Kill Zone: A Sniper Novel (14 page)

VICTOR LOGAN SAT AT A SMALL
table, pecking at a laptop computer to input the names of the Marines killed in the crash. His big, thick fingers were blunt instruments, meant for things much more coarse than dainty taps on a keyboard, and he found this work both laborious and somewhat insulting. Clerks did this kind of shit, not warriors. He detested having to wear reading glasses when he worked on this machine. They were a sign of weakness, of getting old, past the prime, but Logan had decided to adopt the modern age to get the technological edge. Just because a gorilla eats leaves does not mean he is any less of a mean son of a bitch.

He could tell the sun was up by the steady increase of the temperature in the room. Finally, he finished copying the names that Jimbo Collins had culled from the dog tags and clicked the key to save the file to a directory. He called up another list that had been downloaded from Washington several hours earlier, did a cut-and-paste job with the one he had just written, and compared the two. He highlighted one name in bright red, increased the font size to make it bold, then pushed away from the screen and studied it. “I was right, Collins. Somebody’s missing. The Washington list has one name more than the dog tags on the kill list. You damned sure you got them all?”

“All of ‘em, Vic. I pulled the tags off every one of those crispy critters.” He held up a plastic bag filled with dog tags and shook it with a definitive rattle of metal against metal. Collins was at his own computer, working with his camera to freeze-frame individual images of each of the dead Marines, inject them into a folder, and adjust the color and clarity.

There was a knock and a shout at the door, and both men grabbed weapons. Security was always on their minds, and they kept an extra AK-47, locked and loaded, on two pegs directly above the front door for emergencies. “What?” called Collins. He went to the front wall and put his back to it.

“Open up! Something else has happened!” The English came in a familiar French accent.

Collins held a mirror to the window and angled it to confirm who was there. “It’s the frog. He’s alone.” Logan nodded, and Collins opened the door.

A small man, thin but muscular, came in. He had a sharp face with prominent cheekbones, dark eyes, and a slit of a mouth that never smiled and was almost invisible in a long, thick black beard. Pierre Dominique Falais was a familiar figure in Sa’ahn, where he had settled after getting out of the Foreign Legion. As a converted Muslim, he was welcome everywhere, despite his European background, and he would drive to other towns and villages to buy crafts, wool, and rugs and load them into his white Toyota truck, then usually find a reason to stay overnight in order to smoke and eat and talk with the locals. The Syrian villagers considered Abu Mohammed to be a most generous man and an honest trader. Success in the little trading enterprise and some carpentry meant nothing to him, for his real money came not from peddling items to stores and bazaars, but by selling his intelligence services to the governments of Syria, France, and Russia. He was able to work openly with all three countries because their policies were seldom in conflict.

For the time being, however, these two large American mercenary soldiers, who had deposited five thousand dollars into his bank account in Damascus, had his total cooperation. A similar amount would come in when the task was completed.

“The fuck you want, Pierre?” snapped Logan, turning back to the name on the laptop screen.
A radioman lived through that and escaped?

The Frenchman stepped inside and closed the door. The place stank. These little homes were usually kept very clean by the women, with the pungent aromas of hard tobacco and cooking food welcoming visitors like a pleasant cloud. In here, the smell of human waste, sweat, and filth offended him. He shrugged it off. They were, after all, Americans, a disgusting people. “Two guards at that checkpoint a few klicks to the west have been killed. Bullet holes all over the bodies, and a villager described some open wounds that sound to me like they may have been made by grenades. I’m going out there.”

“Sounds like our runner, Vic. Somebody had to have some firepower to do that,” said Collins. “Want me to check it out?”

Logan grunted and waved them both away, absorbed by his work.
A radioman fought his way through two armed sentries? Yeah, he was a Marine, but that was a good piece of work.

“Okay, Pierre. Lead on.” Collins followed the Frenchman into the light and over to the pickup truck, a well-maintained vehicle with extra suspension and wide desert-quality tires with deep treads. The custom heavy-duty engine turned over on the first try and the straight exhaust pipes rumbled low. Falais wheeled the Toyota onto the road and sped away. Jimbo Collins immediately started talking to him about different kinds of shock absorbers.

