Target America: A Sniper Elite Novel

by Scott McEwen

  “Hooyah,” said Gil. “Now let’s establish the pecking order. Anybody got a problem with having a green beanie as second in command?”

  Crosswhite cleared his throat. “Uh, Gil, I’d just as soon be a member of the rank and file on this one, if that’s—”

  “I didn’t put that question to you, Captain.”

  Crosswhite shut up, and Gil stood waiting to see whether any of his SEALs were set to complain. As expected, they were all fine with Crosswhite filling the role of second in command. They had all served under him during Operation Bank Heist, and he had fallen on his sword for them when the mission failed to liberate Warrant Officer Brux, taking the blame along with Master Chief Halligan Steelyard, who was killed weeks later during Brux’s eventual rescue.

  “Excellent.” Gil snatched a cigarette from Crosswhite as he was about to light it and stuck it between his own lips, bumming Crosswhite’s lighter at the same time. “Alpha, you’re the ranking petty officer after me, so you’ll play third fiddle.” He drew from the cigarette and exhaled through his nose. “I don’t anticipate a leprosy pandemic, so you should do just fine.”

  The room broke up with laughter, and Alpha lowered his head, his face flushing. The joke was left over from Operation Bank Heist, during which the team had encountered an old woman infected with leprosy. She had lost most of her fingers to the disease, and her eyes had turned completely white due to an untreated trachoma infection. Upon seeing her up close and realizing with horror that he was in the company of a leper, Alpha had wigged out completely, forcing Trigg, his best friend on the team, to subdue him with a rear naked choke.

  “Take heart, Alphabet,” Gil said with a smile. “We all have our weak spot—you just happen to be the only man among us to have found his.”

  There was more laughter, and Alpha shook his head, crossing his arms and looking off across the room to see a tall, white-haired man he had never seen before standing in the doorway dressed in civilian clothes. He pointed at the man. “Gil.”

  The laughter dropped off as Gil turned his head to see Bob Pope standing in the doorway with a red backpack over one shoulder.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting,” Pope said, pushing his glasses up onto his nose.

  “Not at all, Bob. This is your show. I’m just warming up the crowd.” Gil turned to the team. “Gentlemen, this is your boss, SAD director Robert Pope, whom you already know by reputation.”

  All the team members had worked under Pope throughout their time as SOG operators, but this was the first time any of them had seen him.

  “Hey, guys,” Pope said with a boyish smile, giving them a short wave. “How are you?”

  None of the SEALs knew quite what to think. The man they saw standing before them in baggy khakis and a flannel shirt did not at all resemble the mysterious CIA spook they had previously imagined.

  “Well, I suppose we’ll get to it,” he said, unzipping his pack and removing a stack of files, which he handed off to Gil. “If you’ll pass those around for me.”

  Gil gave the stack to Crosswhite, who took one and passed the rest on.

  “Okay,” Pope said, taking a seat on the edge of the table. “Open your files, and you will see a photo of a man named Muhammad Faisal. He’s the man you’re going to bring me. He is not only an American citizen but also a member of the House of Saud.” He went on to tell them the rest of what he knew about Faisal, ending with the disclosure of what little evidence there was linking him to the Chechen terrorist group RSMB.

  The briefing took less than three minutes, and as Pope stood up and zipped his backpack closed, the SEALs sat looking at one another in open disappointment, scarcely able to believe the president had moved heaven and earth to bring them all together on such a paltry amount of actionable intel.

  “Any questions?” Pope asked.

  Trigg put up his hand. “Sir, if we know where to find this guy, why doesn’t the FBI just bring him in?”

  “Because where’s the fun in that for us, Petty Officer Trigg?”

  Pope smiled. “Kidding aside, the FBI has a list of rules they have to follow, and we can’t afford the risk of Mr. Faisal refusing to cooperate. If he’s detained and demands a lawyer—which he would be stupid not to do—the FBI will have to comply, and the time lost could cost us everything. We’re looking for a live nuclear weapon; that means all rules go out the window.”

