Game of Snipers Page 5

  “But we did turn it around?”

  “The marine counterintelligence people did a brilliant job of analysis and counterplanning, and, yes indeed, it pretty much destroyed Sergeant Alaqua’s sniper force in a single afternoon. He himself escaped death, barely, having killed much and learned much. But his name had been made in radical circles. He was eagerly recruited and offered not merely princely sums to keep himself available but, most of all, interesting targets. Upon returning home, he disengaged from the army and became radical Islam’s go-to guy. We have him in Afghanistan, Africa, India, even the Philippines. He seems to have gone to work mainly for Tehran. But he helped the home folks too. In 2005, the prime minister of Beirut—occupied at the time by Syria—had run afoul of young Assad and old Tlass. On February fourteenth of that year, he was blown up by car bomb in Beirut. The mystery was, how did the killers wire the bomb? The answer is, they didn’t. Too tricky to use radio detonation in a heavily urban area, flooded already with transmissions. Rather, they planted twenty kilos of Semtex under the street, leaving a lump of highly volatile contact compound visible, possibly chlorine azide or silver nitrate. Perhaps it was camouflaged as dog shit. As the car passed over the bomb, from three hundred yards out, Juba, as he was now called, hit the compound with Bulgarian heavy ball, and the whole thing detonated. A great shot, a huge blast. Twenty-two others perished.

  “Which brings us at long last,” said Gold, “to the incident of the bus.”

  7

  Outside Tel Aviv

  June 15, 2013

  The old Arab’s pony pulled his cart through the streets of Herzliya, a leafy suburb of well-appointed, well-landscaped houses, as well as luxury high-rises with ocean views, for the Israeli professional classes. Many lawyers, many engineers, many dentists, many doctors lived here, people far insulated from war and want and the anger of the Islamic entities. Twice the cart had been stopped by police patrols, and the old man offered to give them some of the fruit he had left over. They laughed, and one young policeman took a ripe banana. They checked his papers, checked his cart, warned him not to be out so late, and sent him on his way.

  Somewhere between Yefet Street and Harmony Cove, the wagon drifted wide until it almost reached the sidewalk, and there a shadowy figure slipped off the vehicle’s underbelly, rolled swiftly to a thicket of bushes, and slid deep into them. The wagon continued its meandering ways to a central road, which took it out of Herzliya, then it disappeared into the maze of streets in the city’s Arab section.

  The man who had slipped out lay flat in the brush for a good hour, not moving. Patience in these matters was everything. Possibly this site had been discovered. Perhaps it was an elaborate Israeli ruse, and perhaps capture and interrogation and ultimately surrender—no one held out forever—lay ahead. Having penetrated the Zionist homeland, he was risking everything, knowing himself to be a high-priority target.

  But nothing happened. No commandos swept in for the arrest. Once or twice, late-returning citizens drove by, one in a BMW, the other in a Mercedes. He heard car doors slam, and a wife yell at a husband. But that was all.

  When at last he felt secure, he slid back farther into the undergrowth. He knew the layout only from photos and diagrams. As usual, design diverged considerably from reality. The night was darker, the trees thicker, the turf spongier, the night smell of shrubbery and the sea more intense. His fingers probed, and for a second he experienced a whisper of panic. Suppose it wasn’t here? Suppose he couldn’t find it? Suppose he failed? Suppose—

  But the supposition exercise became moot in the next second as his fingers came across, an inch or so under some low accumulation of loose dirt, the heavy canvas of a gun case. He pulled, the thing emerged, and he drew it to him.

  Without needing to see, he unzipped the canvas bag and removed the object it concealed and protected. His fingers closed on the familiar configuration of the Russian-designed Dragunov sniper rifle, a semi-automatic beast that shot the old tsarist 7.62×54R rounds, same as they had used in the Russo-Japanese War of a hundred-odd years ago. He knew it as well as one could know a thing. He had always loved the Dragon, from his first glimpse many years ago, such an improvement over the claptrap junkiness of the AK-47.

