“Commendable bravery but, in the end, futile,” the educated insurgent from the village said. He placed his right hand over his heart. “Your Government has disowned you, you know. They are not even willing to negotiate your release. As such, you have no further value to us . . . so, now it’s your turn.”
He gestured that she stand. When she didn’t comply, another man raised his stick, but the leader intervened and yanked her to her feet. He pushed her outside where there was another man waiting. A heated discussion was held between the three men with much leering and gesticulating in her direction.
Oh no, not that. Please, not that. Her stomach churned at the thought of these men touching her.
The leader silenced the other two men with an abrupt wave of his hand. He pulled out a pistol and addressed Amanda. “Kneel.”
Amanda’s knees buckled. They aren’t going to rape me—just kill me. The cold muzzle of the gun brushed the base of her neck. She screwed her eyes shut, took a deep breath. Oh, Angel, I love you! A cough was followed by someone splitting open a watermelon. Amanda had just enough time to process the surreal thought that the men must have brought ringside snacks along to the show.
37
Mason surveyed the landscape below through his night vision goggles. The team had been inserted several kilometers away by Black Hawk helicopter, descending by fast-rope in the dark. He and Rivera had been in their current position for almost three hours, removing their flak vests for comfort and replacing their Kevlars with floppy-brimmed Boonie hats. Now they watched and waited for the rest of their element of the team to move into position. Two days previous, at a height almost invisible to the naked eye, an unmanned drone had overflown the area. It had taken a detailed photographic record of the terrain, so the team knew what they would be facing. This vantage point, amid rocks and bushes, commanded a wide field of view.
Using his spotter scope, Mason took a closer look at the area under surveillance. He checked his watch: 0508.
Over the year they’d been working together, he and Rivera established that they operated well on a cycle of thirty-five minutes on and off, where one would observe while the other rested, ate, or answered the call of nature—if either of the latter two options were even possible. Right now, he was maintaining overwatch while Rivera dozed.
He checked his watch again, then lightly tapped Rivera’s leg. Rivera’s eyelids sprang open and he silently asked if anything was amiss. Mason motioned with his hand that all was quiet and the two hostiles had not moved.
Rivera slept on his stomach, his left arm curled up over his head. If Mason tapped him with a prearranged signal, Rivera would be reattached to his rifle and ready to fire it where directed within five seconds. Rivera stretched his right leg by pointing his foot and circling his ankle.
Mason smiled to himself. He was observing through his scope and Rivera was staring down the barrel of his ‘40’—M40A5—rifle. Doing what they were both trained to do.
Wait.
Wait, as the spotter, to gauge the windage and elevation needed, and to relay the adjustments. Wait for the message that they were good to go. Wait to look through his spotter scope at the target and softly call the shot. Then, the waiting would be over and Rivera would unleash the 7.62mm match grade bullet that would end a life.
Mason took another look through his scope. No change. Rivera motioned that Mason get his head down for a few, so he rolled over and looked up at the stars. He was too alert to sleep, but he let a recess of his mind wander to relieve some of the tension. He drifted back to the Scout Sniper School where he’d been sent after being accepted into Special Operations. On graduating the School, he learned he was to be spotter for a guy with more than eight years’ experience as a sniper. Rivera was known to be one of the toughest guys to partner with and Mason had harbored doubts he’d be up to Rivera’s exacting standards. In the beginning, Mason mistook Rivera’s reticence for dislike of, or worse distrust in, him. Angel reassured him it was just Rivera’s way, and that if he didn’t try to get Ding to talk—everyone tried to get him to talk—Mace would learn a lot from him. He would become more than just a mentor. And Rivera did talk. He never talked about himself, but he talked freely about other things. Mason also discovered, through being a victim of several of them himself, that Rivera had a good stock of pranks and a scathingly dry sense of humor. The pair soon settled into a comfortable partnership. He was no longer just an observer either. They shared sniper/spotter duty depending on the mission and/or objective.
On this operation, Rivera was the designated marksman due to its sensitive nature, and his greater experience. However, Mason was a fully-fledged sniper too. He merited the Hog’s Tooth he wore, but he in no way considered himself Rivera’s equal. Every mission, every exercise, every shot fired, he learned something from this man.
The white line of true dawn crept onto the horizon. Rivera tapped Mason’s shoulder and pointed to the spotter scope. Mason nodded. Game on.
Several insurgents appeared for Fahj; morning prayer. They had from dawn breaking to sunrise, approximately ninety minutes, to make their morning devotions. It began with the ritual of Wudu, the washing of the exposed parts of the body.
