Game of Snipers Page 7

  “Sergeant Swagger,” he said. “I read the accounts of Sniper Team Romeo-Two-Bravo against the North Vietnamese Second Battalion, Third Shock Army, in the highlands outside Nha Trans in 1974. That was a hell of a fight. But you were twenty-six then. Now you’re seventy-two.”

  “The only thing I can’t do now that I did then is win at hopscotch. A weapon will equalize me out just fine.”

  “To be frank, I’d much rather go drinking with you, hear your stories and learn your lessons, than lead you into combat. But let me ask the fellows. We’re tight in battle, but I like democracy in the unit.”

  The young man turned, wandered off to where a dozen or so other guys were arrayed on the tarmac, all identical helmeted dogs of war. They gathered and talked, quietly and briefly, and finally Motter waved Bob over.

  “Welcome to the team, brother.”

  Men crowded, slapped him on the back. One guy kissed him. Names came at him, and he kept nodding as if able to remember them while answering “Bob, Bob.” Like the SEALs, 13 was clearly a first-name-only kind of outfit.

  “Too late for gear,” said Motter. “We’re airborne in three.” He turned. “You, sentry, over here please.”

  Swagger hadn’t even noticed air force security guards at the perimeter of the loading area. The fellow loped over.

  “Last-minute addition. Don’t have time to check an M4 out of the armory. Sergeant”—he looked closely at the name tag on the sentry’s Kevlar vest—“Sergeant Mappa, he needs your vest, your Uzi, and your ammo.”

  Such was the charisma of Motter that no resistance was offered. The sentry seemed pleased to play with the cool kids. Smiling, he stripped off his Kevlar and handed it over to Bob, who tossed his sport coat on the tarmac, pulled the vest tight over his polo shirt—helpfully, black—and clicked the links closed, feeling it tighten and solidify. Where the helmet came from, he never knew, but it more or less fit; strapped, it was reasonably secure. Someone handed him a piece of charcoal, and he rubbed it over his pale features, feeling the grit. Soon he was of the night. Finally, he took up the ancient submachine gun, and even though he’d never touched one, it felt so familiar, like he’d known it all his life, so iconic was it. Short, with an open bolt, its weight centralized in the grip, which housed the twenty-five-round 9mm magazine in an elbow joint, with another twenty-five-rounder hitched on, all under the density of a telescoping bolt, it felt solid and useful in his hands as he looped the sling around his neck. He seized the nearly perpendicular grip, conspicuously pronging his finger upward, far from the trigger, noting that the grip safety had been clearly taped flat, so there’d be no problem if he had to shoot fast and didn’t come up square on the grip.

  The sergeant pointed to a horizontal slide lever, labeled in Hebrew, over the trigger guard of the blocky little thing. He said, “First position, safety on. Second, single shot. Forward, bap-bap-bap!”

  Bob nodded. He knew their doctrine was chamber empty, and the guns didn’t go hot until they were safely on the ground, advancing toward the objective. Then, and only then, would the boys pull the bolt to get ready for the man dance. As policy, the Israel Defense Force didn’t want anyone jumping out of a chopper with a hot gun.

  The three choppers began to whine. Slowly at first, gathering momentum, quickly speeding to a blurred fury, their rotors sucked at the air, and the boys self-divided into squads to file aboard, six to a ship, Swagger being the seventh on the Command ship.

  “You’re on me,” said Motter, pulling him along.

  “Got it,” he said. He turned to the three Mossad wise men—stolid, two smoking, one not—but they simply witnessed the ritual in silence.

  “Let’s go to war, brother,” said Motter.

  * * *

  • • •

  Three dark birds hurtling over the dark landscape. Running hot, running low to avoid radar. The raiders were silent, knowing that when they hit the landing zone, it could turn tragic in a split second, and would definitely turn complex in two. That was the nature of the raid, and if you couldn’t handle it, you were in the wrong business. So each man smoked, prayed, dreamed of sex, wondered if the Tel Aviv Guardians would beat the Jerusalem Bobcats, then wished they’d told their dad how much they loved him or hated him, and told Sally Sue either to wait or to move on with her life. Each guy had his little thing.

