by David Poyer
“There they are,” said the driver. Young, with stubbled skin the color of creamy coffee. His name tag read Spayer. “Hold on. Could get rough.”
It did. The Humvee jolted and banged over rocky outcrops. After a painful body slam off the door into one of the medical personnel—who carried something hard in his side pocket—she clung to him to avoid getting bruised like an eggplant in a grocery bag. Her own service sidearm was in her purse. Peyster had looked at her funny in the floodlights inside the embassy gate. “A purse? And you’re wearing—that? Into the desert?”
“They’re designed for the desert, Terry. Not coming?”
“Not me, this is your show. You look like . . . I don’t know.”
“How about this? Better?” She pulled the chador up over her face. Not really an abaya, a georgette caftan in teal her sister had gotten her at Barneys, but kind to someone who, to be blunt, was packing more weight than she liked. She wasn’t looking forward to the annual fitness test. “I can wear Level Three protection and nobody’ll suspect.”
“Right, but—”
“And the best thing is, there’s this cute little Arab with them. Believe me, he’ll come in his pants when he sees me. They know how to appreciate a good-looking woman.”
The marines snapped their shaven heads around. Peyster seemed lost for words. Finally he’d just waved. “Good luck, everybody. Bring ’em back alive.”
Once she wouldn’t have said such words. She thought about asking for forgiveness. But she didn’t.
Something was happening, all right. The longer she stayed in the Mideast, the less pious she felt.
Wasn’t that what her mother had been afraid would happen? When she’d told her she wanted to be a cop? “You’ll get hardened. Fall away from the faith.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t believe. But the more evil she saw done in God’s name, the more horrors justified with twisted religion, the less she felt like invoking Him herself.
Like the sticker she’d seen on a bumper: I love God. It’s His fans I can’t stand.
The Humvee lurched and tilted, climbing. Diesel noise filled the compartment, and of course there was no air-conditioning, unlike the embassy vans, or the massive SUVs the GrayWolf personnel drove. Jolene had asked if she wanted them along, and she’d put her foot down. She had more confidence in the marines. There were disturbing rumors out of the Washington office. A whistle-blower had implicated the security conglomerate in arms dealing and influence peddling. So far just rumor, but she felt more comfortable with real military protecting her.
She shifted, trying to get some air in under the protective vest. She was sweating like a pig. They had to keep the windows closed or dust infiltrated everything, so they were all cooking, sweat glazing their faces. The bad thing was Kevlar degraded to a lower level of protection when wet.
“There they are,” said Spayer. She peered through the dirty glass. Four vehicles, parked in a rough circle. Flags flying. Two larger trucks, a white pickup, a strange-looking contraption that might once have been a Land Rover. “Thought the deal was no weapons, Special Agent.”
She peered. Both pickup and Rover mounted machine guns. Beside her Erculiano was examining them through binoculars. “Abort?”
“No way. We’re committed. Which truck’s he in?”
“I’d guess the white one,” Spayer said. “He won’t be with the hostages, which is probably the one that looks like a stake truck.”
She wasn’t sure what a “steak truck” was but figured it was the one that looked as if it were built to haul livestock. “Stop a hundred yards out. I’ll walk the rest of the way. You’re coming with me? Spayer?”
“Absolutely, ma’am.”
“Special Agent.”
“Hooyah, Special Agent.”
The Humvee crested the rise and came out on a hilltop twice as large as a football field. It was littered with rocks and dwarf bushes that looked corkscrewed into the ground. As they approached, men in light-colored clothes dropped flat. Spayer muttered under his breath but kept rolling. “They aiming at us, Ready?”
“Looks like it, Team.”
“Fuck. Fuck.”
“Just keep driving,” Aisha told him, clutching her purse. They must know that if anything happened to them there’d be aircraft, helicopters on call. They’d be hunted down and exterminated.
But maybe fanatics, desperate for martyrdom, wouldn’t really care.