In silence, Rivera stretched his limbs and snuggled into his shooting stance. He picked one of the men and he and Mason corroborated the range was 330 meters. He moved a dial on the rifle’s optic and trained the scope’s reticle on the group of four men praying. Mason calculated for the temperature and windage effects on ballistics and murmured an adjustment Rivera needed to make.
Rivera keyed the mic on his personal lightweight headset. “Raven Six, this is Raven One. We have eyes on. Over.”
“Raven One, this is Raven Six actual. Everyone reports in position. Nighthawk confirms Sitrep remains unchanged. You are cleared hot, Ding. Over.”
“Copy that. Out.”
Mason acknowledged he understood they were free to fire when ready. He pointed down into the village. The four men were finished with their prayers and another four were preparing to say theirs. When they were done, no one else appeared.
“Drone intel put the number of tangos present at twelve,” Mason said.
Rivera glanced at the inward facing watch dial on his right wrist. He wore it that way so it was easily visible, with very little arm movement, when he was in a sniping position. Sunrise was in less than ten minutes. He chambered a round. “Let’s find out.”
Rivera picked out one of the three men walking towards a mud-walled building and leveled his scope on him. Mason quickly worked out the distance, windage and temperature corrections. The man opened the door and went inside with another while the third waited outside. Rivera kept his aim trained on the open doorway. Someone emerged, but it was not the man who had gone in.
It was one of the goals of their raid: Amanda.
An animated conversation took place below them. The man who came out behind Amanda was clearly in charge of the situation. He pushed Amanda out into the square where he made her kneel.
Mason moved to a vantage point behind Rivera, effectively giving him the same line of sight down the barrel of Rivera’s rifle. He gave Rivera another alteration for the rising temperature which he dialed into his scope. As Amanda kneeled, he sighted on the head of the man behind her. He closed his eyes and took a breath and on the exhale let all the excess tension out of his body.
Rivera opened his eyes and made a minute adjustment to his aim. He shifted his arm to make sure the rifle was supported on bone, since supporting on muscle could lead to an involuntary tremble causing the rifle to move. He formed a tight stock weld with his chin and shoulder against the butt and stock of the rifle. A thin pad of chamois leather on the end of the stock absorbed any motion that might be caused by his pulse throbbing against the weapon. He inhaled.
With his right hand in a support position that would discourage him from influencing the shot, he secured his left forefinger on the trigger. At the end of his exhale the rifle reached its natural
point of aim. Rivera timed his shot with the man’s raising of the pistol to the back of Amanda’s neck. His finger closed on the trigger.
In an expressionless tone, Mason said, “Send it.”
The 7.62mm round left the end of Rivera’s rifle, accompanied by a ‘thwut’ sound as the suppressor on the end of the barrel captured the expanding gasses that cause the typical gunshot sound. Rivera followed through. In the blink of an eye, the weapon recoiled, but he kept a firm stock weld on the rifle. His left finger remained in the trigger guard but off the trigger. His muscles remained relaxed. Through the scope, he kept his eye on the man he had just fired upon.
To Mason, this moment always seemed to play out in slow-motion. Not this time. In one fluid movement, Rivera’s right hand pulled the bolt out of the battery, pulling it to the rear, then pushing the bolt back—and with it, another round—into the firing position. Simultaneously, he adjusted his position to bring the scope onto a second target. When shooting at multiple targets, shooting left-handed gave him a slight advantage over right-handers in that he could fire and reload faster.
Mason confirmed Rivera’s first shot. “Hit.”
Etiquette stated that Rivera wait for his observer to call the next shot for him, but there wasn’t time. He lined up the second target in his scope. On his next exhale, he paused—and fired.
“Hit.” Another clean head shot.
Amanda was still kneeling in the dirt. The third man looked to be opening his mouth to shout a warning to the other insurgents.
Rivera swung his sight onto the upper middle part of the man’s back and squeezed the trigger.
“Hit.” Mason verified the accuracy of his aim. He patted Rivera softly on his back.
Both men got to their knees and shrugged into their body armor. Rivera removed the suppressor and stowed the sniper rifle in a drag bag. He swung the 50-plus pound ruck onto his back. Mason pocketed the three spent shells and checked for any other signs of their presence. They made their way down into the village to join the rest of the team taking care of the remaining insurgents.
With the element of surprise in their favor, the Marines faced limited resistance. Kalinski and Lowell took out three insurgents, Rivera dealt with one on the outskirts of the village, and Venneford dispatched two others with a grenade fired through a window of the building in which they’d taken cover.
“Where’s Amanda?” yelled Venneford. “Where the fuck is she!”