  This Dragon, one of his best, was purely a parts gun, assembled from recovered battlefield castoffs. It had a Romanian receiver, a Polish stock, and a Russian barrel. An irony utterly lost on him was that it was universally called the Dragon, but its naming had nothing to do with that mythical beast. It was simply prosaic Russian policy to designate firearms by their designer’s name, and the designer happened to be named Dragunov. This gun was highly tuned for accuracy, with minute filing of the trigger sear arrangements, the springs cut to a minimum for less vibration, the barrel cleansed to the atomic level, all of it lovingly reassembled, each screw torqued to the appropriate weight for maximum accuracy. It was perfect and it was untraceable and, therefore, expendable.

  The scope, called a PSO-1, was Russian, of course, of highest optical quality. It was affixed to the rifle by a clamp bolted to the side of the receiver, which held it, solidly and perfectly, over the piece, perfectly vectored to his dominant eye when he was in the prone position. He slid the rifle to his body, his right hand easing onto the familiar contours of the pistol grip, the buttstock tight, hard, without mercy, against the pocket of his shoulder, the support arm running directly under the rifle, jutting upward at the elbow so that the hand could grasp the wooden forestock, but not tightly, for a shooter’s enthusiasm could compress the forestock so that it touched the free-floating barrel and thus bring imperfection to the system. He twisted, tested, squirmed, and wiggled, as any shooter will do, building the perfect position, so that the weapon was supported off bone, not muscle, and the legs splayed behind him, in full contact with the support of the planet itself. He lifted the rifle to his eyes from the ground a dozen times just to make sure he’d found his natural point of aim. He tested the electronics of the scope, switching them on to see the reticle etched in glowing red against the night, the chevron denoting point of impact, the crude range finder, an inverted arc in the right-hand quadrant, which denoted the height of a six-foot-tall man at eight ascending ranges, unnecessary to him because he’d already zeroed the chevron to two hundred and thirty-four meters, appropriate to task.

  Now he attached the suppressor. Another battlefield pickup, possibly found still screwed to the muzzle of a marine M40 destroyed along with its owner in a roadside bombing and salvaged for use against its inventors. It was a well-machined tube that was something like a nautilus shell, encasing a series of chambers that ran its eight-inch length, each chamber leading to the next by a small orifice. The gases released by the shot emerged at supersonic speed from the muzzle but expanded into the surrounding tube, and raced, chamber to chamber, through the apparatus, so when they emerged at the end of the trip, they had lost most of their energy. The result could be measured in decibels by a sophisticated electronic device, but the number meant nothing. What mattered was that the blast of the rifle was reduced, not to the pfft! so beloved of the movies but a generic snap, like that of a door closing stoutly, not merely quiet but so diffused it was impossible to track. A small-arms genius somewhere in the Islamic State apparatus had machined a kind of linking device that united the rifle and the suppressor, which bore the name Gemtech.

  That appliance threaded and screwed tight, he reached back to the gun case, found a zipper denoting a pouch, unzipped. And removed three ten-round magazines with the Bulgarian yellow-tipped heavy ball. He left nothing to chance. Each of the thirty rounds was selected from a larger cache of them, all weighed and measured to exact sameness, each tested for runout and found to have come out of the manufacturing process with perfect circularity. No group of mass-produced cartridges could be more accurate. He laid two magazines under his right hand so they’d be easy to access. The third he placed into the magazine well, rotated it into the gun until
it clicked and was stable, then drew back the bolt and eased it forward, setting shell in chamber and firing pin at full cock. He was as ready as he could be.

  He tried to relax, letting his body settle, letting his lungs oxygenate, letting his heart still. The moral aspects of that which he was about to do had been utterly replaced by the technical aspects. Before it was anything else, and after it was everything else, it was a pure shooting exercise, and he knew that Allah had put him on the planet to shoot infidels, he knew that his mission was blessed.

