Every sniper has his own way of adjusting.
Kyle told his shooters when they were in training, “We have to be peculiar, or we wouldn’t be snipers in the first place. None of us do what we have to do simply because we enjoy killing people. That would be crazy.” Some, the lucky ones, would just get drunk and wash away the images with beer and whiskey. Nightmares and divorces were common. Others would be gripped by unreasoning anger and fight whoever came along and end up in the brig. Kyle’s own habit was to shake and bake a little bit and be done with it.
Middleton just squatted there beside him, mystified at the quaking Marine sniper. He had invaded Kyle Swanson’s private world uninvited, and after a minute he rose and walked back into the sunshine and left Swanson alone.
Neither of them forgot the incident. Then Middleton saw him do it again after a brawl in Somalia, by which time Swanson was a staff sergeant and Middleton had risen to light colonel. Middleton considered the continued strange behavior to be important and gave Kyle a negative evaluation report. “Shaky,” he wrote of Swanson in an evaluation report, by which he meant undependable, unworthy, and unreliable. He recommended that Swanson undergo psychiatric evaluation and be retired from the Marine Corps because he was a walking time bomb. Who in their right mind would want a shaky sniper around?
Kyle had come within an inch of being ruined until other officers and senior enlisted types jumped to his defense and forced the potentially career-ending piece of paper to be withdrawn. But the term “shaky” leaked out and his fellow snipers loved it, for they gave no quarter in busting balls. “Shake” stuck, an unwanted nickname.
As he watched the news report aboard the
Personally, the moment also made him proud to be an American, because he knew the United States had a firm policy of never bargaining with terrorists. Well, almost never. So there would be no deals made to get the general back. Kyle believed that the unwritten rule book on international terrorism was very clear on that point.
Therefore, now that terrorists actually had taken Middleton, Kyle reasoned that they had to keep him. That was just fine with the sniper.
CHAPTER 12
TWO OLD MEN LEANED UPON the railing of the bridge on which the Boulevard de la Gare crossed the Seine. Clouds had rolled in to chase the sun and a chilly afternoon breeze swept up the river, warning of coming rain. Sweaters protected their shoulders. Automobiles swarmed behind them on the roadway, and trains clattered into and out of the Gare de Lyon and the Gare d’Austerlitz stations on either side of the river. It would have been impossible for either to have been followed by someone without being seen, and the noise drowned out their soft voices.
They had been competitors, enemies, partners, allies, and opposing spies in their younger years. After retirement, both stayed in Paris and a friendship followed. It was enjoyable to pass the time talking about the good old days of the Cold War over cups of hot cafe, particularly since they could now laugh at the absurdity of six decades of spying for the United States and France.
Buzz Higbee had grown up in the Minnesota woods and could have returned to the U.S. of A., but found the thought of retiring to a cabin beside a lonely lake that was frozen half the year to be unattractive. He had lived most of his adult life in Paris, and his wife, children, and grandchildren were all French. Minnesota had become the foreign land. He was a healthy eighty-two years old, with white hair, weak blue eyes, high blood pressure, and a hearing aid.
Higbee had ventured out today to meet Jean-Paul Delmas, who was only eighty. Delmas walked with the help of a cane, but his intellect remained sharp and since his spy days he had devoted himself to an extensive collection of rare stamps. Buzz called him “the Kid.”
“This is rather delicate,” Delmas told Higbee.
“
“It is true. But I was quite pleased when your people in Washington changed the name of French Fries to Freedom Fries. What awful things you Americans have done to food.”
“I’m glad that we were able to please the republic in our own little way, Kid, but that was bullshit and anyway, they changed the name back. You eat them, too, but with a Frenchified name.
“Entirely different.”
“Same thing. Now why are two over-the-hill spooks like us meeting clandestinely? Everybody knows who we are, what we were, and that we hang out together. My landlady calls me the ‘old American spy who lives upstairs in 2B.’”
Delmas laughed and looked down at the fast-moving dark water. “Which is why we have such excellent cover, no? No one would suspect that we had any worthwhile missions left in us.”
“They may be right. How are you doing?” Higbee knew that Delmas had undergone chemotherapy for lung cancer.
“It may be coming back.”
“Jesus. Sorry to hear that, my friend.”
Delmas shrugged. “Life. Death.” His wife had died twelve years ago, and the way he spoke those words showed that he no longer cared about living or dying, and probably would choose death if it meant a chance to reunite with his love. He turned in a circle, as if watching a passing pigeon, but checking to be sure no one was loitering nearby. “I have been asked to give you something to relay to your former masters at Langley. My people wanted to keep this affair as back-channel as possible, and nothing can possibly be any more back-channel than you and me.”
Even when governments are locked in extreme disagreements over international policy, sometimes even while at war, their intelligence services maintain unofficial contacts. Such was the case with the current strain between Paris and Washington. The French could not afford to be seen as helping the Americans in the Middle East, so passing an urgent and sensitive message was better done through very unofficial means.
Buzz put on his CIA game face for the first time in many years. It felt good. Jean-Paul had been an agent with Le Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE) back in the dirty days of Algeria, and since 1982 with its successor, the Directorate of External Security. He was retired over his protests.
A crash of thunder rolled over the city, and raindrops began to fall from the churning, slate gray sky, speckling the bridge. In unison, they raised black umbrellas.
“It is your missing general. You heard about him? This Middleton?”
“Been all over the television. Yeah. What about him?”
“As you know, we depend heavily upon human intelligence sources, where you Americans rely more on technology. We don’t have your capability in that field, but we have been growing agents in Africa and the Middle East for better than a century.”
“Tell me about it. If somebody was about to fuck a sheep in Algiers, you knew about it before the sheep did.” They both laughed. The rain fell steadily, lightly.
“Buzz, the Directorate has been contacted by one of our people, a former soldier in the Foreign Legion. He now lives in southern Syria, travels all around the area for us, and he saw your general being taken into a house in a village called Sa’ahn. The general appeared unconscious, but our man recognized that distinctive Marine uniform.”
“Whoa, partner. You have a man on the fucking scene?”
Jean-Paul reached into the pocket of his sweater and pulled out an envelope. “
