In the Crosshairs: A Sniper Novel

by Sgt. Jack Coughlin

  So don’t blow it all because of a few minor setbacks. Stay cool. The fun part was just ahead.

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  NOON LOCAL

  1200 ZULU

  SEVEN TIME ZONES TO the west, Sir Geoffrey Cornwell was on a Skype call, and Janna Ecklund was at the other end in Washington, seven in the morning her time. The gray-haired Englishman rubbed his neck, frustrated but maintaining his composure. “It is preposterous, Janna. I have three messages on my desk from news organizations asking for my comment.”

  Janna was in total agreement. “I’m fielding a lot of queries, too, Jeff. The story is on the morning news shows over here: the CIA caught running drugs with the help of Excalibur, and our company promoting terrorism. Kyle’s name is being made public. We can’t let this stand, sir. We have to issue a statement.”

  “Rubbish! That’s my statement, Janna. It’s all rubbish.”

  She smiled. The old warrior looked ready to leap from his chair, locked and loaded for battle. “Actually, that is a perfect official response, sir. One word that leaves no room for interpretation. Should we give interviews?”

  “No, absolutely not. We’re not going to cooperate with these vultures. Our public-relations people will release the statement, not us. Let their lawyers talk to our lawyers. Have you heard from Kyle?”

  “No, sir. He’s pretty much off the grid on that manhunt. Director Atkins says the agency will probably call it off today and bring the team back. I suggest that we get him back into the office here, let him carry on normal work, and we stick with the ‘Rubbish’ comment. Kyle will demonstrate that he has nothing to hide.”

  Sir Jeff paused. “That could be dicey, given the situation.”

  “The other side is going to have to show proof and some solid evidence in order to move this thing forward, Sir Jeff. Months will pass before it gets a hearing on the Hill and subpoenas are issued. Meanwhile, we stay our course, as if the problem doesn’t exist. Rubbish. We will cooperate with any legal requirements, but we keep to the high road.”

  A slow smile creased Cornwell’s weathered face. “Many things may happen during such a long time.”

  Janna shook her finger at the camera. “Do not start thinking about interfering in a congressional investigation, you old rascal.”

  He laughed. “And you don’t forget that it’s not my Congress, young lady. I am a citizen of Great Britain, and Excalibur Enterprises is a privately held company with many friends. The United States Marine Corps will be very unhappy to learn that we have changed our minds about opening that test facility at Twentynine Palms and putting it instead in Ireland because of a friendlier tax structure.”

  “You won’t do that, and you know it. Remember, this is an unsecured line.”

  “I’m just considering our options, Madam Vice President, and, as you Yanks say, we play hardball. We are legally innocent of all charges, and I will not stand by and let political fools freely besmirch our reputation.”

  “Jeff, calm down,” she warned.

  “No. I look forward to this fight, and to finding out what’s behind all of this. But first things first. Issue the news release—Rubbish!—and get Kyle back. If Director Atkins thinks we can help on that front, we will happily oblige.”

  18

  CIA HEADQUARTERS,

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  8 AM LOCAL, WEDNESDAY

  1300 ZULU

  MARTY ATKINS, THE DIRECTOR of intelligence, was alone in his office, elbows on his desk and his head in his palms early Wednesday morning. How in the hell had this thing jumped from a small deal to a big deal? One minute he was working quietly to put down a mad dog named Nicky Marks and here he was, a few days later, with a political inferno waiting for the touch of a match. A steaming mug of coffee was his only solace.

  Atkins had barely mentioned the situation to the man in the White House during the president’s daily security briefing, but had brought the national-security adviser and the chief of staff up to speed on the summons from Congress. Both had already heard about it on the morning news, and would tell the president what he needed to know only when he needed to know it. He hadn’t asked about the plan to abort the mission, either, because the decision wasn’t appropriate for a White House intervention.

  Still, the decision wasn’t his alone. Marty Atkins wasn’t at the top of the CIA pyramid and needed to get the final stamp from the director himself, who wouldn’t be in for another few hours, about eleven o’clock. The chiefs of all the alphabet agencies were spending the morning in a conference about the overall global-terrorism situation and homeland security.

