Jack Coughlin: Kill Zone

The first book in the Sniper series, 2007

A DUSTY HAZE HUNG OVERthe little cluster of mud and brick huts just before dawn, and the smell of cooking fires filtered back to the snipers. A boy with a stick herded a few goats across stony ground to the east, trying to find something on which the animals could graze. The land was barren and bleak, like the lives of the few people who lived here. A single guard with an AK-47 walked about, trying to stay awake.

It had taken Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson and his spotter, Corporal Eric Martinez, seventy-two hours since being dropped by helicopter to reach the hidden overlook position. They had humped through valleys and steep ridges, following faint trails that led them to a rough road running through the no-name village.

They had moved only during darkness, for although they wore the same sort of clothing as the locals, they obviously were quite different. Swanson was a Massachusetts Irishman with reddish-blond hair, and Martinez was an olive-skinned Mexican. With such distinctive faces, plus being weaponed up, they could not take the chance of being examined too closely.

They made scheduled radio checks every two hours. Swanson led the way in silence as they closed in on the road until they spotted the lights of the village in the distance. He looked at the map for a final time, smiled, folded it up, and put it into a pocket.

It was still the darkest hours of the night when they discovered the deep cave on the ridge above the village. It had an exit at the far end, which allowed them to crawl in undetected. They gathered weeds and bushes from the rear side of the ridge and stuffed them into the folds of their loose clothing to create crude ghillie suits, and became invisible in the night. They took their positions, set up the rifle and the spotting scope, and lay motionless fifteen yards back in the gloom of the small cavern.

The target was in one of those huts below them on the road that led from Afghanistan into Pakistan.

At 5:00 A.M., Martinez reported on the radio that the hunter-killer team was on station and expected the target to move soon. Swanson gave him some map coordinates, and a routine confirmation was returned. Without contradictory instructions at that final radio check, the mission was to proceed, so the snipers went black. The radio was turned off to save the battery, and the backup satellite phone was also shut down.

They would have preferred to conduct the entire operation at night to help with their escape, but the world isn’t perfect in combat. A window of opportunity such as this would be open for a very short time. It had to be done now.

They ran laser ranges on every hut and worked out firing solutions on all of them, including the front door of the target hut, its single window, and the old pickup truck parked out front. There was a scramble of junk in the bed of the pickup to make it appear to be just another vehicle carrying scavenged items for resale at some bazaar.

Kyle Swanson smoothly glassed the area, the huts, and truck. The images jumped in magnification, seeming close enough to reach out and touch. He looked at the guard wandering aimlessly about. Still good.

A light came on in the window, the yellow flicker of a lantern. “We have movement,” whispered Martinez.

A big man came through the door. The snipers, working from a picture, examined him closely through their scopes to get positive identification. The bearded face of Ali bin Assam was unmistakable in the brightening morning light. “It’s him,” said Martinez.

Ali was a top military operative of al Qaeda, one of the operational guys who planned the dirty work, then had others carry out the attacks. He was responsible for a lot of innocent people being dead, and American intel had picked up his scent after a suicide bomb attack in Baghdad had misfired a week earlier. Swanson and Martinez were assigned to hunt him down and kill him.

Now Swanson laid the crosshairs of his rifle on the dark figure.

“I see the target,” said Martinez. He quickly glanced at the logbook. “Four hundred eleven meters to the doorway.”

“Wind?” Swanson asked softly.

Martinez looked at the smoke drifting over the hut. “Two minutes left.”

Swanson fine-tuned until Ali bin Assam filled the scope. “I’m holding center mass.”

“Roger. On scope.”

The terrorist looked up at the brightening sky and seemed pleased with the coming of morning. The new day held the promise that he would soon be safe in the tunneled sanctuary of Pakistan’s forbidding Tora Bora mountains. He raised his big arms and stretched, his back bending.

“On target,” said Swanson as he took up the slack on the trigger.

“Fire when ready.”

Swanson exhaled and gently pulled straight back on the trigger, and the long rifle fired. The 7.62mm bullet tore through Ali just left of center, ripped through vital organs and arteries, and took out a chunk of the heart. He staggered back and collapsed against a dirty wall as blood poured out of him.

The guard stared down in surprise at his fallen leader, and Swanson turned the rifle on him, jacked in a new round, and hammered the gunman with a chest shot. The body crumpled to the ground, where it quivered briefly like a piece of Jell-O.

“Two hits,” Martinez confirmed. “Two targets down.”

To make sure, Kyle Swanson put another round into Ali’s head.

The shots echoed across the little valley, but no other fighters emerged from the huts, and no return fire came searching for the snipers. In this harsh land of easy death, no one wanted to get involved in whatever had just happened, and they all stayed inside except for the little boy, who had abandoned his goats and taken off running. They let him go.

Martinez backed out of the rear entrance of the cave and ran down to the fallen targets while Swanson covered him. He opened a kit containing test tubes, snipped a hair sample from Ali, and shoved a long cotton swab to the back of the dead man’s tongue for a saliva sample. He bottled them both and locked them in the small box. The DNA would be used later for positive identification.

When he was clear, they started to hump back to a flat area about 800 meters away, where the daylight extraction could be done by a Black Hawk helicopter accompanied by a pair of Apache gunships. There was no need for secrecy now, just speed. The jig was up and the snipers had to get out of there.

Martinez turned the radio back on and gave the map coordinates to call in the birds, but a raspy and angry voice broke into his transmission. “Where have you been?” the voice demanded. “We’ve been trying to get you for the last thirty minutes! Abort the mission. Say again, abort the mission!”

Martinez stared in shock, but Swanson winked at him and grabbed the receiver. “Too damned late! Mission accomplished.”

“Fuck!” There was panic in the disembodied voice. “You gave us the wrong coordinates on that village. You were on the wrong side of the border. Fuck! Choppers are inbound. We’ll deal with this when you get back.” The transmission was terminated.

Swanson handed the receiver back to Martinez. “Let’s go home.” They set out in a trot down the ravine toward the landing zone.

“Gunny, we in trouble?”

“Eric, you just remember we took out a real bad motherfucker today. We may get some shit for it, but when they quit shouting, old Ali’s still going to be real dead, and that’s a good deal. He was a worthless piece of shit who had a lot of American and Iraqi blood on his hands. Anyway, we can’t unshoot him, can we? Can’t change a thing. I’ll take any blame, but my guess is they will just bury it. The CIA never admits mistakes.”