Jack Coughlin - Dead Shot

Few lights flickered in the windows during this dead time of night, and the group steered clear of them, carefully threading through the outlying streets and clinging to the shelter of walls and alleyways. They seldom paused and entered the tangled neighborhood where the suspects were without detection. Joe Tipp snaked forward on his belly, elbows, and knees to scout the house. No one was on guard, and the old white Ford sedan with a rusting roof sat just where it had been shown in the intel photo, right outside the gate of a small wall around the house.

Hughes fell in beside Kyle to be his spotter, and the two of them scurried away to set up a stable firing position while Captain Rick Newman fanned out the others in a protective arc and messaged Sybelle that they were in place.

“You sure you want to do it this way, Shake?” asked Hughes. “I don’t like being so exposed.” They were in prone position in the middle of a street.

“We want to be seen, Travis. This time, I want people to know that a sniper was at work here.”

“Still. Just saying.”

“I know. Come on. Let’s build the range card.”

At four o’clock, Kyle clicked his microphone twice, and Newman and Rawls set off at a lope around the front of the house. Swanson nestled his cheek into the custom-made stock of his personal sniper rifle, the Excalibur, and brought the scope to rest on the engine of the car. His world began to slow down as the moment of action neared.

Rawls started kicking at the front door, hard and noisily, and Newman smashed his rifle into the glass of a window, shattering it. Voices were heard yelling inside. Newman popped in a red smoke grenade. Neither man had said a word while causing the occupants of the house to head for the back door.

Out they came, some of them coughing and wiping at their eyes as the trails of red smoke followed them. Hughes had his binos on them. “One, two, another, four. That’s all of them. Nobody else coming out.” The mortar crew made straight for the car, and Swanson waited until they were all inside and the doors were slamming. “Fire. Fire. Fire.”

He let his finger pull back slowly on the trigger and Excalibur roared, snapping a.50 caliber round down the street. It burrowed into the engine block, and the car shook with the impact. Now it was a matter of reloading and shooting fast, but accurately, at men trapped in a ruined car only a hundred meters straight ahead of him. He took out the driver first, before the man released the steering wheel.

“Target down,” reported Hughes. The man seated behind the driver jumped out and filled the sight. Kyle shot him in the chest. “Target down!”

Swanson shifted to the other side of the vehicle and nailed the man scrambling from the passenger seat. He was part of his rifle, the world a black-and-white place of mechanical action and reaction, and he felt the new bullet reloading as the old brass ejected out. “Target down.”

There was one more, and he ran. Excalibur roared again and the bullet tore out the Iraqi fighter’s heart as the forward momentum propelled him into the courtyard. “Target down,” Hughes said. “Let’s get out of here, Kyle.”

“Follow the plan, Travis. Stay with the plan.” Swanson watched the Marines form up near him, in the shadows, and Hughes joined them. Rawls and Newman were back.

“Helo inbound,” said Newman.

Kyle Swanson stood up in the street, holding the ominously long Excalibur at his side with his left hand, and moved without hesitation toward the car. Lights were coming on, but no one was yet on the street. Fear and confusion were making them pause. He paced deliberately forward until he was standing beside the body of the man who had been behind the driver.

Swanson propped Excalibur against the car and used his knife to cut off part of the dead man’s shirt, which he twisted into a knot. Squatting beside the car, he dipped the shirt in his victim’s blood and slowly wrote a single word on the driver’s door: JUBA . Wherever he found Juba, the secrets to the poison gas would be nearby. The terrorist would never let that information be far from his side, and it was more dangerous than he was. A matched set, and Kyle had to get them both this time.

He picked up his rifle and strode away, a perfect target but also a fearsome figure in the darkness. The neighbors had heard some noise, but no talking, then a volley of five steady shots from a high-velocity rifle. That meant “sniper,” and while no one wanted to stick a head out the door, they did watch from the windows.

When he reached the Marines in the shadows, Darren Rawls grabbed him by the shirt and pushed him forward, making him run, and Kyle’s senses rolled back into normal time. “You a crazy mutha, you know that?” called Rawls into his ear, running right beside him. “Now haul your ass!”

HARGATT, IRAQ

T HE CITY OF T IKRITis hemmed in tightly by a dirty necklace of small towns and villages, and in one of them, a tangled little place called Hargatt, a tense meeting was under way. Light razored sharply through the window of a bullet-pocked two-story building, illuminating a husky, bearded man who sat in a worn green chair in the main downstairs room. Guards were at every window and on the roof, and one stood directly behind him. The area commander of the Iraqi insurgency asked, “Why did you do this thing, Juba?”

“I told you. I did not do it. What reason would I have to kill four of your men, who are helping to protect me?” Juba had been staying at the man’s spacious and comfortable home since arriving in Tikrit. He had already secured a new laptop computer and filled it with the data from the disk that al-Shoum had provided in Syria, plus the vital material from the memory stick that he had carried for three days in his rectum. Juba was back in business.

“The townspeople have described in detail that a man wearing our style of garments and carrying a long rifle had the courage to walk down the middle of the street after the murders. He wrote your name in blood- Why? -and then walked away again. Walked, as if he owned the town! No Shiite dog would take that chance, and certainly no American.”

“One would. His name is Kyle Swanson, he is a Marine sniper, and he wants to personally kill me.”

The commander took a few breaths before speaking again. “You did noble things in London and the state of California, Juba, and for that, I have granted you sanctuary. But death follows you like a plague.”

Juba motioned toward the guards and the windows. “How long has this war been going on? You and the people of Tikrit are no strangers to death. I didn’t bring it. It was already here.”

“Why would this Swanson Marine do this thing last night? It was foolhardy. He would be aware of what we do to captured snipers, but his audacity stunned and delayed the fighters who might otherwise have swarmed outside and taken him. That was why many of them thought it was you out there.”

“Swanson was, ah, communicating with me. Telling me he was around here and looking.”

Finally a glimmer came into the man’s eyes. “So he will be back?”

“Yes. No doubt.”

“Are you afraid?”

Juba softly laughed. “No. Of course not. I want him to find me, because I am going to kill him.”

The commander’s mind was suddenly busy with ideas. “Then we shall lure him in close and hope that he brings many friends. You kill him, we kill them.”

“I like that,” said Juba. “Just be sure to leave him for me.” Once he cleared away the Swanson obstacle, he would find a safe haven and resume the auction process. General al-Shoum would not be pleased to learn that he had been swindled, but Juba planned to be a long way from Syria by then. Tahiti and Fiji both sounded good.