Clean Kill (15 page)

NO BULLETS WERE COMING
his way, so Fatehi Awwad knew he had not been seen crouching beside the culvert. He sighted his RPG launcher on the main road coming out of the base and patiently waited for his enemies to play their part. The crossbar arm at the guard shack was being raised and four Humvees were ready to move out in column, their big engines rumbling and the huge tires crunching on the road. As the first one came out, Awwad sighted on it and pressed the trigger.

An igniter exploded a ball of gas inside the RPG launcher and flung the pointed antipersonnel grenade from the front end of the tube while the enormous back-blast from the rear disappeared in the ditch behind him. The rocket covered the first eleven meters of flight in a tenth of a second, then automatically armed itself. Stabilizer fins popped out. A fuse kicked in the propulsion system, and the Russian-made grenade increased to 294 meters per second, with a clockwise spin. Designed to penetrate armor, it easily bored into the Humvee and exploded with full fury inside.

The explosion tore the lead vehicle apart and killed four soldiers. The wrecked and burning Humvee plugged the gateway, stopping the convoy before it started. Soldiers opened fire, shooting blindly beyond the edge of the lights, but hitting nothing. The Egyptian terrorist threw down the empty launcher tube and ran.

THE ARMY BASE HAD
not been designed to repel any real attack, so the surprise was total. Years of routine patrol duty had dulled a low sense of military readiness and the soldiers, with no combat discipline, were stressing out, fixated on whatever was in front of them and running toward the burning Humvee. The antiaircraft missiles were left unguarded.

Swanson knew that if he did not stop the RPG attack, Saudi soldiers would be killed and the relief column would be delayed in reaching the besieged foreign compound to battle the rebels in the city. Still, it was a sound tactical decision, for this was not about who got hurt, but the sacrifice of a few to be measured against the greater good. The presence of a tactical nuclear missile easily trumped the lives of a few individuals. He would take that opportunity first and worry about the decision process some other time. To overthink the situation would only muddle what needed to be done. He went forward, dragging his prisoner along.

TO MAKE OPERATIONS ON
the military base simple, a pattern had matured over the years. Everything from supplies to people alike was funneled through the primary entrance and exit. The secondary gate had fallen into disuse and was secured by nothing more than a big padlock on a chain. Swanson found no fresh tire tracks to indicate recent use.

He shoved Salid to the ground about six feet from the unused gate, beside some scrub brush next to the fence. Using a set of Homer Boykin’s bolt-cutters, Kyle chose a link about three inches above the ground and snipped it, then did the next link and kept going until he had opened a gap about eighteen inches square, held in place by the links at the top. He pushed Junior through the open flap in the wire, crawled through himself and folded the fence back into place. The opening would not be noticed by a casual observer. Any guard would know that the secondary gate was supposed to be chained and locked, and would see exactly that, since the chain and lock were right where they were supposed to be. The nearby fence would not even be inspected.

Swanson led the captured man like a puppy on a leash and went to the side of the long, low building, stopping in the deep shadow of the wall. He wrapped some duct tape around his prisoner’s legs to immobilize him. “Stay, Junior,” he said in Arabic, pointing a finger at him. The young man nodded. He had no idea who this man was, but they were in the middle of an enemy military camp, so there was no escape anyway. Any noise would serve only to alert Saudi soldiers who would kill him.

The front of the building had two large doors in sections that would roll up and out of the way at the touch of a button. A regular door stood between them. The big doors were down but the smaller was open and a long, thin bar of startlingly bright light spilled outside. Kyle hugged the wall as he moved in from the left. When he reached the portal, he leaned forward and listened for any sound that would indicate someone was moving inside. Swanson slid an eye around the edge. No movement. Safe.

At the front gate, soldiers were reorganizing and pushing the wrecked Humvee out of the way to resume their mission into Khobz to save the embattled foreign workers. Kyle cut the tape from Junior’s legs, grabbed him and shoved him through the doorway. They stood exposed in the bright lights of the large building.

