Target America: A Sniper Elite Novel (21 page)

51

MONTANA

As it began to grow dark, Marie Shannon stood on the house’s back porch, looking up at the ridge where Buck Ferguson’s two youngest sons, Roger and Glen, had pitched camp to keep watch over the ranch. A storm was coming in from the west, and she was growing concerned about the distant rumbling of thunder.

Buck came out the back door and stood beside her, a Colt .45 on his hip.

“It’s fixin’ to blow,” she said. “You should probably call the boys down for the night. I don’t want ’em struck by lightning.”

“They’ll be fine. They’ve been camping in these mountains all their lives. If Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t kill ’em, these mountains sure as hell won’t.”

She smiled. “Thank you again for coming, Buck.”

“Gil would do the same for us if it was the other way around. We take care of our own out here, always have. You’re too young to remember, but when I was over in Vietnam, your daddy used to look in on Liddy and the boys for me. He was a good man, your daddy.”

“And Liddy was a good woman. I remember she used to bring me warm chocolate chip cookies.”

“Yeah, she was a dandy,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s a shame they’re both long gone. But then again, ain’t nothin’ meant to last, is it?”

“No, I reckon not,” she said sadly.

They sat on the porch talking until the wind began to blow and the rain began to drive.

“I’d really feel better if you called ’em down, Buck.”

He smiled at her in the porch light. “Honey, they’re grown men. You don’t think they know enough to come down on their own if they start gettin’ wet?”

“At least call ’em for me?”

Buck took the cell phone from his pocket and looked at the screen. “As usual,” he said. “No signal. That tower they put on my land ain’t worth a holey shirt.”

“Maybe it’s the storm.”

“That ain’t helping, but service around here is always spotty, even in good weather.”

 • • •

UP ON THE
ridge, Roger and Glen were nice and dry in their tent, both of them lying on the same sleeping bags they’d used during the war. Each of them had an AR-15 carbine, and they’d brought Kashkin’s scoped Mauser along as well. They lay in the dark listening to the thunder, the wind buffeting the tent. There was sporadic lightning, but it didn’t seem dangerously close.

Roger, the youngest at twenty-two, had killed three Taliban during his first tour in Iraq, but Glen, twenty-five, was not yet blooded, at least not that he knew of. He’d fired a few thousand rounds in combat but never knew if he’d hit anyone. He kind of hoped not.

“Think it’ll blow all night?” Roger wondered.

“Weather Channel said it will.”

“Weather Channel don’t know shit about mountain weather.”

Glen lit a cigarette with a First Marines Zippo lighter and tossed the pack at his brother. “Think anybody could see the glow of the cherry through the tent wall?”

“Who the hell would be out in this?”

Glen rolled onto his elbow, his face faintly visible in the glow. “We’re out in it.”

Roger lay on his back, tapping an ash from his cigarette onto the front of his Carhartt jacket and rubbing it in. “If it’s gonna blow all night, we might as well make our way back down to the house. We can’t see shit from in here anyhow.”

“Let’s give it an hour,” Glen said. “It might ease off.”

“The old man’s right,” Roger said. “Bastards won’t make another try at Gil anytime soon. If they were super committed, they’d have sent more than one dude the first time. I think they probably shot their wad for now. Their priority is the nuke.”

“Sons a bitches,” Glen muttered. “Where you think it’s at? I bet it’s in New York. Those fuckers love shittin’ on New York.”

“That’s why I think it’s DC. They won’t bother LA on any account. Even Chechens aren’t stupid enough to blow up Hollywood. Everybody likes our movies too much.”

“Buncha hypocrites.” Glen exhaled smoke through his nostrils.

They bullshitted awhile longer and smoked another couple cigarettes before deciding it was likely to rain all night. “If it quits, we can always come back up.”

They crawled out of the tent, slinging their weapons barrel-down over their shoulders as they walked the ridge line in the downpour.

It was Roger who saw the red laser dot appear on the back of his brother’s head in the driving rain. At first he thought his eyes were playing him tricks, but his instincts were fast to set him in motion.

“Get down!” He shoved Glen forward, spinning to unshoulder his carbine.

He did not hear the 5.56 mm NATO round that struck him in the forehead, dropping him in his tracks. Just as Glen did not hear the rounds that struck him in the back. He hit the ground without ever grabbing for his weapon.

Duke rose soaking wet from a copse of junipers fifty feet away, strolling forward to stand over the bodies that lay crumpled on the muddy horse trail, slinging his suppressed M4 and raising the infrared binocular up onto his forehead.

Akram stood from his place among the rocks and came forward.