  His talk with Janna Ecklund over at Excalibur Enterprises had left him with a headache. Sir Geoffrey Cornwell wasn’t going to back down from a confrontation with anybody; that just wasn’t who the old commando was. Instead, her report that he was rethinking an important project in California meant the possible loss of American jobs while also throwing a wrench into Pentagon out-years planning.

  Killing Nicky Marks had become a small-potatoes project. Atkins wanted to tamp down the sudden threat and get his snipers back under cover. When the director arrived, Marty planned to meet him at the door and get his autograph on the shutdown order, then hunker down before the coming storm.

  PAKISTAN

  6:30 PM LOCAL, WEDNESDAY

  1430 ZULU

  THE STUBBORN RED SUN that had hung in the sky all day finally settled behind the mountains, painting the underside of the drifting clouds with dusty golds and purples. By six o’clock, it was dim enough for Gibson and Swanson to get down to business.

  Their ride turned out to be neither a swift jet nor a quick helo, but an updated USAF C-130 prop plane, as common as a piece of toast, older than members of its crew, and trusted as a workhorse. The four-engine turboprop could grind out almost any job. It had come in early in the afternoon and was immediately assigned for the snipers’ run up to Afghanistan.

  By six-thirty that evening, the briefings had been completed, the weather and the target had been examined in detail, and the aircraft commander and the primary jumpmaster had run their final checklists. Swanson and Gibson climbed the ramp, which closed behind them as they strapped themselves into their seats and stuffed plastic plugs into their ears as the engine began to whine and roar. With final clearances, the aircraft began to move. Everything was a go. Swanson checked his watch. Outside, darkness gathered. The drop zone was two hours away.

  SAVANNAH, GEORGIA

  9:30 AM LOCAL, WEDNESDAY

  1430 ZULU

  SPECIAL AGENT LUCKY SHARIF read the thorough biography that the FBI had assembled overnight on Tom King as if delving into a spy novel rather than doing a normal dull backgrounder. The most interesting thing was that the man wasn’t even the star of his own remarkable life. The analysts had to look higher up the family tree to discover the patriarch, Sir Horatio Kingsley, who was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on November 11, 1873, the son of a British Army officer. At the age of twelve, the boy had been packed off to England to get a top-tier education in public school and then at Oxford. He graduated with honors eight years later. At twenty-one, he followed his father’s footsteps back to Egypt as a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. In 1894, Kingsley distinguished himself in battle at Omdurman, where befriended the young Winston Churchill, and later fought in the Second Boer War, during which he was wounded. Retired from active military service, Kingsley continued working for the government as an engineering consultant along the Nile Valley and the Suez Canal at the dawn of the twentieth century.

  A son, Horace, came along in 1903, and a daughter, Margaret, the following year, and when the Great War began the family moved back to Alexandria, where the engineer was recalled to active service on the General Staff. There he met the enigmatic T. E. Lawrence, who milked Kingsley for every drop of information he had about Arabia and, in the process, became a lifelong friend. After the war, when it was time to draw the boundary lines of new countries in the Middle East, Brigadier Horatio Kingsley
was named to the Sykes-Picot Commission. Nobody was really satisfied with the outcome, but Kingsley was knighted for his service and exited the military. At this point, he knew almost every leader of consequence in the region, plus his influential friends Churchill and Lawrence.

  Sharif stopped leafing through the family tree and walked around his hotel room to gather his thoughts, calling for room service to bring up a second breakfast with plenty of coffee. So shouldn’t Luke Gibson be a Brit? He took a short bathroom break and hurried back to the next chapter.

  THE WAKHAM CORRIDOR

  AFGHANISTAN

  6:45 PM LOCAL, WEDNESDAY

  1445 ZULU

  NICKY MARKS REACHED THE rendezvous point first, with time to spare, and was greeted warmly by the elderly couple who kept the hideaway ready for visitors. They had been expecting him, so the generator was on and providing electrical current. He gave the shabby place a quick walkthrough inspection. Everything was in order. The woman prepared a small meal for him, then she and her husband chuffed away in an old Fiat to spend the next several days with the man’s family. It was understood that anyone staying at the house was a guest of the Prince and was not to be bothered. Patrols of Taliban fighters often came by to ensure security.