Two boxy, flat-tracked vehicles squatted in the middle of the building, side by side, each pointed toward one of the rollup doors. Swanson recognized them as variants of the familiar old M-113 armored personnel carriers that the U.S. Army had introduced a half-century earlier, during the Vietnam era. The basic design had been steadily modified and updated to meet different needs and the versatile APC became a standard armored vehicle for many jobs in many armies.

He climbed aboard the nearest one and peeled away a sand-colored tarpaulin that stretched the length of the vehicle. Below it, a pudgy missile was nested in the cargo bay above a web of pipes that made up the hydraulic launch system. Kyle grunted in satisfaction. From his days of hunting mobile SCUD missile launchers in the deserts, he was familiar with this system.

When ready for action, the rear deck of the APC would be lowered to create extra space, then the missile would be raised into position and it could be fired by remote control from the second APC, the command vehicle. This pair matched up with the modern Humvees parked outside. The entire operation was not for air defense at all. It was a shoot-and-scoot missile launching system. They could drive it almost anywhere and target almost anything.

The missile was blunt on its nose, which told Swanson what was in the cargo hold of the other APC. He climbed down from the first, tied Junior to a protruding metal strut, then jumped aboard the second one. A large weatherproof container was secured in the cargo hold and it was stamped with yellow and black circular radiation warnings: a tactical nuclear warhead.

In his mind’s eye, he could envision the little convoy rushing to a mapped firing position, the removal of the warhead from its box, and how it could be married to the missile body and launched in a matter of minutes. Whether the target was an invading Iraqi army or an Israeli city or an American naval battle group, this was a dangerous puppy. Kyle estimated it was relatively low yield, since it was for battlefield use, but still more powerful by itself than the bombs that were dropped on Japan.

Time was sliding away. Once the military relief column from the base reached the foreign compound, the fighting would end quickly and guards would resume their standard duties, including checking the base. The warehouse building would not stay empty forever. He called Homer on his sat phone and told the CIA agent what he needed.

THE ROUND ARMORED HATCH
cover above the driver’s position was folded back and Kyle dropped easily into the compartment on the front left of the M-113 that contained the nuke. Again, he was on familiar ground because he had driven these boxes before. To break the monotony of long hours of down time in Afghanistan, he had occasionally joined some other guys in taking a few old APCs into the empty desert for some totally unauthorized off-road racing.

He adjusted the seat on its post so that he could see through the viewport and also use the infrared periscope. Swanson was not planning to shoot anybody, but did not want to have his head sticking out of the hatch as an easy target. His right foot rested on the large accelerator pedal. He checked the hand brake and the hydraulic service brake pedal. The only major change he could see was that a sort of steering wheel on a yoke had replaced the twin tiller handles to make driving easier. It had an automatic transmission. Sweet.

There was no key, just a switch to turn it on. Kyle clicked it and the big 350-horsepower diesel coughed and grumbled to life. The dials flickered and showed a full tank of diesel, which would give him a range of more than a hundred miles.

Swanson hoisted himself back through the hatch and went over to his prisoner, stripped away the AK-47, and tossed the weapon into the other APC. The young terrorist’s eyes grew wide in fear. “Relax, Junior. You’re free to go,” Kyle said. He removed all of the tape and stuffed it in his pocket so as to leave no sign that the man might be there against his will. “Good luck.”

The prisoner stood perfectly still for a moment, rubbing his wrists as his captor disappeared back inside the big armored vehicle. The hatch slammed and locked. When the engine roared, Junior broke from his trance and ran to retrieve his rifle. He had been left behind as bait.

