by Scott McEwen
Sistan-Baluchistan Province
Gil lay prone beneath his hide fifty yards across the desert road from the ruins. The hide was a shallow trench, not much wider than his body, dug perpendicular into the back slope of a subtle defilade running east-west across the jagged, semirocky terrain. His firing aperture was six inches wide at two hundred yards, leaving him a visual arc of more than 90 degrees. This arc would allow him to sweep the target area for anyone attempting to flee on foot in any direction.
If Al-Nazari were traveling today as he normally did, there would be three SUVs in his caravan. He would ride in the middle vehicle with the woman, his driver, and his bodyguard. The lead and rear vehicles would carry three to four gunmen each. Gil would allow all three vehicles to cross the bridge, and then kill the lead driver, shifting immediately to the second, and then the third. There was no way to predict which way the vehicles would veer once their drivers were taken out, but firing at two hundred yards gave him plenty of time and room to adjust his fire.
The first three shots were key and would be the most difficult to place, firing at moving vehicles. The rough surface would keep their speed down, but a jouncing target was tough to hit at a distance. With this in mind, Gil had spent time during the night filling in some of the larger potholes in the road seventy yards out from the stone bridge. If one of the drivers dropped below his reticle as he squeezed the trigger, he would lose valuable seconds.
What the remaining security people would do after the drivers were dead was open to conjecture, but this wasn’t a concern. They would be trapped inside a wide-open kill zone with nowhere to run and precious little cover save for the dry creek bed. The SVD’s 7.62 mm, armor-piercing rounds would cut through any part of a vehicle except for the engine block, and with Gil’s hide located at a slightly lower elevation than the kill zone, he should be able to fire beneath the vehicles well enough to hit anyone attempting to take cover behind the engine compartments.
He had been briefed to expect no more than twelve targets in total, but he considered this speculation. There was no accounting for luck in combat, and Murphy’s Law held sway no matter the weather. He also had to count on the enemy possessing at least one sniper rifle, with optics at least as good as his Russian PSO-1 sight. This was the reason for not taking cover in the ruins across the road. Most of his targets would be carrying AK-47s, and the moment they realized they were under sniper fire, they would begin pouring rounds into the only visible cover they could see. A man with a sniper rifle, given time enough to find even lousy cover, might manage to get off a few rounds. The danger of an RPG, of course, spoke for itself.
Gil preferred to fight like the Comanche whenever possible, and the Comanche believed firmly in the safety of the earth. He sipped sparingly from his CamelBak, watching the road. “Typhoon main, this is Typhoon actual. Still no eyes on my location?”
“Negative, actual. Cloud cover is still too dense. Over.”
“Roger, main.”
Just then, the lead vehicle came into sight.
“Main, this is actual. Targets are inbound at this time. Over and out.”
He pulled the stock of the Dragunov firmly into his shoulder and brought the lead truck into sight, a dusty black Nissan Armada. He knew all three vehicles would reduce their speed dramatically just before crossing the bridge because the road dipped severely on the downward approach, and Gil had dug away the natural taper of that approach to create an abrupt six-inch drop, not near enough to damage the suspension or to cause alarm, but more than enough to force the vehicles into slowing down as they crossed into the kill zone.
The lead driver wore dark glasses and some kind of ball cap, and Gil could see that he had not shaved that morning. As expected, the lead did not speed away from the bridge after crossing, but instead drove slowly, waiting for the others to cross, keeping the caravan intact.
After the third vehicle was across the bridge, Gil gave them time to put some distance between the caravan and the potential cover of the creek bed. When the bridge was fifty feet from the bumper of the rear vehicle, he drew a breath and squeezed the trigger.
The round struck the lead driver in the base of the throat, causing him to slump over into the passenger’s lap.