She put her hand in her purse, then took it out. The trucks loomed in the windows. The men stood as the Humvee braked. They weren’t armed. What she’d thought were rifles were sticks, like Ashaaran goatherds carried.
She got out, knees shaking, and tried to hold her skirts down as the wind whipped them. That would make a great impression, to Marilyn Monroe them. She hobbled toward the trucks, wishing she hadn’t told the marine to park so far away. The landscape shimmered, as if they were all submerged in some hot thin fluid heated by gas jets beneath their feet. Far above, specks soared between her and a swollen, white-hot sun that occupied half the sky. So bright and hot it seemed to spear down into her brain. Hawks, buzzards? She blinked up, but the birds kept the sun behind them, circling so slowly and so high they hardly seemed to move at all.
As she neared, a figure detached itself. Green-turbaned, and even thinner than she remembered.
When she saw his face she gasped.
His eye sockets were those of a skull. Most horrible, though, was the enormous swelling that disfigured his whole lower face. He was probing his mouth with two fingers as he came forward. He worried something out, examined it, then tossed it away.
Had that been a molar? Three lieutenants ambled forward with him. She knew them now by name. The tallest, the most dangerous, in her book: Juulheed. Hasheer, the Judas, in Western-style jeans and short-sleeved ocher-and-sunflower-striped polo shirt. The Arab, Yousef, fussy in spotless white turban, white robe, and thobe. The latter spread his arms as he approached, as if to embrace her, though of course he didn’t. She called greetings as they came within speaking distance, keeping her tone demure. She was acutely conscious of Erculiano behind to her left, the marine to her right. Another woman, black-burkaed head to toe, trailed the approaching party. She kept her gaze on the ground save for one glance up. When their eyes locked Aisha caught her breath at the hatred in them, a flaw at the heart of a black diamond.
Al-Maahdi swayed as he walked. They stopped a few feet apart on the hot ground, and she saw he was terribly ill. He trembled, leaning on one of the camel prods.
Then he spoke. She concentrated but couldn’t make out a word of the slurred mumble. He opened his hands and held them forward, as if thrusting something out. Then half turned, and waved behind him.
“The money,” she told Erculiano, without looking away from the insurgent chief. The plan was to get the hostages clear, then helicopter-land the anvil force behind the Waleeli and their retreat. She looked steadily into Hasheer’s eyes. He dropped his gaze.
Erculiano brought the suitcase up. He popped the latch and held it open like a counterfeit-Rolex vendor on Fifth Avenue. The men opposite stared in.
Their chief put his hands in front of him, palms down, fingers spread. He drew them apart, then twisted his open hand. She frowned. The twisting hand was a signal of refusal. He spoke again, but once more, she couldn’t make it out.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” she said in Arabic, more or less to Yousef, but the Arab wasn’t smiling anymore. He was frowning at Al-Maahdi.
The sick man took a stride forward, rocked on his heels, then steadied. He put his hand on the lid and closed the case. Made that rejecting motion again, and stepped back. When the Arab spoke he rounded on him, speaking angrily through clenched teeth. Bloody fluid trickled down his beard. He spoke on, to her now. She stood bemused, not understanding. Was he refusing payment? But wasn’t that what had drawn him out of his den in the first place?
She looked away, at the sweep of dead horizon all around. The purple loft
ings of the mountains, far to the west. The ruins the map had shown, below, to her left. Down there somewhere, the well they’d been supposed to meet at. She shaded her eyes and looked toward it. The men followed her gaze.
. . .
“GOT the TI.” Cooper, behind him on the scope.
“Wind?” Teddy grunted.
“Effective, ten to fifteen right to left.”
“Pass that up here.”
Very slowly, the spotting scope crept up. Making sure the black plastic grid and sunshield were in place, Teddy aimed it at the hilltop.
He studied the man leaning against the truck. Graving not so much his face—he wouldn’t be able to see features through the aperture sight—as his clothes, his height compared to those around him. The turban. The others’ were black, but his was green. Once Teddy knew him he defocused, pulling the plane of sharpness back three-quarters of the way to his eye, then halfway, then a quarter.
