“For God’s sake, what about me dignity, man?”
“Not my department. You get aboard an ATV, also stripped, except for that big bag of money, and you set out on the Water Hole Road, and you make tracks to the hole. At the hole, you take High Ridge Trace and you make tracks down it. I’m guessing you’ll hit Big Bend Creek at oh-six-thirty just as the light’s beginning to come across the valley. I’ll call you on this radio, this frequency, so you better have a headphone set. Then you can guess the drill. I’m going to give you GPS headings and bounce you up hills and down valleys and over streams. Sometimes I’ll be watching, sometimes I won’t, but you’ll never know. You move straight and fast to where I tell you. You’re alone, you’re unarmed, you’re naked. When I satisfy myself that your goddamn boys aren’t following you and that you aren’t in communication with them, I’ll take you to me, someplace wide open where nobody gets close. I take the dough. I give you the first half or so of the film. I leave you naked, I take your radio and your ATV and I’m gone. Again, when I’m satisfied I’m not being followed and your boys aren’t around, I’ll call them and give them the coordinates of your spot and they come get you. The first part of the deal is over.”
“You’re a bastard, Swagger. Do you know who you’re dealing with?”
“Yeah, a naked Irishman hoping a grizzly doesn’t decide he’s lunch. Sometime in the future, when I’m feeling secure and have thought out the angles, I’ll make contact again. This time there’ll be an exchange not of cash but of account numbers. When mine’s full up, I’ll turn over the last of the film to the naked Irishman. You’ll never see or hear of me again unless you come after me, and if you do, I go after the big guy, and since you know how good I am, you’ll sell him on the proposition that if he wants his legacy clear and to live out his years in peace, he stays the hell away from me. Have you got that?”
“I have.”
“And no one else goes out either. I’ll be watching the house tonight, and if I hear motors on those ATVs as you send the boys out, I’ll sneak down and cut your throat and head into town. They’ll have a long wait tomorrow, and when they get back, they can watch the FBI arrest the boss on the TV.”
“They’s not going nowhere. Where would they go?”
“Tomorrow, oh-five-hundred. Tonight you better hope I don’t have nightmares of you guys holding me down while the water crushed my lungs, because I might decide to take it personally and put a bullet in the potatohead.” He clicked off.
The call finished, Bob knew he had to check kit while it was still light. Though it was probably an unnecessary precaution, he didn’t want to be throwing flashlight beams into the darkness.
Weapons: He wore Denny Washington’s Sig 229 in a Mitch Rosen horizontal leather holster under his left shoulder. It was loaded with twelve .40 Corbon +P hollow points, and he had two more twelve-round mags hanging vertically under his right shoulder, to balance the weight of the automatic on the other side of the harness. That gave him thirty-six; if he needed more, he should have had an M4 along.
The rifle was a stainless steel Remington 700 Sendero with a gray-green camo McMillan stock, more hunting rig than dedicated sniper, but accurate as hell way out there with its 7mm Remington Ultra Magnum 150-grain cartridges loading Swift Scirocco polycarbonate-tipped bullets, of which he had four boxes of twenty. The only tactical flourish was the Leupold Mark IV 4–15X scope with the old mil-dot range-finding system built into its reticle, secured in heavy Badger Ordnance tactical rings and bases. The barrel, which he had taped black to mute the dull silver gleam, was fluted, which theoretically meant it cooled faster and empirically made it lighter, and it wore a Blackhawk black canvas cheek pad lashed to the stock to provide the higher stockweld necessary from the prone.
He had an SOG black steel Bowie with seven inches of razor-sharp death taped to the ankle of his right 5.11 assault boot. He had a Colt .380 Pocket Automatic 1908 in his right cargo pocket, with eight Corbon 95-grainers aboard.
Wish I had an M4. Wish I had that Swedish K. Wish I had the best weapon of all, which is two thousand marines.
Food and drink: He had a hydro-pack on his back, a water bladder slung flat against his spine and sustained by shoulder straps, with a tube that curled around his neck, so he could hydrate anytime he needed to without the excess motion of unlimbering, then unscrewing a canteen, then reversing the motion. He also had a Depends on, for obvious reasons. He had six energy bars. He had insect repellent, lip balm, alcohol swabs, and a trauma kit strapped to his lower left calf, with scissors, bandages, a couple of packs of clotting agents, disinfectant, and morphine Syrettes.
