“I’m very sorry … .”
“Then please leave us alone.”
“Would it matter if I said it was a matter of life and death?” Janson flashed what he hoped was a winning smile.
“My gawd, you Yanks, you think you own the bloody world. Take no for an answer, would you?”
Too many seconds had elapsed. The breeze had subsided. Janson could picture, in his head, the sniper he could not see. Hidden in foliage, or braced on a strong lateral tree branch, or perched on a telescoping boom crane, the steel lattice and base hydraulics minimizing any sway. However positioned, the sniper’s main camouflage was his very stillness.
Janson knew the terrible, emptied-out clarity of the sniper’s mind firsthand. He had received extensive sniper training in Little Creek, and had been required to draw upon those skills in country. There had been the afternoons spent with a Remington 700 braced on two sandbags, the barrel itself resting on nothing but a cushion of air, waiting for the shimmering motion in his scope that told him his target was emerging. And, on radiophone, Demarest’s voice in his ear, coaching, coaxing, reassuring. “You’ll feel it before you see it, Janson. Let yourself feel it. Relax into the shot.” How surprised he was when he took it and hit his target. He was never in the same league as those who now pursued him, but he did it well and reliably because he’d had to. And his having been on the other side of the scope made his current position that much more nerveracking.
He knew what they saw. He knew what they thought.
The master sniper’s world would be reduced to the circular image through his scope, and then to the relation between the darting body and the scope’s crosshairs. His gun is a Remington 700, or a Galil 7.62, or an M40A1. He would have found the spot-weld, the contact point between his cheek and the rifle stock; the rifle would feel like an extension of his body. He would take a deep breath and let it out fully, and then another breath, and let it out halfway. A laser range finder could tell him the precise distance: the scope adjusted to compensate for bullet drop. The crosshairs would settle upon the rectangle that was the subject’s torso. More breath would be expelled, the rest held, and the finger would caress the trigger … .
Janson dropped to the ground, adopting a sitting position by the crying girl. “Hey,” he said to her. “It’s going to be all right.”
“We don’t like you,” she said. Him personally? Americans in general? Who could fathom the mind of a seven-year-old?
Janson gently took her binoculars, lifting the straps from around her shoulders, and quickly set off.
“Mummy!” It came out somewhere between a scream and a whine.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the mother bellowed, red-faced.
Janson, clutching the binoculars, dashed toward the wooden bandstand, two hundred yards away. Every time his position changed significantly, the snipers would have adjusted their sightings. The woman ran after him, puffing but determined. She had left her child behind, and now stomped after him with a spray bottle she had extracted from her purse.
An aerosol can of pepper spray. She was striding toward him with a look that combined disapproval and rage, Mary Poppins with mad cow disease. “Damn you!” she shouted. “Damn you! Damn you!” There were countless Brits just like her, their powerful calves stuck into Wellingtons, their bird-watching manuals stuck into bottomless handbags. They invariably collected string and ate Marmite and smelled of toast.
He turned to see her holding the bottle of pepper spray at arm’s length, her features twisted into a vicious grin as she prepared to spray a noxious jet of capsicum oleoresin into his face.
There was an odd clang a split second before her bottle burst, and a cloud of pepper exploded around the torn metal of the canister.
A look of utter disbelief passed over her face: she had no experience with what happened when a bullet destroyed a pressurized container. Then the cloud drifted over her.
“Defective, I guess,” Janson offered.
Tears streaming from her eyes, the woman spun on her flat-heeled shoes and rushed away from him, gagging and hacking, her breathing now a reedy stridor. Then she threw herself into the lake, hoping for relief from the searing heat.
Thwack. A bullet struck the wood of the bandstand, the closest shot yet. Snipers who used high-precision bolt-action rifles paid for greater accuracy with reduced frequency. Janson rolled on the ground until he was under the bandstand, the abandoned concert area, before which plastic chairs were neatly set out for a concert that evening.
The trelliswork of the base would not protect him from bullets, but it would make him more difficult to sight. It would buy him a little time, which was what he most needed right now.
Now he dialed up the binoculars, testing various focal points, avoiding dazzle from the late-afternoon sun.
It was maddening. The sun lit up the boom derrick of the crane like a match; it cast a halo over the trees.
The trees, the trees. Oak, beech, chestnut, ash. Their branches were irregular, the leafy canopies irregular, too. And there were so many of them—a hundred, maybe two hundred. Which was the tallest, and the densest? A rough eyeballing of the arboreal clusters suggested a couple of candidates. Now Janson zoomed the binoculars to maximum magnification and scrutinized just those trees.
Leaves. Twigs. Branches. And—
Movement. The hairs on his neck raised.
A breeze was scurrying through the trees: of course there was movement. The leaves fluttered; the slender branches swayed, too. Yet he had to trust his instinct, and soon his rational mind made sense of what had pricked his intuition. The branch that moved was thick, too thick to have been affected by the passing gust. It moved—why? Because an animal had shifted its weight on it, a scampering squirrel? Or a person?
Or: because it was not a branch at all.