  He prayed himself toward the nullity of complete relaxation and concentration, where he wanted his mind to be. Praise be to Allah, the wise, the benevolent, the merciful. Praise be to He who watches over and favors His people so that they will always be under His protection no matter the ordeal. Praise be to the mission to which He has assigned me through his mullahs. Praise be to my training, my experience, my will, and my belief in Allah. Praise be to them all. And praise be that which is about to happen, and may its purpose be achieved.

  In that steadiness of incantation, which evened his breathing and sharpened his vision, which calmed his hands and his nerves, he passed the time, not knowing if it were an hour, a day, or even a month.

  When he opened his eyes and came back from the realm of prayer, it was light. A crisp day, still very early. Now and then, a sedan negotiated the street where he had concealed himself, usually a BMW or a Mercedes-Benz, but nobody was out for walks. The sky was clear and blue, though still blurred by the illumination of the rising sun. It had not yet cleared the small rise that had offered itself to him some two hundred and thirty-four meters down the road. From nowhere, it seemed, a woman and child had come from one of the great houses, she in bathrobe, he with a small briefcase, and stood at the curb. That meant it was time.

  Juba drew the rifle to him, squirmed again to find the necessary position, set arms and chest in the correct opposing angles for the appropriate lockup of tension throughout the body, flicked the PSO-1 on, and put his dominant eye squarely to the rubber cup that cushioned the eyepiece. He was rewarded with the world swollen by a factor of four and the glow of the reticle against the crest of the hill.

  He waited, not fighting the small tremble as the chevron responded to his own internal rhythms, the pulsing of his chest, the rogue twitches in his musculature, and watched as, slow, steady, dignified, the school bus rose over the crest, first its yellow roof, followed by its darkened windshield, behind which only the silhouette of the driver was visible, due to tunnel effect, against the opaque illumination from the rear escape door.

  It was like any school bus from the world over, a lengthy van, a cab with a truck’s snout, a flat windshield, the whole as aerodynamic as a brick. It was meant for slow, stolid transport of squirming treasure. It halted where it had to. The driver bent a bit to open the door, and he killed her.

  The bullet spalled the windshield, and she slumped, an ejected Dragon shell popped free off the action of the breech, the acrid tang of decades-old Bulgarian powder rose ambrosia-like against his nostrils, and he rotated slightly to the mother, who just stood there, crucified by shock. She may have acted on instinct to throw herself around her child, but Juba was faster by a fraction and shot her in the head, which disappeared in a spurt of plasma, just a thumb smudge against the pristine perfection of the day. The infidel child, standing there, also dumbfounded, was next, dispatched by a side entry, in the chest, his little body spasming, knocked back by the impact of the high-velocity heavy ball.

  Juba settled again on the windshield and saw some young hero had raced to the driver and was pulling at her. A shot, and he pulled no more. The children left inside, of course, panicked, filled the aisles in their desperation to escape, perfectly silhouetted by the illumination pouring through the rear door from the east, and he put the chevron to each squirming blur and brought it down. In time, the windshield was so occluded by bullet fractures that it became incapable of displaying detail. But movement was enough, and he shot until there was no movement, stopping at ten to switch magazines—ack, a cartridge had slid a quarter inch forward, and so he quickly pushed it back in line—ack again, his glove caught on the lip of the mag, so he quickly shook it off, forced the cartridge under the lip down with his thumb, snapped the box in with a dexterous aplomb, and came back to find a child had actually escaped and was heading toward tree cover. He was faster than she was.

  Seventeen rounds later, it was over. No more movement. Nothing.

  Praise be to Allah. Thanks be to Him for blessing my enterprise, for sanctifying my mission to completion, for rewarding my effort and virtue with success.

  8

  The black cube, sixth floor

  The present

  He looked at the crime scene pictures, or at least the ones taken outside the bus. Three bodies inert on pavement or curb. The bus windshield a smear of cracked glass, supernovas of fracture. Fragments glittered all over the bus’s hood and the street.

  He did not look at the shots from the interior of the bus. What was the point?

  “And you want to interview this guy?” he said. “See, if it was me—and what do I know, I’m just an Arkansas hick—I’d cut off his face and feed it to the pigs.”

