy you a coffee and we’ll go over this thing lawyer to lawyer. It would eventually come down to us anyway.” There was a sidewalk café nearby, and they had beaten the lunch crowd so were able to get a table on the side.

  Captain Andrews, a short and stocky man not far beyond his law school years at the University of Arizona and his USAF-JAG training at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, already had the pallor of someone who did too much desk work. He got out a yellow legal pad, on which he had filled several sheets with notes, and clicked open his pen. “General Coleman briefed me on the way over, so I assume this is about the same subject.”

  “Yeah. Let’s make it Howell and Doug informally, since we’re probably going to be meeting a lot.” Jimenez wanted him at ease. “Last time, my senator directly asked your general if American troops were involved in some reprisals that seem to be going on in retaliation for the Barcelona terrorist incident. Your man said there were none. This latest murder of the woman in Paris knocks that into a cocked hat. Three members of the Group of Six. It’s you guys.”

  Howell flipped back a yellow page and read his scribbles. “The question was clumsily phrased, Doug, and ambiguous. Senator Monroe asked, quote, ‘Are uniformed American troops involved in what appear to be coordinated attacks by snipers on important Spanish civilians?’ The general said there were not. Uniformed was the way out, and he took it. The answer would have been the same anyway, because he really doesn’t know about any such operation.”

  Jimenez chuckled in appreciation. “So he taped the meeting. I imagine that a microphone could be hidden in all of that colorful spaghetti on his chest and never be seen.” He opened a window on his iPhone. “Then your general said, and I also quote, “The Pentagon has nothing to do with any reprisals that may or may not be under way.’”

  “Everybody records every
thing.” The captain returned the smile. “Makes our jobs easier when we start parsing the language. So let’s put our own recording devices on the table today.” They both switched on apps on their phones. “What do you want?”

  Doug Jimenez leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “It has come to us now from multiple sources that something is indeed going on over there, and that it probably involves the U.S. military. This new assassination of the woman economist in Paris extends the pattern of suspicious deaths of foreign nationals who apparently were directly connected to the Muslim offer of funds to the Madrid government. The senator is convinced you guys have secret boots on the ground over there, stomping on our alliances and working against our national interest.”

  “That’s a pretty big leap, Doug. I smell a fishing expedition.”

  “Naw, Howell. We’ve already got the big fish. It is called Task Force Trident, and contains a shark Marine sniper named Kyle Swanson.”

  “Never heard of them,” Howell Andrews honestly replied as he wrote down the names. “Anyway, what does any of this have to do with anything? We conduct black ops in a lot of places for a lot of reasons, and under a lot of code names.”

  “Here’s Swanson’s picture from back when he received the Congressional Medal of Honor. Downloaded it from Google this morning, but there is no background on him, not even a driver’s license. Every query is diverted to an ERROR message, and that means to me that his record has been scrubbed.” Doug Jimenez paused to drink some of his coffee.

  Andrews stopped writing. “Maybe you need to upgrade your telephone?”

  “Let me be clear,” said Doug. “We’re not talking about some drone strike in an isolated Afghan village. This apparently is a rogue operation that endangers global American interests.”

  “Rogue? You think the military is dodging civilian oversight? Preposterous. We don’t work that way. Sounds more like CIA, if it exists at all.”

  “Remember Marlon Brando’s crazy character, the mad Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now?” Doug Jimenez looked hard at the young man in the blue uniform and recited a line in his best hissing Brando voice. “We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow after cow. Village after village. Army after army.”

  “That was just a movie, Doug.”

  “Iraq and Afghanistan ruined a lot of people, Howell. So let’s find out if you’ve got a new Colonel Kurtz going bananas on you and carrying on his own private war with his own private army. What do we want specifically? Any and all documents pertaining to Task Force Trident, including internal discussions, e-mails and other electronic media records, and the personnel jacket of this guy Swanson. The senator is willing to let the military deal quietly with this out-of-control unit, as long as we have access to ensure there is a thorough investigation.”

  “So you want us to crack open black operations for you and hand over everything? Get real. That sounds like subpoena talk—produce everything ever said about anything. You are still fishing at a dry hole, Doug.”

  “It doesn’t have to be hostile. Congress has inquisitive powers and can call for a full hearing, but we want to settle this off the record—stop this travesty of justice and save the military from another black eye.”

  Howell shook his head. “You got nothing. How about a swap? Give me the names of your sources so we can interview them independently while we look into your accusations. Then we can have a level playing field.”

  “That’s not going to happen because of confidentiality, but I’ll sweeten the deal. We offer partial immunity to Kyle Swanson if he rolls over on his organization. He could not possibly be doing this on his own.”

  Captain Andrews folded up his material. “Particularly when the woman in Paris was killed by other women, and Swanson obviously is the wrong gender. I’ll take this back to the brass, but our position remains that we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Tell the senator we thank him for the heads-up.”