Communications: He had the radio unit from the ranch, freshly empowered with new batteries. He had his Nokia folder, freshly charged.
Camouflage: He had his best ghillie, a cumbersome exoskin made largely of heavy gauze secured to a one-piece reinforced tactical unit and woven cleverly with six-by-one-inch strips of cloth in the green-brown-gray dispersal pattern of the natural world in autumn, an abstraction so dazzlingly authentic that it all but disappeared when inserted into nature and further camouflaged by its wearer’s willingness to endure the ordeal of complete stillness. He had a boonie hat, soft and floppy-brimmed, itself multihued but more importantly also woven with tufts of the nature-toned material. He had three sticks of face paint—green, tan, brown—that would fold the whiteness of his face into the blur of natural color. The only odd color visible would be the lenses of his Maui Jim prescription shades, tear-shaped, brown, sprayed with lacquer to counteract their tendency to reflect the light. All in all, he looked like a bush.
He geared up. An observer, though of course there was none, might have thought of a samurai preparing for a duel at a temple against a hated enemy, or a knight strapping on the armor for a joust to the death with the forces of darkness. Swagger, no romantic, thought of none of this, only the careful placement of gear, the protection of the film reel inside a nesting of bubble wrap inside a thickness of duct tape, in his left cargo pocket, the buttons well closed and checked; he thought of the ordeal of the night and the different ordeal of the day. He put on his war face, smearing alternating abstractions of the green, tan, and brown face paint this way and that, until all his pink flesh was hidden and only the absolutism of war camouflage showed. He thought of the long shot, of the short, quick encounter, all of it shooting for blood. He thought of his plan and how many ways it could fall apart and leave him alone surrounded by enemies; he thought of his age, which was way beyond the limit for this kind of mission; he thought of the soreness in his joints, particularly in his right hip from both a bullet and a sword cut, and six or so operations; he thought of his wife and two daughters and how he missed them; and finally he thought of Carl Hitchcock, head shot open, his legacy tarnished into crazed marine sniper, and all other thoughts, memories, dreams, hopes, and fears disappeared. Now the advantage was his. No more recon, no more recovery, no more negotiation. It was straight killing time, at last.
It was time to hunt.
47
The boys, heavily geared up, left at 2100, when the last smear of sun disappeared. Theirs was a hard thing: they had to cover the miles on foot, hung with weapons, ammo, ghillies, knives, water, and protein bars; night-navigate off their GPSs, shortcutting over foothills and down draws to achieve crow-flight directness; arrive in the dark still, low crawl a thousand yards, dig in, camo up, and settle into perfect stillness for four or so hours of perfect snipercraft awaiting the shot. It was more ordeal than job, just barely doable by war athletes at the peak of operational perfection with two hours in the gym and a five-mile run per day behind them for years. But then, this is what you trained for.
Anto was left alone in the house. He didn’t fancy his own agonies: he’d be naked to the elements in harsh weather for a barely survivable length of time, and riding the goddamned ATV fast over rough territory, his bollocks bouncing and squishing, the brutal cold—in the thirties, sure—turning fingers blue and bum white, and when he got there, t
here being the goal at the end, then a new game started and he’d be thrown this way and that on the radio or the mobile, all of which was getting him into a delicate shooting situation where he’d be so close to the target, a hair’s width of mistake in hold or press would dress him in a 7.62 forever, which might only last the eight seconds it took to bleed him out.
He’d smear his flesh, particularly his feet and hands, with thick grease to fight the cold; he’d wear gloves and socks, surely the bastard wouldn’t complain about that; and he’d stoke on amphetamines, the soldier’s little chemical buddy, that would keep aggression, alertness, and quick thinking at the highest pitch until the natural juices of combat took over.
He tried to sleep but couldn’t; he jacked off to a dirty book, but that didn’t calm him; he didn’t want to mix booze with the recipe of pills he’d take on leaving, so he just tried to sit there, soothing himself with memories of kills.
