Dead Shot

“You’re not going to play fair?”

“Nope. Never happen. As much as I definitely want to personally blow him away, we have a lot of other gadgets in our toolbox.”

When he explained his plan, Sybelle relayed the orders back to the task force.

The big armored force that had been moving awkwardly suddenly fell into exact positions and nosed casually into the village streets, heading in to secure the area, disarm the remaining house lined with explosives, and retrieve the bodies of its dead soldiers. Sporadic small arms fire whanged off the thick armor plate and was answered with booming cannons and machine guns.

Fifty thousand feet overhead, a strange-looking toothpick of an aircraft received new commands from its controller on the ground at Balad Air Base and tipped over to descend to a lower altitude. The MQ-9 Reaper hunter-killer unmanned aerial vehicle had been on station for nine hours and had plenty of fuel left. It wore a pair of GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided six-hundred-pound smart bombs beneath its wings.

“LET’S DO IT,” KYLE said. “You go high and paint the building, and I stay down on the dirt to draw his attention.”

Sybelle gave him a long look. “Take it easy out there, pardner. And remember we have exactly fifteen minutes, not a second more. Do not go in that building.” Then she rolled through a side window and was gone.

Kyle gave her a minute’s head start and then went out the back door, hooked a left, and ran across the road and into a doorway. The rumble of the approaching tanks and Bradleys shook the stones on the surrounding streets, and Kyle used that to mask the noise of breaking windows and jumping to the adjoining house. Juba’s hideout was no more than a thousand yards away, an easy shot for either of them.

As planned, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle suddenly came around a corner on the far side of the building, scraped alongside it in passing, and then screamed down the street at high speed, crunching over an automobile parked in its way. Kyle ran to another building on the right-hand side of the street and dove through the door. Good diversion. Juba had to feel the hard whack of the armored vehicle against the side of his house. Surprise the enemy. Force him to conform to your plan.

As soon as the Bradley passed, Sybelle lobbed a smoke grenade down from the roof of a nearby building, and it bounced once in the street before igniting. Kyle let the gray blossom smolder and spread, then sprinted back across and climbed a low wall. He was about eight hundred yards away now. Close enough. He went inside the building and spent time clearing both floors and checking his watch. He had less than ten minutes left.

He pushed an eating table close to the rear wall opposite the window facing up the street and began stacking up a pile of pillows, then fronting it with overturned furniture to break up any regular lines. The sun was on the back side of the building, at an angle that did neither sniper any good, other than keeping them obscured in darkness.

Kyle pulled up a solid wood chair behind the table, sat down, and found a comfortable and firm rest for his sniper rifle, with the muzzle poking through the latticework of debris. He pulled the weapon back, checked the load, and pushed it forward again. His eye went to the scope.

Sybelle’s progress had been easier. After throwing the smoke grenade, she took a roundabout route over rooftops and through houses, then angled back to the target zone. An Apache gunship hovered a few blocks away, securing her flanks and back. No one shot at her.

She went prone when she reached a rooftop on the left side of Juba’s location, cleared it for safety, and clicked her radio as the helicopter swung into a new protective position.

“Good to go,” she said. A double click meant that Kyle had heard her message and was also in position.

Putting her rifle to her left side and laying her pistol within easy reach on the right, Sybelle removed a small monocular from a rubberized carrying case. Since she had been working as Kyle’s spotter, she had packed along the laser rangefinder, which now had another use.

She edged her eyes above the top of the small revetment running along the edge of the roof and had a clear view of the cream-colored target house. Bringing up the monocular, she focused and pushed the switch to activate an invisible laser beam, which bounced off the sturdy target house and came back to the electronics packet with an exact reading. She secured it into a firm position. “Target is painted,” she reported, and at Balat Air Base, the controller linked the information to the circling Reaper UAV, which then descended another ten thousand feet. From that point on, Sybelle’s laser was married to the Reaper’s guidance system. Where the point of the laser rested, the bombs would hit.

“Confirming that target is lit and weapon is armed,” came the voice from Balat. “Three minutes.”

Juba let his breathing slow and felt his heart beating normally in his chest, not thumping with excitement. This was his house. This was his safe zone. And he was Juba! He was the Sword of the Prophet, and he intended to become an even sharper sword by brewing the terrible poison gas! He let the scope run down the street to where the American troops and vehicles surrounded the other house of explosives. They had gone in and nothing had happened, so the trap had not been sprung. Both the triggerman and the commander were probably dead by now, but that was beside the point.

Kyle Swanson might be somewhere in that milling crowd of American soldiers, and while Juba could have shot several of them with ease, the only person he wanted in his crosshairs was his old nemesis, Shake. Since Swanson always liked to be in on the action, maybe he was down there checking out the strange bomb.

Juba’s trigger finger tightened momentarily when a figure in black walked across the scope, but it wasn’t Swanson. He eased off and kept searching, facing the target zone, in his hide, waiting like a patient spider.

No, Swanson would not be down there. He was stalking, coming closer. The unexpected, noisy passing of the Bradley and then the smoke grenade was enough confirmation. Up in one of those many windows facing him on a street filled with buildings and homes? Low on the ground beneath a bunch of junk? A doorway? A shadow? He moved the scope slowly across the most likely danger zones.

Swanson studied the various openings in the Juba building. The shit-bird knew his business and could be in any one of those places except on the roof, where the helicopter would have taken him out. Slow and steady scan, top to bottom, left to right. He couldn’t fire without a target because the first shot would give away his position and draw a return bullet in instant retaliation.

The radio spoke to him again. “One minute.” Out of time. He could put down the rifle and let the bomb take care of it, but hell, he did have some pride invested in this hunt to the death. He cursed himself for even thinking about something that ridiculous. Who is the better sniper? Horseshit. Nobody cares. Whoever walks away is better. Keep the scope moving. Nothing. Nothing.

Juba thought about saying a prayer. No. Stay focused. The butt stock of the rifle was cool against his right cheek. Plenty of time to pray later. Where would I be hiding if I was Shake? That window looked a bit curious. The others had ordinary lines in the rooms behind them. The shadows in this one seemed jagged and jumbled, as if a storm had passed through. A hide?

The impersonal voice in Kyle’s headset said, “Weapon free. Weapon released.” The big GBU-12 fell away, and the Reaper jumped higher at the sudden subtraction of weight and then curled back onto its course. There was no pilot getting tired, and the controllers at the base would simply swap off to a fresh shift as soon as this job was done and the UAV would perform some other job, somewhere else.

The bomb was in free fall, with big fins on the rear providing lift and the four smaller fins on the front allowing the guidance unit to steer it. The internal guidance system locked on to the laser beam that Sybelle had affixed to the side of the house and transitioned the control services from simple ballistics into a precise line-of-sight flight path. The bomb twisted into a smooth spiral motion, gaining speed as it plummeted nose down toward the target.

Kyle took up the slack on the trigger and held it so as not to require that extra fraction of a second if he found the target. Then he saw dark against darker in the small hole left by a missing cinder block almost at ground level.