The Crisis (66 page)

Erculiano brought the suitcase up. He popped the latch and held it open like a counterfeit-Rolex vendor on Fifth Avenue. The men opposite stared in.

Their chief put his hands in front of him, palms down, fingers spread. He drew them apart, then twisted his open hand. She frowned. The twisting hand was a signal of refusal. He spoke again, but once more, she couldn't make it out.

“I'm sorry, I don't understand,” she said in Arabic, more or less to Yousef, but the Arab wasn't smiling anymore. He was frowning at Al-Maahdi.

The sick man took a stride forward, rocked on his heels, then steadied. He put his hand on the lid and closed the case. Made that rejecting motion again, and stepped back. When the Arab spoke he rounded on him, speaking angrily through clenched teeth. Bloody fluid trickled down his beard. He spoke on, to her now. She stood bemused, not understanding. Was he refusing payment? But wasn't that what had drawn him out of his den in the first place?

She looked away, at the sweep of dead horizon all around. The purple loftings of the mountains, far to the west. The ruins the map had shown, below, to her left. Down there somewhere, the well they'd been supposed to meet at. She shaded her eyes and looked toward it. The men followed her gaze.

 

. . .

 

“GOT the TI.” Cooper, behind him on the scope.

“Wind?” Teddy grunted.

“Effective, ten to fifteen right to left.”

“Pass that up here.”

Very slowly, the spotting scope crept up. Making sure the black plastic grid and sunshield were in place, Teddy aimed it at the hilltop.

He studied the man leaning against the truck. Graving not so much his face—he wouldn't be able to see features through the aperture sight—as his clothes, his height compared to those around him. The turban. The others' were black, but his was green. Once Teddy knew him he defocused, pulling the plane of sharpness back three-quarters of the way to his eye, then halfway, then a quarter.

The mirage eddied and flowed, first this way, then that, a disquieting shimmer of heated atmosphere pushed by the breeze. At three hundred meters it simply seethed in place. But there wasn't just one wind. It was different at a hundred yards than what it was at five or six or eight hundred. The farther the bullet got from the muzzle, the more velocity it shed, the more the wind at that point would affect it.

“I get about a mil and a half right.”

Teddy didn't answer, still squinting into the eyepiece as his fingers rested on the focusing knob. The spotter made recommendations, but the shooter was in charge. The spotter kept a roving eye, in case a perimeter guard wandered up the slope, or a circling buzzard read two motionless forms wrong and landed for lunch. It had happened.

After a while the TI got in the truck again and sat back, one leg sticking out. Teddy put the front sight on him and practiced snapping in. He dryfired ten times, visualizing the way the sight looked when the snap came. Making sure he had the top plane of the front post perfectly centered in the peep. Every few seconds he put a click or two on the windage, this way or that. Picking up the rhythm as the flags straightened or drooped, angled this way or that.

Some time later, Cooper pointed at a dust cloud bleaching the sky. They watched as the vehicles diverted from their course for the well, turning for the trucks atop the hill, the flags flapping in the hot breeze. Saw bobbing heads, but nothing more, as the ransom party dismounted.

He waited, wishing fervently for a better angle. All he could see was the tops of heads, no, just distorted, shimmering blobs that now and then, in the moiling overheated atmosphere, detached from their bodies and floated upward, bobbling like helium balloons. If they stayed there,
no way he could take a shot. He'd just draw doom down on them for nothing.

He had to act. SEALs didn't wait around scratching their asses. They made things happen. He pulled his consciousness out of the sights and looked left and right. Cooper must have thought he was doubting his backup, because he muttered, “I got your six.”

“I know. But I can't see. We gotta get closer.”

Cooper's look said:
You're shitting me.
Teddy wasn't that sure himself, but he knew one thing: he didn't have the shot. And that was what this whole fucking mission was all about.

Reslinging the rifle along his side, he started crawling. Out from behind the last bush, from behind his little concealing rampart.

Out onto open ground.

