Super Sniper

by Rawlin Cash

  “Nope, but I’ve been there. That’s a different story.”

  “More fun?”

  “Too much fun. They’ve got it all there.”

  “Clubs and shit?”

  “Clubs doesn’t begin to describe it, brother,” the pilot said. He made a gesture like someone sucking a cock. “Cheap as hell. You know what I mean?”

  “I thought this was a conservative country.”

  “Not if you know where to look.”

  Hunter had been to Jeddah and knew what to expect. He’d always flown in directly. From the air base he had a seventy mile drive ahead of him.

  He got a cab into Taif. He’d come into the country unarmed, but the CIA had a safety deposit box in Taif where he could get a Glock 18 chambered in 9x19 mm Parabellum, a silencer, and some cash. The drop box was in a hotel in the center of the city. The ride into the city was nicer than Hunter expected. It took him through mountains and there were vineyards, pomegranates, and fig orchards on the slopes.

  The city had a low skyline of solid brick buildings and wide, well-lit streets. The sun was setting as the cab pulled up outside the hotel. The hotel looked like an apartment building. It’s main selling point was that it had a view over some dry vacant scrub land next to the Shubra Palace.

  “I’m here to pick up a package,” he said to the concierge.

  The man looked him up and down. Fawn had called ahead and Hunter gave the name that had been arranged. The man gave Hunter a key and brought him to the basement where a row of lockers was located. The lockers looked like they were for the use of hotel staff, but one of them was kept for the CIA.

  Hunter got what he came for and asked the concierge if he could get him a car.

  “What kind of car you want?” the man said in English.

  “Something good,” Hunter said.

  The man nodded and Hunter waited in the lobby drinking black tea with sugar from a small glass. About thirty minutes later, a black seven series BMW pulled up outside. They didn’t fuck around. The car was beautiful. The interior was like a spacecraft.

  Hunter put Jeddah into the navigation system and followed the directions west out of the city. The highway was good, two lanes in each direction with very little traffic. It wound up into the mountains past squat villages carved into the rocky slopes. He put his foot down and tested the engine. The car revved perfectly.

  At the top of the mountains he passed Alhada and then it was a hairpin descent into the desert plain below. The highway went right through Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, birthplace of the Prophet, but Hunter couldn’t enter. Every year the city received fifteen million pilgrims but Christians were forbidden. Hunter passed close to the cave where Mohammad first received the Quran from the angel Gabriel. A few miles later, the highway split in two with religious police stationed at the turnoff. One way was for Muslims only, and the other way redirected non-Muslims around the city toward Jeddah.

  From the road he could already see signs of the Kingdom’s wealth. Soaring into the skyline to his north was the world’s fourth tallest building, the Royal Clock Tower Hotel. Ahead, the road hit the hot flats and descended through Bahrah into the coastal sprawl of Jeddah.

  If Mecca was a holy place, Jeddah, thirty miles to the west, was the opposite.

  Hunter knew how to find what he was looking for. Driving down Tahlia Street, the broad avenue lined with palm trees and sleek shopping malls, he opened the windows and leaned out of the car. In a country that was so strict that the Mutawa religious police could have a man executed for having gay sex, this was a place where all the rules flew out the window.

  Hunter whistled at some men who were walking down the street. It was late and they were out on the town. Hunter licked his lips and the men laughed. It might be against the law to be gay in Saudi Arabia, but the rules surrounding women were so much stricter that it was easier for men in the kingdom to pick up each other than a woman.

  Hunter pulled over and called out to the men in English.

  “Where can a guy have some fun around here?”

  They kept walking and he had to call out a few more times and cruise along the sidewalk next to them until they answered. One of the men came over to the window.

  “You want me to get in?” he said.

  Hunter smiled and bit his lip. The man said something to his friends and they laughed and made fun of him. The man waved them off and got into the car next to Hunter.

  Hunter immediately gunned the engine. He drove fast down the street and turned toward Al Kurnaysh Road, the main promenade along the beach.

  They drove past hotels with swimming pools and expensive stores.

  “Where are you taking me?” the man said.

  He spoke good English. Hunter guessed from his accent he’d spent time in England.

  The man put his hand on Hunter’s thigh and Hunter removed it. He picked up speed and pulled the Glock from his jacket and pointed it at the man’s head.

  “What is this?”

  “I’m in a hurry,” Hunter said. “I need to know where the real parties are held.”

  “What real parties?”

  “The parties where things get nasty.”

  “Nasty?”

  “You know. Orgies. Pissing on hookers. Underage Filipinas. The real shit.”

  “I don’t know where you’d find that.”

  Hunter touched the gun against the man’s temple. “Come on, pretty boy.”

  “I swear. They don’t let just anyone into those parties.”

  “But there’s a way to get in?”

  “No. This isn’t Soho. You have to know someone who knows someone who knows someone,” the man said. He was starting to panic.

  “Well, everyone knows someone, right?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said. “Please, let me out of the car.”

  “I’ll let you out when you give me what I need.”

  “I don’t know what you need.”

