by Scott McEwen
“Mama!” she called. “Where are you?”
Oso came running over to her.
“Right here,” her mother said, poking her head around the kitchen doorway. “Why? What’s the matter?” Her name was Janet. She was seventy-six years old and just over five feet three inches tall, with long gray hair she wore in the braid of a horsewoman.
“Stay away from the windows on the west side of the house.” Marie trotted up the staircase. “And don’t go outside!”
Janet stood in the kitchen drying her hands, then set down the towel and went upstairs. She found Marie in the spare bedroom taking Gil’s Browning .300 Winchester Magnum with a 3 to 24 Nightforce scope from the gun safe in the corner.
“Marie, what in hell’s half acre are you about?”
“We’ll find out in a minute.” Marie lay the rifle down on the bed and gathered her long brown hair behind her head, weaving it quickly into a loose braid. Then she picked the rifle back up, popped off the lens caps fore and aft, and slipped past her mother into the hall, making her way to the master bedroom on the west side of the house.
Oso followed her excitedly, thinking they must be going hunting.
Janet followed too, a discerning frown creasing her face.
“Stay away from the windows, Mama.” Marie knelt beside the bed opposite the windows, extending the legs of the bipod on the hunting rifle and resting it on the mattress. She put her eye to the scope and trained it on the ridge overlooking the house. When she spotted Kashkin, wearing an olive drab ball cap, hunkered down in the rocks behind the scoped Mauser, the urine in her bladder turned to ice water. The house was not built parallel to the ridge line, so she was looking at him angle-on and angle-off to Kashkin’s right at about 30 degrees. From the look of him, he seemed to be glassing the house, but she knew there was no way he could see deeply enough into the room to spot her because the room was too dim.
She pulled back the bolt and rammed one of the torpedo-nosed .30 caliber rounds into battery.
“Marie, what are you doing?”
She safed the weapon and got to her feet. “Have a look,” she said. “Up in the rocks above the ranch.”
Janet knelt beside the bed and pulled the stock into her shoulder. She was not a stranger to shooting, and she didn’t have to adjust the aim much in order to spot Kashkin in his nest.
“Lord A’Mighty!” She sat back from the rifle. “What’s he doin’ up there?”
Marie got down beside her. “Al Qaeda put a price on Gil’s head. He must be some kind of damn bounty hunter.” Janet got up, and her daughter retook her position behind the rifle, pulling the stock back into her shoulder and making the weapon hot. “Bring me a sofa cushion from downstairs, and fill Gil’s CamelBak with water for me,” she said intently. “I can’t see enough of this guy for a shot, so I’ll have to wait until he gets up. And lock the dog door, so Oso can’t get out.”
Janet watched her, grim faced. “Are you sure you want to do this? What if you’re wrong? What if he’s just some ignorant fool up there bein’ silly?”
“Mama, you don’t believe that any more than I do.” She continued to study Kashkin through the scope. He didn’t look like an Arab in the eyes, which was about all she could see, but if he was a bounty hunter, he could be anybody—even an American. “Now please bring me a cushion for my knees. I won’t last long on this hardwood floor, and I don’t dare take my eyes off this man. There’s no tellin’ when he’ll let out, and I can’t afford to let him get away.”
Janet went below and returned with the sofa cushion, slipping it under Marie’s knees one at a time. Oso jumped onto the bed, whining because he still thought they were going hunting.
“Get down.”
“But what about your conscience?” Janet said. “If you shoot that man, you’ll have to live with it the rest of your life.”
“Gil lives with it, so I reckon I can too. That man’s up there lookin’ to kill him, and I can’t abide it—I won’t abide it!”
Janet stood nodding for a moment and then went to fill Gil’s CamelBak with water. When she returned, Marie was naked from the waist down with the bedspread bunched up beneath her on top of the sofa cushion.
“Marie Anne! What on earth!”
“I might have to pee later. This way, I can pee on the blanket and not have to worry.”
Janet set the CamelBak down on the mattress and took a seat on the cane-back chair in the corner, resting her hand on Oso’s big head. The dog was getting frustrated with all the waiting. “We could call the police, ya know.”
“They’d just make a circus of it, especially when the media found out. And suppose he got away?” She took her eye from the scope for just a moment. “This is business between Al Qaeda and the McGuthrys, Mama.”
“Oh, so now you’re a McGuthry again.”
“This is McGuthry land,” Marie said, repositioning herself behind the scope. “Daddy wouldn’t have done any different.”
Janet sat back in the chair with a sigh. “Well, your daddy wasn’t always the smartest man in the world.”
“Mama, you know I’m right; otherwise you’d be downstairs on the phone right now callin’ the sheriff—in spite of anything I had to say about it.”
Janet clicked her tongue. “Maybe so. And then again, maybe I’m still tryin’ to make up my mind.”
“Well, until you do, I’ll be right here behind this rifle.”
BY THE TIME the sun began to set, Kashkin’s back had grown stiff, just as it had during the past three days. He thought it odd that the woman hadn’t come back out to bring the horses into the stable as she normally did, but there was no telling with people.
