Game of Snipers

1

He saw Katie amid the prairie flowers. She sat, legs crossed, while the wind played with her hair, and it gleamed in the sun. She smiled brightly. She always smiled. Four years old was the age of smiles. She looked so happy, and around her the grass fluttered in the breeze, and it must have pleased her, for she turned to face it, tilting her little nose up.

“Katie!” he called. “Katie, sweetie… Katie!”

She turned to his voice, and her blue eyes lit with love.

“Daddy,” she called. “Hi, Daddy!”

“Sweetie, I’m coming,” Paul yelled, and lunged to run to her, to hold her tight, to smother her in his arms and protect her from all. It’s what a father did.

But he could not make it.

He was handcuffed to a post. The sharpness of metal pulled hard against his wrists.

“Katie, I—”

“Daddy, I have to go.”

“No, Katie, no. I’ll be right there.”

But his wrists would not yield, and though he yanked hard enough to draw blood from his flesh, the cuffs would not give.

“Bye, Daddy,” said Katie, as she rose to run away. “I love you.”

And then she was gone, and he was aware that he was awake. Dream finished, he was awake. But the odd thing was that the binding of his wrists was no dream, and he yanked hard, the steel biting. He could feel a solid post threaded through his bound arms, mooring him upright as solidly as Joan of Arc had been for the fire.

He blinked, it did not go away.

Other oddities revealed themselves. For one, a gentle wind pushed the smell of prairie grass against his nostrils, and, two, he felt the radiance of a sun above him, welcoming him — or damning him — to wakefulness.

He did not smell his own piss and vomit. He did not feel the crusty ripple of long-uncleaned skin. He hadn’t shit his pants, or if he had, someone had cleaned up the mess for him.

He wasn’t wearing that pair of ragged chinos, fifteen years old, filched from some garbage can, or that old pair of Adidas, two sizes too big. He was in turquoise surgical scrubs and white socks.

Paul blinked himself more fully awake, opened his eyes fully, waited for them to focus, and examined the world in which he now found himself.

It was not the world he had left, which was the alley behind restaurant row, where he had unreliable memories of the effects of muscatel and methamphetamine, of his surrender to unconsciousness behind a dumpster a half block down from that Mexican restaurant in the alley where all the normals came to eat and drink and laugh every night and from whom he could occasionally cadge a buck or even a five-spot.

Where had it gone? What was happening?

Did I die? Am I in Heaven?

No, it was not Heaven, but it was definitely outside.

He saw grass, lots of it. The world was well lit. Details, vistas, landscapes dialed into focus. He saw vastness, mountains, pines. He saw a huge dome of sky, tendrils of wispy clouds spread across it, a sun that could have been hotter but not clearer, and green, green, everywhere, as he was confined to the floor of a valley that was bordered by forest, its pines rolling away to infinity mostly.

Confusion, not an unknown condition, took over his already murky mind, though for once, at least, the voices were quiet. He looked for human beings of any sort and soon saw them. A good fifty yards away, three men sat on deck chairs, coolly appraising him. One was holding a cell phone to his ear, talking to someone.

“Hey!” he called. “What is this? Who are you? Where am I?”

They did not respond to his calls, though the one on the phone glanced at him, then went back to his animated conversation.

More details: they seemed Mexican, from their hair (long) and wardrobe (cowboy hats, jeans, boots). Sunglasses, a certain macho languor in body postures of amused relaxation. Was he in Mexico?

Oddest detail of all: standing apart from the crew was a man in black. That is, all in black, from the toes of his boots to the crown of his hat, including a black mask that covered his face, with slits for his dark eyes. Of them all, only this one was watching Paul.

Paul tried to assemble a series of steps by which he somehow ended up chained to a post in Mexico, cleaned up to some degree and placed before the world like a specimen. But rigor was long missing from the working of his mind, and nothing made any sense. His will crumpled against the effort. He wanted a drink, he ached for the blur and smear of the muscatel that drove his furies away, at least temporarily.

He went dizzy, leaned against the post to utilize its support. That small effort exhausted him. He breathed heavily, already in oxygen debt.

“Help me please,” he shouted.

But now the postures of the Mexican steering committee had changed. The one on the phone seemed to be in charge, and he commanded the attention of the others. They joined the man in black in directing attention toward him, but not in empathy.

The moment seemed to elongate until it fell out of time. He heard an odd noise, not a blast or a burst, no sharpness to it, but it still carried sensations of destruction to it, as if something had struck in near silence against the earth itself. Immediately, the man on the phone began to speak.

Paul turned. About twenty-five yards out, a cloud of dust — debris from some sort of explosion, by the conical shape of it — hung gracelessly above the folds of scrub prairie, but was disorganizing in the breeze.

Again, he had no framework into which he could fit this puzzling event. It was just there, defying his attempts to classify and respond.

In the next second, another eruption occurred. The earth itself expressed the tremor of the released energy as a geyser suddenly spurted at the speed of light, easily ten feet of supersonic dust and dirt, roiling, climbing, disassembling in the breeze. It was much closer, and Paul felt the sting of pellet and grit.

He tried to place it, again seeking context, and rifled through the crazed index of his memories to find something and came to the conclusion that these were bullets striking the earth, delivering a violence of energy and purpose. He’d seen it in the movies a thousand times — at least, when he went to movies.

The ground beneath him shattered. He was smashed hard into the post by unseen energy, as the cuffs twisted and sliced his wrists. He tasted blood and copper in his saliva, and after a second’s numb mercy, sharp pains began to clamor for attention, announcing the presence against his body of shards of debris, flung stones, supersonic grit.

He realized now: someone was shooting at him from a long way away.

The panic of the prey flooded his brain, and he tore away, only to have his motion halted by the cuffs.

“No,” he shouted. “You can’t do this. This isn’t right,” he screamed, but involuntarily began to sob.

They laughed. It was pretty funny.

“Katie,” he screamed. “Forgive me! Forgive Daddy! Please.”

He entered the light.

2

What was there to complain about? The view from the rocker was superb, prairie meadows giving way in the distance to the mountains, snowcapped (as was he) and remote (as was he), been there forever (as had he). He owned everything he could see except for the mountains (ownership: God). The late-spring climate temperate, the sun not so strong, the breeze mild. Children successful. Wife content, as much as any wife could be. He just kept getting richer, not of his own volition but by the working of certain mechanisms. Health fine, even superb. The new hip (number three) felt great, his ticker still ticked. Horses — too many, all sinewy beasts with plenty of go in them. His guns? Some new ones, in fascinating calibers, maybe a new sniper round to test out, called 6.5 Creedmoor, which promised lots of amusement of the dry, technical sort he so enjoyed. Friends — more than he deserved, and in places he never thought he’d go, from NRA celebs to old snipers to a few journalists, to a lot of big-animal vets across seven states, plus dozens of former marine NCOs, as salty a crew as could be imagined. Pickup trucks? Could only drive one at a time, so what was the point in having any more?

I have everything, he thought.

His late self-education was progressing in his leisure. He was on to Crimea now, trying to imagine battles under gunpowder clouds so vast and brutal that no one could see their limits, the wounds nasty and greenish, headed into gangrene, toward, ultimately, amputation without anesthetic save whiskey. As a man whose life had been saved several times — and he had the scars to prove it — by modern emergency medicine, this fact alone sent a tremor of dread down his straight old spine. Everything was fine.

He knew it couldn’t last.

It didn’t.

It was the lowest category of rental car, in a shade of Day-Glo otherwise found no place on earth, pulling up the long road in from Idaho 82. It had to mean some sort of trouble, because friends never came without a call first, and not one of them would travel under such brightness. No mailbox shouted SWAGGER to the world at the otherwise unmarked gate, and the size and beauty of the house was not manifest from the highway: the road could have just as easily led to a broken-down trailer or a complex of heavily armed religious zealots or some other monstrosity that had taken root in Idaho’s free soil.

He touched the .38 Super Commander holstered under the tail of his T-shirt, found it secure yet accessible in a second, though that was mere habit, as the arrival of a nuclear airburst fuchsia Tempo or Prism hardly presaged a gunfight. Actually, he would have preferred a gunfight.

The car pulled up, and he rose, and he was not astonished but mildly nonplussed by the driver, who got out and faced him. Woman. Fifties, maybe early sixties. Pantsuit, makeup, and the ubiquitous high-end sneakers that most American women wore most places these days. Her smile was tentative, not practiced and professional. Her face was slightly out of symmetry, as if parted and rejoined inadequately, but no scars showed. It was just an oddness of cast that suggested complexities. He couldn’t help picking up a note of forlorn loss, however, when he added it all up. Something damaged about poor whoever-she-was.

“Ma’am,” he called. “Just so you know: this is private property, and I’m not what you’d call a public fellow. If you’re selling, I’m not buying. If you’re interviewing, I’m not talking. And if you’re campaigning, I don’t vote. But if you’re lost, I will happily give you directions, and a glass of water.”

“I’m not lost, Mr. Swagger — Sergeant Swagger. It took me days to find out where you lived. I know you don’t like interruptions, and there’s no reason you should, but I would claim the right to a hearing because of the circumstances.”

“Well—” he said, thinking, Oh, Lord, what now?

“My son. Lance Corporal Thomas McDowell, sniper, 3/8. Baghdad, 2003. Came back to me in a box.”

They sat in silence on the porch for a bit. He didn’t know what he could say, because of course there is nothing that can be said. He knew enough of grief to know that only time eats it down, and sometimes not even that, and death is the only ultimate release. So, it would be her show, and she seemed to need some time to gather.

Finally, she said, “It seems very pretty here.”

“I like to sit a couple of hours each day. Just watch the weather and the grass change. Sometimes a batch of antelope wander by, sometimes a few mulies — a buck and his gals. Once a bull elk, magnificent rack, but they seem not much in evidence these days.”

“You’re being very kind to me.”

“It’s just my way.”

“You think maybe I came for explanations. Context, history, the who, the why, the what, the physics of it. The ballistics. You would know such things.”

“If it helps, I’ll sound off.”

“I’ve learned a thing or two since the notification team knocked on the door. Seven-point-sixty-two by fifty-four, 160 grain. Classic Dragunov. Velocity about sixteen hundred feet per second by the time it reached him. Steel-cored, probably didn’t distort or rupture. Went clean through. It would have been instant, I’m told.”

“Sounds about right.”

“I should be grateful for that mercy, but don’t look to me for grateful. Mom doesn’t do grateful. Mom wants the man who pulled the trigger dead. That’s what Mom wants.”

He paused. That one was unexpected. Now, what the hell could he say?

“Mrs. McDowell, this ain’t healthy. Not only because what you describe is murder, not war, not only because it could get you into a whole peck of trouble that would make where you are now seem like kindergarten, not only because no matter how it came out you’d end up spending all your money — and I mean all of it — on lawyers and various other forms of predators, not only because it’s probably not even possible, and, finally, if you’re trying to get me to go on some kind of revenge safari for you, I am too old, at seventy-two, and lack any wherewithal for door-busting, stair-climbing, and the stalking part of sniping and would only get myself killed or arrested.”

She nodded.

“That is entirely sensible,” she said. “The people who would talk about Bob the Nailer said he was a decent man and would not steer me wrong, and he would give me solid advice. And, for the record, nobody in the marine community or the shooting community or the intelligence community — and I have entered them all — has encouraged me. They think it’s crazy.”

“I would not use such a harsh word. Let’s leave it at ‘bad idea.’”

“But—” she said.

“There’s always a ‘but,’” he said.

“Yes, and here’s mine. You can say it was war, that’s all. He joined the Marine Corps of his own volition, he signed on to sniper school, he went to war willingly, he had a few kills of his own, and one night his number came up. Numbers come up, that’s what war is about. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. And the boy who pulled the trigger, the argument would run, he was just another boy like Tom, dancing to a politician’s tune for policy goals that never made any sense, and, just like Tom, he’d rather have been at the mall or the movies, hanging out with girls, whatever. Is that it?”

“That would be the argument I’d make, yes. No peace in it, no justice either. The chances are also that that boy never made it out of Baghdad himself. There was a lot of killing there in 2003, if memory serves.”

“There was.”

“If I recall correctly, for a while they had a very effective sniper program, and our kids died at a significant rate. Some folks went over there, analyzed the data, made charts, and figured out where, when, and how these shots were being made, and designed new strategies. So our dying went way down, theirs went way up. I guess Tom went down before the experts figured it out.”

“That’s it exactly.”

“Shouldn’t you be mad at the Marine Corps for being so slow to get it figured out? Or at the president and the long line of men in gray suits who put your son where he was when he got taken? What about the newspapers that wrote editorials in support? That might be a way to channel your rage. Another way might be to see that those that died, in fact died for something, even if it was only to become part of a countersniper database, which ultimately saved a lot of mothers from feeling what Tom’s mom feels. It meant something. It was a sacrifice not for nothing but for the betterment of all those who came after.”

“I suppose I could feel that. But I don’t. There’s that ‘but’ again.”

“All right. Tell me about this particular ‘but.’”

“But it wasn’t a part of the war. But it wasn’t another kid who wanted to be at the mall. But it wasn’t even an Iraqi. But he’s not dead. But I know who he is and where he is.”

It was a tale full of sound and fury. What it signified was as yet unknown. Only one thing was clear: it was told by a woman who was either insanely brave or insanely insane — maybe both.

She had been to Baghdad seven times. She had been raped four times and beaten three, once severely, which explained the somewhat odd shape of her face.

“The bones didn’t heal properly,” she said. “Big deal. Who cares?”

Three times she’d been bilked by fast operators. She’d used up the money she’d made selling her house on those. She borrowed money from her brother to pay for a six-month immersion course in Arabic.

“It’s not like I can follow the nuances, because you know it’s very fast, and so much depends on context or prior knowledge. But I can pretty much stay with it, I can negotiate, I can double-check, I can follow. Oh, and I became Moslem.”

“You became Moslem?”

“I had to understand him. You can’t do that from the outside, not really. So I gave myself another six months to convert, to really try and become Islamic, to understand it in history and culture and ideology and fervor of faith. I even experimented with the idea of blowing up some infidels just to see how it felt, but, crazy as I am, even I saw how wrong that would have been.”

The story, so far. Tom’s battalion intelligence officer had told her that the men opposing 3/8 in that sector of Baghdad were thought to be refugees from the 2nd Armored Assault Brigade of the 5th Baghdad Mechanized Division of the 1st Republican Guard Corps. Crack troops who melted back into society after the end of the war, mostly from the capital city themselves, so they knew it pretty well. They came together on a strictly ad hoc basis in the southeast sector of the city, where 3/8 had been placed, and began guerrilla operations against the infidel invaders. At first, it wasn’t much: the odd IED, the bungled ambush, the sniper who missed, the constant betrayals, setbacks, mistakes, and sheer incompetence. But they learned fast.

