by David Poyer
The woman puts her hands on her. Her voice grows soft. Is this the voice of a witch? Is this the voice of a mother? She struggles, begging the driver to help her. He turns away, his profile hawklike. She shudders, the world spins, the mountain’s about to fall on her.
WHEN she comes to again she’s curled in the basket. When she peers up, loose strips of blue cloth interlace above her. A rope curves upward until it vanishes. The basket revolves, creaking and swaying in a way that grips her heart.
She knows where she is now: in the bowl with the birds and bunnies on it she used to eat from when she was small. There are the birds, down below her. They’re free, released from the hard forever of porcelain.
She stares at the cliff passing a few arm’s-lengths away. Strange plants with gray spines grow on it, clinging in the crevices, and around them bright butterflies weave like the colored yarn on a carpet loom.
Then the basket revolves, and she sees only bright blue of empty sky, and below it, so far away she can hardly imagine it, stretch so very many miles of foothill and desert over which they must have driven in the truck. She shivers in the witch’s basket gazing out at the whole world, so wide and small now she can’t see her village, can’t see the road, can’t see her old life, which, she finally understands, whatever happens now, is forever gone.
3
Eskan Village, Saudi Arabia
THE air force captain had stopped fighting the night before, after Teddy fucked her for a couple of hours. Zoned out, like they did when you got them quieted down. Turning over when he told her to, doing what she had to, but without a word. When the alarm sounded he lay with an arm over his eyes, listening to the unquiet peep. Then rolled over.
She shifted under his weight, half acquiescent, until she came awake. Then she fought again, trying to kick, scratch, but too late.
When he pulled out, feeling supernaturally alive, the world was still dark outside the curtains of the room in the gated village the Saudis kept the Americans confined to except when they were actually under orders. He shaved and brushed his teeth with quick strokes, then dropped to the slick tile and did one hundred slow push-ups and a hundred sit-ups.
When he went back in, sucking deep breaths, she was sitting up, holding the sheet to her chest and lighting a PX Salem with shaking fingers. Her dark hair was snarled, mascara streaked, face swollen. She was Air Force, some logistics type who got things in and out through Saudi customs. He’d gone down to the pool, swam a few laps, then got out and walked the perimeter, picking the best body out of the baking flesh on display. The Look, a caramel latte at the PX Starbucks, and back to his room.
“Don’t smoke here,” he told her.
“Fuck you.”
“Again?”
“That wasn’t fun, you asshole. People don’t do things like that to each other where I come from. And why do you keep it so hot in here?”
“Air-conditioning weakens you. And you’d be surprised what people do to each other.” He stepped into fresh skivvies, pulled a set of BDUs out of the closet, and laced his boots sitting beside her. She smoked angrily, scattering ash over the sheets. He stuffed the funky shorts and T-shirt from last night into his duffel. Then slid the nightstand drawer open, shoved the retention-clipped Beretta into his belt, and pulled his blouse over it. It was fairly safe here for Americans, but staying alive anywhere in the Mideast meant never going off Condition Yellow. He tried to remember her name, but not very hard. “Gotta go, babe.”
Her eyes were wide. The pistol, probably. “Wait a minute. What was your name again? You said you were a consultant. You’re enlisted?”
He kept his left side turned away so she couldn’t see his name tape, even though she’d picked up on his rating insignia. “Like I told you. Mickey Dooley.”
“You used another name last night. What the hell are you, anyway?”
He did a quick scan of the room—the rest of his team gear was still out at the op site, but it never hurt to check, make sure he left nothing with his name on it—and winked. “Know something? When you’re sore? Ice works.”
“You bastard.”
He made sure the lock clicked on his way out.
THEODORE Harlett Oberg was six foot even and not as heavily muscled as one might expect, but he could run twenty miles on any given day, swim five miles in the open ocean, bench his weight fifteen times, and do twenty-five pull-ups carrying a weapon and basic load. He wore his dirty blond hair in a ponytail but, unlike some of the guys on the team, shaved whenever the mission permitted. His eyes were light blue and never seemed to blink, but the first thing most people noticed about him were the scars radiating out from his nose. They’d said they could fix the scars, at least make them less noticeable, but he’d told them not to bother.
