Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

“Ha ha,” said Jared. “Now you’re the funny one.”

“It’s time. Be a man.”

They crept to the lee of the house again, low-crawled down the side, turned the corner toward the front, and reached the front door.

“Go on,” said Juba. “Do it! Now!”

Jared swallowed and stood. More gracefully, more fluently, more practiced, Juba stood next to him, back against the door.

Jared pounded hard on its surface, feeling the rebound of the wood with each blow.

Nothing. He pounded again.

Sounds of scuttling inside.

Then the thump-thump of someone racing down the hall.

“Who the fuck is that?” came the call from the door.

“Ginger sent me. Man, he’s hurt bad. They jumped him, beat his ass, and took his shit. I think he’s going to die.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Ginger told me to come here. He may be dead by now.”

A view hole in the door opened, as whoever was in there had to check out the messenger before deciding what to do. Juba pivoted and without pause or hesitation, but with full strength, commitment, and great accuracy, jammed the sharpened stick through the hole.

Jared heard an unprecedented sound. It had both the qualities of crunch and slurp to it, something cracking, something squirting, and the stick disappeared as whoever now received it surrendered to gravity. Juba, fast as a snake, reared back and drove the sole of his right foot at high velocity into the door, just above the lock, and the wood splintered as if it were balsa. The impact sprang the door, ripping splinters and chunks with it, as bolts and chains clanked with their sudden release, and Juba was in, followed by Jared, who got just a brief look at the guard. He lay against the wall, about six inches of raw stick protruding vertically from his left eye socket, a torrent of blood washing down his slack face and running onto his black satin shirt. Jared had never before seen the devastation to flesh that violence brings, and it froze him solid for a second.

Juba had no time for coaching. He snatched up the man’s weapon, a short-barreled semi-automatic shotgun, pivoted, throwing its bolt even as he lifted it to his shoulder, and stormed down the hall. Another figure, in the full animation of urgency, appeared, Glock in hand. But he was way behind the action curve, and Juba put what had to be six gallons of buckshot into his center chest, shredding it, and him, lifting him off his feet, where he bounced against the doorframe and went to the floor like a shock of wheat.

The ear-stabbing blast of the gun, and the acrid smell of burnt powder, snapped Jared free of his trance, but also set his ears to ringing like all the alarms in the world. Following Juba, he raced down the hallway, while struggling to get his hoodie wrapped around his skull, and he ended up looking more like a bedraggled mummy than Juba, whose wrapping was tight and efficient.

Juba reached the doorway out of which the man had come. Instead of bursting through it, he went prone and snaked around it low. Whoever was in there expected no such move; for his misinterpretation, he got his own six gallons of buckshot in the knee. He went down, tried to rise on his one good leg, and Juba sent buckshot in an angry cloud into his genitals. Juba rose, strode in, and Jared heard the headshot.

But he became aware of scurrying upstairs. He had paused halfway down the hall at the foot of the stairway.

“Stop!” he screamed in English. “If you come down, we’ll kill you. Stay upstairs and hide until we’re gone.”

But suddenly a large woman materialized at the head of the stairs, her face bulging out with fury, and she came leaping down the stairs at Jared. She was immense and full of adrenaline. He swallowed as she launched from five steps up and filled the sky like a crashing dirigible, huge enough to squash him. But some instinct caused his legs to spring, and he jumped to the right. She thundered past and landed with what sounded like meat smashing into wood at three hundred miles an hour. He knew if she got her hands on him, it was all over, so his cowardice poked him into action, and he kicked her, hard, in the face. And then he kicked her again.

She went prone, but was still breathing and struggling to move, rolling over like a large farm animal caught in the muck, and, the next thing he knew, he was using her face as a trampoline — up, down, up, down. And then Juba pulled him back.

“Good,” Juba said, “you are warrior now. Allahu Akbar! God is great! Now, come on, we have to get the fuck out of here.”

Jared looked at the carnage he had unleashed. The woman’s face was pulped, and squalid splatters of blood reflected greasily in the yellow hallway lighting. Her wounds had swollen so quickly that she looked as if tumors had overtaken and eaten her features. Her immensity made her stillness even more apparent.

Hideous detail, never to be unseen: a dental bridge, with two gold teeth and one white one, all twisted and bent, sitting in the puddle of blood that was oozing across the floor.

Working group MARJORIE DAW headquarters

The next day

Afew hours of sleep, a shower, then back in to file reports, read the wires, scan the incoming reports, Nick on the phone with D.C., everyone busy.

They finally got together at 4.

“Hope you all appreciate the lie I told Mrs. McDowell yesterday. In fact, not picking up Juba at the mosque, alerting him and letting him fly the coop, was a total catastrophe. They are not happy in D.C. Don’t know how much longer I’m going to be around.”

“If you go, I go,” said Swagger.

“Appreciated, but not helpful,” said Nick. “Anyhow, in this room, we all understand that, but once it’s been acknowledged, we have to forget it and move on. So if anybody has any bitches — complaints, recriminations, bitterness — now’s the time to let fly, because after today it’s a closed file.”

Gold said, “It does no good to compare to Israeli methods. I feel, however, that psychologically your people — I don’t mean anyone in here, but more generally — have not made the kind of commitment that is necessary to deal with this sort of existential threat. I hope I am wrong.”

“You probably are not,” said Nick. “Passive-aggression haunts our every move, even in the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Division. We haven’t committed as yet to the path of total destruction. Many still believe some sort of rapprochement is necessary.”

“Do you yourself, Agent Memphis?”

“Tough question, soft answer. I hope so. Deep down, however, nobody wants to go full theater. It’s not in our character. Look at our wars and how equivocal we’ve been, at least since 1945, and the two months immediately after nine/eleven.”

“Then your task will be harder.”

“I understand that. I will help in any way I can, as I have an intense investment in seeing Juba eliminated.”

“Anything else?” Nick said.

There were no murmurs.

“And we did gain,” said Nick. “A, we confirmed that he’s here. B, he’s supported by an expensive maintenance system of unknown provenance and sophisticated capabilities. C, he’s unsure of his ability to maneuver here in America. And, D, he’s with this Jared Akim, whom we can track. Now, Chandler, update us.”

“Got over a dozen responses from the wired picture of the Akim kid, but, in all cases, they’re outside the cone of possibility. He couldn’t have gotten there that fast by car. So I low-prioritize them. There are many reports of stolen cars, but nothing unusual in them, no way of knowing if one of them was taken by Juba and Akim. We have upgraded priorities on the license numbers of those taken after Imam el-Tariq put in his call to Akim and warned him of the spy. El-Tariq said that was about six p.m., and on his phone there indeed was a call to a number at six-oh-seven p.m. confirmed as Jared Akim’s.”