Gil was already shifting his aim to the second vehicle, instantly spotting Al-Nazari in the backseat on the passenger side. He did not hesitate to squeeze the trigger. Al-Nazari’s head exploded like a pumpkin on a fence post, and the forward momentum of the vehicle brought the profile of the driver’s head into view as he turned to look into the backseat. Gil squeezed the trigger a third time and blew the driver’s face away.
The driver of the third vehicle barely had time to jerk his shifter lever into reverse before Gil shot him through the sternum.
In less than four seconds, he had disabled all three vehicles and eliminated his primary target. Everything he did from this point on would be to ensure his own survival. He was reminded briefly of the motto he had learned to live by during his late teens as a choker setter for the Louisiana Pacific lumber company in the mountains of Montana: In for your job—out for your life! When the grizzled old foreman blew the horn, Gil and the other setters would rush in to set the cable chokers around four freshly felled trees. If they weren’t clear again by the time the foreman blew the horn a second time, they’d be dragged off down the mountainside, crushed to death beneath a turn of trees.
Once, during his first week on the job, he’d been caught walking down the mountain alongside a turn being dragged downhill. The foreman had screamed at him, violently waving him away. As Gil jumped clear, the turn twisted, flinging a massive tree over the top to impact against the ground where he’d been walking.
“Never walk beside a turn,” he muttered, squeezing the trigger a fifth time for a fifth kill. None of the vehicles had slewed off the road, but the rear vehicle continued in reverse until it hit the abutment of the stone bridge and came to an abrupt stop. Gil pumped the remaining five rounds from the magazine into the vehicle, killing the remaining three passengers and preventing their escaping into the cover of the ditch.
As he was loading a fresh magazine, he spotted the woman ducking from the driver’s side of the second vehicle. He shot her through the passenger door, and she dropped to the ground. Shifting his aim, he prepared to engage the remaining four gunmen piling out on the passenger side of the two lead vehicles. They fired wildly at the ruins on the far side of the road, unable to determine Gil’s actual position.
Bullets whined off the stone walls, kicking up small clouds of dust.
Gil had been firing for less than thirty seconds. Within another thirty, all of his targets would be down. He fired through the fender of the lead truck to send a man sprawling. Another reached out to grab the downed man’s wrist to pull him to safety. Gil blew his arm off at the elbow. The remaining two men began a hasty retreat toward the bridge, keeping low as they scurried behind the vehicles. Gil shot one through the body of the second SUV, catching him in the head by pure luck. This frightened the last man into making a desperate break cross-country.
“Don’t bother to run, partner. You’ll die tired.” Gil shot him dead center between the shoulder blades, severing the spine, and the man pitched forward onto his face.
There was no need to confirm that Al-Nazari was dead—Gil had seen his head explode—but there might be valuable intelligence inside the vehicles.
“Typhoon main, this is Typhoon actual. Do you copy my traffic?”
“Roger, actual.”
“Main, be advised all targets are down. Repeat. All targets are down. Primary target is confirmed KIA. Over.”
“Roger that, actual.”
“Stand by, main. Moving into the target area to sweep for intelligence. Over.”
“Roger, actual. Main standing by.”
Gil emerged cautiously from the hide and moved forward with the Dragunov at his shoulder, ready to fire. He covered the two hundred yards at a trot, then pulled up short to move carefully around the f
ront of the lead vehicle. The man with the missing arm was sitting up against the wheel hub, cradling the head of his dying compatriot in his lap. Both were slowly bleeding to death, their eyes closed in peaceful prayer.
Gil drew the .45, hating like hell the idea of shooting someone in the midst of a prayer, but he realized they would probably continue to pray until they finally blacked out from loss of blood. He shot them each in the head.
As the echo of the second shot faded, he heard a very disturbing sound from the far side of the vehicle—the beep of a cellular phone. He darted around the back end of the lead truck to find the woman was still alive behind the passenger door of the second, a bullet hole through her shoulder blade. Even with Al-Nazari’s blood and brain matter spattered all over her, she was a very striking woman. She was obviously in tremendous pain and just as obviously very pregnant.
