Kill Zone

by Jack Coughlin

  Buchanan nodded in approval, pleased that Rambo Reed had been slow to understand how any situation such as this was fluid and one had to adapt to change. “So the senator and I can use the identifications as additional proof of how efficient private contractors can be, and how we can accomplish missions better than rote-memory military teams that court an international incident every time they get involved.”

  Ruth Hazel read the list without changing her expression and handed it back to Gates. “I don’t like it when plans fall apart, but I agree that this problem can be turned to our favor.”

  Gates switched on his cold voice, totally unemotional. “Good. We’re back on the same page. If you two approve, I’ll fire off a signal to the sheikh in Basra to have his men execute the general in some interesting and public manner as soon as possible.”

  “And your team on the ground?” Buchanan raised an eyebrow.

  “They will not be seen, nor will they interfere. They will simply hand Middleton over to the sheikh’s people and get out. So I expect Middleton will be dead within a few hours, and we can get on with Operation Premier.”

  CHAPTER 25

  HE AWOKE WITH A START. THE tinny recorded voice of a muezzin was being broadcast from a loudspeaker attached to the minaret of the little town’s mosque, the summons to morning prayer. Gritty crumbs of sand had fallen into his mouth, and every one of the over two hundred bones in his body felt broken. The fear of falling completely asleep had kept Kyle hovering near the surface until he heard the familiar call: “Hasten to prayer!” Over and over and over, broadcast five times every day. It reminded him of Somalia, where he occasionally would shoot the broadcasting loudspeakers in revenge for the annoyance.

  He looked at his watch and cursed. He had been out for almost an hour, much too long, and wondered what he had missed. There was no way to recover anything that might have happened during that time.

  Swanson fumbled for a packet of MRE crackers, popped all eight out of the vacuum-packed seal, lumped peanut butter on them, and started chewing. Tasteless, but it would keep the digestive tract well plugged during the coming hours. Dessert was two Motrin tablets for his aches and pains, and some water, and then he exercised with some isometric stretches and told his body to stop bitching about being so thrashed. Swanson never liked that macho line about pain being a friend. He hurt like hell, but nothing was broken, and he would make time to moan later, with a pretty nurse in attendance. Right now, he had to get back to work.

  He pulled out the powerful spotting scope that had been on his gear list, only to find it had broken in the crash and was useless. But the Steiner binos had survived, and their 10x32 viewing field would serve him almost as well. At five hundred meters, objects would appear about twenty times their normal size. He removed the lens caps, gave the glasses a quick wipe, rolled onto his stomach, and slowly raised his eyes above the edge of the hide.

  He had no specific plan other than to observe for a while and, after that, play things by ear, with the big advantage of the enemy not knowing he was in their backyard. First he would conduct the basic recon to determine the security posted by the bad guys, what kind of patterns the guards had, and determine the weakest point and how to exploit it. After that, he would be able to make realistic, systematic decisions to set conditions of battle in his favor. What he saw through the binos made him smile.

  People were going about their business. Shops were opening, goats were in the streets, women were cleaning around their homes, farmers moved to the fields, some dude was selling bread from a cart, and other men were settling down for some early-morning smoking and coffee. It was the normal tempo of a village. The big four-barreled Zeus still sat brooding beside the road, but there was no gunner in the seat. The fighting holes and trench lines were empty, and the guys with the guns were gone, except for two lazy guards sitting on the ground in a patch of shade beside the Zeus.

  There was nothing Swanson could do until dark other than gather information, so he took out his logbook and started a detailed sketch of the village. He started with the building to his far left, where a woman swept her front stoop with an old broom, and slowly examined the small house with a left-to-right, up-and-down grid. Then he checked the surrounding streets and pathways.

  He laid the M-16 aside and unsheathed Excalibur. After giving the sniper rifle a quick once-over, he brought the scope to his eye and touched the button to turn on the laser rangefinder. The numbers stopped scrolling when he clicked on the doorway of the woman’s house: exactly 680 yards. He jotted the figure on one of the logbooks’ green range sheets as the woman finished her sweeping and propped her broom against a side wall. He shifted his attention to the next building.

  Someone cursed in Arabic and the two Zeus guards scrambled to their feet. A chubby little man in civilian clothes with an AK-47 slung across his back had emerged from a doorway and moved toward them, shouting that they were worthless pigs and gesturing at them to stand up. Kyle examined him closely. Who are you, Pudgy? No uniform, but obviously in some kind of command. Another man, tall and bearded, also with a rifle on his shoulder, came from the same house and stood idly while the sentries were chewed out. Okay. You’re Beanpole. Assigning nicknames helped Kyle sort out the various players.

  They laughed at the young guards, then crossed the street to a café and disappeared inside through a front door shaded by a small cloth awning. Fifteen minutes later they came back out, carrying stacked boxes of food. Pudgy and Beanpole had not had time to have eaten at the little store, so they obviously were taking meals back to the house. Judging by the number of boxes, it was a hell of a lot more food than for just the two of them. Kyle’s interest had perked up by the appearance of the Arab fighters, and he sketched their house, did the ranges to the door and windows, and marked it as a probable target.

