commander of the insurgents was knocked flat by the explosion and jumped back to his feet with a shout of exasperation and fury. “He set it off too early! That stupid, ignorant son of a whore! The Americans are not even in the streets yet and now they have been warned! I am going over there and kill him myself!”
Juba laughed. “You’re a fool. If you go out there, the only one who will die is you. Your crude ambush attempt is over.”
The commander spun around in anger. “Don’t call me a fool! You cannot accept the hospitality of my home and then dare to insult me! Do not forget that it is you, Juba, who is under my protection, not the other way around.” The bearded man vaulted down the stairs, grabbed an AK-47, and sprinted toward the triggerman’s building, trailed by a bodyguard.
Juba raised his eyes and looked beyond the edge of the village at the armored vehicles bumping about over a couple of miles of ground. Nothing but a feint.
30
COUPLE OF GUYS RUNNING this way, and they don’t look too happy,” said Sybelle, peering around the edge of the door.
“Right.” Swanson dug a finger into each phone and levered out the batteries and then smashed the instruments with hard stomps of his boots. “Let them come in and we grab them.”
The insurgent commander was the first through the door, and he was allowed to rush into the center of the room, but when the bodyguard crossed the threshold, Sybelle clocked him hard in the mouth with the butt of her M-4. His head snapped back, his feet flew out from beneath him, and he collapsed. At the same time, Swanson launched onto the commander’s back and rode him to the floor, rolled him over, and popped him hard on an ear to daze him. By the time the man collected his senses, a strip of duct tape was across his mouth, plastic flexicuffs ensnared his wrists behind his back, and more duct tape had been wound around his ankles. Between the colors and shapes dancing in his eyes, he saw that the bodyguard was sprawled unconscious, also being wrapped like a mummy in black duct tape.
“You speak English?” Kyle asked, peeling back the tape across the mouth just enough to let the man speak.
“Who are you?” The words came out in a garble, as if he were talking around a cigar.
Kyle slapped him hard. “I ask the questions.”
The commander shook his head. He understood the seriousness of the situation. His attempt to trap the Americans had failed, the town had been penetrated, the remaining explosives would be neutralized, and he had been captured. The plan to bleed the Americans badly and write the name of this village in the annals of resistance had failed. Without his leadership, his fighters would fade to other locations and the village would return to peace.
“I will tell you nothing,” the commander grumbled. “Nothing.”
“Then you are of no value to me.” Kyle stood, took out his pistol, and fired a shot that ripped away part of the man’s ear. The commander jerked at the pain and the impact. “Last chance,” Swanson said.
Sybelle spoke. “Kyle. Hold on. No use wasting more time on him. He may have some intel, but the interrogators will wring it out of him. Let’s just leave them tied up here while we go find Juba.”
The commander looked strangely at them and shook his head vigorously, grunting for attention. Kyle lifted the tape again.
“Now you suddenly got something to tell me?”
The man bounced his head in understanding. “The woman just called you by the name of Kyle. Are you the Swanson Marine?”
“Maybe.” Kyle ripped the gag all the way off with a swift pull that yanked out patches of beard.
“If you are, then I can tell you exactly the location of your enemy, my friend Juba. He wants you to find him, Swanson Marine,” said the commander, a slit of a smile on his bloody face. Here was a chance to repay Juba for calling him a fool. Maybe both of them would die. “He is waiting just down that street.”
JUBA WAS IN A mouse hole. Over the past few days, he had used some of the idle hours in the commander’s home to create a unique sniper’s hide, oriented along the most likely line of approach, and now he crawled into a prone position and made himself comfortable.
The moment was finally approaching, and without realizing it, he had started losing perspective. He was so intent on killing Kyle Swanson that his thoughts rejected anything but that one goal. The smart play was to leave now and fight somewhere else, some other day, but he wanted to finish it here. Never would he have a better opportunity. Swanson had to come up that single road and straight into the crosshairs.
Each decision he made now contained a trade-off, because a defender cannot defend against everything. The situation he had created was imperfect, for a mouse hole opening was so narrow that the shooter could not remain too far back in the darkness. The muzzle of Juba’s rifle was no more than a foot behind the opening.
Nevertheless, arranging a battlefield of his choice had been important, for Swanson would have to be the one risking exposure. The biggest advantage was Juba’s intimate knowledge of his enemy, the operational concepts of a sniper and the combat habits. He could get inside of Swanson’s head and think along with his adversary.
Juba had opened all the windows in the three-story house and pulled the curtains almost closed so they would flap in the air. He chipped out several cinder blocks up high as decoy hides and stacked another dummy emplacement on the roof behind a barricade of loose wood. A sheltered animal pen stood to one side of the house. Swanson would have to be wary of all of them and might make a mistake while doing the recon. Snipers always scan a target house from top to bottom, and the higher the defender’s position, the more it stands out and the more likely it is to draw attention. The mouse hole was only on the fourth row of cinder blocks up from the foundation of the house, below eye level. Juba would be watching for a slight movement of a rifle and a scope as Swanson ranged over the possible hides higher in the building, an advantage of a few microseconds.
An added bonus was the spider hole. Almost every house in Iraq had a small pit in which a family could seek shelter if and when bullets started flying outside. Juba’s position was right beside the hole that had been constructed below the commander’s home, which normally was kept covered by a small door and a rug. Once in the pit, there was a narrow tunnel some twenty feet long that led away to a dry well next door as an emergency escape route.
Juba had rolled away the rug and removed the wooden hatch to leave the hole uncovered. He placed the computer in the backpack and laid it on the far side of the hole. Once again, he had downloaded the important information on the memory stick as a backup, and the small device was in his breast pocket.
It was going to be a one-shot battle, and whoever fired first probably would win-but that shot had to score. Otherwise the advantage, however miniscule, switched to the other sniper. Juba would be patient, take the critical shot, and then grab the backpack, roll into the spider hole, and leave. Shoot and scoot, the Americans snipers called it.
He racked a round into the chamber of the M40A1 and settled behind his scope to wait.
THEY WRAPPED BOTH OF the captured men tightly in rings of duct tape. A hand-drawn map of the area had been pulled from the commander’s pocket, and Sybelle and Kyle spread it on the floor, compared it with their own maps, and worked out the grid coordinates of the house where Juba was said to wait.
“I don’t like this
“Hey, I never said that I want a quick-draw contest. He’s the one fixated on taking my scalp to show he’s the baddest sniper around. That ego is forcing him to stay put instead of hauling ass.” Kyle sat on the floor, with his legs crossed and his M40A1 resting in the crook of his right arm. “I just want to kill the bastard any way we can.”
Sybelle, down on one knee, brushed some hair back from her eyes. She was sweating, and it was still morning.
