“Mr. Swagger, my orders are to bring Mr. Heflin in by foot two minutes after the airborne drop.”
“That your understanding, Heflin?”
“That’s what they told me. I brought a gun in case there’s a gunfight.”
“Don’t hurt yourself with it.”
“I’m actually pretty good with it,” said Heflin.
“Well, leave it in the holster. If you’re shot at, that’s when you draw it.”
“Got you.”
“Here they come!” said the driver.
And come they did. Black Hawks, Wyoming Air National Guard, six of them—low, loud, and fast—in well-crafted delta-assault formation, altitude about one hundred and fifty, low enough to rip a column of dust from the earth below so that, in the settling gloom, it looked like they led the apocalypse toward the target.
Helicopters! Bob thought. I hope I am done with helicopters after this.
The birds disappeared over the crest, Nick announced, “Green, green, remember your positions and your assignments, safeties off only after disembarking, green, green, green!”
The accordion of vehicles again opened itself up, only this time at speed, as Nick’s Command truck led the way, screeched out, yanked hard right to the ranch entrance and went cascading down the road toward Hell or Glory. Three more armored trucks, riveted turtles in black with FBI in white painted on every flat surface, followed, in turn, by the SUVs and the other two sedans.
“Okay,” said the young FBI driver. “I guess it’s time.”
“You up for this, son?” asked Bob.
“Yes, sir,” said the driver.
He accelerated gently, not being part of any speed brigade, followed the column of dust ahead of him, entered the ranch, and proceeded through a mile of rolling plains before reaching the actual security gate. It was deserted. He pulled over.
Bob was first out. He waited for the sound of the guns. There was none.
“Okay,” said the agent, “I’m taking Mr. Heflin into Command now.”
“No guns,” said Bob. “Announce yourself to the assaulters so you don’t get shot up.”
“Yes, sir,” he snapped, and the two men set off at a half run, leaving Bob leaning on the fender under the dark sky, a bit beneath the last crest, feeling a whip of wind but no sense of human activity.
He heard the raid happening via radio.
“Hammer One, have entered house, no resistance.”
“Hammer Two, entering from rear, some civilians in the kitchen, have cleared them, no weapons, they’re just a mess.”
“Barn clear, this is Hammer Four, barn clear, no hostiles, no fire, deserted.”
“Hammer Five, in garage, all quiet, nice cars, nobody here.”
“This is Hammer Six, I am in the kitchen, moving through the basement, coming up the stairs. Hold your fire, Hammer One. No tangos, no incoming fire, it’s just your buddies from Minneapolis.”
“Got it, Six. Yeah, see you. Hey, everybody, just waiting on upstairs report. Okay, getting signal, no tangos upstairs, upstairs clear.”
“No incoming, no movement?” asked Nick, holding at his Command vehicle.
“Nothing, big dog. Oh, well, yeah: lots of bodies,” said Hammer 1. “What is this, Jonestown?”
53
The ranch
Earlier
No signal from Alberto the next day, nor the next. Juba was just waiting. He made his call to his own control, making certain the schedule was still set, his pickup would be on time, all things were in place, and there were no imminent signs of aggressive action against the operation. It was all subterfuge, of course, as he had no intention of leaving that way. That way, he knew, was death.
But he was also certain no attempt against his life would be made here. It would raise too many questions and lead to too many difficulties. He thought, instead, when he had been picked up—he himself did not even know by whom—that the vehicle would be followed, perhaps by a drone, and when it was far away, in some state disconnected by miles of highway from Wyoming, some police incident would be arranged so that the true perpetrators could claim utter innocence.
Juba passed the time working out in Menendez’s elaborate gym, went for a long run each day, and otherwise spent his time in his shop, reading reloading manuals and classic ballistics texts, if only to enjoy privacy in the world he so enjoyed. If he imagined a future—it happened occasionally—he saw himself on a large estate with a shop full of interesting rifles and, outside, a mile of free countryside into which he could shoot. It would not be shooting for purposes of politics, history, or faith. It would be shooting as shooting, an end in itself, a kind of subreligion of the larger commitment to Allah, demanding the same rigor, stamina, commitment, and vision. It would be a paradise on earth well-earned.
