Jack Coughlin - Kill Zone

Finally, U.S. and coalition ground troops and armor showed up. A Saudi National Guard unit was allowed to roll into the town first, for symbolic reasons, but the big chase was conducted by a Marine light recon battalion that roared through the broken town like it was Saturday afternoon at the Daytona Speedway. TOW missiles and 25 mm Bushmaster cannons obliterated any Iraqi vehicles that were too slow.

Kyle and his spotter climbed from their hide like filthy moles, covered with dirt and debris. Only then did he realize that a big splinter had punched into his left bicep. Blood stained his uniform. He had been too busy, and the adrenaline was pumping too hard, to notice when it happened.

A medic yanked out the splinter, cleaned the puncture, and tied on a quick bandage. “You’ll get another Purple Heart for that one, Sar’nt,” the medic said.

“Forget it,” Kyle responded, rubbing the sharp piece of wood, about three inches long, between his fingers, then tossing it away. “Ain’t worth nothing.”

As the other teams emerged, similarly battered and bruised, Kyle walked off to get some water and find a quiet place to be alone.

It was part of his routine that let his mind disengage from the combat mode and come back into the real world. He found a cool, dark room in one of the empty houses and sat down as his body began to quiver. He thought of that big gaping hole he had blown in the throat of the first officer. Of the infantryman who believed he was safe behind a wall until Kyle shot out his liver in splash of blood. Of the driver of the armored personnel carrier who popped out of his hatch and caught Kyle’s bullet through the left eye. Sights of inflicted death paraded before him, and he knew that in future months, those Iraqis would visit in his dreams. Kyle Swanson, exhausted, curled into a fetal position and grabbed his knees tightly while his mind dealt with the carnage of his trigger finger. Tears streaked the dirt on his cheeks.

A hand touched him on the back. “S’arnt Swanson? You hit?” A Marine major had found him, saw the bloody shirt, and thought he was wounded.

Kyle relaxed. His eyes were still unfocused. “No, sir. I’m okay.” He swiped a hand across his dirty face, the sweat and tears leaving muddy tracks. “Just catching my breath. It got kinda intense out there.”

It took a few moments for Kyle to recognize the face of Major Bradley Middleton, the executive officer of the Force Recon battalion. The major was a veteran but had little experience with snipers, and had never seen one personally deal with the aftermath of a day of battle. Ordinary soldiers shoot almost anonymously and seldom see what they hit. Pilots never view the bodies blown away by their bombs, and tankers have limited visibility. But with a powerful scope, a sniper sees every strand of hair in an enemy mustache, the color of an eye and the movement of a finger. They also see the gory holes they make in a man, and after the battle is over, that has to be dealt with. Every sniper has his own way of adjusting.

Kyle told his shooters when they were in training, “We have to be peculiar, or we wouldn’t be snipers in the first place. None of us do what we have to do simply because we enjoy killing people. That would be crazy.” Some, the lucky ones, would just get drunk and wash away the images with beer and whiskey. Nightmares and divorces were common. Others would be gripped by unreasoning anger and fight whoever came along and end up in the brig. Kyle’s own habit was to shake and bake a little bit and be done with it.

Middleton just squatted there beside him, mystified at the quaking Marine sniper. He had invaded Kyle Swanson’s private world uninvited, and after a minute he rose and walked back into the sunshine and left Swanson alone.

Neither of them forgot the incident. Then Middleton saw him do it again after a brawl in Somalia, by which time Swanson was a staff sergeant and Middleton had risen to light colonel. Middleton considered the continued strange behavior to be important and gave Kyle a negative evaluation report. “Shaky,” he wrote of Swanson in an evaluation report, by which he meant undependable, unworthy, and unreliable. He recommended that Swanson undergo psychiatric evaluation and be retired from the Marine Corps because he was a walking time bomb. Who in their right mind would want a shaky sniper around?

Kyle had come within an inch of being ruined until other officers and senior enlisted types jumped to his defense and forced the potentially career-ending piece of paper to be withdrawn. But the term “shaky” leaked out and his fellow snipers loved it, for they gave no quarter in busting balls. “Shake” stuck, an unwanted nickname.

As he watched the news report aboard the Vagabond that Brigadier General Middleton had been taken hostage, Kyle felt conflicting emotions. It made him angry because he hated that kidnapping shit. Terrorist assholes could not just go around snatching American generals or anyone else without consequences. That anger was on principle alone.

Personally, the moment also made him proud to be an American, because he knew the United States had a firm policy of never bargaining with terrorists. Well, almost never. So there would be no deals made to get the general back. Kyle believed that the unwritten rule book on international terrorism was very clear on that point.

Therefore, now that terrorists actually had taken Middleton, Kyle reasoned that they had to keep him. That was just fine with the sniper.

TWO OLD MEN LEANED UPONthe railing of the bridge on which the Boulevard de la Gare crossed the Seine. Clouds had rolled in to chase the sun and a chilly afternoon breeze swept up the river, warning of coming rain. Sweaters protected their shoulders. Automobiles swarmed behind them on the roadway, and trains clattered into and out of the Gare de Lyon and the Gare d’Austerlitz stations on either side of the river. It would have been impossible for either to have been followed by someone without being seen, and the noise drowned out their soft voices.

They had been competitors, enemies, partners, allies, and opposing spies in their younger years. After retirement, both stayed in Paris and a friendship followed. It was enjoyable to pass the time talking about the good old days of the Cold War over cups of hot café, particularly since they could now laugh at the absurdity of six decades of spying for the United States and France.

Buzz Higbee had grown up in the Minnesota woods and could have returned to the U.S. of A., but found the thought of retiring to a cabin beside a lonely lake that was frozen half the year to be unattractive. He had lived most of his adult life in Paris, and his wife, children, and grandchildren were all French. Minnesota had become the foreign land. He was a healthy eighty-two years old, with white hair, weak blue eyes, high blood pressure, and a hearing aid.

Higbee had ventured out today to meet Jean-Paul Delmas, who was only eighty. Delmas walked with the help of a cane, but his intellect remained sharp and since his spy days he had devoted himself to an extensive collection of rare stamps. Buzz called him “the Kid.”

“This is rather delicate,” Delmas told Higbee.

“ Merde , Jean-Paul. Where our two countries are involved, what is not rather delicate?”

“It is true. But I was quite pleased when your people in Washington changed the name of French Fries to Freedom Fries. What awful things you Americans have done to food.”

“I’m glad that we were able to please the republic in our own little way, Kid, but that was bullshit and anyway, they changed the name back. You eat them, too, but with a Frenchified name. Pommes frites”

“Entirely different.”