Game of Snipers Page 4

  “Who’s Cohen?” asked Bob.

  “I’m Cohen,” said a small man with bright, combative eyes and a disorganized goatee.

  “For some reason, our Director tolerates Cohen and his poor attempts at humor. Perhaps it’s a lesson for us as to what not to become. Anyway: Cohen?”

  “Are you fucking Mrs. McDowell?” asked Cohen.

  Swagger knew trouble when he saw it.

  “No,” he said.

  “Have you ever dreamed of her naked?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Does she have large or small breasts?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Would you consider her a sensual woman?”

  “Do you find grief sensual?”

  “How many men have you killed?”

  “Ah. Too many. I didn’t count. None that couldn’t and wouldn’t have killed me.”

  “Do you enjoy killing?”

  “I enjoy the craft of shooting. It’s what I was put here to do.”

  “Are you a gun nut?”

  “I have respected them and they have served me. My family heritage is battle with the gun, for the sake of society, but also—and I have thought hard about this and can admit finally—it fulfills me. As I say, it’s what I do, and if I am not doing it, something is missing from my life. But I don’t have sex with them.”

  “Still, this whole thing could be a fantasy to get yourself in another gunfight, yes?”

  “I often wonder about that. It’s possible. But in all the things I’ve done since the Marine Corps, I was on the track of righting some wrong, usually recalling the sacrifice of someone like me who had been forgotten.”

  “Are you a psychopathic killer?”

  “I am not psycho. I just have always found guns interesting and appreciate their capabilities, which, like my own, are at their highest peak when circumstances are at their most extreme. I have no need to kill. But I never dream about it.”

  Questions came and went. There seemed no pattern to them. It was like receiving fire from all points of the compass. As promised, Cohen was the most annoying.

  “Do you consider sniping an act of murder or an act of war?”

  “War. I have only taken out armed men. I take no pleasure in the kill, and I’ve made no money from it. I make my money taking care of ailing horses. I love horses. My wife is a good business manager, I have a reputation, and so we have prospered. I don’t need money, I have all I will ever need.”

  “What moved you about Mrs. McDowell?”

  “Her pain. Some people close to me have died in violent action. They were, all of them, too good to pass that way, but sometimes, by whimsy or evil, it happens. So I felt that.”

  “Do you think that could have clouded your judgment?”

  “No. She was real. Her pain was real. Her courage is real. Her facts are true.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I was afraid if she didn’t see progress, she’d commit suicide. I realized that we had reached a point—she had reached a point—where to proceed, we needed the support of state actors. Resources beyond our means, access to information beyond our scope. We just weren’t big enough to do it no more. And every time she went over there, she risked her life. The next trip would have left her floating upside down in a river.”

  “It sounds more like you are hiring us, not us hiring you.”

  “I want Juba. For me, that’s what this is about.”

  “If we decide to work with you,” said Gold, “there is a precondition you must accept. That is, in our employ you will regard Juba as our property. Our goal is not to put a bullet in his head. That does limited good and would only satisfy in an Old Testament sense—”

  “And nobody here believes in the Old Testament,” said Cohen, and this time there was some laughter.

  “Our goal,” said Gold, “is to have a series of chats with him. We need to unravel his life. He harbors many mysteries and will settle many issues. Assuming our success at that enterprise, we will try him, then imprison him. He will live the remainder of his life in an Israeli prison. If you shoot him without cause, we will try you for murder. Though oceans of our blood have been spilled, we are not, as a culture, particularly bloodthirsty. We are justice thirsty. Do you understand?”

  “I do.”

  “Can you live by those rules?”

  “Yes.”

  “We are professionals, not avengers. We expect the same from you.”

  That seemed to do it. The session had lasted six hours, he realized. He was hungry. But the men at the table seemed to communicate by nod or even subtler stratagems, and after a pause for wordless communication, Gold went through the nature of the professional arrangements, involving contracts, payments, insurance, next-of-kin notification, and other bureaucratic necessities.

  “Do you have any questions?”

  “I am curious about one thing. What in the presentation convinced you this was worth following and not a scam or a dumb-ass initiative by amateurs?”

  “On January fifteenth, 2014, an Israeli businessman, who was secretly our agent and very well known by many of the men in this room, was leaving Dubai. He was shot by a sniper on the tarmac as he waited to board the jet and killed. Very long, impressive shot. But mysterious too.”

  “Why?”

  “He thought—and we thought—his cover was secure. He had been in Dubai for two weeks, attending to issues. On several occasions, he was accessible, we realized, to shorter, easier, more certain shots. We were baffled by the fact that it was not until his last day that he was taken from us, and the shot was much harder. But the bill of lading that Mrs. McDowell located in the SouthStar files provides the answer. Juba was out of ammunition. He had fired his quarterly allotment, and he would not move without the Bulgarian in his magazine. It arrived the thirteenth. He immediately was dispatched to Dubai. With his preferred ammunition finally in stock, he made the shot, though much harder than it could have been. The bullet was recovered, and indeed it was the heavy ball, although we attached no importance to that at the time. But now we see that it explains the timing.”

