“Somebody survived that mess,” he told Jimbo as they returned to the village and their satellite radio. “We got a runner.”
CHAPTER 22
HE HATED NOISE. KYLE SWANSON valued silence, for stealth was his cloak of protective comfort. On a wide battlefield, there was so much racket in a raging shootout of tank cannons, masses of small arms, machine guns, grenades, and artillery that soldiers talked in shouts for a week afterward, long after the fighting stopped. As a sniper, he preferred to be far from that chaos, out on his own, where making sounds could spell doom. Swanson was the ghost at the party, able to move unseen and unheard. Noise weakened snipers and made them vulnerable, almost like normal human beings. The only noise he liked to hear in combat was the single
So although the dirt bike had a silenced muffler, the steady throbs of the engine still reverberated in the desert night. Kyle believed any fool with ears could hear him. Combined with the coming dawn, that would leave him exposed and vulnerable. He weaved slowly, deliberately along the pavement, steering through patches of loose gravel normally avoided by motorcyclists because bikes have a tendency to skid. A mistake could dump him in a heartbeat, but he wanted those tracks to be found.
His mind was also busy on another level, thinking about possible places where he might hunker down for the day, when people would be everywhere. Being caught near a population center, even a small village like this one, was never good, plus people were probably going to be out searching for him when they figured out someone had lived through the crash. The flare of a match straight ahead snapped him back to reality.
Someone had lit a cigarette. Swanson took his hand from the throttle and coasted the motorcycle to a halt. He turned off the engine and sat balanced on the dirt bike with a boot down on each side. Focusing his night-vision goggles, he saw two men about two hundred meters ahead, a pair of careless Syrian soldiers at a road checkpoint. Both were watching the area where the helicopters went down instead of paying attention to their jobs.
Kyle laid the bike down along the hardball highway and carefully dropped his gear, except for the M-16 and a couple of hand grenades. On his arms and knees, he low-crawled until he was within twenty feet of the guards. They were cooking something in the guard shack. Smelled like rice and lamb. The guards were jabbering like tourists about the crash and had stacked their rifles against a wall when they climbed onto the flat roof of the shack for a better view. Controlling his breathing, Kyle circled behind them, moved in close, rose to a sitting position against the wall, and pulled the pin on a hand grenade. He let the spoon flip away, held it for a count of two, and then tossed it onto the roof and sprawled to the ground next to the structure.
The explosion blew both of them from their perch, and Kyle quickly checked the bodies, which were riddled with shrapnel. Not good enough. The people back at the crash site were more than a mile away and probably would not have heard this small explosion, so he had to leave enough information to convince whoever eventually investigated the deaths that the work was sloppy enough to have been done by a rookie Marine. A young radioman would have done the easiest thing available and smashed right through the checkpoint, using the basic weapons at hand, in his haste to escape. Kyle wanted to leave this scene as American as possible. He clicked his M-16 to full automatic and raked an entire magazine of bullets across the chests and stomachs of the dead men, and the bullets dug through the bodies and into the hardpan pavement beneath them. Shiny brass cartridges flipped and bounced wildly everywhere. He walked in the sand to leave bootprints. Window dressing. He could easily have taken them both out with Excalibur, or up close with his knife, but this was a stage show. As a final touch, he ducked inside the small bunker and gobbled down some of the meal the men had been preparing. He was right. Spicy lamb and rice.
He reassembled his gear, remounted the bike, and rode past the checkpoint, spiking a piece of cloth torn from his camouflage uniform on the barbed wire. The track of the dirt bike then continued west, again toward the border.
A hundred meters later, he made sure he was on clean pavement, stopped the bike, got off, picked up the bike, and turned it around 180 degrees. Now he would disappear and leave no tracks at all. He pushed the motorcycle through the roadblock, past the dead men. Swanson propped the bike on the kickstand long enough to pull up some bushes and sweep away any prints that might give away his direction change, and then headed back toward the village.
When he entered the vicinity of the crash, people were milling around the wrecked choppers. Kyle knew that meant they might see him, too, but he knew human nature had them in a near frenzy. They were only looking for booty. A lone man in the distance was of no interest. Still, every moment he was out there was a risk because the first hot curve of the rising sun had crested the eastern horizon and painted the underside of the morning clouds in a sheet of shining gold. When Swanson was working, he hated the arrival of daylight as much as a vampire like Count Dracula, for he, too, was a creature of the night.
Swanson went off-road and skirted about a kilometer to the right of the scene, keeping low in the wadis to avoid being spotted. Within a mile, the country flattened again.
The village of Sa’ahn had the familiar, compact look of any other desert town he had ever seen, houses and shops that had grown up over the centuries around a water source. Rainfall in this section of Syria was adequate to feed fields of sugar beets that were bordered by tight patterns of apricot trees in the east. North of town, he could smell as well as see and hear the feed lots where sheep and goats were being fattened for market. Irrigated rows of ragged cotton were planted on the western side. Mount Druz dominated the land, and a carpet of desert stretched to all horizons.
The homes all looked alike, squat and square, with low walls that corralled the family’s chickens and goats. Drooping lines between poles carried telephone lines and delivered electricity from a dam about twenty miles away. One large building near the center appeared to be the town’s administrative center. Lights were on in a few windows of the private homes, brightening colorful small curtains of green and red, so people in those homes were already moving about. He had to hide.
Kyle stopped the bike about three hundred meters from the nearest building. He had run out of darkness and did not have time to bury the motorcycle, which he preferred to do. So he hid it in a deep wadi and covered it with bushes, hoping that the obscure location, the crude disguise of weeds, and the camo paint job would keep it hidden.
With the M-16 locked and loaded and his finger resting on the trigger housing, Swanson moved closer to the village until he found a forlorn and bare hillside that overlooked the approach road. A berm lined with thick brush rose like a dirty pimple near the top, and he ducked down to keep it between himself and the town. This was it.
He circled to the back side and dug a shallow trench straight up to the rim of the berm. The rising sun was already heating the dirt, and Kyle sweated the last few meters, but when he came up in the middle of the bushes, he had a clear view from the high ground.
Dumping his gear, he wiggled back down, gathered more brush from random spots in a radius of about twenty meters, and swept his tracks, then planted the foliage around his new hide until he was sure that it would look to a passersby like a single big bush. Time would slow down for him now, so he arranged things in his shady nook to get some rest. Real sleep was not an option, not alone in hostile territory, but he could allow himself a light doze, just under the edge of total awareness, with his hand always on a weapon.
As the sun cleared the horizon and full daylight arrived, he drank some water and took out the binocs again for a last look at the village before settling down. The homes, the goats, the women and children moving about. Normal tempo. Most of the men were probably still busy stripping the helos. He stopped his sweep with his glasses abruptly when he got to the area where the major road entered the town. Sandbags were stacked along a trench line, and just to his side of the road was another deep trench. AK-47 rifles were laid carelessly over its sandbags, and missile tubes leaned against the sides. Sticking out of a protected hole where the trenches came together were the snouts of the four barrels of a ZSU-23-4.
“Well, now, ain’t this a bitch?” he asked himself. “A Zeus, fighting holes with AKs, and lots of guys. We were flying into a fucking ambush.”
Kyle put away the glasses, took another drink of water, and let the adrenaline and excitement leave his body. He shifted his shoulders to get comfortable, laid the M-16 across his chest, and felt the heavy exhaustion from the
