“You can’t do this on a screen?” he asked. “And click on sections you want to look at closely? Like in the movies?”
“We haven’t caught up with the movies, that’s on next year’s budget. Then again, that has been the case with budgets for the last ten years. Always something happens.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try my best.”
At first, it was just patches of light and dark, slashed by white streaks, occasionally with some kind of nubbin on the streak. There were, as well, dark smears of some kind of textured fabric, and occasionally a cluster of squares, some larger than others. It was abstract. A compass embossed on each photo established true north, and a rubric underneath issued data on time, altitude, position by longitude and latitude, as well as other information he didn’t understand.
“The drones are quite helpful,” said Gold. “They fly too high to be visible with the naked eye—even Juba’s—but their camerawork is quite detailed. Time over target: six hours. Two drones on-site, ever since the TecSAR pictures looked interesting. This stuff is a few hours old. Perhaps our friend Sergeant Swagger might bring something to it our interpreters don’t understand.”
Bob went through the photos again, beginning to make sense of them. The streaks were road, the patches were field, the dark smears were hills covered by forest, the squares were farmhouses, the smaller squares compound outbuildings, the straight lines fences demarking patches of field. In time, he settled on two. He went over each carefully and finally discarded one of them.
“This one,” he said to the men at the table, indicating the remaining photograph.
Cohen looked at it. “A-4511, seven miles northeast of Iria, two miles off what passes as a main highway in southern Syria.”
“Why that, Sergeant Swagger?”
“I’m looking for shooting ranges. This guy has to shoot, a lot, each day. He’s very disciplined, very detail-driven. He has to have access to at least three hundred yards of open space, never less, maybe a lot more. The sun will be important too. He will, if possible, orient north-south or south-north. The other two wasted hours lost to the brightness of sunset and sunrise. And wind. It’s so helpful if there’s shelter. A stormy day, a windy ruckus—that can take a day from him, a day he can’t afford. I see all that here.”
“Please proceed.”
“Another thing. The standard equipment of a range. He’ll want a bench, or at least some kind of concrete pad, to go prone off the bipod. And at the far end, he’ll want a berm—a roll of land, maybe just bulldozed dirt—against which to place his target. He’ll want to see and analyze his misses, make adjustments. He has to see where the bullet hits relative to the target; that’s why the target has to be surrounded by stuff that’ll go puff. And then the target itself. I’m betting he’s shooting at steel, which goes clang on each hit. He doesn’t want to break concentration after a string and go to his spotting scope and track his hits with pad and pencil. Maybe they’d have a TV hookup or something computer-driven, but I’m guessing that’s unlikely way out here. So I’m thinking steel. Looking at the south border of this whatever-it-is, I see a structure. Can’t bring it up high enough for clear resolution, but it could be a jerry-built frame, exactly the sort you’d need to hang a chunk of steel plate . . . Can you get more resolution?”
“Perhaps later. Please proceed.”
“At the other end, it’s smooth, as if flattened out. Not paved, but someone had gone over it with a grader, scoured the grass away, rolled the dirt smooth. Just a little patch, but it orients nicely on the presumed target.”
“Not much space there,” said Gold.
“He doesn’t need much. We think of shooting ranges as broad plains, but that’s only for armies, cops, or hunters, for unit- or community-scale shooting exercises. This is one man. He needs a line, nothing on the lateral. So if you’re looking for a field, you’ll never find it. You have to look for a passageway or a lane. Because there are no regulations here, it will make no difference to him if he shoots over a road or even some houses. He’s too good to whack some wandering peasant wheat farmer. On the other hand, accidents do happen, but it’s not something he’s concerned about. Again, get me some more resolution and I’ll tell you if I see indentations from prone shooting or indications of a portable shooting bench being wheeled in. Can’t tell from this altitude. If you want to be certain, send the drones in lower or with bigger cameras.”
“Anything else? Temperature, humidity, rotation of earth, sunspots?”