The light made it difficult to make out details; though Janson fine-tuned the scope, the object remained frustratingly indistinct. He imposed different mental images on it, which was an old field trick he had learned as one of Demarest’s Devils. A branch, with twigs and leaves? Possible, but not satisfactory. Could it be that it was a rifle, covered in arboreal-camouflage decals, to which small twigs had been attached? When he pictured the optical image according to that mental model, all sorts of tiny irregularities suddenly clicked into place. A gestalt effect.
The reason that the branch seemed unnaturally straight was that it was a rifle. The twigs were attached with furred twist-wires. The tiny area of darkness at the end of a branch was not a tar-healed tree wound, but the rifle’s bore hole.
Five hundred yards away, a man was peering through a scope, just as he was, with the settled resolve of sending him to his death.
I’m coming for you, Janson thought to himself. You won’t see me when I get there, but I’ll get there.
A team of soccer players were making their way toward the playing fields, and he joined them briefly, knowing that, from a distance, he would be hard to pick out among the dense crowd of tall, athletic men.
The lake thinned into a stream, and as the men crossed the wooden bridge, he rolled off into the water. Had the marksmen seen him? There was a good chance that they had not. He expelled all the air from his lungs and swam through the murky, turbid water, staying near the bottom. If his misdirection succeeded, the sniper scopes would still be trained on the crowd of athletes. High-powered scopes inevitably had a narrow field of vision; it would be impossible to keep an eye on the rest of the terrain and follow the crowd. But how much longer before they realized he was not in it?
Now he crossed the water to the south bank, pulled himself up the concrete basin wall, and dashed over to a copse of beech trees. If he had slipped their purview, the reprieve was only temporary—one mistake could put him in the deadly snare. It was the most thickly forested area of Regent’s Park, and it brought to mind training exercises along the ridgelines outside Thon Doc Kinh.
He had studied the formation of trees from a dista
nce and had determined the tallest one. Now he had to turn a distance map into a proximal map, corresponding to the very terrain under his feet.
It was the hour when the park emptied out. This had advantages and disadvantages, and yet everything had to be used for advantage: there was no choice. Willed optimism was the order of the day. A sober reckoning of the odds might well lead to defeatism and paralysis, making the dire outcome even more probable.
He sprinted toward one tree, waited, then rushed toward another. He felt a tingle in his stomach. Had he been silent enough? Inconspicuous enough?
If his instincts were correct, he was directly below the tree where at least one of the snipers had positioned himself.
Marksmanship was an activity of intense concentration. At the same time, concentration required shutting out peripheral stimuli, as he knew from experience. Tunnel vision was a matter not merely of the narrowness of field through the scope but of the intensity of mental focus. Now he had to take advantage of that tunnel vision.
The soccer team had crossed the bridge, then made its way past a brick building, Regent’s College, a Baptist institution. If he were one of the snipers, that would arouse suspicions, particularly when the crowd spaced out and he discovered that his target was not among them. They would have to entertain the possibility that he had somehow ducked into the brick building. It was not a terribly worrying possibility: they could wait him out.
The marksmen would be intensely scrutinizing every square yard of the park in their purview. But one did not scrutinize one’s own feet. Then, too, the snipers would have radiophones to keep them in touch with their coordinator. Yet these would further reduce their sensitivity to ambient sounds. So there were elements in Janson’s favor.
Now he heaved himself up the trunk, as quietly as he could. Progress was slow but steady. When he reached ten feet, what he saw astonished him. Not only was the sniper rifle brilliantly camouflaged, but the entire apron of branches on which the sniper reposed was fake. It was incredibly lifelike, admittedly—the work of an arboreal Madame Tussaud—but up close he could see that it was an artificial construction attached to the trunk by means of metal rigging, an arrangement of steel-wire rope, rings, and bolts, all spray-painted an olive drab. It was the kind of equipment that no individual had access to, and only a very few agencies. Consular Operations was one.
He reached for the rigging and, with a sudden yank, he released the central eyebolt; the steel cable slithered free, and the sniper’s nest was suddenly unanchored.
He heard a muffled curse, and the whole nest dropped through the tree, breaking branches as it tumbled to the ground.
Finally, Janson could make out the green-clad body of the sniper beneath him. He was a slender young man—some sort of prodigy, no doubt, but momentarily stunned by the fall. Janson lowered himself to the ground in a controlled drop, landing with his legs spread over the sniper.
Now he wrenched the rifle from the marksman’s hands.
“Damn!” the curse came out like a whisper. It was light in timbre, the voice of a youth.
Janson found himself holding a forty-inch rifle, hard to maneuver at such close distances. A modified M40A1, which was a bolt-action sniper rifle handmade at Quantico by specially trained armorers of the Marine Corps Marksmanship Unit.
“The tables are turned,” Janson said softly. He reached down and knotted the sniper’s collar around his neck, ripping off the radio communicator. He was still prone. Janson noticed his short, spiky brown hair, his slender legs and arms: not a formidable specimen of manhood at first glance. He started to pat the sniper down, removing a small .32-caliber Beretta Tomcat pistol from his waistband.
“Get your stinking hands off me,” the sniper hissed, and rolled over, glaring at Janson with a look of the purest venom.