  Beanpole came back out with a couple of the meal boxes and walked casually to another house nearby, where the door was closed and the curtains were drawn. He leaned toward the door, and his lips moved as he spoke to somebody inside. More than a minute passed before the door opened quickly and from the shadows, two arms reached out, grabbed the food, and vanished back inside. The door was shut again. Beanpole walked away, and Kyle saw the man’s lips moving, probably in a soft curse at the rudeness of whoever snatched the food. It had only been a momentary glance and at an awkward angle, but Swanson could have sworn that the skin of whoever took the food was light-colored, possibly even white.

  He resumed studying each house in the village, taking time out periodically to check around his hide and make sure he was not under observation himself. Not having someone covering his back left him feeling naked and completely alone. Staying busy by building the range card kept his mind off his vulnerability.

  Over the passing hours, the normal life of the village became his private reality television show, and he noted the times of all significant movement in the area, looking for patterns, sketching and lasering ranges to important aiming points. Seventy-forty-three to the major intersection. Six-twelve to the right edge of the restaurant. Left, right, and middle distances to suspicious houses. He mapped it all out systematically as time ticked by, and tried to commit as much as possible to memory. There was no such thing as too much information.

  “Hasten to prayer!” The noon call of the muezzin surprised him because he had been so busy that hours had slipped away. Then he got an unexpected break. A group of armed men came from the house used by Pudgy and Beanpole. While most residents simply worshipped within their homes or workplaces, or went to the small mosque in the center of the village, these men wanted to make a public show of their fervent devotion. Each unrolled a small rug or a straw mat in the street, knelt, and performed the rituals of prayer. Kyle got an accurate head count: eight men, all with their weapons. Nobody had come from the other suspicious house, where the door remained closed.

  Prayers done, two of the men repeated the breakfast run and went to the store for the group. A small, wiry man tagged along
behind a large character with a square head and big shoulders. SpongeBob and Pee-Wee. Back to their house with arms overflowing with boxes and bottles, and then Sponge Bob made the delivery run of three boxes and six water bottles over to the second house. This time Swanson was ready when the door opened, and was looking only for the hands that reached for the boxes and bottles. White! No damned doubt. Not a damned doubt in the world.

  I’m starving out here on crackers and peanut butter while you assholes are having meals delivered.

  Swanson turned over to rest. Seeing all those clowns down there made him start to think that he might have bitten off more than he could chew with this. He considered that the eight in the house were probably hard-core fighters, but how many else were down there? Enough to keep shifts of guards around the Zeus. Add whoever was in the mystery house. Round it off to at least a dozen, probably more. Clowns with guns could still shoot. He was strongly tempted to break radio silence and call for help.

  It was not fear, for he was not afraid to die. He was just afraid to fail. But if he could get the general, it would take only a moment to light up his phone and get an air strike to take out the main group with a single smart bomb. He could pull Middleton out during the confusion and evade to a landing zone where a chopper could come in under air cover and pick them up. He almost convinced himself that was the way to go.

  Then he weighed the down side. His people would be monitoring the cell phones of the members of the TRAP team to see if they had been put into use by the enemy. Using his own would announce his existence. The element of surprise would be gone, and the tactical situation would tilt back to favor the bad guys. Better that they continue to think he was a lone radio operator running for his life. Same thing with the pack radio he had taken from the dead Marine.

  He rubbed water over his face to cool it. This whole deal smelled as rotten as a month-old banana. Those people down there had known exactly when, where, and how the Force Recon choppers would arrive, and that meant there was a leak somewhere. Not a leak. A flood! The person responsible had to be high enough up the food chain to have been trusted with details of the plan. Who? Kyle dug out another bottle of water. Sweat was pouring from him, even lying motionless in the little bit of shade provided by the bushes roofing his hide. It was probably 120 degrees at midday.

  A call to alert the Marines that he was alive would risk that the traitor would also find out and block any new rescue attempt.

  How high up the food chain was the leak? The mission had been put together in a hurry, but a lot of people knew about it, both civilian and military. But only one person had done something truly unusual: Gerald Buchanan, the man who wrote out in his own hand the order for Kyle to assassinate the general if things went haywire. Why even issue such an order unless he anticipated that something was going to go wrong? As far as the Marines were concerned, it was supposed to be a rather ordinary in-and-out mission with sufficient speed, troops, and firepower to get the job done. The commandant of Marines would never have approved such a plan. The President of the United States knew? Impossible. The man was a decorated veteran himself. The guy who came to the carrier, Shafer, was just the messenger boy. The circle led back to Buchanan.

  He thought about why a man like Buchanan would betray his country, and then he considered what would be a suitable punishment. What would be worse for a deskbound political animal than having to spend the rest of his life cramped in a supermax cell in Colorado alongside big-league terrorists? A bullet in the ear would work, but Kyle felt Buchanan should be brought into public shame and disgrace. Like that Enron guy, he could always have a heart attack after being convicted. Swanson shook his head to clear the cobwebs. The whole thing was irrelevant and had nothing to do with his job at the moment.