  Up front, wedged into the hatch next to the inert but watchful Motter, Bob was pleased to note that the Israeli pilots wore FLIR goggles, so, to their eyes, the darkness ahead was illuminated. A good way to avoid telephone poles and other nasty possibilities. Didn’t have them in ’Nam, and too many good men went down in pointless wastage. The birds vectored north by northwest on a heading the pilots knew by memory, just as they knew the landforms and city features that marked the route until they passed from Israel into southern Syria, where it all went dark. The machine vibrated familiarly—it was, after all, a Sikorsky Black Hawk, a kind of Vietnam-era Huey on protein shakes—and Swagger knew, from a thousand flights in three tours, the whup-whup-whup of the rotor, the buzz of the engines, the octane scent of the fuel. But inside—bigger than the Huey but still the cabin of a combat chopper—it was dark except for the glow of somebody oxygenating the burning stub of his butt.

  Time elongated, but, at the same time, it contracted. Maybe it just couldn’t figure out what to do and decided to go away.

  Red light blinked.

  Motter—Gadi, by first name—spoke with the pilots into his throat mic in Hebrew, pulled his legs in, unstrapped himself. In the darkness of the craft, Bob sensed the boys doing the same: butts out, minds blank, throats cleared, goggles down, bolts checked, straps tested, tightness of Kevlar and mushroom observed, knives and grenades and flares at the ready, Glocks and aid kits prepped, relationship to God figured out. Bob duplicated their motions and found himself crouched in the doorway of an assault chopper about to land someplace interesting. He had no fear.

  The plan was easy enough, so simple as to almost be no plan at all. The birds down a hundred yards out at three points of the compass, the thirteen guys out, cocked, hot and fast, headed straight in. Classic L. Two elements hit frontally, from slightly different angles; a third sets up horizontal at the house’s rear, to take down any escapees. If they run, they have to be shot; if their hands go up, they’re gestured to their knees and flex-cuffed, and the op moves on. All three elements converge in one minute, each under a shield of fire from the other two. Gadi’s team would hit the door first, and Gadi would enter, followed by others, for house clearance. Swagger was not invited. His job was to wait at the door until all the rooms were cleared and then move in with a second team while a third team formed a perimeter facing the road to Iria, seven klicks away, its militia being the only Syrian force in the area. Job done, Juba either captured or dumped, the guys would take their prisoners back to the choppers and home to Tel Aviv for beer and cheeseburgers by dawn’s early light.

  Simple, but what had not been counted on was that whatever bad guy was on sentry was not asleep and certainly not overwhelmed by the arrival of 13. It was as if he knew it could happen at any moment. So before the birds touched down, fire lashed from the house, traced stitches of dust across the zone, threw the odd tracer blur through the air, and whanged off the fuselage. Instead of a quick walk to the target, it was advance by fire and movement at the quickstep.

  Swagger stayed close to Gadi, who pushed ahead. In keeping with doctrine, he kept his chamber virginal so that he wouldn’t stumble and kill three Israelis by clenching the trigger by instinct. Meanwhile, fire rose from three points on the upper floor of the house, but the shooters had no targets and could only enfilade the area. Their flashes documented them, however, and steadily any 13 guy who had a shot took it.

  War is hell, it is true, but to Swagger, his soul be damned or exalted, it was also cool. The exhilaration of rounds overhead and nearby, peeling through the air and leaving a vacu
um where they passed. Heat, light, noise, grit, dirt, adrenaline, energy long forgotten blossoming like an instantaneous orchid. Swagger raced into the melee, looking for someone to shoot. Hoochie Mama, ain’t the beer cold!

  Gadi went down. Swagger was on him.

  “Fuck,” the Israeli said. “Leg.”

  Swagger looked, saw, as usual, that God favors the bold, and that the wound was a through-and-through in the left calf. Not much blood, no spurt or gush. Just an ugly pucker in and an ugly pucker out.

  “You’ll be okay.”

  “Tell them to keep moving. They can’t get hung up here.”

  “What do I say . . . what’s the phrase?”