Vic Logan kept staring at the name in red and studying the kill list: McDowell, Harold. Lance corporal. Radio operator. Twenty years old. He had heard lots of stories about people walking away from a plane crash or an automobile pileup that killed everyone else. It was possible. So the kid grabs the bike and takes off for Israel and just surprised the lazy guys at the checkpoint. It was the logical play. “Fucking Syrians can’t even stop a damned radio operator,” he grunted. The Marine would be picked up soon. He probably had a little spec ops training in escape and evasion, but it was a long way to the border, and most of it was either over open territory or on busy roads. He was good as caught and just didn’t know it yet.

Logan opened an encrypted file to transmit to Washington. Collins could send the pictures later. It took him only fifteen more minutes at the keyboard to finish his report, and he saved the work, leaving space at the bottom to add whatever details Collins picked up at the roadblock.

There was nothing more he could do now. Logan felt he had earned some relaxation. He rose, stretched his six-foot-five frame, and peeled off his clothes as he went into the small bedroom. It was a little cooler there.

On the bed lay a terrified, wide-eyed girl, tied to the four corners, spread-eagled and naked. A piece of gray duct tape was across her mouth, and although she could not scream, she wiggled in terror when she saw the huge American approach. He had first spotted her at the local store, where the fourteen-year-old beauty worked with her mother and father, and had checked her out as best he could while he bought a few items. Not really much to see, since the small girl wore one of those damned black bedsheets. But the flashing eyes were unafraid of the foreigner, and Vic imagined there was a flawless body with long, coltlike legs and budding breasts under all that cloth. He snatched her the first night he was here. Knowing the ragheads really thought their women were something special, he went to great lengths to keep her out of sight and quiet. She was tight that first time, struggling, fighting hard, just like he enjoyed his women. A little tiger. Lots of blood. When he was through, the young body was no longer virginal and wore a number of ugly bruises, varying shades of green and purple and yellow. The eyes were no longer unafraid. She had been taught respect.

The only question for Logan at present was whether to feed her or give her a chance to pee before he raped her again. The hell with it. Those helos going down had changed everything and he would be out of here as soon as Gates decided what he wanted done with the general, who lay trussed up in the next room.

Just thinking about the general pissed Logan off. The mercenary was angry that he couldn’t hit that one-star asshole in the face or anywhere that would show a bruise, because they were going to need him looking good for another television show. So he turned his frustrations on the girl instead, and went to her again, his hand moving to his penis. He wasn’t hard yet. This dirty whore was going to have to work to get him aroused.

He struck her hard across the face with his right hand, just to make sure she was paying attention. Her head snapped to the side like that of a doll, and the tears began to roll. Too bad he had to leave the gag on, he thought as he rolled his belt around his fist, leaving the sharp brass buckle dangling free. He slapped it on her thigh and a bloody gash opened in the smooth olive skin. Again, and a crimson streak flowed down the ribs as her body arced in pain. Again, clicking the metal buckle across both nipples. The screams would have been nice.

He looked down at himself with growing frustration. He still wasn’t hard, because she wasn’t working to satisfy him. “Bitch!” he yelled, and the belt came down again, on the side of her head, and dark blood oozed through the tangle of black hair. “Move it, damn you!” Logan’s fury grew like the heat that cooked the room, and he beat the girl without pity. No matter how hard he struck her, no matter how much he made her bleed, his goddam dick would NOT get hard.

A pounding sound drew his attention. The damned general was kicking the wall. Tied up like a turkey and still a pain in the ass. Logan shouted, “Shut the fuck up! I’ll be in there and beat your ass soon as I’m through with this little bitch!” The pounding continued, even harder.

And still the girl just lay there, moaning, refusing to help even though he had total control over her worthless body!
Little whore! It was her fault!
He had taught others, and he would teach her, too. With his free hand, he balled up his big fist and slammed her in the mouth.
Her fault!
Finally, he got hard, grabbed his penis, and ejaculated on the small breasts before falling across her, exhausted, into the pool of blood and semen.

