He turned and raced through the wheat.
12
The black cube
A few days later
He thought the wheelchair a bit much. But the doctors insisted, and you do not argue with Israeli doctors in an Israeli military hospital. Nurse Susan rolled him out of the ambulance and through security, where, even still, he was scanned by electronic wand. These boys didn’t take chances.
He’d come to cleaned and bathed, but he was in pain. His burned arm felt like it was suspended in oil, which was simply antibiotic cream meant to lessen the chance of infection. The burns were second-degree and would heal, no skin grafts needed. He felt well enough on the second day to talk to his wife and assure her it was no worse than some kind of Fourth of July accident or maybe from staying too long at the beach—that sort of thing. Her unexpressive voice told him she didn’t buy it, but there was no way to fix that.
And now this. Dressed in surgical scrubs, shaved, smoothed, hair cut, he found himself being rolled into the same conference room as before, once again to a rabbinical audience of men who had done much and who spoke little. As before, it seemed Gershon Gold was in charge. The Director would sit, imperturbably unimpressed, in his central seat, and the comedy material would be supplied by the man called Cohen, who announced, “Freshly returned from his recon in Hell, the possibly insane Gunnery Sergeant Swagger, USMC. How did you find the weather down there, Sergeant Swagger?”
“It ain’t the humidity,” said Bob. “It’s the heat.”
“Excellent,” said Cohen. “If he can banter at a time like this, he’s ready for the rabbinate.”
“All right,” said Gold, “no need to go over tactical details, as Lieutenant Commander Motter and the others have been debriefed extensively, and all accounts are in accord. Time now to hear Sergeant Swagger’s read on the situation and his action recommendations. I suppose there’s really only one question, in the end. Our soldiers—I include you, sir—killed eleven men that night. We were able to get right thumbprints off of ten of them. No Juba. So, have you reason to believe he was the eleventh man—that is, the chap who melted himself before your eyes? He was obviously impossible to fingerprint.”
This hadn’t occurred to Swagger, and, in a second, he realized why.
“No possibility. Because whoever he was, he died the happiest man on earth. You could read it on his face. When the lighter flicked on, he knew he’d won. He’d done his job. I’d guess that job was destroying the evidence, and he knew also that Juba had not been taken. He was happy to face his god. You don’t see that much in the West. Then he was gone in flame. As to the implications, I don’t know. But I can read the signs for indicators, if you want.”
“That is exactly what we want, Sergeant Swagger.”
“Sure,” he said. “I didn’t get a clear look, and it was a little hot to be taking notes—the pen would have melted. Still, I think I got something. I was in a place I’d been before. I was in the shop of a dedicated shooter, and he was in the midst of, or possibly had finished, a serious project.”
“And that is?”
“He was trying to find a load.”
“The meaning evades us,” said Gold. “Can you be more specific? We are not NRA members.”
“Sure,” said Bob. “Most folks think shooting is divided into two components. You have a bullet, number one, which you put in a gun, number two. Pull the trigger, and a hole appears somewhere, wanted or not.”
“I take it there’s more.”
“A bit,” said Swagger.
“Is this going to be long and boring?” asked Cohen.
“I’ll certainly try to make it so, sir,” said Bob. “Turns out each gun—not each type of gun, but each individual gun off the assembly line—has peculiarities of construction: screw torque, variation in machine tool setting, metallic composition of barrel, precision of fit of moving parts, and on and on. This is where it can get really long and boring, Mr. Cohen, so I am cutting you some slack here.”
“You are a humanitarian,” said Cohen.
“All these little things affect accuracy. In most applications, it don’t matter. In most applications, you’re just trying to hit the target in the fat part—man, beast, or paper. In three applications, it does. Those would be hunting, benchrest shooting, and sniping. So people who do those things pay special attention to details.”
“Fascinating,” said Cohen, as his face said the opposite.