So her first trip — and her second and even half of her third — was to find a veteran of that unit and of that campaign who would talk. Many false leads, much money stolen, many blind alleys in which, at least for the first time, the rape occurred.

Swagger had an image of this middle-class suburban American mom gone native in Baghdad, swaddled in the robes of the believers, knowing that at any moment she could be found out and be raped, beaten, or even murdered, at the same time being hunted by the alliance policemen who must have known she was there. She made mistakes, she got caught, she paid the price over and over, but somehow she kept on. Nothing scared her more than her son’s death going unpaid for.

Finally, she met a man, an ex-captain in the 2nd, now crippled by a gunship chain gun, and needy of money to support wife and family, and, as well, angry at the leadership that had led him to this sorry, provisional life.

“Assiz”—his name — knew. Knew something. Maybe not enough, maybe not all, but something. He told her of the outsider.

“He was from elsewhere,” Assiz told her, and didn’t take money for it. “Brigade Command brought him in. He was said to be skilled with a rifle. We were canvassed for our best shots. I lost two excellent gunners from my IED team. They went off — where, I do not know. Someplace safe, where they could learn to shoot the rifle, not the AK but the other one, the sniper rifle.”

She went on. When the men returned — there were just twenty-two of them — they were equipped with the Russian sniper rifle, the Dragunov. The sniper had a program, he scouted with them, he organized their escape routes, he was very professional. He had tricks they had not seen. A bomb would drive the marines back, under cover to all — save the sniper, who knew where they had to go, who had measured the distances, knew the adjustments, practiced the shots. The marines took refuge, unknowingly, in a kill box. The sniper fired quickly, taking as many as he could, but departed before organized return fire and maneuver elements came into play. The sniper killed and went to ground.

“He was an old hand,” said Bob. “He knew a thing or two.”

“Tommy was on perimeter overwatch. I’m told he had a premonition. He was on the roof of an apartment block, which 3/8 had taken as patrol headquarters. His job was to look for snipers through his scope. He moved positions every few minutes, a few feet one way or the other. If you stayed too long in one place, they might see you and zero you. But—”

“I know this is hard.”

“But whoever the man with the Dragunov was, he was ahead of the curve. He knew where Tommy had to be. He set himself up where he had a narrow angle to target, knowing that, sooner or later, Tommy would have to occupy that position. The rifle scope was preadjusted to the range, and the sniper himself showed superb discipline. He didn’t move a muscle in his hide, he just lay there, locked into the rifle, waiting, waiting, waiting until somebody took up the position in his zero, and when Tommy did, the shot was almost immediate. It was the headshot. Instantly fatal. Huge exit wound, though the hole in the face, just under the off eye, simply looked like a little black dime. Then nothing. There was a bounty on marine snipers, so whoever fired got a nice bonus that night. Maybe the Bossman took the shot, maybe he paid himself a bonus, maybe he kicked it into a fund for the party — I don’t know. Again, it doesn’t matter. He set it up, he made it happen, he entered their war and taught them things they were incapable of doing on their own. It was his training, his program, his planning, his initiative, that killed Tommy. It wasn’t his country, right or wrong. It was this other thing: jihadi. He’s the one that has to pay, and he’s the one who authored that two-month surge in deaths where the casualty rate went from 2.4 per thousand to 9.6. Total kills for those two months was over two hundred and forty-five, with another fifty or so wounded.”

“I’m surprised there were so few wounded. Usually, it skews the other direction, with a ten-to-one ratio of WIA to KIA. He must have trained them to shoot for center mass and wasn’t interested in simple out-of-actions.”

“According to my Captain Assiz, he had no use for that. The Qur’an says slay the infidel, not wound him, and he believed in it totally.”

The story continued. The Corps brought in a countersniper intelligence team that applied special analytical skills to the problem and realized that the snipers always shot to pattern. The lack of improvisational skills again. Nothing left to chance. Do it by the program. They operated between 1600 and 1800, usually used cars for cover, the streets littered with wrecked and burnt-out vehicles, and fell back on a straight line to the nearest available building, where shelter had been prepared.

“Tommy was dead by then,” said his mother. “It was too late. But on a certain day, the snipers went out early and placed themselves according to the doctrine. As soon as four o’clock came, every abandoned car on every company or battalion perimeter in Baghdad was taken out by TOW missiles, the wreckage sprayed with SAW fire, followed by grenades. Of the twenty-two, the Iraqi resistance lost seventeen that day. The snipers were never a problem after that.”

“What happened to Bossman?”

“He vanished. He knew the tables had turned and that his program was now defunct. He’d done the best he could, but the game of snipers was over, and it was time to go on a nice vacation and begin to recover to fight another day in a war that’s fourteen hundred years old.”

“But his usefulness wasn’t quite finished, if I’m not mistaken,” said Bob. “After he was gone, the fighters put together a propaganda video. He became famous. Everyone feared him. The exploits of the twenty-two snipers were all attributed to one. It was said he killed hundreds of Americans. He was given a name, and the name was marketed. Great marketing, by the way. Madison Avenue quality all the way.”

“You know the name, then.”

“I heard it. He was called Juba the Sniper.”

Darkness came. Julie arrived home from her office in town, from which she ran the Swagger empire of layup barns, and met Janet McDowell, and the two immediately bonded. Janet came easily out of her manhunter personality and warmed to Julie, who insisted she stay for dinner. Janet went with Julie into the kitchen, and the two worked quite happily together.

After dinner — a good time — Bob and Janet returned to the porch. It was time for the rest of the story.

“After he’d fled Baghdad, you lost him. How’d you pick him up again?”

She’d tried everything. More trips to the capital city after Bush’s surge finally quieted things down, trips to Moscow to bribe her way into KGB files and see if the Russians had any contact or training with Juba, a trip to Chechnya to see if he was one of the notorious Chechen snipers, so ruthless and cruel to the Russians during that little war. Afghanistan revealed some possibles: an American colonel, highest-ranking officer to fall to a sniper off an exceedingly long shot — that seemed to suggest a much higher degree of skill than normal. The same on a senior CIA operative in Helmand Province. Using her son’s death as an entrée, she met many marine snipers and intelligence officers, searching for hard leads. But everything was soft, a vague possibility, not proof.

“I almost gave up,” she said. Left unsaid: if she had nothing to live for, what would be the point?

But then she thought: What don’t I know? I don’t know the instrumentality. Perhaps that’s the key.

The rifles. She immersed herself in them, beginning with gun magazines, reading seven a month to familiarize herself. She read sniper memoirs, sniper fiction, saw sniper movies. She caught the upsurge in sniper as hero that pop culture suddenly embraced and followed the careers of Chris Kyle and other celebrity snipers. She learned ballistics, she studied rifles, she took shooting lessons…

“My son’s father — we divorced when he was three — gave me two hundred thousand dollars. So I was able to keep going, though I am running out of relatives to pay for all this.”

At a certain point, she decided to concentrate on the specific weapon. Juba and his team, according to every marine intelligence officer she talked to, had used the classic Dragunov, Russian-manufactured, and an issue weapon for close to fifty years. The marines knew it well. It had opposed them all over the world, and they’d been able to recover one in 1973 with CIA assistance.

“I’ve heard the story,” said Bob.

“But the key wasn’t the rifle. It was the ammunition.”

“Good insight,” said Bob.

“I never would have understood that. I thought you just put what I called a bullet into what I called a gun and pulled the trigger and that was that. But that wasn’t even the half of it. Not even a tenth. So much to learn. I learned most of it.”

The woman was determined. Nothing stopped her, not even the labyrinths of technical detail, shooting culture with its nuances, its contradictions, its loads of false information, its arbitrary names for things that made no sense and just had to be memorized.

“It turns out the most accurate 7.62×54R ammunition in the world was manufactured by the Bulgarian Arsenal AD in the ’50s. It’s called heavy ball, and it has a yellow tip. It ships in metal cans of three hundred rounds and has corrosive primers, so the sniper has to keep his barrel clean. I reasoned that Juba would always have heavy ball on hand.”

“That’s good,” said Swagger, who had hoarded American .308 Match Target from Frankford Arsenal during his time in operations. You wanted the best. You had to shoot with gear and ammunition you trusted with your life, because you were trusting it with your life.

“So I reasoned that after he left Baghdad, he’d continue to have need for the ammunition, because in any further endeavors he’d need it. So I had to know: where do you get Bulgarian 7.62×54 heavy ball?”

“Next stop: Bulgaria?”

“Yes. It turned out that it was no longer being manufactured, and even when it had been, it wasn’t turned out in mass quantities. Not in the tens of millions, but in the low millions. It was a slower process because the tolerances in the loading dies were tighter, the inspection of rounds more intensive.”

In Sofia, she met a man who knew a man, and, twenty-five thousand dollars later, she was in the government archives, going through bills of lading for the heavy ball. It had been declared surplus in 1962 and spent the next twenty years in a warehouse. When the Russians moved into Afghanistan, their snipers quickly discovered how good it was, and the bulk of shipments went to the Russian army. It killed a lot of mujahideen there, and more in Chechnya. But by the new mandates of capitalism, the leftover ammunition — maybe ten million rounds — was exported to a variety of countries where the 7.62×54 was shot, mostly countries that had imported large quantities of the Mosin — Nagant, the Soviet/tsarist twentieth-century bolt-action battle rifle of the same caliber. It was a great Mosin round. So it ended up that the largest for-sale accumulation of Bulgarian heavy ball was an importer in Elizabethtown, South Africa, called SouthStar.

“You went there.”

“Yes. Helpfully, it’s another country where everything is for sale. After a few false starts, I gained entry to SouthStar’s shipping and inventory records, for a single evening.”

She reached into her briefcase and pulled out a computer printout.

It was a huge thing and it must have taken hours to master. But she’d gone over it before and certain shipments were annotated over the long years of SouthStar disbursement of the metal boxes, with their yellow dots painted on the sides to signify the superiority of the round.

It seemed that once every three months, five thousand rounds were shipped to certain spots in the world, mostly the Middle East. For a number of years, the destination was Egypt. For another couple, it was Iraq. Eventually, the printout put the recipient in southern Syria.

“The payment was always the same: money wired from the same Swiss bank. The last shipment shows he’s still in southern Syria, far from the war.”

“You think that’s him?”

“I do. The trouble with ammunition is that it’s so heavy by density. Which means he can’t order a million rounds and be done with it. He’s got to get a small, manageable amount every few months. If he’s going to stay sharp, if he wants to stay at operational peak, he’s got to have it coming in all the time. Clearly, it’s the same customer, no matter the location or the customer name, because the method of payment is always the same. Don’t you see what that gives us? Not an address, but a town. In this case, the last batch, only a month ago, went to a town in southern Syria called Iria. He has to be there. Somewhere in that area, convenient to whatever outlet receives out-of-country shipping, obviously with government approval.”

“That’s really not an address. It’s not actionable.”

“No, but a good man could infiltrate sometime when the next shipment is due. He could locate the point of arrival and mark the pickup. If it was impossible to follow to the source, he could ask around. Surely someone has noted a lone guy, quite prosperous, living in the far desert, doing a lot of shooting.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bob. “If he’s as smart as you say he is, he’ll have snitches scattered throughout the town. If anyone shows up asking questions, that’s the signal to find new digs. He’ll move fast, and be chastened by his near miss and double up on his security. Maybe he’ll stop receiving the heavy ball or find another source. He’s probably worried because he’s been getting it from SouthStar for so long. Have you gone to the Agency with this?”

“No. They’ve had me kicked out of so many countries it’s funny. They think I’m the Madwoman of Baltimore. I’m nothing but trouble to them. They’ve even gotten me on the no-fly list, so I’ve had to become an expert at clandestine identity. That’s why no emails, no phone calls, no announcements. I just show up and count on my pathos to get me an audience. I have no shame. So, no, I won’t go to them. I want to handle it the same way I’ve handled everything else, which is on my own. I still have relatives, I can still pay a substantial amount. But it has to be fast, because he’s skittish, he moves a lot. That’s a pattern of his I’ve come to recognize.”

“I see,” said Bob, considering. “And you think I’m the fellow who could get in there, find him, and put him away?”

“Now that I’ve laid it out for you, I hope you’ll alter your position. I can get you in on a very good phony passport. I’d get you a guide and translator, someone I trust. You won’t even be in country more than a few days. You find him in the Iria area, then you smoke him. One shot, one kill. Not only is it righteous, it’s profitable. And you’ll be doing the world a favor.”

Of course it wouldn’t go as planned, but, still, to end up with Juba in his sights and to see the shattered face sink into oblivion forever: that was quite an enticement. Everything about it felt right, no denying. But it was still wrong.

“No,” he said, “I won’t do that. Murder, not war. Revenge, not justice. Of no intelligence value, of no strategic value. May save some lives of some diplomats somewhere, but I don’t care.”

“There’s nothing—”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. You’re some piece of work, Mrs. McDowell. American suburban woman becomes her own CIA and outperforms the professionals. Outguts them too. Understands she’ll get degraded and beaten and perhaps even killed, but goes ahead. You’ve got some sand in you. I respect sand. What do they call it? True grit.”

“I’m not a hero. I just had to do something or the pain would have killed me. I only had Tommy.”

“I’ll tell you what I will do. None of it involves money on your part.”

“That’s a first,” she said.

“I agree on staying away from the Agency. That was smart. It’s full of idiots who think they’re playing the long game. They’ve convinced themselves they’re the masters of chaos. In this case, they wouldn’t action this guy, they’d track him, see where he led them. If he led them to somebody bigger, maybe they’d sell that information, maybe they’d kidnap and debrief, but they’d do something so smart it would be stupid. And not to beat jihadi, but to outsmart the guy in the next cubicle, who’d be working on the same thing but from a different perspective. It’s a mess. It’s like an eighth-grade classroom with too many smart kids and a wobbly teacher.”

She said nothing, but her silence suggested she’d reached a similar conclusion.

“Here’s what I’m offering,” he said. “I have a contact with a guy who’s very high in the Israeli outfit, the Mossad. Never met him, but he ran an operation that kind of dovetailed with something I got involved in a few years back. So I heard he looked into me, and, as it turned out, I was his inadvertent benefactor. I know this because my daughter was a Fox correspondent in Tel Aviv, and he reached out to her and became a friend and a source. So I think, through her, I can put this before him. I’d guess this Juba operated against them too, and unlike our fellows, the Israelis take everything personal. So let me go to Tel Aviv and see if I can get them interested.”

“I should pay your expenses.”