  “I need to know who you know.”

  “What?”

  “If you wanted to go to one of those parties, who would you go to?”

  The man still wasn’t giving him anything. Hunter took his hand off the wheel and opened the passenger window.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t want your brains all over my car.”

  “No,” the man said.

  Hunter pressed the gun harder against the man’s head, pushing it toward the open window. They’d driven north along the coast and crossed the bridge to the future Jeddah Economic City, an entire region of the city that was being built by Prince Waleed bin Talal, Ibn Saud’s grandson and the King’s nephew. He had a personal net worth of over thirty-four billion dollars which was enough to put him in the top thirty of the Forbes rich list. He was chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company and had tried to build the world’s first mile high building, the Jeddah Tower. Its concrete hulk, on which progress had halted in 2017, stood in the distance, topped out at forty-seven stories. Hunter had no doubt it would eventually be finished, but for the time being the site was deserted and bin Talal was in a private prison owned by the Crown Prince.

  Hunter pulled over.

  “All right,” the man said. “I’ll tell you where to go.”

  “Thank you,” Hunter said.

  “They’ll never let you in. Those parties are for royalty only.”

  “Just tell me the place.”

  “Everyone knows it.”

  “Then it shouldn’t have been so hard to get it out of you.”

  The man nodded. “There’s a club. It’s private.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s not far from here, a place called Dreamland.”

  Hunter looked at the construction sites and scrub that surrounded them in every direction. It didn’t look like anything dreamy could survive in such a place. They were close to the water but the view was obscured by high mounds of sand and construction materials. The entire area had been unclai
med desert just a few years earlier, and over the next ten years would become an entirely new city, the Jeddah Tower being its crown jewel at the center.

  “How do I get there?”

  “You’ll never get in.”

  “Let me deal with that.”

  “They’ll kill you.”

  “Who will?”

  “The security guards. They’re Nigerians and they’re trained to protect their owner from the day they’re born.”

  “Their owner?”

  “Owner, employer, whatever you want to call him. They’re born in a prince’s house. They’re assigned to him when they’re still children. They grow up protecting the prince. Even when they’re children, and the prince is a child, they’re together. They train, they receive gifts from the prince, they protect him, and by the time they’re adults they are so loyal they will kill on command.”

  “How do I find out who’s at the party?”

  “How would I know? People come and go? There’s different people there every night. It’s like a night club.”

  Hunter nodded. He’d come on a tip off from Fawn that the Crown Prince would be in Jeddah to party. She’d intercepted calls that he was upset his hitman was dead and that he wanted to blow off steam. The CIA knew there was a place in Jeddah where the royals could go to indulge in their sexual fetishes. They also knew that the Crown Prince had been personally involved in arranging for the purchase of orphans from a number of countries. They bought boys and girls, often when they were still babies, from orphanages in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Djibouti, Somalia, Nigeria, Romania, and Bulgaria.

  Despite the strictness of the country, and the ultra-conservatism of the Royal family, it was rumored that Jeddah now had a fully functioning slave market where royals, of which there were thousands, could go to buy and sell sex slaves of any age, for any taste.

  “Just tell me where the party is and I’ll let you go,” Hunter said.

  The man looked at him, unsure whether he could trust him or not.

  “All right,” he said. “This road, it curves around the bay.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Follow it to the end of the bay.”

  Hunter zoomed in on the map on the car’s navigation screen and the man pointed out the place. “Here, don’t get on the highway, and don’t follow signs for the stadium.”

  “I see it.”

  “There’s a bridge and a security check point. If you get across the bridge, you’re on an island.”

  It was in fact two islands, man made, shaped like stars, with each arm jutting out into the water and lined with piers and marinas for private yachts.

  “And once I’m on the island?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve never been there.”

  “Come on.”

  “I swear it. You have to be rich or important,” the man paused, “or very popular.”

  Hunter unlocked the doors. The man looked at him and then opened the door but hesitated before getting out.

  “What is it?”

  “How will I get back to the city?”

  “You know the way.”

  “Walk?”

  “You want me to call you a cab?” Hunter said.

  “It’s not safe out here.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Hunter said.

  The man took his time leaving the car and walked slowly across the abandoned boulevard to a semi-constructed sidewalk. The place was desolate. There was nothing but construction machinery and the hulking frame of the tower about five hundred yards away.

  Hunter drove along the bay on Prince Abdullah Al Faisal Street and thought about heading back to the city to hijack a yacht. He knew he didn’t have time to create a name for himself as a western playboy in the city. As he thought about what he’d heard of the Crown Prince’s sexual preferences, he was starting to think he didn’t have time to hijack a yacht either.

  He checked his gun. He had the original Parabellum model. The 19 mm rounds weren’t as powerful as he’d have liked, but they would do plenty of damage to coked up party boys with their pants down. It was the Nigerians he was worried about. The clip carried seventeen rounds and he had two spares.

  He decided to go directly to the island. He knew the Crown Prince had flown in to Jeddah a few hours ahead of him, and he knew it was one of the places he’d likely end up.

