Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

“Thank you. Echo-Foxtrot,” said Linnett. “We’ll take over now.”

The Spectre, mission accomplished, returned to McChord AFB. The snow stopped, the skis hissed over the new powder, making the sort of progress that skis ought to make with a skilled athlete on them, and the Alpha team came across the remains of the pony. Few fragments were bigger than a man’s arm, but they were definitely horse, not human. Except the bits with tawny fur. Linnett spent ten minutes looking for pieces of arctic clothing, boots, snowshoes, bowie knife, femurs, skull or beard. The skis were lying there, but one was broken. That had happened when the pony fell. There was a sheepskin sleeve but no rifle. No snowshoes. No Afghan. Two hours to dawn, and it had become a race. One man on snow-shoes, twelve on skis. All exhausted, all desperate. The Alpha team had their Global Positioning System, or GPS. As the sky lightened fractionally in the east, the team sergeant murmured, “Border half a mile.”

They arrived twenty minutes later on a bluff overlooking a valley that ran from their left to right. Below was a logging road that constituted the Canadian border. Right across from them was another bluff, with a clearing containing a cluster of log cabins, a facility for Canadian lumberjacks when the timber concessions resumed after the snows.

Linnett crouched, steadied his forearms and studied the landscape through binoculars. Nothing moved. The light increased. Unbidden, his snipers eased their weapons from the sleeves that had housed them throughout the mission, fixed their scopes, inserted one shell each and lay down to stare across the gulf through their scopes.

By the norms of soldiering, snipers are a strange breed. They never get near the men they kill, yet they see them with a clarity and an apparent proximity greater than anyone else. With hand-to-hand combat almost extinct, most men die not by the hand of the enemy but by his computer. They are blown away by a missile fired a continent away or from somewhere under the sea. They are destroyed by a smart bomb loosed by an aircraft so high they neither saw nor heard it. They died because someone fired a shell from two counties away. At the nearest, their killers, crouching behind a machine gun in a swooping helicopter, see them only as vague shapes, running, hiding, trying to fire back. But not as real humans.

The sniper sees the enemy like that. Lying in total silence, utterly immobile, he sees his target as a man with three days’ stubble, a man who stretches and yawns, who spoons beans out of a can, unzips his fly or simply stands and stares at a lens a mile away that he cannot see. And then he dies. Snipers are special-inside the head.

They also live in a private world. So total does the obsession with accuracy become that they lapse into a silence peopled only by the weights of projectile heads, the power of various powder loads, how much a bullet will wind-drift, how far it will drop over various distances, whether yet another tiny improvement can be made to the rifle.

Like all specialists, they have their passions for rival pieces of equipment. Some snipers like a really tiny bullet, like the Remington M700.308, a slug so small that it has to be sheathed in a detachable sleeve to go down the barrel at all.

Others stay with the M21, the sniper version of the M14 standard combat rifle. Heaviest of all is the Barrett “Light Fifty,” a monster that sends a bullet like a human forefinger over a mile with enough speed times weight to cause a human body to explode.

Lying prone at Captain Linnett’s feet was his leading sniper, Master Sergeant Peter Bearpaw He was a half-blood Santee Sioux with a Hispanic mother. He came from the slums of Detroit, and the Army was his life. He had high cheekbones, and eyes that sloped like a wolf’s. And he was the best marksman in the Green Berets.

What he cradled as he squinted across the valley was the.408 Cheyenne by CheyTac of Idaho. It was a more recent development than the others, but with over three thousand rounds on the range it had become his weapon of choice. It was a bolt-action rifle, which he appreciated because the total lockdown of a closed bolt gave that tiny extra stability at the moment of detonation. He had inserted the single slug-very long and slim-and he had burnished and buffed the nose tip to eradicate the tiniest vibration in flight. Along the top of the breech ran a Leatherwood X24 scope.

“I have him, Captain,” he whispered.

The binoculars had missed the fugitive, but the scope had found him. Set among the cabins across the valley, walled on three sides by timber, with a single, glass-paneled door, was a phone booth.

“Tall, long shaggy hair, bushy black beard?”

“Roger that.”

“What’s he doing?”

“He is in a phone booth, sir.”

Izmat Khan had had little concourse with his fellow inmates at Guantanamo, but one with whom he had spent many months in the same solitary confinement block had been a Jordanian who had fought in Bosnia in the midnineties before returning to become a trainer in the AQ camps. He was hardline. As security slackened around the Christmas period, they found they could whisper from one cell to another. If you ever get out of here, the Jordanian told him, I have a friend. We were in the camps together. He is safe, he will help a true believer. Mention my name.

There was a name. And a phone number, though Izmat Khan did not know where its owner lived. He was not quite sure of the complexities of subscriber trunk dialing, for which he actually had enough quarters; but, worse, he did not know the overseas code for dialing out of Canada. So he punched in a quarter and asked for the operator.

“What number are you trying, caller?” said the unseen Canadian telephone operator.

Slowly, in halting English, he read out the figures he had so painstakingly memorized.

“That is a UK number,” said the operator. “Are you using U.S. quarters?”

“Yes.”

“That’s acceptable. Put in eight of them, and I will connect you. When you hear the pips, put in more if you wish to continue the call.” “Have you acquired the target?” asked Linnett.

“Yes, sir.”

“Take the shot.”

“He’s in Canada, sir.”

“Take the shot, Sergeant.”

Peter Bearpaw took a slow, calm breath, held it inside and squeezed. The range was a still-air 2.IOO yards on his range finder, well over a mile. Izmat Khan was pushing quarters into the slot. He was not looking up. The glass front of the booth disintegrated into pinpricks, and the bullet took away the occiput from the rest of his head.

The operator was as patient as she could be. The man down in the logging camp had inserted only two quarters, then apparently left the booth and left the handset hanging. Finally, she had no choice but to hang up on him and cancel the call.

Because of the sensitivity of the cross-border shot, no official report was ever made.

Captain Linnett reported to his commanding officer, who told Marek Gumienny in Washington. Nothing more was heard.

The body was found in the thaw when the lumberjacks returned. The hanging phone was disconnected. The coroner could do little but record an open verdict. The man wore U.S. clothing, but in the border country that was not odd. He had no ID; no one recognized him locally.

Unofficially, most people around the coroner’s office presumed the man had been victim of a tragic stray shot from a deer hunter, another death from careless shooting or ricochet. He was buried in an unmarked grave. Because no one south of the border wanted to make waves, it was never thought to ask what number the fugitive had asked for. To even make the inquiry would give away the source of the shot. So it was not made. In fact, the number he wanted was that of a small apartment off-campus near Aston University in Birmingham. It was the home of Dr. Ali Aziz al-Khattab, and the phone was on intercept by Britain ’s MI5. All they waited for was enough evidence to justify a raid and an arrest. They would get it a month later. But that morning the Afghan was trying to call the only man west of Suez who knew the name of the ghost ship.