“Guess what? I’m rich. Not sure how, but I’m just spending my dough on guns and an occasional trip to Cracker Barrel with my wife. It’s an honor to invest in the takedown of Juba the Sniper. You pay me by sitting back and relaxing and not getting yourself beat up and raped no more.”

3

It was the same dream. He’d had it for years, he’d have it forever. Allah would not intercede. Allah had commanded it, and for a purpose: it kept him smart, scared, aware. And it reminded him of the hard reality of the world he had chosen to occupy and the price that he’d have to pay to dominate it.

In this dream, he crouched in the rubble. He imagined Americans in front of him. He imagined his Dragunov against his shoulder, braced solid against wall or fallen column or automobile fender, his eye to the reticle, his hand to the grip, the butt against the shoulder.

He had been thus many times. He imagined the scurry and twist of the Americans. The helmets were turtle-shaped, sand-colored, flanged to protect the back of the neck. They wore so much gear, it was a miracle they could even move. They looked like Crusaders, lacking only the flapping white tunics emblazoned with the Templar cross. In their armor, and with rucksacks and an abundance of weapons, they seemed to be a new crusade, and, in the way his mind worked, it wasn’t hard to go from there to cities in flame, men burned at the stake, mosques desecrated, women raped, towns pillaged, despair everywhere in the land of Muhammad. All that had happened ten centuries ago meant nothing. Time was meaningless; there was no “then,” as there was no “now.”

The rifle was marvelous to his practiced touch. No tremble afflicted the chevron that dominated the center of the broad encirclement of his scope image. He put the point of the chevron where it had to be, gauging distance, adjusting the hold up a bit, down a bit, perhaps a bit to the right or left if heavy winds blew sand across the lens. Then the squeeze, almost automatic at this point, as the trigger resisted him slightly as he pressed it back, toward himself. No torque, no twist, the regularity of a robot’s press, and the gun issued death in the form of Bulgarian heavy ball, which to Juba felt like a bit of smash to the shoulder and looked like a blur. Followed by the recovery of the system as it fell back to steadiness after its adventure in recoil.

Each one reacted differently when hit. You could never tell what was going to happen. Some went instantly still, some fought against the penetration of the bullet — that is, the penetration of death itself. Some manifested fury, some resignation, some even relief, as they went down into eternal sleep.

In this dream, the world was rich with targets, even if in the real world it was seldom so. Marines crouched everywhere, rigid with fear, trying to find cover, twisting their bodies into cracks and fissures in the rubble, trying to insert themselves into doorways or vehicles, anything to get away from the anger of the sniper. But the world was a kill box. His finger spoke for God. It nursed a bolt of heavy ball from the Dragunov without upset to the reticle image in which the infidel was pinned atop the chevron. He had lost track of how many times he’d sent infidels on their voyage to wherever Allah sent them.

But, every time, the dream turned. Each time, he encountered his own fate. As he sought targets, he came at last to settle on one sunk in shadow, not quite clear. He paused a fatal second, waiting for smoke to clear, and as the wind took it and spread it thin, he saw exactly what he knew he would see in life someday: a man, such as himself, hunched calmly behind the stock of a scoped rifle, its muzzle supported and, hence, stilled by the double vectors of a bipod. At that moment, the flash, a smear of disorganized radiance, lasting but a fraction of a second as the cartridge’s unburned powder consumed itself. He knew he was doomed.

O Allah, hear me. I have served you with all my being and spirit and request humbly absolution for my sins and a welcome to Paradise.

He knew that’s how he would die. Sooner or later, having been hunted his whole life, first by Israelis and then by Iranians and then by Kurds and then by Russians and then by Israelis again and finally by Americans, he would become the trophy to a man as skilled as himself.

He jerked awake — as always — in sweat, fighting panic. The desert night was calm. He rolled from the bed and went to the window to see the broad, empty plain outside. Far off, a light burned, a police station on the other side of the valley. Downstairs, his guards were quiet, though one of them was purportedly on duty. No point in checking, as nothing would happen today.

But his mind wouldn’t settle down. Perhaps what lay before him had him unsettled — it still happened, even after so many years — and his biology was responding. No prayer could still it. He thought of a pipe of hashish, but that left him logy and imprecise in the morning.

Instead, he focused on his moment of glory. It was a gift from God. It was Allah sending him recompense for all that had been taken from him, for the humiliations and the disgrace and the echoes of a pain that never went away.

He thought of the bus.

4

Swagger found the address — less than a mile from the beach, and less than a mile from his hotel — which was a certain café with tables outdoors in the sunlight. He sat at one, and the waiter came by, and Swagger ordered an iced tea, though he didn’t like iced tea. He had been told to order iced tea. He sat for a while, figuring that one team was observing him by means of binoculars while another examined passersby for threats. No bombs exploded, no machine guns sounded, no one noticed, no one moved.

Finally, from inside the restaurant, a man came out and joined him.

“Sergeant Swagger? I’m Gershon Gold.”

“Sir,” said Swagger. “Please sit down.”

The man slid in. Like Swagger, he wore sunglasses. Like Swagger, a short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck, pale and gossamer, loosely woven for comfort. Swagger wore a Razorbacks ball cap, while Gold wore a tropical fedora with a black band. He had on dark pants, shined loafers, and a Breitling watch with a green band. No color showed on his face, an ovoid specimen of milky whiteness built around a prim and unexpressive mouth. He looked like the rare man whose tombstone might read “I wish I spent more time at the office.”

“Thanks for the chat,” Swagger said. “I hope you find what I have for you useful.”

“I’ve seen the FBI file on you,” said Gold. “You have contributed much. Myself, I’m really just a clerk. For me, courage is not a job requirement. But I consider myself, nonetheless, of some utility.”

“I was told by my daughter that you’re the George Smiley of your organization. I guess that means ‘a famous spy.’”

“Something like that. I lack a beautiful wife, however, and an encyclopedic memory. And unlike Smiley, I’m not a cynic, I’m still a humble pilgrim. By the way, I found your daughter extremely bright. I’m sure you’re very proud.”

“I am.”

Gold nodded. “Please proceed.”

“Is this place secure? Can I say a certain name that might be classified?”

“You are actually surrounded by young members of our counterterror staff. This is their favorite kind of assignment.”

Swagger took a single breath before beginning. “Let me begin by asking, do you have familiarity with the name Juba? As in Juba the Sniper.”

Gold sat back coolly, betraying no surprise. Yet the microlanguage of his facial architecture — so subtle, few would have noticed — communicated a response. A stimulation. Then it was gone.

“A very interesting gentleman.”

“Ain’t he just?” said Swagger.

“I must warn you, much of what has been offered to us in re Juba over the years has turned out sourly. He is surrounded by misinformation. The man himself is quite clever in his security arrangements, as are his masters. This includes false trails, inaccurate leaks, bogus sightings, and the like. We have gone up many alleys to find them blind. He knows many things which we would like him to share with us — and I’m sure we could persuade him — but he seems more a myth than a man. A phantasm.”

“You’re telling me I could have been suckered, and this is just mischief, meant to eat up energy and leave everyone frustrated in the end.”

“It might even be a distraction. You can never be sure. A whisper of Juba’s presence orients us in a certain direction, and he operates in the opening left by our commitment to that lure. It has happened before.”

“In other words, in this game I am an amateur and may be full of shit.”

“With all due respect, at this stage anything is possible.”

“Well, let me tell you the story and all about the remarkable woman who is its hero.”

“Please.”

Swagger narrated as succinctly as possible the odyssey of Janet McDowell, the one-woman CIA who’d gone from suburban matron to deep-cover penetration agent. The Mossad professional listened intently, occasionally sipping lemon water, but did not interrupt.

Finally, he said, “Is any of this backed up on paper? Do you have copies of the various documents in play, photographs of the individuals mentioned — proof, say, of her mistreatment on her journeys? Does this hold up to elemental scrutiny?”

“All of it, here in this briefcase. Moreover, I hired a private detective. Please, if you should meet her, don’t tell her. I had the same questions. I also ran her paperwork by a friend of mine who’s a retired FBI agent and extremely practiced in this business. In both cases, she passed the test brilliantly. Her zygoma was indeed fractured into four pieces in 2010, and she spent seven months in the hospital. Even then, the bones didn’t quite heal properly. Her finances indicate funds coming in from relatives, an ex-husband, the sale of property. She doesn’t have much left or much future to look forward to. She’s two million in debt, with no end upcoming.”

“So she is legitimate, though you wouldn’t be offended if we double-checked?”

“Help yourself.”

“But her legitimacy doesn’t prove her information is legitimate. Perhaps this is another Juba game, conjured by some Iranian Ministry of Intelligence genius. I could name several. The brilliance of it would be discovering the woman on one of her trips, feeding her false information artfully disguised as the truth. Her belief — and she would have a need to believe, a need to achieve some justice for the poor lost boy — might be exactly the tool they’d put to use in order to achieve some sort of leverage over us.”

“Sure. I guess,” said Bob. “But it seems more likely that if they knew about her, they’d put a bullet in her head instead of going to all this trouble.”

“And, other than being a nuisance, she is not under active CIA control or even in their awareness?”

“I don’t know anybody there like I once did. But the mess that place is in now — again, it seems unlikely. Maybe this genius could play a game using her uniqueness, but right now everybody in the Agency seems really pissed off.”

Gold nodded.

Finally, he said, “Why don’t you let me run some checks. I’ll call you in a day or two. Please enjoy our town. I will put everything on a Mossad account.”

“That’s very kind, but to keep myself untouched by financial interests, I prefer to pay my own way. I can afford it. Why should I just leave it to my kids?”

Gold’s eyes crinkled briefly. “Ha. Why indeed?”

For two days, he enjoyed the sights and flavors of Tel Aviv, admiring the scenery, the women, the live-for-today ethos that seemed to animate the place. It had a gay living-on-the-bull’s-eye quality to it, familiar from Saigon toward the end. They probably felt the same in Troy. He developed a liking for pomegranate juice and soda taken on the hotel veranda with the Med a blue pool in one direction and, in the other, scrub mountains sustaining what appeared to be thousands of apartments, all of this in splendid sunshine. Only occasionally did the percussion of what might have been an explosion jar his eardrums. Sometimes, but not always, sirens. He felt his face darkening in the rays from above, and his own step turning jaunty.

On the third night, his phone rang. It was not Gershon.

“You will be picked up tomorrow at nine,” the voice informed him, then vanished.

And indeed at 9 a black Citroën pulled up, driven by a boy.

“Mr. Swagger?”

“Yep.”

“If you please…”

The car wound through town and eventually made it to the suburbs, where, after a bit, it seemed to set a course toward a black cube of a building, looking all sci-fi in the light, gleamless, obdurate, implacable. He knew it was Mossad headquarters, a six-story glass block whose dark surface evoked the idea of being watched from the inside while remaining impenetrable from the outside.

Security was thorough, his documents vetted, his body scanned, even the labels on his clothes checked. The boy stayed with him the whole way, ultimately depositing him on the sixth floor in a shabby conference room, where he was awaited by what appeared to be a committee.

Gold didn’t bother to introduce him to them or them to him. Names were irrelevant. The men were as somber as Gold, some bearded, some not. All had the game written on faces that might not have smiled in the past few years. Each of them had a folder in hand, and Gold seemed to be in charge.

“Sergeant Swagger, my colleagues and I will put certain questions before you. We do so in the interest of efficiency and probity. In some cases, you may think they are hostile. You might be right. I’ve asked my colleagues to divide themselves between advocacy and prosecution. No disrespect is meant, so please take nothing personally. Especially from Cohen.”

“Who’s Cohen?” asked Bob.

“I’m Cohen,” said a small man with bright, combative eyes and a disorganized goatee.

“For some reason, our Director tolerates Cohen and his poor attempts at humor. Perhaps it’s a lesson for us as to what not to become. Anyway: Cohen?”

“Are you fucking Mrs. McDowell?” asked Cohen.

Swagger knew trouble when he saw it.

“No,” he said.

“Have you ever dreamed of her naked?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Does she have large or small breasts?”

“I have no idea.”

“Would you consider her a sensual woman?”

“Do you find grief sensual?”

“How many men have you killed?”

“Ah. Too many. I didn’t count. None that couldn’t and wouldn’t have killed me.”

“Do you enjoy killing?”

“I enjoy the craft of shooting. It’s what I was put here to do.”

“Are you a gun nut?”

“I have respected them and they have served me. My family heritage is battle with the gun, for the sake of society, but also — and I have thought hard about this and can admit finally — it fulfills me. As I say, it’s what I do, and if I am not doing it, something is missing from my life. But I don’t have sex with them.”

“Still, this whole thing could be a fantasy to get yourself in another gunfight, yes?”

“I often wonder about that. It’s possible. But in all the things I’ve done since the Marine Corps, I was on the track of righting some wrong, usually recalling the sacrifice of someone like me who had been forgotten.”

“Are you a psychopathic killer?”

“I am not psycho. I just have always found guns interesting and appreciate their capabilities, which, like my own, are at their highest peak when circumstances are at their most extreme. I have no need to kill. But I never dream about it.”

Questions came and went. There seemed no pattern to them. It was like receiving fire from all points of the compass. As promised, Cohen was the most annoying.

“Do you consider sniping an act of murder or an act of war?”

“War. I have only taken out armed men. I take no pleasure in the kill, and I’ve made no money from it. I make my money taking care of ailing horses. I love horses. My wife is a good business manager, I have a reputation, and so we have prospered. I don’t need money, I have all I will ever need.”

“What moved you about Mrs. McDowell?”

“Her pain. Some people close to me have died in violent action. They were, all of them, too good to pass that way, but sometimes, by whimsy or evil, it happens. So I felt that.”

“Do you think that could have clouded your judgment?”

“No. She was real. Her pain was real. Her courage is real. Her facts are true.”

“Why are you here?”

“I was afraid if she didn’t see progress, she’d commit suicide. I realized that we had reached a point—she had reached a point — where to proceed, we needed the support of state actors. Resources beyond our means, access to information beyond our scope. We just weren’t big enough to do it no more. And every time she went over there, she risked her life. The next trip would have left her floating upside down in a river.”

“It sounds more like you are hiring us, not us hiring you.”

“I want Juba. For me, that’s what this is about.”

“If we decide to work with you,” said Gold, “there is a precondition you must accept. That is, in our employ you will regard Juba as our property. Our goal is not to put a bullet in his head. That does limited good and would only satisfy in an Old Testament sense—”

“And nobody here believes in the Old Testament,” said Cohen, and this time there was some laughter.

