Jack Coughlin: Dead Shot

“Shhh. Summers will kick your ass if she hears you.”

The experienced warriors of the Marine Special Operations Command (MARSOC) normally shied away from taking orders from women, but Summers was different. She wore a black jumpsuit with the silver railroad tracks insignia of her rank glinting on the collar of a turtleneck sweater and projected a maximum “don’t give me any shit” attitude as she walked to the podium and flipped open a file folder. Her short black hair, dark blue eyes, and lithe figure disguised the fact that she was the only woman ever to make it through Force Recon training.

“Settle down,” she snapped, and the MARSOC team quieted. “We are going after a High Value Target tonight in Iraq, and I don’t want any of you jarheads to screw this up. Mustapha Ahmed al-Masri has surfaced again, stirring up the Kurds in northern Iraq, and the intelligence pukes have pinpointed his location. They list him as the number two for al Qaeda in the region, which is why he has been designated an HVT and we have been assigned to stop him.”

She walked around the podium to the front and nodded to her left. A door opened and a man stepped in, also wearing a black jumpsuit and with his face covered by a pull-down mask. A long rifle of a sort they did not recognize was slung over his shoulder. Sniper.

“Batman?” whispered the lance corporal.

“Maybe a holdup,” joked his partner.

“CIA spook. Definitely.”

Summers spoke. “You guys will assault the house at 0500, and I’ll leave it to the other briefers to give you the details. By the time you arrive, this gentleman and I will already be on the ground, closing the back door. He is masked simply because you do not need to know who he is. The two of us have been attached as special operators for this mission. Far as you are concerned, we aren’t here, and we will go in and extract on our own.”

As she finished, other briefing officers came forward with their maps and timetables. The lights started to dim. “If you see al-Masri, kill him. The best bet is that he will haul ass once the attack starts, and we will be waiting. You absolutely must remember that this is friendly territory and be sure not to have civilian casualties. If you screw up and shoot at us, even by mistake, he will shoot back, and I guarantee that you don’t want that to happen. Be very careful when you pull the trigger. Know your targets. That’s it. Good luck and good hunting. Captain Barnes will continue your brief.” She spun on her heel and disappeared out the door with the masked man.

Once they were in the Humvee and driving to the helicopter pad beside the ten-thousand-foot runway, Kyle Swanson rolled up the mask, changing it into a watch cap. His face itched. “Damn, Sybelle, you are a woman of few words.” He changed his voice to imitate her grim briefing cadence. “‘Shoot at us and he will shoot back!’ Way to inspire confidence in the troops.”

They both laughed. “I had to get their attention. We don’t want any mistakes out there.”

“I knew about half the guys in that room,” Swanson said. “Worked with some of them. It’s always strange not letting friends know who you really are.” In special ops, he had a million aliases but no real name at all because he was officially dead.

The Turkish night was crisp and starlit, with a slice of a coasting moon. A giant Air Force cargo plane roared overhead on its landing approach, hauling more material from the States into Incirlik, a major supply dump that fed the war in Iraq. Adana, a modern city of a million people, was less than ten miles away, and the Mediterranean washed onto beaches within easy access. For special operations types, it was a good location. You could get a decent hamburger and a cold beer, jump on a bird and fly off on a quick combat mission, and be back in time for a hot shower and a movie.

Swanson brought the Humvee to a halt beside a hangar, and they both got out and suited up with their web gear. Summers removed her shiny captain’s bars because they were entering the world of hiding, blending, and deceiving, a dark place where nothing must reflect light. She had assigned herself to this mission for several reasons, one being that she still spoke the language of her childhood, although her Kurdish last name had disappeared when her father had died and her mother remarried an American. It was a welcome asset.

A U.S. Air Force lieutenant approached, saluted, and introduced himself as their command pilot. He would not be going with them, however, and behind him sat a tiny HTX-I helicopter, the rotors already turning lazily on battery power. Commonly called a TAXI, it would be controlled by pilots far away from the action, with this lieutenant in charge of getting them launched and then handing the flight over to another controller cruising far overhead in an electronics warfare plane.

The TAXI had been perfected by the U.S. Special Operations Command as a revolutionary tactical delivery system for particular missions and could deliver up to four operators to an exact point, then speed away to some nearby isolated site and shut down, roosting there patiently for days if need be, while solar panels recharged the batteries. When summoned, it would zip back in to pick them up. Except for the reconfigured overhead rotor, it hardly even looked like a helicopter. With no pilot, copilot, or loadmaster and with the giant internal combustion engines gone, weaponless and without armor, the unique helicopter was a blend of ultralight, stealth, and modern fuel cell and electronic technologies. It possessed extraordinary range and was virtually invisible to searching radar while its passengers sat in pairs, side by side, encased in a sleek aerodynamic bubble. The HTX-I wore the X designation to indicate it was still in the experimental stage, nothing more than an idea on the drawing boards. The media had never even picked up a scent that it was already operational.

Swanson and Summers climbed in, checked their gear, buckled up, and put on their headsets as the flight engineer closed the hatches and backed away, speaking into a radio to the controller. The reaction was immediate, and they heard no roar of engines as the TAXI rose from the landing strip like a quiet elevator, with only a slight whipping sound from the rotors, then flitted away on its run to the border. Swanson watched the lights of Adana disappear behind them. It was like sailing on a quiet lake.

At an exact GPS location, the TAXI slowed to a crawl and went close to the ground and then into a motionless hover. They jumped out, boots crunching desert sand, and ran to some nearby clusters of trees. The contact who had alerted the Americans about the presence of Mustapha Ahmed al-Masri was waiting, and Sybelle spoke to him in Kurdish, apologetically explaining to him that she was just a mere translator for the man with her.

Satisfied that as a woman, she was still an underling, the man guided them into the village and pointed them to a flat place in a ditch. The road beside them ran straight for a while, then bent right, and at the curve was the house that was to be attacked.

Sybelle and Kyle slid into the dry gully, and Swanson unlimbered some of his gear, setting up shop. Sybelle thanked the guide profusely and told him he was now free to go and wait for the main force that would be coming in on the other end of town. The guide disappeared into the night.

“Let’s move,” she said.

Kyle was already packing. They had no intention of staying in a place known to a local. Trust went only so far. “That house on the left. We go over the wall and get some protection, and I can brace the rifle on top of it.”

They moved out quietly, and Sybelle spider-dropped over the wall and landed without a sound on the far side. Swanson turned the knob on the gate, opened it, and walked through. Sybelle raised her middle finger in response.