CHAPTER 1
“You will use ten kilograms of Semtex, which will be delivered to you by another. Messages regarding it will be delivered to the safe house,” Rafiq bin Qasim said to the man before him, concluding the briefing. “Are there any questions?”
“None, sir. I go with God!” replied the man. His name wasn’t important. Allah knew his name. He would remain nameless unless caught or killed, in which case he would be promoted as a martyr.
Bin Qasim’s office was unusual. The brand-new computer and flatscreen monitor, fax, several TVs and radios, all wired into uninterruptible power supplies, set on modern desks and static-reducing mats, were in sharp contrast to the poured-concrete walls and hazed glass in the single, small window. Woven mats covered the rest of the floor, lit at present by the four-tube fluorescent can overhead.
“Go with God, brother,” he agreed, dismissing the man to his task. He was neither bright nor highly trained, but he was dedicated to the cause and that was enough. He could plant bombs. For now he would survive, though he was willing to die if required.
There were others like that. There were also those who didn’t want to die, who had to be led to believe such plans were nonlethal. But martyrs were necessary to the cause, and it was annoying that so few of them were intelligent enough to bother with. Some were the type to accomplish great deeds, and others only served as role models. This man was just bright enough for the latter.
That done, he watched as his three assistants, the only ones allowed to be armed in his presence, escorted the man out of the building. A car would take him to the airport, he’d fly a circuitous route through increasingly more respectable countries until he reached Egypt, then Germany.
Shortly thereafter, an explosion would destroy a nightclub. A place filled with sexual music and rutting, filthy women, alcohol, drugs, and best of all, American tourists and soldiers. Bin Qasim would see to it that as many of them as necessary were blown up to force them out of the Islamic lands.
Perhaps he could arrange for a day-care center next. Any American who didn’t grow up was a good American. Pondering that, he looked over the office, and focused on the pliers atop the toolbox. He’d been too distracted earlier to finish. Now, perhaps.
He rose, retrieved the pliers, and said to his guards, “I shall be some time. You may leave.” They nodded and filed out, grinning in amusement, but not in front of bin Qasim, for his temper was legendary.
Bin Qasim took the pliers with him into the back room, where the British woman reporter still waited, whimpering. He’d taught her her place, in fear and suppliant to God, then Man. Now to let her show her enthusiasm for that place.
*****
“Sergeant Monroe, right face,” came the voice on the radio. Sergeant First Class Kyle Monroe did so, and waited for further instructions. He knew what they’d be: the sniper trainee was clearly visible. But he was damned sure going to be letter-of-the-regulation fair to the student who was about to fail this exercise. The observer at the end of the range had to make the call, Kyle was only a marker for him.
But this kid was as obvious as a hooker in church.
Kyle sighed, feeling old again. He had fourteen years of service, and still felt physically capable and flexible. He hadn’t slowed down when he hit thirty, the way everyone said happened. Inside he felt worn, though. It wasn’t the years getting to him, but the mileage. But he had all his hair and none of it gray, a taut physique and clear eyes. After tours in Bosnia and the first Gulf, Airborne and Ranger Schools as well as Sniper, and a few miscellaneous radio courses, he felt that his physical condition was still decent and quite an accomplishment. He’d feel a hell of a lot better if he could lose the guilt over that event in Bosnia, which was something everyone said wasn’t his fault. It felt that way to him, though. It didn’t help that he had been an instructor here at the school since then. It was mere coincidence; they needed some of the best snipers to teach others, and everyone said he was that good. But he couldn’t escape the timing. It felt like a punishment, no matter how much he really did like teaching the kids.
“Three meters,” he was told, then, “left face,” which he did, leaving him facing the boots of Corporal Samuel Merrick, clothed in a shredded burlap ghillie suit and hidden in deep weeds.
At least he imagined he was hidden in deep weeds. “Two meters forward and tell Merrick he’s a corpse,” was the next radio transmission.
“You got ’im,” he confirmed for Staff Sergeant Dick Rogers, who was one of the “targets” the students were trying to “shoot.”
“Stand up, Merrick, you’re dead,” Kyle said. Merrick sighed, heaving himself up as if a pile of weeds suddenly assumed human form. “Figure out what you did wrong?” he asked.
Merrick said, “The sun came out.”
