Jack Coughlin - Kill Zone

He thought about why a man like Buchanan would betray his country, and then he considered what would be a suitable punishment. What would be worse for a deskbound political animal than having to spend the rest of his life cramped in a supermax cell in Colorado alongside big-league terrorists? A bullet in the ear would work, but Kyle felt Buchanan should be brought into public shame and disgrace. Like that Enron guy, he could always have a heart attack after being convicted. Swanson shook his head to clear the cobwebs. The whole thing was irrelevant and had nothing to do with his job at the moment.

He would trust Double-Oh to get that letter into the hands of the right people and that they would take care of the problem. Isn’t that what the FBI does? He was a sniper, not a cop, and all he could deal with at the moment was whether to make this fight all alone, or risk using the damned telephone. He was fucked either way. He would not make the call yet. Anonymity was his friend, and the best route, the only route, was straight ahead. He kept the sat phone and buried the pack radio. No use lugging it along, since it had only been taken as a diversion in the first place.

He rubbed his eyes, picked up the binos, and got back to sketching the village.

Boredom set in as the sun baked the town and the lone man watching it, but Swanson would not let himself fall asleep. There would be no more sleep until this job was done, for to sleep would be to yield awareness of the situation, and that could be the end of everything. He began arranging what he knew, planning his attack. He studied the little grocery, putting it on his mental list of places to visit after dark.

About four o’clock, a dirty white Toyota pickup truck came down the shady side of the main street with a throaty rumble and stopped in front of the suspicious place Kyle now called the House of White Hands. Although he had a beard, the driver was not an Arab, but he moved with the loose gait of someone comfortable in the surroundings. He wore lightweight slacks and a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt rolled up at the wrists, with sunglasses pushed up on top of his head. He greeted a few men seated on stools in some nearby shade. Damn! Kyle kept his right hand on the binos while his left dug into a thigh pocket and grabbed a plastic envelope. It contained the small photograph of the Frenchman who was to be the contact for the Marine raiders, and he looked at the picture, then back at the man. Pierre Falais. The Frenchman knocked on the door, said something, and was allowed inside. Fifteen minutes later he was out again, and his truck roared to life. Toyotas don’t roar, Kyle noted, and they don’t wear big desert tires. This was a custom job. He watched it drive to the gate in a low wall that surrounded another flat-roofed house three blocks down the main street, and then he lasered the hell out of the place.

It was finally time to move. Swanson spent two hours backing out of his hide and working his way down the wadi to a new spot a hundred meters to the right to get a better view of the mysterious door before the dinnertime delivery at the House of White Hands. This time, when the door opened, he had a plain view of a big man wearing desert cammie pants and an olive drab tank top. Not only was he white, but he had a line of tattoos on his right arm from shoulder to wrist. He took the food and shut the door.

Swanson was stunned. Who the hell was that and what did he have to do with the situation? The white skin meant westernized: Eurotrash or Aussie or Kiwi or Canadian or Scottish or whatever. Maybe even American. The tattoos helped narrow the field because they indicated a military background. That meant a spook of some sort, or a mercenary, and so much food being delivered indicated more than one in the house. A couple of Frankensteins just happen to be in the neighborhood during a Marine raid? No chance that could be just a coincidence, and it sure as hell didn’t help the odds against him.

Kyle crawled back to his hide, ate some more crackers, and checked his water supply before taking a sip. He had taken two one-quart and four two-quart canteens from the other Marines so that he could be liberal in staying hydrated, because he planned to resupply after dark. But he never drank more than half of the water on hand. Water was life in the Middle East, and he judged that he still had plenty. As he ate, he considered his list-the Zeus and its guards; the house with Pudgy, Beanpole, SpongeBob and Pee-Wee, and a minimum of four other Arab fighters; the frog and his souped-up Toyota; and finally the House of White Hands, which contained at least one non-Arab guy who was most likely a mere.

Places to go and things to do, and Middleton was down there somewhere. The frog will tell me. Lots to do. He cut chunks of C-4, rolled them into tiny balls and put them in an arm pocket. A handful of pencil-sized detonators went into another pocket. From a full roll of black duct tape in his pack, he ripped off a half-dozen long strips and stuck them along the legs of his pants. He cleaned his weapons. He waited for darkness.

NEWS FROM THE FRONT, GENERAL!Guess what? You’re gonna be a fuckin’ TV star again!” Victor Logan squatted before his captive, grabbed Brad Middleton hard by the jaw, and turned him so the prisoner had to look into his eyes. Logan laughed, a mirthless sound that echoed in the small room, and he wore a smile of triumph.

As the heat of the day was easing, Middleton, prone on the bunk, was able to breathe a bit easier, pulling air into his lungs despite the aching rib that had been broken in one of the beatings. The broken finger was useless. He had ripped a strip of cloth from his robe and tied it to the next finger to immobilize it. The room stank so badly it had become part of him. His guts were sore, and he had neither bathed nor shaved since they had used him in that earlier rigged media show.

Middleton’s right wrist was chained to the metal cot, giving him only enough movement to reach two buckets, one about a third full of fresh water and the other a stinking one that he used as a toilet. The loose full-length cotton robe was filthy.

“We just got some new instructions,” Logan said, letting go of the jaw but giving Middleton a medium-strength slap on the side of his head, enough to make the general’s ears ring. “I guess you might consider the good news is that this is going to be our last day in this shithole. The bad news, for you that is, comes tomorrow morning. Jimbo and I are going to clean you up, get you all dressed in that spiffy uniform hanging on the door over there, and hand you to the raggedy-heads. The jihadists plan a big show. Might call it the local version of American Idol.”

Middleton ignored the flash of pain, slowly swung his feet to the floor, and spat on the floor to disrespect Logan. He wasn’t afraid of the giant, because almost by definition a Marine Corps general has a streak of arrogance. His mind had cleared as the drugs wore off and he had thought long and hard about why he had been taken hostage, adding in the snippets of information he overheard through the door as his captors talked. He knew that he would never be released, so damned if he would go down sniveling. Middleton decided to interrogate the big man.

“If you have something to tell me, Logan, just say it. You and your partner: Dumber and Dumbest,” the general said with a condescending sneer. “I can’t understand why a company as big as Gates Global, with hundreds of pretty good people on the payroll, would stoop so low as to bring a couple of losers like you aboard.”

Logan reacted sharply and stood to his full height, glaring down at Middleton. “They came recruiting me, not the other way around! The company uses Shark Teams to handle the uncomfortable side of things.”