Kill Zone

by Jack Coughlin

  “Nothing but the wreckage,” said Collins as he put the goggles away. “The fire and the hot metal just kills this heat-sensitive imagery. All I can pick up are those damned ragheads running around.” He glanced at the brightening sky. “Think the Harriers will be back to burn it?” Collins had a shoulder-fired Stinger ground-to-air missile beside him. Other Stingers lay scattered in the other trenches.

  “That’s the SOR Makes no sense to leave all that gear for the sand monkeys to pick over, but the Harriers seemed to be getting out of here in a hurry.” Vic Logan had been in too many emergencies, in too many places, too many times, to let shit like this bother him. “Let’s go see who’s what. Big fuckup, this.”

  The American mercenaries moved from the sandbagged trench and walked around a large ZSU-23-4 antiaircraft weapon. The gunner had abandoned his position behind the ammunition feed trays immediately after the helos went down, leaving the powerful radar-guided gun useless in his run to get to whatever booty he might steal from the helicopters. The quad rack of 23 mm cannons was still locked into position, useless if the Harriers returned.

  Logan and Collins walked easily, not bothering to keep distance between them, because they were in no danger. “Too damned bad, Vic,” said Collins. “This was a good ambush configuration.”

  Logan’s big strides ate up the ground. His head was on a swivel and his hard eyes captured the tactical situation. The ragheads from the trench to the right, which would have supplied a cross-fire, were also out of their holes and heading toward the wreckage, along with women and children from the village. From soldiers and civilians to scavengers in the blink of an eye. A verse of Kipling came to him: “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.” Afghanistan then, Iraq yesterday, Syria today, who knows where tomorrow? These people were going out to the crash site to do what they had been doing to foreign soldiers for centuries. Fuckin’ vultures.

  Logan sort of hoped none of those jarheads were still alive, although the idea of killing Americans had not cost him a moment of sleep. It was a business deal, sweet payback for being screwed over by the navy, and Logan was determined to come out of all this rich. He had shopped his services around until he discovered that being part of a Shark Team paid better than any of the other private billets. He was pulling in ten thousand dollars U.S. a month, and complicated things like this brought more. For these big bucks, he didn’t give a fuck if he had to kill the pope.

  The fact that the birds went down by themselves made no difference to Logan, because the result was the same. He got fifty thousand for snatching the general and now the rescue mission had failed, which meant still another fifty would flow into his bank account. He figured to retire when he topped two million.

  He clicked his AK-47 to full automatic and fired an entire clip into the air while shouting in Arabic for the ragheads to clear out until he and Collins were done searching the area. Reluctantly, the crowd pulled back away from their looting and stood in sullen groups while the two American mercenaries got to work.

  “Get the camera going,” Logan said as they approached the twisted wreckage. “I’ll look around the perimeter. You take pictures of every one of those Marines, get the dog tags, and read off the names loud enough to be recorded, clear enough to be understood. Any funny names, spell them out. I want a stone-cold positive ID on every one of those dudes.”

  “Got it.” Collins stepped into the wreckage. It was a mess in there. He started photographing.

  “And make sure all the arms and legs add up!” Logan called, then began a slow walk around the site, circling from the nose of one of the choppers out to about a hundred meters. That put the helicopter in the center of an imaginary clock, with the nose pointed to twelve o’clock, and Logan switched on a powerful flashlight as he worked back and forth in pie-shaped segments. One o’clock. Two o’clock. Raghead footprints and chunks of debris from the aircraft reached out in all directions. He would have missed the puddle of vomit near the seven o’clock position had he not smelled it before locating it with the bright beam of his flashlight. Nothing much more than some discolored yellow bile. A raghead sickened by the sights and smell of new death? Not likely, but possible. He walked on, and two slices of the clock later, almost obscured by the scuffed footprints of the scavengers, he found the unmistakable tire tracks of a motorcycle. He did not recall hearing any. How old was the track? Some civilian ride through yesterday? It led toward the road, east.