Swanson slipped the transmission into gear, pressed down hard on the accelerator and the powerful engine roared as the 23,000-pound vehicle lurched into motion. Its rolled aluminum armor made quick work of the closed, thin door and he plunged through, straight out onto the concrete apron. He turned the steering wheel to the left without touching the brakes, as easily as he would have turned a pickup truck. Lining up with the secondary gate, he stomped the accelerator and the APC chewed across the open area. The improved tracks and suspension kept the ride steady and the big machine smashed through the locked gate.

Off to his right, tips of fire still pierced the dark sky as buildings blazed in the foreign compound and Kyle took a side road that led far around the fighting. Within five minutes, the broad tracks of the APC were off the concrete and onto desert sand as he headed into the deep nowhere.

THE WHITE HOUSE

“HE DID
WHAT
?” STEVE
Hanson, the chief of staff for President Mark Tracy, pushed away from his desk in surprise. After a career in the turbulent world of high-tech start-ups, bitter political campaigns, and a long stint in Washington, Hanson believed he was immune to shock. “Are you bullshitting me, General?”

“Not at all. You heard me right.” Major General Bradley Middleton, the commander of Task Force Trident, was seated in a brown leather chair in front of Hanson’s desk. A small fire burned in the fireplace, giving off a faint, pleasant tinge of smoke. “Gunny Swanson stole a nuke last night.”

“Good Lord. The man never does things by half measures, does he? Just outright stole it?”

“Like a thief in the night, Steve. He broke into the Khobz military facility, found the tactical nuclear warhead mounted in its very own APC beside the missile launcher and drove off with it. With CIA help, a heavy-lift CH-43 helicopter made a rendezvous with him in the desert about twenty klicks outside of town and Swanson took the APC straight on board. The TNW is secure in the weapons bay of the USS
Enterprise
even as we speak. The armored personnel carrier was dumped overboard.”

“Incredible. The Saudis have no clue?”

Middleton shook his head and ran a hand over his close-cut hair. A big smile spread over the square jaw. “No. That’s the real beauty of it. Swanson also snatched up some terrorist beforehand and abandoned him inside the missile storage building, where he was killed during a shootout with the Saudis. They look at the corpse as proof that the terrorist was part of the group that had also attacked the Khobz oil workers’ compound. He actually was to be part of a rebel RPG team that ambushed a convoy rushing out of the military base. So the obvious conclusion was that his terrorist buddies took the TNW. Is that confusing enough?”

“And Swanson is okay?”

“Yep. The chopper dropped him off on a stretch of beach north of Khobz and he walked back to the CIA safe house. He radioed a report to Major Summers in Kuwait and she forwarded it to me.”

Hanson stood up, holding the yellow legal pad on which he had made notes. “This might be a game-changer, Brad. We know something the Saudis don’t, about their own nuclear weapon.” The chief of staff lapsed into a terrible Hispanic accent for a quirky Ricky Ricardo imitation from
I Love Lucy
: “The new king has got some ’splainin’ to do.”

“Right.” Middleton laid a folder on Hanson’s desk. “Steve, you keep that copy so you can brief the boss and I’ll privately feed you any more details as they come up. The CIA and the Pentagon obviously already know about what happened, but I told them to keep the secret compartmentalized since it was a black Trident operation. I told them that President Tracy would land on them hard if there were any leaks. So, you need anything else?”

Hanson placed the folder atop his tablet and headed for the Oval Office. “Yeah. Tell Kyle to find another one.”

KHOBZ, SAUDI ARABIA

NO LOOSE ENDS. KYLE
Swanson remained absolutely still, concentrating totally on the final stages of the fighting that had unrolled at the mosque only 400 meters from his hide. The window on the far side of the shadowed room was open and his emotions were replaced by purpose.

Since the Saudi authorities did not know what had happened to the nuclear warhead, other than that it had disappeared, he intended to keep the mystery tight and intact. To do so meant he was going to have to kill some people. That did not bother him, because in his judgment, they were enemy combatants. Swanson’s personal habit was that when presenting a gift to an enemy, one should wrap it very carefully so as to keep their attention on the unimportant things, like the shape of the box or the crinkly yellow paper wrapping, and not the bomb inside. The trick was as old as the wooden horse at Troy and usually worked. Today, he would add a final flourish of distraction on his theft at the base by tying a big bloody red bow.