For a fleeting moment, Gil felt sick to his stomach. “How far along?” he asked, without even considering whether or not she would understand.
“Eight months,” she gasped in good English. “There will be a place for you in hell if . . . if my baby dies.”
“You might be right,” he muttered, squatting to take the phone from her hand. “Who did you call?”
“My father. He and his men are coming for me. Your only chance is to leave me alive . . . run for your life and pray I can talk him out of chasing you.”
Gil had only seconds to choose his course of action. As far as his orders went, they were very clear: shoot the woman, evade capture until nightfall, and get on the fucking helo. But he’d been suckered, and he knew it. Lerher had known the Sherkat woman was pregnant, known it would be a problem for Gil, and so had kept the detail to himself. This betrayal of confidence went well beyond the implicit obsceneness of assassinating a pregnant woman. Had she cleared the car door before Gil could shoot her, he would have seen her belly, and he would have hesitated to fire. He would have hesitated because he would have seen something in his scope that he wasn’t expecting to see, and hesitation was every bit as deadly to a sniper as impatience or overeagerness. Lerher knew this, and it was his responsibility to provide his operators with all relevant, available—pertinent information concerning their targets.
Gil’s hotheadedness made the call for him. He was on his own time now, so fuck Lerher. Let him shoot the woman if he had the balls.
He slipped his arms beneath her to pick her up. “You’re coming with me.”
“No!” She struggled out of his arms, and he rocked back on his haunches to look at her.
“Look, lady. Either I take you with me—try to take you with me—or I kill you. Because I can’t leave a living witness to say I was here. Understand?”
She stared into his eyes, realizing it made sense to assume the Iranian government would not suspect America’s involvement in this. Even she had believed they’d been attacked by bandits until Gil had stepped around the door, as did her father and his men who were barreling toward them at this very moment.
Gil’s radio came to life. “Typhoon, be advised . . . electronic surveillance reports that a cellular call has been made by your female target. Repeat. Your female target is alive and in contact with enemy forces headed to your exact location. ETA—forty minutes. Do you copy? Over.”
“Roger that, main. I copy. Target has been neutralized. Requesting immediate extraction. Over.”
“Typhoon, are you declaring an emergency? Over?”
Gil knew that an emergency declaration was the only way to get clearance for the Night Stalkers to extract him during daylight. He had no right to endanger the flight crews just because he had decided to enter into a pissing contest with Agent Lerher.
“Typhoon, are you declaring an emergency? Over?”
Gil looked up at the gray sky, the ceiling still too low and thick for either satellite or drone observation. “Negative, main. Negative. I am not declaring an emergency at this time. Proceeding with mission as planned. Over.”
“Roger, actual.”
Under normal circumstances, a forty-minute head start would have been plenty of time to evade an enemy that had no idea who they were looking for. However, escaping and evading with a wounded, very pregnant woman was a horse of a much different color. There were no training ops for such a mission. He would have to improvise.
“Can you walk?”
“Not to the Afghan border!” she snapped. “You shot me, remember!”
He couldn’t help chuckling. “And I’m fixin’ to shoot ya again.”
18
AFGHANISTAN,
Kabul
Two representatives from the US State Department, code-named Tom and Jerry, had been ordered to deliver twenty-six million dollars’ worth of Afghan currency, called afghanis, to the presidential palace. There they would meet briefly with President Karzai’s appointed intermediary, the appropriate agent tasked with delivering the ransom payment to Sandra Brux’s Taliban captors. The president himself was not in the palace that day. He was in Abbottabad, Pakistan, ostensibly to discuss plans for a proposed trans-Afghan natural gas pipeline that would extend all the way from Iran to India.
Officially, Tom and Jerry were diplomats from the US Embassy in Kabul, but in reality, they were two well-armed members of the US Army’s Delta Force, acting under the direction of SOG. They were dressed in khaki pants and black leather boots, ball caps, and matching olive drab North Face jackets, under which they each carried an HK-MP7, a 4.6 mm submachine gun that fired 940 rounds per minute.