  It was a small, square place girdled by a head-high adobe wall that was almost concealed by a grove of hardy junipers and wild-olive and pine trees. There was a narrow bedroom, a large main room, a kitchen, and a bath; the high windows in each room were curtained. A scatter of cheap rugs and pillows gave color to the wooden floor. The building plan was the most common in the community of Girdiwal, a village of about a thousand souls.

  Once the old couple left, Marks pushed aside the rugs in the main room to find a metal handle that was set into the floor. Beneath the trapdoor was a small cache of weapons and explosives, and he picked out what he anticipated he would need for the coming night. One flash-bang grenade, a Glock handgun, a compact Israeli Tavor bullpup 5.56 rifle for close-quarters firepower. He didn’t stack up extra magazines, because whatever happened here tonight was going to be over in a hurry. He turned the lights off and settled down to wait in the gathering gloom.

  SAVANNAH, GEORGIA

  10:00 AM, WEDNESDAY

  1500 ZULU

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? THERE was a time gap in the King family tree, and Sharif burned up Google and the FBI’s private databases hunting it.

  Brigadier Sir Horatio had been in the British Army at its zenith, when the nation was rich and influential and ruled the oceans, with colonies around the globe. The bloodbath of World War I ended that marvelous era, and Kingsley could see over the time horizon that Britain was in decline and the United States was ascending. So the old boy adjusted the family’s gears accordingly and did not send his son to Sandhurst to learn soldiering. Horace came back to Egypt from Oxford as a businessman, and shrewd Arab traders replaced the university dons at just about the time oil was discovered in Arabia by another Englishman, who had been hired to look for gold. He started a family of his own, with a proper British wife, a daughter and a son.

  Lucky thought that was interesting but still couldn’t see how or why they jumped the pond when they were doing so well in the Middle East, where ARAMCO was leading the oil boom. Oil didn’t just spring from the ground; it had to be pumped and refined and transported, which meant that roads and infrastructure and entire new cities were going to be built. The Kingsleys got rich, but not sweaty, by being go-betweens who could connect the eager buyers with willing sellers.

  That was where the veil was drawn. Horace and his own father, the brigadier, saw war clouds gathering again over Europe as Hitler took over Germany. It was time to shift to a safer base. Horace’s daughter Margaret was already in the United States, married to a Boston banker. The son, Royce, who had grown up among Egyptian aristocracy, was dispatched to attend Harvard and live with Margaret. The brigadier died when a U-boat torpedoed the passenger liner Athenia in 1939. Horace remained in Egypt as an allied intelligence officer and vanished behind the iron walls of British official secrets.

  So, then, on to Royce. How did a young man in his prime get out of serving in World War II, since he graduated in 1945? And why was there no Royce Kingsley listed in the graduating class? Sharif needed another bathroom break and a talk with Janna.

  OVER AFGHANISTAN

  7:15 PM LOCAL, WEDNESDAY

  1515 ZULU

  SWANSON AND GIBSON UNBUCKLED and stood up in the noisy, quivering cave of the C-130 cargo hold. The jumpmasters swarmed around them like seamstresses attending a couple of debutantes, studying even the smallest details. Missing something could cost a jumper his life. The two snipers swayed with the rhythm of the plane as the Ram Air Parachute Systems were fitted and tightened and checked and rechecked until the fussy jumpmasters were satisfied.

  “You guys are good to go,” said the leader after he went over the work done by his assistants. He had the power to terminate the mission but, after a final discussion with the pilot, declared that the conditions were acceptable. “You hop-and-pop at ten thousand feet, so you won’t need helmets or air cans. Your altimeters will be recalibrated in thirty minutes. Green light in about forty. Any questions?”