  Another SEAL named Speed, the team’s only black member, put up his hand. “What about NDAA?” This was the National Defense Authorization Act. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen anymore. Anybody suspected of terrorism can be held without due process, right?”

  Pope crossed his arms. “That’s a common argument these days, Petty Officer Hall, yes. One that many constitutional lawyers are still debating. But let us suppose for the sake of argument that it’s true; do you think the Saudi royal family would stand for us denying one of their own access to a family lawyer? And even if they did, suppose Faisal still chose not to talk. What then?”

  “So you all see the dilemma,” Gil said. “Faisal is the one and only lead we have on the nuke, and that means we can’t afford to take any chances. This guy has to be taken and interrogated—by whatever means necessary—and nobody can know the US government had anything to do with it. We are going to make him vanish into thin air.

  “And anyone who gets in our way is going wake up in the halls of Valhalla.”

  “What kind of time do we have?” Crosswhite asked. “Couldn’t this nuke go off any minute?”

  “It could,” Pope said. “However, September 11 is only two days away. I believe that’s our date. Now, flip to the last page.” He directed them to a photocopy of Iosif Hoxha’s cutaway sketch of the RA-115. “This is not an exact schematic, but it’s the closest approximation we have to a Soviet-made RA-115 two-kiloton suitcase nuke. As you can see, the weapon is of the gun-detonator design. Our most reliable intelligence indicates that it should weigh approximately one hundred pounds and fit snugly into a navy seabag.”

  “That’s pretty small,” Tuckerman said.

  “You begin to see what we’re up against,” Gil remarked.

  “And no leads at all as to where it is?” asked Crosswhite.

  “None,” Pope answered. “For all I know, it could be right here in this hangar—perhaps in one of your own seabags.”

  Everyone glanced around, collectively focusing on Tuckerman seated at the back. They all knew him as the shadiest character on the team, and he hadn’t been given the nickname Conman without good reason.

  “Don’t look at me,” he said with a smirk. “I don’t have the fuckin’ thing.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Ah, yes,” Pope said. “Mr. Tuckerman, petty officer first class. It’s curious your teammates would choose to single you out at this moment. How are your poker skills these days, Mr. Tuckerman?”

  Tuckerman sat up straight in the chair. “Just fine, sir. Why do you ask?”

  Pope smiled. “Because why else would I liberate a pair of vigilantes from the brig if not to utilize the exceptional skills of one or the other? The renegade Captain Crosswhite here is talented, but he’s not exactly indispensable with that arthritic hip of his.”

  Everyone faced the front again, looking wide eyed at Crosswhite; none of them knew anything about his and Tuckerman’s brief incarceration by the 82nd Airborne.

  Crosswhite shrank a bit in his chair.

  “Take good care of the company you keep, Captain.” Pope shouldered the pack to leave. “It seems to keep saving your life.”

  26

  LAS VEGAS

  Pope slipped into his hotel room to find Lijuan Chow asleep in bed. Her name meant “beautiful and graceful,” and she was definitely both, with a mind to match: a brilliant intelligence analyst and computer technician whom he’d recruited right out of MIT ten years earlier. She was thir
ty-four, exactly half his age, and over the past decade, he had come to love her with all of his soul, despite the folly of it. He stood watching her sleep—his peaceful Chinese princess—and was overcome by a profound sense of melancholia. Exactly when their relationship would come to an end, he did not know, but he knew that it must be soon.

  He opened his laptop and went online to check in with the system back in Langley, making sure that all of his surveillance programs were still running nominally. Some of the programs were of his own design, and the intelligence they gathered went into his own personal database: everything from satellite photos to banking transactions. He was a very, very curious man about a great many goings-on around the globe, and he wanted to learn as much about the world as possible before he was finally forced into retirement. Some of his most secret programs would, of course, remain accessible to him even after his retirement, but he would have to be careful to limit his time in the cloud, because technology was constantly evolving, and his personal programs—many of which ran parallel to the CIA programs and accessed all of the same intelligence—wouldn’t likely remain secret forever.