  He stopped the car just before the turn off for the bridge. He planned to find a hiding place close to the gate and watch it. He would see who came in and out and try to figure out what was going on inside. He didn’t want to storm in and alert the Crown Prince.

  He left the car and began walking along the shoreline but as he went, he realized he could see the island out in the water. It was just a few hundred yards away, lined with piers for yachts. There weren’t many boats pulled up to the quays but there was plenty of activity going on. He could see vehicles, lights, the buildings were lit up. He could hear voices shouting over the sound of machinery. There were workers on the island and it looked like they were preparing for an event.

  He looked left and right. No one was on the beach. The gun was waterproof.

  He took off his shoes and jacket and left them under some rocks on the sand, then strode into the water and started swimming. A minute later he was pulling himself up onto a pier on the island. No one was there and he hurried behind a retaining wall. There were vehicles loading siddiqui, a locally fermented alcohol, and when he peered around the wall he saw that they were filling empty Smirnoff vodka bottles with funnels. Alcohol was illegal in the kingdom and even for a place like this, brewing your own was a lot cheaper than buying it on the black market.

  He ran across a small road into a manicured garden, watered by constant sprinklers, and crept through the trees toward the main building at the center of the island.

  The building looked like any other villa with white marble steps leading up to the front entrance. Balconies overlooked all the approaches and he could see Nigerian guards standing on them, one man per post, relaxed, smoking cigarettes.

  Hunter remained hidden in the bushes and waited. He was in range of one of the sprinklers which periodically sprayed him. The water felt good.

  After a while, a black Cadillac Escalade pulled up in front of the villa and Hunter watched as twelve children were led out by a man in a suit. They were male and female, as young as five or six, up to early teens.

  Hunter felt the anger flowing through his veins.

  He’d kill the Crown Prince if he showed up, but he’d kill as many other men there as he could, whether they were royals there to blow their load, or Nigerian soldiers of fortune. He had fifty-one rounds and the world would be better off with as many of these guys dead as possible.

  The children went inside the villa.

  It was another hour before the first guests started to arrive. The yachts came in, one by one, and docked at the piers. They were coming in from clubs back in the city and had groups of rowdy men on board, already drunk, some with prostitutes or party girls along for the ride. Later, other yachts came in. These ones were quieter, with just a single man or two in from their villa for a little rest and relaxation. Now and then, another Escalade would pull up and let out another load of prostitutes. They came in all shapes and sizes, all races and genders, and all ages.

  Hunter saw that special preparations were being made. The place was getting busy. Something was going to happen. Staff came out of the villa and went down to one of the piers. Nigerians came down from the balconies and stood around waiting. Two boats pulled up and someone’s entourage, disembarked. Then a massive yacht, Hunter recognized it from the data pack given him by Fawn, pulled up to the pier. The yacht had been the largest in the world at the time of its launch in 1984. It remained the largest in the world for almost twenty years, until Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Dubai commissioned a larger one. Today, it was barely in the top ten in the world. But it was a monster. More ship than yacht, it was over 480 feet long, and had lan
ding pads for two helicopters, as well as an underwater bay for a submarine. According to NSA files, the yacht was also equipped with surface-to-air missiles, although their exact specs were unknown as they’d been purchased from the Soviets before the end of the Cold War. The interior was supposedly a replica of the main lobby of the Titanic.

  Hunter mouthed the word “bingo” under his breath.

  He watched the pier and waited. There was a lot of coming and going but the Crown Prince didn’t disembark. Hunter waited, and when he saw a line of children, all very young, being walked along the pier toward the boat, all of them holding hands like they were on a field trip, he knew he was ready to spill some blood.

  He attached the silencer to the Glock and made his way back through the brush to the next pier. Then he lowered himself quietly into the water and swam toward the prince’s yacht.

  When he got to the pier he heard the children above being boarded onto the boat.

  He clenched his fists.

  This fucker was going to pay.

  He held onto the side of the pier and waited for the last of the children to get on board.

  When they were done, three Nigerians, armed with Heckler and Koch G36 assault rifles carrying thirty round magazines took up positions at the base of the gangway. The guns were German-made, could fire six bullets per second, and were effective to about five-hundred yards. They chambered a 5.56 NATO round, which for all intents and purposes felt like a Remington .223 if it hit you.

  Hunter didn’t intend for that to happen. He scanned the yacht and knew no one on board was paying attention. There were guards but their boss was about to have an orgy. If they were interested in anything, it would have been that, but it looked more like they weren’t interested in anything at all. They were about as bored and uninterested as any soldiers Hunter had ever seen. Being born into a job, being owned, being trained from birth, it wasn’t as effective a regimen as you’d think.

  He pulled himself waist-high over the side of the pier and shot the three guards with the silenced Glock, one after the other, with three headshots. They fell to the ground without a sound.

  Light spilling from the yacht meant anyone who looked at the pier would see the bodies, but no one was looking. Hunter picked up an assault rifle and slung it over his back then rolled the three men off the side of the pier into the water.