On the third day, a nod from Alberto told him that the tunnel entrance had been located and that things were set, to the degree that they could be. A nod in return was all that Alberto needed.
“I will see you in the big room at six-thirty,” Juba said to Alberto. “Tonight, I will say my farewell to our extraordinary host.”
“I will be there to perform my duties,” said the old man.
* * *
• • •
At 6:30, Juba, freshly showered and dressed casually in slacks and sweater, ambled to the vast room to find Menendez by himself, reading a book in front of the fireplace. The room was a museum of images and objects from cowboy movies. Sculptures of wild animals, their muscles ripped in strain as they galloped or reared or fought. Massive paintings of the knights of the plains at full gallop across the sagebrush, dust a-rising, neckerchiefs a-fly. Buffalo and elk heads, all with massive spans of knurled, polished horn. Tapestries in tribal patterns, gaudy colors in zigzags like lightning bolts. Polished wooden tables of thick oak, wrought-iron lamps, two sofas and four massive chairs, all in burnished leather and swaddled in tribal blankets. It was a cowboy fantasyland.
“How nice of you to visit,” said Menendez, rising. “I understand why you must remain solitary—it’s for your concentration. You must shoot even more precisely than you did at Wichita, though that was breathtaking. But I appreciate, now that our relationship is ending, the pleasure this last time of your company. I know you do not drink, but perhaps just his once. It’s a very fine Spanish wine, Sierra Cantabria Teso La Manja Toro.”
He spoke so fast, Alberto had trouble keeping up.
Juba shook his head.
“No? That is fine. A man as hard as you can make no concessions to appetite, I understand. Your true test is upcoming. I feel mine has passed, with the elimination of the witness. It is time for me to relax for a bit. Soon, I will leave here—one cannot stay in any one place too long, alas—and go to houses perhaps in the Caribbean or the South of France or in Cancún. I have always said my true headquarters is, literally, my head—ha—and I can administer my responsibilities from anywhere, which is the one pleasure of the modern age and all its communications genius, though I do think, my friend, that you and I might have been better suited to an earlier age, you as a general, in silk caftan and turban, mighty scimitar in its sash, ready to go against the Crusaders at Acre or Tours or wherever, myself a king of Old Spain, as our humble peninsula achieved domination over the world, due to the guts of her conquistadors and her admirals.”
He seemed flushed tonight, a bit florid, pausing now to sip while Alberto caught up. Maybe he was tipsy. Maybe he was blotto. The fire crackled, sending flickers of light and shadow into the room, which, in any event, was lit from behind ochre shades so that the illumination everywhere was gold. He smiled. He drew his arm around Juba, pulling the sniper closer.
“You know,” he said conspiratorially, “this has been such a pleasure for me, so much more than mere business. I feel that we are brothers. We are both men of the dark skin, our forebears were swarthy, and only
a little polish hides our true nature as men of color. I feel our alliance is determined by nature. It is time for those of us of the darkness to take over. The world has too long been dominated by los gringos or les blancs, or whatever one chooses to call them. I have lived among them, I know them. I was educated at Harvard, you know, and have studied them. It could be said I majored in White People, ha ha. You know them too. You have hunted and killed them. Such entitlement they have, such a sense of nobility and position and grace, not knowing how they are loathed among those of us who are not of them. Really, it is about race—la raza, as we call it—and how they have assumed for centuries our inferiority and how that time is coming to an end. And you and I, my friend, we are on the front lines—you in your way, I in mine—not just to bring down an entity known as the United States, with its capital in Washington, D.C., but an entire culture, a civilization, and the assumptions upon which it was built. They consider themselves superior because freak chance awarded them custodianship of the Industrial Revolution, but to make it work, they had to steal from us at a rate beyond calculation. Their wealth and power was built on our flesh and sweat and death. They thought they built a thing when, in fact, it was our muscle and our lives that paid the price. And, from that, they assumed possession of all material goods and all spiritual succor. It was, I tell you, the greatest crime in history, and only now are we beginning to understand the extent of the white man’s thievery, not just from Africa, not just the labor of the Negro, but from the world over. From all the peoples of color, they looted and pillaged and alchemized our tears into their gold. It is my deepest pleasure to be a weapon in the war against all that.