  Satisfied that all was as it should be, he turned off the computer and went to take a shower. When he came back from the bathroom, Lijuan was sitting propped in the pillows wearing a nightgown made of blue silk that extended to her knees.

  “How did it go?” she asked, her English as perfect as her body.

  “Good,” he said, shouldering into a hotel robe and pulling the towel from his waist. He sat down on the bed and gathered her into his arms. “They’re the best at what they do, so it should go well. My biggest concern is that Faisal won’t know enough to help us.”

  “And if he doesn’t want to talk?”

  “Oh, he’s going to talk. He won’t have any choice about that. The trouble will be in knowing when to quit extracting information. A man begins to make up lies once he runs out of truth.”

  “What sort of torture will they use?” she asked softly, slipping her hand inside his robe to touch his chest.

  “Whichever I tell them. They’re reliable men.”

  “They must be barbarians,” she said sadly. “To be able to cause such pain without remorse.”

  “Am I any less barbaric for giving the order?”

  She rested her head against his chest. “Can’t you just retire? Can’t we leave and go to Singapore like we’ve talked about?” She lifted her head to gaze soulfully into his eyes. “What does it matter what happens here now? This country doesn’t care about all that you’ve done for it; all that you’ve sacrificed. The president and his men will betray you in the end—you know they must. We have enough money, Robert. Let us go away . . . tonight. Right now.”

  He caressed her hair, wanting very much to go with her to Singapore, to live out the rest of his life and to die in her arms. Christ in heaven, what man wouldn’t? But Singapore was another world and beyond their destiny.

  “You won’t allow them to betray me,” he said with a smile. “You’re my protection against them.”

  She shook her head, a tear falling. “You put too much faith in me, Robert.”

  He petted her and kissed her hair. “Do you trust me?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “In that case, you should have nothing to worry you. I tell you that you are my talisman against them, and you can believe it.” He smiled and touched the tip of her nose with his finger. “Now, no more tears for me. I’m as safe in your arms as anywhere on earth.”

  She hugged him tight, allowing the cloth of his robe to soak up her tears. She was not afraid for herself, only for him, and she knew that they would crucify him after she fled.

  “When will they take Faisal?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow night. Once I leave here in the morning, you can take your time about getting back to Langley. Midori has everything under control there.”

  “Are you sure Langley is safe?”

  He opened her nightgown with a long index finger and smiled. “If we could be so lucky that they’d waste such a weapon on Langley, Virginia.”

  27

  MONTANA

  Since killing the trooper, Nikolai Kashkin had been camped in the foothills above Gil Shannon’s horse ranch, and so far he’d seen neither hide nor hair of the former Navy SEAL he had come to assassinate. Each morning, he awoke in the wee hours before sunrise, slowly emerging from his tent like a lazy bear coming out of hibernation. He would stretch and yawn and leisurely set about preparing his backpacker breakfast over an MSR pocket stove. Then, after breakfast, he would sit beneath the trees, listening to the birds while enjoying his morning coffee and watching the sunrise. It was a pleasant time for him, perhaps the most pleasant he had experienced since he was a boy.

  Upon finishing his coffee, Kashkin would say his morning prayers and then pick up the German Mauser Karabiner 98k rifle with Zeiss optics and make his way to the ridge overlooking the ranch, where he had carefully prepared himself a sniper’s nest among the rocks.

  Throughout his boyhood, he had enjoyed hunting with his father’s father in the great forests near his home. His grandfather had been a sniper in the Red Army during the Second World War, and he had taught Kashkin the art of shooting game at long distance with an old Soviet Mosin-Nagant, but Kashkin had long since grown attached to the German Mauser, which he considered a more elegant weapon. There were more modern sniper rifles on the market with higher calibers and greater ranges, but he had never desired to bother with them. Besides, he was too old to be learning new tricks at this stage of the game. With an effective range of a thousand meters, the Mauser was more than enough rifle for the job at hand, and its 7.92x57 mm round was more than enough bullet to put a man down and keep him down. His one-shot kill ratio during the First and Second Chechen Wars was evidence enough of that.