  He would trust Double-Oh to get that letter into the hands of the right people and that they would take care of the problem. Isn’t that what the FBI does? He was a sniper, not a cop, and all he could deal with at the moment was whether to make this fight all alone, or risk using the damned telephone. He was fucked either way. He would not make the call yet. Anonymity was his friend, and the best route, the only route, was straight ahead. He kept the sat phone and buried the pack radio. No use lugging it along, since it had only been taken as a diversion in the first place.

  He rubbed his eyes, picked up the binos, and got back to sketching the village.

  Boredom set in as the sun baked the town and the lone man watching it, but Swanson would not let himself fall asleep. There would be no more sleep until this job was done, for to sleep would be to yield awareness of the situation, and that could be the end of everything. He began arranging what he knew, planning his attack. He studied the little grocery, putting it on his mental list of places to visit after dark.

  About four o’clock, a dirty white Toyota pickup truck came down the shady side of the main street with a throaty rumble and stopped in front of the suspicious place Kyle now called the House of White Hands. Although he had a beard, the driver was not an Arab, but he moved with the loose gait of someone comfortable in the surroundings. He wore lightweight slacks and a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt rolled up at the wrists, with sunglasses pushed up on top of his head. He greeted a few men seated on stools in some nearby shade. Damn! Kyle kept his right hand on the binos while his left dug into a thigh pocket and grabbed a plastic envelope. It contained the small photograph of the Frenchman who was to be the contact for the Marine raiders, and he looked at the picture, then back at the man. Pierre Falais. The Frenchman knocked on the door, said something, and was allowed inside. Fifteen minutes later he was out again, and his truck roared to life. Toyotas don’t roar, Kyle noted, and they don’t wear big desert tires. This was a custom job. He watched it drive to the gate in a low wall that surrounded another flat-roofed house three blocks down the main street, and then he lasered the hell out of the place.

  It was finally time to move. Swanson spent two hours backing out of his hide and working his way down the wadi to a new spot a hundred meters to the right to get a better view of the mysterious door before the dinnertime delivery at the House of White Hands. This time, when the door opened, he had a plain view of a big man wearing desert cammie pants and an olive drab tank top. Not only was he white, but he had a line of tattoos on his right arm from shoulder to wrist. He took the food and shut the door.

  Swanson was stunned. Who the hell was that and what did he have to do with the situation? The white skin meant westernized: Eurotrash or Aussie or Kiwi or Canadian or Scottish or whatever. Maybe even American. The tattoos helped narrow the field because they indicated a military background. That meant a spook of some sort, or a mercenary, and so much food being delivered indicated more than one in the house. A couple of Frankensteins just happen to be in the neighborhood during a Marine raid? No chance that could be just a coincidence, and it sure as hell didn’t help the odds against him.

  Kyle crawled back to his hide, ate some more crackers, and checked his water supply before taking a sip. He had taken two one-quart and four two-quart canteens from the other Marines so that he could be liberal in staying hydrated, because he planned to resupply after dark. But he never drank more than half of the water on hand. Water was life in the Middle East, and he judged that he still had plenty. As he ate, he considered his list-the Zeus and its guards; the house with Pudgy, Beanpole, SpongeBob and Pee-Wee, and a minimum of four other Arab fighters; the frog and his souped-up Toyota; and finally the House of White Hands, which contained at least one non-Arab guy who was most likely a mere.

  Places to go and things to do, and Middleton was down there somewhere. The frog will tell me. Lots to do. He cut chunks of C-4, rolled them into tiny balls and put them in an arm pocket. A handful of pencil-sized detonators went into another pocket. From a full roll of black duct tape in his pack, he ripped off a half-dozen long strips and stuck them along the legs of his pants. He cleaned his weapons. He waited for darkness.

  CHAPTER 26

  NEWS FROM THE
FRONT, GENERAL! Guess what? You’re gonna be a fuckin’ TV star again!” Victor Logan squatted before his captive, grabbed Brad Middleton hard by the jaw, and turned him so the prisoner had to look into his eyes. Logan laughed, a mirthless sound that echoed in the small room, and he wore a smile of triumph.

  As the heat of the day was easing, Middleton, prone on the bunk, was able to breathe a bit easier, pulling air into his lungs despite the aching rib that had been broken in one of the beatings. The broken finger was useless. He had ripped a strip of cloth from his robe and tied it to the next finger to immobilize it. The room stank so badly it had become part of him. His guts were sore, and he had neither bathed nor shaved since they had used him in that earlier rigged media show.

  Middleton’s right wrist was chained to the metal cot, giving him only enough movement to reach two buckets, one about a third full of fresh water and the other a stinking one that he used as a toilet. The loose full-length cotton robe was filthy.

  “We just got some new instructions,” Logan said, letting go of the jaw but giving Middleton a medium-strength slap on the side of his head, enough to make the general’s ears ring. “I guess you might consider the good news is that this is going to be our last day in this shithole. The bad news, for you that is, comes tomorrow morning. Jimbo and I are going to clean you up, get you all dressed in that spiffy uniform hanging on the door over there, and hand you to the raggedy-heads. The jihadists plan a big show. Might call it the local version of American Idol.”