“That is the point of the narcotics: they are weapons, not pharmaceuticals, their mission to eat at the structures and disciplines of these pretenders, so stupid in their ways that they do not see the larger picture and understand that we are rotting out their infrastructure from beneath them so that it will collapse upon itself. And, in the end, all men will have the character bred out of them or softened by the pleasures of the chemicals that we sell, crippled by their need, desperate for the effect. They have no strength left—not physical, not moral, not even metaphorical—and so they too shall pass, and the world shall become the communion of ‘we,’ of color and blood, well bound by the intensity of our co-struggle and our—”
“Can I see the gun?” Juba said.
“What? Why, yes, of course. Yes, what a beauty it is. A perfect symbol of our struggle. How appropriate it is at this moment.”
He walked to the gun case, unlocked it, and removed the gold-plated AK-74.
“This is not a toy,” he said, “or a fraud. The plating is genuine twenty-four-karat, the rubies and diamonds that encrust it are all real. It is said to have a value of close to three million dollars. It was given me by a consortium of Mexican gentlemen who understood the nature of my struggle and my commitment to my race. See how it gleams and sparkles?”
The weapon indeed gleamed and sparkled in his hands.
“It is a monstrosity to some tastes, a work of art to others, a kind of melding of fifteenth-century aesthetic drawn from the treasures the conquistadors had come to the New World in search of, as applied to the fist of the twenty-first century, that expression of guerrilla will and courage as perfected by Sergeant Kalashnikov in the workshops of the old Soviet Union at the end of the Great Patriotic War as it prepared, planned, and plotted for its next Great Patriotic War, men of the East, men of small stature, who would end the rule of—”
“May I?” asked Juba.
“Of course. I do go on, don’t I?”
Juba removed the magazine from his belt, where it had been tucked under his sweater, and, with knowing hands, rocked and locked it into the mag well of the weapon, smiling mildly all along, hit the bolt latch with a strong palm, so that it flew back, admitted a cartridge to the chamber, slammed forward with the system’s prototypical klak. Menendez watched this brief ceremony with fascination, as it was the last of all things he imagined happening, and he, normally so sure, could generate no policy toward it but instead fell into a sort of numbed enchantment.
Juba stepped toward him and rammed the muzzle of the rifle into his throat, the angle upward and just to the right of the larynx, so that the barrel pointed into the cerebral vault.
Menendez made sounds like a thirsty frog requesting water, finding it difficult to form words with the cylinder of the flash suppressor shoved an inch into the flesh of his throat.
“Gk . . . Gk . . . Gk . . .” he said, eyes opening wide in realization of what was happening.
“You should not have required me to kill my friend,” said Juba.
Bang, said the AK-74.
* * *
• • •
La Culebra liked to do certain things to Rosita at one place, while Rita did certain things to her at another. Then they would change positions, and he would work there while Rita came up here. There was always a lot of delightful sound involved. It was moist, yet fricative, and seemed accompanied, if one listened hard enough, by a chorus of droplets landing everywhere. Wetness was general over the three of them, including the slide and slurp of fluids, salty, even fishy, flavors, dribble tracks zigzagging this way and that, and the skin upon which these phenomena played out was so prehensile—theirs and his—that it always found some new way to lie or arrange itself. It was so very interesting. Sometimes, comically, his mask slipped, rising or falling from the dynamics of the action, and his eyes were covered. That had become quite enjoyable because, at that moment, both women went down below and began to work on him while, at the same time, they were working on each other, all of this in warm darkness. The energy developed could be quite astonishing.