The boy was exasperating. “Sun came out, my ass. Relying on the light is luck. If you rely on luck here, you’ll rely on luck in combat. Dead. Get me? Dead!”
Merrick looked slightly chagrined, but Kyle was still talking. Merrick likely wasn’t cut out to be a sniper. He could shoot, he could hide, he could observe, but he just couldn’t coordinate them with the patience required to be a true professional. He even took it lightly, wearing a grin.
“I’m not smiling, Merrick,” Kyle said yet again. “Look there!”
The kid was a bit more attentive now. He turned to look behind him, where Kyle was pointing. Predictably, he let his heavy M-24 rifle— a highly modified Remington 700 in 7.62mm NATO—swing across his legs as he turned. It tangled with his right boot and his ghillie suit. He hopped, recovered, and stood.
“See that?” Kyle snapped, pointing at the tall growth of the range. “There’s a very clear Corporal Merrick-shaped rut through the weeds there. Anyone can tell you crawled through here. And it’s a straight line. Prey don’t move in straight lines, only hunters. So what will anyone seeing this think?”
Without waiting for an answer, he continued, “Then, you shifted the branch you used as a rifle rest. And when you shot, you blew that stalk in two. See?”
Merrick looked, and finally gave evidence of remorse. That had been really stupid. Any one of the errors was bad. All of them together were inescapable. He’d screwed up.
Kyle’s problem student nodded, turned, and headed for the trucks. He was done for the morning, and the loss of points wouldn’t help his final class score.
Kyle wasn’t sure if the kid needed a girlfriend, a thousand pushups, or just a couple of years to mature. He was all hyped on the glamour of being a sniper, and didn’t want to hear about the slow, boring infiltrations. Those were in bad weather, bugs, dirt, and with the risk of being discovered and shot.
Kyle Monroe knew about all of that personally. It hit him again right then, that pain that wasn’t fading. Bosnia. He and his spotter had been a bit too eager to advance on a target. End result, Staff Sergeant Jeremy Reardon dead, a Serb sniper’s bullet through his head. The funeral had been closed casket, and Kyle really hadn’t cared to discuss it with Reardon’s pretty young wife and seven-year-old son, who was old enough to understand death, but not old enough to understand why.
He snapped back to reality. This time it was nausea, washing over him as he massaged the scar on his right arm. Other times it was fear, sweats, anger. And he’d be drinking tonight, fighting with himself over whether to not drink, drink enough to relax, or just bum brain cells with alcohol.
In the meantime, Captain Schorlin, the school commander, was over there watching, and the expression on his face indicated he wanted to talk. Kyle hitched at his load-carrying harness and headed in that direction. The other instructors and the French observer were looking at him, too, and he knew why. Normally, everyone snickered and laughed at inept movements, strange twists of fate, or sheer forgetfulness. There was enough stress in the class, and they tried to be relaxing when counseling. Kyle had been rather brusque.
Schorlin looked at him levelly. It wasn’t unkind, just appraising. As Kyle approached, the blond-haired young man—he was only thirty— said, “I think you need to ease off just a bit on the kid, Kyle.”
“He needs to grow up, sir,” Kyle replied. “Or he’ll wind up dead and taking people with him.”
“We have time,” the captain said, sounding relaxed and unperturbed. “And you know I won’t let him graduate if he can’t hack it.”
“So I’m helping him with that.”
“Yes,” Schorlin agreed, “and making him think he can’t hack it. At this point, we’ve gotten rid of the bad ones. He just needs encouragement and some sarcasm. Remember when you could be sarcastic without being mean?”
Kyle had to grin at that, though it was a sickly grin. “Yes, sir. So what’s up?”
“We’ve got a meeting tomorrow. It might mean an assignment for you.”
Kyle was immediately defensive. Were they trying to shuffle him off?
“But I like it here, sir. Is something wrong?”
“Yes, but not with you. It’s TDY only, I’m told, which is good, because we need you here. They want you to help with a problem elsewhere. But General Robash has the details. So be at the classroom at 0900. Look sharp. BDUs and beret,” the captain said, pointing at Kyle’s headgear, which, like his own, was a standard Battle Dress Uniform cap. It worked better in the field than the beret, and both men, despite being Ranger trained, took it as a point of honor not to wear the Monica, as it was deprecatingly called, unless they had to.