“Not really. This ain’t benchrest, where you try for a group of five in the same hole. He’s shooting at men, has to hit them in the thoracic cavity, heart, lungs, spine, spleen, so his kill zone is about eighteen inches by eighteen. That’s all the combat accuracy he needs.”
“Night shooting? Will he use night vision?”
“Not at longer ranges. That stuff can clarify to maybe two hundred yards maximum. Fine for sniper work in a city, but not the kind of reach-out hit he wants for this. And that worries me. A lot.”
“Why is that?”
“He’s teaching himself to hit from way out. Beyond security service worry zones. Really, beyond infantry ranges. He’s not training for battle but for assassination. It seems in this last operation, the one in Dubai, that he was out farther than he’d ever been. He’s teaching himself how to hit the long ones off the cold barrel. I have to tell you, that’s way outstanding stuff. The long shots in Afghanistan came at the end of a sequence, where the shooter was either able to walk his rounds in unnoticed or had already zeroed in on that spot the day before. Juba can’t afford to walk rounds in against high-value targets; he’d give up his position and get return fire in a second. Choppers, SWAT, the whole security apparatus, silencer or no. So he’s got to train himself to the cold barrel. That’s another advantage of the dirt backdrop.”
The comment was met by the sound of men breathing.
Finally, Cohen: “Again, you go with this one? No second thoughts, no doubts, no little suspicions?”
Bob put his finger on A-4511.
“Here’s your huckleberry. It’s got all the necessary components I just described. As I said, you can see at the southern end where someone has chewed up a furrow with a backhoe or something to chart the bullet strikes against the raw dirt. Do you have distance? I’d guess close to a thousand yards.”
“About right,” said Cohen. “Ten twenty-seven, to be exact.”
“If you know so fast, that means you’ve had your photo hotshots on it, and this is the one they went for too. They’ve given you all the numbers.”
“Sergeant Swagger is no fool,” said Cohen. “He misses no nuance. Continue, then.”
“A thousand yards. Very long shot, by combat standards, but not so much anymore for sniping. The great shots in Afghanistan are much farther, well over a thousand, even over a mile. A couple of things to look for: if he’s teaching himself to go this far, he’ll need a better rifle. The ballistics on the Dragon 7.62 round drop way off, and, yep, you might get some hits from over a thousand, but you’ll get a lot more misses. He’s right at the distance limits on the Dragon. So he’ll upgrade the hardware.”
The somber old man whispered something to Cohen, who nodded, then turned to Swagger.
“Our Director is a man of few words,” he said, “and I am a man of many. So he turns to me to blabber for him. He said: ‘Add it up.’ What he means is, given all that you have learned from the photos, what is your read on the situation? Can you project a scenario in which all this information comes into play?”
“Sure. He’s a long way from being retired. If it were my call, I’d say he’s in this location with this setup for a specific purpose. He’s preparing for a job. It’s a big one too, because look at the assets they’ve invested in it. They scoured the country and found exactly the place where he’d be safe, they went to great trouble to keep it secret, and we tumbled
on it only because of Mrs. McDowell—”
“God bless Mrs. McDowell,” said Cohen.
“Look,” said Swagger, “maybe I’m out of place here, it’s your country, but what I’m getting seems sort of undeniable. He is getting ready for something. He’s either going operational or onto another step in his training before he goes operational. That means at any second he could disappear. It’s your business, not mine. But if I was you, I’d chopper in the tough boys and hit this motherfucker tomorrow. Payback for lots of bad shit, yes—but, more important, you make sure there’s no more bad shit down the road. I’d go tomorrow.”
“Why tomorrow, Sergeant Swagger?” said Cohen. Do you think us miracle workers? We couldn’t possibly hit him tomorrow.”
“So when can you go?” said Swagger.
The Director spoke for the first time.
“What about,” he said, “in two hours?”
9
Outside Iria, southern Syria
He hated his father. He hated his mother. He hated the madrassa. He hated the beatings, the punishment, the molestation, the degradation, the hopeless, endless despair of it. He hated everything he thought of as “before.” Except for the wheat.