“Our goal,” said Gold, “is to have a series of chats with him. We need to unravel his life. He harbors many mysteries and will settle many issues. Assuming our success at that enterprise, we will try him, then imprison him. He will live the remainder of his life in an Israeli prison. If you shoot him without cause, we will try you for murder. Though oceans of our blood have been spilled, we are not, as a culture, particularly bloodthirsty. We are justice thirsty. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“Can you live by those rules?”

“Yes.”

“We are professionals, not avengers. We expect the same from you.”

That seemed to do it. The session had lasted six hours, he realized. He was hungry. But the men at the table seemed to communicate by nod or even subtler stratagems, and after a pause for wordless communication, Gold went through the nature of the professional arrangements, involving contracts, payments, insurance, next-of-kin notification, and other bureaucratic necessities.

“Do you have any questions?”

“I am curious about one thing. What in the presentation convinced you this was worth following and not a scam or a dumb-ass initiative by amateurs?”

“On January fifteenth, 2014, an Israeli businessman, who was secretly our agent and very well known by many of the men in this room, was leaving Dubai. He was shot by a sniper on the tarmac as he waited to board the jet and killed. Very long, impressive shot. But mysterious too.”

“Why?”

“He thought — and we thought — his cover was secure. He had been in Dubai for two weeks, attending to issues. On several occasions, he was accessible, we realized, to shorter, easier, more certain shots. We were baffled by the fact that it was not until his last day that he was taken from us, and the shot was much harder. But the bill of lading that Mrs. McDowell located in the SouthStar files provides the answer. Juba was out of ammunition. He had fired his quarterly allotment, and he would not move without the Bulgarian in his magazine. It arrived the thirteenth. He immediately was dispatched to Dubai. With his preferred ammunition finally in stock, he made the shot, though much harder than it could have been. The bullet was recovered, and indeed it was the heavy ball, although we attached no importance to that at the time. But now we see that it explains the timing.”

“So again, the lady was right. She had a list of killings from around the world. Your people, ours, their own. Whoever. Juba is the one for the job.”

“Juba is promiscuous,” said Gold. “To our misfortune, he has had many encounters with us. And as you know, he’s very good at what he does.”

“You have IOUs to cash in as well.”

“You don’t know the half of it. Cohen, be unusually useful. Tell him about the bus.”

5

You must do this hard thing for us, Juba,” said the commander. “Bombs have lost their magic. Blow up two hundred and fifty people in the marketplace, and no one notices. It doesn’t even make the news in the West. We need something with an edge to it, something that will make the bastards sit up and listen. And realize they cannot forget us for even a single second.”

“I am in obedience, as always,” Juba said.

The commander had told him of the politics of the situation, not that he knew or cared about politics. The Americans were attempting to negotiate with the Iranians, and if they got a mullah’s name on a dotted line, it would be celebrated as a major event in the West. The idea would take hold that “progress” was being made, delusionary or not. But such arrangements made without the presence of the Islamic State at the table could not be allowed. It would suggest that such a way could lead to a “solution,” when the only real solution was the eradication of the Zionist entity and its citizens. That was the solution that Allah demanded, that and nothing else.

An atrocity was needed that would shock the world and generate such heat that no accord could be signed and an important object lesson would be taken. The leaders had considered many alternatives, but all were difficult to arrange, needed heavy logistic support, and were subject to discovery and penetration.

Juba was one man, with extraordinary skills. With minimal assistance, he could move into position, strike his blow, and vanish. No networks risked, no valuable supplies eaten up, no large bodies of men required. Such was the magic of Juba the Sniper.

“The thought of the death of one by another, that is what scares them to their core. The bomb is impersonal. It has no charisma. It is anonymous and seems almost like the weather. It’s like a tornado arriving. But the man with the rifle intimately acquaints himself with each victim. They are all narcissists, the idea of being not a victim of circumstance but of a conspiracy aimed directly at them — that is something that will linger in their minds.”

“I understand,” he said.

The trip in the hold of the ancient freighter was finished. So was the rumble through Gaza City traffic, the long trek hunched in the dampness of the tunnel, prone to discovery at any moment by Israeli security teams. But he had made it to the Promised Land.

In a nameless village in the Negev, not far from the Erez Crossing, he climbed aboard a decrepit vehicle and paid his shekel passage. It was crowded, but he found his way to the rear and got a seat. Nobody looked twice at him. And why should they? He was of them.

He wore a loose tribal turban over his head and loose shirts and a scarf, all of it of the random sort picked up by laborers the Middle East over. His loose pants had seen so many other days and owners, his boots were scuffed from their own record of days and owners. He was the nameless one, the Arab, sustained by faith but otherwise oblivious to reality. He was the millions. If he had or had had a wife and family, it was all forgotten in the ceaseless turmoil and labor. This side of the wire, that side, this wire, that wire, made no difference. He was eternally on the move, and the only pleasures he could seek were religious or illicit. He had no place to go, he had nothing to belong to. To such, Allah would be everything, for in Allah and the next life was the only hope.

The bus coursed the Negev, stopping now and then in other nameless villages that had sprung up along the road. The desert here was vast, but not as cruel as much of its other territory, which was scorched land, inhospitable and dark, with stone rills running crazily this way and that. It could kill you fast if you didn’t know what you were doing. Here, though, agriculture had taken hold. Still close enough to the sea, and the Jews had built their kibbutz, where they lived and sang and farmed and fucked, while, on the lesser land, Arabs farmed wheat or dates, mostly by the power of their own backs, and the sea temperature was mild enough so that those wheat and dates usually were ready for harvest on schedule. The Jews patrolled in their machine-gun-equipped jeeps, young men drawn from the city, serving for only a few years. They knew nothing, their eyes saw nothing. It was a game of wasted time for them, until they had done their service and could be about better business.

But Juba knew it well. He had lived twenty years in such degradation, one of many children of a village chief in another country, virtually uneducated, beaten like a dog for any infraction, untouched by love from mother and father, for each had too much to do to spend precious seconds on that. There was never enough food. And the television reception — every house, no matter how poor, had a television — showed fuzzy images of some other world that was unreachable, unimaginable.

His life was defined by the wheat. From the age of eight on, he toiled in the fields. It wasn’t any mechanical kind of farming but instead the ageless struggle of the Arab peasant, the harvest by hand, with flail and hoe, as the tough thistles on the stalks rubbed the fingers raw, and one had to bend to get to them, until the back knitted in pain, and the ground cut into the knees, while above the sun was merciless, and his father kept yelling, “Faster, faster, you lazy little insects. Do you want to die of hunger? This is survival!”

Only the True Faith was real, and only it offered some kind of escape. He could lose himself in the mandates of the Qur’an and the idea that somehow this life had structure and definition. So the only place he felt human was in the madrassa, where he applied himself hard, hoping to earn Allah’s pleasure. It turned out he had a nimble mind, and at least one of the leaders said that among them all, he had the possibilities. He could escape from this world without tomorrows.

“You’re smart,” he was told. “There can be more for you. You can escape the great nothingness of your people.”

“If God wills it, it will happen,” he said, and believed.

One day after he turned eighteen, the letter arrived, informing him that he had been conscripted for two and a half years. He would be taken away and trained in some military skill. Maybe that would be his future, maybe it would open his eyes, maybe it will come between him and the life laid out for him, the life of labor and uselessness.

But the army was another delusion. A rural Arab conscript was the lowest form of military scum, and he was again laughed at and cursed and beaten and starved for his crudeness and ignorance. Sergeants mocked him, officers ignored him. He was invisible, his prayers without weight. God had forsaken him.

And then he discovered the rifle.

6

He’s Syrian,” said Cohen. “A Sunni peasant named Alamir Alaqua, you can spell it any way you wish, with or without hyphens, it makes no difference to us. Born in 1970. Raised in the north, a hundred or so miles east of Aleppo, in Syria’s narrow rim of arable land. His family are wheat people. His first eighteen years are unnoticed, and he never refers to them, it is said. One can imagine: working the fields, at prayer five times a day, beaten often, perhaps molested occasionally, part of a large family of minor distinction in a village named Tar’qu. To his father, and the rest of the world, he was but another beast of burden. That is all.”

“If,” said Gold, “you have some idealized vision of the international assassin as a man of erudition, you will be disappointed. This chap is a cold brute, utterly committed and sublimely talented.”

Bob nodded. He’d seen enough bullshit about snipers on TV and in the movies to know that almost nobody ever truly got it: the closure of mind, the dedication to skill and art, the commitment to the faith. But Bob got it, and he would never take such a man lightly.

“It was in the army that he showed his extraordinary gift. He shot a sixty-year-old Persian Mauser so well that he was selected for sniper school. For the first time in his life, he felt special. He completed himself by putting the rifle in use to Allah’s purpose.

“At the sniper school, taught by Saudi mercenaries, who themselves had been trained by American Green Berets, he was again picked out, developed, quickly promoted. And, again for the first time in his life, he had food in his belly. And respect from his elders. For the first time, he was a man.

“We assume he drew first blood in 1990. His targets, however, were not infidels but coreligionists. Under the first Assad’s realpolitik, Syria had joined the coalition against the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. No records exist, no tales of a legendary sniper among the Syrian forces of that war. Yet knowing his ambitions, it seems logical that he would have tested himself. I’m sure there are Iraqi widows owing to his efforts, the irony being that he served first against the men that he would later serve so ably for.”

But his real experience, Cohen said, came as a specialist with the minister of defense’s campaign to exterminate opposition to Assad and the Ba’athists in the ’90s. That fellow, Mustafa Tlass, was a mediocre general, a mediocre politician, an excellent sycophant, and a first-rate secret policeman. He used snipers to isolate and eliminate non-Ba’athist pretenders to power to solidify Old Man Assad’s rule. It was so much easier than raiding, interrogating, imprisoning, executing. One application of Bulgarian heavy ball from four hundred meters out and the problem was solved forever.

“In 2000,” continued Cohen, “old Assad dies, to be succeeded by his surviving second son, the ophthalmologist without a chin or a scruple.”

“What happened to his first son?” asked Bob.

“Ask us no questions and we’ll tell you no lies,” said Gold.

“Well, that’s assuring,” said Bob.

“Assad Two’s first priority is to repair the enmity his father created by siding with the coalition and invading Kuwait in ’90. Thus, in 2003, after the destruction of the Iraqi army and the occupation of Iraq by the Americans, he authorizes sending military advisors to the insurrection. At that point, he has the largest, most well-trained and — equipped army in the Middle East. Among the technicians and tacticians he sends is our Grim Reaper, Sergeant Alaqua.

“There seems to have been no initial plan to turn him into a legend,” said Gold. “But he found the ruins of Baghdad an excellent place to practice his craft, he found these disgruntled ex-soldiers of the Iraqi Republican Guard highly motivated students. They were blooded, they were aggressive, they had no fear of death. They were the worst kind of patriots: they lived to kill or die, and it didn’t much matter to them which. We could cite numbers and show you the marine reports, if you wish—”

“I’ve picked up enough from the fellows I know,” Bob said.

He didn’t like to think of it. The kids were fine as infantrymen when they had lots of high explosives a radio signal away, the American way of war. But the shattered wilderness of a city, all confusion and confinement, where the bad guys knew the streets so much better, the kids — at least the first rotation of them — were just so many sitting ducks.

Bob thought sourly that Tom McDowell had been one of those ducks.

“Against the sacrifice of Iwo Jima, Baghdad is nothing,” said Gold. “But of course America — and the West and Israel — has lost the will to sustain casualties on a steady basis. When the numbers begin to rise, the parents begin to panic and the media begins to notice. It shows that the true realpolitik of the world is demographics.”

“But we did turn it around?”

“The marine counterintelligence people did a brilliant job of analysis and counterplanning, and, yes indeed, it pretty much destroyed Sergeant Alaqua’s sniper force in a single afternoon. He himself escaped death, barely, having killed much and learned much. But his name had been made in radical circles. He was eagerly recruited and offered not merely princely sums to keep himself available but, most of all, interesting targets. Upon returning home, he disengaged from the army and became radical Islam’s go-to guy. We have him in Afghanistan, Africa, India, even the Philippines. He seems to have gone to work mainly for Tehran. But he helped the home folks too. In 2005, the prime minister of Beirut — occupied at the time by Syria — had run afoul of young Assad and old Tlass. On February fourteenth of that year, he was blown up by car bomb in Beirut. The mystery was, how did the killers wire the bomb? The answer is, they didn’t. Too tricky to use radio detonation in a heavily urban area, flooded already with transmissions. Rather, they planted twenty kilos of Semtex under the street, leaving a lump of highly volatile contact compound visible, possibly chlorine azide or silver nitrate. Perhaps it was camouflaged as dog shit. As the car passed over the bomb, from three hundred yards out, Juba, as he was now called, hit the compound with Bulgarian heavy ball, and the whole thing detonated. A great shot, a huge blast. Twenty-two others perished.

“Which brings us at long last,” said Gold, “to the incident of the bus.”

7

The old Arab’s pony pulled his cart through the streets of Herzliya, a leafy suburb of well-appointed, well-landscaped houses, as well as luxury high-rises with ocean views, for the Israeli professional classes. Many lawyers, many engineers, many dentists, many doctors lived here, people far insulated from war and want and the anger of the Islamic entities. Twice the cart had been stopped by police patrols, and the old man offered to give them some of the fruit he had left over. They laughed, and one young policeman took a ripe banana. They checked his papers, checked his cart, warned him not to be out so late, and sent him on his way.

Somewhere between Yefet Street and Harmony Cove, the wagon drifted wide until it almost reached the sidewalk, and there a shadowy figure slipped off the vehicle’s underbelly, rolled swiftly to a thicket of bushes, and slid deep into them. The wagon continued its meandering ways to a central road, which took it out of Herzliya, then it disappeared into the maze of streets in the city’s Arab section.

The man who had slipped out lay flat in the brush for a good hour, not moving. Patience in these matters was everything. Possibly this site had been discovered. Perhaps it was an elaborate Israeli ruse, and perhaps capture and interrogation and ultimately surrender — no one held out forever — lay ahead. Having penetrated the Zionist homeland, he was risking everything, knowing himself to be a high-priority target.

But nothing happened. No commandos swept in for the arrest. Once or twice, late-returning citizens drove by, one in a BMW, the other in a Mercedes. He heard car doors slam, and a wife yell at a husband. But that was all.

When at last he felt secure, he slid back farther into the undergrowth. He knew the layout only from photos and diagrams. As usual, design diverged considerably from reality. The night was darker, the trees thicker, the turf spongier, the night smell of shrubbery and the sea more intense. His fingers probed, and for a second he experienced a whisper of panic. Suppose it wasn’t here? Suppose he couldn’t find it? Suppose he failed? Suppose—

But the supposition exercise became moot in the next second as his fingers came across, an inch or so under some low accumulation of loose dirt, the heavy canvas of a gun case. He pulled, the thing emerged, and he drew it to him.