He heard the shot.
He immediately knew something terrible had happened. But he was naked with two naked women. He disengaged, reached for and pulled on his clothes.
He hated to be so unprepared. He straightened his mask, tightened his belt buckle, and slid into the harness that contained, in different locations, seven different blades. A black guayabera shirt went over it.
“What is—” began Rita.
“Shh,” he hissed, hearing more shots, all single taps, suggesting careful aiming, and knew that some kind of catastrophe was occurring.
“Stay here,” he commanded, and went to investigate.
* * *
• • •
The bullet killed but the gas destroyed. Roaring at supersonic speed and energy, it vaporized all before it, scalding a funnel-shaped zone of vacancy, an eviction notice from the high lords of physics to Señor Menendez’s skull, emptying it of matter, which it distributed artfully on the ceiling, on supersonic zephyrs, forming whorls and pinwheels and lone dazzlers of abstraction. Droplets of crimson goo were flung everywhere, and Juba had to do a quick wipe on his eyes to clear them of the mess.
He turned to discover Alberto, standing, as if encased in amber a billion years ago.
“Stay with me, old man,” he said to him, and gave him a playful smack on the shoulder.
The sounds of footsteps arose, from the main passageway, and Juba fired quickly at the shapes that suddenly filled it, not a burst, as only fools fire bursts, and placed 5.45×39s into thoracic cavities as they became available. One shot, one kill; three shots, three kills.
He turned back.
“Okay, now lead me out of here. I don’t want to have to fight his whole fucking army.”
Alberto came out of his shocked stupor, realized what had and was happening, and said, “This way, quickly, the library.”
They ran, and, here and there, encountered terrified random household staff, who melted before them and did not require killing. They passed the foyer, and Juba called a halt, opened the front door, spied three armed men racing toward him from the sentry house, and, with three shots, delivered languidly but with smoothness, he dropped them.
Then an amazement: the stairway upward. Who was halfway down it, barefoot, but the man with the sock on his head.
Yet Juba did not shoot him as he could have. Instead, he smiled, nodded sportingly, and the fellow drew back.
Alberto pulled Juba along to the library. He knew where it had to be, a section of shelving with faux books, but did not understand what mechanism would spring it.
“There,” he said. “Do you see? The books are fake. It has to be a door.”
“And suppose it leads to a wine cellar,” said Juba, but pushed hard, and indeed the shelves moved backwards on ball bearings, far lighter than its weight should have been, and revealed an alcove and a spiral staircase. The two stepped inside, pulling the door closed, and descended into darkness. Alberto saw a light panel, hit a switch, and the lights came on, revealing a well-engineered tunnel leading away from them.
“There you have it,” he said. “Escape. Is this where you kill me, now that my use is over?”
“I am not a murderer,” said Juba. “I am a jihadi. I have honor. Besides, you are not important enough to kill.”
“Then let’s get out of—”
Even inside the bowels of the house, they heard the roar of mighty engines and shivered as the wave of vibrations poured over them.
“What is—”
“Helicopters,” said Juba. “I think Bobleeswagger is here. Won’t he be surprised?”
* * *
• • •
La Culebra returned to his room, finding the two women, still naked, terrified on the bed.
Suddenly a roar arose from outside.
What on earth—
He rose and watched as six large machines settled out of the sky amid columns of dust whipped up by invisible rotors. As each landed, men poured from them, armored in the commando style, with all kinds of automatic weapons, shields, lights—the entire modern war-making trousseau. Serious customers, now running hard and low to the house, which they’d broach and penetrate in seconds. Everything was happening at once! The world was ending!
Game of Snipers Page 29
