Kill Zone

“Did you know we were on the wrong side of the border?” They heard the buzz of the approaching choppers, and Swanson popped a smoke grenade to signal their location.

“I was always lousy at map-reading,” Swanson grinned. “That bastard needed killing and now he’s dead. That was the job. Fuck the border.”

CHAPTER 1

THE BOATMAN STOOD WAITING in the cold fog, a ragged apparition resting against a long oar that disappeared into the black water. He smelled of death, and his robe pulsed in the stiff wind. “Do you have another one?”

“No. Not this time.” Kyle Swanson recognized the five silent passengers seated in the low craft, for he had brought them all here, one by one. They stared at nothing, with empty and lifeless eyes, and did not know him.

“Then I still have an empty seat,” said the Boatman. “Will you furnish someone else soon?”

“I don’t know. Probably. Maybe not.” Over the Boatman’s shoulder, he saw tongues of fire raging along the far shore.

“No.”

The spectral figure shook its head and exhaled a foul odor. “I cannot leave with an empty seat.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Swanson looked about, but there was no one else around. He carefully put down his fully loaded M40A1 sniper rifle, unsnapped the web gear, and let the pack fall away. He took off blocks of C-4 explosive and tossed them aside. Two razor-sharp knives, gleaming blades streaked with blood. A silenced 9 mm pistol. A sawed-off shotgun. An M-16 and an AK-47 and a Claymore mine and its clacker. Smoke, fragmentation, and thermite grenades. A small satellite radio. All the tools of the sniper’s trade. He wanted to hold on to something. “Can I keep my boots?”

“You will have no need for boots, but it does not matter.”

“They’re comfortable. I just got them broken in good.”

“Keep them.” A favor. Bare, cracked teeth showed in the skull. The Boatman usually had little to say, but he and Kyle Swanson had known each other for a very long time.

Swanson took off his boonie cover and put it on top of the stack, tucking it so that the eagle, globe, and anchor emblem of the United States Marine Corps remained visible. Then he removed the plastic- laminated photograph of a beautiful young woman with dark hair and eyes, kissed it, and placed it on the pile.

“Is there anything else?”

“No.”

“Very well.” The Boatman extended a long, bony hand. Swanson grabbed it for support as he stepped aboard and took a seat among his latest five kills. Ali bin Assam, looking gray and with a big hole through him, was beside him.

Swanson felt the small vessel rock gently as the Boatman shoved off, pushing hard on the oar to begin the passage across that black river to whatever was over there where the flames danced along a brimstone beach.

At least I still have my boots, he thought. At least I still have my soul.

Then the hand grabbed his shoulder.

CHAPTER 2

KYLE! LET’S GO, LAD. Time to do some shooting.” Sir Geoffrey Corn well pushed gently on Swanson’s shoulder, awakening him with a start. As a former colonel in the British Special Air Services, Jeff understood that warriors sometimes have dreams, and his keen gray eyes beneath bushy brows studied the sniper, who had been twitching in his sleep.

Swanson blinked in the bright sunshine that made the Aegean Sea glow like burnished copper. The boat was rocking gently, but this was not a death cruise. The fucking Boatman didn’t get him this time. Instead, he was safe aboard the Vagabond, one of Jeff’s favorite toys. One hundred and eighty feet long and twenty-nine feet wide, the yacht was as sleek as a needle and carried five luxurious cabins and a crew of eleven, plus a full-time captain. A pair of 3,240-horsepower engines thrummed quietly somewhere below the polished teak decks.

Swanson yawned. “Okay,” he said. “Let me wash up and grab something wet to drink and I’ll be ready.” His mouth was dry. “Go tend your flock. Five minutes.” Jeff smiled and slapped him on the back and returned into the air-conditioned main cabin where three venture capital money men, two Americans and one Brit, were having drinks, and resumed promising them an opportunity to buy into a river of gold. When Jeff retired from the SAS, he had made a quick fortune as a consultant to defense industries, then raked together an even bigger pile of money by designing, producing, and selling high-tech weapons on his own. At the age of sixty, he had a knighthood for his outstanding, although undisclosed, services to the Empire, a Bill Gates-size checkbook, and better hair than Donald Trump.

Kyle Swanson got up, stretched, adjusted his bathing suit, and walked to the hot tub area.

Jeff’s wife, Lady Patricia, was in a lounge chair. She wore a big white straw hat that provided a circle of shade that protected her face. She was drinking neat whiskey and smoking a thin cigar as she read a Danielle Steel novel. Her shimmering blue one-piece bathing suit was covered by a gauzy wrap. Lady Pat had put up with being a military wife for years and now openly enjoyed the good life. In Kyle’s opinion, she had earned it.

The venture capitalists had brought along the eye candy for the week of cruising among the Greek islands, their stunningly beautiful young trophy wives, who had been topless almost since the yacht left Naples two days ago. Now they lay bronzing on large towels beside the pool, toasting magnificent plastic breasts that gleamed with oil. Kyle wondered if there was a factory somewhere with an assembly line that stamped out these kids for rich old farts.

He sat on the edge of the hot tub, stuck his feet in the warm water, and nodded in their direction. “You ought to do that,” he told his girlfriend, Lieutenant Commander Shari Towne. “You know, take off your top for a while. Looks comfortable.”

“No,” she said, protectively adjusting the top of her red bikini.

“You’re already way out of uniform, ma’am.” Her long black hair lay wet against her dark shoulders, and just looking into her black eyes made his stomach do flips, because he considered Shari to be the most delectable intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy. She had been born in Jordan to an American father and a Jordanian mother, both of whom worked for their respective governments. Shari was only six years old when her father, a young diplomat based in Amman with the State Department, was killed in a plane crash. Her mother was a public relations and tourism specialist and worked at embassy postings in Cairo, Paris, and Tokyo before her current assignment as head of the public relations department for the Jordanian Embassy in Washington.

Shari was fluent in several languages by the time she entered George Washington University and accepted a U.S. Navy commission upon graduation. It did not take long for her to land in Naval Intelligence, where, after compiling a sterling record, she was snapped up to be an analyst for the National Security Council. Her office was only a desk in a basement cubicle, but the address was still the best in town, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: the White House.

“Go away,” Shari told Kyle, closing her eyes and leaning against the high-pressure jets that churned the water into frothy bubbles around her. She lifted her face to the sun.

“Hey,” Swanson argued. “Your boobs are real! We ought to show them off.”

“We? You don’t get a vote on that. You want tits, go over there and ogle the