He was in the wheat. He was of the wheat.
He had watched the sun go down over the western hills. He was a few hundred meters from the house. Prayers were over, the day’s efforts over, and now he sat among the stalks. The darkness was deep and lovely, a vault of towering stars and silence. A mild breeze rustled the wheat, and it whispered to him. He turned, grabbed a handful of stalks, and brought them close to his eyes.
He observed the genius of the heads, their complexity so staggering that only Allah could have designed them. Intricate, tiny structures, each identical to the other, arranged in rows, waiting to ripen into something life-sustaining. The wheat would become grain, the grain would become bread, the bread would feed the Moslem nation and make it strong.
The wheat had created him. It demanded that his back be strong for the bending, that his legs be limber for the weeding, that his arms and hands be remorseless for the cutting, that his coordination be superb for the flailing. Later, the huge machines reached the commune to take so much of the misery out of the stooped labor. But in his time, it was all muscle: the weeding, the cutting, the flailing. You found a rhythm; you guided the beating stick exactly. It was his gift, and he had it from the start. He flailed more wheat faster, more accurately, than anyone in the province. Afterward, to amuse his brothers and the villagers, he would do tricks, which also came naturally. Put three eggs on a table and, with three cracks of the flail, smash each one perfectly. Toss an egg into the air, toss a second, toss a third, and before any of them reached the ground, whizz the beating stick to intercept them, catching each egg in the center and turning it into a spray of yellow yolk, bringing cheers and laughter. He got so he could do it one-handed, left-handed, and behind his back. He had gifts. He remembered those harvest festivals with joy. He was probably happier then than at any time in his life.
But, of course, the dark times came. Which war was it? He couldn’t remember, there had been so many, and what did it matter? The fear of starvation everywhere, the sounds of hungry babies screaming as their mothers tried to calm them to sleep. Though the killing and dying was far off, the government took everything to support the soldiers, and the imams demanded obedience in their holy quest for survival, then hegemony. Easy to demand, hard to sustain.
To make things worse, a drought had scoured the earth, the clouds going heavy and dark but not bursting, the irrigation was primitive, there was only so much water, and what was left after conscription had to be rationed strictly. Many wondered how Allah could forsake His obedient children so fiercely—but the sniper did not. Instead, he nursed his misery, felt it harden into hatred, and found in it the determination to continue. I will survive, if Allah allows it. I will fight, if Allah permits it. I will die a martyr to Allah. But be pleased, Allah, do not consign me to the meaningless death of a starved peasant in a forgotten backwater of what was once a great empire. That would be waste, and what good—this was apostasy, he knew, but could not deny it—would my death do? Allah must have more in mind for me. He must enable me. Like the wheat, He must let me grow and ripen and do my part. If not, why did He give me the gift of the flail?
Now, so many years later, so many battles fought for Allah, he tried to forget, for memories of the past were of no use at all.
What mattered was tomorrow. The task. You survived the past, you fought as a soldier of Islam, and will do so yet again. You became what you became and were permitted to do your part.
Allahu Akbar, he thought. God is great.
Then he heard the helicopters.
10
The reasons to deny him were many and excellent. They were explained to him with great patience in the Land Rover as it sped through the Tel Aviv night to the air station.
