Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

Only the True Faith was real, and only it offered some kind of escape. He could lose himself in the mandates of the Qur’an and the idea that somehow this life had structure and definition. So the only place he felt human was in the madrassa, where he applied himself hard, hoping to earn Allah’s pleasure. It turned out he had a nimble mind, and at least one of the leaders said that among them all, he had the possibilities. He could escape from this world without tomorrows.

“You’re smart,” he was told. “There can be more for you. You can escape the great nothingness of your people.”

“If God wills it, it will happen,” he said, and believed.

One day after he turned eighteen, the letter arrived, informing him that he had been conscripted for two and a half years. He would be taken away and trained in some military skill. Maybe that would be his future, maybe it would open his eyes, maybe it will come between him and the life laid out for him, the life of labor and uselessness.

But the army was another delusion. A rural Arab conscript was the lowest form of military scum, and he was again laughed at and cursed and beaten and starved for his crudeness and ignorance. Sergeants mocked him, officers ignored him. He was invisible, his prayers without weight. God had forsaken him.

And then he discovered the rifle.

The black cube

He’s Syrian,” said Cohen. “A Sunni peasant named Alamir Alaqua, you can spell it any way you wish, with or without hyphens, it makes no difference to us. Born in 1970. Raised in the north, a hundred or so miles east of Aleppo, in Syria’s narrow rim of arable land. His family are wheat people. His first eighteen years are unnoticed, and he never refers to them, it is said. One can imagine: working the fields, at prayer five times a day, beaten often, perhaps molested occasionally, part of a large family of minor distinction in a village named Tar’qu. To his father, and the rest of the world, he was but another beast of burden. That is all.”

“If,” said Gold, “you have some idealized vision of the international assassin as a man of erudition, you will be disappointed. This chap is a cold brute, utterly committed and sublimely talented.”

Bob nodded. He’d seen enough bullshit about snipers on TV and in the movies to know that almost nobody ever truly got it: the closure of mind, the dedication to skill and art, the commitment to the faith. But Bob got it, and he would never take such a man lightly.

“It was in the army that he showed his extraordinary gift. He shot a sixty-year-old Persian Mauser so well that he was selected for sniper school. For the first time in his life, he felt special. He completed himself by putting the rifle in use to Allah’s purpose.

“At the sniper school, taught by Saudi mercenaries, who themselves had been trained by American Green Berets, he was again picked out, developed, quickly promoted. And, again for the first time in his life, he had food in his belly. And respect from his elders. For the first time, he was a man.

“We assume he drew first blood in 1990. His targets, however, were not infidels but coreligionists. Under the first Assad’s realpolitik, Syria had joined the coalition against the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. No records exist, no tales of a legendary sniper among the Syrian forces of that war. Yet knowing his ambitions, it seems logical that he would have tested himself. I’m sure there are Iraqi widows owing to his efforts, the irony being that he served first against the men that he would later serve so ably for.”

But his real experience, Cohen said, came as a specialist with the minister of defense’s campaign to exterminate opposition to Assad and the Ba’athists in the ’90s. That fellow, Mustafa Tlass, was a mediocre general, a mediocre politician, an excellent sycophant, and a first-rate secret policeman. He used snipers to isolate and eliminate non-Ba’athist pretenders to power to solidify Old Man Assad’s rule. It was so much easier than raiding, interrogating, imprisoning, executing. One application of Bulgarian heavy ball from four hundred meters out and the problem was solved forever.

“In 2000,” continued Cohen, “old Assad dies, to be succeeded by his surviving second son, the ophthalmologist without a chin or a scruple.”

“What happened to his first son?” asked Bob.

“Ask us no questions and we’ll tell you no lies,” said Gold.

“Well, that’s assuring,” said Bob.

“Assad Two’s first priority is to repair the enmity his father created by siding with the coalition and invading Kuwait in ’90. Thus, in 2003, after the destruction of the Iraqi army and the occupation of Iraq by the Americans, he authorizes sending military advisors to the insurrection. At that point, he has the largest, most well-trained and -equipped army in the Middle East. Among the technicians and tacticians he sends is our Grim Reaper, Sergeant Alaqua.

“There seems to have been no initial plan to turn him into a legend,” said Gold. “But he found the ruins of Baghdad an excellent place to practice his craft, he found these disgruntled ex-soldiers of the Iraqi Republican Guard highly motivated students. They were blooded, they were aggressive, they had no fear of death. They were the worst kind of patriots: they lived to kill or die, and it didn’t much matter to them which. We could cite numbers and show you the marine reports, if you wish—”

“I’ve picked up enough from the fellows I know,” Bob said.

He didn’t like to think of it. The kids were fine as infantrymen when they had lots of high explosives a radio signal away, the American way of war. But the shattered wilderness of a city, all confusion and confinement, where the bad guys knew the streets so much better, the kids — at least the first rotation of them — were just so many sitting ducks.

Bob thought sourly that Tom McDowell had been one of those ducks.

“Against the sacrifice of Iwo Jima, Baghdad is nothing,” said Gold. “But of course America — and the West and Israel — has lost the will to sustain casualties on a steady basis. When the numbers begin to rise, the parents begin to panic and the media begins to notice. It shows that the true realpolitik of the world is demographics.”

“But we did turn it around?”

“The marine counterintelligence people did a brilliant job of analysis and counterplanning, and, yes indeed, it pretty much destroyed Sergeant Alaqua’s sniper force in a single afternoon. He himself escaped death, barely, having killed much and learned much. But his name had been made in radical circles. He was eagerly recruited and offered not merely princely sums to keep himself available but, most of all, interesting targets. Upon returning home, he disengaged from the army and became radical Islam’s go-to guy. We have him in Afghanistan, Africa, India, even the Philippines. He seems to have gone to work mainly for Tehran. But he helped the home folks too. In 2005, the prime minister of Beirut — occupied at the time by Syria — had run afoul of young Assad and old Tlass. On February fourteenth of that year, he was blown up by car bomb in Beirut. The mystery was, how did the killers wire the bomb? The answer is, they didn’t. Too tricky to use radio detonation in a heavily urban area, flooded already with transmissions. Rather, they planted twenty kilos of Semtex under the street, leaving a lump of highly volatile contact compound visible, possibly chlorine azide or silver nitrate. Perhaps it was camouflaged as dog shit. As the car passed over the bomb, from three hundred yards out, Juba, as he was now called, hit the compound with Bulgarian heavy ball, and the whole thing detonated. A great shot, a huge blast. Twenty-two others perished.