“Yes, sir,” Kyle agreed, controlling the slight grimace he felt. He resented how the black beret he’d earned the hard way was now being worn by everyone and his brother. . . and sister. He realized it hadn’t always been a Ranger symbol, but it had become one, and then it had been taken away and trivialized.
He turned his attention back to the broad terrain and work. There was a twitch of grass. It was Sergeant Brendt, moving too eagerly. From the radio came Sergeant Rogers’s voice, “Sergeant Monroe, left face, ten meters.” Rogers had spotted another one. Kyle sighed and went back to the task at hand.
It was a pleasant spring day, at least, though the ground was damp, making it cold and squishy for the students. The undergrowth was thick and plentiful. Apart from daylight, it was the thickest concealment a sniper could ever reasonably hope for. If the students, all trained infantrymen, could get past the sharp eyes of the target/observers, they should be able to get past anyone. And “anyone” would be an enemy who was trying to kill them, not merely humiliate them.
For this exercise, Rogers and McMillan were seated at a desk in the bed of a truck, portraying driver and passenger. The students infiltrated the 1,000-meter range, trying to get under 800 meters from the targets and as much closer as necessary for a clear shot. Upon doing so, they would fire a blank and call the target. An instructor on the range, like Kyle, would report the shot, and the target would hold up a placard with a letter. The students would call off the letter, proving they had a clear view of the target through the scope, and the shot would be scored. They would then take a second shot. In the meantime, the targets were scanning with binoculars. If they caught sight of the students as they approached, or after they shot, indicating spoiled concealment, those students failed.
If the students had paid attention, they should easily be able to do it in this Southern pine forest, full of red clay, brush, rolling ground, and deadwood. If they couldn’t do it here, there was no way they could do it in the desert or on open fields.
And right now, three of them were lined up about five meters apart, line abreast. So if one of them fired, it was likely that the spotters would catch all three of them. They were all infantry trained and should know better. But eagerness and carelessness brought them to this.
Then, there was Sergeant Favrot, who’d decided that 400 meters wasn’t good enough for a shot. He was nearly to the 200-meter mark. He’d certainly get a clear shot from there, but he’d also be much easier to find. The point of being a sniper was to keep hidden and distant, getting as close as necessary, not as close as possible. Still, Favrot was good enough that he might pull it off. But he needed to be cautioned against excessive exuberance. They were here to shoot, not make records.
Kyle chewed an MRE for lunch, just as the students would when done. They’d have time for lunch between now and the afternoon shoot, which would be in a concrete building, one group sniping from it, and the other countersniping from outside. There was no time to drive off range, down long, rutted and washed-out roads, to the cantonment area of Fort Benning. But he knew he needed to eat, and wasn’t in the mood for fast food or the chow hall, anyway. His lingering depression, anger, sadness about the Bosnian screw-up he’d been involved in didn’t encourage a good appetite. Neither did MREs for that matter, but he had one and chewed at it component by component. He washed it down with water from his CamelBak. They were finally standard issue rather than just a nifty accessory, and he used it without even realizing it was there, which was the mark of good equipment.
After Favrot got in his shot, along with two others who’d pushed the time limit, the students climbed into the back of their truck and rolled off. Kyle followed behind in the stake truck, the jolting ride down gully-washed trails clearing his mind slightly.
The concrete training “house” used for the next exercise was also used by various units practicing assaults. Expended flash-bang grenades and blank rounds joined cobwebs and deliberately placed furniture and debris. While movie snipers would shoot from near a window, professionals, or those training to be, found contorted positions well back against inside walls, with several feet of space to absorb muzzle flash and dull some of the report of a shot.
Merrick picked a good spot, atop a sturdy table, out a curtain-shrouded window facing south. He could see through the sheer fabric out with his scope, but it would be near impossible for someone outside to see into the comparatively dark room. His position was solid, his view clear, and took in the large drainage culvert that was an obvious hiding place for the infiltrating team. And being obvious, one of them would invariably take it.
The kid was shrewd when not in a rush. Kyle simply watched silently from the doorway to the adjoining room, where he could watch Favrot, calm and imperturbable, set up a low position through a loophole and across what would seem like a safe zone.
Just as when doing the shooting himself, the wait hypnotized him into calmness. He watched and waited for twenty minutes, until Merrick said, “Permission to shoot, Sergeant?”