  “So again, the lady was right. She had a list of killings from around the world. Your people, ours, their own. Whoever. Juba is the one for the job.”

  “Juba is promiscuous,” said Gold. “To our misfortune, he has had many encounters with us. And as you know, he’s very good at what he does.”

  “You have IOUs to cash in as well.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. Cohen, be unusually useful. Tell him about the bus.”

  5

  Israel, the bus

  June 14, 2015

  You must do this hard thing for us, Juba,” said the commander. “Bombs have lost their magic. Blow up two hundred and fifty people in the marketplace, and no one notices. It doesn’t even make the news in the West. We need something with an edge to it, something that will make the bastards sit up and listen. And realize they cannot forget us for even a single second.”

  “I am in obedience, as always,” Juba said.

  The commander had told him of the politics of the situation, not that he knew or cared about politics. The Americans were attempting to negotiate with the Iranians, and if they got a mullah’s name on a dotted line, it would be celebrated as a major event in the West. The idea would take hold that “progress” was being made, delusionary or not. But such arrangements made without the presence of the Islamic State at the table could not be allowed. It would suggest that such a way could lead to a “solution,” when the only real solution was the eradication of the Zionist entity and its citizens. That was the solution that Allah demanded, that and nothing else.

  An atrocity was needed that would shock the world and generate such heat that no accord could be signed and an important object lesson would be taken. The leaders had considered many
alternatives, but all were difficult to arrange, needed heavy logistic support, and were subject to discovery and penetration.

  Juba was one man, with extraordinary skills. With minimal assistance, he could move into position, strike his blow, and vanish. No networks risked, no valuable supplies eaten up, no large bodies of men required. Such was the magic of Juba the Sniper.

  “The thought of the death of one by another, that is what scares them to their core. The bomb is impersonal. It has no charisma. It is anonymous and seems almost like the weather. It’s like a tornado arriving. But the man with the rifle intimately acquaints himself with each victim. They are all narcissists, the idea of being not a victim of circumstance but of a conspiracy aimed directly at them—that is something that will linger in their minds.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  * * *

  • • •

  The trip in the hold of the ancient freighter was finished. So was the rumble through Gaza City traffic, the long trek hunched in the dampness of the tunnel, prone to discovery at any moment by Israeli security teams. But he had made it to the Promised Land.

  In a nameless village in the Negev, not far from the Erez Crossing, he climbed aboard a decrepit vehicle and paid his shekel passage. It was crowded, but he found his way to the rear and got a seat. Nobody looked twice at him. And why should they? He was of them.

  He wore a loose tribal turban over his head and loose shirts and a scarf, all of it of the random sort picked up by laborers the Middle East over. His loose pants had seen so many other days and owners, his boots were scuffed from their own record of days and owners. He was the nameless one, the Arab, sustained by faith but otherwise oblivious to reality. He was the millions. If he had or had had a wife and family, it was all forgotten in the ceaseless turmoil and labor. This side of the wire, that side, this wire, that wire, made no difference. He was eternally on the move, and the only pleasures he could seek were religious or illicit. He had no place to go, he had nothing to belong to. To such, Allah would be everything, for in Allah and the next life was the only hope.

  The bus coursed the Negev, stopping now and then in other nameless villages that had sprung up along the road. The desert here was vast, but not as cruel as much of its other territory, which was scorched land, inhospitable and dark, with stone rills running crazily this way and that. It could kill you fast if you didn’t know what you were doing. Here, though, agriculture had taken hold. Still close enough to the sea, and the Jews had built their kibbutz, where they lived and sang and farmed and fucked, while, on the lesser land, Arabs farmed wheat or dates, mostly by the power of their own backs, and the sea temperature was mild enough so that those wheat and dates usually were ready for harvest on schedule. The Jews patrolled in their machine-gun-equipped jeeps, young men drawn from the city, serving for only a few years. They knew nothing, their eyes saw nothing. It was a game of wasted time for them, until they had done their service and could be about better business.

  But Juba knew it well. He had lived twenty years in such degradation, one of many children of a village chief in another country, virtually uneducated, beaten like a dog for any infraction, untouched by love from mother and father, for each had too much to do to spend precious seconds on that. There was never enough food. And the television reception—every house, no matter how poor, had a television—showed fuzzy images of some other world that was unreachable, unimaginable.

  His life was defined by the wheat. From the age of eight on, he toiled in the fields. It wasn’t any mechanical kind of farming but instead the ageless struggle of the Arab peasant, the harvest by hand, with flail and hoe, as the tough thistles on the stalks rubbed the fingers raw, and one had to bend to get to them, until the back knitted in pain, and the ground cut into the knees, while above the sun was merciless, and his father kept yelling, “Faster, faster, you lazy little insects. Do you want to die of hunger? This is survival!”

  Only the True Faith was real, and only it offered some kind of escape. He could lose himself in the mandates of the Qur’an and the idea that somehow this life had structure and definition. So the only place he felt human was in the madrassa, where he applied himself hard, hoping to earn Allah’s pleasure. It turned out he had a nimble mind, and at least one of the leaders said that among them all, he had the possibilities. He could escape from this world without tomorrows.

