As the car approached, the jet’s cabin door opened and a stairway unfolded.
Menendez spoke by phone to whoever his necessary assistants were, then put his arm on Juba’s shoulder and indicated the way toward the stairway. They walked to the plane, and, in seconds, both men were inside, in a plush tan-leather interior, attended by an unctuous steward, who offered alcoholic beverages—Menendez took a brown liquid over ice in a squat, wide glass; Juba refused politely, secretly annoyed that nobody realized the faith forbade liquor—and ushered them to seats.
They strapped in.
29
Cyber Division, Zombieland
As it turned out, spread over the three retail outlets—EuroOptic, Mile High Shooting Accessories, and Sinclair International—there had been nine transactions that dispatched product to an 871×× zip code. Of the nine, three had received two shipments, so it amounted to six different addresses spread over the four Albuquerque area codes, but to a single name.
“Sounds generic,” said Chandler. “Brian Waters. Mean anything?”
“Not sure,” said Bob. “Maybe a whisper of a buzz. Keep going.”
Taken together, the nine separate orders amounted pretty much to an advanced kit for the care and feeding of an Accuracy International .338 Lapua Magnum, but more or less camouflaged as a series of small orders of no significance.
“Here’s an interesting one,” Swagger said. “He orders the Wilson bullet seater and neck sizer in one package, but he orders the .367 neck-sizer bushing in another. Yet for the system to work, you need both, meaning he’s putting together the reloading kit but in increments that nobody would ever notice, save for Chandler’s 8-7-1 pickup.”
“So the implication is that ‘Brian Waters’ is putting together the reloading kit but wanted nobody to know it, particularly snoopers coming at it from cyberspace—namely, us.”
“Not only that but this 8-7-1 has ponied up for a ballistic engine, that is, a handheld computer prekeyed with possibilities and algorithms for figuring out corrections for wind and distance. You pop in .338 Lapua Mag, Sierra 250-grain HPBT MatchKing bullet, 89 grains of Hodgdon H1000 powder. Wind south-southwest at one-half value, barometric pressure at 30.12, humidity at fifty-four percent, range: 1,922 meters. Push a button, and it gives you a solution based on your zero, which you’ve preentered. It’ll say something like ‘windage left: 12.7 mil dots, elevation: 14.44 mil dots.’ You crank your knobs—elevation and windage—to that location and squeeze. Nineteen hundred and twenty-two meters away, something falls dead.”
“I think we’ve connected.”
“More here. To one address, a Whidden Bullet Pointing Die System. It’s a new, hot lick by which you can ‘sharpen’ the bullet point, which assists greatly in long-distance shooting. And, if I’m not mistaken, this other thing is an electric annealing machine, by which you heat-treat prefired brass and make it more consistent.”
“This guy must read all the gun magazines,” said Chandler.
“No, this stuff ain’t been in the magazines yet. He’s that far ahead. And that fits in neatly with Juba’s patient, plodding, one-step-at-a-time methodology, very thorough, not rushing, not making any mistakes. Both Mrs. McDowell and Mr. Gold make that point. All t’s crossed, i’s dotted. Not that he did the ordering, but he provided the operating plan and the security requirements to whoever was working with him on this.”
“So here’s my thought,” said Chandler. “Let’s run the addresses for each of the six locations and see what we turn up.”
“Good move,” said Swagger.
It didn’t take long to pull the data free.
“No homes,” said Swagger. “They’re all FedEx Office or UPS outlets, all places that take packages for people.”
“Yes, and though usually those places rent you a post office box,” she said, “in this case Brian Waters requested or paid extra not to list a P.O. box but just the street address of the little shop. I suppose that was part of the camouflage operation.”
“Yeah, and, moreover, most mail-order places won’t ship to post office boxes, only to residential addresses. But it’s not a rigorous system. The guy at the sending end isn’t going to check. If it’s just an address, he doesn’t have the time or the interest to make sure the street address is a house, not some retail thing.”
“Well, let’s run the credit card number that paid for all this stuff.”
Another quick discovery: Brian Waters again.