The mirage eddied and flowed, first this way, then that, a disquieting shimmer of heated atmosphere pushed by the breeze. At three hundred meters it simply seethed in place. But there wasn’t just one wind. It was different at a hundred yards than what it was at five or six or eight hundred. The farther the bullet got from the muzzle, the more velocity it shed, the more the wind at that point would affect it.
“I get about a mil and a half right.”
Teddy didn’t answer, still squinting into the eyepiece as his fingers rested on the focusing knob. The spotter made recommendations, but the shooter was in charge. The spotter kept a roving eye, in case a perimeter guard wandered up the slope, or a circling buzzard read two motionless forms wrong and landed for lunch. It had happened.
After a while the TI got in the truck again and sat back, one leg sticking out. Teddy put the front sight on him and practiced snapping in. He dryfired ten times, visualizing the way the sight looked when the snap came. Making sure he had the top plane of the front post perfectly centered in the peep. Every few seconds he put a click or two on the windage, this way or that. Picking up the rhythm as the flags straightened or drooped, angled this way or that.
Some time later, Cooper pointed at a dust cloud bleaching the sky. They watched as the vehicles diverted from their course for the well, turning for the trucks atop the hill, the flags flapping in the hot breeze. Saw bobbing heads, but nothing more, as the ransom party dismounted.
He waited, wishing fervently for a better angle. All he could see was the tops of heads, no, just distorted, shimmering blobs that now and then, in the moiling overheated atmosphere, detached from their bodies and floated upward, bobbling like helium balloons. If they stayed there, no way he could take a shot. He’d just draw doom down on them for nothing.
He had to act. SEALs didn’t wait around scratching their asses. They made things happen. He pulled his consciousness out of the sights and looked left and right. Cooper must have thought he was doubting his backup, because he muttered, “I got your six.”
“I know. But I can’t see. We gotta get closer.”
Cooper’s look said: You’re shitting me. Teddy wasn’t that sure himself, but he knew one thing: he didn’t have the shot. And that was what this whole fucking mission was all about.
Reslinging the rifle along his side, he started crawling. Out from behind the last bush, from behind his little concealing rampart.
Out onto open ground.
HASHEER seemed very excited. “He says he doesn’t want the money,” he said, in Arabic. But Aisha was watching the Saudi. This guy didn’t like what he was hearing. He kept trying in his polite way to butt in. But the leader raised a hand and he stopped. Al-Maahdi mumbled a few more words through his bleeding mouth.
“He wants a cease-fire.”
“Holy smoke,” muttered Erculiano.
Aisha caught her breath. The guy was linked to the Cosmopolite bombing. To the deaths of Buntine and the marines, the rocket attacks on the airfield. In one way or another, the man before her had caused the deaths of thousands, pitted himself against the United Nations and every concept of civilized behavior. He was beyond the pale.
And yet . . . his militias were still in the field. They still occupied great swaths of the hinterland. If he was willing to cooperate, allow the aid workers to go back, they could save many lives.
“Yeah, a cease-fire. Just what they’d want,” Spayer murmured.
“What do you mean, Sergeant?”
“So they can regroup. Recruit. Rearm. Come back and hit us again.” He glanced at the sun, then down at the valley. “We better get those hostages, ma’am.”
Which was absolutely correct. That was the number one priority. “We need the hostages in our custody before we discuss anything else,” she told Hasheer. “I have no power to negotiate a cease-fire. But I can relay the word to General Ahearn. If that’s what your leader wants. Let’s do that now, transfer the hostages, and we’ll leave the money issue on the table for a few minutes.”
Al-Maahdi waved to the Waleeli by the livestock truck. They began shouting, herding the gaggle of men and women forward with sticks. The hostages milled, then limped forward eagerly.
GRÁINNE heard a queer moan and was startled to realize it came from her own throat. “They want us over there,” the old man told her. His claw-like hand fixed in her shoulder as if a falcon perched there. The other hostages were chattering like an after-theater crowd, the same bright accents, the same sudden animation after a passive trance.
