Sniper Elite (15 page)

“Like I said,” he muttered, “I'm on my own time.” He put the woman into the backseat where she would be more comfortable, then went to find himself a good AK-47 and all the spare magazines he could carry. During the hurried search, he found a worn-looking grenade in the coat pocket of one of the dead men, an old Russian RGD-5, packing four ounces of TNT. It wasn't likely to be of much use to Gil, considering the open terrain and his close itinerary, but there were other ways to employ a grenade besides throwing it at the enemy. Leaving it behind for them to find often worked as well. He pulled the pin and hid the grenade inside the man's jacket, resting it on the safety lever. Any disturbance of the body, and the grenade
would roll over beneath the jacket, releasing the safety lever and igniting the internal fuse. Four seconds later . . . pop goes the weasel!

He found a first aid kit in one of the trucks and packed the woman's wounds with wadding front and back, strapping her arm to her chest to immobilize the broken clavicle.

“You should be running,” she told him, sweat pouring from her face.

He checked his watch. “We ain't goin' all that far, lady. And unless you want your father shot, you'd better describe him for me.”

“So you can shoot him first!”

He shrugged. “Have it your own way.” He took hold of her hands to help her step out onto the road. “Now listen up. If you slow me down or pull any shit—
any shit at all
—I'll shoot you. Understand?”

She glared at him, nodding once with great reluctance.

With his shemagh wrapped around his head like a Bedouin and the AK-47 slung over his back, he set off overland leading her by the arm. They walked approximately a thousand meters out from the road where he made her sit down. Then he took the spade and began to dig.

“Your father's an opium smuggler, right?”

She gathered the coat he'd found for her about her shoulders and stared off back the way they'd come as if she hadn't heard him.

“Well, he has to be,” Gil remarked, hacking at the hardened earth. “Otherwise, the guards from that radiation bomb factory would have been here by now. How many of his men is he bringing with him?”

She looked at him. “All of them.”

He laughed. “You're never gonna warm up to me, are you?”

She looked away again. “You're a murderer.”

“I suppose from a certain point of view that's true enough.” He dug for a while, being careful to scatter the dirt to prevent there being any sign of a fresh dig should his enemy scan the terrain through a scope or a pair of binoculars.

“Do you remember Neda?” he asked a few minutes later, shaping
the trench he was digging for her to take cover in. Neda Agha-Soltan was a twenty-six-year-old woman shot and killed during the Iranian freedom protests of 2009. Her graphic death was broadcast within minutes to the entire world via the internet.

She turned to look at him again, her dark eyes full of suspicion. “What do you know of Neda?”

“I know she was murdered by Pasdaran thugs in the streets of Tehran.” He took a drink from his CamelBak. The Pasdaran were special Iranian police charged with protecting the nation's Islamic system of government. “I also know she was protesting for Iranian rights when it happened.”

She shrugged him off. “No one knows who killed Neda.”

“Yes, you do.” He took up the spade again. “There are good people in your country, lady. You're not all drug smugglers and murderers.”

She whipped her head around, hissing, “I am not a smuggler—and
you're
the murderer!”

He sat back on his haunches. “Your father's drugs kill more people in a month than I'll kill in my entire career. But that's okay, isn't it? Because they're just infidels.”

She smirked and turned away again. “Dig your grave, American. Dig your grave and leave me alone.”

He chuckled, muttering, “This grave here is yours.” He dug a bit more before asking, “He was your husband, Al-Nazari?”

“He was more than that,” she said proudly. “He was a hero. Now he is a martyr.”

“But he was Sunni—you're a Shia.”

She laughed at him. “Is that what they told you? My family is not Shia.” She noted his wedding band. “What does your wife think of what you do?”

“She doesn't really know what I do. But if it makes you feel any better, I'll probably never get to see her again. Lookin' out for you is likely gonna cost me the ball game.”

She turned to face him fully, her pride falling off suddenly. “I am in great pain.”