“You’re too old. Your reflexes are too slow. Your vision is impaired. You have a steel hip that could pop or break at any moment. You could not pass the exacting physical demands of Unit 13. You do not speak or understand Hebrew, so you would not understand commands. Do you think, under the circumstances, we should provide you with a translator? Hardly possible, and even if it was, there is the issue of time. Then there are weapons. You are not up to speed on ours. To know how to operate them efficiently, you would have to be drilled with them thousands of times under intense pressure and by mandate of our doctrines. This our Unit 13 people have done, you have not. Also procedures. With raiding, all members of the team must know the target intimately, must be in agreement on tactics and intentions, and if they must improvise, they improvise from that plan, and as soon as possible return to it. You don’t know the plan. Then there are the men. All of them will worry about you, not about the mission. They will be agitated to have a stranger in their midst. It’s an unfair burden to place on them. And there are diplomatic concerns. You are an American citizen. You have no authorization from your government to participate in our combat operations. I don’t know the legal repercussions, but if an American dies on an Israeli combat mission, there could be harsh political consequences. There are many in America who despise Israel and would use the tragedy as leverage to pry us further apart. Conspiracy theories would spring up like germs. Occlusion would be general where clarity is demanded. And consider journalism. Your newspaper rats would probe your death, expose your past life and your secrets, bedevil your survivors, blow security on Unit 13, breach its security, shine a light on its missions when what is most needed is darkness. I cannot under any circumstance imagine this man”—Gold indicated the Director, sitting obdurately next to him, smoking a cigarette, barely listening—“would authorize such a thing.”
“Okay,” said Swagger. “Just hear me out. If it matters, my eyesight has degraded: from twenty/ten to twenty/twenty. I spend three hours a day on horseback. Ever see any fat cowboys? No, because the horse works your muscles like an exercise machine, keeps you limber and strong. As for the guns, that’s pretty much all I do. I can shoot with or against anyone in the world and either win or tie, and if I tie, I’m dead, but so is he. Raiding? I did an extended tour in Vietnam with CIA Studies and Observation Group—‘commandos’—and that’s all we did was plan raids, raid, look for new raids. I come from raiders. My father raided five Japanese islands. My grandfather raided the Huns for eighteen months in the first big war. Ask the Germans about him, they still remember. He also had a spell raiding motorized bank gangs for the FBI in the ’30s. Note the lack of a motorized bank gang problem now? Too bad you don’t have either of them, I agree, but you’re stuck with me. As for diplomacy—really, I’ve signed a contract, and to the world I’ll just be another hard-ass contractor trying to get his kicks. Happens every day all over the world.”
The Director looked at him impassively. Not a guy to go “Gee, wow!” easily.
“But all of that is irrelevant,” Swagger continued. “I can stay here with you Mossad rabbis under the presumption that everything is going to happen exactly as it’s planned. Has there ever been a mission like that? Even at Entebbe, the best special op in the history of the world, your commander got plugged. So if things go bad—say, there’s more resistance; say, militia units from nearby get on-site faster than we expect—you need someone to eyeball that place. Maybe you get Juba, maybe not. And if you don’t, you nevertheless have to learn what he’s planning. You need a sniper, a gun guy, to read Juba’s setup. If I see his equipment, his targets, his ammo, his scopes, I can do that, and we can draw conclusions. And from conclusions, we can move on to intercepts or preparations, whatever. And if we do that, we can save lives. So the priorities here have to be these: nail the big guy first, or, failing that, get hard intel on upcoming activity. Anything less than that is failure and not worth the effort. I’m not the afterthought; I’m the thought. I’m the whole goddamned dog and pony show. Do you understand?” he added for the Director.
“I suspect he does,” said Gershon. “He went to Harvard.”
The Director looked at Swagger.
Finally, he said, “It’s Lieutenant Commander Motter’s mission. We’ll let him make the call.”
“You’ll be fine,” said Cohen, smiling at Swagger. “Motter went to Harvard too.”
* * *
• • •
That this fellow Motter was a lieutenant commander, not a major, meant that Unit 13 was, like the SEALs, a navy thing. You couldn’t tell from the man himself, all geared up in mushroom-cap helmet, his Kevlar strapped with frags and flares and fighting knives and various kits and packs that might come in handy, a Glock Kydexed to his chest, his face smeared black to match the night. He looked like any special ops jock, from SEAL to Delta to Pointe du Hoc Ranger to Spartan at the Hot Gates—same war, different day—to the horse raiders under Sergeant Major Odysseus outside Troy that fateful evening. He smoked a cigarette, listened impassively, as the Director spoke to him. His eyes were dead, his emotional engagement somewhere between calm preparedness and existential meaninglessness.
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