Yet the killer or killers might come one of these days. Someone had murdered Tchernychenko’s aide, and Wolfgang Zetsche, and Isolde Petrou’s son. Someone from the Kremlin? Perhaps the Kremlin had ordered Surkov’s murder — he had immediately assumed that when he first heard the news, but why would the Kremlin want Zetsche dead? Or young Petrou, a French diplomat?
Terrorists, he thought. Yes, indeed. Fanatics. Throat-slitters. Suicidal bombers and mass murderers.
He needed a professional bodyguard, he told himself again. Someone trained to be watchful for all these threats. The bodyguard could worry about all this stuff and Gnadinger wouldn’t have to.
The traffic was moderate at this hour and threw up sheets of spray that the wipers had difficulty with. Gnadinger kept busy punching the windshield wash system every few moments.
His neighborhood of renovated older homes was also quiet. Only a few cars passing on the streets, no pedestrians. His house was empty tonight. His wife was in Rome on a shopping expedition with their daughter, who was grown with children of her own. They had planned this trip for months.
And today was the maid’s day off. The maid was from somewhere in North Africa — he didn’t know where; the employment agency had sent her, and his wife had dealt with them. What the maid did on her day off, where she went or whom she talked to, he had no idea.
He pushed the button to raise the door on the two car-garage, the new one that he had had built after he and his wife bought the house ten years ago. The old one was a ramshackle wooden affair, ready to fall down, and he had gotten tired of looking at it. The new one had the same facade and design as the old house, so it looked as if it had been there forever.
Much better, he thought as he walked out of the garage and lowered the door with another button on his key fob.
Fifteen paces took him to his front door. As he walked he eyed the icicles hanging dangerously from the eaves. He needed to have the maintenance people remove those tomorrow.
As he looked for the door key on his ring, he heard a noise behind him, very slight. Startled, he turned immediately.
A man coming at him, with something in his hand! Before Gnadinger could react, he jabbed the thing downward into Rolf Gnadinger’s chest.
Stunned and amazed, Gnadinger glanced down and saw the butt end of an icicle protruding from his chest. He grasped it, tugged futilely… and looked into the face of the man who had stabbed him. The man smiled.
Rolf Gnadinger could no longer stand. He felt himself sinking toward the ground, too weak to remain upright. His vision became a tunnel. Through that long, long tunnel he saw the man walking away. Then the tunnel closed completely and the darkness became total.
Harry Longworth and Gat Brown were dirty, cold and bored. They had been sleeping in a hole, eating MREs and pooping in another hole for ten days now, and they were thoroughly sick of it. The cold, the wind that never stopped and the blowing dust didn’t help.
“One more day of this,” Harry Longworth said. “Then tomorrow we call for an extraction and hike to the pickup point.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Brown retorted. “Let’s call this morning and start hiking tonight. Get picked up tomorrow afternoon and by tomorrow night we’ll be in a bath, eating real food and drinking real beer. A tub full of hot water, real soap, aaah.”
“Pussy.”
“If I had some I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“If nothing happens by this time tomorrow, we call then.”
The men were hidden on the side of a canyon that wound its way into the mountains. The crest of a rocky ridge was a thousand feet behind them. To their left the Hindu Kush rose in peaks covered with snow.
They listened to the weather on their shortwave radio every day. If snow was forecast, they would have to leave. They had had a window of dry air, though, cold as the devil, with not a cloud in the sky or a flake of snow. They huddled in their hole, watching, shivering, enduring, cursing, telling each other the same old lies.
Below them, against the far wall of the canyon, sat a cluster of six houses and barns, ramshackle affairs made of stones and wood and cinder block. Smoke rose from several chimneys. When the wind was just right, they could smell the smoke and the aroma of cooking meat. Of course, they couldn’t risk a fire. Although it was wide, the canyon wasn’t particularly deep. On its floor were flats with grass for goats and small gardens.
They were there to watch that village complex. So far, for ten days, nothing of interest had happened.
Beside them on a bipod was the.50-caliber sniper rifle, complete with scope. The darn thing weighed thirty- one pounds and shot 1.71 ounce slugs a half inch in diameter and two and a half inches long.
Brown lay on his back as Longworth kept watch. Occasionally Longworth glanced through a spotting scope at the village, but mostly he just watched. They were hidden in an acre of leafless brush, and the view outward was restricted. Ten days ago they had ensured they had a good viewing hole through some judicious pruning of branches. Not much, just enough.
They had counted four men in the village and given each a nickname. There was also one woman and two children. The man they wanted wasn’t there.
“I don’t think the bastard will ever come,” Brown said. “More bum information, and we do the big camp-out. I don’t care what anyone says, at least we can out-camp these bastards.”
“Right.”
“I don’t know how these people stand living in this wasteland. No wonder they’re hot to die and get to Paradise.”
“Next life’s gotta be better than this one.”
“You Jesus freaks keep saying that, and without a shred of evidence,” Gat Brown said, delighted that Longworth had given him this opening. To keep from dying of boredom, they had been debating religion for days. Longworth was a born-again Christian, and Brown was an atheist, or so he said. He wasn’t really, but he wanted to keep the conversation alive, and one way was to never agree with Longworth.
There was a man on the ridge behind them. He had climbed up there at dawn and was hiking along the ridge, looking. He had a rifle of some kind. With his back to the village, Brown tracked his progress with binoculars. “They’re expecting something to happen,” he muttered.
“What?” muttered Longworth.
“Why don’t you admit it?” Brown asked, his eyes glued to the binoculars. “All religion is bunk, theirs and yours and everyone else’s. The whole religious house of cards is built on the premise that man is a special animal, and he isn’t. We’re cousins of the monkey, and he doesn’t fret about getting to heaven or worry about going to hell.”
“You’re an idiot,” Harry Longworth said mildly and closed his eyes, pretending to sleep.
An hour later Longworth said, “Well, look at this. Truck coming.”
Gat Brown checked the sentry on the side of the ridge one more time, got him located on the skyline, then crawled to his hole in the brush for a look. He swung up his binoculars. The vehicle was coming up the canyon, trailing a plume of dust. An old flatbed truck of some kind.
“This might be it,” Harry said.
“That guy up behind us. When we shoot, think you can take him? He’s about three hundred yards away.”
Longworth crawled to a place where he could see the ridgeline. He located the sentry. “Okay,” he said, and checked his M40A3 bolt-action rifle in 7.62 mm NATO, which was lying on a blanket. Then he returned to the spotting scope.
Brown settled himself behind the big Fifty and ensured the safety was on. He swung the scope crosshairs onto the huts, checked that both legs of the bipod were level and the horizontal line in the scope was also level. Beside him was the case that held the.50-caliber Browning machine-gun cartridges. He opened it, pulled four more cartridges out so they lay loose upon the padding.
After a little fidgeting, he settled down to watch the scene through the scope, which had a twenty-six-power magnification.
The range to the huts was 1,639 yards. They had used a laser range finder to establish that, and had lased every path and promontory below them, just in case the people in the huts discovered them and decided to come up here for a look-see. This would be a long shot, but Gat Brown had made shots at this distance before. His longest was almost 1,700 yards.
