Sniper Elite (25 page)

“No,” Perez said. “No place else is secure.”

Naeem was beginning to come around.

Gil turned to Trigg. “Run and find Doc! Get him to give you a bottle of albumin and a hundred-cc syringe.”

Trigg gave the box of trash bags to Perez and ducked out of the room.

“Any chance we can reason with the MPs when they get here?” Gil ventured.

Steelyard took another garbage bag from the box in Perez's hand. “Nope. Hardcore MPs don't break the rules for Special Forces people. They're too busy resenting the shit out of us.”

Gil took smelling salts from his pocket and cracked it under Naeem's nose. “Wake up, fucker.”

The Taliban came to almost instantly, jerking his head away from the burning aroma of the smelling salts.

“Where is the American woman?” Forogh quickly demanded.

“Fuck you!” Naeem swore, spitting on Forogh's tunic.

Gil viciously boxed Naeem's ears from behind, causing him to cry out with pain as Steelyard slipped the second bag over his head, repeating the same process as before, only this time jerking the zip tie around his neck even tighter, cutting off the blood flow to the brain and causing intense physical discomfort.

Naeem flailed around in the chair even more hysterically than before, gasping horribly as he began to strangle. He blacked out in half the time, and Steelyard used a pair of diagonal cutters to snip the nylon tie-down from his neck, restoring the blood flow to his brain and pulling the plastic bag from his head.

Naeem's face was distorted into a puffy, purple effigy of itself.

“Bring his ass back around fast,” Steelyard said. “We'll have another go.”

Naeem came awake to the smelling salts once more and began struggling to get free even before the bag was placed back over his head.

“Tell them where the woman is!” Forogh pleaded. “Tell them now and this will stop!”

Naeem gnashed his teeth, calling them the filthiest names he could think of, wailing that they were all going to hell. “Allah will punish you all!” he shrieked, nearly berserk with rage and shame. “He will punish you all for this!”

Forogh looked uneasily at Steelyard. “He's beginning to crack.”

A Humvee squealed to a halt on the far side of the hangar. Trigg came through the door in that same second. “It's the fucking MPs!”

Gil grabbed the syringe and the bottle of albumin, looking at Perez. “Commander, you have to stall them—two minutes.”

Perez began to protest.

“Damnit, sir, will you just act like a SEAL for once in your goddamn life!”

Perez glared at him and fled the room.

“That wasn't cool,” Trigg muttered, worried that Perez might tell the MPs to arrest them all.

Gil spoke to Forogh as he held up the bottle of blood expander and stuck the needle into it to fill the big plastic syringe. “Tell him this is swine serum—made from pig blood. Medics use it as a blood expander to keep wounded men from bleeding to death.”

Forogh hesitated, started to stammer.

“Translate what I said, goddamnit!”

Forogh did as he was ordered, and Naeem's eyes filled with genuine fear for the first time.

Steelyard slipped the bag back over his head, and Gil grabbed his arm, jamming the needle into a bulging vein.

Naeem jerked his head wildly around, screaming in vain for Forogh to help him.

“Tell him his ass is going straight to hell,” Gil ordered. “No Muslim could ever get into heaven with swine blood in his veins.”

Forogh was a Muslim himself, and the notion of what Gil was about to do shook him on a very fundamental level. “Gil, you can't . . . it's not—”

“Fucking tell him!” Gil shouted. “Tell him now!”

“Brother!” Forogh said in a panic. “Please! Tell this crazy infidel where the woman is. He's going to make you filthy in the eyes of Allah—you'll spend eternity in hell!”

“Stop him!” Naeem shrieked. “For the love of Allah, I will tell him!” He was shaking with genuine terror now, sure that he could already feel the foul swine serum burning in his veins. “I will tell him—I will tell him! Just make him stop!”

“Where is she?” Gil bellowed. “I'm injecting now.”

“Brother, he's pressing the plunger!”

“Bazarak—she's in Bazarak in the Valley of Panjshir! You have to stop him!”

Forogh translated, spitting out the words as rapidly as he could.

“Is he telling the truth?” Steelyard demanded. “Do you believe him?”