“What they have learned—and remember that the gun and its ballistics is one of the most studied, engineered areas in human behavior—is that these elements can make an immense difference in accuracy. In the rifle itself, it can be the barrel, the rifling in the barrel, the trigger pull, the fit of the stock to the action—all of these can make a difference in determining whether the rifle is just accurate enough, accurate, or superaccurate. Questions?”
The rabbis appeared to be paying attention but had no questions.
“But that’s even more true of the ammunition. Thus, what’s called reloading. It gives the shooter control over many more factors. He takes a spent shell, pops the spent primer, cleans the case. He reshapes it under pressure, primes it, puts a new and different kind and amount of powder into it, and loads a new and different type of bullet—same caliber, different shape, design, weight, material, whatever—and assembles it in a press. He documents all this carefully. It’s about recording each step in the process. Then he shoots it, usually in groups of five. He wants all five to go in one hole, or close enough to it. He very carefully documents the results of the shooting—that is, group size, response to wind, velocity, muzzle energy—and he compares it to factory ammo or, more likely, his other attempts. Maybe it’s better, maybe it’s not. The point of this trial-and-error process is that he is searching for a combination—it’s almost a musical thing, hunting for a chord—that gets the absolute most out of the rifle’s potential. Usually one load—a certain brand or make of shell, a certain ritual of preparation, a certain bullet weight, a certain bullet design, a certain powder, a certain amount of powder, a certain length of cartridge, a certain high degree of concentricity, and maybe half a dozen other empirical things—will produce the best load. That is the cartridge that meets its goal for accuracy, velocity, perhaps lack of muzzle flash, in combat considerations. Anyway, that would be his ideal, and it would be his round of choice. It would be significantly better than factory ammunition, across the board, for any usage.”
“And there is an industry that supports such behavior?” asked Gold.
“Yep. Chemical companies make dozens of different powders—different burning rates, different-shaped crystals, different fillers—while gun accessory companies make measuring devices, powder scales, reloading dies, primers, primer loaders, and bullet companies make different weights, shapes, interior structures, tips, composition materials. He’s just trying to find that right chord and build his harmony around it.”
“Superb,” said Cohen. “The Mozart of the sniper world. But do you also have a point?”
“Given that he had pounds and pounds of different kinds of smokeless powder, boxes and boxes of bullets, boxes signifying Wilson reloading dies, an arbor press for squishing all the stuff together, it seems to me he was doing a methodical search for a certain round for a certain task that would be far more efficient than anything he could obtain on the market.”
“He’s setting up for an extra-hard shot where maximum accuracy is mandatory?” said Gold.
“It gets worse,” said Swagger. “You haven’t asked about caliber. I am all but certain—remember, I was in Hell, and the Devil himself was trying to turn me into a marshmallow—that the bullets were of a diameter of three hundred and thirty-eight hundredths of an inch. This would mean the load in question was a caliber called the .338 Lapua Magnum. It’s currently the go-to sniper round in Afghanistan for long-distance situations—which are most sit
uations in Afghanistan. In 2009, a British sniper named Craig Harrison used the .338 Lapua to hit the longest documented shot in history. He popped a Taliban machine gunner at over twenty-three hundred yards. That’s a mile and a half. That’s the point of the .338 Lapua: it lets you strike from a different time zone. So I would conclude that Juba is putting together a .338 Lapua Magnum load to put someone down from a long, long way out. He’s methodical, skillful, dedicated. He’s going about it the right way. However jazzed up his jihadi half is, his shooter half is professional, cool, cunning, taking no chances, no shortcuts. They’ve spent a lot of money and a lot of effort getting him exactly what he wants. There don’t seem to be no limit on the purse strings. My guess is, he’s got either a stolen or a recovered Accuracy International Magnum—the best sniper rifle in the world—and all the gadgets to support it. All that stuff had to be somehow gotten and smuggled into Syria. So you’re looking at a major effort by someone’s intelligence agency. Only one conclusion: he’s going after a high-value target.”