“See, it’s like I told you,” Duke said over the sound of the storm. “Even these idiots knew ya gotta hold the high ground . . . but then, you desert folk probably don’t see much high ground where you’re from. Am I right?” He laughed and turned around, ordering two other men to drag the bodies from the trail into the junipers. “Likely gonna be a long, wet night. You all better get used to the idea right now and stop standin’ around with your hands in your pockets.” Then he walked off, mumbling beneath his breath, “Ya haji pricks.”

52

MONTANA

The power to the house went out, and Buck stood up from the couch where he’d been reading the latest internet news about the intensifying search for the nuke. Lightning flashed, and Janet saw him clearly for a brief instant, his hand on his pistol.

“Probably just the storm,” she said. “It happens out here a lot.”

“My place too, but this ain’t a good night to be in the dark.”

Marie came hurrying down the stairs with Oso growling, gripping Gil’s Springfield Armory .45. “Something’s wrong,” she whispered. “Oso’s upset.”

Oso went straight to the back door and began to scratch at the locked dog door.

“Wake Hal up!” Buck said, drawing the pistol. “Janet, you and Marie get upstairs. Take Oso with you.”

Hal was already coming down, a carbine in each hand. He crossed the room and gave one to his father. “We got movement outside by the stable, and it’s not the boys.”

AFTER CUTTING THE
power and phone lines, Akram gathered his team of twenty men in the stable and stripped off his soaking jacket. The odor of horse manure was offensive to him, and it made him feel unclean. He ordered Abad and the rest of the men to cover the entrances. The Muslims were equipped with civilian-grade, first-generation night vision goggles, but Duke had brought along his third-generation military-grade binocular, which allowed him to see in infrared in addition to utilizing ambient light.

“If anyone comes out of the house,” Akram said, “shoot them immediately.”

Duke sat down on a bale of hay. “So what’s our next move gonna be?”

“I’m not sure,” Akram said glumly. “I hadn’t planned on it raining.” Where he came from, rain had never been a problem. “I’ll take the TAC-50 up into the loft. You set up down here, and we’ll wait for Shannon to show himself.”

“We could assault the house,” Duke said. “We’ve got the manpower.”

“We’ll wait to see. If Shannon’s in there ready for us, it could be a disaster. We don’t know how many more men he has inside with him.”

“Listen, you want to end this duck hunt before morning, or you wanna fuck around out here all night in the goddamn rain?”

“You need to stop with the blasphemy.”

Duke chortled. “I’m talkin’ about the Jew God.”

“It’s as Abad told you before . . . blasphemy is blasphemy.”

“You want to kill this prick or not?”

Akram narrowed his eyes, wishing it was time to put the American to death. “I’m listening.”

“You need to send in that kid with the bomb vest. Even if the blast doesn’t get Shannon, it’s gonna fuck up whatever defense they’ve organized in there and set the house on fire. Then we shoot whoever comes running out.”

“Tahir!” Akram called in the darkness, his face illuminated briefly by a flash of lightning. “Come here.” It was a brilliant idea to send a bomber into the house. But Akram was irked with himself for not having thought of it on his own.

Tahir appeared with a pair of night vision goggles on his face, an AK-47 hanging from his shoulder. “Yes, teacher.”

“Your moment has arrived.” Akram put his hands on the youth’s shoulders and squeezed. “I need you to go into the house and detonate the bomb. You will arrive in heaven instantly, bathed in the affections of Allah.”

Tahir shivered, and then felt the warmth of his urine running down the inside of his leg into his boot. “Yes, teacher.” His voice felt raw, and he suddenly realized that he did not want to die. But there was no turning back.

Akram unzipped Tahir’s jacket and readied the dead-man switch, putting it into the youth’s fist. “It is very easy,” he promised. “All you have to do is let go of the handle, and Allah will take care of the rest.”

“Will there be pain?”

“None,” Akram promised. “And your name will live forever.”

Weak in the knees, Tahir leaned back against the stall door where a horse stood eating from a bucket of oats. “Should I sneak across or run?”

“Be stealthy,” Akram said. “Work your way to the red truck, and from there you can run full speed to the back of the house. If you cannot force the door, break in through a window. Whatever you do, you must stay alive long enough to get inside, where the pressure wave will do the most damage. If you see our target, get as close as you can before releasing the detonator.”

“I will not fail,” Tahir said numbly, feeling utterly empty inside his skin.

Akram broke open a hay bale and spread it on the ground, getting to his knees and beckoning the youth to do the same beside him. “Now let us pray. This straw will serve as our
musallah
and protect us from the dung of these animals.”

A few feet away, Duke sat watching them in infrared as they knelt in the hay, bowing their foreheads to the ground. He felt nothing but contempt for them.

