Kill Zone: A Sniper Novel (25 page)

ARE YOU GOING TO HAVE ONE
of your little mental earthquakes now?” General Bradley Middleton did not take his hand from the AK-47 or stop scanning the darkness moving around the truck.

“You better hope I don’t.” Swanson kept his eyes on the road, watching a landscape painted green and black in his NVGs. He maneuvered around potholes, driving as fast as he dared without lights. “You know what I like best about being a sniper?”

“What?”

“I get to pick my partner, so at least I’m with someone I like. Unlike now.”

The two men settled into an uncomfortable silence as Swanson drove due west. Every kilometer they covered added to what he considered a growing debt of good luck that would not last forever. They were about six klicks out of Sa’ahn, had seen no other vehicles, and the truck was running smooth.

“There’s a McDonald’s up the road a couple of miles,” he told the general. Swanson was extending an olive branch because they had to work together. In this kind of situation, there should be only one enemy. “We can stop and get coffee and a Big Mac.”

Middleton actually grunted what might have been a laugh under other circumstances. He wanted to back off, too. “I prefer Burger King. Double Whopper with cheese. Flame-broiled.”

“Of course you would. You argue about everything?” Kyle asked.

“Yep. I’m what they call a contrarian.” Middleton sucked in a sharp breath, and his words were hoarse.

“I was lying about the Mickey D’s.” He handed the general a canteen of water. “We’ll be able to eat in a little while. How you feeling?”

“Been better. Been worse.” Middleton paused, and seemed lost in thought and more focused. He said, “Who sent you to kill me?”

Swanson slowed and steered off the road to avoid a ragged, deep hole. A sharp bump like that might make the broken rib puncture Middleton’s lung. “Gerald Buchanan, the national security advisor, wrote the order directly to me on official White House stationery. He didn’t give a reason, just the assignment. If the mission to rescue you failed, I was to shoot you.”

“He can’t do that.”

“Well, he did.” Kyle pushed the accelerator back down to regain his speed, and another kilometer passed beneath their wheels. “He bypassed the military chain of command by handling it through the CIA, which has used me once in a while. It was handed to me by a guy from his office.”

“Why would he want me killed?” Middleton asked.

“Beats the hell out of me, General. But you do tend to piss people off. Why were those American mercs involved?”

“They worked for Gates Global. That’s who organized the kidnapping, I think, because of my opposition to the military privatization bill. They were going to let the damned jihadists chop off my head anyway, so why would Buchanan send you out to do the same job, other than as an insurance policy in case that plan failed? There must be a direct link between Gates and Buchanan.” He sucked in another breath with a grimace.

Kyle removed his night-vision goggles. The black sky was showing the first signs of the new day, and he could make out shapes along the road. “General, keep in mind that our whole rescue mission was a setup. We were flying into an ambush. We were never supposed to succeed. I might not have even gotten through. Only somebody pretty high up could have gotten that information to the mercs. Buchanan would have been in the loop somewhere.”

“Damn. I need to think about this for a while.” Middleton fell silent.

Pinpoints of headlights crossing the road far ahead were easily visible in the remaining night. “Those have to be trucks on the main highway between Damascus and Amman,” Kyle said. “End of the road for us.”

Middleton watched the busy traffic, drivers hurrying with their loads to reach their destination before the sun rose and the heat of the day baked the roadways. “So we wait for a break and just scoot across. The Golan Heights are what, about thirty or forty klicks straight west?”

“We’re not going that way,” Swanson answered.

“But the Israeli army is all over those hills,” Middleton shot back. “It’s the quickest way out of here, and solid protection when we reach them.”

“There are just as many Syrian soldiers on this side of the border, General, and they all will be looking for us. Hold on.” Kyle found a narrow, paved frontage road that paralleled the main distant highway and skidded onto it with a sharp right turn that took them off the pavement. He intentionally clipped a traffic sign, crushed roadside brush, and shifted into a lower gear to dig deep ruts, leaving a clear trail before entering the northbound road.

