Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

Below Zarqawi, a long line of noncombatant Haditha men and their sons, even their youngest male children, singled out because of their community leadership and cooperation with the Americans and government, knelt on the bridge where the gathering crowd could see them. A hundred gun-wielding al-Qaeda jihadists were scattered around the throng, keeping the people standing in place, while other Zarqawi gunmen combed the surrounding blocks and marched more people to the riverbank-and-streets viewing area and forced them to watch.

Behind the kneeling men and boys, AQI insurgents dressed in executioner black, like Zarqawi, hoods and masks covering their heads and faces, exposing only their eyes, stood ready with long knives drawn.

Zarqawi gave his dark minions a nod, and they commenced sawing off the heads of the men and boys, and even the smallest children.

On a desert hilltop more than fifteen hundred meters away from his target, on the east side of the river, two hundred yards east of where it bends like an elbow toward the southwest, Gunnery Sergeant Jack Valentine blinked at what he saw in his twelve-by-fifty-millimeter Schmidt and Bender telescopic gunsight.

“You seeing this shit?” Sergeant William “Billy-C” Claybaugh fumed, watching through an experimental, twelve-to-forty-power refracting spotting scope. The optical system had a Leupold Mil-Dot reticle and range grids built in it for distance and moving-target speed calculations. Sitting on a squatty little tripod, the new scope, sent to them by brothers in the Marine Corps Scout-Sniper Association, in one of their black-plastic-footlocker “care packages,” had a Leupold sixty-millimeter-diameter, nonreflective, light-gathering objective lens with laser filter to guard against eye injury from amplified light on the battlefield. At the back end, the scope also accommodated an assortment of high-tech attachments, such as night vision and infrared. Still years away before anyone considered that this new system or anything like it had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting in the sniper-kit inventory, it was the envy of everyone using the old twenty-power M49 scope.

“I’m taking the shot. That’s gotta be Zarqawi!” Jack said, watching as heads and bodies fell off the bridge. Both Marines could hear the echoes of Zarqawi’s rants as the men and boys fought their best fights, hands tied behind their backs, dying horribly.

“Don’t do it,” Billy-C argued. “Listen, Hammer. We got no backup. Just that motorized dip-wad platoon out of Hit supposedly cleaning up some IED mess somewhere between Barwana and Haqlaniyah.”

“I’m taking the shot, Bubba,” Jack insisted. “I cannot abide watching murder. Not little babies. Give me the fucking range. Now!”

“Feet or meters?” the sergeant came back, looking in the lenses.

“Both,” Jack answered.

“I’m reading 5,143.21 feet,” Claybaugh called out. “That’s 1,524 meters, give or take a cunt hair.”

“Wind!” Gunny Valentine snapped. “Hurry, Bill, or we’ll lose him!”

Leaning on his side and holding his handheld Kestrel weather meter into the air, Billy-C called out, “Southeast to northwest, 12.6 miles per hour, right up your ass. At least we have that going for us, but then again, it has a little chop, dropping to eight, bouncing to twelve. Temperature, too fucking hot, ninety-one. Humidity, 8 percent. Barometer says 30.06. You might hold to favor a bit on the left side and up, given air density, the long distance, bullet drop, and clockwise spin.”

“You think too much, Billy,” Jack said as he fired his 7.62-by-51-millimeter NATO, Remington model-700, short-action, M40A3 sniper rifle.

Both Marines saw the bullet splash the roof of the taxi, striking between Zarqawi’s feet, blowing dirt out the car’s open side windows.

“Fuck!” Jack huffed, slammed the bolt, and tried a second shot, but the al-Qaeda leader had already taken cover, and it missed, too. Meanwhile, Zarqawi’s army opened fire, hosing the streets and sky in every direction as Haditha’s civilians ran for cover.

“Hey, Gunny! You gonna shoot or what?” a voice crackled on the small green two-way radio that lay next to Jack Valentine at the thousand-yard berm.

He jerked awake and yawned. The memory of the horror at the bridge already fading. Then he picked up the radio, and said, “Keep your panties on. When you hear that target go pop, you can pull it. Until then, don’t worry me. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” the voice crackled back.

Jack looked through his riflescope and mumbled under his breath, cross and groggy, “Fucking newbies.”

Then he settled into his work, focusing on the new rifle’s sight reticle, letting the black bull’s-eye on the target more than a half mile away get good and fuzzy in his crosshairs.

North Carolina early-morning dankness smothered the Carlos Hathcock thousand-yard high-power rifle range at Camp Lejeune, used by the Second Marine Division and Marine Special Operations Command Scout-Sniper School where Gunnery Sergeant Jack Valentine was senior sniper and chief instructor. Cool breezes coming off the nearby Atlantic sent swirls of thin fog across the long green to the targets.

Controlling his breathing, holding it as he relaxed and laid pressure on the trigger, Jack let go his shot.

Two seconds later, down the target went.

Jack picked up a black, government-issue pen, tried to plot his target call in his data book, and couldn’t get the ballpoint to write.

“Fucking crap!” he snapped, and threw the pen as hard as he could, still lying prone.

His target then rose in the air, with a large white spotter sitting in the center of the black.

“Here, try this one,” a voice behind Jack said.

The gunny looked over his shoulder, then up at a towering giant of a Marine holding out a clear-plastic Bic pen in his hand.

“You are one tall motherfucker, you know that?” Jack said, and took the pen and plotted his call but wrote nothing for the hit.

“So they tell me,” the tall Marine said.

“How long you been standing there?” Jack said, frowning at the man.

“Maybe twenty, maybe thirty minutes,” he said.

“Really? That long?” the gunny asked.

The tall Marine nodded. “I sat down awhile behind you, too. Then I got to my feet, to give you a nudge, when I heard you snoring.”

“Snoring?” Jack laughed. “Fuck me. I might have shot you, you know?”

“Roger that,” the Marine said. “Then the guy in the butts called on your radio, so I backed off.”

“Lucky you. I had a bad night,” Jack grumbled. “Getting ready to deploy a team to Iraq. Back to some of my old haunts, I’m guessing. Maybe up north of Ramadi, badlands out past Hit.”

“Yeah, I know the area,” the tall Marine said. “I worked on a sniper team out of Ramadi. Mostly hunted there and down to Fallujah. But we made a few runs up your way.”

“You ever make it up to Haditha?” Jack asked.

“Couple times,” the staff sergeant said. “Took Route 12 past Haditha once, on up to Al Qàim, on the Syrian border. Looking for Zarqawi and killing lots of Qaeda up and down the road. Left ’em scattered like dead jackrabbits.”

“That’s where they pour in the country,” Jack said, and let go a laugh. “Good old asshole Zarqawi. I was just reliving one of my recurring nightmares of him while I was snoring on my gun. I had a shot at him, you know. Too far off for that weak-ass .308. Put one between his toes.”

“I heard about it,” the Marine said. “I heard about you, too, Ghost of al-Anbar.”

Jack laughed. “Fucking ragheads. Ghost of al-Anbar my ass. What a joke. They’ve got a name for everybody nowadays.”

“Not me,” the Marine said.

“Lieutenant Colonel Elmore Snow running MARSOC, his dream finally come true, us fielding as his inaugural special operations team, those sand fleas will hang one on you, too,” Jack said. “By the way, we’re calling my platoon Ghosts of al-Anbar, using Ghost for our call sign. I am sick to shit of that cliché crap like Reaper.”