In the Crosshairs

Prologue

The CIA sniper team huddled unseen in a shadowy crevice that had been created when an earthquake scrambled the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan four years earlier. Luke Gibson and Nicky Marks were eyes-on the scruffy home of old Mahfouz al-Rashidi, warlord of the Wakham Corridor.

They had been there for almost twenty-four hours, having been dropped by a helicopter onto a high plateau six kilometers away and then humping the hills beneath a cold and cloudless black sky spangled with bright stars. The terrain was so silvery that the night-vision goggles weren’t needed. The chopper’s racket, which had pounded their ears during the flight, had given way to silence as their ears adjusted, and all their senses finally clicked into sharpness. Along their quiet way the two men, dressed in local garb, made frequent stops just to look and listen and smell the surroundings. A dog in the nearby village of Girdiwal yelped as if it were being whipped. The stalk was sweaty work, even on the chilly night, but they had found the predetermined slot without difficulty, converted it into a hide in the scrub bush, done a soft radio check, and, with rifles zeroed and telecoms set before the sun rose, had burrowed into position. It was no big deal. The pair of seasoned veterans had been in this area before, for a CIA safe house had been set up there many years ago. It would not be used this time, so the strike couldn’t be traced back to them. The loose shale covering the hard rock on which they lay was as familiar as an old couch.

At about 0800, there was a buzz in the heavens and a lightweight AS550 Fennec scout helicopter belonging to the Pakistani Army popped over the horizon. Gibson heard it first and pointed as the dot grew larger and the bird found a landing spot near the front gate of the house. The snipers had been expecting it, as had Mahfouz al-Rashidi, for this was a regular payday for the master of the Wakham.

“Right on time,” Gibson said softly as he watched the camouflaged rotary-wing aircraft shut down, its rotors revolving slower and slower. An officer climbed out and was escorted through the gate while a soldier and the pilot unloaded freight and lugged it in.

Nicky Marks unzipped a satchel that he had brought with him and powered up an electronic array of miniaturized snooper technology, pushing buttons to start recording. “We’re green across the board, Luke. The audio is five by five, and we should be getting a picture any minute.”

Al-Rashidi put down his cup of mint tea when he heard the sweep of the blades, anticipating the homage that would come to him on this special day. The host welcomed the courier from Islamabad and bade him sit and visit with the family, as was the custom with strangers.

Outside, Luke Gibson watched the swirling dust settle from the helicopter landing to gauge the wind speed between the hide and the house. He was as still as a sleeping snake. Nothing bothered him.

The warlord had a peculiar relationship with the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, and it had been fruitful. The Islamabad government provided cash in return for information about what was happening along the long valley in neighboring Afghanistan, particularly at the point where it met the closed Chinese border. The first gift from the officer today was a black nylon suitcase filled with shrink-wrapped bricks of American greenback dollars. The second was a huge flat-screen television set with powerful receiving capability that could pick up broadcasts from around the world, almost everything from the Sky Network to Netflix, plus a built-in CD player. The technician, a lowly enlisted man, was ignored as he set up the amazing equipment, burying his real purpose in the maze of wires and controls that only he understood.

The TV set, the receiver, and the suitcase also communicated the other way, for it contained a hive of mini-microphones and sophisticated spyware. Within a few minutes, Nicky Marks and Luke Gibson could see and hear as if they were sitting inside with Mahfouz al-Rashidi and his sons.

The old guy had an unkempt beard and looked comfortable in loose trousers beneath a long tunic. He was totally at ease, feeling quite pleasant, not just about the courier and the gifts but because all four of his sons had come together for the first time in months to celebrate their father’s seventieth birthday. He also had two daughters, both devout and placed beneath the veil early in their teens, then married off to worthy men and gone from his life. Soon the ISI officer, his men, and the helicopter were gone, and the warlord turned to the business at hand. The TV set was not even turned on, for it was a mere entertainment trinket and of no true substance, just a gift from an appreciative customer to mark the first day of Muharram, the start of the Islamic new year.

The four young men sat with their father in a circle, paying close attention to his words. Together, the family of Mahfouz al-Rashidi formed a jihadi terrorist cell whose five members were known only to one another. With family, there was no worry of betrayal.

The clan originally came from the Egyptian intelligentsia in long-ago years when Islam existed in the shadows and, in the opinion of the old man, the people strove not to exalt God, as was proper, but to be ever more like the infidel Westerners. Had not his own father and uncle amassed wealth from an international import-export business created by their own forefathers along the Nile? Mahfouz had been born into a life of privilege just after the war in 1949. But for the grace of the Prophet, praise be unto him, he would also have been lost to the secular temptations prevalent in his formative years.

Instead, he had puzzled out deep meanings of the Koran, befriended radical mullahs, and fallen under the hypnotic sway of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the dream of jihad. It was with bin Laden’s advice that al-Rashidi migrated with his family away from secular Egypt to this forsaken place on what had once been a trade route to China. That heathen nation had closed the border at its end of the Wakham Corridor, making it a dead end for official trade but creating a thriving black-market haven, a valuable pipeline for information, and a prosperous place for the cultivation of hillside hectares of opium poppies.

It provided the priceless isolation in which al-Rashidi raised his own den of lions. His religious mentors and the billionaire bin Laden kept him going as a special project, almost cut off from the world, tediously making ready for a strike at some unknown future date when the tawdry Western world would cower in fear.