  “Alas,” said Cohen, “we’re a little Jewish country. No pigs.”

  “Dogs, then,” said Swagger.

  “Commendable enthusiasm,” said Gold. “But Juba’s secrets are more important than his life. Who can he identify? What is he working on? Who gives him orders, who supplies the logistics, the egress and exit. Who’s in planning, who in execution, who is liaison? Which unknown state actors are influencing him? What has he heard of other operations? Perhaps most important, what is the source of their considerable funding?”

  “Do you have a photo of him? What about DNA? Without those, he could be anybody that looks like anybody else named Mohamed.”

  “No picture,” said Cohen. “No DNA. However, we have one good right-hand thumbprint. We believe it belongs to him, as it was taken from a shell casing found at the massacre. He would not allow anyone else to load his weapon. Prints don’t usually show up on weapons or ammunition, but this shell had a slight sheen of oil on it, and so it registered. Perhaps an error committed under the pressure of expediency.”

  “By the way, did the plan work? Did he stop the treaty?”

  “No, he didn’t. Your Agency people were very fleet of foot that day, and even before all the first responders were on scene, your president was on the phone to our prime minister, begging him not to let this thing get out of hand. So instead of a massacre-of-the-innocents sensation, we prevailed on our press corps—more obliging than yours—to report it as a shooting in a suburb. No casualty figures were released, no speeches were given, no funerals were open to press and television. The dead were mourned in private. Rumors went wild, of course, but there are always rumors. And in the end, your State Department got its deal, and everyone pretended the world was a little safer. We realize that it goes that way, sometimes. I concur with Cohen, for the first time, on this one. We are just a little Jewish country. What can we do?”

  “I vote for the dogs,” said Swagger. “Anyhow, now what? Do you have enough? If so, how fast can you move? Who needs to give the go code? Is it just this room, or do you have to go to politicians who will decide on a dozen factors you have no control over?”

  “No doubt other opinions will be sought.”

  “Meanwhile, a guy like this gets antsy. He knows how many people are interested in him. He knows no place is secure forever. Look at bin Laden. Thought he had it made in the shade until Santa and his reindeer dropped by on a midnight clear. I’m tight with some of those guys. Osama had so much SEAL lead in him, they didn’t even have to weight him down when they chucked him overboard. Juba knows that. He will be ready to jump. His go bag is packed.”

  “We are aware,” said Gold.

  “And we just
sit here?”

  “We do.”

  “Are you waiting for electronic intel? Have you zeroed that area and are scanning for clues?”

  “Yes, but it’s less illuminating than you might think.”

  “So what is happening? Or do you consider it rude to ask?”

  “Ask Cohen,” said Gold.

  “Mr. Cohen?”

  Cohen said nothing.

  “Cohen enjoys playing things out slowly. He gets more attention that way.”

  “Please, Mr. Cohen,” said Bob. “I’m seventy-two. I may die before you get it out, if you don’t hurry.”

  “Fair enough. The square mile containing the town of Iria in southern Syria has to be looked at not by us but by satellites. Ours is called TecSAR. It’s very modern, I’m told. Its product will be flashed back to this building and examined by experts. They will debate like rabbis. They will come up with what looks promising to them. Drones will be dispatched to follow up on the promising areas. Lower-level, longer overhead, more precise cameras. They will return, their film will be developed, and that will be examined by the same experts to see what is what.”

  “When will all this happen?” said Bob.

  “It happened yesterday,” said Cohen.

  * * *

  • • •

  It took a while for him to adjust his eyes. The room was dark, hushed, pristine, and without personality, full of cut-rate office furniture in the style of the ’50s, and so air-conditioned it was like a meat locker. Cohen and Gold and a more somber man, who said nothing, sat around the table, waiting patiently as Bob examined the twenty-by-twenty-inch sheaves of photo paper placed before him, sometimes using the jeweler’s loupe provided. He had trouble manipulating the awkwardly large sheets before him.