Forogh stood adamantly nodding his head. “Yes! Yes, I believe him. He's terrified—he's only seconds away from meeting the devil!”

Steelyard gave Gil a wink just as the door flew open and six towering Army MPs came barging into the room.

“We have orders from General Couture to take this prisoner into custody,” announced a hulking first sergeant who looked as though he'd been carved from black oak.

Gil depressed the plunger, and Naeem let out an unholy shriek of terror. “He's all yours, First Sergeant.”

The MPs shouldered their way past and unbuckled the straps securing Naeem to the chair. Naeem went limp in their arms, blubbering and refusing to bear his own weight as he began to babble away with despondent prayers for forgiveness.

The first sergeant looked at Steelyard and shook his head in disappointment. “I really wish you hadn't put me in this position, Master Chief. I gotta report this.”

Steelyard took a Cohiba from his pocket and stuck it between his
teeth. “This piece of shit sodomized one of our female Night Stalkers, and we were trying to find out where they're holding her . . . but you do what you have to, First Sergeant.”

A crease formed in the first sergeant's brow. “You're telling me they've got one of our female GIs out there somewhere?”

Steelyard took a moment to strike a match. “That's still classified at the moment.” He paused long enough to light the cigar. “But yes, First Sergeant, that's what I'm telling you.”

The first sergeant told his men to put Naeem in the Humvee. He watched them carry him out the door, then stood thinking things over. “I'll leave the chair and the needle out of my report,” he decided. “But don't ever put me in this situation again.” With that, he turned and left.

Perez came back in right after.

Gil and Steelyard stood glaring at him.

“Don't look at me like that,” he said with indignation. “I had them convinced they were at the wrong hangar until you assholes started screaming back here.”

Forogh shoved Trigg out of the way and made for the door.

Gil grabbed his jacket. “What's your fuckin' problem?”

Forogh wheeled him, eyes full of fire. “You're a liar! You said you wouldn't inject him if he told you where she was. You lied to me—and now his soul goes to torment unnecessarily. You're a bastard liar, and I won't work with you anymore.”

Gil let go of the jacket and exchanged smiles with Steelyard. “You wanna tell him, Chief, or should I?”

Forogh stood looking back and forth between them. “Tell me what?”

Steelyard took the cigar from his teeth. “Son, the only thing in that bottle was saline solution. There's no such thing as albumin made from swine blood. But we needed
you
to believe that's what it was so that rapist son of a bitch would believe it, too. Otherwise,
it might not have worked. Desperate moments sometimes require desperate measures.”

Forogh went slack in the jaw. “It was a trick?”

Gil chuckled. “And don't be mad at me. I voted to shove a pork chop up the fucker's ass, but the chief here, he didn't think that would have the same effect.”

Crosswhite and the four wounded SEALs were all rushed into surgery moments after the returning Black Hawks had set down on the tarmac. No one from the top brass had been there waiting to ask them any questions, and as far as anyone else on the airbase still knew, Bank Heist had been a sanctioned operation.

By now, night had fallen, and still no one from the SOG brass had arrived to arrest Crosswhite or even to debrief him. He sat propped up in his hospital bed still feeling loopy from the anesthetic and the pain medication he'd been given. The bullet wound to his leg wasn't particularly serious, but an Air Force spinal surgeon had been called in to remove the bullet from his back near his spine. After the hour-long procedure, the surgeon had gravely informed him that he'd come a mere five millimeters from being paralyzed.

He looked over at Gil and Steelyard, who'd come to sit with him after having first visited their wounded shipmates. “Know what?” he said. “I'm going to recommend Doc for the DSC. He saved Blane's life. If our medics in Somalia had been trained to do a cut-down like that in the field, Jamie Smith probably would have survived that fucking battle.” Corporal Jamie Smith was the US Army Ranger who had bled to death on October 3 back in 1993 during the infamous Black Hawk Down mission to capture Mohammed Aidid in the city of Mogadishu. Smith had been shot too high in the upper thigh for either a tourniquet or direct pressure to stop the bleeding from his severed femoral artery.

Gil rolled his eyes. “That'll go over like a fart in church.”

“Fuck 'em.”

