Jack Coughlin - Clean Kill

Hanson stood up, holding the yellow legal pad on which he had made notes. “This might be a game-changer, Brad. We know something the Saudis don’t, about their own nuclear weapon.” The chief of staff lapsed into a terrible Hispanic accent for a quirky Ricky Ricardo imitation from I Love Lucy : “The new king has got some ’splainin’ to do.”

“Right.” Middleton laid a folder on Hanson’s desk. “Steve, you keep that copy so you can brief the boss and I’ll privately feed you any more details as they come up. The CIA and the Pentagon obviously already know about what happened, but I told them to keep the secret compartmentalized since it was a black Trident operation. I told them that President Tracy would land on them hard if there were any leaks. So, you need anything else?”

Hanson placed the folder atop his tablet and headed for the Oval Office. “Yeah. Tell Kyle to find another one.”

KHOBZ, SAUDI ARABIA

N O LOOSE ENDS. K YLESwanson remained absolutely still, concentrating totally on the final stages of the fighting that had unrolled at the mosque only 400 meters from his hide. The window on the far side of the shadowed room was open and his emotions were replaced by purpose.

Since the Saudi authorities did not know what had happened to the nuclear warhead, other than that it had disappeared, he intended to keep the mystery tight and intact. To do so meant he was going to have to kill some people. That did not bother him, because in his judgment, they were enemy combatants. Swanson’s personal habit was that when presenting a gift to an enemy, one should wrap it very carefully so as to keep their attention on the unimportant things, like the shape of the box or the crinkly yellow paper wrapping, and not the bomb inside. The trick was as old as the wooden horse at Troy and usually worked. Today, he would add a final flourish of distraction on his theft at the base by tying a big bloody red bow.

Kyle had returned to the safe house just before daylight and found both Homer and Jamal busy closing up shop, arranging det cord and explosives in a pre-arranged pattern that would not only destroy the structure but make it cave in upon itself.

“The Boykin Group is out of business,” Homer declared. “It won’t be long before the Saudis start wondering about how a handful of foreign workers just happened to have enough automatic weapons, ammo, and grenades to whip a pretty big onslaught of rebel bad guys. Come dark, we will be gone.” He rubbed his eyes, and then looked fondly around the well-stocked basement that had been maintained over the years. “Shame to lose all this, but we’ve got no choice. Our cover is blown.”

“Probably,” Kyle agreed. He got a cup of coffee and sat on a foldout cot. “How’d it go out there?”

Jamal was planting C4 bricks beneath the communications console, and his voice had a dim echo. “The soldiers in the Saudi relief column were pretty pissed off that they had been ambushed back at their own front gate. Came barging in on the left flank of the rebels with lots of firepower and pretty good maneuvering. The terrorists were pushed back into the urban area.”

Homer was puttering with a timing device. “That’s when we gathered up our toys and came back here. A while later, when they got the word that their nuke was gone, the Saudis went big league mean and are still bringing in more troops and armor and attack helicopters. It has degenerated into house-to-house fighting.”

Kyle finished his coffee. “I assume that all of the action is pointing toward the mosque?”

“Yep,” replied Homer. “That’s their problem. Despite the king being assassinated and the nuke being gone, the commanders are hesitating. They are squared off against the Religious Police and the Committee on Virtue as well as the rented terrorists, which means a Muslim-on-Muslim showdown.”

Swanson walked over to the sand-table model of the city and studied the area. “Will they attack the mosque?”

Jamal came out from beneath the counter and got busy with a screwdriver and pliers to pull out hard drives and memory boards on phones and computers. “No doubt,” he said. “They have to capture the mosque in order to get some prisoners to question about the nuke.”

Homer agreed. “I wouldn’t want to be in the same room when the prisoners are being asked to assist with the investigation. Gonna be messy.”

“Torture,” Jamal agreed.

“Big time. They know that anybody will crack under torture, sooner or later.” Homer’s eyes suddenly came up and met the steady gazes of Kyle and Jamal. “You think the prisoners might actually convince the Saudis that they really don’t know anything about the missing weapon?”

Swanson walked into the armory cage. “We won’t take that chance.”

S NAVPERSKAYA V INTOYKA D RAGUNOVA. N OThis first choice of a sniper rifle, which would have been his custom-made Excalibur, or even his second choice, the familiar U.S. Marine M40A3, or even a Barrett, or an Armalite. But this wasn’t a gun show. He needed a good sniper rifle with no American fingerprints on it, and Homer Boykin had both the SVD Dragunov and a Chinese-made NDM-86. Swanson took the Dragunov. In his opinion, the rough NDM was only a small step up from an AK-47 and had the look of being stamped out in an old Commie tractor factory. Not what he wanted for prime-time combat.

Jamal helped Swanson find a deserted third-floor apartment in a building that provided an unobstructed view of the mosque. The sun was almost directly overhead, so the room was darkened by shadows while he crawled around to set up his hide. He wiped grime from the floor and rubbed it onto his face and neck to camouflage the white skin. Jamal helped push the sparse furniture around to further break up his silhouette and also to create a firm rest for the long rifle. Kyle braced the Dragunov in a comfortable position and took his time adjusting the PSO scope with its red reticle in the illuminated range finder. It read exactly 347 meters to the front plaza of the mosque. Smoke from the sporadic shooting outside the building hung thick in the air before drifting away on a light breeze from the north and he fine-tuned the scope for a minimal wind. It would probably be no factor because he was so close to the target zone.

Jamal left him alone and went down to their car. Kyle needed a getaway driver more than he needed a spotter.

The eerie sense of once again entering a slow-motion film flowed over him. Noise faded and his vision sharpened, but he did not sweat, even though the mid-day temperature was hot. In a combat situation, it was normal for his senses to heighten, for the mental thought to give way to the physical muscle memory of years of scout-sniper training. His body already knew how this movie would end.

O NCE THEY RECEIVED AUTHORITYthrough their own chain of command, the Saudi soldiers had moved in with admirable violence of action. They assaulted the mosque by savaging the building with helicopter gunships and raking it with.50 caliber machine guns and mortars, pounding the exterior into rubble. As soon as the heavy fire lifted, infantry assaulters went in to finish the job.

After about twenty minutes of searching, and with sporadic fire, they had yanked out three survivors and brought them into the plaza of smooth stone. A badly wounded man lay sprawled and moaning, bleeding from the gut and in obvious pain. To the right stood a sullen fighter wearing the red headgear of the Religious Police, wiping dirt from his eyes. In the middle was a stout, middle-aged man in a turban, the imam of the mosque. He was moon-faced and arrogant.