Jack Coughlin - Kill Zone

Logan sort of hoped none of those jarheads were still alive, although the idea of killing Americans had not cost him a moment of sleep. It was a business deal, sweet payback for being screwed over by the navy, and Logan was determined to come out of all this rich. He had shopped his services around until he discovered that being part of a Shark Team paid better than any of the other private billets. He was pulling in ten thousand dollars U.S. a month, and complicated things like this brought more. For these big bucks, he didn’t give a fuck if he had to kill the pope.

The fact that the birds went down by themselves made no difference to Logan, because the result was the same. He got fifty thousand for snatching the general and now the rescue mission had failed, which meant still another fifty would flow into his bank account. He figured to retire when he topped two million.

He clicked his AK-47 to full automatic and fired an entire clip into the air while shouting in Arabic for the ragheads to clear out until he and Collins were done searching the area. Reluctantly, the crowd pulled back away from their looting and stood in sullen groups while the two American mercenaries got to work.

“Get the camera going,” Logan said as they approached the twisted wreckage. “I’ll look around the perimeter. You take pictures of every one of those Marines, get the dog tags, and read off the names loud enough to be recorded, clear enough to be understood. Any funny names, spell them out. I want a stone-cold positive ID on every one of those dudes.”

“Got it.” Collins stepped into the wreckage. It was a mess in there. He started photographing.

“And make sure all the arms and legs add up!” Logan called, then began a slow walk around the site, circling from the nose of one of the choppers out to about a hundred meters. That put the helicopter in the center of an imaginary clock, with the nose pointed to twelve o’clock, and Logan switched on a powerful flashlight as he worked back and forth in pie-shaped segments. One o’clock. Two o’clock. Raghead footprints and chunks of debris from the aircraft reached out in all directions. He would have missed the puddle of vomit near the seven o’clock position had he not smelled it before locating it with the bright beam of his flashlight. Nothing much more than some discolored yellow bile. A raghead sickened by the sights and smell of new death? Not likely, but possible. He walked on, and two slices of the clock later, almost obscured by the scuffed footprints of the scavengers, he found the unmistakable tire tracks of a motorcycle. He did not recall hearing any. How old was the track? Some civilian ride through yesterday? It led toward the road, east.

“Hey, Vic!” Collins hollered from the ruptured end of one of the helicopters. “Take a look.”

Logan was there in a couple of big strides. “What?”

Collins was squatting down and had the loose end of a big strap in one hand. He tugged on it to show that the other end was secured to the deck of the fuselage. “Three more of these straps. There, there… and there.”

All four ends had been sliced clean. Something had been secured here. Had the ragheads already stolen it? Something large? No, he would have noticed. Logan backed out of the wrecked bird and Collins followed, putting away his camera after photographing and identifying the final two bodies. They went to the fuselage of the other helicopter. A little Kawasaki dirt bike, badly damaged, was still lashed to the deck with straps like the ones that had been cut on the first helo.

Logan scratched his neck, came to a conclusion. He waved to the onlookers and they poured back into the wreckage like honeybees after a lump of sugar.

“Somebody survived that mess,” he told Jimbo as they returned to the village and their satellite radio. “We got a runner.”

HE HATED NOISE. KYLE SWANSONvalued silence, for stealth was his cloak of protective comfort. On a wide battlefield, there was so much racket in a raging shootout of tank cannons, masses of small arms, machine guns, grenades, and artillery that soldiers talked in shouts for a week afterward, long after the fighting stopped. As a sniper, he preferred to be far from that chaos, out on his own, where making sounds could spell doom. Swanson was the ghost at the party, able to move unseen and unheard. Noise weakened snipers and made them vulnerable, almost like normal human beings. The only noise he liked to hear in combat was the single POP of his silenced rifle being fired.

So although the dirt bike had a silenced muffler, the steady throbs of the engine still reverberated in the desert night. Kyle believed any fool with ears could hear him. Combined with the coming dawn, that would leave him exposed and vulnerable. He weaved slowly, deliberately along the pavement, steering through patches of loose gravel normally avoided by motorcyclists because bikes have a tendency to skid. A mistake could dump him in a heartbeat, but he wanted those tracks to be found.

His mind was also busy on another level, thinking about possible places where he might hunker down for the day, when people would be everywhere. Being caught near a population center, even a small village like this one, was never good, plus people were probably going to be out searching for him when they figured out someone had lived through the crash. The flare of a match straight ahead snapped him back to reality.

Someone had lit a cigarette. Swanson took his hand from the throttle and coasted the motorcycle to a halt. He turned off the engine and sat balanced on the dirt bike with a boot down on each side. Focusing his night-vision goggles, he saw two men about two hundred meters ahead, a pair of careless Syrian soldiers at a road checkpoint. Both were watching the area where the helicopters went down instead of paying attention to their jobs.

Kyle laid the bike down along the hardball highway and carefully dropped his gear, except for the M-16 and a couple of hand grenades. On his arms and knees, he low-crawled until he was within twenty feet of the guards. They were cooking something in the guard shack. Smelled like rice and lamb. The guards were jabbering like tourists about the crash and had stacked their rifles against a wall when they climbed onto the flat roof of the shack for a better view. Controlling his breathing, Kyle circled behind them, moved in close, rose to a sitting position against the wall, and pulled the pin on a hand grenade. He let the spoon flip away, held it for a count of two, and then tossed it onto the roof and sprawled to the ground next to the structure.

The explosion blew both of them from their perch, and Kyle quickly checked the bodies, which were riddled with shrapnel. Not good enough. The people back at the crash site were more than a mile away and probably would not have heard this small explosion, so he had to leave enough information to convince whoever eventually investigated the deaths that the work was sloppy enough to have been done by a rookie Marine. A young radioman would have done the easiest thing available and smashed right through the checkpoint, using the basic weapons at hand, in his haste to escape. Kyle wanted to leave this scene as American as possible. He clicked his M-16 to full automatic and raked an entire magazine of bullets across the chests and stomachs of the dead men, and the bullets dug through the bodies and into the hardpan pavement beneath them. Shiny brass cartridges flipped and bounced wildly everywhere. He walked in the sand to leave bootprints. Window dressing. He could easily have taken them both out with Excalibur, or up close with his knife, but this was a stage show. As a final touch, he ducked inside the small bunker and gobbled down some of the meal the men had been preparing. He was right. Spicy lamb and rice.