Then Logan, still naked, went into the other room, where the general was handcuffed to the steel frame of a cot. Middleton’s eyes were filled with fury at having to sit there helplessly while a young woman was torn apart.

“You got a problem? Kickin’ on the wall like that?” Logan asked with a sneer.

“You sick shit.” Middleton spat on the floor in disgust. “You’re going to die under my knife!” He wore a loose and dirty Arab robe, was totally under Logan’s control, and yet still was making threats.

“Assholes like you got me kicked out of the Teams,” Logan said, squatting down beside Middleton. “I expect that we are going to get permission soon to blow your ass away. I’ll enjoy it.” He rolled Middleton over, grabbed the little finger of his left hand, and bent it back until it broke.

The general exhaled a sharp groan, then sucked up the rest of the pain, refusing to give Logan the satisfaction of hearing him cry out. When the sharp wave of having a bone snapped ebbed, he glared at the big man. “That changes nothing, you psycho.”

“Don’t judge me, dickhead. You’ve got nine more fingers I can break before I start on the toes.” He left the room, slamming the door behind him.

Logan was washing up in the small, stinking bathroom when Jimbo Collins returned. The water had cooled his body and the demons within.

Collins called out, “Vic? You in there?”

Logan walked back into the main room. “Well?” He was wiping himself with a towel.

“The frog had it right. A grenade apparently was used first, and there was a bunch of brass all over the place. M-16 cartridges. I found tracks of the motorcycle for about a hundred meters on the other side of the checkpoint. The runner took those Syrian dudes out without hardly slowing down.”

“Okay.” Logan sat down and added the checkpoint incident to his report, then hit the transmit button. The names and the details of what happened before dawn near the little town of Sa’ahn zipped into the morning sky and were relayed by satellite to a computer that was waiting far, far away.

Collins tossed his weapon aside and kicked off his boots. “Say, Vic. It’s gonna take some time for me to finish the video. How ‘bout you let me have another piece of that kid first? We’ll probably be leaving soon anyway.”

“Be my guest, Collins,” Logan replied with a sweep of his arm toward the bedroom door and a dark laugh. “And when you finish screwing that dead pussy, you can feed and water the general.”

“She’s dead?”

Logan grinned, his eyes almost sparkling. “Little whore just laid there like a pillow. No enthusiasm at all. The scrawny bitch didn’t earn her life.”

Jimbo Collins looked into the bedroom. The girl and the bed were covered in blood. This was not the first time that he had thought there was something really wrong with Logan, but it was wise to keep that thought to himself. A few more hours and he probably would never see the asshole again. Concentrate on the money, not the corpse. “Good thing we got dirt floors,” Collins remarked as he turned to his camera equipment. “We can bury her right here, then burn this shit-hole to the ground.”

THE ASSHOLE OF THE WORLD
sounded like a pig going after slops, snorting in his pleasure, so she just let her mind drift that way. Sprawled in the pigpen, down in the muck, a worthless piece of pork wallowing in a place where feelings were meaningless and the next “oink” meant only that she was still alive to hear it. A surge, heat, a final groan, and her father released her wrists and rolled off, spent. “I’m going downtown,” the Asshole muttered, wiping himself on her bunny sheets.
Like I even care.
Ruth Hazel Pierce blinked her blue eyes and came out of the pigpen stench enough to hear that. On this night the fourteen-year-old girl decided to care very much, a moment of decision that changed her life and ended his.

