from it, clearly the command track. The turrets were open, but the gunners were at ease, bantering with the kids. Then the soldiers got out, their rifles hanging loosely, some squatting down to the children’s level. They came here often to rendezvous with other convoys before heading out on individual missions. Only two troopers took sentry positions, one at each end of the convoy. Iraqi adults stayed away, clustering in doorways or just going about their business.
The scope was on a small boy, about seven years old, with dark hair and a smiling face, all white teeth and dirt, who stood beside a kneeling American soldier, talking to him. The rifle stilled its movement. The boy turned enough for a back shot, and Juba pressed the trigger with four pounds of pressure. The snap of the gunshot was loud inside the hide but was barely heard on the outside, and the big bullet smashed hard into the child, knocking him in a bloody heap onto the American soldier, who grabbed the boy and fell atop him to shield him from further harm. He was already dead.
The moment of frozen realization that danger was upon them occurred when Juba squeezed the trigger the second time and brought down an American who had been smoking a cigarette, the bullet ramming through his armored vest and into his vital organs. The man staggered, a look of disbelief on his face, and fell.
Now came the chaos of children screaming, soldiers yelling and getting their weapons up, and the ugly Bushmaster cannon looking for somebody to shoot.
Now he wanted a good shot, a difficult shot, to put his seal on this attack, and he found it with the soldier who had made the mistake of grabbing a telephone handset from a radioman. The officer, calling in for help with this ambush. He was on his belly beside one of the Bradleys, peering out around the track, searching for the threat, just enough for Juba to see his eyes beneath his helmet. Easy, smooth trigger squeeze and the Steyr snapped again.
The firing began in his general direction, but there was no target. The bullets were just chewing dirt and rearranging rocks. The soldiers and the Bradleys would be on the move in seconds. Juba wrapped his rifle beneath his loose robe, tore away the old awning, and walked into the morning sun, down the alley and around the corner. No one was on the streets because of the sudden eruption of gunfire. He got into his car and drove away.
Fifteen minutes later, he was snuggled beneath some bushes that lined the top of a hard mud fence some four feet high at the edge of an irrigation ditch. He peered over the berm and saw the crossroads, which had become a beehive of activity as the Americans swept into the neighborhood he had just left. It was hard for them to keep their professionalism, for the murder of a child does something to the American psyche. Snipers have to know about emotions. They were after the shooter who killed the kid, and he was somewhere in that neighborhood. Even their new defense perimeter was oriented toward the original hide, the place of the perceived threat, and not toward his new location behind them.
He had a plain view of the medical personnel working frantically with the three victims, who were laid side by side, trying somehow to keep them alive long enough to get them back to the aid station at COB Baharia. Juba was not depending on luck now but on expected responses. Suppress the threat and evac the wounded. The troops were in the village, and no more shots had been fired, so a medevac chopper was coming in.
He heard it before he saw it. Then the helicopter zoomed in low toward the battle site, flared to a stop in the air, and settled to the ground, the rotor wash throwing up a blizzard of dirt. Red crosses were painted in large white squares on the green chopper. Mercy flight. Juba aimed.
Two soldiers picked up a stretcher that carried one of his earlier victims. A medic leaped from the helicopter to give them a hand, and Juba shot him in the stomach to tear out the liver and a kidney.
The Bushmaster gunner atop one of the Bradleys was facing toward the village, exposing his back. Juba put the scope on him and fired a bullet that hit center mass. The soldier threw his hands up on impact and fell straight down into the vehicle.
The medevac pilot had realized they were under attack and started winding up his bird for an emergency takeoff, but Juba had a clear view through the side window. Tight head shot. The pilot turned his head, and Juba, using the dark sunglasses as his aiming point, once again gently squeezed the trigger. The bullet crashed through the pilot’s helmet and destroyed his head. Immediately, the helicopter began to power down while the stunned copilot took command.
Juba ducked away behind the wall, carried his rifle back to the car, and quickly vanished into the streets again.
27
CAPTAIN NEWMAN HAD THE Trident team in a tight security perimeter while Kyle Swanson and Sybelle Summers probed through the sniper hide behind the mud wall like crime scene specialists on a TV show. As soon as the attack was reported to the base, orders rocketed back to hold in place, and an uneasy silence engulfed everything up to a mile away on every side. Extra troops were dispatched to bolster the available firepower, and the Trident team hustled in aboard a helicopter.
The mud-wall sniper’s hide was the closest to the landing zone, so they went there first. A trooper had marked the spot with a yellow cloth tied to a stick, and the slash of bright color was stark against the bland brown surroundings. Kyle went in from one side, Sybelle from the other end, looking for booby traps, but they found nothing. Some bushes had been crushed where the sniper had lain on them, and there was a crease in the wall on which he had braced the weapon. Three hefty.50 caliber brass cartridges were scattered off to the right of the position, flipped out by the weapon during the reloads.
“Excellent field of fire,” Sybelle said, looking over the wall to the bloody crossroads, still the center of activity.
“Particularly if you have the enemy looking the other way,” said Kyle, kneeling in the dirt to study the placement of the attacker’s body. He would have had a solid base and fired with an economy of movement. Swanson reached out and touched a dirty piece of cloth that was still in front of where the rifle muzzle had been. Wet, spread there to tamp down the dust, which otherwise would have been thrown up when the weapon fired and given away the position. A thorough pro, taking care of the little things. Boot prints led away from the wall, toes deeper than heels, indicating he was moving fast but not running. Those prints vanished at the small road almost hidden by the wall. A vehicle was waiting for him.
They all walked as a group across the action zone to a destroyed building that had been marked by another yellow flag, and Kyle and Sybelle again went into the sniper’s hide. The canvas curtain had been torn down, and three more.50 caliber brass cartridges blinked in the light. Sybelle turned them over in her fingers.
“Same as the others,” she said. “One punched clean through the armored vest. My guess is it’s an M8 armor- piercing incendiary. He was going for a big wallop.”
Swanson agreed. A velocity of 3,050 feet per second and a range of 6,470 yards. It was overkill to use such a weapon from only seven hundred meters. Was the shooter trying to prove a point? There was a makeshift rest for a rifle in the middle of the room, well back from the opening in the far wall. He went closer to the odd window and looked at the sparse vegetation that had been broken and singed by the muzzle blast.
Rick Newman came into the basement hide. “What do you think, Shake? Was it Juba?”
“No doubt,” Kyle replied. “He left his shell casings behind, which he does as sort of a signature. Then, this double ambush was the work of a single professional, because not even two average shooters would be able to pull it off with perfect coordination. Three shots maximum, then move, that’s standard doctrine.”