One man with six addresses, each FedEx Office unknown to the other five, had ordered all the goods.
Swagger went to his list of competitors.
“He placed highly in the thousand-yard championships at the NRA range in New Mexico. He’s a shooter. They had to use him as the fulcrum of their operation, alive or dead, probably dead.”
He thought of this fellow. Shooting geek, maybe a little private money, lived for nothing more than putting five .338 bullet holes inside a couple of inches at a mile. To what purpose? If you weren’t a sniper, it had no purpose, it was just damned hard to do, and he had decided he’d become one of the few men in the world who could do it on demand, off a cold barrel. That’s all his life was: he lived in a world of numbers and weights, and certain refined body movements, and one night someone snuck in and put a silenced bullet through his brain. They took his rifle and reloading stuff and shipped it secretly to Syria, where a cold-minded fellow named Juba became him, mastered his rifle, learned his tricks, all with some dark purpose in mind that would leave a lot of other people dead. Swagger shivered.
Mrs. McDowell wants you for her son. The Israelis want you for the bus. The Marine Corps wants you for Baghdad. But I want you for the shooting geek, who never did no harm and got sucked up and spit out for something he couldn’t understand.
“Now he’s here, he’s got the rifle, he’s used the credit card to reorder the stuff he had in Syria but was too bulky to smuggle in. So they’ve been replacing it.”
“Whoa!” she said. “Isn’t that leap a little far?”
“No,” Swagger said. “His name was Brian A. Waters. In the burning shop in Syria, I saw his gun case in the second before the flames took it. I saw the two initials, A and W, the B was already roasted. They need a pigeon. He’s the pigeon. Somehow, some way, this is going to turn on him. I mean, what good is an assassination conspiracy without a Lee Harvey Oswald?”
30
The ranch
The jolt of landing awakened him. No dreams of American snipers this time. Instead, he saw the blank look of existential nothingness on Jared’s face as he went down, bullet in head. This was fiction. As Jared had been turned, Juba had not seen the expression, and the flash of the pistol’s cartridge from the muzzle did not illuminate it. Still, awaking, he could not shake the grief and the hurt, which surprised him. Mission discipline, he ordered of himself: push it all out, make it go away.
He shook his head and came fully awake as the plane came to a halt.
“Enjoy the nap?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not far now.”
The steward opened the door, sliding it sideways on its rollers, then pushed a button to lower the stairs. As the door cracked, bright light flooded in. Juba blinked, but felt the rush of natural air, warmth with perhaps a tang of grass to it, a suggestion of wildflowers. He stepped out to cooler temperatures and a sense of being engulfed by mountains. They were everywhere, green and lofty, some cragged with solemn old faces, others, higher up, still capped with snow. It was a small airport somewhere, presumably for rich people, as the other planes on the ground all seemed to be jets, with swept wings and sporty paint jobs featuring impressions of blur, speed, lightning, and other symbols of modern, comfortable transportation for the elites.
A Land Rover waited, with its driver inside. Next to it sat a Mercedes S, with four men deployed, well-dressed, but of the thick variety that re
minded him of the American contractors in Baghdad, standing about, hands loose. Bodyguards, they’d have weaponry secured in the vehicle, quick to come out or packed against their bulked-up bodies. All wore sunglasses, all had snail earplugs, all watched warily, not the arrival but the horizon, for threats.
“Now, my friend,” said Menendez, “it’s just this last little bit, and you will have everything you require, most of all absolute security and privacy, as required.”
“I am very impressed with your preparations,” said Juba.
“We are bigger than many Fortune 500 companies,” said Menendez. “I am proud to say our growth, though stymied at times, has been remarkable in the past several years. There is money for everyone. I know money means little to you, and politics everything, but it is only with money that political ends may be achieved.”
“True. But that’s not my concern. I leave it to others. Allah has seen to give me a gift for a certain kind of war and I will use it in the infidel heartland to strike a vital blow.”
“And that is why I am so eager to assist. The money, it’s nothing. It’s the ends, really, that make all this so interesting.”