The best: a squaddie of fellas setting up an ambush in deepest slum Basra, the hide given away by waterboarding that Iraqi lieutenant colonel. So he sets up to the east with Ginger spotting, and Raymond’s shooting from the west with Jimmy on the tube. It’s pure sniper pleasure. He got nineteen in about two minutes, firing, finding a new target, firing again, throwing the bolt in a blur, watching them boys pivot when hit, then go slack as death sent them to paradise, them falling with the thud of jointless collections of bones and meat. The bastards had no place to run that day, because that was their plan, to blow a Coalition Humvee at a place where all the exits was blocked, and shoot down the survivors. Ha! Hoisted on their own petards, was they.
Now that was a goddamn day a sniper lives for. He doubted even Swagger at his finest hit so many so fast. Maybe Swagger did more in a day, but ’twas over time and involved moving about, staying ahead of his hunters, a different game altogether. But he’d never had the intensity of taking that many that fast. A machine gunner might get it, but again, different: blurred, rushed, the working of the gun, the spray of empties flying, the muzzle blast and noise. His was pop, pop, pop, the suppressed AI taking them down, but each image against the reticle was memorable.
Was they all insurgents? He was shooting so fast and Ginger was changing magazines so fast, Anto couldn’t tell if indeed each had a giveaway AK on his back; did it matter? Not really, and what dif could it make if the Rockies howled “atrocity” or “massacre” or “murder” or whatever? The point was to give ’em a taste of obliteration in the boldest of ways, so it would haunt them, and maybe that was the beginning of the turnaround in Basra, even though his teams never got no credit, and soon enough the Clara Bartons had turned on them.
He glanced at his watch. He’d eaten enough time. It was 0430, time to grease up.
Nobody was blown, but Ginger, still fighting the concussion, wasn’t in the best of shape. He breathed raggedly, held his guts in, crouched low. A bit groggy, he swore he was fine, but Jimmy didn’t quite believe it. Eighteen miles is a long haul on the double time with all the stuff aboard, as well as the extra load of Anto’s rifle and pack with clothes, even though they were at acme shape. They’d made the crest, hidden Anto’s stuff where he’d designated, and now crouched just under the ridgeline, looking down on the broad, dark valley. Because he was cautious, Jimmy checked the GPS again and confirmed for himself that this was indeed the valley Anto had selected, the more southern of the two goggle lenses on the map.
Ginger gulped some water from the tube running out from his backpack.
“Easy, mate,” said Raymond. “You may be needing that around noon.”
“I’m fine,” said Ginger. “It’s me goddamned head, hurts so much. That fucker done a fine job on me.”
“He’s a grand one, he is,” said Raymond.
“We’ll see his corpse lying still in the grass tomorrow.”
“For sure we will.”
“Okay, lads, time for a last piss, then to camo up.”
They turned for modesty to hasten a last urination, pulled their own Depends adult diapers tight afterwards, and zipped and buckled up. Then came the squishing of the face paint, easy enough, for all had experience in this theatrical craft. Their features gone gray-green-brown, the next thing on the list was the wretched crawl-squirm-tug-wrestle into their ghillie suits and the button-up that followed as the heavy garment closed, heated, and tightened about them. This was followed by the labor of arising and pulling on packs and hats, and finally seizing rifles.
Each, of course, looked like an animated fluff of greenery, some cartoon-factory creation. It got worse when, three large beasts of war, caparisoned in the texture of the natural world itself, with packs of gear and mean implements of death strapped on, they began the long crawl down. At the halfway point they separated, partners Jimmy and Raymond heading for a shooting site and Ginger veering directly downward, to place himself and his M4 close to the creek and therefore, by design, close to the action.
A chill wind bit. He wore slippers at least to the bike. Above, moonglow but no moon lit a sector of sky, and in others the stars lay out in their millions. He could barely make out landforms, though some of the drugs he’d taken were said to enhance night vision. He felt revved, twitchy, intense. His ears were closed off by the headset leading to the radio, which was affixed to his one garment, a Wilderness belt about his gut.
“Potatohead?”
“Go ahead, bastard,” he said.
A scrambled crackle of mixed syllables responded.
“What?”
“I said, ta——socks off.”
“You bastard. Me feet’ll freeze.”
“An——gloves.”
“What again? I can hardly hear you, this radio transmission sucks. Can we switch to me mobile? It’ll be so much clearer and—”
“No. Gloves. Take off——loves.”
