by Stephen King
The next day Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson showed up while our squad was getting ready to go on patrol. He ordered me and Taco down from the back of the Hummer we were in and told us to come with him, because there was a man who wanted to see us.
The man was sitting on a pile of tires in an empty garage bay that stank of motor oil and exhaust. It was also hot as hell because all the doors were closed and those bays had no air conditioning. He stood up when we came in and looked us over. He was wearing a leather jacket, which was absurd in a stinky room that must have already been eighty-five degrees. It had the Darkhorse Battalion emblem on the breast: CONSUMMATE PROFESSIONALS on top and GET SOME on the bottom. But the jacket was just for show. I knew it right away and Taco said afterwards that he did, too. You only had to look at him to know he was “fuckin’-A, CIA.” He asked which one of us was Summers and I said that was me. He said his name was Hoff.
Billy stops short, bemused. He has just crosswired his present life with his life in the suck. Was it Robert Stone who said the mind is a monkey? Sure it was, in Dog Soldiers. The one where Stone also said that men who shoot elephants with machine guns from Huey helicopters are just naturally going to want to get high. In Iraq it was camels the grunts and jarheads sometimes shot at. But yeah, while they were high.
He deletes the last line and consults the monkey that lives between his ears and behind his forehead. After a few seconds of thought, he comes up with the right name and decides the mistake is entirely forgivable. Hoff was at least close.
He said his name was Foss. He didn’t offer to shake hands, just sat back down on the tires, which was sure to dirty up the seat of his pants. He said, “Summers, I heard you were the best shot in the company.”
Since that wasn’t a question I didn’t say anything, just stood there.
“Could you make a twelve-hundred-yard shot across the river from our side?”
I took a quick look at Taco and saw he had heard it too, and knew what it meant. Our side meant anything outside of town. And if there were sides, that meant we were going in.
“Are you talking about hitting a human target, sir?”
“I am. Did you think I was talking about a beer bottle?”
A rhetorical question I didn’t bother answering. “Yes sir, I could make that shot.”
“Is that the Marine answer or your answer, Summers?”
Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson kind of frowned at that, as if he didn’t believe there was any answer except the Marine answer, but he didn’t say anything.
“Both, sir. Confidence maybe not so high on a windy day, but we—” I cocked a thumb at Taco. “We can correct for wind. Blowing sand is something else.”
“The wind speed forecast for tomorrow is zero-to-ten,” Foss said. “That wouldn’t be a problem?”
“No, sir.” Then I asked a question I had no business asking, but I had to know. “Are we talking about a bad haji, sir?”
The l-c said I was out of line, and would have said more, but Foss waved a hand at him and Jamieson closed his mouth.
“You ever tagged a man before, Summers?”
I told him I hadn’t, and that was true. Tagging means sniping, and when I shot Bob Raines it was up close.
“Then this would be a very good way to start your career, because yes, this is a very bad haji. I’m assuming you know what happened yesterday?”
“We do, sir,” Taco said.
“Those contractors went through downtown Fallujah because they were told by what they considered to be a reliable source that it would be safe. They were told that goodwill was shifting toward the Americans. They were also given an escort by the Iraqi police. Only their escort was either insurgents in stolen uniforms, or renegade police, or real police who chickened out when they saw what a truly awesome raft of shit was coming their way. And they didn’t do the killing, anyway. That was done by four dozen AK-wielding bad boys who… what do you think, fellas? Who just happened to turn up on the scene?”
I shrugged like I didn’t know and let Taco carry the ball. Which he did. “Doesn’t seem likely, sir.”
“No, not likely at all. Those mujis were all in place. Waiting. A couple of pickup trucks were blocking the main drag. Someone planned that ambush, and we know who it was, because we were up on his cell phone. You follow?”
Taco said he did. I just shrugged again.
“That someone was a shemagh-wearing weasel named Ammar Jassim. In his sixties or seventies, nobody knows for sure, probably including him. He owns a computer and camera store that doubles as an Internet café and triples as a game room where the local young men can play Pac-Man and Frogger when they’re not building IEDs and planting roadside bombs.”