They climbed into the Land Rover, and the S fell in behind. The convoy set off along roads through a valley, beneath the peaks on either side, and again, in more time than he expected, drove and drove and finally reached a gate of no particular interest.
“From the road: nothing,” said Menendez.
The car passed through and rolled down a one-lane blacktop, climbed a small hill. There it encountered a second perimeter, this one of barbed wire, with a sentry post at its locked gate. Two men with M4s, also sunglassed and earplugged, operated the gate to let the two cars pass. They surmounted the crest and started downward.
Juba had no sense of architecture and had no way of knowing the elegant log mansion in the valley before him was famous and dated back to Teddy Roosevelt’s time, though of course it had been much upgraded. In fact, TR had stayed there on one of his many western hunting trips. To Juba, it was just an immense log house, and his idea of a palace involved marble columns, cupolas, and gold fixtures. This building reminded him of cowboy movies he had seen as a boy, all juts and angles, with gables and balconies in roughly cobbled wood.
Jorge the translator was kept busy, as this Menendez, after so much silence, had much to say.
“If the editors of Architectural Digest understood who owned the famous Hanson Ranch, they’d be stunned. Especially if they comprehended that it was their own children’s enthusiasm for our product that paid for it.”
The grandee was a man of boastfulness. He could not help himself.
“I own several houses—Mexico City, Acapulco, Cap d’Antibes, the U.S. Virgins, even Malaysia—but this is my favorite. It is very private. A small army guards it. Come, you’ll see.”
Juba had no interest in a tour, but he had been raised in the tradition of hospitality and pretended to appreciate the rooms through which he was led. He saw lots of tribal patterns on the walls and floors, brown-leather furniture of the heavy sort, paintings of bears and mountain lions and prairies and cowboys, sculptures of animals—what was “an original Remington”?—and a glistening gun cabinet, presumably full of the famous American Winchesters.
“This will interest you,” said Menendez.
He opened the gun case and pulled a weapon out—but it was no Winchester.
“I keep it to remind me of how I got here,” Menendez said. “Of course, it reflects the gauche tastes of the Mexican peasantry, but what it lacks in class it makes up for in earnestness.”
Jorge had trouble with “gauche,” but Juba didn’t care. Menendez handed him the gun.
It was an AK-74, but plated in gold. It was also encrusted with diamonds and rubies in a somewhat primitive array along the receiver, as if dribbled into place by a child. It glittered with surreal brilliance, the two themes—lethality and decadent bad taste—making even less sense than the mistranslated word.
“It was presented to me by my former competitors, now vassals, when my absorption of their organizations became complete. It is an object of veneration, respect, and, I suppose, fear. The gems, by the way, are real, and the gold is indeed twenty-four karat. Estimated value: about three million dollars. A fighter like you would think, what a waste of rifle! A connoisseur like me would think, what a waste of three million in diamonds! But to the men who gave it to me, it had real meaning, and, thus, I keep it, enjoying it both literally and ironically.”
This made no sense whatsoever to Juba, but much of what the slick and sophisticated Menendez said made no sense. He did get that it was in some sense special.
“Magnificent,” he said. “But, then, I would expect no less from a man of such accomplishment.”
“Yes, yes, appreciated. But I know you yearn to see the shop we have built and equipped for your work and the ranges to which you will have access. But first”—he gestured emphatically—“this fellow will be seen lurking about. He is my body man, my most trusted bodyguard, my assistant, a very large part of what I do and how I do it.”
A lithe but powerfully built man appeared at a door, advanced to Menendez, and bowed. Like the others, his duty uniform was a well-fitted black suit; like the others, a radio wire ran to his ears; like the others, he crackled with messages of skill and intensity; but, unlike the others, he was wearing a tightly fitted black hood, its tightness more akin to a sock than a hood. Only his eyes showed.