Kyle had returned to the safe house just before daylight and found both Homer and Jamal busy closing up shop, arranging det cord and explosives in a pre-arranged pattern that would not only destroy the structure but make it cave in upon itself.

“The Boykin Group is out of business,” Homer declared. “It won’t be long before the Saudis start wondering about how a handful of foreign workers just happened to have enough automatic weapons, ammo, and grenades to whip a pretty big onslaught of rebel bad guys. Come dark, we will be gone.” He rubbed his eyes, and then looked fondly around the well-stocked basement that had been maintained over the years. “Shame to lose all this, but we’ve got no choice. Our cover is blown.”

“Probably,” Kyle agreed. He got a cup of coffee and sat on a foldout cot. “How’d it go out there?”

Jamal was planting C4 bricks beneath the communications console, and his voice had a dim echo. “The soldiers in the Saudi relief column were pretty pissed off that they had been ambushed back at their own front gate. Came barging in on the left flank of the rebels with lots of firepower and pretty good maneuvering. The terrorists were pushed back into the urban area.”

Homer was puttering with a timing device. “That’s when we gathered up our toys and came back here. A while later, when they got the word that their nuke was gone, the Saudis went big league mean and are still bringing in more troops and armor and attack helicopters. It has degenerated into house-to-house fighting.”

Kyle finished his coffee. “I assume that all of the action is pointing toward the mosque?”

“Yep,” replied Homer. “That’s their problem. Despite the king being assassinated and the nuke being gone, the commanders are hesitating. They are squared off against the Religious Police and the Committee on Virtue as well as the rented terrorists, which means a Muslim-on-Muslim showdown.”

Swanson walked over to the sand-table model of the city and studied the area. “Will they attack the mosque?”

Jamal came out from beneath the counter and got busy with a screwdriver and pliers to pull out hard drives and memory boards on phones and computers. “No doubt,” he said. “They have to capture the mosque in order to get some prisoners to question about the nuke.”

Homer agreed. “I wouldn’t want to be in the same room when the prisoners are being asked to assist with the investigation. Gonna be messy.”

“Torture,” Jamal agreed.

“Big time. They know that anybody will crack under torture, sooner or later.” Homer’s eyes suddenly came up and met the steady gazes of Kyle and Jamal. “You think the prisoners might actually convince the Saudis that they really
don’t
know anything about the missing weapon?”

Swanson walked into the armory cage. “We won’t take that chance.”

******

SNAVPERSKAYA VINTOYKA DRAGUNOVA.
NOT
his first choice of a sniper rifle, which would have been his custom-made Excalibur, or even his second choice, the familiar U.S. Marine M40A3, or even a Barrett, or an Armalite. But this wasn’t a gun show. He needed a good sniper rifle with no American fingerprints on it, and Homer Boykin had both the SVD Dragunov and a Chinese-made NDM-86. Swanson took the Dragunov. In his opinion, the rough NDM was only a small step up from an AK-47 and had the look of being stamped out in an old Commie tractor factory. Not what he wanted for prime-time combat.

Jamal helped Swanson find a deserted third-floor apartment in a building that provided an unobstructed view of the mosque. The sun was almost directly overhead, so the room was darkened by shadows while he crawled around to set up his hide. He wiped grime from the floor and rubbed it onto his face and neck to camouflage the white skin. Jamal helped push the sparse furniture around to further break up his silhouette and also to create a firm rest for the long rifle. Kyle braced the Dragunov in a comfortable position and took his time adjusting the PSO scope with its red reticle in the illuminated range finder. It read exactly 347 meters to the front plaza of the mosque. Smoke from the sporadic shooting outside the building hung thick in the air before drifting away on a light breeze from the north and he fine-tuned the scope for a minimal wind. It would probably be no factor because he was so close to the target zone.