The general was shoved against the door by the force of the turn and yelped in pain. “You’re going north? Toward Damascus?”

“Of course not.” Kyle stopped the truck and did a three-point turn to head back the way they had come, careful to stay on the pavement. He jumped out and used a small bush as a broom to erase marks of his reversed turn. The bush went into the truck bed and he headed east again.

“We’ll double back for a couple of klicks. The stuff I did back in the village and the claymore ambush worked better than we thought. It slowed them down so much that I haven’t seen the BTRs or anybody else on our tail. There are no headlights coming this way, so I think they stopped to regroup and call for help.” He mashed the accelerator, tearing along the quiet road.

“There’s a little road back here that heads south. We’ll get on it for a little while, then hole up for the day. They’re going to have a lot more choppers up as soon as daylight comes, so we can’t run in the morning hours. Both of us need rest, too. I haven’t slept in two days and you’re hurt.”

Middleton leaned back against the seat. “Not the way I’d do it, Gunny.”

“I know. It’s hard to stay still when the natural inclination is to haul ass, but this is how to best exfiltrate enemy territory and get out of here alive. Right now, they don’t know where we are, and probably will conclude that we are heading straight for Israel. So we have to do something else, and going north to Lebanon isn’t an option.”

The countryside rolled by as the sky lightened to a warm gray, and as the very edge of the fiery sun showed above the horizon and into his eyes, he found the road and turned right. The Syrians would try to cordon off all of the escape possibilities. Swanson felt exposed and vulnerable with morning coming on so rapidly, the sun seeming to point at him, giving away their position. There was nowhere to hide.

HELLO, RALPH. AREN’T YOU
supposed to be on the other side of the world?” General Hank Turner returned Colonel Ralph Sims’s salute and shook his hand. Turner introduced Sims to a three-star air force general with short silver hair who sat behind a huge desk in a spacious office where pictures of airplanes covered the walls.

Lieutenant General Peter Brady, commander of the 11th Air Force, also shook Sims’s hand, and his dark eyes examined the disheveled appearance of the commander of the 33rd Marine Expeditionary Unit. “You look a little worse for wear, Colonel. Have a chair. Coffee?”

“Thank you, sir, I will. I just came in on a meteor, that NASA X43-D scramjet.” Sims was wearing a borrowed air force jacket over his short-sleeved summer uniform. What was appropriate wear in the warmth of the Med offered little comfort at Elmendorf Air Force Base outside Anchorage, Alaska. Only a few hours earlier, his uniform had been crisp and starched, and now it was a mass of deep wrinkles.

General Brady’s eyes narrowed. “Colonel, there is no such aircraft, but I would like to know how the hell you were riding in it.”

“Yes, sir, I understand. I’ve never heard of such a plane either, and I’m not quite sure how I ended up in the back seat. The pilot told me to get in, and I did.” He sat down, wrapping his palms around a warm mug. “Forgive my appearance. I barely had time to change out of the flight suit before your command sergeant major hustled me over here.”

General Turner refilled his own cup. “I heard you were on the way with something special, so I sat here while my plane kept being repaired over and over. I heard that the Sergeants’ Network has been busy, so a lot of pretty smart people must think your news is important enough to hold the chairman of the Joint Chiefs on the ground. I am curious.” He sat in a big leather chair and crossed his legs. “Let’s have it, Ralph.”

Sims took a long drink of coffee and felt the warmth go all the way to his stomach. “No disrespect to General Brady, sir, but I believe you should have this on an ‘ears only’ basis.”

Turner waved his hand. “Pete Brady and I go back more than twenty years. I value his counsel. He can listen to whatever you have. Proceed.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll give you the short version, then answer any questions that I can.” He handed the plastic-enclosed envelope and note to Turner and stood by silently while the two generals passed the order between them.

“This was delivered personally to Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson by the senior military aide of National Security Advisor Buchanan,” the colonel told them. “It was to be destroyed as per instructions from Buchanan, but the Gunny managed to sneak a copy, which was what the aide unknowingly burned. This is the original,” Sims explained. “Then Swanson went in with the Force Recon team on the Middleton mission as scheduled, but did not plan to obey the order. When the choppers crashed and it was assumed Swanson was dead, my Top brought that letter to me. Swanson had planned to bring General Middleton out of there safely.”

