Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

“Do you see it?” asked Neill, who’d masterminded the aerial recon with his usual nonchalant genius while making smart-guy comments the whole time.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Swagger. “I’ve got it down to two.”

He gave his two selections. Neill punched buttons at a keyboard, the two images came up side by side on a giant screen more usually given to the display of Russian bombers on Siberian tarmacs. To the uninitiated, it was just a blur and smear in odd shades, imprimatured by a digital display at one corner that expressed latitude and longitude, altitude, time, weather. But Swagger got it, homed in on one, homed in further on a specific area and requested the blowup.

“I’m seeing what looks like, um, a post? It’s not a natural structure. It’s clearly man-built. Is that what everybody else sees? Can you bring it up more?”

Neill diddled— clickety-click, clickety-clack —and selected the piece of picture in which the post-like thing was featured, brought it to center screen, and blew it up nice and big.

They were in the darkened theater of an air force room, decorated with photos of supersonic fighters, gray-haired generals, and flags. The screen was the only thing that differentiated the chamber from a Kiwanis Club.

Nick said to Colonel Nickel, who was the USAF representative at the meet, “Colonel, wouldn’t you have some guys who can read these things at a high level? Any chance you’d loan us their eyes for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” said the colonel. “Always happy to pitch in.”

He disappeared quickly, leaving the hard core alone.

“If we can get NSA on them hard,” said Nick, “maybe we can pick up some commo linked to a foreign intelligence service. With that, we can go to FISA. If we get a FISA warrant, we can go prime time on their asses.”

“That works,” said Neill.

“It better, because that’s going to be your job. Bob, tell me what you’re seeing.”

“The post is at the end of a meadow that’s over a mile long. It’s situated east-west, to make the sun less a problem. The trees and gentle incline work as a natural wind barrier. There are car tire tracks all over it, signifying recent activity. Somewhere in the far trees, there’s got to be a shooting platform. That’s key, because if we can measure the range from platform to target and weigh that against the possibles, we can find a match and identify the target. But I’m sure it’s a mile-long shooting range with a post at one end to mount targets.”

“So if your read is verified, we might raid.”

“You’d need two elements, in coordination. A chopper insert of aggressors and a simultaneous penetration off the highway, with backup, communications, more ammo, medical, all the necessities. It’s straight SEAL work. Too bad we can’t get ’em.”

“Sounds like Mogadishu,” said Neill.

“I hope we do better than Mogadishu,” said Bob.

Nick was thinking out loud. “We’ll start with Counterterrorism’s teams and fill in with SWAT people from a lot of field offices. Once we get FISAed up, we’ll get an okay to drop the airborne raid out of Salt Lake City, where we have the assets. I’ll get Ward Taylor involved, and, with Counterterrorism behind it, it’ll get moving. But it can’t happen tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or even—”

Staff Sergeant Abrahams arrived, in tow behind Colonel Nickel. Briefed, he laid his extremely gifted eyeballs on the two-dimensional imagery stolen from up above. He looked hard at the first image, then directed Neill to take him through the sequence so he could see it in the context of the larger plat of land upon which it was situated.

“Abrahams is the Da Vinci of photo interp,” said the colonel as Neill zoomed in on the image and then out. “He can tell you if the rubles in the bad guys’ pockets are heads or tails.”

“Sir,” said Abrahams, a rather dapper black NCO who looked like the leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance, “not knowing what you’re looking for—”

“By design,” said Neill.

“I get that. Okay, I’d call that identified structure a post of some sort, apparently of wood — wood has a unique reflect pattern, which I see here. Relating its shadow to the time of day, I’d make it about six feet tall. I can even make out what I’d call some kind of cement at the base. The tire tracks are SUV weight; I’ve seen that same tread all over the Mideast wherever service Humvees and Agency Explorers do their work. Too deep, too wide, for regular passenger vehicle.”

“Anything else?” said Swagger. “Assume we’re dopes and have missed everything.”

“Well, there is some reflect in the center of the meadow. Meaning wet. Meaning marsh. Meaning mud. Meaning moisture. Meaning humidity. If this is where they put it, they put it in such a position where access to it — visual, ballistic, laser, infrared, radar, whatever — dealt with differing air densities, the humid air over the marsh being heavier than the dry air over the prairie. I don’t know if that was something intended or just happenstance, but my guess is, given the amount of drier land available and the many other possible access angles on the target, that it was on purpose. For whatever reason, they wanted to track the effect of the heavier air on their effort.”

He’s shooting over water, Bob thought.

The Swamp

0430

It was a tangle of trees artfully positioned to give definition to an exquisitely landscaped garden that lay behind the main house, perpetually damp from water seepage, giving it the nickname The Swamp. Tactically, its great advantage was that it could be accessed on the crawl, unseen by any of the night sentries who roamed the property on predictable paths, which Juba had noted.

Thus, when he saw Alberto approaching, even on a night without a moon, he knew that the transaction went unobserved. And before the man reached the edge of the brambles, Juba attracted his attention with a small snort, diverting him yet again to the lee of a small tree.

“Nobody saw you?” he asked.

“No one. I don’t think there are security cameras in my wing of the house. His fear is, people coming in from the outside, not betrayal from the inside. But he is a very paranoid man.”

“Indeed,” said Juba.

“What is this about?”

“Your future.”

“Meaning?”

“That I suspect you want one. If that is so, you will have to perform certain tasks. Otherwise, you will be dead, cut to ribbons by the freak in the sock.”

“I have done nothing to—”

“It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you know. They will kill you within seconds after they kill me.”

The Syrian-Mexican could make no sense of this.

“What? Why would—”

“He cannot let me go on my mission. It’s too big a risk. Wichita changed everything. Suppose I am captured? Suppose the Americans offer me a deal to testify against him and identify him as the instigator of the Wichita thing? They offer me a new life, as opposed to sending me to some black site where Serbian mercenaries blowtorch my secrets out of me. That is now a more serious problem for him than any damage my people will do to him in suspicion of a betrayal. And, in any event, my murder will be disguised as some kind of mishap, a chance encounter with a policeman, an auto accident. He will pay an indemnity, but in that lies survival for him. He knows it. I know it. He just doesn’t know I know it.”

“I am only half Arab, so I lack your gift for cunning.”

“I need two things from you. First, I have to know when that screwball in the sock is out of the picture or indisposed in some way.”

“Easy. Two Mexican women come to him at six each evening. He must either have sex or kill somebody every single day or it is said he becomes irritable.”