He laid the M-16 aside and unsheathed Excalibur. After giving the sniper rifle a quick once-over, he brought the scope to his eye and touched the button to turn on the laser rangefinder. The numbers stopped scrolling when he clicked on the doorway of the woman’s house: exactly 680 yards. He jotted the figure on one of the logbooks’ green range sheets as the woman finished her sweeping and propped her broom against a side wall. He shifted his attention to the next building.
Someone cursed in Arabic and the two Zeus guards scrambled to their feet. A chubby little man in civilian clothes with an AK-47 slung across his back had emerged from a doorway and moved toward them, shouting that they were worthless pigs and gesturing at them to stand up. Kyle examined him closely.
They laughed at the young guards, then crossed the street to a cafe and disappeared inside through a front door shaded by a small cloth awning. Fifteen minutes later they came back out, carrying stacked boxes of food. Pudgy and Beanpole had not had time to have eaten at the little store, so they obviously were taking meals back to the house. Judging by the number of boxes, it was a hell of a lot more food than for just the two of them. Kyle’s interest had perked up by the appearance of the Arab fighters, and he sketched their house, did the ranges to the door and windows, and marked it as a probable target.
Beanpole came back out with a couple of the meal boxes and walked casually to another house nearby, where the door was closed and the curtains were drawn. He leaned toward the door, and his lips moved as he spoke to somebody inside. More than a minute passed before the door opened quickly and from the shadows, two arms reached out, grabbed the food, and vanished back inside. The door was shut again. Beanpole walked away, and Kyle saw the man’s lips moving, probably in a soft curse at the rudeness of whoever snatched the food. It had only been a momentary glance and at an awkward angle, but Swanson could have sworn that the skin of whoever took the food was light-colored, possibly even white.
He resumed studying each house in the village, taking time out periodically to check around his hide and make sure he was not under observation himself. Not having someone covering his back left him feeling naked and completely alone. Staying busy by building the range card kept his mind off his vulnerability.
Over the passing hours, the normal life of the village became his private reality television show, and he noted the times of all significant movement in the area, looking for patterns, sketching and lasering ranges to important aiming points. Seventy-forty-three to the major intersection. Six-twelve to the right edge of the restaurant. Left, right, and middle distances to suspicious houses. He mapped it all out systematically as time ticked by, and tried to commit as much as possible to memory. There was no such thing as too much information.
“Hasten to prayer!” The noon call of the muezzin surprised him because he had been so busy that hours had slipped away. Then he got an unexpected break. A group of armed men came from the house used by Pudgy and Beanpole. While most residents simply worshipped within their homes or workplaces, or went to the small mosque in the center of the village, these men wanted to make a public show of their fervent devotion. Each unrolled a small rug or a straw mat in the street, knelt, and performed the rituals of prayer. Kyle got an accurate head count: eight men, all with their weapons. Nobody had come from the other suspicious house, where the door remained closed.
Prayers done, two of the men repeated the breakfast run and went to the store for the group. A small, wiry man tagged along behind a large character with a square head and big shoulders.
Swanson turned over to rest. Seeing all those clowns down there made him start to think that he might have bitten off more than he could chew with this. He considered that the eight in the house were probably hard-core fighters, but how many else were down there? Enough to keep shifts of guards around the Zeus. Add whoever was in the mystery house. Round it off to at least a dozen, probably more. Clowns with guns could still shoot. He was strongly tempted to break radio silence and call for help.
It was not fear, for he was not afraid to die. He was just afraid to fail. But if he could get the general, it would take only a moment to light up his phone and get an air strike to take out the main group with a single smart bomb. He could pull Middleton out during the confusion and evade to a landing zone where a chopper could come in under air cover and pick them up. He almost convinced himself that was the way to go.
Then he weighed the down side. His people would be monitoring the cell phones of the members of the TRAP team to see if they had been put into use by the enemy. Using his own would announce his existence. The element of surprise would be gone, and the tactical situation would tilt back to favor the bad guys. Better that they continue to think he was a lone radio operator running for his life. Same thing with the pack radio he had taken from the dead Marine.
He rubbed water over his face to cool it. This whole deal smelled as rotten as a month-old banana. Those people down there had known exactly when, where, and how the Force Recon choppers would arrive, and that meant there was a leak somewhere. Not a leak. A flood! The person responsible had to be high enough up the food chain to have been trusted with details of the plan.
A call to alert the Marines that he was alive would risk that the traitor would also find out and block any new rescue attempt.
How high up the food chain was the leak? The mission had been put together in a hurry, but a lot of people knew about it, both civilian and military. But only one person had done something truly unusual: Gerald Buchanan, the man who wrote out in his own hand the order for Kyle to assassinate the general if things went haywire. Why even issue such an order unless he anticipated that something was going to go wrong? As far as the Marines were concerned, it was supposed to be a rather ordinary in-and-out mission with sufficient speed, troops, and firepower to get the job done. The commandant of Marines would never have approved such a plan. The President of the United States knew? Impossible. The man was a decorated veteran himself. The guy who came to the carrier, Shafer, was just the messenger boy. The circle led back to Buchanan.
He thought about why a man like Buchanan would betray his country, and then he considered what would be a suitable punishment. What would be worse for a deskbound political animal than having to spend the rest of his life cramped in a supermax cell in Colorado alongside big-league terrorists? A bullet in the ear would work, but Kyle felt Buchanan should be brought into public shame and disgrace. Like that Enron guy, he could always have a heart attack after being convicted. Swanson shook his head to clear the cobwebs. The whole thing was irrelevant and had nothing to do with his job at the moment.
He would trust Double-Oh to get that letter into the hands of the right people and that they would take care of the problem. Isn’t that what the FBI does? He was a sniper, not a cop, and all he could deal with at the moment was whether to make this fight all alone, or risk using the damned telephone. He was fucked either way. He would not make the call yet. Anonymity was his friend, and the best route, the only route, was straight ahead. He kept the sat phone and buried the pack radio. No use lugging it along, since it had only been taken as a diversion in the first place.
He rubbed his eyes, picked up the binos, and got back to sketching the village.
Boredom set in as the sun baked the town and the lone man watching it, but Swanson would not let himself fall asleep. There would be no more sleep until this job was done, for to sleep would be to yield awareness of the situation, and that could be the end of everything. He began arranging what he knew, planning his attack. He studied the little grocery, putting it on his mental list of places to visit after dark.
About four o’clock, a dirty white Toyota pickup truck came down the shady side of the main street with a throaty rumble and stopped in front of the suspicious place Kyle now called the House of White Hands. Although he had a beard, the driver was not an Arab, but he moved with the loose gait of someone comfortable in the surroundings. He wore lightweight slacks and a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt rolled up at the wrists, with
