Kill Zone

by Jack Coughlin

  THEY SPED SOUTH DOWN THE highway, to the point where it intersected with a major east-west road. An unfenced area of tired old cars, wrecks, and abandoned mechanical devices and farming equipment was off to one side, a mechanical graveyard that had probably begun many years ago with someone’s car breaking down on the road and being pushed to the side and abandoned. It had become a tangle of junk that spread over about ten acres, and Swanson steered into it, driving around until he found a crumbled old Mercedes cargo van that had rolled over in an accident and been hauled to the junk pile to rust in the punishing sun and wind.

  Swanson stopped the Toyota next to the wrecked vehicle. “End of the line, General,” he said. “We hump the rest of the way to the LZ, a few more kilometers.”

  “Why not just drive?” Middleton was out of the truck.

  Swanson emptied his pack and picked out only a few things for them to carry. Water, more ammo, a few grenades, smoke grenades, and the sat phone. Each of them had a rifle, and he kept Excalibur over his shoulder and gave Middleton the pistol. It was time to lighten the load for the final dash, and if something would not fit on his web gear, he would leave it behind. When the pack was empty, he reloaded the computers in it, along with the sat phone, and gave it to the general to carry. “They will be looking for the truck now in a pretty narrow area, so we have to dump it and stay off the road.”

  Kyle had a drink of water and moved out, heading into the fields, and General Middleton followed. Swanson figured they were only about three kilometers from the landing zone, but could not go directly to it. He was considering how to circle wide around and come in from the side or the rear while keeping the sun behind him, when he found a small footpath that had been pounded out by generations of goats, sheep, and other animals and their keepers. Probably leads to water. “ We’re pretty near a population center now, so keep a sharp eye out for people moving about. We don’t want to be seen.”

  One step at a time, he led them into the field and moved parallel to the path so as to leave no bootprints. The monotony of taking the slow steps helped him consider how the helicopter knew where to find them. There had been a Syrian army search going on, but that chopper flew in straight and was carrying mercs, and the more he thought about it, the more Kyle believed the Frankensteins knew where he was. He had to assume that someone had sold them out, just as the Force Recon rescue mission had been compromised.

  He stopped, and Middleton stepped closer. They had walked about two miles from the junkyard, first through the fields and then tracking near the dirt path, which had narrowed as it went upward into irregular terrain when the cultivated area gave way to wrinkles of land that folded into distant hills. “We’ll set up over there,” he said, pointing to the first low rise.

  A few minutes later, they reached the crest of the initial slope and Kyle got busy digging a hole for them while Middleton gathered bushes and stuck them into the ground in front of the hide. Swanson left Middleton lying there with the binos while he explored higher up the hill. Right behind their position, the little path ducked into a flat pocket of land that skirted a slightly higher hill. Kyle climbed it in five long steps, liked what he saw, and did some more digging, arranging a little wall of rocks and some brushwork, then came back down. He was careful this time to leave plenty of bootprints leading to the hide.

  Then he went back off the trail and explored both sides of a small canyon that opened before him, and found a field of large rocks and boulders. He established a third hide there.

  He trotted back to the original position. Both he and Middleton drank some more water, then lay side by side while they scanned the country they had crossed, Middleton with the binocs and Swanson with the scope of Excalibur, while Kyle explained the next step of the escape and evasion plan.

  They saw it about the same time: a triangular dust trail rising from the road, kicked up by a fast-moving vehicle they recognized as the familiar shape of a Humvee. “Here they come,” said Middleton. “With any luck, they’ll stop and search the junkyard, or go highballing right on by us.”

  “Not a chance,” Swanson replied. “Get on the horn and tell the MEU to come get us right now.”

  Victor Logan was in the passenger seat of the Humvee, with a map on his lap and the GPS locator box between his knees. He was sore all over from the crash, and his spine flared with so much pain that he believed he must have cracked something. At least he was better off than that Russky, who was shot in the face, and the pilot, who had two broken arms. The mercenary ignored his body and studied the readout. The numbers had been flashing steadily when the sniper was on the move, but had remained still now for more than a minute. Logan put a checkpoint on the map.

