Kill Zone: A Sniper Novel (26 page)

GORDON GATES BROUGHT
up a secure e-mail from the Sharks who had hit Elmendorf, read it, and then electronically shredded the message through the Magneto program. It vanished as if it had never been sent. They had done an extraordinary amount of damage and gotten away clean. Gates had long ago discovered the truth of the old question, “Who guards the guards?” and had spent a lot of time and money penetrating the security forces of many military bases. Surprisingly, it was not difficult at all to find otherwise good soldiers ready to sell their services to a high bidder.

Buchanan’s security net had tracked Colonel Sims to Elmendorf, where he was likely to link up with General Turner, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who had been delayed there on a trip to China. Sims would have given Turner the message. So bringing down the Boeing with a Stinger missile meant that Turner and Sims were dead, and the assassination letter would have burned in the crash. Perfect. The mortar rounds were thrown in as icing on the cake to embellish the terrorist possibilities.

Gates considered the situation at this new point. Shari Towne had been taken out in the attack on the Jordanian ambassador’s car. He would like to have had visual confirmation on Sims and Turner, but he had seen a lot of plane crashes and the odds were overwhelming that they were both cooked. Nothing had been heard from them since the shootdown. So three of the people who had learned about the letter were dead, which left three elusive Marines—Swanson, Dawkins, and Middleton.

The master sergeant aboard the ship was proving to be invisible, which won an approving smile from Gates for the Spec Ops veteran. It would take some luck to dig him out, particularly if he had the assistance of other people on the boat, but sooner or later he would be discovered. Gates just had to leave that in the hands of the NCIS people for the time being. Dawkins had no proof of whatever he might claim, so he was relatively harmless and totally isolated at sea.

He turned to the problem of General Middleton and Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson, who apparently had been on a rampage in Syria. The stakes for catching those two were enormous. The whole plan hung on finding them. One of his Sharks in Syria was dead, and the second was in the custody of the Syrian army, but alive and helping track Swanson. That didn’t worry Gates, because all Sharks were expendable. The risk was part of the big pay and benefits package.

But Swanson had freed General Middleton and had so far eluded the Sharks and the Syrian army. Gates had sent a message to the Rebel Sheikh requesting more jihadists to augment the search, because the more eyes they had looking, the better. It was best not to count too heavily on the Basra cleric, however. He was a slippery devil.

Gates went to a bar built into a wall of his office, where he kept a bottle of Absolut vodka in the freezer. He poured some into a tall glass and added ice cubes, club soda, and a slice of lime. He stirred and drank, letting his thoughts roam.

Google Earth was an excellent map program that could be used without pinging the military system. He called up the image of lower Syria and projected it on a large plasma screen. The southern area of the country jumped into view and he worked the mouse to increase magnification and tilt the image.

Not much there, he thought. Mostly flat and brown, with some stretches of cultivation. He put his mind in Spec Ops mode, placed the cursor on the village of Sa’ahn, and used the pointer tool to trace and measure possible routes of evasion. He had plenty of time, because the sniper and the general would be hiding in the daylight hours.

Swanson would avoid populated areas. The Syrians had helos in the air, but they had to cover a search area of several hundred square miles and probably would not see him. With so many helicopters searching, Swanson and Middleton had to keep their heads down during the day. If Gates were in the sniper’s boots, he would head south tonight and make a dash to the Jordanian border tomorrow at first light.

He sipped his icy vodka and tonic. Then he minimized the Google Earth map and brought up the digitalized copy of Swanson’s military jacket. Quite the package: a real war fighter and a gold-plated pain in the ass. Buchanan had screwed up by picking him for the job. Gates thought the man would be a terrific Shark Team leader, but would never flip for money.

He had to be stopped. Both Swanson and Middleton had to be killed. First they had to be found, and who better to look for Spec Ops types than Shark Teams who knew all of the tricks of that dark art? Victor Logan, a violent cretin in many ways, was one of the best, but Gates decided to lend the Syrians some more specialized assistance.

He tapped into his private database to see what was available. There was an unmanned aerial vehicle, a pilotless UAV with a video link, on the ground in Jordan, and he sent instructions to get it into the air. It would be one more thing from which Swanson would have to hide. Gates added the Shark Team that was helping to train Hezbollah fighters in a remote part of Lebanon. That team had a serviceable UH- IE Huey helicopter with miniguns slung on the sides. He also sent in another team from Israel, where the two Sharks were acting as counterinsurgency advisors with the Israelis on how to trap Hezbollah guerrillas. They would drive over in their armored Humvee. He sent a coded message through a Syrian contact to the search team in the desert. Five well-trained Sharks brought a lot of expertise to the operation. Plus the new Iraqi jihadists. A lot of eyes.

Gates studied the Marine’s personnel jacket some more, looking for anything that might help. This sniper had already proven to be very aggressive, so Middleton and Swanson would be watching for the watchers. Middleton probably would have the strong binos, while Swanson would use the powerful Unertl telescope on his SASR, the big. 50-caliber M82 Special Applications Scope Rifle. That was a hog of a weapon, a real bone-breaker that Gates knew well from lugging one himself. That would slow Swanson down even more when it came time to run.

