Kill Zone

infiltrated and got these photos. Buchanan received the file from Gates himself. Now the boss wants somebody in this meeting to explain how a private company could do something we could not.”

“Good question.” Shari hesitated before accepting the folder. If these were the dead Marines, then she surely would see Kyle’s body. But she wanted to do it, for maybe photographic proof would finally erase any lingering hope that somehow the man she loved actually had survived.

“I’ve got to back up Buchanan during the meeting, so could you take a look at it and let us know if everything is in order? Brace yourself, because it’s awfully graphic, Shari, but you have the best eyes for detail of anyone at this table. We need to match up the Gates Global data with the names of those actually on the mission. The roster is in there.”

She nodded and put the folder in her lap, then looked around the table. So much power. The Vice-President. The Attorney General, the Secretary of State and several cabinet members, the American representative to the United Nations, and military leaders. Buchanan, quiet and arrogant, sat directly across the table from the President. Many considered him a peculiar hybrid of Henry Kissinger’s showboating, Colin Powell’s confident manner, and John Poindexter’s sneakiness, a man who placed himself above his position and somehow got other powerful people to recognize that self-created authority. Shari was part of his staff, but she wouldn’t trust Gerald Buchanan to paint a fencepost. It was impossible to ever determine what the man really wanted.

She tuned one ear to the conversation and reluctantly opened the folder, then snapped it closed again, her heart beating hard. The first photo was of a charred corpse, the skin of a blackened skull dried out and pulled back so tight by the heat that it was set into a horrible grin. Shari felt a nudge from Shafer, who whispered, “You okay?”

She nodded again, and listened for a few minutes to comments of the NSC principals. Buchanan railed about the Gates Global identifications, letting unspoken accusations of Pentagon incompetence hang in the air like invisible vultures. The Syrian government was outraged, but there had been no major troop movements. U.N. and SecState both believed the biggest danger now was a possible Syrian or Hezbollah missile strike against Israel for allowing the Americans to fly through Israeli airspace. The Israelis were saying they would respond to any rocket attack. Shari tuned them out. The eternal Middle East waltz. So what’s new?

With a deep breath, she turned her attention to the folder again and steeled herself against the ghastly images. The names of the dead Marines were on a separate page that she removed, and found “Swanson, Kyle M., Gunnery Sergeant” listed close to the alphabetical bottom. An asterisk beside the name of “McDowell, Harold H., Lance Corporal,” indicated that he was missing.

She turned the pages slowly, one by one. Each photo had the matching dog tag image superimposed in the lower left-hand corner. Shari mentally checked off the names against the complete flight manifest. The names were seared into her brain. Three-quarters of the way through, she paused, knowing the next photo in alphabetical order would be that of Kyle. She bit her lower lip and turned to the picture, keeping her mental defenses firm and letting her analyst training guide her eyes and thoughts.

Her fingers grew white with a tight grip at the sight of the broken and burned body. No facial identification was possible because of the fire, but the size and shape of the torso seemed about right for Kyle’s dimensions. She felt wetness at the edges of her eyes as she studied the picture, read the dog tag, and examined the photo in detail. Something isn’t right. The dog tags were authentic and accurate, but an anomaly she could not pinpoint chewed at her. Instead of looking at the grisly picture as an entirety, she studied it a square inch at a time. Left to right. Top to bottom. Shadows and light. Pixels. Uniform and flesh. A dead Marine. A destroyed human body. There! She stared in disbelief, trying to persuade herself that she was wrong while knowing she was not.

“Oh my God!” she whispered loud enough for Shafer to hear. The folder spilled from her lap and onto the carpeted floor of the Situation Room as she grabbed the single picture with both hands and stared at it. Buchanan spun in his chair and gave her an angry stare as the most powerful people in the United States government turned to watch her gather the papers.

“Sorry,” she said, shuffling the papers and photos back into the folder. Using every ounce of her considerable willpower, she sat motionless through the rest of the meeting, letting her mind work the problem. A slight smile played over her lips and a new brightness shone in her eyes.

CHAPTER 33

KYLE SNAPPED BACK INTO consciousness, flat on his back. He took a deep breath, surprised that he wasn’t dead. The air he pulled into his lungs was fresh and cool and reviving, and he lay still as his brain stitched together wisps of memories about what the hell had just happened. Being right-handed saved his life.

The brief, deadly confrontation was nothing but a quick-draw contest. The guard had been holding the stock of the AK-47, but not with his finger on the trigger, and hesitated for a heartbeat before trying to bring it to bear on Swanson. Professionals do not hesitate, and Kyle put the barrel of his pistol right against the man’s eye and double-tapped him. Two big bullets at point-blank range totally destroyed the head.

Swanson roamed his hands across his own body and felt no pain, no wounds. The gore covering his face and chest was the blood, brains, and bone fragments of the other man, whose skull had exploded, and the unexpected concussion had scrambled Kyle’s senses for a few seconds. He pushed onto his elbows and wiped his face. The guard lay dead at his feet.

Where are the others? The whole village had to be awakened by those explosions! He grabbed the pistol that had fallen by his side while his befuddled mind realized the guard had not shouted, had not fired his rifle, and Kyle’s own silenced pistol had spoken with only two burps, quick and quiet except for the weapon recycling. There had been no detonations at all, and the great sounds he imagined that had been heard by everyone were only his gun firing almost next to his ear. He and the guard had both fallen where they stood, but everyone else slept on. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and poured water from a canteen over his face for a quick cleaning while he caught his breath.

Enough of this recovering shit! Get back to work! The inner voice, immune from physical hurt, was pissed, and the minutes were slipping by like desert sand.

The shadow of the house loomed like a big castle, and Swanson dropped the pack and stuffed eight blocks of C-4 into his pockets. He had guessed right back at the helicopter crash by topping off with C-4. Before the night was over, he would need a lot of explosives to help him survive.

He found a handful of pencil-thin detonators that had small timers like a digital watch and spent a moment activating them all to blow at exactly the same time. He needed at least an hour, with extra time for unforeseen circumstances, but he wanted to keep as much darkness as possible to help his escape. He set all of the timers to go off at exactly 0300.

He attached the first of the six-inch-long blocks of gummy explosive to the corner of the house where he had had the shootout, pushing the clay tight, like a kid playing with Silly Putty, and sticking in two of the detonators, just to be sure. The second block was placed just below the single window on the left side of the house, and he repeated the pattern all the way around until C-4 was in place on each corner and in the middle of each wall, all molded to force the explosions inward. The detonators blinked silently, and Kyle was sweating hard by the time he was finished, drops of water falling into his eyes. He struggled back into his pack, gathered his weapons, and stole enough laundry from the clothesline to outfit himself and the general.

This was going to be overkill. The simultaneous explosions would destroy the supports of the house and collapse it on the sleeping men, then the surrounding outer wall would bounce the concussion wave right back toward the house instead of letting the blast effect roll away. It was time-consuming, but the house was the roost of his biggest source of potential opposition, the jihadists, and to wipe them out in a single attack was worth the risk of time.

It would also be a hell of a diversion, and Swanson had to be gone before the place lit up like a space shuttle launch.

It had taken him another eight minutes to plant the C-4, and he was at the wall at 0153. That left only another hour and seven minutes to do what he had to do and get the hell out of Dodge, including the ten minutes he had