He was driving the white Caravan the platoon had rented on the OPTAR card in Kuwait, for when they wanted to go places without looking military. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the base was bustling. People got up early here and worked until the temperatures hit 110. The air was already blow dryer hot, and he was sweating. He stopped to pick up his guys, a big Hawaiian named Jeff Kaulukukui, and a shorter man, Mickey “Trunk Skunk” Dooley.
The Humvees were warming up when they arrived, desert-tan slant-backs with external water and fuel cans. The lead one was a gun truck with a .50 up for the roof gunner. An older man in three-color BDUs and a boonie hat tilted to shade his eyes was loading long gray equipment cases into the second vehicle. When Oberg came up he turned. Their hands locked and strained against each other.
“Obie, how you? Get to Perry this year?”
“Not this year. How you doing, Master Chief?”
Master Chief “Doctor Dick” Skilley had been Oberg’s senior instructor at the nine-week SEAL sniper school at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, two years before. Skilley had barely survived the train-wreck SEAL insertion in Grenada and done countersniper work in Desert Storm and Bosnia. He’d become a legend after taking out fifteen snipers in Mogadishu with the bolt-action M24. He ran an on-the-road countersniper postgraduate course these days, hopscotching around to do refreshers. So when the platoon had gotten assigned to Centcom, headquartered in Qatar but most of the time either on float in the Gulf or back in the desert taking their turn in the barrel, Teddy had put in for him to come out and do some on-the-spot training.
At the moment the Det was gearing up to relieve the Special Forces in Operation Maple Gold, a barrier operation to keep the unrest in southwestern Iraq from spilling over into Saudi Arabia. There was a listening post out there too no one talked about, but Teddy figured it had something to do with ballistic missile detection and reading Syrian radars.
All of which explained what SEALs were doing three hundred miles from the nearest salt water. He released Skilley’s arm and introduced Dooley and Kaulukukui. Skilley shook their hands too, but not as competitively.
“What’ve you been doing, Doc?”
“Pickup team to Afghanistan. Showing the spooks which end the bullet comes out of. You?”
“Got a new Samurai. Did some of that mud bogging, rock crawling, up in Silver Lake.”
Kaulukukui was hauling ammo boxes out of the van and handing them into the lead Humvee. “He’s got no idea what you’re talking about, dude.”
“Silver Lake, Utah. Four-wheel drive. Cross country, fun shit, you’d like it.”
A driver leaned out to shout over the diesel clatter. “Turn off your cell phones, beepers, any radios.” He sounded ticked off at having to truck Navy types around a desert the Army had already pissed on all four corners of. Teddy checked his cell.
The master chief said, “That’s right, you were a motorhead, not just a pussy hound. That all you do, chase poon and race them mud cars?”
“Me and Sumo here saw a little action. Chasing that rocket torpedo.”
“Catch any?”
“Tell you sometime, buy me enough beer.”
“How much is enough?”
“In Saudi? I’m a cheap fucking da
te, Mas’ Chief.”
Black smoke shot out the Humvees’ stacks. Oberg, Skilley, and Kaulukukui rolled into the lead vehicle and slammed the doors, which had been hastily armored with bolted-on quarter-inch steel. Dooley parked the van in the long-term area, locked it, and jogged toward the second vehicle. Seconds later, the vast rectangles of the base, the glitter of windshields in the rising sun, the flat wavering tarmac of the airstrip, were gone in a cloud of rolling dust.
ONCE they left the ring road behind, there was nothing but desert from road to horizon. Tan bedrock covered with sand fine as talcum, and here and there in pleats of the land visible only because the sun was still low, sparse huddles of shriveled brush. Oberg sat with boots on the dashboard, glove wrapped around a handgrip, watching morning wake northern Saudi. Over the curved horizon black smoke rose from Iraq. He liked the dry air, the brilliant sky that was almost blue today, for a change. He’d grown up in the desert, or next to it: in LA, running up in the canyons to get away from the assholes his mother was always bringing home.