Without needing to see, he unzipped the canvas bag and removed the object it concealed and protected. His fingers closed on the familiar configuration of the Russian-designed Dragunov sniper rifle, a semi-automatic beast that shot the old tsarist 7.62×54R rounds, same as they had used in the Russo-Japanese War of a hundred-odd years ago. He knew it as well as one could know a thing. He had always loved the Dragon, from his first glimpse many years ago, such an improvement over the claptrap junkiness of the AK-47.

This Dragon, one of his best, was purely a parts gun, assembled from recovered battlefield castoffs. It had a Romanian receiver, a Polish stock, and a Russian barrel. An irony utterly lost on him was that it was universally called the Dragon, but its naming had nothing to do with that mythical beast. It was simply prosaic Russian policy to designate firearms by their designer’s name, and the designer happened to be named Dragunov. This gun was highly tuned for accuracy, with minute filing of the trigger sear arrangements, the springs cut to a minimum for less vibration, the barrel cleansed to the atomic level, all of it lovingly reassembled, each screw torqued to the appropriate weight for maximum accuracy. It was perfect and it was untraceable and, therefore, expendable.

The scope, called a PSO-1, was Russian, of course, of highest optical quality. It was affixed to the rifle by a clamp bolted to the side of the receiver, which held it, solidly and perfectly, over the piece, perfectly vectored to his dominant eye when he was in the prone position. He slid the rifle to his body, his right hand easing onto the familiar contours of the pistol grip, the buttstock tight, hard, without mercy, against the pocket of his shoulder, the support arm running directly under the rifle, jutting upward at the elbow so that the hand could grasp the wooden forestock, but not tightly, for a shooter’s enthusiasm could compress the forestock so that it touched the free-floating barrel and thus bring imperfection to the system. He twisted, tested, squirmed, and wiggled, as any shooter will do, building the perfect position, so that the weapon was supported off bone, not muscle, and the legs splayed behind him, in full contact with the support of the planet itself. He lifted the rifle to his eyes from the ground a dozen times just to make sure he’d found his natural point of aim. He tested the electronics of the scope, switching them on to see the reticle etched in glowing red against the night, the chevron denoting point of impact, the crude range finder, an inverted arc in the right-hand quadrant, which denoted the height of a six-foot-tall man at eight ascending ranges, unnecessary to him because he’d already zeroed the chevron to two hundred and thirty-four meters, appropriate to task.

Now he attached the suppressor. Another battlefield pickup, possibly found still screwed to the muzzle of a marine M40 destroyed along with its owner in a roadside bombing and salvaged for use against its inventors. It was a well-machined tube that was something like a nautilus shell, encasing a series of chambers that ran its eight-inch length, each chamber leading to the next by a small orifice. The gases released by the shot emerged at supersonic speed from the muzzle but expanded into the surrounding tube, and raced, chamber to chamber, through the apparatus, so when they emerged at the end of the trip, they had lost most of their energy. The result could be measured in decibels by a sophisticated electronic device, but the number meant nothing. What mattered was that the blast of the rifle was reduced, not to the pfft! so beloved of the movies but a generic snap, like that of a door closing stoutly, not merely quiet but so diffused it was impossible to track. A small-arms genius somewhere in the Islamic State apparatus had machined a kind of linking device that united the rifle and the suppressor, which bore the name Gemtech.

That appliance threaded and screwed tight, he reached back to the gun case, found a zipper denoting a pouch, unzipped. And removed three ten-round magazines with the Bulgarian yellow-tipped heavy ball. He left nothing to chance. Each of the thirty rounds was selected from a larger cache of them, all weighed and measured to exact sameness, each tested for runout and found to have come out of the manufacturing process with perfect circularity. No group of mass-produced cartridges could be more accurate. He laid two magazines under his right hand so they’d be easy to access. The third he placed into the magazine well, rotated it into the gun until it clicked and was stable, then drew back the bolt and eased it forward, setting shell in chamber and firing pin at full cock. He was as ready as he could be.

He tried to relax, letting his body settle, letting his lungs oxygenate, letting his heart still. The moral aspects of that which he was about to do had been utterly replaced by the technical aspects. Before it was anything else, and after it was everything else, it was a pure shooting exercise, and he knew that Allah had put him on the planet to shoot infidels, he knew that his mission was blessed.

He prayed himself toward the nullity of complete relaxation and concentration, where he wanted his mind to be. Praise be to Allah, the wise, the benevolent, the merciful. Praise be to He who watches over and favors His people so that they will always be under His protection no matter the ordeal. Praise be to the mission to which He has assigned me through his mullahs. Praise be to my training, my experience, my will, and my belief in Allah. Praise be to them all. And praise be that which is about to happen, and may its purpose be achieved.

In that steadiness of incantation, which evened his breathing and sharpened his vision, which calmed his hands and his nerves, he passed the time, not knowing if it were an hour, a day, or even a month.

When he opened his eyes and came back from the realm of prayer, it was light. A crisp day, still very early. Now and then, a sedan negotiated the street where he had concealed himself, usually a BMW or a Mercedes-Benz, but nobody was out for walks. The sky was clear and blue, though still blurred by the illumination of the rising sun. It had not yet cleared the small rise that had offered itself to him some two hundred and thirty-four meters down the road. From nowhere, it seemed, a woman and child had come from one of the great houses, she in bathrobe, he with a small briefcase, and stood at the curb. That meant it was time.

Juba drew the rifle to him, squirmed again to find the necessary position, set arms and chest in the correct opposing angles for the appropriate lockup of tension throughout the body, flicked the PSO-1 on, and put his dominant eye squarely to the rubber cup that cushioned the eyepiece. He was rewarded with the world swollen by a factor of four and the glow of the reticle against the crest of the hill.

He waited, not fighting the small tremble as the chevron responded to his own internal rhythms, the pulsing of his chest, the rogue twitches in his musculature, and watched as, slow, steady, dignified, the school bus rose over the crest, first its yellow roof, followed by its darkened windshield, behind which only the silhouette of the driver was visible, due to tunnel effect, against the opaque illumination from the rear escape door.

It was like any school bus from the world over, a lengthy van, a cab with a truck’s snout, a flat windshield, the whole as aerodynamic as a brick. It was meant for slow, stolid transport of squirming treasure. It halted where it had to. The driver bent a bit to open the door, and he killed her.

The bullet spalled the windshield, and she slumped, an ejected Dragon shell popped free off the action of the breech, the acrid tang of decades-old Bulgarian powder rose ambrosia-like against his nostrils, and he rotated slightly to the mother, who just stood there, crucified by shock. She may have acted on instinct to throw herself around her child, but Juba was faster by a fraction and shot her in the head, which disappeared in a spurt of plasma, just a thumb smudge against the pristine perfection of the day. The infidel child, standing there, also dumbfounded, was next, dispatched by a side entry, in the chest, his little body spasming, knocked back by the impact of the high-velocity heavy ball.

Juba settled again on the windshield and saw some young hero had raced to the driver and was pulling at her. A shot, and he pulled no more. The children left inside, of course, panicked, filled the aisles in their desperation to escape, perfectly silhouetted by the illumination pouring through the rear door from the east, and he put the chevron to each squirming blur and brought it down. In time, the windshield was so occluded by bullet fractures that it became incapable of displaying detail. But movement was enough, and he shot until there was no movement, stopping at ten to switch magazines — ack, a cartridge had slid a quarter inch forward, and so he quickly pushed it back in line — ack again, his glove caught on the lip of the mag, so he quickly shook it off, forced the cartridge under the lip down with his thumb, snapped the box in with a dexterous aplomb, and came back to find a child had actually escaped and was heading toward tree cover. He was faster than she was.

Seventeen rounds later, it was over. No more movement. Nothing.

Praise be to Allah. Thanks be to Him for blessing my enterprise, for sanctifying my mission to completion, for rewarding my effort and virtue with success.

8

He looked at the crime scene pictures, or at least the ones taken outside the bus. Three bodies inert on pavement or curb. The bus windshield a smear of cracked glass, supernovas of fracture. Fragments glittered all over the bus’s hood and the street.

He did not look at the shots from the interior of the bus. What was the point?

“And you want to interview this guy?” he said. “See, if it was me — and what do I know, I’m just an Arkansas hick — I’d cut off his face and feed it to the pigs.”

“Alas,” said Cohen, “we’re a little Jewish country. No pigs.”

“Dogs, then,” said Swagger.

“Commendable enthusiasm,” said Gold. “But Juba’s secrets are more important than his life. Who can he identify? What is he working on? Who gives him orders, who supplies the logistics, the egress and exit. Who’s in planning, who in execution, who is liaison? Which unknown state actors are influencing him? What has he heard of other operations? Perhaps most important, what is the source of their considerable funding?”

“Do you have a photo of him? What about DNA? Without those, he could be anybody that looks like anybody else named Mohamed.”

“No picture,” said Cohen. “No DNA. However, we have one good right-hand thumbprint. We believe it belongs to him, as it was taken from a shell casing found at the massacre. He would not allow anyone else to load his weapon. Prints don’t usually show up on weapons or ammunition, but this shell had a slight sheen of oil on it, and so it registered. Perhaps an error committed under the pressure of expediency.”

“By the way, did the plan work? Did he stop the treaty?”

“No, he didn’t. Your Agency people were very fleet of foot that day, and even before all the first responders were on scene, your president was on the phone to our prime minister, begging him not to let this thing get out of hand. So instead of a massacre-of-the-innocents sensation, we prevailed on our press corps — more obliging than yours — to report it as a shooting in a suburb. No casualty figures were released, no speeches were given, no funerals were open to press and television. The dead were mourned in private. Rumors went wild, of course, but there are always rumors. And in the end, your State Department got its deal, and everyone pretended the world was a little safer. We realize that it goes that way, sometimes. I concur with Cohen, for the first time, on this one. We are just a little Jewish country. What can we do?”

“I vote for the dogs,” said Swagger. “Anyhow, now what? Do you have enough? If so, how fast can you move? Who needs to give the go code? Is it just this room, or do you have to go to politicians who will decide on a dozen factors you have no control over?”

“No doubt other opinions will be sought.”

“Meanwhile, a guy like this gets antsy. He knows how many people are interested in him. He knows no place is secure forever. Look at bin Laden. Thought he had it made in the shade until Santa and his reindeer dropped by on a midnight clear. I’m tight with some of those guys. Osama had so much SEAL lead in him, they didn’t even have to weight him down when they chucked him overboard. Juba knows that. He will be ready to jump. His go bag is packed.”

“We are aware,” said Gold.

“And we just sit here?”

“We do.”

“Are you waiting for electronic intel? Have you zeroed that area and are scanning for clues?”

“Yes, but it’s less illuminating than you might think.”

“So what is happening? Or do you consider it rude to ask?”

“Ask Cohen,” said Gold.

“Mr. Cohen?”

Cohen said nothing.

“Cohen enjoys playing things out slowly. He gets more attention that way.”

“Please, Mr. Cohen,” said Bob. “I’m seventy-two. I may die before you get it out, if you don’t hurry.”

“Fair enough. The square mile containing the town of Iria in southern Syria has to be looked at not by us but by satellites. Ours is called TecSAR. It’s very modern, I’m told. Its product will be flashed back to this building and examined by experts. They will debate like rabbis. They will come up with what looks promising to them. Drones will be dispatched to follow up on the promising areas. Lower-level, longer overhead, more precise cameras. They will return, their film will be developed, and that will be examined by the same experts to see what is what.”

“When will all this happen?” said Bob.

“It happened yesterday,” said Cohen.

It took a while for him to adjust his eyes. The room was dark, hushed, pristine, and without personality, full of cut-rate office furniture in the style of the ’50s, and so air-conditioned it was like a meat locker. Cohen and Gold and a more somber man, who said nothing, sat around the table, waiting patiently as Bob examined the twenty-by-twenty-inch sheaves of photo paper placed before him, sometimes using the jeweler’s loupe provided. He had trouble manipulating the awkwardly large sheets before him.

“You can’t do this on a screen?” he asked. “And click on sections you want to look at closely? Like in the movies?”

“We haven’t caught up with the movies, that’s on next year’s budget. Then again, that has been the case with budgets for the last ten years. Always something happens.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try my best.”

At first, it was just patches of light and dark, slashed by white streaks, occasionally with some kind of nubbin on the streak. There were, as well, dark smears of some kind of textured fabric, and occasionally a cluster of squares, some larger than others. It was abstract. A compass embossed on each photo established true north, and a rubric underneath issued data on time, altitude, position by longitude and latitude, as well as other information he didn’t understand.

“The drones are quite helpful,” said Gold. “They fly too high to be visible with the naked eye — even Juba’s — but their camerawork is quite detailed. Time over target: six hours. Two drones on-site, ever since the TecSAR pictures looked interesting. This stuff is a few hours old. Perhaps our friend Sergeant Swagger might bring something to it our interpreters don’t understand.”

Bob went through the photos again, beginning to make sense of them. The streaks were road, the patches were field, the dark smears were hills covered by forest, the squares were farmhouses, the smaller squares compound outbuildings, the straight lines fences demarking patches of field. In time, he settled on two. He went over each carefully and finally discarded one of them.

“This one,” he said to the men at the table, indicating the remaining photograph.

Cohen looked at it. “A-4511, seven miles northeast of Iria, two miles off what passes as a main highway in southern Syria.”

“Why that, Sergeant Swagger?”

“I’m looking for shooting ranges. This guy has to shoot, a lot, each day. He’s very disciplined, very detail-driven. He has to have access to at least three hundred yards of open space, never less, maybe a lot more. The sun will be important too. He will, if possible, orient north-south or south-north. The other two wasted hours lost to the brightness of sunset and sunrise. And wind. It’s so helpful if there’s shelter. A stormy day, a windy ruckus — that can take a day from him, a day he can’t afford. I see all that here.”

“Please proceed.”

“Another thing. The standard equipment of a range. He’ll want a bench, or at least some kind of concrete pad, to go prone off the bipod. And at the far end, he’ll want a berm — a roll of land, maybe just bulldozed dirt — against which to place his target. He’ll want to see and analyze his misses, make adjustments. He has to see where the bullet hits relative to the target; that’s why the target has to be surrounded by stuff that’ll go puff. And then the target itself. I’m betting he’s shooting at steel, which goes clang on each hit. He doesn’t want to break concentration after a string and go to his spotting scope and track his hits with pad and pencil. Maybe they’d have a TV hookup or something computer-driven, but I’m guessing that’s unlikely way out here. So I’m thinking steel. Looking at the south border of this whatever-it-is, I see a structure. Can’t bring it up high enough for clear resolution, but it could be a jerry-built frame, exactly the sort you’d need to hang a chunk of steel plate… Can you get more resolution?”