Jamal left him alone and went down to their car. Kyle needed a getaway driver more than he needed a spotter.

The eerie sense of once again entering a slow-motion film flowed over him. Noise faded and his vision sharpened, but he did not sweat, even though the mid-day temperature was hot. In a combat situation, it was normal for his senses to heighten, for the mental thought to give way to the physical muscle memory of years of scout-sniper training. His body already knew how this movie would end.

ONCE THEY RECEIVED AUTHORITY
through their own chain of command, the Saudi soldiers had moved in with admirable violence of action. They assaulted the mosque by savaging the building with helicopter gunships and raking it with .50 caliber machine guns and mortars, pounding the exterior into rubble. As soon as the heavy fire lifted, infantry assaulters went in to finish the job.

After about twenty minutes of searching, and with sporadic fire, they had yanked out three survivors and brought them into the plaza of smooth stone. A badly wounded man lay sprawled and moaning, bleeding from the gut and in obvious pain. To the right stood a sullen fighter wearing the red headgear of the Religious Police, wiping dirt from his eyes. In the middle was a stout, middle-aged man in a turban, the imam of the mosque. He was moon-faced and arrogant.

Swanson watched dispassionately through the scope of the Dragunov. He had nothing personal against the three men, even though two were obviously terrorists while the imam was the instigator of the attacks. Kyle didn’t care, for his own secret was much bigger than any of theirs. He rested his finger lightly on the trigger, looking over the heads of the Saudi force that had relaxed after capturing their objective. No one looked his way, up and behind them. It had been assumed to be empty and secure. He wanted to shout:
Where is your fucking rear security?

His hand was comfortable on the grip and he held steady on his first target, the religious cop. Although the man’s wrists were tied, he would be the most likely to make a quick move upon realizing the threat. His tunic was torn and the beard was caked with mud. Kyle had him center-mass and squeezed straight back on the trigger until the Dragunov roared and bucked against his shoulder. The shot ripped across the small distance and into the man’s throat. The bullet tore out the neck and spinal cord before exiting lower through the back. Firing a little high, Kyle thought.

The semiautomatic rifle cycled another round into the chamber as the target flipped over, the bolt moving with such smoothness that he silently thanked Homer and Jamal for keeping the weapons so clean. The Saudi guards stood frozen for a decisive moment, never having considered an outside attack on their prisoners. Beads of sweat were starting to worm through Kyle’s scalp as he firmed up the sight picture on the imam, who had been allowed to remain standing untethered.

The man had his arms crossed, his hands hidden within sleeves, and was haughty even in captivity, certain that no harm would befall him. From his height of piety, he had sent many men to kill many infidels with his heated, distorted versions of hate from the Koran. The imam was part of the religious food chain in Saudi Arabia and answered to the leaders of the entire religious establishment in his country. They would protect him. Reality was dawning on him as he stared at the blood and gore that had splattered his robes.

Swanson paused his breath, waited for the instant between heartbeats, never wavered the crosshairs and with a liquid smoothness, squeezed the trigger for the second time. The bullet struck solid in the center of the imam’s body, taking out the lungs, with splinters angling down to chop the kidneys. The moon face was seized in shock as the target jolted back, somehow remaining on his feet for a moment before slumping to his knees and keeling over forward.

Kyle was out of time.
Three shots and move!
The Saudis were stirring, horrified that their prize quarry had been murdered before their eyes, and so fast that they could not react immediately. After all, nobody was shooting at them! Swanson brought his scope on the wounded man on the plaza. He was dying anyway, but why take the chance that some medical miracle might save the bastard’s life. The final bullet gouged into his heart, the force making the body bounce on the stone.

Swanson left the rifle, dodged out of the door, and pounded downstairs to the waiting car.

Nobody would be questioning those three prisoners, with or without torture. No loose ends.