“This news is extremely bad,” said Gold.
“One small advantage we may have: the distance of the range he was practicing on was only 1,023 yards, if I recall. There’s not really any advantage to the .338 Lapua over any one of a dozen other long-range cartridges at 1,023. The point of the Lapua is the long, long shot. No point in going to all the trouble they’ve gone to if it wasn’t a long one they were planning. So my thought is, he ain’t done. He’ll have to find somewhere to test his stuff out to Harrison’s range, another thousand yards or so. He’ll need to have made that shot a hundred times in practice before the real thing. So maybe that gives us a little time. He’s got to find someplace to shoot where the distance, the climate, the wind patterns, the weather all match up with his target zone. But it’s taken him a bit of time—we don’t know where in his program he is—to get to 1,023. If he’s planning to take someone further, he’s got to move on to that next stage and become friends with it. Seems like in Syria there wouldn’t be too much trouble finding fifteen hundred or two thousand yards to go shooting.”
“No, but it’s the climate,” said Gold. “Syria is desert, as is Israel. Much less humidity, much more wind, odd temperature patterns. Maybe shooting at that range elsewhere in Syria wouldn’t teach him what he needs to know because he’s not operating in Syria. He has to travel to wherever that is, or to its duplicate.”
“It’s a damned shame we don’t know where he’s gone,” said Swagger.
“But of course we know,” said Cohen. “We’re Mossad. That’s what we do.”
13
On the run
He would be all right. The preparations were in place, the contacts set, the logistics arranged, the codes known, the schedule activated. It would all happen as planned, nothing could stop it.
False leads, clues within clues, switchbacks, deviations, deceptions, booby traps, the full genius for Ottoman deception and betrayal woven into one grand plan certain to do horrendous damage. Cities would topple, fire would engulf infidels, the mighty would fall, death would be general. It couldn’t fail.
But it depended on a cold bore shot only one of the best in the world could make from a distance until a few years ago thought unreachable. Maybe Harrison of Afghanistan could make it, maybe not.
But even that was not enough, for Harrison was safely within his own lines and had no difficulty slithering through enemy territory. He could have had a nice cup of tea before he shot and then gone back to bed behind the barbed wire and sandbags. Juba, on the other hand, would be the most hunted man in the world afterward, and it was mandatory that he escape, leaving only hints that pointed to another man.
But . . . what did the Jews know?
How had they found him?
Had they intercepted a message?
Was there a leak?
Was he in jeopardy?
All of that was premised on the idea of Israeli intelligence having tentacles as yet unseen. It would represent a penetration so subtle and devious, it would be among the world’s best. Yet if that were the case, would they have hit him with three helicopters full of commandos, in and out in seven or so minutes? The best thing to do would have been an American smart munition takeout of the whole site. Even if subtlety was desired, a larger engagement force—at least a company of 13’s best, maybe more; a gunship recon by fire; boots on the ground in the dozens; night vision everywhere; drones scouring the area—a real show. But, no, this was limited, fast, lethal.
The other possibility: it was a raid motivated by simple vengeance. After the school bus, he was the first name on their kill list. Anywhere in the world they located him, they would strike quickly. It had nothing to do with intelligence; it was raw vengeance. And they would never stop hunting him, would never let him escape. At any moment, an Israeli commando could knock in the door and finish him.
He favored that second possibility. It was the simplest, as the operation itself was so secret, only a few in the world knew of its far-reaching possibilities, much less its target, much less its location.
That meant he had great advantages still. He could be headed anywhere. Without a destination, they were helpless. A worldwide alert for a shadowy figure called Juba the Sniper would do them no good at all and would be ignored in the West, where security services were too busy wiretapping mosques to find the odd angry imam trying to cajole losers into shooting up homosexual bars.