“You're taking it like a champ, though.” He admired her. “I'm afraid if I give you morphine, you won't be able to walk when the time comes.” He stopped to rest against the spade, taking the shemagh away from his face. “On the other hand, all that pain could put you into labor, so I don't reckon I have much choice.”

He dug into his personal first aid kit. Then he injected a small dose of morphine into her wounded shoulder. At once, the tension went out of her face, and he could see the relief, the slight drift of her eyes. He made her lie down in the trench, which was only a few inches deeper than she was.

“When the shootin' starts, you keep your head down unless you want it shot off. Now tell me what your father looks like, and I'll try to avoid shooting him.”

The morphine had dropped her inhibitions enough to elicit some cooperation. “He wears glasses. A black mustache.”

Gil finished his own trench and settled in with the Dragunov SVD pulled into his shoulder. He'd brought twenty 10-round magazines, which had been more than enough for the mission as planned, but in view of these new developments, two hundred rounds was starting to feel a little bit light. He had twenty-five 30-round magazines for the AK-47, but the AK put him on equal terms with the enemy. He would need to make every SVD round count.

Her father's men arrived a short time later in two trucks full of men, about twenty in all. A number of them spread into a defensive perimeter around the ambushed caravan while her father and his lieutenants walked the site. Gil studied the man's movements for a moment, and then scanned the rest of the men, looking for a sniper.

He found him standing near the tail of the second truck, studying the countryside through a large, powerful pair of binoculars. The shooter carried a Dragunov with a synthetic stock slung across his
front, and the optics were far better than Gil's PSO sight. It was obvious from the way he carried himself that he was one confident son of a bitch. Probably, he'd been nailing rival drug smugglers at long range for quite some time, helping the Sherkat woman's father to become the local big shot.

Gil couldn't afford to let this character live, which meant he had to engage these people now. A sniper duel over open country was anybody's game, and Gil was not at all inclined to fighting fairly. He placed the
T
of the reticule on the sniper's heart and squeezed the trigger just as the grenade hidden in the dead man's jacket detonated.

The sniper jerked around toward the sound of the explosion, and Gil's round grazed his rib cage.

Shit! Someone had disturbed the body at exactly the worst possible instant.

He fired again, catching the sniper in the left shoulder to spin him back around. As he fired a third time, another man, running away from the explosion, slammed into the sniper and accidentally took the bullet for him, knocking him from his feet and out of sight behind the truck.

Gil knew he was in for some shit now. The sniper was not dead. He would be hurting like a bastard, but he was definitely still in the fight, and undoubtedly already moving to take up a firing position, looking to zero in on Gil's location. He checked his fire, ignoring the other gunmen who scrambled about as he scanned for the sniper.

The man had disappeared.

Inside of a minute, fifteen gunmen—including the Sherkat woman's father—were formed up in a wide skirmish line marching toward his location with their AK-47s shouldered and ready to fire. If Gil began to pick them off now, he probably wouldn't kill more than two or three of them before the enemy sniper spotted the dust kicked up by the Dragunov and burned him down.

“Looks like a bad day at Black Rock,” he muttered, glad the
woman was doped up, otherwise she would certainly give away their position now, regardless of any danger to herself. The thought occurred to him briefly to use her as a shield, but that was the act of a coward, and even a cornered rat could do better. He could see the enemy had his general position worked out.

“Typhoon main, do you read? Over?”

“Roger, actual.”

“Typhoon main, be advised . . .” He took a moment to choose his last words. “Typhoon main, be advised I am pinned down by ten-plus gunmen . . . up against a sniper of unknown talent. Will advise further if and when able to do so. Over.”

The reply sounded vaguely anxious. “Actual, are you declaring an emergency? Over.”

“Negative, main. This'll be over one way or another long before the cavalry shows up. Typhoon actual, out.” He switched off the radio and studied the target area through the PSO. “Now where the fuck would I be if I were you, asshole?”