“Tell me of our purpose,” the old man said, addressing his eldest son, Mohammed.

“To destroy America,” came the answer. Mohammed was a forty-year-old architect who now lived in Paris.

“Ali. Our mission?” The watery dark eyes of the old man passed to the second son, a year younger.

“To grind fear into the heart of the United States! To make them eat ashes!” There was no hesitation from the skilled attorney, who was a prosecuting lawyer for the Afghan government.

The old man nodded again. Very good. “How do we do that, Kalil?”

“Follow the teachings of Osama bin Laden and make a memorable strike to glorify the Prophet, whose name be praised.” Kalil rocked back and forth, as he had done as a child while memorizing the Koran. He was employed as a petrochemical engineer by a British company and spent much of the year aboard North Sea rigs.

“And who among us shall do this thing?” He turned to the last of the four.

The youngest spoke with the same certainty as his brothers. “Why, Father, that will be me,” replied the smiling and clean-shaven Stephen Rush, who ran a reputable industrial real-estate business in Houston, Texas.

The father felt as though he might burst with joy, and rolled his eyes heavenward as he said softly, “Allah be praised.” It had been a very long and hard journey raising this family beyond the reach of so many enemies, keeping them pure, educating them at fine universities, and placing them in strategic occupations. Sacrificing them all simultaneously was a tragic decision, but it was a promise he had made to Osama. He knew that after coordinated attacks were made in Texas, Pakistan, France, and London the honored house of al-Rashidi would be hunted down like rabid dogs and extinguished from the face of the earth. They would reunite as martyrs in paradise. Who could ask for more?

Gibson decided that he had heard and seen enough of the Rashidi boys. They had just confirmed the intelligence gathered over the past few years. “Put up our radio link,” he said over his shoulder to Marks without taking his eye from the powerful spotting scope that was poking through the tumbled foliage. When Marks confirmed that the encrypted signal was available, Gibson said, “Tell them it’s a go on this end.” Then he made some final minor scope adjustments to his old-school M24 (SWS) sniper rifle and chambered a 7.62 × 51-mm. NATO cartridge.

The house, five hundred meters distant, loomed large in the magnified image, and Gibson scanned left to right, then up and down. Al-Rashidi should have heeded the Prophet’s warning against becoming arrogant, for it had been his undoing. The Egyptian prided himself on his relationship with Osama bin Laden, who had left notes about him and the special project in his private files. Unfortunately, when an American commando team killed bin Laden and found that information the careful and loyal Mahfouz al-Rashidi stood exposed. The little warlord in the small house in the no-name wasted valley became a person of interest. He had reached too far.

Then he was groomed as carefully as a teenage girl tends her hair and eye makeup. Money began to flow in exchange for information about who was doing what in his valley. He liked the new power and importance, and his sons had been happy to get out of the Wakham, with money to spend. Mohammed developed a liking for the whores of Paris. Ali enjoyed the perfumed boys of Islamabad. Kalil was up to his neck in gambling debts to London bookies, and young Stephen Rush, whose real name was Syed, was a cocaine freakazoid. The boys had all gone Western, but told their jihadi father what he wanted to hear, not necessarily what was true. All hated having to come back to this crude shack and were about as capable of planning a coordinated attack as a herd of turtles.

No matter, thought Gibson, who knew their backgrounds. It was time to end this game and take all five of them off the map. He slowed his breathing and steadied the rifle. Forty thousand feet above him, an MQ-9 Reaper drone had been loitering for two hours in sky circles on sixty-six-foot wings under the control of a pilot and a sensor operator back in the United States. When Gibson passed along the permission from Marks, the drone slid into a straight path above the target and jumped up as it released a pair of GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munitions, smart bombs that weighed five hundred pounds apiece. The JDAMs rode the laser beam flawlessly directly through the roof of al-Rashidi’s home and exploded with a thunderclap that rolled far down the valley.

Gibson had been expecting it, but it was still quite a show. With the thud of detonations, the building actually blew apart in a canopy of debris and dirt. A tower of smoke rolled up and fire flashed horizontally. He kept his eye on the scope as the concussion pushed against the mountains.

He had been doing this kind of thing for a long time, and it still surprised him that anyone could live through such an attack, but, invariably, someone did. Even Hitler walked away from a bomb blast that killed or wounded almost everybody around him in a closed room. And, sure enough, down in the smoking rubble a figure stirred. An arm — not much more than a claw in Gibson’s scope — was raised, and then fell, and rose again. A man was digging out. The head emerged. It looked like Kalil, but the sniper couldn’t be certain because the face was so badly burned. It really made no difference. The torso wiggled and struggled and emerged from the ruins. It stood slowly, holding on to a torn wooden beam for support, and Gibson shot him through the chest. The target fell and there was no more movement.

Gibson pulled the rifle back. “Tell them mission completed.” Marks passed along the message to send the drone back to its base and bring in the extraction chopper. There was no hurry to get away. No cavalry would be riding to the rescue for the al-Rashidi gang. Gibson pulled out a packet of chocolate, took a sweet bite, and thought, Happy New Year, Mahfouz, old buddy. That thought was followed quickly by Damn, I’m good at this.