Usually she curled into a fetal position for a while, safe in her happy place, a pretend enchanted castle, surrounded by good friends and fire-breathing dragons that protected her. Only after an hour or so would she return to the real world of fear and shame and hate and get cleaned up before her mother came home from her late shift as a waitress. On that final night, however, Ruth Hazel exhaled a big sigh and headed for the hot shower and sweet bath soaps and freedom. From her dresser, she removed the tight one-piece black swim team suit she wore for school meets, stretched into it, and then put on old jeans with torn knees, a bulky San Diego State University sweatshirt, and jogging shoes. Out the door and down the hall to her parents’ room, where the Asshole of the World, the gun nut, kept all those weapons loose in the closet. When she was small, before the molestation got really serious, he had taught her how to shoot, thinking that a girl enjoyed the explosions. Respect a weapon, he said. Guns can hurt you if you’re not careful. No shit, Pops. She grabbed the Ruger .22, made sure it had a full ten-round magazine, tucked it into her waistband, and walked out of the house to change her future. One of them, either herself or the Asshole of the World, would not be coming back.

She walked along the beach from the trailer park to Oceanside in the early darkness, thinking she could see his footprints, since he always came this way. He walked because he had been picked up too many times for driving drunk. On the edge of the seedy downtown area, Ruth Hazel found a dumpster in an alley directly across the street from the Asshole’s favorite bar, a run-down strip joint, and she sat on the concrete in the shadows, crossing her legs and listening to the traffic on the street and the rumble of the surf. He staggered out two hours later, alone. Either he had run out of money or had been thrown out again. She didn’t care. It didn’t matter. Oink.

He ambled down the sidewalk and cut through a vacant lot to the high, dry ground of the beach. She followed his wavering silhouette against the starry night as the waves nibbled and sloshed at the sand about forty yards away. The tide was coming in. Not a soul in sight. Ruth Hazel pulled out the Ruger and began a little jog that closed the space between them in only a few steps. She stopped and took a firing stance, both palms around the grip like he had taught her. “Daddy?” she called in her little-girl voice as she snapped off the safety.

The Asshole of the World turned. The first bullet caught him in the stomach, but he was a big man, and a single .22 shot was not much more than a hard punch to the gut, not enough to put him down. The other six shots went into the chest, careful shots, one after another, and sprawled him on the sand like a beached porpoise. Ruth Hazel stepped closer. She saw recognition in his eyes, then horror as she deliberately aimed the Ruger at his crotch and fired. He screamed. She put the last two bullets into his eyes.

She rolled him onto his side and snatched the wallet from his back pocket, put the pistol back into her waistband, and jogged smoothly away down the beach. About a mile later, she shucked off her bloody clothes and swam through the surf, fighting stroke after stroke to get past the steep slant where the water went deep and the currents were crazy. Treading water, she pulled the pistol and the wallet from within her stretchy bathing suit and dropped them. As the items settled to the bottom of shifting sand, Ruth Hazel went into an easy butterfly kick and let the waves carry her to the beach. She walked home, her feet light on the sand. Another hot shower, stain remover on the blood spots on the jeans and sweatshirt, and those went into the washing machine. Ruth Hazel was drying her hair with a big blue towel, watching TV and eating popcorn, when her mother came home. “Hi, Mom!” she called.

The small woman who had lived with the beatings for years cast her worried eyes around the mobile home, puzzled as to why Ruth Hazel was in such a good mood. “Is your father here?”

“No. He was in for a little while after work but then went out again a few hours ago. Come on and sit with me, Mom. This is a hilarious movie. Have some popcorn.”

“Have you done your homework?” Doris Reed put down her purse and went to the sofa and smiled at her daughter. So much happiness! She seemed to glow.

“Yes, Mom. I did everything I had to do.”

Senator Ruth Hazel Reed kept two framed photographs on the long polished credenza behind the desk in her office in the Russell Senate Office Building off of C Street. One was of her handsome young army Warrant Officer Chuck Reed, lounging against a helicopter in Vietnam, the black-and-white picture taken four weeks before he was killed in action. The other was a family photo of ten-year-old Ruth Hazel snuggled between her smiling mother and father during a vacation to SeaWorld in San Diego. All of them were gone now. The Viet Cong had killed Chuck, cancer had taken her mom, and Ruth Hazel had murdered her father. Ancient history.

She never told anyone about the shooting; not her mother, not her husband, not even her hairdresser. The cops did a brief investigation and decided it was a robbery by some Mexicans coming up from the border, although the savagery of the attack, the clear rage, made them suspect a family member had done it. But they had alibis, sitting at home watching TV and eating popcorn together. Had to be Mexicans.