  “Well, it’s—”

  Two other men came and hovered, the three talking in Hebrew. One, a sergeant, stood and waved the boys forward. With no Gadi to be his sponsor, Swagger felt himself freed from obligation, and he moved fast as any of them on the house, heard a cry, which he knew had to be “Grenade out,” went flat as three large concussions ripped up dirt and debris and filled the air with dangerous stuff, but he was up. The fire volume rose, and everywhere in the brush fast smacks of dust displayed the random pecks of bullets as the defenders fired blindly at men they couldn’t see. He made it to the door and realized—Hello! Ding-dong! Eureka!—it’s time to go hot. He slid back the Uzi bolt, felt it lock, and he shoved the handle, at that point disengaged, forward. His thumb made certain the lever was pushed to full auto, and, last of all, he yanked on the folding stock, getting it to telescope out, and though it was no ergonomic masterpiece, it gave him something to lock between arm and rib cage. That done, he did an appraisal of the house. He was alone. He reached for a grenade, realized he had no grenades. He made ready to enter under his own full-auto cover, but then, out of the night, two more commandos showed. One had a frag in hand, nodded at Swagger, who nodded in reply and pulled back. The man tossed it. In an instant, it transformed into pure energy—lots of it.

  He waited a second for pieces of stuff to cease whirling about what used to be a room, was the first to enter the boiling atmosphere, and when a figure emerged from another doorway across the space, he put six Uzi nines into him fast, melting him to the ground at light’s speed, feeling the jerk of mechanism, peripheral vision noting the spew of spent cases and smear of flash at the muzzle. Behind him, he heard men climbing steps to deal with upper-floor resistance, but his job was to push through to any sort of shop.

  He rushed ahead, found nobody else to shoot, came to a door, kicked it open to behold a shooter’s headquarters: targets on wall, components on shelves, heavy reloading bench, arbor press. A smashed laptop lay atop the bench, its screen a look-alike for Bonnie and Clyde’s windshield. A man crouched at the bench, struggling with a lighter while holding an opened eight-pound plastic jug whose label proclaimed Hodgdon H1000, a smokeless powder applicable to reloading cartridges. It was highly volatile.

  Bob thrust the Uzi muzzle at him, finger on trigger, but did not pull down.

  “No!” he screamed. “No!”

  Another commando was at his shoulder, rifle zeroed, also screaming, but more helpfully in Arabic.

  The lighter lit. The fighter laughed, showing white teeth.

  “Allahu Ak—!” he screamed and dropped it into the jug. If he expected a blast, he did not get it, for smokeless burns incredibly fast but does not explode. What he got, rather, was an instantaneous transformation of the universe, of which the central feature became the Devil’s blowtorch, which His Satanic Majesty had just ignited. All the mythic furies of lethal flame proclaimed the presence of that which melts everything in a fraction of a sliver of a fragment of an instant. The man himself was wardrobed in flame. The fire simply cloaked him alive, engulfing him to the atomic level, as all eight pounds of H1000 went. He was not a man on fire but a man of fire. Yet still, in the heart of the heart of the burning, he had some rational impulse left and spun backwards, where, in a corner, a collection of similar powder jugs had been stashed.

  The result was ten more satanic blowtorches so bright, it hurt to see. The world became flame. The commando grabbed Bob to pull him out, for clearly the room would be completely lost to fire in seconds, the house in a few more, but Bob pulled away, screaming in English, “I have to check it out.”

  Few men run into fire; he was one. Though he could feel his skin blistering, he shoved himself forward three or four feet, then five or six, yanked his goggles off for better vision and saw what he could see of the components above the bench before they were consumed by flame. He saw the green boxes of Sierra bullets, the yellow of Berger, the yellow-and-black of Swift, and others. He wasn’t close enough to grab one but had the impression, not clearly confirmed, that the calibration on all the boxes was .338s.