The driver said grudgingly there was lemonade in the container in the back, and red licorice, Chex Mix, Slim Jims, and dry-roasted peanuts in the box on the floor. A handheld GPS was cooking on the dashboard but Obie didn’t say anything. It wasn’t his vehicle, and he had his own GPS.
“Gonna tell me about this torpedo?” Skilley asked. Obie nodded at the driver, and the chief squinted and changed the subject, to a new digital marksmanship training system they were installing at Atterbury.
“Digital? Meaning what? You shoot electrons?”
“Pretty much. Lie on this rubber mat that criticizes your hold. Shoot a toy gun at a screen. Cost five million bucks, I heard.”
“Buy a lot of live rounds for five million bucks.”
“Tell me about it. But they’re talking lead contamination, the air handlers got to be rebuilt on the indoor range, it’s gotta be filtered—it’s a fucking nightmare. Who let the EPA on base?”
TWO hours later the Humvees turned off the highway and began climbing into the hills. Not mountains, but steep enough to make the automatic transmissions take a strain. Goatherds in black cloaks faced away as they passed. The Saudis didn’t like Americans in what they called Holy Country. The only locals Teddy had seen since he got here were their Saudi Guard liaison officer for Maple Gold and these distant, aloof goatherds, glimpsed as he sped along the long, line-straight, empty roads.
By ten o’clock it was 115 degrees and heat shimmered up off the baking rocks and ledges. The drivers stayed with the Humvees, the music from their CD players following the SEALs as they climbed. Oberg, Kaulukukui, and Dooley carried Camelback water bladders and sidearms. Skilley carried a black rifle from one of his cases.
Oberg considered it as they climbed, since he was directly behind the master chief. The heavy barrel was longer than the standard twenty inches and ended in the black tube of a sound suppressor. The skeleton stock was covered with foam plastic. The top of the receiver was flat with a backup rear sight that folded down and a scope that wasn’t any night vision sight he was familiar with. From time to time Skilley would bend and squint through it up toward the hilltop. A spray can hissed as he colored a six-inch spot of fluorescent orange onto a large rock.
At last, at the top of a rise, Skilley stopped and looked back down the valley. He unslung the rifle and took a knee. He was panting, flushed, and Teddy held out the tube to his water. The older man sucked at it, nodded, and handed it back.
“We use snipers to destroy enemy morale. Nothing saps your motivation faster than seeing your lieutenant’s head blow apart, then your sergeant’s. We deployed them in two-man teams, shooter and observer, back when we were shooting bolt-action thirties and then when we went to the M14. Problem with the M24 and M14?”
“Range,” Kaulukukui said, hunkered on his heels in a way Oberg couldn’t believe was as comfortable as the big Hawaiian made it look.
“Well, half right. Problem’s really not range, it’s dispersion. That 173-grain boattail will only reach out six, maybe eight hundred yards till the cone of fire widens so much you can’t count on connecting with a trunk shot. Just not good enough these days, when you’re working from a hide in the open, or trying to overwatch an urban area ten blocks in every direction. And more of your high-value targets are wearing some kind of personal armor.” Skilley dusted his hands and adjusted the weapon on his lap. “Obie, remember what we did to fix that?”
“Went to the fifty cal.”
“That pushed us out to a thousand meters or better. But then we had to go to three-man teams, to carry that son of a bitching rifle and all the fucking gear. And forget trying to conceal it in a hide site.”
“So what’s this?” Teddy pointed to the black weapon. “A sixteen with some kind of superheavy barrel? What makes this so shit hot, Dick?”
Skilley explained that indeed it looked like an M16. The SR-25 was its big brother. The barrel was a twenty-four-inch stainless steel Obermeyer, cut-rifled and floated to isolate it from sling tension. The trigger was a Geissele match model, and the scope had been improved with larger objectives, higher magnification, and a new stabilization system that reduced tremor and heartbeat. It also had a laser rangefinder built in.
“Caliber?” Dooley asked.
“Still seven-six-two. Standard thirty caliber.”
“That the wind pushes around like a piece of dandelion fluff.”