Every pound Swanson carried would weigh him down a fraction, and the SASR was 37 pounds even before adding the ammo. The sniper had to be carrying a big pack, more weapons, and maybe some other gear, too. He would start to shed the unneeded items, but in the current time frame, he was losing the speed contest. This was the moment to catch them, while they were at rest and before they could start moving again.

Gordon Gates slammed his drink down onto the thick glass top of his desk.
The rifle!
Of course! He scrolled down through Swanson’s jacket to read about Swanson’s recent assignment to Sir Jeff Cornwell’s company, advising in the development of a new generation of sniper rifle. Vague stories had been carried in the gun magazines about the experimental weapon with the magical, highly computerized scope, and Cornwell had garnered the venture money needed to take it into production. Gates did a web search for the rifle through “sniper” Web sites until he found the name of the weapon: the Excalibur. He waded through a bunch of sites about King Arthur’s sword before coming up with some of the specs on Cornwell’s futuristic gizmo. It was lighter than the SASR by far, so maybe Swanson had this thing along, the Excalibur, and if he did, he might save on weight, but there was a potential weakness.
Gotcha!

Gates opened his private electronic Rolodex and found an overseas telephone number. London. A quiet British voice answered.

YOUSIF AL-SHOUM WAS BIDING
his time. Logan had been correct, that the sniper would go to ground during the daylight hours, so moving fast was neither necessary nor wise. Al-Shoum rested in a large tent that had been set up beside the road near the village and watched his soldiers probe up the road for more mines and booby traps. Not far from the tent was the burned and blackened hulk of the BTR-80 troop carrier that had triggered the mine. The two men whose heads were above the armor were decapitated by the blast, and the fuel tank ruptured and exploded, which took out three more men. Al-Shoum was alive only because he had stayed behind with the second BTR to communicate with Damascus. Otherwise his own head would have been sticking out of the forward hatch of the lead vehicle.

The Syrian intelligence officer had had his fill of surprises for one day. Five of his men had died in the BTR ambush. Another was killed at the front door of the house in the village, along with one of the American mercenaries. The house with eleven jihadist fighters from Iraq was blown to pieces and they were all dead. Parts of the Frenchman who was everybody’s intelligence contact were found in the smoking ruins of his demolished home. The guard who was taped to the Zeus and the gunner who tried to fire it were dead. Two pairs of sentries at the checkpoint down the road had been slain. Two pair! The Marine general was gone. Enough was enough.

Al-Shoum would coordinate the search from this tent and be the spider at the center of the search web. While he waited for more troops and helicopters, he sent a squad back into the village to conduct a house-to-house search to be sure the American troublemaker had not taken shelter back there where he was least expected.

A big map was spread on a table before him, along with two radio sets, a Thermos of tea, water, and some food on clean white plates. Al-Shoum munched bread and cheese. “Well, Mr. Logan. Where did he go?”

Victor Logan had been impressed by the wreckage of the BTR, which still wore big stripes of dried blood and guts. The undamaged armored personnel carrier remained parked nearby, almost as if cowering until the minesweepers pronounced the area clear. This sniper knew what he was doing. Logan wiped his palm across the lower half of the map. “South. Toward Jordan.”

“Our scouts report some damage to a road sign at an intersection to the west, several kilometers from here, big truck tires digging around a sharp corner that would lead them north, toward Lebanon.”

Logan shook his head, a statue with his beefy arms crossed across his chest, thinking hard. “It’s a bullshit play to draw you that way. He’s not going there.”

“I agree,” said Al-Shoum. Still, he had to devote some search assets to the area, because from what this American Marine had done so far, he was not beyond leaving a false trail, doubling back on it and then doubling back still again. The Syrian remembered reading about that trick in a detective story about how a serial killer trapped a never-give-up New York cop and his beautiful FBI partner… he snapped his mind back to the present. “One would think he would take the general due west, as fast as possible, toward Israel.” He glanced at Logan. “Why not?”

“He’s made the same deductions that we are doing now. Getting to Israel would be the most logical and quickest route to safety, so he knows your troops will flood the area. Therefore he won’t use it, and he cannot head the opposite direction, to the east, into territory that is just as dangerous. To the south is Jordan, which is friendly with the United States. That’s where I would go. It’s where he will go.”

Again al-Shoum agreed, and scratched his head. Logan could afford to guess, but he had to cover all possibilities, and there were many. He could not rule out the dash to Israel, and he had sent search teams toward the Zionist border, further depleting his force.

Then there was the problem of the vehicle itself. The Marine had stolen an old white Toyota pickup truck, which was the most common vehicle in Syria, if not in the entire region. There were hundreds of white Toyota pickups on the roads, going in every direction, in and out of every population center, all day long. The escapees could be in any of them.