  Two or three subsequent cans of powder went, and their Devil’s breath spewed plumes in on him. He saw his sleeve was on fire, twisted, tried to find his way out in the flames, which were now general, and suddenly remembered the laptop. He twisted back against the wave of heat, and though each particle of skin was being clawed with hurt, he managed to reach out, snag the laptop with one grasp, and pull away. He stumbled a step or two, unfortunately gasped and took in some superheated atmosphere and lost another second to a racking cough. At that point, on one knee and in recovery from his hacking spasm, his eyes caught on a large gun case, steel, expensive, a wealthy sportsman’s piece of equipment, leaning against the far wall, buckling as the heat crunched it. Two of three initials engraved on the case in exquisite calligraphy six inches tall were briefly visible, and again he thought he registered them as A and W. Then they were gone.

  Fire propelled him to the door, and though it seemed to take hours, he reached it and spilled out. The room before him was empty, though beginning to ignite here and there too. He passed the entryway and felt the coolness of uncontaminated oxygen. Two men grabbed him and pulled him back to where the commandos had gathered and the fire’s heat was not lethal.

  “We thought we’d lost you, brother!” yelled Gadi.

  “Damned near,” said Bob, sprawling in an ecstasy of oxygen debt, sucking desperately for some air to inflate his life force. Someone took the laptop, someone else peeled the Uzi off his shoulder, and the Kevlar vest was sprung next. Cool water from a canteen gurgled in his throat, and he gulped it down. He was done for the night. Maybe for the year.

  “Medic!” yelled Gadi. “Get some salve on this arm.”

  He was quickly tended to. Gadi gave the signal, and the party fell back to the landing zone and popped red flares, even as the three birds broke orbit and swooped down. Swagger still had fire flaring in his mind, his left arm and left shoulder hurt badly, his night vision shot—perhaps forever—by his encounter with the big flame, and his mind wasn’t ticking properly. He turned back, saw the house now all gone to flame. Nothing left.

  The next thing he knew, men were pulling him aboard a chopper and flattening him out on the deck. A quick radio count was made and confirmed that all who’d landed were back aboard, and the birds roared airborne, 13 homeward-bound.

  11

  Southern Syria, in the wheat

  Juba watched. Three Black Hawks, expertly flown, as one expected of the Israelis. They did nothing poorly, they never quit or surrendered, their timing was exquisite. He hated these guys, but, damn them to the deepest chamber of Hell, they were good.

  The helicopters landed, their cargo of commandos disembarked, and the birds were airborne again in seconds and climbed and vanished to a holding pattern above the fight. The operators moved fast; the question was, how fast would his people react? He knew that battles turned in the split second between action and reaction. His fellows were the best, ex–Republican Guard Special Forces, and they didn’t let him down.

  The volume of fire rose quickly, and the night was speared by the blasts of grenades. From three hundred yards out, he could see the automatics opening up. His guards had no
t wasted time wondering what was happening but got straight to the guns. The Israelis would win, with surprise and firepower on their side, but how much data would they collect in the aftermath of the raid? The guards knew their duty: to serve Allah by holding off the assault long enough for someone to detonate the smokeless powder and leave no trace behind.

  It was close. A detonation came from within far too early, meaning that the commandos had gotten close enough to use grenades to room-clear and advance. Indeed, with his superb vision, he saw the figures of commandos scurry low through the doors, and now the gunfire came from within the dwelling as its assaulters closed in and flooded it.

  Adid, he thought. Adid, you swore to me you’d succeed. I trusted you. But maybe Adid had taken a bullet in the head on the first exchange, and all his zeal and drive and hatred of infidels hadn’t been enough to drive him to the final act.

  Adid, I pray to Allah that I have not sacrificed you for nothing. Be a martyr in the battle, you who have given so much over the years, you who—

  The powder went. Adid! Adid the Martyr had somehow, under the very eyes of the Israeli commandos, gotten it done. It was a bolt of incandescence, Allah’s lightning, that blew out the shopwindow, and it was followed a second later by another bolt—larger, faster, hungrier—that seemed to rip through the house, and everywhere it struck, it ignited, and in another few seconds the whole dwelling was in flames.

  Now, he thought, I must run. Suppose they hunt me with heat-seeking lenses and machine guns from the air. It would be so like them, for the Jew loved his gizmos, much more than a blade for stabbing or a scarf for strangling. It was evidence of their depravity.