Unconscious, she sagged against him. He slid off the examination table, keeping a grip on her so that she wouldn’t fall. His knees buckled, but by force of will he remained standing.
He hoisted her onto the table. She would regain consciousness in seconds. The marines who had brought him here would return sooner.
There was simply no time for infirmity.
He took the white blanket from the foot of the examination table and cast it over her. The marines would mistake her for him, at least for a few seconds.
He crouched behind the crash cart, the portable trolley with the dimensions of a floor safe. It contained all equipment and medication required for cardiopulmonary emergencies, and he would need one of the meds momentarily. In the shorter term, the cart would hide him. He rotated it so that its drawers faced him.
Sergeant King entered at a jog. On seeing the fully covered body on the examination table, he froze. “Damn it,” he said to himself.
Hidden by the portion of the blanket hanging from the examination table, Drummond slowly opened the crash cart’s drawers fractions of an inch at a time, searching for succinylcholine, the swift-acting neuromuscular blocker used to facilitate endotracheal intubation. Drummond intended to use a small dose of the drug to temporarily paralyze King.
The sergeant wandered toward the table. “Ginny?” he asked at a whisper, as if worried about disturbing the corpse. “Where’d you go?”
Drummond found three pencil-sized preloaded succinylcholine syringes, each packing an eighteen-gauge needle.
Warily, King peeled the blanket from the head of the examination table. He recoiled, drawing his gun and shouting, “Flint!”
Drummond reached beneath the table and slung the needle sidearm into King’s calf. The sergeant looked down in mystification-he probably felt no more pain than if he’d been stung by an insect. Drummond sprang, hitting the floor on a roll, then reached and tapped the plunger, driving succinylcholine into King’s muscle.
King twisted away with such force that the needle jerked free and flew across the infirmary. It struck a cabinet on the far wall, lodging there like a dart.
Flint ran in, gun drawn. King pointed, superfluously, to Drummond, then crumpled to the floor, where he lay, unmoving.
Glad of the diversion, Drummond dove back behind the crash cart.
Flint pivoted on his heels, firing. Strips of linoleum slapped Drummond. The air clouded with sawdust that had been a chunk of the examination table.
From his knees, Drummond shoved the red cart at Flint.
The marine spun, shooting and ringing the face of it. The bullet exited through the uppermost drawer, whistling past Drummond’s ear, followed by a spray of glass and a milky white substance that smelled of alcohol.
Pushing the cart ahead of himself, Drummond picked up the gun King had dropped.
Another bullet pounded into the cart.
Drummond said, “I have a clean shot at you, son. Neither of us wants me to take it. So, slowly, set your sidearm down on the floor and kick it toward me.”
“Mr. Clark, sir, there is no chance whatsoever that you can get out of here, so-”
Drummond fired, aiming to Flint’s right. The wall a few inches from Flint’s right ear exploded into plaster dust. The man dropped to the floor.
Drummond tracked him through the gunsight. “We’re making progress. Now, all you have to do is surrender your weapon.”
Ashen, independent of the haze of plaster dust, the marine complied.
As Drummond reached for the weapon, something hard slammed into the back of his head. He fell against the crash cart, toppling it. As he hit the floor, he saw the metal bed rail swung like a cricket bat by Genevieve.
Meanwhile the crash cart’s five metal drawers dropped open and pounded him, the sharp corner of one ripping through his shirt and slicing into his chest. All manner of medical supplies rained onto him.
He implored himself to maintain focus; he had one last play in mind.
White light devoured his consciousness.
52
Snipers aim for the “apricot,” better known as the medulla oblongata, the part of the brainstem that controls the heart and lungs. To reach Charlie Clark’s, Gretchen Lanier needed to fire from the barely opened window of the third-floor hotel room, across and through more than three hundred yards of parkland, and into the barred detention rooms.
If only every job were so simple, she thought. A year ago in Afghanistan, she’d recorded a kill from 2,267 yards away, or 1.29 miles, on icy and mountainous terrain.
She dropped to a kneeling position at the foot of the bed. In her year and a half of sniper school, her instructors had placed almost as much emphasis on proficiency in camouflage and concealment as on marksmanship. More often than not it involved wearing a ghillie suit in order to pass for a bush or clump of weeds. Tonight’s camo involved surrounding the rifle with a well-placed pillow and the blankets bunched just so. Wrapping the comforter over the works simulated a person lying in the bed she and Stanley had rolled against the window.
She needed to accurately estimate and balance the many components in a bullet’s trajectory and point of impact. Range was simplest. From this relative proximity, she would have zero difficulty placing the red laser dot smack on the base of Charlie’s head. But if she made a mistake in calculating the effects of wind direction or velocity, among other factors, the round might fly several feet wide of Charlie and bore instead through the far wall of the detention room, possibly taking out the marine guard stationed on the other side.
Shooting at a downward angle also complicated matters. Gravity could wreak havoc on a shot traveling three thousand feet per second. Fortunately, the wind was almost nil, the conditions otherwise were practically ideal, and sniping technology had advanced at a head-spinning rate lately: The ballistic calculator in Lanier’s telescopic sight- and this was an el cheapo telescopic sight available in a Caribbean version of a hick gun shop-all but offered a glimpse at the future in the form of an animated preview of the shot.
She leaned into the stock’s cheek-piece and squinted against the cold scope to find not a view of an impromptu detention room, as she’d expected, but the profile of a young man with sandy blond hair. Charlie Clark, no doubt about it. The back of his head was centered almost exactly within the crosshairs.
She half expected him to turn around, feeling her eyes upon him.
He stood still, an ear pressed against the door, as if trying to hear through it.
She disengaged her conscience. The target became a piece of paper with concentric circles around a bull’s- eye rather than a human being with loved ones who would suffer from his loss.
Rather than draw attention with the laser range finder, she used the mil dot reticle in the scope-a sort of electronic slide rule-to find the range. 194.8 meters, or, as she thought of it, nothing.
Anticipating the target’s behavior was integral to a precise shot. With moving targets, the point of aim was ahead of the target, the distance depending on his speed and angular movement. A stationary target like this was the sniper’s version of a three-inch putt.
Lanier zeroed the scope, then looked over her shoulder at Stanley, who sat in an executive-style simulated- leather desk chair with a gash in the back.
“How’re things in the Sound Department?” she asked. He tapped nine digits on his BlackBerry. “Just waiting on your cue now.”
When she pulled the trigger, he would dial a tenth number, sending a radio signal to detonate a C-4 shaped charge not much larger than a Tic Tac. She’d stuck it to a transformer hanging within easy reach of the roof. The blast would obscure the thunderous report of the M40. The simpler solution, a suppressor, would skew her shot. When possible, she opted for loud sounds heard in the environment, exploding artillery shells in an Afghanistani