“As a part of his commitment to his craft, Señor La Culebra prefers to keep his face mysterious. He values his anonymity. He will always see you before you see him. He has the gift of cunning, stealth, and grace. He would have made an extraordinary sniper, but his hunger is to kill at more intimate levels, with the blade, at which he excels. His skill level is perhaps the world’s most dangerous. Policemen, detectives, journalists, competitors—they have all been awakened by the hiss of their own throat being cut. His very presence at my shoulder is an extraordinary asset when I am in meeting with my peers. Of course, when I meet with, say, my fellow suburban Los Angeles Subaru dealers and Carl’s Jr. franchise holders, I leave him in the car, behind tinted glass. He is not for the bourgeois.”
“My respects to such a talented man,” said Juba, nodding in greeting.
The hooded man nodded back, his eyes intense behind the slits of the hood.
That ceremony completed, Menendez led Juba first to a bedroom—nice, but Juba had no interest in bedrooms—and laid out eating arrangements, as well as laundry and maid service, and then out a back entrance, through a garden, across a stable yard, where Mexican boys could be seen exercising and otherwise caring for some beautiful horses, and finally to a small, corrugated prefab cottage, clearly temporary.
“Sir,” said Menendez. “To your liking, I hope. If not, corrections will be made.”
Juba took the key and entered.
It appeared perfect. Every item he ordered was displayed on a heavy worktable against the wall. He went quickly to the heart of it, the yellow packaging from L.E. Wilson, and saw several containers of neck bushings that ran from .366 to .368, as well as the crucial boxes containing neck sizer and bullet seater. Another box contained a Whidden bullet-pointing die, to sharpen the tips of the missiles themselves, and they were close by, boxes of Match bullets from Sierra, Nosler, Hornady, and other makers, all .338 Match grade. Next to the bench was packaging from Oehler, signifying a high-grade chronograph, to measure velocity. And an iPhone 8, lying on the bench. Seemingly innocuous, it had been programmed by its original owner with data onto a ballistic app, the Hawkins Ballistics FirstShot software, which offered instant solutions to the equations that ruled the universe of long-range. Canisters of smokeless powder, bright as pennants leading the Saracen army, stood on higher shelves, and a brand-new arbor press, as well as boxes of Federal 215M large-rifle Magnum primers, chamfer tools for both neck and primer hole
, seven reloading manuals—all had been placed around the central icon in what was almost a crèche of infidel devotion.
And its icon was a rifle.
31
Eighth-floor conference room, Zombieland
The zombies were hungry. Pink-faced, blue-suited, white-shirted, red-tied—they sat around the conference room table, champing their jaws, screaming for flesh, starved for protein to be washed down by blood.
They were the creatures Bob had always hated. So far away from it, so sure, so absolute, so magnificent, so clean of fingernail: who could not hate them? If you lived behind wires and sandbags, and shit in a hole and got shot at a lot, it was mandatory to hate zombies—not these particular ones but zombies as a class. Yet where would the world be without its zombies?
“All right, Nick,” said the head zombie, “who, what is, and why should we care about a Brian A. Waters of Albuquerque, New Mexico, who has no record and no footprint, and, by all accounts, is a pleasant, accomplished, well-respected fellow?”
“Mr. Gold, would you speak to that?” Nick said, then checked for zombies who had trouble keeping up. “Swagger found Brian Waters, but Mr. Gold identified him as only a theoretical possibility, so Swagger worked off that, isn’t that right, Bob?”
“Completely,” said Bob.
Gold was not a zombie. Somehow being an Israeli meant you could never be a zombie. Swagger wasn’t sure by what principle this was, but it was a principle nevertheless, perhaps having to do with all the shit they’d been through, their tenuous grasp of survival, and perhaps most of all the subtle intensity that underlay the Israeli faces, as opposed to the theatricality of these American intelligence and enforcement executives.
“Gentlemen,” said Gold, “it has to do, eschatologically, with the different meanings of terror in the Middle East and here in the West. In the Middle East, terror is force. It is about killing lots of people as efficiently as possible. In the West, terror is metaphor. This is a feature of asymmetrical warfare at its purest. It is not the act itself, tragic though it may be, but the resonance of that act in the public imagination. The West cannot be destroyed through numbers; it must be destroyed through its imagination. Its capacity to fight will not be eliminated, but its will to fight can be, and that is the object.
Game of Snipers Page 18