Steelyard waited for Crosswhite's nurse to finish taking his vitals. When she was gone, he said, “We'll be lucky to avoid landing in the brig after this fucked-up mission, you idiot. And you want to start making recommendations for the Distinguished fucking Service Cross?”

Crosswhite winked at Gil. “Would you remind your mentor there that he's addressing a superior officer?”

“I'm pretty sure he knows,” Gil said grimly, the bullet wound to his ass still very sore.

“What'd Captain Metcalf have to say about that rapist prick we brought back?” Crosswhite suddenly wanted to know. “He hasn't even dropped by to see how I'm doing.”

Steelyard grimaced, signaling for Gil to push the door closed. “Captain Metcalf knew
nothing
about the mission—that was the agreement. The onus was on us to pull it off . . . and we failed.”

Crosswhite sat almost straight up in the bed, his many IV lines pulling against the steel post where his IV bags were hung, threatening to topple it over. “Hey, Chief . . . we didn't fail at a goddamn thing. She wasn't fucking there!”

Gil sat forward to put his hand on Crosswhite's leg. “Dan, that's not what he meant. Relax.”

“That's the morphine talking,” Steelyard muttered, crossing his arms. “Listen, Dan, you're right. I misspoke. We took our shot, and the fuckers moved the target. That's just how the cookie crumbled this time. The silver lining is that you brought that rapist son of a bitch back with you—that and none of our people got killed. This way we may at least stand a chance of avoiding the brig.”

The door suddenly opened and in strolled General William J. Couture, wearing a starched ACU with four black stars down the front. He was flanked by Captain Metcalf of the United States Navy and his aide-de-camp, a tall, hard-nosed looking army major with a Ranger tab and a .45 caliber Glock pistol suspended beneath each arm.

Gil and Steelyard got quickly on their feet, snapping to attention. Gil had heard one or two tall tales about General Couture being somewhat Pattonesque, but the sight of his aide-de-camp's
non
-government issue pistols gave him pause to believe the tales might not have been so tall after all.

Ignoring the wounded Crosswhite, General Couture trained his attention on Gil and Steelyard. He was over six feet in height and wore his graying hair cropped close to his head. He had merciless, piercing gray eyes and a wicked scar that ran up the left side of his face. Everyone in the theater knew the scar was the result of an RPG attack on his Humvee during the early days of the Second Iraq War, back when he was still just a major general with two stars.

“Shannon,” he said in a deep, contemplative voice. “I seem to remember hearing that name recently. Been to Iran lately?”

Gil remained at attention. “My apologies, sir, but I'm not at liberty either to confirm or deny such a thing.”

Couture grunted. To Steelyard he said, “Master Chief, how much of this mess was your doing?”

“All of it, sir. I accept full responsibility.”

Crosswhite sat back up in the bed. “General, with respect, sir, the master chief is a liar. The entire mission was my idea. I ordered him and his men to assist me in a mission to—”

Steelyard cleared his throat, cutting him off. “Sir, I'm afraid that Captain Crosswhite doesn't know what he's saying at the moment . . . it's the morphine, sir.”

“The hell I don't!” Crosswhite said.

A faint light began to show behind the general's eyes. “Should I take it, then, that when the time comes both of you two hardheads are willing to fall on your swords for the good of everyone else who participated in this misbegotten
bank heist
of yours?”

“Yes, sir!” both men said in unison.

“Excellent,” Couture said, somewhat dryly. “That makes my job a hell of a lot easier than I expected it was going to be.” He turned to Captain Metcalf. “Captain, it looks like we have a head from both Army
and
Navy to offer up to the president. I think that should probably cover it, don't you?”

Metcalf stole the very briefest of glances with Steelyard. The two men shared a lot of history. “Yes, sir. I think that should probably cover it.”

“Very well, then,” Couture said. “As you were, gentlemen.” He paused before leaving the room to meet eyes with Gil. “Well done over there, Master Chief.”

“Thank you, sir,” Gil muttered, dropping his gaze.

The general's aide pulled the door closed after them, and the three warriors sat in the gathering silence until Crosswhite finally sat back with a sigh. “Fuck 'em,” he said again, smoothing his blankets. “Now I'm definitely going to recommend Doc for the DSC.”