 

HASHEER seemed very excited. “He says he doesn't want the money,” he said, in Arabic. But Aisha was watching the Saudi. This guy didn't like what he was hearing. He kept trying in his polite way to butt in. But the leader raised a hand and he stopped. Al-Maahdi mumbled a few more words through his bleeding mouth.

“He wants a cease-fire.”

“Holy smoke,” muttered Erculiano.

Aisha caught her breath. The guy was linked to the Cosmopolite bombing. To the deaths of Buntine and the marines, the rocket attacks on the airfield. In one way or another, the man before her had caused the deaths of thousands, pitted himself against the United Nations and every concept of civilized behavior. He was beyond the pale.

And yet . . . his militias were still in the field. They still occupied great swaths of the hinterland. If he was willing to cooperate, allow the aid workers to go back, they could save many lives.

“Yeah, a cease-fire. Just what they'd want,” Spayer murmured.

“What do you mean, Sergeant?”

“So they can regroup. Recruit. Rearm. Come back and hit us again.” He glanced at the sun, then down at the valley. “We better get those hostages, ma'am.”

Which was absolutely correct. That was the number one priority. “We need the hostages in our custody before we discuss anything else,” she told Hasheer. “I have no power to negotiate a cease-fire. But I can relay the word to General Ahearn. If that's what your leader wants. Let's do that now, transfer the hostages, and we'll leave the money issue on the table for a few minutes.”

Al-Maahdi waved to the Waleeli by the livestock truck. They began
shouting, herding the gaggle of men and women forward with sticks. The hostages milled, then limped forward eagerly.

 

GRÁINNE heard a queer moan and was startled to realize it came from her own throat. “They want us over there,” the old man told her. His claw-like hand fixed in her shoulder as if a falcon perched there. The other hostages were chattering like an after-theater crowd, the same bright accents, the same sudden animation after a passive trance.

“I'll steer you. Like walking a bicycle. Can you move a little faster?”

“I can't.” Her thighs were weeping fluid. It was running down her legs. Like when she'd felt her period trickling down her leg in algebra class. Had to press her binder over her skirt. Thank God, the school uniform had been dark blue skirts and a white blouse.

“Don't worry, I'll be right here. Let them jog ahead if they like.”

Prying an eye apart with finger and thumb, she made out the drab angularity of military vehicles framed by a gauntlet of Waleeli in tattered jeans and looted camos and black headwraps. She nearly wept, then nearly laughed. She stumbled and the old man caught her. “Not far. Keep walking, old girl.”

For a moment she thought he was her father, there beside her, and murmured, “Okay, Da.” Then, “No, no, I was confused, I thought—”

“That's all right, love. Call me whatever you like. Another hundred steps. The first people are already there. They're giving them something to drink. One foot in front of the other.”

She felt sick to her stomach, faint. Maybe she wouldn't make it. Then she thought, I must. Not for herself, but the secret she carried. It would transform the desert. Transform the lives of everyone in the country. Give them food, plenty, the certainty of a tomorrow instead of eternal famine and war.

For that, she could force bare bleeding feet across burning-hot sand. She heard murmuring ahead. It slowly drew closer. She was passing whoever was speaking. There were three voices. One was a woman's. The sounds drew abreast of her, then fell behind. She heard motors idling.

“I see a camera,” the old man said. “Chin up, then, let's look good.”

She took a deep breath. Lifted her head, and tried to paste on something like a smile.

 

“EIGHT hundred and twenty yards,” murmured Cooper, behind him. Teddy breathed in slowly, held it, forcing oxygen into his bloodstream. Then breathed out, letting the tension go. Sucked it in, let it go.

He made sure the safety was on. Then pulled the charging handle back and slipped the long slim cartridge, nose-heavy with its black moly-coated projectile, into the chamber.

Very quietly, he eased the bolt forward and heeled it closed.

He fitted his finger around the trigger. Sensing the wind, how it enveloped and embraced the land. It flickered the flags on the distant hilltop.

“Hold two and a half minutes right. Five clicks right, by the tables.”