“Perhaps later. Please proceed.”

“At the other end, it’s smooth, as if flattened out. Not paved, but someone had gone over it with a grader, scoured the grass away, rolled the dirt smooth. Just a little patch, but it orients nicely on the presumed target.”

“Not much space there,” said Gold.

“He doesn’t need much. We think of shooting ranges as broad plains, but that’s only for armies, cops, or hunters, for unit- or community-scale shooting exercises. This is one man. He needs a line, nothing on the lateral. So if you’re looking for a field, you’ll never find it. You have to look for a passageway or a lane. Because there are no regulations here, it will make no difference to him if he shoots over a road or even some houses. He’s too good to whack some wandering peasant wheat farmer. On the other hand, accidents do happen, but it’s not something he’s concerned about. Again, get me some more resolution and I’ll tell you if I see indentations from prone shooting or indications of a portable shooting bench being wheeled in. Can’t tell from this altitude. If you want to be certain, send the drones in lower or with bigger cameras.”

“Anything else? Temperature, humidity, rotation of earth, sunspots?”

“Not really. This ain’t benchrest, where you try for a group of five in the same hole. He’s shooting at men, has to hit them in the thoracic cavity, heart, lungs, spine, spleen, so his kill zone is about eighteen inches by eighteen. That’s all the combat accuracy he needs.”

“Night shooting? Will he use night vision?”

“Not at longer ranges. That stuff can clarify to maybe two hundred yards maximum. Fine for sniper work in a city, but not the kind of reach-out hit he wants for this. And that worries me. A lot.”

“Why is that?”

“He’s teaching himself to hit from way out. Beyond security service worry zones. Really, beyond infantry ranges. He’s not training for battle but for assassination. It seems in this last operation, the one in Dubai, that he was out farther than he’d ever been. He’s teaching himself how to hit the long ones off the cold barrel. I have to tell you, that’s way outstanding stuff. The long shots in Afghanistan came at the end of a sequence, where the shooter was either able to walk his rounds in unnoticed or had already zeroed in on that spot the day before. Juba can’t afford to walk rounds in against high-value targets; he’d give up his position and get return fire in a second. Choppers, SWAT, the whole security apparatus, silencer or no. So he’s got to train himself to the cold barrel. That’s another advantage of the dirt backdrop.”

The comment was met by the sound of men breathing.

Finally, Cohen: “Again, you go with this one? No second thoughts, no doubts, no little suspicions?”

Bob put his finger on A-4511.

“Here’s your huckleberry. It’s got all the necessary components I just described. As I said, you can see at the southern end where someone has chewed up a furrow with a backhoe or something to chart the bullet strikes against the raw dirt. Do you have distance? I’d guess close to a thousand yards.”

“About right,” said Cohen. “Ten twenty-seven, to be exact.”

“If you know so fast, that means you’ve had your photo hotshots on it, and this is the one they went for too. They’ve given you all the numbers.”

“Sergeant Swagger is no fool,” said Cohen. “He misses no nuance. Continue, then.”

“A thousand yards. Very long shot, by combat standards, but not so much anymore for sniping. The great shots in Afghanistan are much farther, well over a thousand, even over a mile. A couple of things to look for: if he’s teaching himself to go this far, he’ll need a better rifle. The ballistics on the Dragon 7.62 round drop way off, and, yep, you might get some hits from over a thousand, but you’ll get a lot more misses. He’s right at the distance limits on the Dragon. So he’ll upgrade the hardware.”

The somber old man whispered something to Cohen, who nodded, then turned to Swagger.

“Our Director is a man of few words,” he said, “and I am a man of many. So he turns to me to blabber for him. He said: ‘Add it up.’ What he means is, given all that you have learned from the photos, what is your read on the situation? Can you project a scenario in which all this information comes into play?”

“Sure. He’s a long way from being retired. If it were my call, I’d say he’s in this location with this setup for a specific purpose. He’s preparing for a job. It’s a big one too, because look at the assets they’ve invested in it. They scoured the country and found exactly the place where he’d be safe, they went to great trouble to keep it secret, and we tumbled on it only because of Mrs. McDowell—”

“God bless Mrs. McDowell,” said Cohen.

“Look,” said Swagger, “maybe I’m out of place here, it’s your country, but what I’m getting seems sort of undeniable. He is getting ready for something. He’s either going operational or onto another step in his training before he goes operational. That means at any second he could disappear. It’s your business, not mine. But if I was you, I’d chopper in the tough boys and hit this motherfucker tomorrow. Payback for lots of bad shit, yes — but, more important, you make sure there’s no more bad shit down the road. I’d go tomorrow.”

“Why tomorrow, Sergeant Swagger?” said Cohen. Do you think us miracle workers? We couldn’t possibly hit him tomorrow.”

“So when can you go?” said Swagger.

The Director spoke for the first time.

“What about,” he said, “in two hours?”

9

He hated his father. He hated his mother. He hated the madrassa. He hated the beatings, the punishment, the molestation, the degradation, the hopeless, endless despair of it. He hated everything he thought of as “before.” Except for the wheat.

He was in the wheat. He was of the wheat.

He had watched the sun go down over the western hills. He was a few hundred meters from the house. Prayers were over, the day’s efforts over, and now he sat among the stalks. The darkness was deep and lovely, a vault of towering stars and silence. A mild breeze rustled the wheat, and it whispered to him. He turned, grabbed a handful of stalks, and brought them close to his eyes.

He observed the genius of the heads, their complexity so staggering that only Allah could have designed them. Intricate, tiny structures, each identical to the other, arranged in rows, waiting to ripen into something life-sustaining. The wheat would become grain, the grain would become bread, the bread would feed the Moslem nation and make it strong.

The wheat had created him. It demanded that his back be strong for the bending, that his legs be limber for the weeding, that his arms and hands be remorseless for the cutting, that his coordination be superb for the flailing. Later, the huge machines reached the commune to take so much of the misery out of the stooped labor. But in his time, it was all muscle: the weeding, the cutting, the flailing. You found a rhythm; you guided the beating stick exactly. It was his gift, and he had it from the start. He flailed more wheat faster, more accurately, than anyone in the province. Afterward, to amuse his brothers and the villagers, he would do tricks, which also came naturally. Put three eggs on a table and, with three cracks of the flail, smash each one perfectly. Toss an egg into the air, toss a second, toss a third, and before any of them reached the ground, whizz the beating stick to intercept them, catching each egg in the center and turning it into a spray of yellow yolk, bringing cheers and laughter. He got so he could do it one-handed, left-handed, and behind his back. He had gifts. He remembered those harvest festivals with joy. He was probably happier then than at any time in his life.

But, of course, the dark times came. Which war was it? He couldn’t remember, there had been so many, and what did it matter? The fear of starvation everywhere, the sounds of hungry babies screaming as their mothers tried to calm them to sleep. Though the killing and dying was far off, the government took everything to support the soldiers, and the imams demanded obedience in their holy quest for survival, then hegemony. Easy to demand, hard to sustain.

To make things worse, a drought had scoured the earth, the clouds going heavy and dark but not bursting, the irrigation was primitive, there was only so much water, and what was left after conscription had to be rationed strictly. Many wondered how Allah could forsake His obedient children so fiercely — but the sniper did not. Instead, he nursed his misery, felt it harden into hatred, and found in it the determination to continue. I will survive, if Allah allows it. I will fight, if Allah permits it. I will die a martyr to Allah. But be pleased, Allah, do not consign me to the meaningless death of a starved peasant in a forgotten backwater of what was once a great empire. That would be waste, and what good — this was apostasy, he knew, but could not deny it — would my death do? Allah must have more in mind for me. He must enable me. Like the wheat, He must let me grow and ripen and do my part. If not, why did He give me the gift of the flail?

Now, so many years later, so many battles fought for Allah, he tried to forget, for memories of the past were of no use at all.

What mattered was tomorrow. The task. You survived the past, you fought as a soldier of Islam, and will do so yet again. You became what you became and were permitted to do your part.

Allahu Akbar, he thought. God is great.

Then he heard the helicopters.

10

The reasons to deny him were many and excellent. They were explained to him with great patience in the Land Rover as it sped through the Tel Aviv night to the air station.

“You’re too old. Your reflexes are too slow. Your vision is impaired. You have a steel hip that could pop or break at any moment. You could not pass the exacting physical demands of Unit 13. You do not speak or understand Hebrew, so you would not understand commands. Do you think, under the circumstances, we should provide you with a translator? Hardly possible, and even if it was, there is the issue of time. Then there are weapons. You are not up to speed on ours. To know how to operate them efficiently, you would have to be drilled with them thousands of times under intense pressure and by mandate of our doctrines. This our Unit 13 people have done, you have not. Also procedures. With raiding, all members of the team must know the target intimately, must be in agreement on tactics and intentions, and if they must improvise, they improvise from that plan, and as soon as possible return to it. You don’t know the plan. Then there are the men. All of them will worry about you, not about the mission. They will be agitated to have a stranger in their midst. It’s an unfair burden to place on them. And there are diplomatic concerns. You are an American citizen. You have no authorization from your government to participate in our combat operations. I don’t know the legal repercussions, but if an American dies on an Israeli combat mission, there could be harsh political consequences. There are many in America who despise Israel and would use the tragedy as leverage to pry us further apart. Conspiracy theories would spring up like germs. Occlusion would be general where clarity is demanded. And consider journalism. Your newspaper rats would probe your death, expose your past life and your secrets, bedevil your survivors, blow security on Unit 13, breach its security, shine a light on its missions when what is most needed is darkness. I cannot under any circumstance imagine this man”—Gold indicated the Director, sitting obdurately next to him, smoking a cigarette, barely listening—“would authorize such a thing.”

“Okay,” said Swagger. “Just hear me out. If it matters, my eyesight has degraded: from twenty/ten to twenty/twenty. I spend three hours a day on horseback. Ever see any fat cowboys? No, because the horse works your muscles like an exercise machine, keeps you limber and strong. As for the guns, that’s pretty much all I do. I can shoot with or against anyone in the world and either win or tie, and if I tie, I’m dead, but so is he. Raiding? I did an extended tour in Vietnam with CIA Studies and Observation Group—‘commandos’—and that’s all we did was plan raids, raid, look for new raids. I come from raiders. My father raided five Japanese islands. My grandfather raided the Huns for eighteen months in the first big war. Ask the Germans about him, they still remember. He also had a spell raiding motorized bank gangs for the FBI in the ’30s. Note the lack of a motorized bank gang problem now? Too bad you don’t have either of them, I agree, but you’re stuck with me. As for diplomacy — really, I’ve signed a contract, and to the world I’ll just be another hard-ass contractor trying to get his kicks. Happens every day all over the world.”

The Director looked at him impassively. Not a guy to go “Gee, wow!” easily.

“But all of that is irrelevant,” Swagger continued. “I can stay here with you Mossad rabbis under the presumption that everything is going to happen exactly as it’s planned. Has there ever been a mission like that? Even at Entebbe, the best special op in the history of the world, your commander got plugged. So if things go bad — say, there’s more resistance; say, militia units from nearby get on-site faster than we expect — you need someone to eyeball that place. Maybe you get Juba, maybe not. And if you don’t, you nevertheless have to learn what he’s planning. You need a sniper, a gun guy, to read Juba’s setup. If I see his equipment, his targets, his ammo, his scopes, I can do that, and we can draw conclusions. And from conclusions, we can move on to intercepts or preparations, whatever. And if we do that, we can save lives. So the priorities here have to be these: nail the big guy first, or, failing that, get hard intel on upcoming activity. Anything less than that is failure and not worth the effort. I’m not the afterthought; I’m the thought. I’m the whole goddamned dog and pony show. Do you understand?” he added for the Director.

“I suspect he does,” said Gershon. “He went to Harvard.”

The Director looked at Swagger.

Finally, he said, “It’s Lieutenant Commander Motter’s mission. We’ll let him make the call.”

“You’ll be fine,” said Cohen, smiling at Swagger. “Motter went to Harvard too.”

That this fellow Motter was a lieutenant commander, not a major, meant that Unit 13 was, like the SEALs, a navy thing. You couldn’t tell from the man himself, all geared up in mushroom-cap helmet, his Kevlar strapped with frags and flares and fighting knives and various kits and packs that might come in handy, a Glock Kydexed to his chest, his face smeared black to match the night. He looked like any special ops jock, from SEAL to Delta to Pointe du Hoc Ranger to Spartan at the Hot Gates — same war, different day — to the horse raiders under Sergeant Major Odysseus outside Troy that fateful evening. He smoked a cigarette, listened impassively, as the Director spoke to him. His eyes were dead, his emotional engagement somewhere between calm preparedness and existential meaninglessness.

“Sergeant Swagger,” he said. “I read the accounts of Sniper Team Romeo-Two-Bravo against the North Vietnamese Second Battalion, Third Shock Army, in the highlands outside Nha Trans in 1974. That was a hell of a fight. But you were twenty-six then. Now you’re seventy-two.”

“The only thing I can’t do now that I did then is win at hopscotch. A weapon will equalize me out just fine.”

“To be frank, I’d much rather go drinking with you, hear your stories and learn your lessons, than lead you into combat. But let me ask the fellows. We’re tight in battle, but I like democracy in the unit.”

The young man turned, wandered off to where a dozen or so other guys were arrayed on the tarmac, all identical helmeted dogs of war. They gathered and talked, quietly and briefly, and finally Motter waved Bob over.

“Welcome to the team, brother.”

Men crowded, slapped him on the back. One guy kissed him. Names came at him, and he kept nodding as if able to remember them while answering “Bob, Bob.” Like the SEALs, 13 was clearly a first-name-only kind of outfit.

“Too late for gear,” said Motter. “We’re airborne in three.” He turned. “You, sentry, over here please.”

Swagger hadn’t even noticed air force security guards at the perimeter of the loading area. The fellow loped over.

“Last-minute addition. Don’t have time to check an M4 out of the armory. Sergeant”—he looked closely at the name tag on the sentry’s Kevlar vest—“Sergeant Mappa, he needs your vest, your Uzi, and your ammo.”