  “Hey, Vic!” Collins hollered from the ruptured end of one of the helicopters. “Take a look.”

  Logan was there in a couple of big strides. “What?”

  Collins was squatting down and had the loose end of a big strap in one hand. He tugged on it to show that the other end was secured to the deck of the fuselage. “Three more of these straps. There, there… and there.”

  All four ends had been sliced clean. Something had been secured here. Had the ragheads already stolen it? Something large? No, he would have noticed. Logan backed out of the wrecked bird and Collins followed, putting away his camera after photographing and identifying the final two bodies. They went to the fuselage of the other helicopter. A little Kawasaki dirt bike, badly damaged, was still lashed to the deck with straps like the ones that had been cut on the first helo.

  Logan scratched his neck, came to a conclusion. He waved to the onlookers and they poured back into the wreckage like honeybees after a lump of sugar.

  “Somebody survived that mess,” he told Jimbo as they returned to the village and their satellite radio. “We got a runner.”

  CHAPTER 22

  HE HATED NOISE. KYLE SWANSON valued silence, for stealth was his cloak of protective comfort. On a wide battlefield, there was so much racket in a raging shootout of tank cannons, masses of small arms, machine guns, grenades, and artillery that soldiers talked in shouts for a week afterward, long after the fighting stopped. As a sniper, he preferred to be far from that chaos, out on his own, where making sounds could spell doom. Swanson was the ghost at the party, able to move unseen and unheard. Noise weakened snipers and made them vulnerable, almost like normal human beings. The only noise he liked to hear in combat was the single POP of his silenced rifle being fired.

  So although the dirt bike had a silenced muffler, the steady throbs of the engine still reverberated in the desert night. Kyle believed any fool with ears could hear him. Combined with the coming dawn, that would leave him exposed and vulnerable. He weaved slowly, deliberately along the pavement, steering through patches of loose gravel normally avoided by motorcyclists because bikes have a tendency to skid. A mistake could dump him in a heartbeat, but he wanted those tracks to be found.

  His mind was also busy on another level, thinking about possible places where he might hunker down for the day, when people would be everywhere. Being caught near a population center, even a small village like this one, was never good, plus people were probably going to be out searching for him when they figured out someone had lived through the crash. The flare of a match straight ahead snapped him back to reality.

  Someone had lit a cigarette. Swanson took his hand from the throttle and coasted the motorcycle to a halt. He turned off the engine and sat balanced on the dirt bike with a boot down on each side. Focusing his night-vision goggles, he saw two men about two hundred meters ahead, a pair of careless Syrian soldiers at a road checkpoint. Both were watching the area where the helicopters went down instead of paying attention to their jobs.

  Kyle laid the bike down along the hardball highway and carefully dropped his gear, except for the M-16 and a couple of hand grenades. On his arms and knees, he low-crawled until he was within twenty feet of the guards. They were cooking something in the guard shack. Smelled like rice and lamb. The guards were jabbering like tourists about the crash and had stacked their rifles against a wall when they climbed onto the flat roof of the shack for a
better view. Controlling his breathing, Kyle circled behind them, moved in close, rose to a sitting position against the wall, and pulled the pin on a hand grenade. He let the spoon flip away, held it for a count of two, and then tossed it onto the roof and sprawled to the ground next to the structure.

  The explosion blew both of them from their perch, and Kyle quickly checked the bodies, which were riddled with shrapnel. Not good enough. The people back at the crash site were more than a mile away and probably would not have heard this small explosion, so he had to leave enough information to convince whoever eventually investigated the deaths that the work was sloppy enough to have been done by a rookie Marine. A young radioman would have done the easiest thing available and smashed right through the checkpoint, using the basic weapons at hand, in his haste to escape. Kyle wanted to leave this scene as American as possible. He clicked his M-16 to full automatic and raked an entire magazine of bullets across the chests and stomachs of the dead men, and the bullets dug through the bodies and into the hardpan pavement beneath them. Shiny brass cartridges flipped and bounced wildly everywhere. He walked in the sand to leave bootprints. Window dressing. He could easily have taken them both out with Excalibur, or up close with his knife, but this was a stage show. As a final touch, he ducked inside the small bunker and gobbled down some of the meal the men had been preparing. He was right. Spicy lamb and rice.