They were lying full length with no cover, out in the open, trusting to their sand capes and the camo paint to evade any searching eye. Even so he was at the far limit of his marksmanship, his weapon, and his ammunition. He hoped Skilley's bullet would hold the half minute of angle the old sniper had promised. That it wouldn't tumble, way out there, or let the wind seduce it off course. He'd get one chance. Then the shitstorm would descend.

“Got the TI?”

“Got him.” The green headwrap definitely helped.

Only seconds now. The hostages, a herd moving left to right, were almost at the Humvee with the red cross on the side. He'd built his position. His natural point of aim. The blackened post of the front sight rose and fell as he breathed to center precisely on the TI's headwrap. Like a green bull's-eye, but smaller than any he'd ever fired on at the SpecWar range at Dam Neck. A beautiful range, overlooking the ocean, the waving sea oats on the dunes giving you wind dope right on the target line. Like the black-and-green flags were now, rippling up there on the hilltop. He watched them. Hesitated. Then reached up and put one more click on the windage dial.

His spotter began the chant behind him, low and rhythmic. “Fire. Fire. Fire.”

Teddy breathed in again, very slowly, taking up the slack in the first stage of the trigger as he looked off to the right, at the pebbles and dirt, to relax his eye.

He looked back. The post came down as he exhaled. The TI shifted his feet, as if to turn and walk away.

The trigger broke. A surprise, just like it was supposed to be.

Bang.

As the sights came back down from the recoil, he saw the flags had foreshortened. He cursed, hurriedly shoving the second round into the chamber.

 

SPINNING at three thousand revolutions per second, the bullet leaves at over 3000 feet per second. At a hundred meters out its velocity is 2,800
feet per second; at three hundred, 2,500; at six hundred meters, a fraction under 2,000.

All this can be known, calculated in advance; corrected for barometric pressure, altitude, humidity, temperature, the rotation of the earth. But as it arches outward the wind sways its unwinding trajectory through space and time and moving air first this way, then that. Pushes it half an inch to the left at a hundred yards, two inches at two hundred, twenty-two inches back to the right between two hundred and six hundred.

From moment to moment the wind shifts and folds on itself in a thousand whirls and pleatings, like sheer cloth dropped fluttering through the air. There's no way to predict density, speed, direction ten seconds from now. Each molecule batters the flying metal with its own will, each impact infinitesimal, but numbered in the trillions.

There's no way to predict the wind. Or even to measure it, until the present's passed into history.

By the time the tapered slug reaches the hilltop it's dropped 158 inches below a line drawn level from the muzzle. The wind has drifted it 50 inches off its original course. As it reaches its target, one and a quarter seconds after it was fired, it's still moving three hundred feet per second faster than the speed of sound.

 

GHEDI watches the sky, the moving specks up there, as his finger works at a loose bicuspid. Crows were messengers of
waaq
, of an evil death. That was the old way, the old belief. Like the
wadaaddo
some said inhabited Juulheed. The way of the clans. Not the new way.

He's offered the foreigners peace. Now God will determine whether they accept. If not, there'll be more war. Whatever He decides, he will accept. The wind cracks and snaps in the flag above him.

He's looking up at it when someone shouts. It's Juulheed. Ghedi shades his eyes. What's he yelling? He's pointing, calling out about hearing something. Another voice joins in. His sister. What's she saying? But if there are helicopters . . . he starts to turn, to see what's wrong.

The bullet comes out of the sun and explodes through his head.

The superheavy metal barely slows as it traverses the eight inches that hold his dreams and terrors, and wipe them away. All memories evaporate in the instant liquefaction of fat and brain tissue. His skull flies apart. His body still stands, shaking with sudden palsy, but he no longer exists.

The bullet drills on, barely slowed by bone and flesh. But that resistance alters its course. It spins off to one side and downward in a spray of blood and fluid that creates for a fraction of a second a halo of pink spray, all around the shattered head it has just emerged from.

 

. . .

 

“SHOT one, TI, good hit. Head,” Cooper said from the scope. No longer murmuring. Just a normal everyday business voice. “But he's still standing. Refire, same dope.”

Teddy was surprised. He'd expected that wind shift to push him off target. And he'd been aiming center mass, not head. He put in one click down and tripped the bolt release.