interest and no resistance. The city was eerily quiet, but I would not allow myself to believe that the enemy had just run away, so I swept my scope across the rooftops and the roads and the windows of lines of apartment buildings.
After forty-five suspenseful minutes, Casey said that the battalion intel guys were reporting that a dark Mercedes carrying some Ba’ath Party officials was heading our way. Almost at the same moment, I saw the dark green Mercedes, containing three Iraqi men, move cautiously into my area, stopping and starting, almost as if the occupants were peeping around corners. Suspicious, yes, but a danger? The windows of the fine motorcar were rolled up, indicating these dudes were riding around in air-conditioned comfort. With the scope locked on, I could see that both passengers had AK-47s, and that was enough for me, so I adjusted for a high-angle shot. The Mercedes, although only 170 yards away, would be a tricky piece of work, since I was about eight stories above the target.
Shooting from such an angle makes a bullet hit below the point of aim, while shooting through glass will cause the bullet to rise. I had spent the idle time lasering ranges on various points in my zone and doing calculations in the gun book, and since snipers have formulas for everything, there was no real mystery to work out. I already had the dope figured and dialed it into the scope so the rifle would adjust the path of the bullet, which would change several times. This wasn’t skeet shooting.
I lined up on the rear window of the moving target as it headed north, then fired. The bullet crashed through the glass to smoke-check the guy in the backseat right between the shoulder blades, only four inches above my aim point. Not bad for a high-angle, glass-stressed shot on a moving target in a combat zone. The Mercedes accelerated out of the area with the passenger in the backseat slumped over dead.
Downstairs, the grunts were charging hard and fast into the warren of apartment buildings, shops, and homes, under the watch of curious, not hostile, Iraqi civilians. A civilian car turned a corner and braked to a hasty stop when the driver found himself looking down the big barrel of an Abrams tank cannon and a Humvee’s heavy machine gun. He shifted into reverse and sped away, and no one fired. We were pushing, but no one seemed to be pushing back, and the stillness of the battlefield bothered me.
At 10:20 A.M., I spotted a guy on a distant roof and lased the distance at 1,025 meters, almost three-quarters of a mile away. Being up high, I had a clear sight line on him and the AK-47 he held. He was an amateur sniper hunting Marines from a rooftop, so he had to go. I did not think for a moment about him being another human being with a family, and in fact didn’t really think about him as a person at all. He was a threat who had stepped into my world, and those would be the last steps he ever took. I calculated the wind to be about three minutes left, tweaked the scope, and brought the crosshairs to his belly, right about where his navel would be, so if my bullet drifted either up or down, there would still be plenty of target area. I fired and watched as the big bullet covered the distance in an instant and struck the soldier in his right chest with terrific force. The impact yanked him around in a pirouette; he dropped his weapon, fell over, and didn’t get up.
Casey scanned his binos back to our north, the area in which I had shot the Mercedes, and saw one of the CAAT teams in a fight. They had taken some fire from a large field alongside the road and had called in mortars to suppress the enemy and opened up with their own chattering machine gun. They were justified in returning fire, but there was no way they could have seen exactly who they were shooting at, and vehicles of all sorts fled the area.
The CAAT machine gun stopped immediately, and Casey watched with relief as women and children jumped from the van; then other civilians emerged from other cars, confused and scared, with their hands up. From his rooftop vantage point, from which he could see more than the guys on the ground, he had probably prevented a slaughter.
There were still threats in the area, and we had to be careful, not foolish. After another fifteen minutes of slow scope movement, I found a target, a uniformed soldier with an RPG launcher on his shoulder, in the third window from the left on the fourth floor of an apartment building. I checked my range card-exactly 427 yards northeast of our position. It was in Dino’s zone, but he didn’t have the angle, and I had a clean shot, so I killed the dude with a round dead center in his chest.
The battle was now advancing quickly through the streets, and it was time for us to move if we wanted to get out front. The India Company commander radioed that he could see a tall building a few miles away, which he believed to be a major hotel that towered over everything around it. “If we can get snipers up there, they should be able to see a long, long way,” he said. From my rooftop perch, I could see that it was too far away for us to reach anytime soon, but we had to find another position.
We took off down the stairs and emerged from the dark interior into a battle that was still going on around us. Dave Howell took two snipers and went to link up with the moving tactical headquarters, while Casey, the Panda, and I headed for another tall structure, accompanied by four other Marines who had joined us.
We broke into a large industrial structure that had huge locker rooms on each floor and headed for the top. It was seven stories tall, but when the Panda and I got up to the roof, we found it was worthless as an overview site. While downstairs, there was no way to know that bigger buildings nearby blocked all of the sight lines on the roof. “Shit,” I exclaimed. “We can’t stay here.”
Casey had lagged behind to establish rear security for us and was trying to make sense of a storm of radio traffic. The battalion was running into occasional hot spots, but there was no organized opposition truly worth the name. We met him about halfway up the stairs as we were running back down, and I yelled, “You took me to the wrong building, fucker!”
“What?” Casey replied incredulously. “This is the one we pointed to back at the other building. Jackass.” Not exactly proper military courtesy, but the exchange of information was perfect.
“No, it isn’t. This is the wrong one, so get me to the right one.” I was hot. Time was wasting.
“What the fuck are you talking about? There isn’t a better-looking place anywhere around here.” It was a moot point, because we were already leaving, running down the stairs and arguing as we went. We burst through the door yelling, “Coming out!” and the harsh Iraqi sun, well into the morning sky by now, slammed our eyes.
Marines were everywhere, pushing through a confusing battlefield. Our plan was falling apart because of the lack of resistance, but why argue with success? We caught up with McCoy, who was receiving piecemeal fragments of official orders and adjusting to those frags as the battalion surged like the undertow pulling along a beach and sweeping everything before it. He called in the flanking companies to orient the battalion toward a technical university and the headquarters of the Iraqi air force.
I had his attention for only a moment and asked, “Sir, the battle’s moving too fast, and our objectives are changing by the minute. Can you give me any idea of what’s up next? Where you want us to go?”
“I know, I know,” he replied, not even looking up as he studied his maps of downtown Baghdad and put his finger on one grid square. “We’re going to take out this air force headquarters compound… right here. Find yourself somewhere to support that attack.”
Casey marked the grids on his own map, and our Humvees raced through the tangled streets of the city, trying to get in front of our highballing mechanized battalion. Burning cars belched smoke, and the bodies of some dead dudes lay scattered about. To support the unfolding attack, we had to get into position before it was launched. That was the whole point of a mobile sniper team, but it meant driving headlong into the dangerous abyss of an urban environment.
The morning had been one of steady, small fights, and the intelligence officers thought the air force compound might be the first real stronghold of the day. Even as we whizzed through the streets, down canyons of uncleared Iraqi buildings with average citizens waving at us from windows, while we kept watch for the barrels of guns to appear from those same windows, Casey heard another call on the radio. The India Company commander wanted to know if his troops should proceed to a hotel that he had mentioned earlier. He was told to stand by, because that objective was not in our zone of operations.
We came up behind the air force compound, parked around a corner, and darted into an apartment building