  Kashkin felt no personal rancor toward Shannon, though he was aware that the SEAL had executed a Muslim cleric with a garrote in Afghanistan. In Kashkin’s experience, most clerics were pushy, arrogant men seeking to burnish their egos while claiming to do the work of Allah. He understood that to assassinate one of them was a horrible insult against Islam, but he doubted very much whether the late Aasif Kohistani had been any different from the others he had known, so he doubted equally that there had been any great loss.

  Akram al-Rashid and his people in AQAP had held up their end of the bargain by helping to purchase the RA-115s, so Kashkin would hold up his end by shooting Navy SEAL Gil Shannon dead in his very own backyard. He supposed this would send a definite message to the American Special Forces community, particularly if it served as a prelude to a devastating nuclear strike, but to Kashkin, killing Shannon would be little more than a justifiable act of vengeance—“an equal wound for a wound,” as it said in the Koran.

  For the fourth morning in a row now, he lay prone in his hide eight hundred meters above the ranch, watching the woman with long, dark hair as she went about her morning routine of loosing the horses into the various paddocks outside the stable. He assumed she was Shannon’s wife, and he enjoyed watching her despite himself. He had never been one to covet another man’s woman, be he friend or foe, Muslim or not, but the woman was undeniably pretty, and her beauty, when combined with the heady experience of living so closely with nature, was enough to make him stir.

  Keeping her in the crosshairs throughout most of the morning, he wondered idly if blowing off one of her arms might draw Shannon out of the house. By this point in the stalk, however, he was growing confident that his prey was not bedding down in its usual lair. So he began to think in terms of going down to the ranch and putting a knife to the woman as a means of finding out where Shannon was and when he would return. She might even get him on the phone to expedite that return.

  • • •

  MARIE SHANNON HAD been married to a professional sniper for almost ten years, so when she saw the glint of Kashkin’s
scope high on the ridge, she knew that something was god-awful wrong because she’d seen a glint the morning before in precisely the same spot. She hadn’t thought much of it the day before, however; the Fergusons crossed the ridge from time to time between the ranches while hunting coyotes, and it was only human nature to scope things out from above.

  She continued currycombing Gil’s Appaloosa, Tico, maintaining an easy smile in case the shooter’s optics were strong enough to make out her facial features. A Chesapeake Bay retriever named Oso Cazador (Bear Hunter) came trotting across the yard and paused to take a leak on a post. He was a big dog, one hundred pounds, with a devilish canine smile and a reddish brown coat.

  “Oso,” she said, without looking at him. “Get inside, baby.”

  The dog looked at her, as if unsure if he’d heard her correctly.

  “Go check on Grandma!”

  The dog turned and ran back to the house, jumping onto the deck and ducking inside through the dog door.

  Marie guessed there was a price on Gil’s head and that the shooter wasn’t up there for her, but even knowing there was a rifle pointed in her general direction was more than enough to make her want to run for the house. She was just able to suck in her fear and finish combing the horse before finally dropping the comb into the green bucket at her feet and walking the short but hellish few feet into the stable.

  Once inside, she sat down on a bale of hay and at last allowed herself to tremble. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders, swearing quietly at her husband for bringing an assassin to their gate. Part of her knew she was nuts to believe there was a sniper in the foothills above the ranch, but another part of her realized that thousands of people the world over lived with snipers all around them all the time, never knowing when someone might be shot dead in front of them. Now that reality had come to Montana.

  She got up and walked to the far end of the stable, pausing at the door to draw a breath, and then set off casually across the yard toward the house—knowing she would be within the shooter’s line of sight for better than a hundred feet. It was the longest hundred feet of her life, but she made it to cover and hurried up onto the front porch, jerking open the screen door, and ducking inside.