In a professional sense, al-Shoum held a grudging respect for his opponent for sticking with his job after the helicopter crash, coming into the village and rekidnapping the general. It did not matter. His job was now to catch them both, and that was what he would do. Afterward, he looked forward to dealing with Victor Logan for the murder of that girl.

He stood and turned when a soldier called out to him and pointed. A dark blue Land Rover came sailing toward them from the village, the tinted windows sealing in the air conditioning as the tires threw plumes of dust into the air behind it. A man with a gray beard and thick eyelashes, wearing clean white robes and head covering, got out of the back seat when the vehicle stopped beside the tent.

“General al-Shoum,” the visitor said. “My dear friend.”

Al-Shoum bowed with respect, then embraced the senior imam from a mosque in Damascus. He helped the cleric to a chair at the table, and poured tea. A guard moved Logan out of earshot.

“I am always delighted to see you, my friend, for you have the peace of Allah with you. But what brings you to this desolate place?” al-Shoum asked. “A man of the Book need not trouble himself in this routine business.”

The old man sipped his tea and spent about five minutes exchanging pleasantries. The children, of course, and the crops and the animals, and also the wife. Al-Shoum grew more impatient by the minute. This imam did not leave his mosque to drop by as a curious tourist. He might have been sent from the government to report on al-Shoum’s work.

“Please forgive me for keeping my radios tuned so loudly,” he said. “I am conducting a wide search for the missing Americans.”
Take the hint, old man.

“That is part of why I am here, beyond learning the joyous news of your family. I am doing a favor for my fellow cleric and our important ally, Sheikh Ali Shalal Rassad in Iraq, a very respected man in the service of the Prophet, whose name be praised.”

“Praised be the name,” al-Shoum parroted. “Anything I can do to assist your mission, I shall do.” The Rebel Sheikh was sending a message through a messenger of such high pedigree that there could be no doubt about its validity and importance.

“Our friend is most disturbed. He dispatched an airplane early this morning to transfer the American general safely to his hospitality in Iraq. He knows our own nation had nothing to do with the kidnapping, and it appears that many things have changed since the man was taken. Matters have gone to the highest levels.”

Al-Shoum said, “Which is why I am present here.”

The imam continued without pause. “Our friend, of course, was unaware that you had been sent by Damascus, and offers his most sincere apologies for the misunderstanding. He meant no offense to you or to your abilities. He was only attempting to salvage the situation and help our nation.”

Al-Shoum put his hands flat on the table, eyes downcast, humble, obedient as a sheep.
And what’s your damned point?

“But you can only imagine our friend’s surprise when he learned that not only has the American general escaped with the help of another American, but that all of the Sheikh’s holy warriors who had been guarding him have been martyred. All of them!”

“That is true. His Iraqis apparently were too careless in posting guards.” Al-Shoum’s tone was a sneer at their carelessness.

The old man stroked his beard, the dark eyes stronger than the frail body. “Something insulting has happened. The American infidel Gordon Gates actually ordered our friend to dispatch even more fighters, a large number of them, up here to join your search.
He ordered a man of the Book to do so!
It is an outrage! So our brother has decided to do what is best for us all.”

“Of course. And what was his decision?”

“Naturally, he would never intrude into your operation, brother. He expresses full confidence that you will resolve this situation, and his attention is demanded elsewhere, on more fruitful things.” Having delivered his message, the old man rose and gave the Syrian intelligence officer a final hug. “
Inshallah
, the will of Allah be done,” said the imam. He bestowed blessings for al-Shoum’s sons to grow strong in the service of the Prophet, got back into the Land Rover, and was driven serenely away.

Al-Shoum watched the blue SUV vanish back the way it had come.
Shit!
First that Iraqi pig had tried to sneak in and steal the American general right from under al-Shoum’s nose, and now he was abandoning the search. That would leave al-Shoum alone to take any blame if they escaped.

“What was that all about?” asked Logan, ducking back beneath the tent.

“Nothing,” said al-Shoum. “An old friend who happened to be in the area and wondered what was going on.” Ali Shalal Rassad, who had already lied to the world that his organization, the Holy Scimitar of Allah, was not involved, was washing his hands of the whole mess. The old imam who brought the message was often employed as an unofficial emissary by the Syrian government, which would now be considering doing the same thing to ease international tensions. While al-Shoum sat beneath this tent in the middle of nowhere, the distance from Damascus hung around his neck like an albatross, for he realized that being stuck out here meant that he would not be privy in the final decision-making. Damascus had changed his mission. Instead of making a decision himself, he had been sent off running after a couple of Marines. If a scapegoat was needed, he might be chosen as the sacrifice.

He looked at the sky, where the sun had risen higher. No helicopters in the area. He increased the volume on the radio net. The sooner he captured those Americans, the better, because then he would be on the next chopper back to Damascus, possibly entering the city as a hero. He spun to face the American mercenary, whose help he now needed much more than he had only ten minutes ago. “We are wasting time, Logan.”