Brady slid the letter back into its envelope. “So you flew halfway around the world to hand-deliver this to Hank?”

“Yes, sir. It was too hot for a messenger and I intentionally bypassed a couple of layers in the chain of command. This is way above my pay grade, General, but I think it has to be illegal for a civilian bureaucrat who has never been elected to anything to use the clout of the White House to order the assassination of a kidnapped American general.”

Turner had uncapped an elegant old-style fountain pen and made some notes in a little book. “Bet your ass it is. Does Buchanan know that you were coming to see me?”

“I don’t see how, sir,” said Sims, taking another sip of coffee. “The only people who knew about the letter, other than Buchanan and his aide, were Swanson, Top Dawkins, and me. Now Swanson is dead. Since Buchanan believes the letter was destroyed, he would see no loose ends.”

General Pete Brady glanced out of the window. It was dark outside. Rain scratched at the glass. “He figured it out, Colonel.”

“Sir?” Sims asked.

“About an hour ago, Homeland Security jacked the terrorist warning level all the way up to Red, and an attack in Washington killed the Jordanian ambassador.” He handed Sims a news story downloaded from the Internet. “Not that we have much to worry about up here in Alaska, but it certainly got our attention.”

“I received a separate message, ultra-encrypted, from the National Command Center, authorized by none other than Gerald Buchanan,” said General Turner, beginning to pace around the office. “You are to be arrested on sight, on a charge of treason, no less. You are to be held here until Homeland Security personnel can pick you up for questioning. There’s a cheery thought. How do you reckon he knew to send that message about you, who are supposed to be in the Med, to me, who is stuck up here in Alaska?”

Ralph Sims bit his lip. Arrested?

General Brady reread the order. “We couldn’t figure why he would want you in custody so bad. Now we know. The alert level should have nothing to do with you being tagged as a bad guy, nor with the strange message direct to Hank, but I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“Our question now becomes whether Buchanan is acting on his own.” Turner moved to a wall map. “The President was on the campaign trail tonight out in San Diego, one of those thousand-bucks-a-plate things. He was glad-handing the faithful when he got word of the attack in Washington and authorized raising the alert level. He skipped the speech and got back aboard Air Force One. They’re already in the air.” He tapped the map. “We’re up here outside of Anchorage, and before the sergeants intervened, I was en route to Beijing for a meeting that has been six months in the planning. Naturally, I’ve cancelled the China trip. Instead, I’m going to rendezvous with Air Force One when it lands at Andrews. You’re coming with me, Ralph.”

“I just left there,” Sims said with a groan.

“Quit whining, Colonel. I hate air force weenies to see a Special Ops CO whimper like a little girl. Anyway, you can sleep on the way back, and I’ve got some good news for you. Seems that your Gunny Swanson lived through the crash after all, and that General Middleton has gone missing from his captives in Syria. Swanson apparently busted him free and has been raising holy hell in the town where he was held. They’re on the run, with the Syrians hot on their tails. Things are getting interestinger and interestinger.”

Brady turned to his computer terminal and called up a program to show the weather. “This rain squall is just passing through, and the sergeants have assured me that all of our aircraft are suddenly ready to fly again. They’re warming up my Gulfstream II/SP even as we speak. I say let’s go meet the Boss.” The 11th Air Force commander went to a closet, took out a flight suit, stripped to his underwear, and pulled it on.

“We’ll go back with Pete aboard his Gulfstream,” said Turner. “I could use my own big-ass plane that was going to haul me over the Pole to China, but Pete’s toy is a lot more comfortable,” Turner said. He looked at a big clock on the wall. “Matter of fact, the big bird will be taking off in a few minutes. Bet we beat them to Washington.”

“Am I under arrest?” asked Sims.