Such was the charisma of Motter that no resistance was offered. The sentry seemed pleased to play with the cool kids. Smiling, he stripped off his Kevlar and handed it over to Bob, who tossed his sport coat on the tarmac, pulled the vest tight over his polo shirt — helpfully, black — and clicked the links closed, feeling it tighten and solidify. Where the helmet came from, he never knew, but it more or less fit; strapped, it was reasonably secure. Someone handed him a piece of charcoal, and he rubbed it over his pale features, feeling the grit. Soon he was of the night. Finally, he took up the ancient submachine gun, and even though he’d never touched one, it felt so familiar, like he’d known it all his life, so iconic was it. Short, with an open bolt, its weight centralized in the grip, which housed the twenty-five-round 9mm magazine in an elbow joint, with another twenty-five-rounder hitched on, all under the density of a telescoping bolt, it felt solid and useful in his hands as he looped the sling around his neck. He seized the nearly perpendicular grip, conspicuously pronging his finger upward, far from the trigger, noting that the grip safety had been clearly taped flat, so there’d be no problem if he had to shoot fast and didn’t come up square on the grip.

The sergeant pointed to a horizontal slide lever, labeled in Hebrew, over the trigger guard of the blocky little thing. He said, “First position, safety on. Second, single shot. Forward, bap-bap-bap!”

Bob nodded. He knew their doctrine was chamber empty, and the guns didn’t go hot until they were safely on the ground, advancing toward the objective. Then, and only then, would the boys pull the bolt to get ready for the man dance. As policy, the Israel Defense Force didn’t want anyone jumping out of a chopper with a hot gun.

The three choppers began to whine. Slowly at first, gathering momentum, quickly speeding to a blurred fury, their rotors sucked at the air, and the boys self-divided into squads to file aboard, six to a ship, Swagger being the seventh on the Command ship.

“You’re on me,” said Motter, pulling him along.

“Got it,” he said. He turned to the three Mossad wise men — stolid, two smoking, one not — but they simply witnessed the ritual in silence.

“Let’s go to war, brother,” said Motter.

Three dark birds hurtling over the dark landscape. Running hot, running low to avoid radar. The raiders were silent, knowing that when they hit the landing zone, it could turn tragic in a split second, and would definitely turn complex in two. That was the nature of the raid, and if you couldn’t handle it, you were in the wrong business. So each man smoked, prayed, dreamed of sex, wondered if the Tel Aviv Guardians would beat the Jerusalem Bobcats, then wished they’d told their dad how much they loved him or hated him, and told Sally Sue either to wait or to move on with her life. Each guy had his little thing.

Up front, wedged into the hatch next to the inert but watchful Motter, Bob was pleased to note that the Israeli pilots wore FLIR goggles, so, to their eyes, the darkness ahead was illuminated. A good way to avoid telephone poles and other nasty possibilities. Didn’t have them in ’Nam, and too many good men went down in pointless wastage. The birds vectored north by northwest on a heading the pilots knew by memory, just as they knew the landforms and city features that marked the route until they passed from Israel into southern Syria, where it all went dark. The machine vibrated familiarly — it was, after all, a Sikorsky Black Hawk, a kind of Vietnam-era Huey on protein shakes — and Swagger knew, from a thousand flights in three tours, the whup-whup-whup of the rotor, the buzz of the engines, the octane scent of the fuel. But inside — bigger than the Huey but still the cabin of a combat chopper — it was dark except for the glow of somebody oxygenating the burning stub of his butt.

Time elongated, but, at the same time, it contracted. Maybe it just couldn’t figure out what to do and decided to go away.

Red light blinked.

Motter — Gadi, by first name — spoke with the pilots into his throat mic in Hebrew, pulled his legs in, unstrapped himself. In the darkness of the craft, Bob sensed the boys doing the same: butts out, minds blank, throats cleared, goggles down, bolts checked, straps tested, tightness of Kevlar and mushroom observed, knives and grenades and flares at the ready, Glocks and aid kits prepped, relationship to God figured out. Bob duplicated their motions and found himself crouched in the doorway of an assault chopper about to land someplace interesting. He had no fear.

The plan was easy enough, so simple as to almost be no plan at all. The birds down a hundred yards out at three points of the compass, the thirteen guys out, cocked, hot and fast, headed straight in. Classic L. Two elements hit frontally, from slightly different angles; a third sets up horizontal at the house’s rear, to take down any escapees. If they run, they have to be shot; if their hands go up, they’re gestured to their knees and flex-cuffed, and the op moves on. All three elements converge in one minute, each under a shield of fire from the other two. Gadi’s team would hit the door first, and Gadi would enter, followed by others, for house clearance. Swagger was not invited. His job was to wait at the door until all the rooms were cleared and then move in with a second team while a third team formed a perimeter facing the road to Iria, seven klicks away, its militia being the only Syrian force in the area. Job done, Juba either captured or dumped, the guys would take their prisoners back to the choppers and home to Tel Aviv for beer and cheeseburgers by dawn’s early light.

Simple, but what had not been counted on was that whatever bad guy was on sentry was not asleep and certainly not overwhelmed by the arrival of 13. It was as if he knew it could happen at any moment. So before the birds touched down, fire lashed from the house, traced stitches of dust across the zone, threw the odd tracer blur through the air, and whanged off the fuselage. Instead of a quick walk to the target, it was advance by fire and movement at the quickstep.

Swagger stayed close to Gadi, who pushed ahead. In keeping with doctrine, he kept his chamber virginal so that he wouldn’t stumble and kill three Israelis by clenching the trigger by instinct. Meanwhile, fire rose from three points on the upper floor of the house, but the shooters had no targets and could only enfilade the area. Their flashes documented them, however, and steadily any 13 guy who had a shot took it.

War is hell, it is true, but to Swagger, his soul be damned or exalted, it was also cool. The exhilaration of rounds overhead and nearby, peeling through the air and leaving a vacuum where they passed. Heat, light, noise, grit, dirt, adrenaline, energy long forgotten blossoming like an instantaneous orchid. Swagger raced into the melee, looking for someone to shoot. Hoochie Mama, ain’t the beer cold!

Gadi went down. Swagger was on him.

“Fuck,” the Israeli said. “Leg.”

Swagger looked, saw, as usual, that God favors the bold, and that the wound was a through-and-through in the left calf. Not much blood, no spurt or gush. Just an ugly pucker in and an ugly pucker out.

“You’ll be okay.”

“Tell them to keep moving. They can’t get hung up here.”

“What do I say… what’s the phrase?”

“Well, it’s—”

Two other men came and hovered, the three talking in Hebrew. One, a sergeant, stood and waved the boys forward. With no Gadi to be his sponsor, Swagger felt himself freed from obligation, and he moved fast as any of them on the house, heard a cry, which he knew had to be “Grenade out,” went flat as three large concussions ripped up dirt and debris and filled the air with dangerous stuff, but he was up. The fire volume rose, and everywhere in the brush fast smacks of dust displayed the random pecks of bullets as the defenders fired blindly at men they couldn’t see. He made it to the door and realized — Hello! Ding-dong! Eureka! — it’s time to go hot. He slid back the Uzi bolt, felt it lock, and he shoved the handle, at that point disengaged, forward. His thumb made certain the lever was pushed to full auto, and, last of all, he yanked on the folding stock, getting it to telescope out, and though it was no ergonomic masterpiece, it gave him something to lock between arm and rib cage. That done, he did an appraisal of the house. He was alone. He reached for a grenade, realized he had no grenades. He made ready to enter under his own full-auto cover, but then, out of the night, two more commandos showed. One had a frag in hand, nodded at Swagger, who nodded in reply and pulled back. The man tossed it. In an instant, it transformed into pure energy — lots of it.

He waited a second for pieces of stuff to cease whirling about what used to be a room, was the first to enter the boiling atmosphere, and when a figure emerged from another doorway across the space, he put six Uzi nines into him fast, melting him to the ground at light’s speed, feeling the jerk of mechanism, peripheral vision noting the spew of spent cases and smear of flash at the muzzle. Behind him, he heard men climbing steps to deal with upper-floor resistance, but his job was to push through to any sort of shop.

He rushed ahead, found nobody else to shoot, came to a door, kicked it open to behold a shooter’s headquarters: targets on wall, components on shelves, heavy reloading bench, arbor press. A smashed laptop lay atop the bench, its screen a look-alike for Bonnie and Clyde’s windshield. A man crouched at the bench, struggling with a lighter while holding an opened eight-pound plastic jug whose label proclaimed Hodgdon H1000, a smokeless powder applicable to reloading cartridges. It was highly volatile.

Bob thrust the Uzi muzzle at him, finger on trigger, but did not pull down.

“No!” he screamed. “No!”

Another commando was at his shoulder, rifle zeroed, also screaming, but more helpfully in Arabic.

The lighter lit. The fighter laughed, showing white teeth.

“Allahu Ak—!” he screamed and dropped it into the jug. If he expected a blast, he did not get it, for smokeless burns incredibly fast but does not explode. What he got, rather, was an instantaneous transformation of the universe, of which the central feature became the Devil’s blowtorch, which His Satanic Majesty had just ignited. All the mythic furies of lethal flame proclaimed the presence of that which melts everything in a fraction of a sliver of a fragment of an instant. The man himself was wardrobed in flame. The fire simply cloaked him alive, engulfing him to the atomic level, as all eight pounds of H1000 went. He was not a man on fire but a man of fire. Yet still, in the heart of the heart of the burning, he had some rational impulse left and spun backwards, where, in a corner, a collection of similar powder jugs had been stashed.

The result was ten more satanic blowtorches so bright, it hurt to see. The world became flame. The commando grabbed Bob to pull him out, for clearly the room would be completely lost to fire in seconds, the house in a few more, but Bob pulled away, screaming in English, “I have to check it out.”

Few men run into fire; he was one. Though he could feel his skin blistering, he shoved himself forward three or four feet, then five or six, yanked his goggles off for better vision and saw what he could see of the components above the bench before they were consumed by flame. He saw the green boxes of Sierra bullets, the yellow of Berger, the yellow-and-black of Swift, and others. He wasn’t close enough to grab one but had the impression, not clearly confirmed, that the calibration on all the boxes was .338s.

Two or three subsequent cans of powder went, and their Devil’s breath spewed plumes in on him. He saw his sleeve was on fire, twisted, tried to find his way out in the flames, which were now general, and suddenly remembered the laptop. He twisted back against the wave of heat, and though each particle of skin was being clawed with hurt, he managed to reach out, snag the laptop with one grasp, and pull away. He stumbled a step or two, unfortunately gasped and took in some superheated atmosphere and lost another second to a racking cough. At that point, on one knee and in recovery from his hacking spasm, his eyes caught on a large gun case, steel, expensive, a wealthy sportsman’s piece of equipment, leaning against the far wall, buckling as the heat crunched it. Two of three initials engraved on the case in exquisite calligraphy six inches tall were briefly visible, and again he thought he registered them as A and W. Then they were gone.

Fire propelled him to the door, and though it seemed to take hours, he reached it and spilled out. The room before him was empty, though beginning to ignite here and there too. He passed the entryway and felt the coolness of uncontaminated oxygen. Two men grabbed him and pulled him back to where the commandos had gathered and the fire’s heat was not lethal.

“We thought we’d lost you, brother!” yelled Gadi.

“Damned near,” said Bob, sprawling in an ecstasy of oxygen debt, sucking desperately for some air to inflate his life force. Someone took the laptop, someone else peeled the Uzi off his shoulder, and the Kevlar vest was sprung next. Cool water from a canteen gurgled in his throat, and he gulped it down. He was done for the night. Maybe for the year.

“Medic!” yelled Gadi. “Get some salve on this arm.”

He was quickly tended to. Gadi gave the signal, and the party fell back to the landing zone and popped red flares, even as the three birds broke orbit and swooped down. Swagger still had fire flaring in his mind, his left arm and left shoulder hurt badly, his night vision shot — perhaps forever — by his encounter with the big flame, and his mind wasn’t ticking properly. He turned back, saw the house now all gone to flame. Nothing left.

The next thing he knew, men were pulling him aboard a chopper and flattening him out on the deck. A quick radio count was made and confirmed that all who’d landed were back aboard, and the birds roared airborne, 13 homeward-bound.

11

Juba watched. Three Black Hawks, expertly flown, as one expected of the Israelis. They did nothing poorly, they never quit or surrendered, their timing was exquisite. He hated these guys, but, damn them to the deepest chamber of Hell, they were good.

The helicopters landed, their cargo of commandos disembarked, and the birds were airborne again in seconds and climbed and vanished to a holding pattern above the fight. The operators moved fast; the question was, how fast would his people react? He knew that battles turned in the split second between action and reaction. His fellows were the best, ex — Republican Guard Special Forces, and they didn’t let him down.

The volume of fire rose quickly, and the night was speared by the blasts of grenades. From three hundred yards out, he could see the automatics opening up. His guards had not wasted time wondering what was happening but got straight to the guns. The Israelis would win, with surprise and firepower on their side, but how much data would they collect in the aftermath of the raid? The guards knew their duty: to serve Allah by holding off the assault long enough for someone to detonate the smokeless powder and leave no trace behind.

It was close. A detonation came from within far too early, meaning that the commandos had gotten close enough to use grenades to room-clear and advance. Indeed, with his superb vision, he saw the figures of commandos scurry low through the doors, and now the gunfire came from within the dwelling as its assaulters closed in and flooded it.

Adid, he thought. Adid, you swore to me you’d succeed. I trusted you. But maybe Adid had taken a bullet in the head on the first exchange, and all his zeal and drive and hatred of infidels hadn’t been enough to drive him to the final act.

Adid, I pray to Allah that I have not sacrificed you for nothing. Be a martyr in the battle, you who have given so much over the years, you who—

The powder went. Adid! Adid the Martyr had somehow, under the very eyes of the Israeli commandos, gotten it done. It was a bolt of incandescence, Allah’s lightning, that blew out the shopwindow, and it was followed a second later by another bolt — larger, faster, hungrier — that seemed to rip through the house, and everywhere it struck, it ignited, and in another few seconds the whole dwelling was in flames.

Now, he thought, I must run. Suppose they hunt me with heat-seeking lenses and machine guns from the air. It would be so like them, for the Jew loved his gizmos, much more than a blade for stabbing or a scarf for strangling. It was evidence of their depravity.

He turned and raced through the wheat.

12

He thought the wheelchair a bit much. But the doctors insisted, and you do not argue with Israeli doctors in an Israeli military hospital. Nurse Susan rolled him out of the ambulance and through security, where, even still, he was scanned by electronic wand. These boys didn’t take chances.

He’d come to cleaned and bathed, but he was in pain. His burned arm felt like it was suspended in oil, which was simply antibiotic cream meant to lessen the chance of infection. The burns were second-degree and would heal, no skin grafts needed. He felt well enough on the second day to talk to his wife and assure her it was no worse than some kind of Fourth of July accident or maybe from staying too long at the beach — that sort of thing. Her unexpressive voice told him she didn’t buy it, but there was no way to fix that.