  He reassembled his gear, remounted the bike, and rode past the checkpoint, spiking a piece of cloth torn from his camouflage uniform on the barbed wire. The track of the dirt bike then continued west, again toward the border.

  A hundred meters later, he made sure he was on clean pavement, stopped the bike, got off, picked up the bike, and turned it around 180 degrees. Now he would disappear and leave no tracks at all. He pushed the motorcycle through the roadblock, past the dead men. Swanson propped the bike on the kickstand long enough to pull up some bushes and sweep away any prints that might give away his direction change, and then headed back toward the village.

  When he entered the vicinity of the crash, people were milling around the wrecked choppers. Kyle knew that meant they might see him, too, but he knew human nature had them in a near frenzy. They were only looking for booty. A lone man in the distance was of no interest. Still, every moment he was out there was a risk because the first hot curve of the rising sun had crested the eastern horizon and painted the underside of the morning clouds in a sheet of shining gold. When Swanson was working, he hated the arrival of daylight as much as a vampire like Count Dracula, for he, too, was a creature of the night.

  Swanson went off-road and skirted about a kilometer to the right of the scene, keeping low in the wadis to avoid being spotted. Within a mile, the country flattened again.

  The village of Sa’ahn had the familiar, compact look of any other desert town he had ever seen, houses and shops that had grown up over the centuries around a water source. Rainfall in this section of Syria was adequate to feed fields of sugar beets that were bordered by tight patterns of apricot trees in the east. North of town, he could smell as well as see and hear the feed lots where sheep and goats were being fattened for market. Irrigated rows of ragged cotton were planted on the western side. Mount Druz dominated the land, and a carpet of desert stretched to all horizons.

  The homes all looked alike, squat and square, with low walls that corralled the family’s chickens and goats. Drooping lines between poles carried telephone lines and delivered electricity from a dam about twenty miles away. One large building near the center appeared to be the town’s administrative center. Lights were on in a few windows of the private homes, brightening colorful small curtains of green and red, so people in those homes were already moving about. He had to hide.

  Kyle stopped the bike about three hundred meters from the nearest building. He had run out of darkness and did not have time to bury the motorcycle, which he preferred to do. So he hid it in a deep wadi and covered it with bushes, hoping that the obscure location, the crude disguise of weeds, and the camo paint job would keep it hidden.

  With the M-16 locked and loaded and his finger resting on the trigger housing, Swanson moved closer to the village until he found a forlorn and bare hillside that overlooked the approach road. A berm lined with thick brush rose like a dirty pimple near the top, and he ducked down to keep it between himself and the town. This was it.

  He circled to the back side and dug a shallow trench straight up to the rim of the berm. The rising sun was already heating the dirt, and Kyle sweated the last few meters, but when he came up in the middle of the bushes, he had a clear view from the high ground.

  Dumping his gear, he wiggled back down, gathered more brush from random spots in a radius of about twenty meters, and swept his tracks, then planted the foliage around his new hide until he was sure that it would look to a passersby like a single big bush. Time would slow down for him now, so he arranged things in his shady nook to get some rest. Real sleep was not an option, not alone in hostile territory, but he could allow himself a light doze, just under the edge of total awareness, with his hand always on a weapon.

  As the sun cleared the horizon and full daylight arrived, he drank some water and took out the binocs again for a last look at the village before settling down. The homes, the goats, the women and children moving about. Normal tempo. Most of the men were probably still busy stripping the helos. He stopped his sweep with his glasses abruptly when he got to the area where the major road entered the town. Sandbags were stacked along a trench line, and just to his side of the road was another deep trench. AK-47 rifles were laid carelessly over its sandbags, and missile tubes leaned against the sides. Sticking out of a protected hole where the trenches came together were the snouts of the four barrels of a ZSU-23-4.