A coyote yammered somewhere off behind him, and his eyes shifted immediately to the colt down in the paddock. Surely she wasn’t going to leave the colt outside overnight with predators roaming the land. A single coyote would be foolish to attempt getting past the colt’s mother, but a pack of coyotes might be another story.
He thought back over the day, only now completely conscious of the fact the woman had definitely changed her routine. For three days running, she had cleaned out the horses’ stalls, but not today. And after combing the Appaloosa, she hadn’t taken the green bucket back into the stable. He recalled her route back to the house that morning and realized she’d taken the shortest route possible instead of entering through the back door the way she normally did, always leaving her dirty cowboy boots on the back porch.
He scanned the tree line beyond the ranch to the east, briefly imagining policemen staring back at him through multiple pairs of binoculars. Then he scanned the dirt road far beyond the ranch to the south. He saw no sign of law enforcement anywhere, but somehow he was sure he’d been compromised. He could feel it. Paranoia began to creep its way into his mind, and over the next ten minutes, he talked himself into believing that Gil might be stalking him. The painful tightness in his chest returned, and he decided he’d waited long enough. He would go down into the house and take the woman alive, forcing Shannon to show himself.
He took a satellite phone from the bugout bag beside him and called the al-Rashids. “This is Kashkin,” he said. “Let me speak to Akram.”
“He’s not with me right now,” said Haroun al-Rashid, the younger of the two brothers. “Is it done?”
“No, it is not done,” Kashkin said. “It’s possible I’ve been compromised; that the target is stalking me. If you do not hear from me by tomorrow morning, you should proceed with plan B.”
“What? How are you compromised? Are we all compromised?”
“No, only me. You are safe. So good luck, my friend. I must go now. May the blessings of Allah be upon you.”
“No, Kashkin, wait—”
Kashkin switched off the phone and smashed it against a rock.
He then drew his knees beneath him and began to pray, stretching the mu
scles of his lower back at the same time. When he was finished, he stood up and had a good look around, drawing a breath before taking that first step downhill toward the ranch.
He didn’t hear the shot because it was muffled by the house, but when the .30 caliber round struck him, it tore out his right floating rib and a good deal of flesh along with it. Kashkin wasn’t aware of any pain, just the queer sensation of having instantly had all the air sucked from his lungs.
Marie knew she’d hit him from the way he’d grabbed his side. Her shoulders were aching from sitting hunched over the mattress all day, but she shrugged it off and worked the bolt to ram another round into battery before placing the reticule of the scope right below Kashkin’s chin.
She drew a breath, held it . . . and squeezed the trigger a second time.
The round hit Kashkin dead center in the sternum and slammed him onto his back. He landed with his arms splayed out at his sides, and though all that Marie could see of him now was the sole of his right boot propped up on a rock, she knew she’d taken him out.
She sat back from the bed and looked up as Janet hurried into the room.
“He’s down,” she said, getting stiffly to her feet and taking her jeans from the edge of the bed. She stepped into them and gathered up the pee-stained bedspread, stuffing it down the laundry chute in the hallway. “I’ll wait til dark, then rig the travois to Tico and go up and get him. We’ll bury him on the ranch.”
28
MONTANA
Marie sat in the saddle atop the ridge in the light of the moon, looking down from the back of Gil’s Appaloosa mare. Kashkin was flat on his back with his eyes wide open, staring up at the glowing crescent in the sky, his arms splayed as if to embrace the heavens. The ground beneath him was stained black with his blood, and there were two cruel-looking bullet holes in his khaki Swiss Army shirt. The Mauser lay near a small rucksack water pouch, and pieces of a shattered satellite phone were scattered at his feet.
Oso sniffed at the body and growled low in his throat.
Marie pulled a Winchester model 94 in .45 caliber from the saddle scabbard and stepped down from the horse.
“Back,” she said to Oso, and he obeyed, sitting on his haunches.
Walking over to the body, she stood on the left arm and prodded Kashkin in the neck with the muzzle of the rifle to make certain he was dead before returning the Winchester to the scabbard. She gathered up the Mauser and rucksack, shouldering the ruck and pulling back the bolt on the rifle to eject the 7.92 mm round. It landed on the ground, and she crouched to pick it up, holding it in front of her discerning brown eyes.
The “boar’s tooth,” Gil called it . . . the round that might have killed her had she missed. She put the round into the pocket of her Carhartt jacket and gripped the Mauser with both hands, pivoting on her right foot to gaze out over her father’s ranch. It was hard reality to accept, but war had once again come to this land, and she was now no less a combatant than her husband was. She had killed another human being in a sniper duel, and this was a claim that even few Navy SEALs could make.
“Damn you, Gil,” she whispered.
She hung the Mauser from the saddle horn by the shoulder strap and did the same with the ruck. Then Marie went to stand over the body once again, her hands on her hips as she nervously chewed her lower lip. She didn’t want to touch the corpse, but there was no other way to get it down the hill. She pulled on her leather roping gloves and crouched to take hold of Kashkin’s left wrist, pushing the arm down against his side. He had been dead for six hours, so he was only about three hours into rigor mortis. Full rigor occurred at twelve hours, when the muscles were at full contraction, so he wasn’t yet stiff as a board, but he wasn’t entirely limber, either.
