Greg Rucka: Alpha

“Why?” she asks. “How old are you?”

“Old enough to know better.”

That gets a laugh, and she begins unbuttoning her Levi’s.

“You going to watch or get undressed?”

Bell thinks that getting undressed is probably the best idea.

There are two sniper teams positioned around the market square, two men to each, and Bell has command. They came in at night unseen, buried themselves amid wreckage and refuse, two rifles, two cones of fire, and a long wait for a killing that may not come to pass. CIA intel fed through JSOC and into the field, and four operators are now in a place they technically shouldn’t be, waiting to kill a very, very bad man. It is a dawn that calls for precision work.

“Spell me,” Bell says, taking his eye from the scope, lowering his head, blinking fatigue away. Despite six hours of motionless waiting, his body feels fine, relaxed and steady. It’s the eye that needs the regularly scheduled maintenance. Beside him, Chaindragger shifts from behind the spotting scope, settles behind the rifle. Somewhere across the square, Cardboard and Bonebreaker are doing the same thing, alternating watch to stay razor-ready.

Sun rises, bleaching the world with heat, the square coming alive. Old men with white beards and ageless women swathed in black, children beginning to spill from homes and hovels, raising dust as they play. Bell watches as six of them begin kicking a soccer ball they’ve made from plastic bags and all the tape they could scrounge up. It’s a good ball. When the smallest of the players pounds a kick into it, it flies true.

Bone’s voice comes into his ear. “Warlock? Vehicle, White.”

Bell swings the spotting scope to the north side of the square, picks up the vehicle instantly. It’s a battered Benz thirty-plus years past warranty, rusted panels and peeling paint. The car coasts to a stop, squeezes between a Transit van and a donkey cart, idles. A Toyota pickup slides past. The Benz rolls forward another twenty meters or so. Stops again, now alongside the largest of the fruit-and-grain stalls on the square. Door opens.

“That him?” Chaindragger murmurs.

Bell stays on the man, the weathered skin and scraggly beard. Boy’s eyes in a man’s face.

“Red,” Bell says, and he keys his mike. “Red. Negative target.”

Confirmations come back. Bell watches the man vanish into the crowd, disappear forever.

There’s silence, but Bell knows they’re all thinking the same thing.

“Warlock?” Bone says, finally. “This is some fucked-up shit.”

Bell says nothing for several seconds before rolling to his side and reaching for the sat phone that leads back to Brickyard. “Fuck it,” he says. “Sending it uphill.”

“Roger that,” Chaindragger says with quiet emphasis.

The square continues filling up, full of life. The Benz isn’t the only car in the square, not by a long shot.

But all four shooters know it’s the only one that’s going to explode.

The last sunlight goes, replaced by a low moonrise, and she comes back from the bathroom carrying a glass of water, stops at the side of the bed. Bell, on his back, looks up at her, watches as she drinks, then brings the water to his lips as if aiding an invalid. He swallows, feeling thick and drowsy, out of practice in too many ways. The last time he had sex was with Amy, four months ago now, just after the divorce went final. A final fuck hurrah, making love with a passion that took them both by surprise. After, they’d lain together for half an hour in silence before she’d left his side for the last time, moving to dress.

“Why are we doing this again?” Bell asked.

“Because you’re a good lay,” Amy said. “And so am I.”

“Not my reference.”

“I know your reference, soldier.” She turned from his gaze to pull on her panties, an awkward modesty that transformed eighteen years of marriage, of intimacy, into wasted days. “We don’t love each other anymore.”

This girl, who’s not Amy, sets the glass aside, then slips back into the bed, rolling onto her belly, breasts pressing against Bell’s chest. He feels where her body has turned cool from the night air beyond the blankets, feels her stealing his own body heat to replace hers. She props herself up on an elbow, rests a cheek in her palm. With her other hand, she begins to tour his body. An index finger traces the puckered line along Bell’s left shoulder.

“How’d you get this?”

Bell turns his head to look at the scar, turns his head back to stare at the ceiling. “I got shot.”

“You were in Iraq?”

“Sometimes.”

“Afghanistan?”

“Sometimes.”

“Army?”

“Sometimes.”

She laughs, concluding that nothing he says can be trusted. Drags a finger across Bell’s chest, then down, stopping at the right lower abdominal. “This one?”

“Shrapnel.”

Her hand moves lower, takes a slight detour, and she offers a naughty grin before continuing to his right thigh.

“Knife?”

“Something sharp, yeah.”

“Roll over.”

Bell obliges. She examines his arms, takes his right hand in hers. He feels the slight brush of her fingertip between his thumb and forefinger, distant, as if from far away.

“This a callus?”

“That is a callus.”

“How do you get a callus like that? There?”

It’s a gun callus, earned by putting thousands of rounds through a pistol seven days a week, from morning to night to morning again. It’s earned on the range and in the Shooting House, live-fire exercises on endless repeat until shooting is like breathing, until missing is Not An Option, and it’s kept by taking that honed skill and applying it to the enemy. It is a killer’s callus, a warrior’s mark, an operator’s badge of honor.

He doesn’t say any of that.

“Yard work,” Bell tells her.

She looks at him, eyebrow arched, then bends her head so her hair brushes over him in a wave. He feels her tongue light between his fingers, her lips as she kisses her way along his arm, onto his back, where she stops again.

“This one?”

“Shot.”

“It’s ugly.”

“Wasn’t too bad.”

“Does it hurt?” she asks. “Getting shot?”

He doesn’t answer at first. Thinking of Amy again, how she never once asked. How her face would fall and her eyes would turn dark, how her lips would draw thin and tight. But she would never make a sound. She never would ask.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Bell says.

Bell switches the sat phone off. Chaindragger’s heard just one half of the conversation, but he knows what’s coming, and still he hasn’t moved.

“Pack it up,” Bell says, and then says it again for the benefit of the radios.

“We got a VBIED parked down there-,” Bone starts to say.

“We are ordered to pull out.” Bell cuts him off. “Brickyard says mission abort, return to LZ Venus.”

There is another heartbeat’s pause, then the confirmations come back to Bell’s ear. Chaindragger is already at his knees, breaking down the rifle. A shout carries through the hot, still air, and Bell looks out at the square once more. Without optics, more than one hundred meters away, figures look like animation tests, waggling, hopping, running back and forth. He sees the makeshift soccer ball sailing through the air, bounce to a stop in front of the parked Benz.

“Sons of bitches,” he mutters.

Chaindragger looks up at him. Like Bell and the rest of the squad, he’s let his hair grow out, now to his shoulders, his beard a scraggly mass of black hanging from his coffee-dark face. Wearing the local color, the way all of them are, baggy trousers and a long shirt-coat to the thighs.