  “Well, now, ain’t this a bitch?” he asked himself. “A Zeus, fighting holes with AKs, and lots of guys. We were flying into a fucking ambush.”

  Kyle put away the glasses, took another drink of water, and let the adrenaline and excitement leave his body. He shifted his shoulders to get comfortable, laid the M-16 across his chest, and felt the heavy exhaustion from the past few hours pull hard on him. His last conscious thought before he passed out was, “They knew we were coming.”

  CHAPTER 23

  VICTOR LOGAN SAT AT A SMALL table, pecking at a laptop computer to input the names of the Marines killed in the crash. His big, thick fingers were blunt instruments, meant for things much more coarse than dainty taps on a keyboard, and he found this work both laborious and somewhat insulting. Clerks did this kind of shit, not warriors. He detested having to wear reading glasses when he worked on this machine. They were a sign of weakness, of getting old, past the prime, but Logan had decided to adopt the modern age to get the technological edge. Just because a gorilla eats leaves does not mean he is any less of a mean son of a bitch.

  He could tell the sun was up by the steady increase of the temperature in the room. Finally, he finished copying the names that Jimbo Collins had culled from the dog tags and clicked the key to save the file to a directory. He called up another list that had been downloaded from Washington several hours earlier, did a cut-and-paste job with the one he had just written, and compared the two. He highlighted one name in bright red, increased the font size to make it bold, then pushed away from the screen and studied it. “I was right, Collins. Somebody’s missing. The Washington list has one name more than the dog tags on the kill list. You damned sure you got them all?”

  “All of ‘em, Vic. I pulled the tags off every one of those crispy critters.” He held up a plastic bag filled with dog tags and shook it with a definitive rattle of metal against metal. Collins was at his own computer, working with his camera to freeze-frame individual images of each of the dead Marines, inject them into a folder, and adjust the color and clarity.

  There was a knock and a shout at the door, and both men grabbed weapons. Security was always on their minds, and they kept an extra AK-47, locked and loaded, on two pegs directly abov
e the front door for emergencies. “What?” called Collins. He went to the front wall and put his back to it.

  “Open up! Something else has happened!” The English came in a familiar French accent.

  Collins held a mirror to the window and angled it to confirm who was there. “It’s the frog. He’s alone.” Logan nodded, and Collins opened the door.

  A small man, thin but muscular, came in. He had a sharp face with prominent cheekbones, dark eyes, and a slit of a mouth that never smiled and was almost invisible in a long, thick black beard. Pierre Dominique Falais was a familiar figure in Sa’ahn, where he had settled after getting out of the Foreign Legion. As a converted Muslim, he was welcome everywhere, despite his European background, and he would drive to other towns and villages to buy crafts, wool, and rugs and load them into his white Toyota truck, then usually find a reason to stay overnight in order to smoke and eat and talk with the locals. The Syrian villagers considered Abu Mohammed to be a most generous man and an honest trader. Success in the little trading enterprise and some carpentry meant nothing to him, for his real money came not from peddling items to stores and bazaars, but by selling his intelligence services to the governments of Syria, France, and Russia. He was able to work openly with all three countries because their policies were seldom in conflict.

  For the time being, however, these two large American mercenary soldiers, who had deposited five thousand dollars into his bank account in Damascus, had his total cooperation. A similar amount would come in when the task was completed.

  “The fuck you want, Pierre?” snapped Logan, turning back to the name on the laptop screen. A radioman lived through that and escaped?

  The Frenchman stepped inside and closed the door. The place stank. These little homes were usually kept very clean by the women, with the pungent aromas of hard tobacco and cooking food welcoming visitors like a pleasant cloud. In here, the smell of human waste, sweat, and filth offended him. He shrugged it off. They were, after all, Americans, a disgusting people. “Two guards at that checkpoint a few klicks to the west have been killed. Bullet holes all over the bodies, and a villager described some open wounds that sound to me like they may have been made by grenades. I’m going out there.”