Jack Coughlin - Dead Shot

To Kyle’s left, Travis Hughes came into a kneeling position with an RPG-7 launcher on his shoulder and fired a grenade that burst from the tube with a loud whoosh! Four sharp fins popped out to stabilize the flight, and ten meters away, the grenade armed itself. Sizzling at the tip of a hot red exhaust tail, the high-explosive round zoomed into the storage area and exploded hard when it hit metal, setting loose a spray of the poison gas.

The crashing symphony of the ambush was fully under way, and none of the people at the site had yet fired a shot in return. In fact, none had yet even reached a weapon.

Watching through binoculars from beside Kyle, Delara Tabrizi viewed the destruction with a burning fury on her face. “Kill them,” she said through gritted teeth. “Kill them all!”

I NSIDE THE BUILDING , J UBAheard the shots, and three seconds later the RPG explosion shook the concrete structure, blowing around a layer of dirt and debris. An attack was the last thing he had expected, and he instantly recognized that his situation had totally changed.

“What’s happening?” Director Kahzahee, who had been heading for the door, stopped in midstride and turned back.

Juba stepped closer, looking through the door and then glancing out a side window. Men were running around trying to find shelter, and smoke was spreading along the ground while a misty haze rose into the air. “Either the Iranians are coming to take over this place, or some dissident bandits are making a raid. Either way, it is not good for us.”

“The fools are shooting at the container loading area! Some of those canisters are still filled with the gas!” The director dropped his briefcase and grabbed for a fresh biohazard suit hanging on a wall hook as another RPG grenade whumped into the containers and rattled the building.

Gas! Juba was beginning to feel a pull of panic and forced himself to slow down enough to think and act. There was no time to go through the complicated procedure of getting a full biosuit back on, and to just stand where he was would be a death sentence. He had to get out!

In one motion, he pulled a Heckler & Koch 9 mm pistol from his belt holster and fired two bullets into the skull of Director Kahzahee, picked up the fallen briefcase, and dove through the side window in the wall across the room from the exploding storage area.

He tucked his head and shoulders and hit the ground with a roll, in a shower of splinters and glass that sliced at him. This wasn’t the Iranian government, he thought. It was dissidents who were determined to capture the site and expose its secrets to the world, making the government in Tehran be viewed around the world as monsters.

Juba rose, bent at the waist, and ran toward a little gulley in order to put terrain between himself and the shooters while hoping he was moving faster than the spreading and invisible cloud of gas. The wind was on his right cheek, not directly behind him, so that improved his chances of escaping. Wet droplets splashed on his arms and face.

The sustained chatter of an AK-47 being fired on full automatic broke the rhythm of the incoming rounds. One of his Chechnyans was returning fire, taking the attention of the attackers and buying Juba a few more steps. The hired gunman was covering the escape in an effort to protect his own paycheck and called out, “Juba! Start the helicopter!”

Juba was standing completely up now, panting and sprinting hard toward the field where an old UH-1 Huey helicopter was stationed, his heels pounding hard. The droplets continued to splash on him. The chopper’s rotors were sluggishly beginning to turn, and the engine was coughing. Almost out of breath, he reached the bird and jumped into the cargo area, rolling flat on his back, his fist tight around the briefcase handle. “Go!” he yelled. “The gas is escaping.”

The Americans had sold a lot of aging Hueys to the old shah before he was deposed, and the helicopters were a common sight around Iran. The pilot had been running his checklist even before the shooting started. He wasn’t worried about some stray bullets, because the Hueys had proven in Vietnam that they could soak up gunfire and keep flying. Bullets were not the threat, but there might be a veil of deadly gas outside his cockpit.

Juba slammed the big side doors shut, found a dry towel, and wiped his face and arms and hands hard, staring straight ahead at the big drops hitting the broad front windows, some of them coalescing into pools. Rain or gas? He didn’t know.

The pilot made an emergency takeoff, kicking the helicopter to full throttle to let the powerful downdraft of the overhead blades dissipate any gathering fumes. They had to get out of the zone. The tail of the Huey rose sharply up and the heavy nose was almost pointed at the ground; then the lift began as the skids came off the ground. The bird, slowly at first and then more rapidly, sailed along the meadow and then made a sudden jump into the sky, climbing high and fast away from the burning site. No one else had made it out to the field, and the pilot didn’t really care.

K YLE SAW THE THIRDbodyguard hiding behind a Jeep and spraying wildly with an AK-47. The man did not know what he was shooting at and was just throwing out a hail of bullets in hopes of making the attackers duck, or at least pause. Above the racket, Swanson had clearly heard the man shout the name of Juba, but he could not take time to analyze who he was calling to. Swanson pinned the scope on him and saw something happening to his target that made him pause before squeezing the trigger.

The Chechnyan not only stopped firing but dropped his weapon and slapped at his skin. His face was twisted in surprise and then in pain. The bubble of poison gas released by the attack had crawled over the bodyguard, and he was trying to rub it away. Then he began to breathe it, and he stood and ran, as if there were some shelter, grabbing at his throat as if strangling. Kyle understood that the man was trying to reach the water hose and maybe scrub away the lethal drops that were congealing into a gel on his body.

Not going to happen, Skippy. Swanson adjusted the scope, following the movement, and fired. The bullet dropped the bodyguard in his tracks, hitting low on the back, just below the kidneys, and the man crashed and bounced on the dirt. Kyle had not wanted to make a kill shot, just to bring him down. In the view of the sniper, the bastard was not a candidate for an easy death. The man tried to crawl but gave up and rolled on the ground as the gas went into his lungs. He lay there with his chest heaving, turning purple in the face as he choked to death on his own fluids.

“Cease fire. Cease fire,” Swanson called to Tipp and Hughes. “The gas has them now. Let their little miracle finish them off.”

“Shoot them!” demanded Delara.

“No need,” Kyle replied. “What those men did to your brother is now happening to them. I will kill any who might survive.”

“One got away on the helicopter,” noted Joe Tipp. “I tried to nail him, but he was low and moving fast.”

“Yeah. I took a shot at the Huey, but it was too far away for the Dragunov.” Juba? Now that would be an interesting twist to things. Kyle stood up. Fire raged in the container area but was not spreading to the building. A dozen bodies lay on the ground, three still twitching in the embrace of the poison in their bodies. “Anyway, the site is open. We’ll wait for a little while to let that shit burn off or blow away before going in.”

A slow thirty minutes passed and an uneasy stillness came to the area, as if nature were eager to take back the dead zone. Things someday would grow here again. No curious soldiers came looking for the source of the shooting and explosions because the all-clear siren had never sounded.