“I’ll steer you. Like walking a bicycle. Can you move a little faster?”
“I can’t.” Her thighs were weeping fluid. It was running down her legs. Like when she’d felt her period trickling down her leg in algebra class. Had to press her binder over her skirt. Thank God, the school uniform had been dark blue skirts and a white blouse.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be right here. Let them jog ahead if they like.”
Prying an eye apart with finger and thumb, she made out the drab angularity of military vehicles framed by a gauntlet of Waleeli in tattered jeans and looted camos and black headwraps. She nearly wept, then nearly laughed. She stumbled and the old man caught her. “Not far. Keep walking, old girl.”
For a moment she thought he was her father, there beside her, and murmured, “Okay, Da.” Then, “No, no, I was confused, I thought—”
“That’s all right, love. Call me whatever you like. Another hundred steps. The first people are already there. They’re giving them something to drink. One foot in front of the other.”
She felt sick to her stomach, faint. Maybe she wouldn’t make it. Then she thought, I must. Not for herself, but the secret she carried. It would transform the desert. Transform the lives of everyone in the country. Give them food, plenty, the certainty of a tomorrow instead of eternal famine and war.
For that, she could force bare bleeding feet across burning-hot sand. She heard murmuring ahead. It slowly drew closer. She was passing whoever was speaking. There were three voices. One was a woman’s. The sounds drew abreast of her, then fell behind. She heard motors idling.
“I see a camera,” the old man said. “Chin up, then, let’s look good.”
She took a deep breath. Lifted her head, and tried to paste on something like a smile.
“EIGHT hundred and twenty yards,” murmured Cooper, behind him. Teddy breathed in slowly, held it, forcing oxygen into his bloodstream. Then breathed out, letting the tension go. Sucked it in, let it go.
He made sure the safety was on. Then pulled the charging handle back and slipped the long slim cartridge, nose-heavy with its black moly-coated projectile, into the chamber.
Very quietly, he eased the bolt forward and heeled it closed.
He fitted his finger around the trigger. Sensing the wind, how it enveloped and embraced the land. It flickered the flags on the distant hilltop.
“Hold two and a half minutes right. Five clicks right, by the tables.”
They were lying full length with no cover, out in the open, trusting to their sand capes
and the camo paint to evade any searching eye. Even so he was at the far limit of his marksmanship, his weapon, and his ammunition. He hoped Skilley’s bullet would hold the half minute of angle the old sniper had promised. That it wouldn’t tumble, way out there, or let the wind seduce it off course. He’d get one chance. Then the shitstorm would descend.
“Got the TI?”
“Got him.” The green headwrap definitely helped.
Only seconds now. The hostages, a herd moving left to right, were almost at the Humvee with the red cross on the side. He’d built his position. His natural point of aim. The blackened post of the front sight rose and fell as he breathed to center precisely on the TI’s headwrap. Like a green bull’s-eye, but smaller than any he’d ever fired on at the SpecWar range at Dam Neck. A beautiful range, overlooking the ocean, the waving sea oats on the dunes giving you wind dope right on the target line. Like the black-and-green flags were now, rippling up there on the hilltop. He watched them. Hesitated. Then reached up and put one more click on the windage dial.
His spotter began the chant behind him, low and rhythmic. “Fire. Fire. Fire.”
Teddy breathed in again, very slowly, taking up the slack in the first stage of the trigger as he looked off to the right, at the pebbles and dirt, to relax his eye.
He looked back. The post came down as he exhaled. The TI shifted his feet, as if to turn and walk away.
The trigger broke. A surprise, just like it was supposed to be.
Bang.
As the sights came back down from the recoil, he saw the flags had foreshortened. He cursed, hurriedly shoving the second round into the chamber.
SPINNING at three thousand revolutions per second, the bullet leaves at over 3000 feet per second. At a hundred meters out its velocity is 2,800 feet per second; at three hundred, 2,500; at six hundred meters, a fraction under 2,000.