“I know that place,” Taco said. “Pronto Pronto Photo Photo. Seen it on patrol.”
Seen it? Hell, we’d been in there, playing Donkey Kong and Madden football. When we came in, the local boys all at once remembered they had business elsewhere and put on their boogie shoes. Taco didn’t volunteer that and neither did I.
“Jassim’s an old-line Ba’athist and new-line insurgent boss. We want him. Want him bad. Can’t call in an LGB because we risk killing a bunch of kids playing video games, which will get us a fresh bunch of bad press on Al Jazeera. Can’t afford that. Can’t wait, either, because Bush is going to greenlight a clean-up operation within days, and if you tell anyone that, I’ll have to kill you.”
“You won’t get the chance,” Jamieson said. “I’ll do it first.”
Foss ignored him. “Once the shit hits the fan, Jassim will be gone into the back streets with the rest of his gun-buddies. We need to get him before that can happen and make an example of that fucking Judas goat.”
Taco asked what a Judas goat was. I could have told him but kept my mouth shut and let Foss do the honors. Then he turned to me and asked again if I could do it and I said sir yes sir. I asked where I was supposed to shoot from and he told me. We’d been there before, carrying goods from resupply helicopters. I asked if I could swap the optics on my rifle for one of the new Leupold scopes or if I would have to make do with what I had. Foss looked at Jamieson, and Jamieson said “We’ll make that happen.”
Going back to our barracks—the patrol had left without us—Taco asked me how sure I was that I could make the shot. I said, “If I can’t make it, I’ll just blame my spotter.”
He thumped me on the shoulder. “Fucking dickweed. Why do you always play dumb?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“There you go again.”
“It’s safer. What they don’t know about you can’t hurt you. Or come back to haunt you.”
He chewed that over for awhile. Then he said, “Yeah, you can make the shot, okay, but that’s not what I meant. This is an actual guy we’re talking about. Are you sure you can do it? Shoot him stone-cold in the brainbox and take his life?”
I told Tac I was sure. I didn’t tell him that I knew I could take a life because I’d done it before. I shot Bob Raines in the chest. It was Sniper School that taught me to always take the head shot.
5
Billy saves what he’s written, gets up, and staggers a little because his feet feel like they’re in another dimension. How long has he been sitting? He looks at his watch and is astounded to see it’s been almost five hours. He feels like a man emerging from a vivid dream. He puts his hands in the small of his back and stretches, sending pins and needles down his legs. He walks from the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom, and finally back to the living room. He does it again, then a third time. The apartment seemed just the right size when he first saw it, the perfect place to hunker down in until things settled and he could drive his leased car north (or maybe west). Now it seems too small, like clothes that have been outgrown. He’d like to go out and walk, maybe even jog, but that would be a very bad idea even tricked out in his Dalton Smith gear. So he paces the apartment some more, and when that’s not good enough he does pushups on the living room floor.<
br />
Drop and give me twenty-five, he thinks of Sergeant Up Yours saying. And don’t mind my foot on your ass, you useless cumstain.
Billy has to smile. So much has come back to him. If he wrote it all, his story would be a thousand pages long.
The pushups make him feel calmer. He thinks about turning on the TV to see what’s going on with the investigation, or checking his phone for newspaper updates (newspapers may be failing, but Billy has found they still seem to get the salient facts first). He decides against doing either. He’s not ready to let the present back in. He thinks about getting something to eat, but he’s not hungry. He should be, but he isn’t. He settles for a cup of black coffee and drinks it standing up in the kitchen. Then he goes back to the laptop and picks up where he left off.
6
The next morning Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson himself drove me and Taco out to the intersection of Route 10 and the north-south road the Marines called Highway to Hell, after the AC/DC song. We went in the l-c’s Eagle station wagon, which was special to him. Painted on the back deck was a decal showing a black horse with red eyes. I didn’t like it, because I could imagine Iraqi spotters noting it, maybe even photographing it.