After delivering the money to the intermediary, they would wait for him outside, then covertly follow him and his two-man team to the delivery point. Their orders were clear: First, to ensure the cash was not hijacked en route. Second, if Warrant Officer Brux was at the exchange—which was not expected—they were to wait for her to be safely delivered into the hands of the intermediary, and then terminate—with extreme prejudice—all Taliban/HIK members at the scene before resecuring the twenty-six million dollars’ worth of afghanis.
Tom sat behind the wheel of their beat-up white Nissan watching the palace from behind a pair of Oakley sunglasses. “I didn’t trust that skeevy motherfucker, did you?”
Jerry held up a finger, listening to the real-time intelligence he was receiving in his earpiece via satellite from Creech Air Force Base back in Indian Springs, Nevada. Creech was home to the 432nd Wing, where the pilots of the UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) did the actual flying from the safety of their air-conditioned offices. The UAV loitering thirty thousand feet above them was watching the palace to be sure the intermediary didn’t slip out undetected through a different exit point.
“Okay, they’re coming,” Jerry said. “Should be passing through the main gate any second.”
They were parked down the street where they looked like any other white Nissan against the cluttered backdrop of the city. With the UAV on station, it wouldn’t be necessary to maintain constant visual contact with the intermediary. CenCom would feed them directions if they got tied up in traffic. The trunk lid of their car had been painted flat black to make them stand out from above.
Tom shifted into drive. “Here we go.” He allowed the black SUV to slip out of sight before pulling off.
They drove through the streets of Kabul for about twenty minutes, headed roughly southeast, until CenCom advised that the SUV was turning into an abandoned industrial center near the outskirts of town. Tom and Jerry pulled up and watched as the SUV drove straight across the complex and into a large warehouse half the size of a city block. Two casually dressed men with AK-47s over their shoulders pulled down the large overhead door right behind the SUV.
Tom shifted into park. “Those two pricks look like Taliban to you?”
Jerry shook his head. “CenCom, be advised two men in khakis with AK-47s were waiting here to meet Jackal.” Jackal was the intermediary’s code name.
They sat watching from across the street. As per the agreement, the location of the payoff had not been shared with the US E
mbassy. Kidnap for ransom was routine business in Kabul, and this was the standard procedure generally followed in order to secure the release of Afghan officials and wealthy citizens. With a few exceptions, the captive parties were always returned within twenty-four hours of payment, and for this reason, the US Embassy had advised State that it was probably best to stick with the system already in place if they wanted to facilitate the return of Sandra Brux as quickly and quietly as possible.
Tom and Jerry had been the only modification to that system, the ace up the sleeve of a US State Department very much wanting to send the message that the kidnap and rape of US servicewomen for profit was not a business that ambitious young terrorists around the world should aspire to. It was believed that leaving a bunch of dead bagmen at the scene of an exchange would help to send that message loud and clear, but this could occur only if Sandra was exchanged directly for the cash. There were a number of people within the CIA who believed very strongly that Sandra was likely to be there. Because why hold on to such a dangerous captive any longer than absolutely necessary—particularly if the ransom was paid and everyone was following the tried-and-true intermediary system?
“Think she’s in there?” Jerry ventured, sitting back in his seat with his boot against the dash.
Tom shook his head. “Not a fucking chance. This whole thing stinks like shit. Where the fuck do those assholes think they’re going with all that cash that we can’t follow? They’re not dealing with the Afghan government. They’re dealing with the fucking CIA. How the fuck are they going to shake a UAV?”
“Well, we’re talking about stupid mountain people,” Jerry reminded him.
“Did those pricks with the AKs look like stupid mountain people to you? And even if they are, Jackal knows all about the eye in the sky. He didn’t even ask if we’d be watching. All he did was smile, like he knew something we didn’t. Fucker’s up to something. I know he is.”
“You think he’s on the take?”