38
Amanda expected her last breath to be exactly that. Now, she had to take another one. Fear overtook the numbness and she started to shake. The blood pounding in her head was deafening but she became aware the men were no longer chattering. She opened her eyes. The pistol lay next to her knee. Slowly, she twisted around from her waist—and gagged back the bile rising in her throat. The three captors lay in the dirt; two with most of their heads missing; the contents of the skull cavities seeping into the dirt. The third had a large exit wound in his chest where his heart should have been. She blinked rapidly, looking around the village. Where did the shots come from? Who fired them?
By the hut that been her cell for the past week or so, a movement caught her eye. The door stood ajar. The interpreter had shut it behind him when they took her outside. She picked up the pistol, got to her feet and sprinted to the building. Oblivious to the shouting and barrage of small arms fire going on all around, she kicked the door open, determined not to let one of Jarhead’s torturers commit some last heinous act of desecration to his lifeless body.
Inside the hut, a man stood behind Jarhead pointing a gun at the top of the Marine’s skull. He looked up when Amanda burst in, then smiled at her and lowered his gaze to adjust his aim. Amanda raised her own pistol. He lifted his head at the movement and his smile disappeared. She pulled the trigger. The gun bucked a little in her hand and the man rocked but didn’t fall. Amanda tightened her grip and fired again. This time, he stumbled backward, so she fired another round. He went down. Her vision blurred by tears, she took a step closer and kept pulling the trigger until the slide locked on the empty magazine. She stared at the dead insurgent lying crumpled against the wall.
A gloved hand reached around from behind and gently twisted the pistol from her grasp. “Now that’s what I call finishing a job off properly,” a muffled voice said.
Amanda came face-to-face with what, to her dazed mind, looked like creatures from another world. Their eyes were hidden behind dark wraparound, anti-flash, eye protection. Each man was wearing a shemagh around his neck, which covered his nose and mouth.
“Are you SAS?” she asked.
Without replying, one of the men pulled down the black and cream scarf and removed his lightweight helmet.
“Mace?”
He stuck out a hand to steady her. “Yeah, it’s me. I brought a coupla friends with me too.” He nodded to the man at his side who tugged at his green and black shemagh to reveal his lopsided grin.
Amanda gasped. “Is Angel here too?”
“He wanted to participate,” Rivera said, “but he was stood down for being too close to the objective.”
She attempted a smile but it crumbled and the tears fell.
Rivera held out an arm and Amanda hugged him. Or rather attempted to hug him. She got her arms part way around his body. A Marine in full battle rattle, with a rifle and loaded ruck on his back, holding a machine gun in his hands is by no means an easy thing to hug.
He untangled himself from Amanda’s grip.
Mason keyed his radio. “Corpsman up.” He removed the pistol from the hand of the dead insurgent, then tossed a sheepskin over the body to hide the fixed, staring eyes trained on Amanda.
Kalinski arrived and Mason pointed to Jarhead.
Amanda shuddered. “You’re too late. He’s dead.”
Rivera picked up the Astrakhan coat and placed it around Amanda’s shoulders. Kalinski dropped to one knee, calmly removed a glove and felt around Jarhead’s neck, then pulled away the thin blanket covering his broken body.
Mason cursed when he saw the state of it. Rivera’s nostrils flared, but he made no comment.
Kalinski put a stethoscope to Jarhead’s chest. “He’s still alive! Just.” In seconds, he got an IV started, then popped a painkiller lollipop in Jarhead’s mouth.
“Will he go to The Hacienda?” Amanda asked Rivera.
“I don’t know. He’ll get treated in country, then go on to Germany or the East Coast for his AAR,” he said. “His After Action Report . . . they’ll want to debrief him on what went down.”
“Can you talk to Commander Gant, see if he’ll take him? Please. You don’t understand what he did here. I owe him so much, Domingo. I owe him.”
Rivera looked from Amanda to Jarhead and mumbled, “I know what he did, chica. But you’ll see the commander before I do and you can ask him yourself.” He excused himself, saying he needed to go speak with Captain Venneford.
“Do you know his name?” Amanda asked Mason.
“Yeah. It’s Logan. Jared Logan.”
Amanda’s hands went to her mouth, stifling the seemingly inappropriate giggle. Jared. He had told her his name: it was Ja-red.
Kalinski called to her. “Amanda, he wants to talk to you.”
Going down on both knees, she stroked Logan’s cheek with the back of her hand. “Hello, Jared,” she whispered.
His eyes part-opened. “Like it . . . you call me Jarhead.” He managed a feeble smile, which caused his dried, already cracked lips to open and bleed.
“Sssh, don’t speak,” Amanda said, placing a finger over his lips. “You’re safe now. We’ll be out of here in no time.” She looked at Kalinski for confirmation.
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