“Stand by,” he said. He grabbed his microphone and asked, “Rogers, Monroe, do we have permission to shoot?”
In moments, everyone confirmed readiness— hearing protection was necessary in the tight confines, against echoing high-decibel reports, and it was polite to warn the cadre and any students who didn’t have plugs in yet. “Go ahead,” he said to Merrick, who nodded and squeezed. The muzzle blast echoed tinnily around the concrete structure.
“Where?” Kyle asked. He passed Merrick’s instructions on to Rogers, who walked to the culvert and retrieved a student who was probably disgusted. Kyle couldn’t make out who he was from where he stood, but Merrick had done a creditable job. “Way to go, Sniper,” he said in encouragement, a grin on his face.
“Roger that, Sergeant!” Merrick replied.
Two minutes later, another student bagged Merrick, who’d snuck a peak through the “curtain.” Kyle sighed. Getting off a shot wasn’t the end of the mission, and didn’t make the area safe.
Outside, he waited for the end of the exercise. He wondered again about the possible TDY, both because it represented a pending upheaval, and because it took his mind off Merrick. He stared at nothing, face tight, until Rogers said, “Hey, Kyle, cheer up. You okay?”
“Yeah, just stuck in the past,” he said. “And wondering about the future.”
“Could be worse,” Rogers said. “Could be raining.”
As if on cue, the steady overcast dropped a few beads of rain on them.
“You jackass,” Kyle said, smiling despite himself. Rogers just laughed aloud and walked back over to the mockup house, where half the students waited patiently for the other half to get within range and become visible.
*****
The day ended eventually, and Kyle finished documenting the day’s activities and logged off his computer. He wondered what the possible TDY—temporary duty—was about, and why a general was coming to see him. But Schorlin either didn’t know or wasn’t saying. So he climbed in his truck and joined the exodus toward the dorms, base housing, and off-base living. He drove without thinking, pulled up in front of his dorm, and parked his Chevy S-10.
Kyle had never been married, though he’d had a few girlfriends. Currently, however, he was single; Rebecca had gotten frustrated with his odd schedule and left the month before. She’d objected to a few other things as well, like his drinking to relax, drinking to forget. In fact, Kyle was pretty sure he was drinking too much to be healthy, and had been working on lowering his intake. Since she left, of course, he was drinking to forget her, too.
His mind focused on Merrick. If the kid would just slow down and not expose himself, he’d be great. As it was, he was heading for a violent screw-up where people would die, just like that one in Bosnia.
Dammit, why did everything have to remind him of that flubbed mission and Jeremy’s death? Kyle wondered as he grabbed a bottle of cheap bourbon from the cupboard. He poured three fingers and took it to the recliner with him. As a single NCO, he didn’t bother with much furniture, just the recliner and the couch, both good for sprawling across. He had the TV on, but wasn’t paying much attention. He sipped at the whiskey while staring into the glass. Screw up for two minutes, regret it forever.
It ran through his mind again. They’d been in good concealment, thick alpine scrub that was a sniper’s dream. Then Kyle had decided to crawl out for a better view of the battlefield, because that same brush restricted vision to narrow apertures.
“I don’t know that we should do that,” Jeremy had said from beside him, the last word drowned out by a Crack! and his head exploding. Some Serbian sniper had seen movement in the brush, scoped them, and fired.
Then dirt fountained right under Kyle’s face, up his nose, in his eyes, a Crack! and a soft, moist sound of the exploding soil interrupting his shock. He threw himself on hands and feet and scooted back behind a heavy bush, then farther to place an outcropping of weathered basalt between Kim and his opponent. Then he noticed the burning pain in his arm and the running blood.
The sadistic bastard had taken Jeremy’s body apart with perfectly placed shots, while Kyle tried to call in helos for support and extraction. Three days of sneaking and his spotter’s life wasted because he'd been too eager to grab a good shot.
It hadn’t made him feel better that the Army had refused to place blame and dropped the investigation with no fault to him. He knew whose fault it was. So did the Reardon family. His assignment to the school was a step up for his career. It still felt like punishment sometimes.
It was then that his focus moved to the TV, which was showing a documentary on Bosnia. He punched at the remote until the screen went dead, and slugged back the burning liquor. He stood quickly and put the glass in the sink before he threw it, and decided to call it a night, dinner be damned.