In the Crosshairs

21

Headache. Pounding and painful, and a thirst that begged for moisture. The roar of a machine. Kyle Swanson sensed movement, then fell back into blackness. The machine roared again. Close by. It scared him, and he took the fright back into dreams.

The Boatman was leaning on the oar of his long canoe, waiting. “I told you,” the ragged specter said in a voice dry and sandy. “I tried to warn you. ‘This cannot be done alone,’ I said.”

Swanson groaned. Somebody working with a hammer. “I don’t remember.”

“Try.” The nightmare figure spoke quietly, in contrast to the noise elsewhere.

“Water. Please give me some water.”

“Think about it.”

Swanson heaved, but his arms wouldn’t work, and he collapsed again. “Did you come for me? Is it finally my time?”

“No. Just this one, although my work is just starting this night.” The Boatman gestured toward the front of the bateau, where the corpse of Nicky Marks sat mute. Splotches of dried brown blood crusted his wounds. He had no head.

The Boatman stirred the imaginary pond and the boat sluggishly moved away, toward the carmine glow on the faraway horizon. “Try to remember,” the figure called out before disappearing. “It is the answer.”

Swanson slept awhile, thought he heard someone calling his name. He tried to force his eyes to open, but he couldn’t see anything beyond an intense brightness, so he closed them again. His body shook. Another spell of blackness enveloped him, then he heard different voices, real ones this time. Words he couldn’t understand. So thirsty.

Luke Gibson was beginning to believe that he had popped Swanson too hard. That wasn’t his intent. He had patched up the wound and hoped there was no concussion. He checked the restraints and stepped away, got a cup of water and poured some into Swanson’s mouth, and heard him gag and cough, then gave him a little more.

“Are you finished yet?” he asked in Arabic.

One of the three rugged young men who had come up from the village said the work was complete, and Gibson went over. “Let’s see how you did.”

Nicky Marks’s body hung upside down, tied by the ankles, from a hook in the ceiling above a blood-stained bathtub. It was messy. They had been in a hurry, because blood pools in the lowest part of the body after death, and Gibson needed the postmortem wounds to pump out a profuse amount of blood. It streamed from the deep gouges made on the back and thighs, from the spikes driven through the palms and into the walls, and flowed from the neck, where a chain saw had removed the head, and at the groin, which was missing the testicles and penis. He nodded approvingly. That should do the job. “Smile, Nicky,” Gibson said, and started taking pictures.

The water triggered a recovery, and Kyle Swanson felt as if he were landing in a hot-air balloon as his senses quickened. Where am I? He opened his eyes, but the vision was fuzzy. He saw dark figures and blinking bright light. The headache squeezed him again, and his body tightened in a spasm to compensate. The green field where he had been about to land vanished again.

Gibson, checking the pupils with a flashlight, thought Swanson would be coming around in a few minutes. It was only ten o’clock at night, so there was plenty of time to finish the email and make the calls.

He didn’t sign the note, but attached the grisly photographs in a slide-show format and sent them to Veronica Keenan in Washington. When the transmission had been completed, Gibson broke the burner phone apart, crushed the SIM card beneath his boot, and threw the pieces on the plastic sheet in which two of the men were wrapping the remains of Nicky Marks. “Take it all back into the mountains and burn it,” he ordered.

Then he activated the sat phone and called the CIA contact in Germany. “Checkerboard, Checkerboard, this is Player Two.”

Contact was instantaneous. Ryan Winters had been waiting for this call. “Player Two, this is Checkerboard. Send your traffic and stand by for new information.”

“No time to wait, Checkerboard. Mission failed. Repeat, mission failed. Player One has gone berserk. Swanson tortured Nicky Marks to death and turned on me when I tried to stop him. Gunfight. I am hit and trying to egress. He is following me.”

Winters was stunned. He was supposed to pass along the urgent instructions for Swanson to break off the mission because his partner might be unstable, and return to base on the double. This radio call from Gibson flipped everything. “Player Two, Checkerboard. Are you all right?”

“Bleeding from a shoulder wound. I’m in cover for now. I need orders.” There was a moment of static, but before Winters could say anything, Gibson was talking again, louder and in a rush. “Gotta go! Gotta go! Aw, Jeez. He’s coming.…”

Well, that should keep them busy for a while, Gibson thought as he turned off the sat phone and trashed it, too. Two of the men lugged Marks’s body out the door and tossed it into the bed of a pickup truck, then covered it with canvas, tying the corners. The Toyota pulled away from the house and headed away from civilization.

