Dead Shot

THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA

MASTER GUNNERY SERGEANT DAWKINS set foot on the spotless deck of the Vagabond with supreme confidence, for he, too, was a creature of the sea, having spent much of his life on boats and ships, beneath the water in submarines or flying over it in planes and helicopters. It was good to be back in his element and out of Washington on this sunny Monday morning, ready to take his best bud, Kyle Swanson, on another hunting trip. He left his luggage aboard the bird, since they would be leaving again soon.

Swanson, Lady Pat, and Sir Jeff were waiting at the edge of the helo deck, and they took him to the stern, where a table beside the swimming pool had been set with china and silver utensils and white napkins. The chef had started the eggs when the helicopter was five minutes out, and now an enormous selection of delicious food was rolled out by a female crew member dressed in whites.

Double-Oh plunged into the meal, hardly aware that the others were only nibbling at the feast since they had already had breakfast. The conversation was mild chatter, waiting for him to finish eating before getting down to business. The four of them were family in many ways, except by blood. The brotherhood of spec ops warriors was tight, and the men had known each other for years. Lady Pat was their den mother.

Swanson had joined the Marines while still a teenager, and it was Dawkins, then a staff sergeant, who first discovered that the awkward boy had a remarkable ability in the unique craft of long-distance precision firing and was also a natural in combat. Over the years, as they both rose in rank, Dawkins remained Kyle’s mentor and eventually spun him off for use in special operations work by nonmilitary government agencies.

One of Kyle’s more interesting assignments had not involved combat at all but was serving as a special Pentagon adviser to Sir Jeff Cornwell in the development of a new-generation sniper rifle that they called the Excalibur. It took several years of off-and-on work by Swanson, and although he always kept people at an emotional distance, he was drawn in by the magnetic friendship Jeff and Pat offered. When he had introduced them to Shari Towne as the girl he planned to marry, she also was taken under the protective wings of the Cornwells. Family. Kyle had thought for a while there that he really had one. Then Shari was murdered, and Kyle almost came apart. Pat, Jeff, and Double-Oh had been helping piece him back together slowly over time. Keeping him busy was important.

Dawkins finally finished eating and filled his coffee cup again. Lady Pat motioned for the crew member to clear the table, and the four of them were soon left alone on the deck as a soft Mediterranean breeze blew across the stern of the Vagabond. Pat pulled a soft shawl of Scottish wool around her shoulders to stay warm.

“I am leaving for London tonight to attend a reception for the royal wedding and then spend a lot of Jeff’s money on new clothes,” she declared, looking at Swanson. “But before I leave you boys to talk about whatever the new mission may be, I have something serious to say to you, Kyle.”

He smiled. “What’s on your mind?”

“You are still grieving for our dear girl Shari. Her death left a hole in your heart, a deep hole that you think can never heal, and you think that withdrawing into all of this black ops work will protect you,” she said. “I did not like how you got so stupefied drunk that you didn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain. You’re acting like some dumb ostrich sticking its head into the sand and thinking it cannot be seen. It isn’t working, is it?”

“Instant psychobabble from Dr. Pat? You know everything?” He was instantly defensive.

She stood, and he saw tears in her eyes just before she slapped him so hard that his ears rang. “Don’t you dare speak like that to me, Kyle Swanson! Do you believe that you are the only one who loved Shari? That your heart was the only one broken when she died? I still cry when I think of her. I am thankful that she was in our lives at all.”

“So how did you get over her, Pat? What’s the secret?” He was growing angry. He did not like to talk about Shari, even with Jeff and Pat and Double-Oh.

She had a hand on each hip and glared at him. “You think that Jeff and I got over her? How wrong you are. You never get over that kind of loss. You just…eventually…come to accept it as something you cannot change. The sun comes up in the morning, the clock ticks, and Shari will still be dead. You cannot climb into the coffin with her.” Pat pulled her wrap tight around her shoulders. “Wake up, Kyle. Shari’s been gone for more than a year, and you are condemned to live with the rest of us now. I want you back, the real Kyle Swanson, not some war junkie who is on his way to becoming an otherwise useless alcoholic.” She turned, shook her head, and walked away to the main cabin.

Swanson fell back in his chair. Jesus Christ. She just beat the crap out of me. Kyle had been disturbed for months when he could no longer mentally recall every detail of Shari’s beautiful face, nor smell her fragrance, although he could still imagine her touch and her laugh. He was losing her. She was fading over time. “What’s your opinion, Jeff?” he asked.

“What she said.” He drank some coffee and unblinkingly returned Kyle’s stare.

“And you?”

Master Gunny Dawkins picked up his briefcase and pulled out a folded map. “I’m your friend, not your confessor. Whatever it takes, as long as it takes. But if you get fucked up on booze or dope and get me killed, I shall be very unhappy. Now can we please move past this Oprah moment and talk about the fucking mission?”

Double-Oh laid out the map, pointing at a grid location close to the southwestern tip of Iran. “This is where the defector said the so-called Palace of Death was located, almost within rock-throwing distance of the border. We know from the satellites that there’s nothing important down there except the port town of Khorramshahr. Beyond that is just a lot of dirt, which is why the boss wants to put some boots down and take a look.”

“Could the walk-in just have been looking for a quick cash payment with his allegedly secret information?” Kyle asked. “Peddling bogus information to Americans is not exactly new in Iraq.”

“Not bloody likely if someone went to the trouble to assassinate him in the Green Zone. There was a reason.” Jeff sat back and folded his hands over a growing belly, the price of success. He was no longer young and jumping out of airplanes.

“That was a perfect stalk and shoot,” Double-Oh looked over at Kyle. “We’re sure it was Juba. The description from the hotel people matches what we know about him, and he did everything but leave his autograph. So somehow he’s involved, too.”

“Lots of loose ends,” said Kyle. “But why Iran? It would be a lot more credible if an Iraqi scientist emerged from Syria, since that’s where Saddam stashed his big weapons, up around al-Baida, and in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Iran and Iraq hated each other after eight years of war and a million casualties. I cannot see this level of cooperation, even so many years later.”

Sir Jeff picked up the map and studied it. “Unless…” They could almost see the wheels turning in the man’s brain. “At the end of that war, there were months of negotiations before the two sides agreed to the solution brokered by the United Nations. Very little was changed in the long run, but some deals were made concerning captured territory and the shared use of the Shatt al-Arab waterway.”

“History lesson number 42,” said Kyle. “What is your point?”

“What if this Palace of Death thing was one of the backchannel agreements, something even the UN people did not know about? Hussein and the ayatollahs overlooked their differences long enough to make a deal for the future.”

Double-Oh was interested. “Meaning us?”

“I’ll get to that. What was the major thing people remember about the Iran-Iraq War? The use of chemical weapons by Iraq to blunt Iranian frontal assaults. Later came the biochem attacks in the Kurdistan region. You certainly remember the Arab saying that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ Both sides consider America to be the Great Satan, and both sides anticipated that sooner or later, one or both of them would be facing us in combat.”

Kyle finished his coffee. “So these crazies, the mullahs and Saddam’s thugs, start planning something way back in the 1980s? A jointly owned and operated bioweapons factory? Then they never used the product?”

“If they were trying to come up with something really new and effective and deadly, perhaps it just wasn’t ready in time for the Gulf War, and things tightened up quickly during the current war. The United States sold