“Oh, hell, no,” snapped Turner. “We don’t take orders from that overblown asshole. Buchanan’s up to no good, it has something to do with our Marines getting killed, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”

Sims read the news report about the terrorist attack in Washington while the two generals finished getting ready. “Oh, shit!” he exclaimed.

“What ‘Oh, shit’?” asked Turner.

“This story, sir! The four people killed by the terrorists in Washington: the ambassador, his driver, another embassy official, and a U.S. Navy officer, Lieutenant Commander Shari Towne.” Sims’s face had gone red with anger.

“Come on, Colonel. Talk to me.”

“General Turner, it’s an open secret that Lieutenant Commander Towne and our sniper, Gunny Swanson, have been together for a long time. One of those don’t ask, don’t tell things, so nobody officially knew about it. They’re almost engaged, from what I hear. That direct link between her and Swanson is only point one. Point two is that she ran the Middle East desk on Buchanan’s staff in the White House.”

The generals looked at each other. “Goddam, Hank. Those bastards weren’t after the ambassador at all!” said Brady. “They were after the girl!”

Turner, Brady, and Sims walked outside toward the flight line, where the beautiful Gulfstream was warming up in a circle of bright light. Plumes of jet exhaust streamed away in the cold air, and the light rain glistened on its polished skin. Brady asked Sims, “Do you think this Gunny Swanson can get Middleton out of there alive?”

Sims nodded his head in the affirmative. “Sir, I’m beginning to believe that Gunny Swanson can walk on water. Don’t bet against him.”

A great bellow of noise rolled across from the main runway as a Boeing 707 painted in the distinctive sky-blue-and-white pattern of a VIP of the U.S. government raced past them and gathered speed for takeoff. “There goes my plane. Sort of a shame it’s flying empty,” said Turner.

Brady added, “The crew is happier to be going home than to China.”

They watched it lift smoothly into the air. A spark of bright light flashed on the ground in the distance, and a bright dot streaked higher and higher, gaining momentum and altitude at a dizzying rate. The Stinger shoulder-fired missile rammed into one of the hot engines on the Boeing and detonated, and in a fraction of a second the dark sky seemed filled by a ball of fire that consumed the plane even before it hit the ground.

Ralph Sims grabbed both generals and threw them to the paved runway, sprawling across them. “Jesus Christ, General Turner, you were supposed to be on that plane!”

“Go to Alert One! Scramble the fighters!” Brady yelled to a nearby security guard, who grabbed his radio and relayed the order to the Elmendorf command center. Sirens wailed as ambulances and fire trucks burst from their garages and raced down the runway.

A whine buzzed in the sky, and an explosion shook the ground when a mortar round arced in from the darkness beyond the wire. A second round was on the way before the first one struck and landed closer to a big hangar; then a third mortar round landed right on the building that was filled with volatile fluids and ammunition. It erupted like a volcano. Three fighter-bombers undergoing maintenance inside, out of the weather, were blown apart, and the maintenance crews were incinerated. When Sims saw that the mortars were not coming their way, he got the generals to their feet and they all ran for cover.

Air Force security police surged toward the wire as three more mortar rounds rained down, two of them chewing holes into the main runway. The last one grazed the big control tower and exploded on a parked truck, which set fire to everything around it.

The Shark Team was gone by the time police found the empty launching tubes. Both men had been members of the Security Police and nearing retirement when they were corrupted by the big bucks offered by Gordon Gates to join the Sharks. Weapons had been stashed in an off-base apartment for months just in case they were needed. They also had new identities, new passports, and thick bank accounts and were flying first class to Seattle before it was even discovered that they were missing.

When ground troops had cleared the flight path beyond the fenceline, the Gulfstream piloted by General Brady zipped from the runway, with Turner and Sims strapped into the leather seats. Rolling next were a pair of F-16 escorts, armed to the teeth, which took station off the wingtips.

In the calm skies above the Arizona desert, the President of the United States was briefed about the deadly strike at Elmendorf. Four more F-16s sped out to sandwich over and around Air Force One. The President had no doubt that the terror alert was right at the level it should be. His country was once again under attack.