  The big German was expertly handling the Humvee and the Gurkha was in the back seat, relaxed. Neither said anything. Logan saw that the road was flat and empty and straight, with some sort of clutter that looked like a stack of junk coming up on the right side in about a mile at an intersection. He located the crossroads on the map, then drew a line from his position on the road to the coordinates on the GPS. “Turn here,” he told the German, and pointed off to the left at about a forty-five-degree angle.

  The driver did not remove his foot from the gas pedal and the Humvee went slashing into the field, the big wheels crushing a path through the cultivated plants.

  “Damn!” Middleton exclaimed as the Humvee peeled away from the road. It had not even gotten to the junkyard, much less searched it. Instead, the vehicle was speeding straight for them.

  “Yup,” Kyle said. “Be ready to move out.” He banished everything from his mind except the oncoming Humvee, and let time slow down on his internal clock as he took slow, deep breaths, never taking his eye from the scope. He let Excalibur do the math for a higher-to-lower elevation at two hundred yards.

  The Humvee closed to three hundred yards, then two-fifty, and stopped.

  Swanson released the scope to automatic range-finding. “That’s fuckin’ far enough,” he said.

  The German got out of the driver’s side, and reached back inside to get a weapon. He had pale skin and a shaved head, wore narrow sunglasses, and apparently was chewing gum. The blue stripe flashed and Kyle took him out, the bullet crashing into his exposed left side beneath the arm and rupturing the heart and lungs. The big man was thrown sideways by the impact, dead before he hit the ground.

  Middleton opened up with his AK-47 and Victor Logan dove from the other side and rolled into a drainage ditch, while the Gurkha went out the back and jumped to the opposite side of the vehicle. Both disappeared into the thick tangle of cotton plants.

  Swanson put two more rounds into the engine block of the Humvee, and his shots were answered by searching, controlled, three-round bursts that pecked around their position. For several minutes, the firefight banged sporadically. Logan and the Gurkha were firing and crawling closer, trying to flank the hide.

  A dark speck rose from the field and bounced toward them. “Grenade!” Kyle yelled and pushed Middleton down hard. The explosion shook the ground, sprayed a cloud of shrapnel, and blew up a cloud of dust and debris. Both attackers were up and running when the detonation occurred, then went back into cover and resumed firing.

  “Go now,” Kyle said. “You first.”

  Middleton pushed himself up enough to crawl backward out of the hole, turned, and sprinted up the trail. When he reached the curve, he knelt and called to Swanson. “Come on!” He fired short volleys into the fields.

  Logan watched the readout when he saw the figure retreat, and the numbers had stayed steady. That was the general running. The sniper would be next. He took careful aim at a spot halfway between where the grenade had gone off and the spot where he saw the general disappear.

  Swanson, with Excalibur in one hand and his M-16 in the other, took off, running low under the general’s covering fire. Logan’s bullets cracked around him, but he slid safely headfirst into the bushes beside Middleton. Both paused long enough to put more lead into the likely app
roaches to their old position.

  “Drop the pack, take the sat phone, get back to the rocks, and pop a smoke,” Swanson said. Middleton did as he was told while Kyle fired a few shots to keep the bad guys’ heads down. He did not wait for Middleton to reach the new position. He ran forward, taking a couple of long strides up the little hill to where he had built the other hide, and lobbed the pack into it, then gripped Excalibur around the barrel and flung it into the hole, too. He sprinted back ten meters, dove prone behind some scrub brush, and began to crawl to his ambush point.

  The Gurkha and Logan arrived at the original hide about the same time, and were moving fast. The American read the GPS numbers again and saw they were slightly different, but once again still, which indicated the sniper was in a new hide. While the Asian guy covered him, Logan crawled to the curve in the path and snuggled into some rocks and brush. He spotted the position: a hurriedly built hide bordered with rocks and bushes, with bootprints clear in the dirt.