  “You’re smart,” he was told. “There can be more for you. You can escape the great nothingness of your people.”

  “If God wills it, it will happen,” he said, and believed.

  One day after he turned eighteen, the letter arrived, informing him that he had been conscripted for two and a half years. He would be taken away and trained in some military skill. Maybe that would be his future, maybe it would open his eyes, maybe it will come between him and the life laid out for him, the life of labor and uselessness.

  But the army was another delusion. A rural Arab conscript was the lowest form of military scum, and he was again laughed at and cursed and beaten and starved for his crudeness and ignorance. Sergeants mocked him, officers ignored him. He was invisible, his prayers without weight. God had forsaken him.

  And then he discovered the rifle.

  6

  The black cube

  He’s Syrian,” said Cohen. “A Sunni peasant named Alamir Alaqua, you can spell it any way you wish, with or without hyphens, it makes no difference to us. Born in 1970. Raised in the north, a hundred or so miles east of Aleppo, in Syria’s narrow rim of arable land. His family are wheat people. His first eighteen years are unnoticed, and he never refers to them, it is said. One can imagine: working the fields, at prayer five times a day, beaten often, perhaps molested occasionally, part of a large family of minor distinction in a village named Tar’qu. To his father, and the rest of the world, he was but another beast of burden. That is all.”

  “If,” said Gold, “you have some idealized vision of the international assassin as a man of erudition, you will be disappointed. This chap is a cold brute, utterly committed and sublimely talented.”

  Bob nodded. He’d seen enough bullshit about snipers on TV and in the movies to know that almost nobody ever truly got it: the closure of mind, the dedication to skill and art, the commitment to the faith. But Bob got it, and he would never take such a man lightly.

  “It was in the army that he showed his extraordinary gift. He shot a sixty-year-old Persian Mauser so well that he was selected for sniper school. For the first time in his life, he felt special. He completed himself by putting the rifle in use to Allah’s purpose.

  “At the sniper school, taught by Saudi mercenaries, who themselves had been trained by American Green Berets, he was again picked out, developed, quickly promoted. And, again for the first time in his life, he had food in his belly. And respect from his elders. For the first time, he was a man.

  “We assume he drew first blood in 1990. His targets, however, were not infidels but coreligionists. Under the first Assad’s realpolitik, Syria had joined the coalition against the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. No records exist, no tales of a legendary sniper among the Syrian forces of that war. Yet knowing his ambitions, it seems logical that he would have tested himself. I’m sure there are Iraqi widows owing to his efforts, the irony being that he served first against the men that he would later serve so ably for.”

  But his real experience, Cohen said, came as a specialist with the minister of defense’s campaign to exterminate opposition to Assad and the Ba’athists in the ’90s. That fellow, Mustafa Tlass, was a mediocre general, a mediocre politician, an excellent sycophant, and a first-rate secret policeman. He used snipers to isolate and eliminate non-Ba’athist pretenders to power to solidify Old Man Assad’s rule. It was so much easier than raiding, interrogating, imprisoning, executing. One application of Bulgarian heavy ball from four hundred meters out and the problem was solved forever.

  “In 2000,”
continued Cohen, “old Assad dies, to be succeeded by his surviving second son, the ophthalmologist without a chin or a scruple.”

  “What happened to his first son?” asked Bob.

  “Ask us no questions and we’ll tell you no lies,” said Gold.

  “Well, that’s assuring,” said Bob.

  “Assad Two’s first priority is to repair the enmity his father created by siding with the coalition and invading Kuwait in ’90. Thus, in 2003, after the destruction of the Iraqi army and the occupation of Iraq by the Americans, he authorizes sending military advisors to the insurrection. At that point, he has the largest, most well-trained and -equipped army in the Middle East. Among the technicians and tacticians he sends is our Grim Reaper, Sergeant Alaqua.

  “There seems to have been no initial plan to turn him into a legend,” said Gold. “But he found the ruins of Baghdad an excellent place to practice his craft, he found these disgruntled ex-soldiers of the Iraqi Republican Guard highly motivated students. They were blooded, they were aggressive, they had no fear of death. They were the worst kind of patriots: they lived to kill or die, and it didn’t much matter to them which. We could cite numbers and show you the marine reports, if you wish—”

  “I’ve picked up enough from the fellows I know,” Bob said.

  He didn’t like to think of it. The kids were fine as infantrymen when they had lots of high explosives a radio signal away, the American way of war. But the shattered wilderness of a city, all confusion and confinement, where the bad guys knew the streets so much better, the kids—at least the first rotation of them—were just so many sitting ducks.

  Bob thought sourly that Tom McDowell had been one of those ducks.

  “Against the sacrifice of Iwo Jima, Baghdad is nothing,” said Gold. “But of course America—and the West and Israel—has lost the will to sustain casualties on a steady basis. When the numbers begin to rise, the parents begin to panic and the media begins to notice. It shows that the true realpolitik of the world is demographics.”