“Christ,” Janson said, involuntarily. “You’re—”
“What?” A defiant glare.
Janson just shook his head. The sniper reared up and Janson responded with force, shoving the sniper back down to the ground. Then, once more, the two locked eyes.
The sniper was lithe-bodied, agile, surprisingly strong—and a woman.
Chapter Seventeen
Like a wild animal, she lunged at him yet again, frantically trying to retrieve the Beretta pistol in his hand. Janson deftly stepped back and pointedly pulled back the slide lock with his thumb.
Her gaze kept returning to the Beretta.
“You’re overmatched, Janson,” she said. “No embassy lardasses this time. See, this time they cared enough to send the very best.” Her voice had the twang of the Appalachian backcountry, and though she was trying to sound conversational, the tension showed.
Was the bravado meant for him, or for her? Was she trying to demoralize him, or ginning up her own courage?
He put on a bland smile. “Now, let me make you a very reasonable proposition: You deal, or I kill you.”
She snorted. “Think you’re lookin’ at number forty-seven? In your dreams, old man.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That would make me number forty-seven.” When he did not reply, she added. “You’ve done forty-six people, right? I’m talking sanctioned, in-field killings.”
Janson’s face went cold. The number—which was never a source of pride and increasingly a source of anguish—was accurate. But it was also a count that few people knew.
“First things first,” Janson said. “Who are you?”
“What do you think?” the sniper replied.
“No games.” Janson pressed the muzzle of her M40A1 hard into her diaphragm.
She coughed. “Same as you—same as you were.”
“Cons Op,” Janson ventured.
“You got it.”
He hefted the M40A1. At three and a third feet and almost fifteen pounds, it was too big and bulky if much repositioning was required; it was for the stationary shooter. “Then you’re a member of its Sniper Lambda Team.”
The woman nodded. “And Lambda always gets its man.”
She was telling the truth. And it meant one thing: a beyond-salvage order had gone out. Consular Operations had sent a directive to an elite squad of specialists: a directive to kill. Terminate with extreme prejudice.
The rifle was obviously well maintained and was, in its own way, a thing of beauty. The magazine held five rounds. He opened the chamber and removed a cartridge. He gave out a low whistle.
A mystery solved. It was a 458 Whisper, a cartridge made by SSK Industries, which propelled a custom six-hundred-grain very-low-drag Winchester magnum. The VLD bullets lost velocity slowly, retaining a great deal of energy even at distances exceeding a mile. But the feature that had made it irresistible was that it launched the bullet at subsonic velocities. It eliminated the cracking noise of the supersonic bullet, while the small amount of powder diminished the internal detonation. Hence the name: Whisper. Someone just a few yards away would hear nothing.
“OK, sport,” Janson said, impressed despite himself by her cool. “I need to know the location of the others. And don’t bullshit me.” With a few quick movements, he stripped the M40A1 of its magazine, and threw it high into the tree’s tangled branches, where it lodged, once more a branch among branches to the casual viewer. Then he leveled the Beretta at her head.
She glared at him for a few long moments. He returned her look with complete impassivity: he would kill her, without compunction. Only luck had prevented her from killing him.
“There’s one other guy,” she started.
Janson looked at her appraisingly. She was an antagonist, but with luck, she could be turned into an asset, someone he could use as a shield and as a source of information. She knew where the fortified positions were, where the members of the sniper team were nested.
She was also a glib and effortless liar.
With his gun hand, he reached over and cuffed her hard on the side of the head.
“Let’s not begin this relationship with lies, sweetheart,�
� he said. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re just a killer. You almost shot me, and you endangered lives of noncombatants in the effort.”
“Bullshit,” she drawled. “I knew just what the margin of error was at all times. Four feet in any direction from your torso midline. None of my shots exceeded that error margin, and the field of fire was clean before each trigger pull. Nobody was in jeopardy. Except you.”
The geometry she described was consistent with what he had observed: that much was probably the truth. But to achieve that tight a cluster from more than five hundred yards away made her an off-the-charts marksman. A phenomenon.
“OK. Axial formation. It would be a waste of manpower to station another marksman within fifty yards of you. But I also know there are at least three others spread out in the vicinity. Not to mention whoever’s on the Willmott Dixon crane … . Plus at least two others using tree cover.”
“If you say so.”
“I admire your discretion,” Janson said. “But if you’re not any use to me alive, I really can’t afford to keep you around.” He cocked the Beretta, his forefinger curling around the trigger, testing its resistance.
“OK, OK,” she blurted. “I’ll deal.”
The concession came too quickly. “Forget it, baby. There’s no trust.” He flipped back the safety once more and placed his finger on the trigger, flexing the hardened steel. “Ready for your close-up?”
“No, wait,” she said. Any vestige of bravado had evaporated. “I’ll tell you what you want to know. If I’m lying, you’ll find out and you can kill me then.”
“My game, my rules. You give me the location of the nearest sniper. We approach. If you’re wrong, you die. If the sniper repositioned himself without notifying the team, too bad. You die. If you give me away, you die. Remember, I know the systems, the protocols, and the procedures. I probably wrote half of them.”
Robert Ludlum - [Paul Janson 01] Page 28