  Jimenez tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the table, and they both got ready to leave. “Tell them to put their shoulders to the wheel, Captain Andrews. The clock is ticking.”

  21

  SEVILLE, SPAIN

  DANIEL FERRAN TORREBLANCA let his mind tumble the sharp-edged questions as he sat alone in the office of his crowded home in Seville. The rest of his large family was out enjoying the riotous Feria de Abril, which was where he wanted to be. He glanced at a clock; it was five thirty, and he longed to be at the Plaza de Toros de la Maestranza, shaded about halfway up the stands, watching Pepin Liria cape a bull with nonchalant elegance, even daring to fight on his knees. He would probably be rewarded with an ear today. Instead of being in the Cathedral of Bullfighting with his friends, Torreblanca was isolated with his thoughts, hidden away and praying to Allah that the bullet-resistant glass in his windows worked.

  Mercedes had been careless! She was an old hand in the sneaky world of high finance, but she carried on with her life as if a diamond necklace were a suit of armor. She had known that the Spanish proposition was a high-risk operation from the start, and that lives would most certainly be lost, but she acted as if she herself were exempt from any violence just because she always had been before. Even when schemes that were hatched in her air-conditioned offices funneled money to Muslim warlords and resulted in many deaths, she had sailed untouched above the killing fields, shielded by phony accounts, front companies, paperwork, and foreign banks. Her fingerprints were never actually on the killings. This time, she had been wrong about how distance protected her, and now his dear friend Mercedes was dead.

  Bourihane had been a valuable piece of the overall strategy to bring down the government of Spain precisely because she embodied the image of a nonthreatening, progressive Muslim woman. She could walk into a boardroom anywhere in Europe, make a sales pitch, and walk out with a multimillion-dollar deal. When she put on her lawyer hat, she was fierce, but that was always tempered by the friendly personality. Mercedes simply would not let people not like her.

  Anyway, Yasim Rebiane and his son, Djahid, were supposed to be protecting them all throughout the bargaining with the Madrid financiers. That was part of the original plan, and Yasim had vowed that it would be carried out efficiently and quietly. Instead, the fools had launched a preemptive attack on the Americans in Barcelona, allegedly to warn Washington to stay out of the way. In Torreblanca’s view, all that did was guarantee more U.S. involvement. This time, Washington was not waiting for permission. There was no actual proof that the Americans were carrying out reprisals, other than the cold bodies of Cristobál Jose Bello, Juan de Lara, and now Mercedes Sarra Bourihane. Sometimes you do not need proof; you just know.

  Daniel Torreblanca had wanted to ride his black stallion with the silver saddle during the morning parade, but canceled. He could hear the lively music in the distance but doubted he would even go out and wander through the casetas tonight to laugh and dance with his wife, drink hard wine, eat delicious tapas, and watch the girls swirl about and dance in rhythm to wild gypsy flamenco guitars. He was scared. The Group of Six had become a kill list, and his name was on it. That had come as a total surprise to them all, and before they could react, the whole operation had been dealt a serious blow and three were dead.

  It had seemed so brilliant and easy when they had first gathered at Cristobál’s resort home in Mallorca. Yanis was the strategic brain who had gathered them and would plan an extraordinary financial coup. Mercedes was the pleasant face who would work directly with top banking officials throughout Europe and Asia. Torreblanca would choreograph participation from other Islamic banks, while Cristobál would do the same for the pro-Arab banks spread around the world, enlist avaricious and apolitical pension fund managers, and gather back-door contributions from some governments that detected an opportunity to weaken European solidarity. The obese but jolly Juan de Lara was to launder the needed paper trail to show the money was clean, and to handle the media with positive stories about the alternative rescue offer to whip up po
pular support. All would simultaneously work to loosen the grip of the European Community.

  The sixth member stood ready to swoop in like a hawk to close the deals. The inclusion of Marwan Tirad Sobhi in Abu Dhabi had added prestige and international political clout to the venture, not to mention his ability to tap into the vast oil profits around the Persian Gulf. Sobhi’s extended family linked him to the royal families in three countries and also to leaders in the tribal and religious movements. He held no official title because he did not need one. Prime ministers and presidents answered when he called.

  Torreblanca came out of his reverie when there was a rap on his door and it was opened by a bodyguard. An older woman in party attire came in with a tray of tea and tapas, with slices of cheese and fruit, which she placed on his desk.

  “You will not come out to the fair, Daniel? Not at all?” The face of his mother was etched with concern. Her son, so strong and handsome, had always put aside business for the April fair, and he looked so beautiful astride the big horse, like a smiling warrior prince.

  “I am bound to this awful machine as if by steel cables, mother.” He pushed the computer keyboard away to make room for the tea tray. Smiling, he said, “Look at you in your pretty red dress and with ribbons in your hair. You have to tell me all about it later.”