Ruth Hazel had absorbed the lesson that her rapes had not been about sex as much as about her father exerting power over her until she became more powerful than he. Since then, the search for power was her fuel in everything from sex to academics to business to politics. She might allow a man equality, as she had with Chuck, but she would yield to no one, ever again.

That included Gordon Gates and Gerald Buchanan. When she became President of the United States, she would be the most powerful person not only in New America, but in the world. Privatizing the military would give her off-the-books strength that no other President had ever possessed because she would not have to bring politics into play to assassinate a foreign dictator or sink a ship bringing in drugs or make some terrorists disappear. Just a phone call to Gordon would do the job. Under her reign, New America would be secure.

Now discomforting news had come from Syria, and the three powerful people were alone in a long black limousine parked near the Lincoln Memorial. Gates had told his chauffeur to come back when he called on the cell phone.

“Is our plan in trouble, Gerald?” asked Ruth Hazel. “You said it was foolproof.” Idiot.

“No, Ruth Hazel, the plan is not in trouble. The Marine rescue fiasco actually plays into our hands,” Buchanan responded in a smooth tone, holding his tongue so as not to respond with an insult. “I’ve been riding the Pentagon and intel services hard. There won’t be another rescue attempt, and the Syrian government is in an uproar.”

“Middleton is still alive, Gerald. He was supposed to be killed in the rescue attempt. You even sent in that sniper as a backup. But they are all dead, and yet the general lives. Hardly a success so far.”

“Easy, Senator,” said Gates. “I also think it may turn out to be fortunate for us that the Marines screwed up on their own and did not have to be ambushed.” He took a folded piece of paper from his briefcase and handed it to Buchanan. “Look at this. My Shark Team over there just sent this list of all of the Marines who were killed in the crash, verified by their dog tags. I expect to have pictures soon to help with the identifications.”

“So what am I missing here, Gordon?” Senator Reed asked.

“Look, Ruth Hazel. We wanted to show your committee and anyone else we could get to listen that while the U.S. Marines created a disaster, two special operators from Gates Global had infiltrated the village so deeply that they were able to go in and get these identifications and even make contact with the French guide. We can now say that if the Pentagon had not intervened and screwed up, my people would already have brought General Middleton out of there, safe and sound.”

“Not really.”

“Of course not. The only difference is that instead of the ideal of having the Marine sniper shoot him while we take pictures, or having our Shark Team finish the job, we let the jihadists kill him.”

“I don’t care who shoots him or if he steps on a scorpion. I just do not want him coming back to testify before my committee next week.” She pushed back in the soft seat and folded her arms.

Buchanan finished reading the list and handed it to the senator. It didn’t add up. “Somebody got out?”

“Apparently,” Gates responded with a slight wave. “Some kid who is only a radio operator took off on a dirt bike that was on one of the helicopters. I know that country, and he won’t get far. The Syrians will pick him up before he can reach the border, and I predict that we will be seeing him on television soon. We can exploit that when it happens. Not really a bad thing, when you think of it, because his comments will show even further how fucked up the mission was.”

Buchanan nodded in approval, pleased that Rambo Reed had been slow to understand how any situation such as this was fluid and one had to adapt to change. “So the senator and I can use the identifications as additional proof of how efficient private contractors can be, and how we can accomplish missions better than rote-memory military teams that court an international incident every time they get involved.”

Ruth Hazel read the list without changing her expression and handed it back to Gates. “I don’t like it when plans fall apart, but I agree that this problem can be turned to our favor.”

Gates switched on his cold voice, totally unemotional. “Good. We’re back on the same page. If you two approve, I’ll fire off a signal to the sheikh in Basra to have his men execute the general in some interesting and public manner as soon as possible.”

“And your team on the ground?” Buchanan raised an eyebrow.

“They will not be seen, nor will they interfere. They will simply hand Middleton over to the sheikh’s people and get out. So I expect Middleton will be dead within a few hours, and we can get on with Operation Premier.”