Alex Berenson - The Shadow Patrol

“The one who came and talked? No.”

“You do, you let me know.”

“Will do. When you’re in position, will you signal?”

Yeah, I’ll signal. Coleman Young getting his throat ripped out. That’s the signal.

Francesca hung up. Alders was still snoring. Francesca squeezed him on the shoulder. Not hard. Guys who spent their lives in nests like this didn’t like being woken too suddenly. Alders sat up, wiped a hand over his mouth.

“Was I lucky enough to get blown to hell while I slept or am I still stuck in this tar pit?”

“Sad to say you’re still alive.”

“Why did you wake me? I had a good one going.”

“Your favorite nurse again?”

Months before, Alders had told Francesca that he had a nurse fantasy, not the usual candy striper but a chubby, big-breasted East Indian who gave him a rough massage with a barely happy ending.

“I should never have told you that.”

“True. Ready to rock and roll?”

“Our Talib friends?”

“Our other friends.”

“We just got here.”

“I know, but this way’s better. Get it done quick, come back, chill.”

Francesca hadn’t told Alders that he was still thinking about taking out Weston and Rodriguez with Young. He figured he’d see how the trap set up. A game-time decision.

THEY RODE OFF a few minutes later in their brown shalwar kameez . They had three hours plus before the Strykers arrived. The grape hut was about thirteen or fourteen miles from the saddle. Francesca figured they would have plenty of time. Then they hit the hills. For the last couple miles, he’d wondered whether walking might be faster. The ride had taken so long that they burned through most of their cushion. By Francesca’s watch, they had about forty-five minutes to pick their spot, get settled. Less time than he would have liked.

Francesca pulled the bike off the road, left it behind a rock, grabbed the canvas bag that held the Dragunov’s hard-sided case. He walked east, keeping back from the ridgeline. The saddle turned steeper, blending into the hill above. Loose rocks cut at Francesca’s sandals. He wanted to gain maybe forty or fifty feet of elevation, make the shot easy to take, hard to trace.

Alders ranged ahead and closer to the ridgeline. About a hundred yards east of the road, he waved Francesca over. Above, a dry streambed crosscut the hillside, running southwest. It fell over the ridgeline thirty yards away from where they stood. A tangle of mulberry bushes marked the spot. Francesca and Alders could set up in the streambed between the bushes, which offered great cover. Aside from the last few feet, they wouldn’t even have to crawl or crab-walk to the position. They could walk without fear of being seen from the fields below.

“You see.”

“Long as it has the right angle.” If a boulder or the folds of the ridge blocked Francesca’s line of sight to the village, the position was useless, no matter how good the cover. He cut over to the streambed. It was dry, six feet wide, a couple feet deep. This part of the Arghandab Valley didn’t get much rain. The runoff that fed the river fell in the mountains to the north. Just shy of the ridgeline, Francesca unzipped the bag and pulled out his binoculars and a thin brown blanket. He unrolled the blanket. He wanted to keep his gown clean. On the ride home, even the most oblivious Afghan police officer might notice a man in a dirt-covered shalwar kameez . He squirmed forward on the blanket, ignoring the stones poking at him. At the edge, he propped himself on his elbows, raised his binoculars.

Perfect.

The contours of the hill made him nearly invisible to the villagers below, but no rocks or outcroppings blocked his view. The mud houses and compounds started a quarter mile away. Inside them, villagers did what Francesca had decided Afghans did best: not much. In one compound, three men sat against a wall, drinking tea from a battered brass kettle. Outside another, a bony farmer dragged a rake slowly through the earth, as an equally bony cow grazed nearby. Two empty burqas floated high in the air, ghosts on a clothesline.

In the center of the village was an empty dirt field, a town square of sorts. The Strykers were sure to park there. None of the walls between him and the square were high enough to matter. The fluttering burqas were a lucky break, too. Their movement would make gauging the breeze easy. Francesca hardly even needed Alders.

“Look good?”

“That it does.”

Alders crawled up beside him, holding the rifle and his bag of gear. Francesca edged left and traded the binoculars for the Dragunov. “Too easy,” Alders said.

“There’s no such thing.” Francesca slid the Dragunov’s scope over the rifle’s barrel, which was designed with a metal rail that made attaching the scope a cinch. He flipped a latch to lock it in place. Next he reached for a magazine. He’d brought four, all loaded with ten rounds of 203-grain steel-jacketed 7.62-millimeter ammunition. The bullets could smash Level IV armor plates that stopped regular AK rounds.

At five hundred meters, even a perfectly aimed shot from the Dragunov could go wide of its target by six inches. Instead of a head shot, Francesca planned to aim for Young’s chest and fire a three-shot burst. Unlike most sniper rifles, the Dragunov was semiautomatic. Each squeeze of the trigger fired another round. At worst, the first burst would shatter Young’s vest and knock him down. With ten rounds, Francesca would have plenty of chances for a kill shot.

Francesca locked onto the farmer bent over his rake. I could kill you and you’d never know where your death came from. Not where or why. The excitement went beyond words. Death and life were his to give. He dropped the safety and put a finger to the trigger, his mouth open and every breath a rapture. After a long moment, he flicked up the safety, pulled back. I’ve let you live. Forget Allah. Pray to me tonight, old man. He draped brown netting over the Dragunov’s muzzle and rested his head on his arms and waited for the Strykers to come. Waited for prey.

Wells stopped at the intersection of the valley road and the easternmost of the three tracks that led over the hills. He jumped off and squatted low, looking for bicycle tracks in the dirt. If Francesca and Alders had come this way this morning, their narrow tires should still be visible. But the treads Wells saw were far too wide to belong to bicycles. He pulled out his binoculars and followed the track into the hills. No bicycles, no men walking.

Fifty yards down, three boys played soccer, kicking a ragged ball with the studied indolence of teenagers everywhere. Wells stepped toward them. “Have you been here all morning?” The boys looked at one another. The ball never stopped moving.

“Have the Americans taken your tongues? Answer me.”

The tallest boy grinned at Wells, a confident smile that somehow reminded Wells of his own son. “Yes.”

“Have you seen men riding bicycles this way?”

“One man. My uncle Hamid. He lives down there.” The boy nodded to a low-walled compound about a mile down the road.

Wells hurried back to his motorcycle. He could eliminate this track. Two left. The second intersection was barely ten miles west, but Wells wasn’t sure how long he would need to reach it. Forty miles an hour on the Arghandab road equaled a hundred and twenty on an American highway. Any faster and he would pop a tire.

Wells swung the bike around, headed west. In the last two hours, he’d gotten to know this strip of road: the one-room store that seemed to sell nothing but potatoes and apples, the skinny German shepherd chained to a tree who barked madly when Wells passed. The grape hut that Francesca and Alders were using as a bed-and-breakfast.