There was no sign of Foss. He had gone back to wherever those guys go after they set their plots in motion.
Parked out there on the hilltop in a dusty turnaround were two trucks from Iraqi Power & Light, or whatever was written in the pothooks on their sides. They looked just like American utility trucks, only smaller and painted apple green instead of yellow. The paint was much thicker on the sides, but even so it didn’t completely obscure the smiling face of Saddam Hussein, like a ghost too stubborn to go away. There was also a Genie articulated boom lift with a bucket platform.
Two power poles stood at the intersection of the roads, with big transformers on them to step down the power-load to the residential neighborhoods of Fallujah and the surrounding suburbs. Guys in keffiyehs were scurrying around, plus a couple in those kufi hats. They were all wearing orange workmen’s vests. No hardhats, though; I guess OSHA never made it to al-Anbar province. From across the river those men probably looked like any ragtag government work crew, but once you got closer than sixty yards, you could see they were all our guys. Albie Stark from our squad came over to me, flapping his headdress and singing that song about how you don’t step on Superman’s cape. Then he saw the l-c and saluted.
“Go someplace and look busy,” Jamieson told him. “And please in the name of Jesus don’t sing anymore.” He turned to me and Taco, but it was Taco he addressed, because he had decided Tac was the smart one. “Give it to me again, Lance Corporal Bell.”
“Jassim comes outside most days around ten to have a smoke and talk to his adoring fans, probably some of the same guys that opened fire on the contractors. He’ll be the one in the blue keffiyeh. Billy takes him out. End of story.”
Jamieson turned to me. “If you make the kill, I’ll put you in for a commendation. Miss, or hit one of the hanger-arounders, which would be worse, and I will transfer the boot that goes up my ass to yours, only harder and deeper. Do you understand that, Marine?”
“I think so, sir.” What I was thinking was that Sergeant Uppington could have delivered that line with far greater force and conviction. Still, I had to give the l-c props for trying. Months later he lost most of his face and all of his eyesight to a roadside bomb.
Jamieson motioned over Joe Kleczewski. He was another member of our squad, which we called the Hot Nine. Most of the “utility workers” were. They volunteered for the job. They had to because Taco told them to.
“Sergeant, do you understand what must happen as soon as Summers takes the shot?”
Big Klew smiled, showing the gap in his front teeth. “Get them down ASAP, then exfil like a motherfucker, sir.”
Although I could tell Jamieson was nervous—I think we all could—that made him smile. Most times Klew could coax a smile out of the stoniest face. “That about covers it.”
“If he doesn’t show, sir?”
“There’s always tomorrow. Assuming the attack doesn’t happen tomorrow, that is. Carry on, Marines, and none of that oorah shit, if you please.” He jerked his thumb at the Euphrates and the bear trap of a city on the other side. “It’s like the song says—voices carry.”
Albie Stark and Big Klew tried to cram into the bucket. It was supposed to be big enough for two, but not when one of them was Kleczewski’s size. He almost knocked Albie over the side. Everybody but Jamieson laughed. It was as good as Abbott and Costello.
“Get out, you lummox,” the l-c told Klew. “Jesus wept.” He motioned to Donk, whose brown combat boots were sticking out from beneath his pants, which were too short. This was also comical, because he looked like a kid clumping around the house in his daddy’s shoes. “You. Pipsqueak. Get over here. What’s your name?”
“Sir, I am Pfc Peter Cashman, and I—”
“Don’t salute, you dimwit, not in an op zone. Did your mother drop you on your head when you were a baby?”
“No sir, not that I remember, s—”
“Get in the bucket with what’s-his-fuck, and when you get up there…” He looked around. “Ah God, where’s the fucking shroud?”
Maybe technically the right word for what he was talking about, but wrong in every other way. I saw Klew cross himself.
Albie, still in the bucket, looked down. “Uh, I believe I’m standing on it, sir.”