  He heard a pop and saw a stream of smoke rising from further up the trail. They had sent up a red smoke grenade, which meant that a rescue team was inbound and was to consider the LZ to be hot. Logan could not worry about that right now. Al-Shoum would be sending helicopters to the smoke, too, and the Marines and the Syrians could figure out what to do when they all arrived about the same time. Should be interesting, Logan thought, but he had to be gone by then.

  He used hand signals to communicate with the Gurkha, who was on the ground about twenty feet away, and for the first time saw the man smile. Born in the Himalayas and growing up in the icy shadow of Mount Everest, the small commando felt more comfortable as the fight left the flat land and moved into some hills. His people had lived for centuries among the highest mountains in the world, and the spirit of these little hills spoke to him. He thought he could probably walk to the highest peak without breaking a sweat. Instead of moving directly up the path, the Gurkha crawled around to the left while Logan pumped shots up there to keep the Americans busy. He slung his rifle across his back and unsheathed his long knife with the thick curved blade. By custom, he could not put the khukuri away again until it tasted human blood, and he wanted it to taste Marine blood today.

  It took him no more than a minute to come around a boulder and be within reach of the sniper’s position. The Gurkha flipped a grenade into the secluded hole, ducked away to avoid the explosion, and was immediately up and charging, giving a chilling attack scream and slashing with his khukuri. There were no bodies, just the ruins of a long rifle and a backpack that had been shredded by shrapnel. The Gurkha realized his mistake just as Kyle Swanson came over the top, through the smoke, firing his M-16 at point-blank range.

  Swanson was exposed during the attack for only a moment, but in that second, Victor Logan fired a quick burst at the shadow he saw moving through the dust of the explosion. Kyle felt bullets punch him in the stomach, and he was spun around, knocked over atop the dead Ghurka.

  “Hoo-ah!” shouted Logan. “I got you, you bastard! I’m better than you!”

  The mercenary felt cold steel at the back of his head. Before he could react, Brad Middleton pulled the trigger of the big pistol, and three shots pulverized the skull and the brains of Victor Logan. “No. You’re not,” said the general. “You’re not even close to being as good as Shake.”

  Behind him, the sky seemed alive with approaching helicopters.

  CHAPTER 59

  CRISP FLIGHT ATTENDANTS welcomed Gerald Buchanan aboard the American Airlines passenger jet at Miami International and escorted him to a first-class seat aboard Flight 107 to Puerto Rico. After the dankness of Washington, he had been pleasantly blinded by the brilliant sun and the blue Florida skies. Get used to it. There were a lot of islands in the Caribbean and he planned to settle on one. He already had a new identity and a list of officials to bribe to avoid arrest and extradition. Marge and the kids would come down in a few months, and they would reestablish a home on a beach somewhere.

  He was leaving behind his dream of being the behind-the-scenes king of New America, but felt excitement at moving toward a new dream, one of a long and comfortable life with plenty of money and a big sailboat on the Italian Riviera. He thanked the attendant, gave her a drink request, settled into the soft blue aisle seat, and buckled in. Another attendant was there immediately with an Absolut on ice with a twist of lime.

  He looked over at the passenger in the next seat. His luck was already changing for the better, for next to him was an attractive woman in jeans and a loose T-shirt that showed a band of skin around her waist. Dark brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she had kicked off her tennis sneakers to curl up in the spacious seat, working on a laptop computer balanced on the tray table. Graphs and charts and multipage reports danced on the screen as she clicked through whatever her project was. She was drinking a glass of white wine.

  “Hi there,” he said, taking a sip of his drink. Delicious. “May I ask what you’re working on? It seems complicated.”

  “Oh, just some stuff about fish,” she responded with a shy look. Not much makeup, and big wire-rimmed glasses. Intelligent blue eyes looked at him curiously. “Do I know you from somewhere? I mean, aren’t you somebody famous on TV?”

  Buchanan wanted to tell her everything, to impress her with his name and his title and his extraordinary reach and power. But that was all gone. According to his new passport, he was somebody else, moving toward a tomorrow to find new challenges to test his intellect. “No. Sorry.” He extended his hand. “My name is Bob Walsh. I do oil exploration. And who are you?”

