second and want to shoot as fast as he does. It don’t occur to them that he shoots like this”—he cupped his fingers into a two-inch circle—”and they shoot like this.” He raised his hands in an expansive gesture.
“Like Jeff Cooper always said: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Keep ‘em smooth, Bosco.”
As Bosco resumed his duties, Pitney came off the line for some water. He removed his ball cap and wiped his forehead. “Kind of hard to stay hydrated in this heat, Colonel. But these guys need all the trigger time they can get.”
“Well, as soon as they’re safe in daylight we’ll introduce them to twilight and then full dark. But that’s likely to be a slow process because we’ll have to do a lot of dry runs before I’ll trust them with loaded weapons at night.”
“Yes, sir. I think we can do better if we keep the night relays smaller. It’ll mean more range time, of course, but we’ll have better control of them.”
Leopole considered the suggestion and found it had merit. “That’s not a bad idea, Robert. Have you done that before?”
Pitney raised a bottle from the ice chest and took a long pull. His Camelbak had gone dry fifteen minutes earlier. “Yeah. But that was with a group smaller than this so it wasn’t as hard. Besides, it was an indoor range where we could control the lights. Worked really well.” He chuckled. “Besides, those were cops and some of them actually could look at the sights and press the trigger. These guys…” He shook his head. “On the first day I just about bought myself a ticket home. The gun handling was…”
“Atrocious?”
Pitney laughed again. “I don’t know. What’s worse than atrocious? Awful isn’t bad enough.”
“Abysmal?”
“Somewhere in the first part of the alphabet. But you know, it’s odd. The main problem was muzzle awareness. Everybody sweeping everybody else. It’s hard getting across to these guys that you’re supposed to treat every gun as if it’s loaded, even if you just unloaded it. Some of them just don’t get that. But then I noticed that nearly all of them followed Rule Three.”
“Finger off the trigger?”
“Right. Rule One and Two went out the door but I guess the militia have seen enough movies and news reports that they kept their fingers alongside the frame.”
Leopole conjured up his recent discussion with Bosco. “How’s the language situation?”
Pitney shucked his Camelbak and began refilling it. “Oh, not bad. My basic Arabic is still pretty good. It took me a little while to get used to Druze pronunciation. They speak kind of an archaic Arabic with what we’d call a soft D and a strong, throaty K. But if they slow down just a little I don’t have much problem.”
“Good job, Robert. Keep it up and maybe we can go home early.”
“As Breezy would say, ‘Hoo-ah that, sir.’”
Esmaili saw Azizi conferring with some new arrivals but kept his distance. The strangers were unloading mortar tubes and base plates from a truck with Syrian markings and seemed intent on talking only to the man from Tehran. The imam was nowhere to be seen, which meant he was either plotting or praying.
At length Azizi left his friends to their own devices. Esmaili intercepted him.
“Brother, may I ask what do your mortar men have?”
“Oh, mostly old Soviet equipment, the 2B14 Podnos and M31/M68. Both are 82mm. We find that it is a good compromise between the 60 and 120mm weapons. The Podnos fires a three-kilogram bomb with a range of four kilometers. They weigh only forty kilograms so we can move them and some ammunition with four men.”
“They have experience in operations?”
A faint smile. “Oh, yes. Considerable experience.”
Esmaili conceded the advantage of portability but recognized the limitations. “I only ask because it may be difficult to displace from the firing position once the Druze learn to estimate the location. Their Zionist friends may provide aerial drones for surveillance.”
“Yes, that is always a possibility. The aircraft also may have thermal imagers once our night attacks become evident. It is also thus, brother. The tide comes in and the tide flows out. But Islam’s tide is inevitable.”
Esmaili thought:
“Our strength is in our arms and in our hearts. And the greatest of these is our hearts, for there faith abides.”
Esmaili inclined his torso in a slight bow. “Truly said.”
Walking away, Esmaili felt a spasm in his shoulder muscles.
With a start, Esmaili realized that Azizi must have some additional information that he had not yet shared. The cell leader quickened his pace, seeking a solitary place where he could sit down and think before afternoon prayers.
In his Special Forces career, former Staff Sergeant Chris Nissen had seldom dealt with snipers, either incoming or outgoing, but now he was faced with both.
The SSI team had barely arrived when the local militia explained the situation. The Druze leader, with the unlikely name of Ayoob Slim, had been taken aback when he met the American, apparently surprised that a black man would command the training team. But Slim, an intense individual of some forty years, seemed capable of objectivity. Upon consulting with his IDF liaison, Captain Salah-Hassan Fares, he quickly got down to specifics.
Fares translated. “Sergeant, there are Hezbollah snipers here. They have come before but mainly just to shoot at the village. This new one, he hits what he sees.”
Nissen thought for a moment. “Are you sure there’s just one?”
After some back and forthing with Slim, Fares raised his hands. “I am not certain. The local men seem convinced because there is usually just one shot. But they cannot say where it comes from, so there could be more than one, or perhaps just one who moves and shoots again.”
“Well, we can’t let one gomer with a rifle stop us from training. Let’s have my team meet with Mr. Slim and his folks and explain the lesson plans. Then I’ll have a word with my precision rifleman.”
Robbie Furr had a goodly opinion of his professional abilities but he did not relish odds of two or three to one.
“I’ll see what I can do, Chris, but I’ll need a spotter. I mean, somebody who knows what he’s doing.”
“You’d like to have Barrkman back.”
Furr nodded, rubbing his balding head. “He’s about the only game in town. I could work with Green or Ashcroft because Wallender has some language ability that you need. But Phil and Bob aren’t sniper-trained. If I’m going up against some semipros, I want the best I can get.”
Nissen appreciated the shooter’s sentiment, having had to go to a couple of bad places with goody-good people on occasion. He knew that Leopole would be reluctant to place all his sniper eggs in one basket but saw no harm in asking. He looked at Furr and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
25
The sound was distinctive: a hollow, metallic
Bosco perked up. “That sounds like an 81-mm tube.”
“How’n hell can you tell, man?” The paratrooper in Breezy was skeptical of anything that a soldier could not hump on his own.
“Hey, dude, Rangers use mortars, you know? I was A-gunner on a 60mm for a while. Got so I could hit Pierce County. Thing is, I don’t think the Hezzies would have 81s. Prob’ly 82s.”