Jamieson wiped his forehead. “All right, okay, at least somebody remembered to bring it.”
That had been me.
“Get in there, Cashman. And deploy it with utmost haste. Time is marching.”
The bucket platform rose in a whine of hydraulics. At its maximum height, maybe thirty-five or forty feet, it shuddered to a stop beside one of the transformers. Albie and Donk danced around, yanking at the shroud and finally managing to get it out from under their feet. Then, aided by some inventive cursing—including some learned from the Iraqi kids who came out to beg candy and cigarettes—they got it deployed. The result was a canvas cylinder around the bucket and the transformer. It was held at the top by hooks on one of the pole’s cross-arms and snapped together down one side, like the button-up fly on a pair of 501 jeans. The outside was emblazoned with a bunch of pothooks in bright yellow. I had no idea what they said and didn’t care as long as it wasn’t SNIPER TEAM AT WORK.
The bucket came back down, leaving the cylinder behind. It did look like a shroud once the waist-high rail of the bucket was no longer holding out the sides. Donk’s hands were bleeding and Albie had a scratch on his face, but at least neither of them had taken a header out of the bucket. A couple of times it had looked close.
Taco was craning his neck to look up. “What’s that thing s’posed to be, sir?”
“Sand guard,” Jamieson said, then added, “I believe.”
“Not exactly unobtrusive,” Taco said. Now he was looking across the river at the crammed-together houses and shops and warehouses and mosques on the other side. It was the southwestern part of town we’d come to call Queens. A hundred or so Marines came out of there in body bags. Hundreds more came out with fewer body parts than they had going in.
“When I want your opinion I’ll give it to you,” the l-c said—an oldie but a goody. “Grab your gear and get up there toot-sweet. Put on a couple of those orange vests before you get in the bucket so anyone looking sees them when you go up. The rest of you men kind of swirl around and look busy. The last thing we want is for anyone to see that rifle. Summers, keep your back to the river until you’re under…” He stopped. He didn’t want to say until you’re under the shroud and I didn’t want to hear it. “Until you’re under cover.”
I said roger that and up we went, me with my M40 held at port arms and my back to the city, Taco with his feet planted around his spotter stuff. Snipers are glamor boys, the ones they make movies about and the ones Stephen Hunter writes his novels about, but it’s the spotters who real
ly do the work.
I don’t know how real shrouds smell, but the canvas cylinder stank like old dead fish. I undid three of the snaps down its seam to create a firing slit, but it was in the wrong place unless I wanted to shoot a goat wandering in the direction of Ramadi. The two of us managed to work it around, grunting and swearing and trying to keep the goddamned thing on at least two of the crossbar hooks as we did it. The canvas flapped in our faces. The dead fish smell got worse. This time I was the one who almost fell out of the bucket. Taco grabbed my orange vest with one hand and the strap of my rifle with the other.
“What are you men doing up there?” Jamieson called. From below, all he and the others could see were our feet shuffling around clumsily, like grammar school kids learning to waltz.
“Housework, sir,” Taco called back.
“Well, I suggest you stop the housework and get set up. It’s almost ten.”
“Not our fault those nimrods put the slit facing the wrong direction,” Taco grumbled to me.
I checked the new scope and my rifle—there were many like it, but that one was mine—and used a square of chamois to wipe everything clean. In the suck, the sand and dust got into everything. I handed my piece to Taco for the mandatory recheck. He handed it back to me, licked his palm good and wet, then stuck it out through the firing slit.
“Wind speed nil, Billy-boy. I hope the bastard shows, because we’ll never get a better day for it.”
Other than my rifle, the biggest piece of equipment we had in the bucket with us was the M151, also known as the Spotter’s Friend.
Billy stops, startled out of his dream. He goes into the kitchen, where he splashes his face with cold water. He has come to an unexpected fork in what has been, up to now, a perfectly straight road. Maybe it makes no difference which of the diverging ways he takes, but maybe it does.
