The Survivor

CHAPTER 21

Scott Coleman came over the top of a rocky outcropping and leapt to the steep slope below. His thighs burned and his heart pounded powerfully in his chest as he half-ran, half-skidded down twenty yards of loose dirt.

“Approaching your position,” he said, making sure he didn’t sound out of breath. Despite a training program designed and monitored by a soulless Norwegian coach, he was feeling the relentless grade and the weight of his pack. The passage of time was hard on men in his profession. Better than the alternative, though.

“Roger that, Scott. We were wondering what had happened to you.” One of Wicker’s veiled jabs. See how he felt when he was pushing fifty.

The clearing he entered was probably only thirty feet in diameter, bordered with dense trees choked with even denser bushes. McGraw was in a tree on the north side, barely visible in camouflage fatigues and hat. He was holding the modified hunting rifle that he preferred for shorter ranges, scanning through a Schmidt & Bender scope.

“What have you got, Bruno?”

“Garbage.”

Coleman moved toward the east side of the clearing, stopping when he caught a glimpse of the gray wall surrounding Obrecht’s property. After carefully moving a few leafy branches, he got an unobstructed view of what McGraw was talking about. They were stuck in a trough between hills. From Coleman’s position on the ground, nothing more than the wall and the top of the mansion’s roof was visible. The gate was a complete write-off — too far south for even McGraw to see.

“Do you have a view into the courtyard?”

“Barely.”

“How many guards do you have eyes on?”

“I’m down to two. Intermittent.”

Coleman swore under his breath and pulled out a range finder. Just over 450 yards to the wall. To make matters worse — if that was even possible — they were no longer blocked from the wind. The gentle right-to-left breeze they’d had on top of the knoll was now being accelerated to eight knots as it funneled through a canyon to the east.

To say their new position was a tactical disaster would be the understatement of the century. He might as well have brought a cooler and some beach chairs for all the use they would be stuck in this hole.

“Can you hit either of them?” Coleman said.

“Eighty-twenty. It’s starting to gust.”

“Wick?”

He knew roughly where his top sniper was, but didn’t bother to look for him. Wicker had a custom-built tree stand with telescoping arms painted and textured to look like tree branches even from a few feet away. His camo was modified with fabric leaves and real bark that perfectly matched the tree species he was in. Even his rifle would have been custom painted for this particular contract.

“I’ve got a little more height than Bruno, but I’ve set up to prioritize my line of sight on our former position. I might be able to take one guard. Depends on timing, though. I’m maybe thirty percent.”

Coleman pulled back to the center of the clearing and began — emptying his pack. Best-case scenario, his guys would leave nine highly trained men and no less than two hundred yards of wide-open ground before they hit twelve feet of dead, smooth wall. He hated this plan even more now than when Rapp had first proposed it.

There was nothing he could have done to change it, though. He was comfortable arguing with Kennedy and would even mix it up with Hurley from time to time. Rapp was a different animal. Fighting with him was like taking a swing at a hornet’s nest. You weren’t going to win, and in the process of losing you were going to be in for a world of hurt.

He pulled a small monitor from his pack and turned it on, waiting for the screen to brighten sufficiently to see in the outdoor environment. The image was being beamed from the drone Marcus Dumond had doing lazy figure eights above.

The security detail was still on high alert inside the courtyard, but nothing in the rhythm of their activities suggested they knew about the storm gathering on their perimeter.

He activated his throat mike, keeping an eye on the image of the men he might soon be up against. “Are you still dead in the water, Stan?”

“Mmmmm hmmmmm.”

Coleman set the monitor down and pulled his rifle from its case. Outstanding. He had a cancer-ridden old man cooling his heels in a waiting room, two snipers stuck in the low ground, and Mitch Rapp crawling through a tunnel with the contract killer who murdered his family.

Just another glorious day in the service of the Central Intelligence Agency.