It’s too bad I don’t have all my money yet,
he thought,
because I’d waste every one of you crazy fuckers and be on my way
.

53

MONTANA

Glen Ferguson came to in the rain, facedown in a patch of brambles beneath the weight of his brother Roger’s body, the sharp tip of a dead juniper branch jagging deep into the flesh below his left eye. He had never been so cold in his life, and for nearly a minute he was completely unable to move. At first he thought one of the bullets had nicked his spine and left him paralyzed, but then he realized he could still move his fingers and toes. He became conscious of the dead weight pressing down on his back, and drew his arms up beside him, pushing against the earth to roll himself over. The branch tore a chunk of flesh from his face as it pulled free, but he was cold enough that he hardly felt it.

He lay there a moment, feeling the icy rain beating on his face, and then groped inquiringly at Roger’s body. “Oh, no!” he gasped, suddenly lucid and struggling to sit up. He was aware that he’d been shot multiple times, and he was becoming cognizant of the damage to his skeleton and musculature.

He felt Roger’s carotid artery, but there was too much rain pelting down, his fingers too cold to detect a pulse. His thumb slipped into the
exit wound at the back of the skull, and he jerked his hands back in horror, wiping them on his soaking Carhartt jacket.

The bastards had killed his little brother. At first he couldn’t believe it and simply sat there dumbly in the driving thunderstorm with Roger lying across his lap. Finally it dawned on him that the killers were still out there somewhere, trying to kill his father and older brother. He checked his watch, seeing that an hour had passed since he and Roger had decided to head down to the house.

He hefted Roger’s bulk aside, trying not to look at him, fearful of seeing his brother’s death mask. When he tried to stand, he grew so dizzy that he nearly pitched over into the brambles, so he sat back down, probing about in the dark for his AR-15. It didn’t seem to be anywhere around, so he began crawling back toward the trail. Lightning flashed, revealing the tent fifty feet away, and he crawled over to it, pulling himself in out of the rain.

Glen stripped his soaked cotton clothing, which was rapidly driving him into the advanced stages of hypothermia, feeling his body temperature rise as soon as he was naked. He checked himself over in the inky blackness to locate three exit wounds in his upper chest. The holes were small, about as big around as a pencil, and the bleeding was not profuse. He could feel the bone of both clavicles creaking as he moved his shoulders, and the fingers of his left hand didn’t respond with as much dexterity as they should have, but he could still use both arms and hands, and that was all that mattered.

His Gore-Tex boots had kept his socks dry, so he pulled the boots back on over them, and rolled up his three-layered ECW (extreme cold weather) sleeping bag. Then Glen took the scoped Mauser from beneath Roger’s bag and loaded in the five-round stripper clip by feel. He tucked the remaining four rounds into his brother’s CamelBak rucksack and rolled the ruck up inside the sleeping bag. Slipping from the tent a few moments later, he found that he still couldn’t stand.

He set off crawling toward the ridge naked and dragging the Mauser with his right arm and the sleeping bag with his left. The rain drove down on his back, and muddy droplets spattered his eyes, but he was only vaguely aware of the cold, which he knew must have slowed his bleeding so far. When he got to the ridge, he pulled himself into
Kashkin’s sniper nest and unrolled the sleeping bag, zipping himself up inside its waterproof Gore-Tex shell.

The increase in body temperature would increase the bleeding, but he was dying of hypothermia even faster. Glen aimed the Mauser down the hill at the ranch and peered through the scope to see no signs of life. Three separate lightning flashes revealed nothing. He grew alarmed and unzipped the bag with the intention of crawling downhill to the ranch, but the instant the icy wind and rain hit his exposed flesh, his body was wracked with an intense pain ten times worse than any fever chill he had ever experienced. He jerked the zipper back up and decided to stay put.

Groping around inside the sleeping bag, he took a folding knife from the CamelBak and cut two armholes in the bag so he could operate the rifle without exposing his shoulders to the cold. Then he took Roger’s wool watch cap from the ruck and pulled that onto his head. After eating a Snickers bar and sucking down a quart of water, he felt a great deal better and settled in behind the rifle. There were no broken windows on the back side of the house (except for Marie’s boarded-up bedroom window), and that told him the fight down there was probably yet to begin.

“You’ve still got overwatch, Dad.”

Lighting flashed, and he saw a figure dart from the stable, running for cover behind a steel water trough.

Glen quickly worked the bolt and pulled the stock into his shoulder. “Lord God,” he whispered beneath the rolling thunder. “I beseech you in the name of all that’s holy . . . send me another flash of lightning and let me blow this motherfucker’s head off.”