“Ach,” complained the Irishman, and complied. “See, nothing.”
“Ho——ight leg up.”
Anto did. “See, nothing.”
“Ok——going.”
The radio went dead.
“Bastard,” said Anto.
Anto threw his leg over the Honda Foreman, turned the key. At least he didn’t have to kick-start it, as in the old days. The little engine turned over, and with his bare right foot, he threw the gears, slipping once, tearing some skin, but he was so drugged up and so charged with uppers he barely felt it. He settled it, throttled up, and the four-wheeler’s tires, roughly nubbed for backcountry treks, bit into the earth and the thing lurched ahead.
It was easy going, though the wind bit at him, even through the drugged haze, and now and then a pebble or twig flew up and took off a chunk of skin. His bollocks were undisturbed as long as the road was more or less smooth, and in no time he’d gotten it up to forty, which was top speed on the Honda. He roared through the starglow, through the dark forms of mountains, following the directions he’d been given.
The water hole came up, and he circled it, looking for another track that was the High Ridge Trace, found it, and headed along. Here the going was rougher, as this wasn’t a road shared with pickups and Jeeps, but more of a bouncer, and it also took him so close to trees and brush that the limbs and leaves whipped him hard, sometimes very hard, as he rushed along. By now his hands were all but numb and controlling the brake and the throttle was getting harder. His feet, being close to the motor’s warmth, were surprisingly comfortable still and hadn’t begun to edge toward nothingness. He bent at another lash, saw some fine open road, ginned the throttle, and leapt ahead. As he flew, he checked his watch. It was only 0545 and he knew he’d make his destination in plenty of time.
Jimmy and Raymond, breathless and ragged and clotted with bits of grass, burrs, a slathering of dust stuck to sweat after the long crawl, set up about three hundred yards from the center of the valley flat, with a great overlook on the creek below, with no undulations or folds between them and the presumed target zone. It would be easy shooting, especially with the iSniper911 to solve the shot.
/> They got down in the prone, and rather than exactly digging in against the slight cant of the land, more or less insinuated their way into it, as if it were a crowd, not the planet Earth itself, squirming, adjusting, kicking now and then, trying to do all this without raising telltale signs like clots of thrown earth and dead weeds about themselves. Finally they had enough room to scootch down flat and not at the tilt, and Raymond took up the rifle, unfolded the bipod legs and had a time on the adjustments, getting the height just right, digging into the earth so that the legs of the support would be even, which would make the traverse easier, if indeed that’s what was called for. Meanwhile, Jimmy set up the spotter on its baby tripod, adjusting it for the same presumed target zone three hundred yards and fifteen degrees beneath horizontal out. It was still too dark for him to focus, though in fact a satiny glow had begun to light the eastern horizon across from them. After a bit of busyness, both were as set as they could get, and it was then that Jimmy unfurled a camo tarpaulin, a sheet of canvas threaded heavily with the strips of nature’s-coloring fabric as well as the odd twig or piece of thatch, so that it enveloped them, leaving only a peep slot at the farthest extreme, which left them barely enough room to observe and shoot. They settled in for the long, slow wait in abject stillness, a zen beyond death that was the sniper’s hardest discipline.
As Anto had predicted, it was much harder on Ginger. He was alone, and after breaking contact with his colleagues, he was really alone, seemingly on the face of the Earth. He continued his downward slither, swimming against the soil. It ate his energy and got him dirty, sweaty, and breathless in a hurry, exactly as he stayed throughout the downward progress. He persevered, reaching the valley floor, and before venturing out on the flat, tried to pick the best spot. Certainly dead center, right? But then his mind grew confused: he tried to imagine which way to orient himself; Anto hadn’t specified.
Did he want to be on his belly, looking forward to the action, able to haul himself up to his knees, throw the rifle to shoulder, and open up? Or was the best posture on his back, flat, his soles to the action, by which he could simply sit upright as he drew his legs in and fire from that situation? That would be faster by a second, involving less movement and adjustment on his part. On the other hand, he could only see straight up in that position, and he’d be bereft of visual keys. Suppose Raymond hit dirt, to clear the way for his fusillade, and he was just lying there watching the clouds roll by.