  The two operators nodded. “Any messages from home?” Gibson asked. The senior jumpmaster said there had been no radio traffic concerning them since takeoff.

  Swanson took firm hold of the cargo webbing and started to loosen up. No traffic from anybody. Nothing was a good thing at this point. He glanced at his partner and saw that Gibson was doing similar stretching exercises, his face calm and expressionless.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  10:30 AM LOCAL

  1530 ZULU

  CONGRESSWOMAN VERONICA KEENAN OF Nebraska had been expecting some pressure for rolling out the CIA scandal in the name of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. It was pleasant to discover that things were smooth in her office on Wednesday morning. Requests for press interviews were coming in, and she would pick and choose among them, because a national cable television news show would reach more voters back home than any New York Times ink.

  The CIA was stonewalling under the pretext of national security. The Englishman who was president of Excalibur Enterprises had been dismissive with his one-word reaction that her charges were “rubbish.” Keenan made a note to remind the reporters that she had proof to back up her charges. Of course, the CIA and Excalibur would deny it all, just as tobacco-company executives once pledged that their products weren’t poison. A congressional committee would get to the truth.

  Keenan’s administrative assistant rapped on the door and entered with a smile. “Get your lipstick on straight, girlfriend. You’ve been summoned by the House leadership.”

  “That would be the White House checking in to assess damage control,” Keenan said.

  “Right. You can say that to the media, too. If there’s nothing to this, why is the president meddling?” The assistant studied her smartphone. “Call from the State Department, too.”

  “More administration interference in the overwatch role of Congress?” Keenan cocked an eyebrow.

  “Exactly so,” replied the aide, who was the political professional in the office.

  “Anything from home yet?” Keenan asked.

  “It’s too early for the press back there,” the aide replied. “I’ve alerted staffers from other members of the Nebraska delegation about what’s going on. They can put together statements of their own.”

  The congresswoman found a lipstick tube in her desk, got a small mirror, and organized herself. “Let’s go see his highness the Speaker,” she said.

  CLARKE, VERMONT

  10:45 AM LOCAL

  1545 ZULU

  “COME ON, ORVILLE. I can take anything but your silent treatment.” Coastie was propped against a thick old maple tree that still bore slashing scars from the years during which it had produced syrup. Nero was sniffing the ground nearby after finding the faint scent of muskrats. “You’v
e hardly said a word since the parking lot. Tell me where we’re at. What did you mean that I passed some test?”

  Double-Oh Dawkins was watching the dog get around, unaware that it had lost a leg. The retired marine had a thermos of coffee for himself and a plastic-wrapped bone in case Nero couldn’t find and finish some unlucky varmint.

  “Why did you want to kill those two characters, Coastie? Seems a little extreme, you ask me.”

  “They were drug dealers,” she replied simply.

  “Oh, so you’re a self-righteous vigilante now? Out to scour the world of drug dealers? God knows we have enough of them in Vermont to keep you busy for a while.” He scowled. “Now, try telling me the truth.”

  Coastie peeled a thick leaf and returned his hard look. “You won’t like it, Double-Oh. After what they did to Mickey, yeah, I wanted revenge, sure. Who wouldn’t? I can’t take down a cartel by myself, but I can take them off the board one asshole at a time. I hold each of them personally responsible.”

  “So this wasn’t your first time. You started before you got here.”

  She nodded and straightened her shoulders. “Yes. Down in Mexico, I made them start killing each other because they assumed it was a turf war, when it wasn’t.”

  “Nobody up here yet, right?”

  “Those two at the bar would have been my first.”

  “So you haven’t committed any crime in the U.S.”

  “No.”

  “You can’t have both things now, you realize that. You cannot be the partner of Kyle Swanson and go around helter-skelter murdering drug peddlers.”

  “And if I don’t want to stop?”

  “Then you get the hell out of here and don’t look back. You were little league last night, Coastie. I’ve had you under surveillance since you got here. Everybody here is a former special-ops type, and you painted a bright line straight to your hide. In other words, my dear, you aren’t ready for prime time again. And you were really going to use a little AR-15? Jesus H. Christ.”