Within a half hour, she had him wrapped in a game bag and strapped to the travois attached to Tico’s saddle. She was mounted up and ready to start down the hill when it occurred to her she hadn’t seen Oso for the past five or ten minutes.
She called to him, and he barked twice from a distance. It was the same bark he used whenever he had treed a raccoon, and she knew that he wouldn’t come unless she went and got him. He was very hardheaded that way. So she shucked the Winchester out of the scabbard and dismounted.
“We don’t really have time for this, Cazador,” she muttered, taking a flashlight from the saddlebag and starting off through the juniper pines in the direction of the barking. She called out again to get a better fix on the dog’s location, and he answered as he had the first time. A minute later, she saw him sitting on his haunches in the beam of the flashlight beside a green Timberline tent some two hundred feet back from the ridge. The tent was pitched in a copse of junipers, and there was nothing outside it save for a small pile of coals that Marie found cold to the touch and a pair of white boxer briefs draped over a branch.
The sight of the camp was enough to make her sick to her stomach. The idea that someone had been camping up here without a care in the world, waiting patiently to blow her husband’s brains out, both frightened and infuriated her. She unzipped the tent and shined the light inside to see a large green backpack, a blue sleeping bag, and a pile of cooking equipment. There was also the lingering odor of an unwashed human being. Quickly rifling through the pack, she found the usual incidentals, numerous bags of backpacking food, and a small laptop computer. She crammed everything into the backpack then hurriedly struck the campsite, making sure to scatter the charcoal from the fire.
Forty minutes later, she stood beside her mother in the well-lighted stable looking down at the dead man lying in the center of the gray plastic tarp.
Oso sat across from them whining.
“He doesn’t look much like a Muslim to me,” Janet remarked.
“Me neither.” Marie knelt beside him and went through the cargo pockets of his olive drab trousers. She found his German passport, driver’s permit, and the key to a rental car.
Janet knew they were both way out of their depth. “We should call somebody, honey.”
“Like who?”
“Like you know who. I understand ya don’t wanna hear it, but we gotta tell Gil sooner or later, and there ain’t no point to waiting.”
Marie folded the tarp back over Kashkin’s stiffening body. Then she went to the wall and picked up the phone, calling Gil’s number and being sent straight to voice mail. She swore under her breath and left a message for him to call her right away.
29
CANADA,
Ontario, Windsor
Haroun al-Rashid knocked on the door of his brother’s house, shouldering past his sister-in-law as she opened it. “Akram!”
“In here,” said Akram al-Rashid, seated in the kitchen and eating breakfast. He stood up from the table, recognizing the distress in his younger brother’s voice. He was thirty-five, light skinned, and athletic looking, with short black hair. Akram was handsome when clean shaven, but this morning he had a dark five o’clock shadow, and he was dressed sloppily in a white tank top and gray sweatpants. “What’s wrong?”
“Kashkin is dead.”
If Akram found this news overly disturbing, it didn’t show. “How do you know?”
Haroun explained about the phone call the evening before and that Kashkin had never called back. “So the American must have killed him,” he went on, clearly agitated. “Now you’ll have to go to Detroit and gather our men. We assured our people back home that we could deliver the American’s head, and if we fail to do it . . .”
Akram nodded, crossing his arms and leaning against the kitchen counter. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “It would be bad if we failed to deliver.”
“Very bad,” Haroun agreed. “We gave that stupid Chechen a lot of money, and now that he’s dead . . .” He looked around nervously and then held out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I have no idea who has control of the bomb, Akram. That idiot disconnected before I cou
ld even ask. The entire operation could be in jeopardy, for all we know.”
Akram had spent six years as a Royal Saudi Marine, and at times like this, he still emanated an aura of military confidence. He was not a man to be shaken easily, but his brother Haroun, a bookworm, was very excitable and dependent upon Akram for moral support and encouragement.
Akram gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “Kashkin was an experienced strategist. A very intelligent and capable man. He would never have gone after the American until the bomb was safely delivered to his people. Don’t worry.”
He glanced at his twenty-four-year-old wife, who stood in the living room looking worried, saying something to her in Greek that Haroun did not understand. She answered him timidly and went into the bedroom and closed the door.
“She is pregnant,” Akram told his brother. “We just found out.”
Haroun’s eyes lit up. “Congratulations, brother!”
Akram seemed not to hear it. “Listen. If I do not return from killing the American, it will be your responsibility to marry Melonie and raise my son—as it will be a son. Allah has told us so.”
“But . . . but I don’t speak Greek. How could I even—?”
“You will learn,” Akram said heavily. “She is obedient and loyal, but she is not very smart and could never learn our language. So it will be up to you—your responsibility. You’re my brother, and I will be counting on you in the event that Allah summons me into the void.”
Haroun lowered his head. “I will learn Greek. I promise.” He knew that for Akram to travel so far into the United States on such an intrepid mission, with American law enforcement on such high alert, would be near suicide. He looked up. “She will accept me?”