Agent Lerher set down his cup of coffee with an anxious sigh, glancing irritably around the semicrowded op center. “What the hell does he keep signing off for? How are we supposed to gather real-time intelligence if he's not feeding us? He
knows
we can't see him. Somebody get me some eyes on the goddamn ground.”

The Air Force liaison officer cleared her throat.

He turned toward her.

“Mr. Lerher, I've still got Creech on the line,” she said patiently. “They advise there's a front coming in, but the ceiling is still under five thousand feet. The UAV will be visible if it drops down for a look.”

Lerher was smoldering. Not being able to watch the operation he'd spent the past three weeks capering over was driving
him nuts. He had already been denied seeing the Al-Nazari hit, and now he was about to miss what he guessed was going to be one hell of a shoot-out. He might as well have been back in his hotel room for all of the input he'd been able to offer thus far. He was tempted to order the UAV down from the clouds for a brief overview at the target area, but if it was spotted by any sort of Iranian government entity, that would be enough to put the bloody finger on the United States for Al-Nazari's assassination. Not that it mattered. Hell, it sounded like their operative was about to buy it anyhow.

“Captain Metcalf? Do you have any suggestions?”

Metcalf sat back stroking his chin. “You might consider letting my man do his job,” he said easily. “We didn't send him in there to provide a play-by-play. We sent him in there to eliminate a target. He's done that. Now he's working to bring himself out. If he needs something from you, rest assured, he'll let you know.”

Lerher smiled without humor, resenting the presence of top brass in his operations center. “Sounds like a plan, sir.” Technically, Metcalf was there only as an interested observer, but if anything went wrong, or if Lerher made a bad call, the old man would make sure he was held responsible.

Metcalf gave him a wink.

To the Navy man, Lerher was just another CIA spook, standing over there with his shirtsleeves all rolled up like he was getting ready to do some actual work. Lerher was probably more reliable than most, but he was sneakier, too. He thought his reliability entitled him to special privileges. That was why Metcalf had chosen to remain in operations for every minute of the mission. It pleased him to watch the younger CIA man swilling coffee like he thought Juan Valdez was going to stop growing the beans. A simple Benzedrine capsule was all that was needed to keep a man sharp during
the short haul, and it didn't keep you running to the damn head every ten minutes.

He watched Lerher duck out of the room, and chortled to himself, offering a wink to the black Air Force lieutenant.

She grinned and turned her head before any civilian in the room could notice.

Gil needed a break. The fifteen-man skirmish line was drawing to within five hundred yards and spread out roughly a hundred yards across his field of vision. If they closed to within a hundred yards before he started taking them out, he was a goner. Even being dug in as he was, the AK-47 was more than accurate enough for them to pick him off over open sights at that short range. He could see the woman's father marching boldly forward at the center of the phalanx, shouting orders left and right. He wanted his daughter back even at the risk of all their lives, and though Gil guessed the old man was counting on his sniper to get Gil before Gil got too many of them, it was obvious these people were fucking fearless.

What Gil would have given at that moment for his Remington modular sniper rifle with the suppressor and just twenty measly
rounds of subsonic ammo. Instead, he was stuck with this Russian shoulder cannon that was going to kick up enough dust when he got rockin' and rollin' to reveal his location to everyone from Tehran to Abbottabad. The closer the phalanx drew, the farther he would have to sweep the rifle across his field of vision to pick the men off, and this would give them even more time to zero his position.

As if it were a gift sent straight from the God of War himself, a stiff gust of desert wind blew from behind, and Gil did not hesitate to take advantage of it, pivoting the Dragunov toward the gunman on the extreme left of the phalanx to find center mass and squeezing off the round. He pivoted immediately back to the extreme right to find center mass on a second gunman and squeezed off another shot, blowing the unfortunate skirmisher's guts out his back. The dust from both shots was blown downrange by the gust before it could ever form a cloud.