Meanwhile, having made his first contact, he had picked up a package of superb credentials and identification that would get him across any border in the world. He knew his cover story forwards and backwards. He would become three totally different people on his journey, each unconnected to the other two. The whole thing, with so much money behind it, was first-class.
He was in a cheap hotel in Istanbul, smoking cigarettes, awaiting a flight to his next destination. Tonight’s whore had been good, a lively Turkish girl with dark eyes and pretty hands who gave generously of her skills. Later, there would be no time, and security would be too intense, for such a risk. So for now, it was the flesh, the tobacco, the prayers, and the slow but steady passage to the destination.
He tried now to understand what the Israelis could have learned from the farmhouse. The blaze of light—searing and brilliant—told him that Adid had lit the powder and that everything in the shop was obliterated. But assume nothing. What if a Jew got in there and at least got a look?
So, did they see? And if they saw, did they understand? It might have meant nothing to a Zionist commando—the boxes of American bullets, the jars of powders, the reloading manuals, the targets. Still, assume nothing. He saw it. He reported it. The rabbis studied his reports and interpreted them correctly. But there was nothing in the house that carried an indicator of the mission. None of the guards knew the scope of the mission. They would know only that there was a mission. But, then, there was always a mission, so what did that tell them?
He had but one worry: had Adid destroyed the laptop along with himself? He remembered it was on the desk in his quarters. He had told Adid over and over of its importance. Certainly, even in the gravity of the situation, the arrival of raiders, Adid would have remembered the core of his mission and taken the laptop with him as he fell back into the shop and its powder cache. No piece of electronic equipment could stand up to that sort of conflagration. It would have been liquidized under the affront of the flames.
I am safe, he decided.
If they didn’t have the laptop, they knew nothing.
14
The black cube
What laptop?” said Swagger.
“He’s being coy,” said Cohen. “It’ll play so well when Spielberg films it.”
“What laptop?” said Swagger.
“Sergeant Swagger,” said the Director, speaking to him directly for the first time, “you graciously visited Hell on our behalf and did not come out empty-handed. If we
had the time, I’d give you a medal. But as you’re about to learn, we don’t have the time.”
The Director lifted his briefcase from the floor, opened it, and took out a plastic bag holding a curled and blackened laptop computer. Someone had put a burst through its screen, turning it into a spiral nebulae of fractures surrounding large holes that showed clean through. The keyboard had modulated into a wave, and most of its keys were shapeless nubs.
“Do you remember?” asked Cohen. “Gas and flame, your arm on fire, your Uzi too hot to hold. Somehow you reached out and snagged it, and, in another second, another jug of powder went, and then all of them. Somehow—God favors the insane perhaps?—you grabbed ahold, staggered out, and collapsed.”
“Wish I’d done that,” said Bob. “It seems pretty cool. Also, by the way, I tripped over a gun case with the initials A.W. on it, the third letter gone to fire.”
“It’s all coming back?”
“The only thing that comes back is that fire is hot, and you don’t want to die that way.”
“An excellent lesson,” said Cohen.
“Cohen might know a bit about this one subject,” said Gold. “He was shot down four times.”
Cohen held up his left hand. It was plastic.
“Okay,” said Bob. “I’m impressed.”
“He shot down fifteen of theirs. Net gain for our side: eleven aircraft.”
“Triple ace,” said Swagger. “Again, I’m impressed.”
“Odd that he turned out so annoying,” said Gold.
Bob nodded. “Anyway, that thing looks pretty well shot to hell to me.”
“Forensic computer science is quite advanced,” said Gold, “and we have people who are practiced at it.”
“You got something?”
“There was an undamaged sector header on the otherwise quite useless hard drive. The process is called file carving. Our people were able to extract bits of information from the header, including IP addresses recorded on the data sector. The data sector was gone, the data, therefore, was gone, but not the Internet Protocol addresses. They came from a server in Manila, in the Philippines. We’ve just penetrated it remotely, located the origin of the IPs, and learned that many were created in Dearborn, Michigan.”
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