“That’s been the problem,” Skilley agreed. “Plus, velocity dropped so much at long ranges you had to place the shot in the head, the heart, or the spinal column to turn the lights out. So we had to get in to seven, eight hundred meters.”
“But this is still a thutty-cal.”
“Oh, only technically.” Skilley shifted on the rock and pulled a blue plastic box from his trousers. Opened, it showed the tips of twenty cartridges, like filed, blackened teeth. He slapped one into Oberg’s glove. “Over three thousand feet per second. Don’t try these in your regular chambers. You’ll blow pieces of your face all over the landscape.”
It was much heavier than even the long-range sniper rounds Teddy was used to. A shiny black, queerly elongated bullet with a dull green plastic tip. He turned it over and inspected the base. “Why’s it so heavy?”
“Depleted uranium, with a tungsten core for penetration. Both heavier than lead. So we get a three-hundred-grain bullet, and a ballistic coefficient off the charts.”
Kaulukukui whistled. “Who thought of this?”
“Like a lot of the new stuff, it came out of long-range competition. The Army Marksmanship Unit was up against the stops with the Sierras they were shooting. Somebody says, why not go to a denser metal, see what happens. Course, they can’t shoot these at Perry. Be over a hundred dollars a round. Plus, anything with the word ‘uranium’ in it sets the nut fringe off. Next thing, they’d be calling them atomic bullets and yammering to ban ’em.” Skilley turned one of the cartridges before his eyes as if admiring some rare ruby.
Teddy looked at Kaulukukui. “So this gives you less wind drift.”
“Less drift, a spin of one in five, and image stabilization on the scope. Bottom line: a quarter MOA. A steady hand, you can hold a head shot at a thousand meters.”
The Hawaiian whistled again. Skilley stood. He handed the rifle to Oberg. “I run my mouth enough. It takes forty-two muscles to frown, seventeen to smile—”
“But only three for proper trigger control,” Teddy finished.
“Hooyah. Shoot the fucker.”
He accepted it gingerly. With the long, thick barrel, the suppressor, and the heavy sight, it had to weigh at least twenty pounds. He twisted the sling outward and got his left arm through it and snugged tight under the handguard. He stretched out on the ground and hitched a leg up. As he set the buttstock into his shoulder Skilley reached in to turn a dial on the scope. “Got to load one round at a time. That cartridge won’t fit in the magazine. But you can carry another mag full of regular rounds, to slap in if the
y rush you.”
The bolt snapped closed, and his thumb rotated the safety to FIRE.
When he put the scope to his eye the sight picture was the standard reticle. A grid at the top, so you could estimate range by the arc an erect male figure subtended. Below that were aiming dots for various distances. On the right was something new: the laser range finder. He moved back for eye relief, and steadied the sight on the distant orange fleck Skilley had painted. The spot quivered with the involuntary tremor of his muscles, and of the heat waves cooking off the desert floor.
That was the mirage. A subtle shimmer that took training for the eye to read. He focused back and forth, reading that trembling of the atmosphere halfway between him and the target, then a quarter, then three-quarters. Each time he focused, the mirage rolled like surf in a different direction at a different rate, or simply boiled in place, a milling scramble of heated gas.
No bullet ever went where you pointed it. Gravity, spin, the wind, the very rotation of the earth pulled it off track. Some of those you could allow for. Some you could guesstimate, if you fired enough thousands of rounds. But in that boil of the mirage, no one could be absolutely certain where a projectile would go.
“About a three-minute wind? Right to left?”
“Crank it on. Estimate your range,” Skilley breathed.
The range finder would be more exact, but Teddy didn’t like to put out a laser beam. Protective details were starting to carry laser detectors. He calibrated the top and bottom of the rock against the upper grid, then doubled it, since it wasn’t six feet high. The mirage hesitated, then began to roll left to right. Sweating, he adjusted his windage, hoping he wasn’t overcorrecting.
“Eight hundred fifty meters.”
“Check again. When you have time, use it.”
He breathed out, took his eye away, put it back to the eyepiece. “Eight fifty.”