  “Irish Campbell. Nice to meet you.” She sipped her wine and pointed to the computer screen. “I’m a marine biologist up at Woods Hole in Massachusetts, and I’ve got to get out to the islands to tag some fish we believe are about ready to come off the endangered species list.”

  He noticed the huge wristwatch, a diver’s chronograph with all sorts of dials. “Do you actually go swimming to find them?”

  “All the time,” she said and brought out a little tube of lotion, rubbing a dab on her cheeks. “That salt water and hot sun does a job on a girl’s skin.”

  The doors closed, the pilot made his announcements, and she put away her laptop and removed the earplugs to the iPod that hung around her neck and dangled between her full breasts. The diving would explain the tightness of her body. He had no trouble imagining her in a clinging wetsuit with a scuba tank. Flight AA 107 was in the clouds a few minutes later. The seatmates chatted through the first drink, and Buchanan ordered another round.

  “Are you going to hunt for oil down here?” asked Trish Campbell.

  “No. Just burning off some accumulated holiday time, then I’m off to some other dismal place in the oil patch, possibly up in the North Sea to freeze my ass off,” he said. “My family can’t be with me for a while. Could I persuade you to have dinner with me tonight?”

  She let the question hang as she studied his face, then she gave a warm smile and said, “Maybe.”

  Buchanan was regaining his confidence, which had been sorely tried by the setbacks of recent days. That damned Sniper! I hope Gordon takes care of him in a most horrible way. Of course Trish Campbell would dine with him. By the end of the evening, she would do anything he wanted. They always did.

  The announcement came over the loudspeaker that it was permissible to use electronic equipment again, and Trish dug out her laptop and plugged in the iPod. A few clicks of the keyboard and she had MTV rocking, but only she could hear it. On the screen, a sexy girl was humping a boy wearing an oversize basketball jersey and a baseball cap turned to the side.

  “What kind of fish are you going to tag?” he asked.

  She glanced over and turned down the volume. “What?”

  “Sorry. I asked about your job. What kind of fish will you be tagging?”

  “Wrong question to ask a marine biologist,” Trish laughed. She clicked off MTV and called up a program of big fish swimming slowly to and fro. “Sharks
,” she replied. “I’m into sharks. I don’t want to bore you, but would you like to see something really hot?”

  “Sure. I’m really interested.” It was always a good play to pretend to be fascinated by a woman’s work.

  Trish slid the laptop onto his tray table and leaned across to insert the iPod buttons in his ears. He felt the weight of her breast against his forearm, and the clean smell of her perfume. He would gladly put up with MTV and fish for a roll in the hay with her.

  “This is really good. You ready? Can you hear it okay?” When he nodded, she said, “Okay, watch and listen very closely,” punched in a five-digit sequence, and clicked ENTER.

  The fish dissolved slowly into a slide show. Buchanan was stunned as the pictures flipped past. The first was a full view of himself in the front yard of his home. Then came that picture of Marge that they always kept on the baby grand, and a photo of her playing with their dog, Rio. An action photo of fourteen-year-old Lester playing soccer. One of Missy studying in the library at Princeton, followed by a semi-nude picture of Missy on a bed, smiling sleepily at the camera. Photos of his cousin Florence and her kids, his brother and his family, and his bedridden mother in the assisted living facility.

  The last picture was a live camera shot. Gordon Gates sitting at his desk, looking directly at Buchanan.

  “Hello, Gerald,” he said. “Going somewhere? Don’t say anything out loud, just type your replies and look into the little camera button on the side of the computer screen. We will make this quick.”

  “Gordon? What is this!” he said aloud, but was pinched painfully under the arm by Trish, who pointed at the keyboard. “Type!” she said, and he did. WHAT IS THIS?

  “That was a little photo album that we gathered of your entire family.” Gates’s voice in his ear was cold. “Did you like the one of Missy on the bed? Looks like your little princess just got laid, but never mind that for now. The young woman seated next to you and the big guy across the aisle, who happens to be the air marshal for this flight, are a Shark Team, ole buddy. They are there to make sure you do what you are told.”