And now this. Dressed in surgical scrubs, shaved, smoothed, hair cut, he found himself being rolled into the same conference room as before, once again to a rabbinical audience of men who had done much and who spoke little. As before, it seemed Gershon Gold was in charge. The Director would sit, imperturbably unimpressed, in his central seat, and the comedy material would be supplied by the man called Cohen, who announced, “Freshly returned from his recon in Hell, the possibly insane Gunnery Sergeant Swagger, USMC. How did you find the weather down there, Sergeant Swagger?”

“It ain’t the humidity,” said Bob. “It’s the heat.”

“Excellent,” said Cohen. “If he can banter at a time like this, he’s ready for the rabbinate.”

“All right,” said Gold, “no need to go over tactical details, as Lieutenant Commander Motter and the others have been debriefed extensively, and all accounts are in accord. Time now to hear Sergeant Swagger’s read on the situation and his action recommendations. I suppose there’s really only one question, in the end. Our soldiers — I include you, sir — killed eleven men that night. We were able to get right thumbprints off of ten of them. No Juba. So, have you reason to believe he was the eleventh man — that is, the chap who melted himself before your eyes? He was obviously impossible to fingerprint.”

This hadn’t occurred to Swagger, and, in a second, he realized why.

“No possibility. Because whoever he was, he died the happiest man on earth. You could read it on his face. When the lighter flicked on, he knew he’d won. He’d done his job. I’d guess that job was destroying the evidence, and he knew also that Juba had not been taken. He was happy to face his god. You don’t see that much in the West. Then he was gone in flame. As to the implications, I don’t know. But I can read the signs for indicators, if you want.”

“That is exactly what we want, Sergeant Swagger.”

“Sure,” he said. “I didn’t get a clear look, and it was a little hot to be taking notes — the pen would have melted. Still, I think I got something. I was in a place I’d been before. I was in the shop of a dedicated shooter, and he was in the midst of, or possibly had finished, a serious project.”

“And that is?”

“He was trying to find a load.”

“The meaning evades us,” said Gold. “Can you be more specific? We are not NRA members.”

“Sure,” said Bob. “Most folks think shooting is divided into two components. You have a bullet, number one, which you put in a gun, number two. Pull the trigger, and a hole appears somewhere, wanted or not.”

“I take it there’s more.”

“A bit,” said Swagger.

“Is this going to be long and boring?” asked Cohen.

“I’ll certainly try to make it so, sir,” said Bob. “Turns out each gun — not each type of gun, but each individual gun off the assembly line — has peculiarities of construction: screw torque, variation in machine tool setting, metallic composition of barrel, precision of fit of moving parts, and on and on. This is where it can get really long and boring, Mr. Cohen, so I am cutting you some slack here.”

“You are a humanitarian,” said Cohen.

“All these little things affect accuracy. In most applications, it don’t matter. In most applications, you’re just trying to hit the target in the fat part — man, beast, or paper. In three applications, it does. Those would be hunting, benchrest shooting, and sniping. So people who do those things pay special attention to details.”

“Fascinating,” said Cohen, as his face said the opposite.

“What they have learned — and remember that the gun and its ballistics is one of the most studied, engineered areas in human behavior — is that these elements can make an immense difference in accuracy. In the rifle itself, it can be the barrel, the rifling in the barrel, the trigger pull, the fit of the stock to the action — all of these can make a difference in determining whether the rifle is just accurate enough, accurate, or superaccurate. Questions?”

The rabbis appeared to be paying attention but had no questions.

“But that’s even more true of the ammunition. Thus, what’s called reloading. It gives the shooter control over many more factors. He takes a spent shell, pops the spent primer, cleans the case. He reshapes it under pressure, primes it, puts a new and different kind and amount of powder into it, and loads a new and different type of bullet — same caliber, different shape, design, weight, material, whatever — and assembles it in a press. He documents all this carefully. It’s about recording each step in the process. Then he shoots it, usually in groups of five. He wants all five to go in one hole, or close enough to it. He very carefully documents the results of the shooting — that is, group size, response to wind, velocity, muzzle energy — and he compares it to factory ammo or, more likely, his other attempts. Maybe it’s better, maybe it’s not. The point of this trial-and-error process is that he is searching for a combination — it’s almost a musical thing, hunting for a chord — that gets the absolute most out of the rifle’s potential. Usually one load — a certain brand or make of shell, a certain ritual of preparation, a certain bullet weight, a certain bullet design, a certain powder, a certain amount of powder, a certain length of cartridge, a certain high degree of concentricity, and maybe half a dozen other empirical things — will produce the best load. That is the cartridge that meets its goal for accuracy, velocity, perhaps lack of muzzle flash, in combat considerations. Anyway, that would be his ideal, and it would be his round of choice. It would be significantly better than factory ammunition, across the board, for any usage.”

“And there is an industry that supports such behavior?” asked Gold.

“Yep. Chemical companies make dozens of different powders — different burning rates, different-shaped crystals, different fillers — while gun accessory companies make measuring devices, powder scales, reloading dies, primers, primer loaders, and bullet companies make different weights, shapes, interior structures, tips, composition materials. He’s just trying to find that right chord and build his harmony around it.”

“Superb,” said Cohen. “The Mozart of the sniper world. But do you also have a point?”

“Given that he had pounds and pounds of different kinds of smokeless powder, boxes and boxes of bullets, boxes signifying Wilson reloading dies, an arbor press for squishing all the stuff together, it seems to me he was doing a methodical search for a certain round for a certain task that would be far more efficient than anything he could obtain on the market.”

“He’s setting up for an extra-hard shot where maximum accuracy is mandatory?” said Gold.

“It gets worse,” said Swagger. “You haven’t asked about caliber. I am all but certain — remember, I was in Hell, and the Devil himself was trying to turn me into a marshmallow — that the bullets were of a diameter of three hundred and thirty-eight hundredths of an inch. This would mean the load in question was a caliber called the .338 Lapua Magnum. It’s currently the go-to sniper round in Afghanistan for long-distance situations — which are most situations in Afghanistan. In 2009, a British sniper named Craig Harrison used the .338 Lapua to hit the longest documented shot in history. He popped a Taliban machine gunner at over twenty-three hundred yards. That’s a mile and a half. That’s the point of the .338 Lapua: it lets you strike from a different time zone. So I would conclude that Juba is putting together a .338 Lapua Magnum load to put someone down from a long, long way out. He’s methodical, skillful, dedicated. He’s going about it the right way. However jazzed up his jihadi half is, his shooter half is professional, cool, cunning, taking no chances, no shortcuts. They’ve spent a lot of money and a lot of effort getting him exactly what he wants. There don’t seem to be no limit on the purse strings. My guess is, he’s got either a stolen or a recovered Accuracy International Magnum — the best sniper rifle in the world — and all the gadgets to support it. All that stuff had to be somehow gotten and smuggled into Syria. So you’re looking at a major effort by someone’s intelligence agency. Only one conclusion: he’s going after a high-value target.”

“This news is extremely bad,” said Gold.

“One small advantage we may have: the distance of the range he was practicing on was only 1,023 yards, if I recall. There’s not really any advantage to the .338 Lapua over any one of a dozen other long-range cartridges at 1,023. The point of the Lapua is the long, long shot. No point in going to all the trouble they’ve gone to if it wasn’t a long one they were planning. So my thought is, he ain’t done. He’ll have to find somewhere to test his stuff out to Harrison’s range, another thousand yards or so. He’ll need to have made that shot a hundred times in practice before the real thing. So maybe that gives us a little time. He’s got to find someplace to shoot where the distance, the climate, the wind patterns, the weather all match up with his target zone. But it’s taken him a bit of time — we don’t know where in his program he is — to get to 1,023. If he’s planning to take someone further, he’s got to move on to that next stage and become friends with it. Seems like in Syria there wouldn’t be too much trouble finding fifteen hundred or two thousand yards to go shooting.”

“No, but it’s the climate,” said Gold. “Syria is desert, as is Israel. Much less humidity, much more wind, odd temperature patterns. Maybe shooting at that range elsewhere in Syria wouldn’t teach him what he needs to know because he’s not operating in Syria. He has to travel to wherever that is, or to its duplicate.”

“It’s a damned shame we don’t know where he’s gone,” said Swagger.

“But of course we know,” said Cohen. “We’re Mossad. That’s what we do.”

13

He would be all right. The preparations were in place, the contacts set, the logistics arranged, the codes known, the schedule activated. It would all happen as planned, nothing could stop it.

False leads, clues within clues, switchbacks, deviations, deceptions, booby traps, the full genius for Ottoman deception and betrayal woven into one grand plan certain to do horrendous damage. Cities would topple, fire would engulf infidels, the mighty would fall, death would be general. It couldn’t fail.

But it depended on a cold bore shot only one of the best in the world could make from a distance until a few years ago thought unreachable. Maybe Harrison of Afghanistan could make it, maybe not.

But even that was not enough, for Harrison was safely within his own lines and had no difficulty slithering through enemy territory. He could have had a nice cup of tea before he shot and then gone back to bed behind the barbed wire and sandbags. Juba, on the other hand, would be the most hunted man in the world afterward, and it was mandatory that he escape, leaving only hints that pointed to another man.

But… what did the Jews know?

How had they found him?

Had they intercepted a message?

Was there a leak?

Was he in jeopardy?

All of that was premised on the idea of Israeli intelligence having tentacles as yet unseen. It would represent a penetration so subtle and devious, it would be among the world’s best. Yet if that were the case, would they have hit him with three helicopters full of commandos, in and out in seven or so minutes? The best thing to do would have been an American smart munition takeout of the whole site. Even if subtlety was desired, a larger engagement force — at least a company of 13’s best, maybe more; a gunship recon by fire; boots on the ground in the dozens; night vision everywhere; drones scouring the area — a real show. But, no, this was limited, fast, lethal.

The other possibility: it was a raid motivated by simple vengeance. After the school bus, he was the first name on their kill list. Anywhere in the world they located him, they would strike quickly. It had nothing to do with intelligence; it was raw vengeance. And they would never stop hunting him, would never let him escape. At any moment, an Israeli commando could knock in the door and finish him.

He favored that second possibility. It was the simplest, as the operation itself was so secret, only a few in the world knew of its far-reaching possibilities, much less its target, much less its location.

That meant he had great advantages still. He could be headed anywhere. Without a destination, they were helpless. A worldwide alert for a shadowy figure called Juba the Sniper would do them no good at all and would be ignored in the West, where security services were too busy wiretapping mosques to find the odd angry imam trying to cajole losers into shooting up homosexual bars.

Meanwhile, having made his first contact, he had picked up a package of superb credentials and identification that would get him across any border in the world. He knew his cover story forwards and backwards. He would become three totally different people on his journey, each unconnected to the other two. The whole thing, with so much money behind it, was first-class.

He was in a cheap hotel in Istanbul, smoking cigarettes, awaiting a flight to his next destination. Tonight’s whore had been good, a lively Turkish girl with dark eyes and pretty hands who gave generously of her skills. Later, there would be no time, and security would be too intense, for such a risk. So for now, it was the flesh, the tobacco, the prayers, and the slow but steady passage to the destination.

He tried now to understand what the Israelis could have learned from the farmhouse. The blaze of light — searing and brilliant — told him that Adid had lit the powder and that everything in the shop was obliterated. But assume nothing. What if a Jew got in there and at least got a look?

So, did they see? And if they saw, did they understand? It might have meant nothing to a Zionist commando — the boxes of American bullets, the jars of powders, the reloading manuals, the targets. Still, assume nothing. He saw it. He reported it. The rabbis studied his reports and interpreted them correctly. But there was nothing in the house that carried an indicator of the mission. None of the guards knew the scope of the mission. They would know only that there was a mission. But, then, there was always a mission, so what did that tell them?

He had but one worry: had Adid destroyed the laptop along with himself? He remembered it was on the desk in his quarters. He had told Adid over and over of its importance. Certainly, even in the gravity of the situation, the arrival of raiders, Adid would have remembered the core of his mission and taken the laptop with him as he fell back into the shop and its powder cache. No piece of electronic equipment could stand up to that sort of conflagration. It would have been liquidized under the affront of the flames.

I am safe, he decided.

If they didn’t have the laptop, they knew nothing.

14

What laptop?” said Swagger.

“He’s being coy,” said Cohen. “It’ll play so well when Spielberg films it.”

“What laptop?” said Swagger.

“Sergeant Swagger,” said the Director, speaking to him directly for the first time, “you graciously visited Hell on our behalf and did not come out empty-handed. If we had the time, I’d give you a medal. But as you’re about to learn, we don’t have the time.”

The Director lifted his briefcase from the floor, opened it, and took out a plastic bag holding a curled and blackened laptop computer. Someone had put a burst through its screen, turning it into a spiral nebulae of fractures surrounding large holes that showed clean through. The keyboard had modulated into a wave, and most of its keys were shapeless nubs.

“Do you remember?” asked Cohen. “Gas and flame, your arm on fire, your Uzi too hot to hold. Somehow you reached out and snagged it, and, in another second, another jug of powder went, and then all of them. Somehow — God favors the insane perhaps? — you grabbed ahold, staggered out, and collapsed.”

“Wish I’d done that,” said Bob. “It seems pretty cool. Also, by the way, I tripped over a gun case with the initials A.W. on it, the third letter gone to fire.”

“It’s all coming back?”

“The only thing that comes back is that fire is hot, and you don’t want to die that way.”

“An excellent lesson,” said Cohen.

“Cohen might know a bit about this one subject,” said Gold. “He was shot down four times.”

Cohen held up his left hand. It was plastic.

“Okay,” said Bob. “I’m impressed.”

“He shot down fifteen of theirs. Net gain for our side: eleven aircraft.”

“Triple ace,” said Swagger. “Again, I’m impressed.”

“Odd that he turned out so annoying,” said Gold.

Bob nodded. “Anyway, that thing looks pretty well shot to hell to me.”

“Forensic computer science is quite advanced,” said Gold, “and we have people who are practiced at it.”

“You got something?”

“There was an undamaged sector header on the otherwise quite useless hard drive. The process is called file carving. Our people were able to extract bits of information from the header, including IP addresses recorded on the data sector. The data sector was gone, the data, therefore, was gone, but not the Internet Protocol addresses. They came from a server in Manila, in the Philippines. We’ve just penetrated it remotely, located the origin of the IPs, and learned that many were created in Dearborn, Michigan.”

A silence settled into the room.

Finally, it was the Director who spoke.

“That is why, Sergeant Swagger, in one hour you and Mr. Gold are taking off for Washington. Your FBI shares our concern. The evidence is irrefutable. Juba the Sniper is headed to America. He is going to shoot a high-value target from a long way away. And probably quite soon.”