Kyle Swanson saw shadows that firmed into shapes as he awoke, bound to a chair. “What?” he croaked, his throat aching and parched.

“Ah. Back from nappytime, are we?” The jovial voice of Luke Gibson registered. “You’re okay, Kyle. Just a little bump on the head. Here’s some more water.”

A firm hand gripped his jaw and a plastic bottle bumped his lips. He drank, swallowed, drank again, stopped. “What happened? Grenade? I don’t remember anything after Marks went down.”

“That’s because I knocked you out. You never saw it coming.”

“What the fuck, Gibson? Why am I tied up?”

Gibson put the bottle on a table and rocked back in a chair of his own. “You’re tied up because otherwise you would do something stupid, like try to kill me before I explain the situation. You’re a dangerous man, Kyle, so I can’t take that chance.”

Swanson tested the bonds. Duct tape was strapped around his chest, his hips, and probably his legs, because he couldn’t move his feet. His hands were loose in front of him, but handcuffed, and his watch was gone. He reached for the bottle, looking at Gibson, who made no move to stop him. He drank. A packet of aspirin was on the table, so he opened it and took two tablets, chasing them with another sip. “You contact Checkerboard yet?”

“Sure. Brought them up to date.”

“I thought I heard somebody talking. Marks?”

“Dead and gone.”

Kyle looked around the room. No body. He saw lots of blood in the open bathroom door. “What… the… hell… is… going… on?”

Gibson spread his hands as if to calm him. “Don’t sweat it about Marks. He was a rotten bastard anyway. As for you, I didn’t bring you here to hurt you, Kyle. To kill you, yes, eventually, but not for torture. In fact, I want you in top shape.”

Swanson’s head still hurt, but he was thinking more clearly as he sat back in the chair, seeming to relax a bit while taking a physical inventory. He raised his hands to his head and his fingers found a square bandage compress that had been taped over a small cut that still oozed liquid. He clenched his hands, his toes, and did isometrics to be sure everything still worked. He was tied in a peculiar way, but otherwise it seemed he was fine. “I never trusted you, Gibson. Not from the start.”

Gibson laughed as if he was truly amused and slapped the table a couple of times. “Yet here we are! I win!”

“You win? Win what?” Swanson flicked his eyes to a young man sitting in a shadowed corner. Slight, with an expressionless face that carried only a fuzz of beard. Age no more than fifteen. A Kalashnikov was propped next to him.

Gibson got to his feet and began to pace. He was in full flow, and Swanson didn’t interrupt. Let him talk and give away some nuggets of intelligence. Swanson kept his own mind busy on other things, looking for possible weapons, possible advantages. He stretched against the tautness of his bonds. There was little give to it, and he knew the fibers of duct tape were incredibly strong. He couldn’t bust his way free. A slow anger boiled inside, but he fought it back in order to remain calm. Somehow, someway, there had to be an exit.

“I was telling you about my father, remember? Well, he was a CIA guy, too, as was his father before him. I come from a long, long line of spooks, Kyle, dating back to the days of the British Raj. I was actually bred and trained from childhood for this kind of work. Just like some dads spend their afternoon training their sons to be professional athletes, mine taught me tradecraft.”

Swanson gave a small laugh. “Whoopie for you. Must have been a lot of fun.” Then he paused. “You’re crazy, Luke. You know that, right?”

“That depends on your definitions. Crazy enough to dream big dreams and then go out and make them come true. Crazy enough to be the best at everything I do.”

Swanson checked the kitchen. It was small, with a counter and some cabinets that seemed about to fall from the wall. He saw a small stove, which meant that the place was actually used for preparing meals. That meant a knife or two, perhaps some glasses or plates and other stuff. He inhaled and caught a whiff of stale food, and assumed it had been cooked, which meant that fire was available, probably with propane gas. He turned his attention back to the babbling Gibson. “What’s the plan here, Luke? Why didn’t you shoot me out there? You had plenty of chances?”

“Didn’t you hear me? Listen up. I’ve always been the best at everything. The CIA, through my family connections, first recruited me back in high school. If they could take a kid — the right kid, of course, not just anybody — and mold him through his formative years, they could create a professional of exceptional talent and possibilities.”

Swanson couldn’t let that curveball pass without a swing. “Kids lie about their age all the time to get into the service. Discovering a sixteen-year-old soldier isn’t a rare occurrence. They get trained fast, and a high-school dropout might become a combat medic or learn to speak Russian in six months. You aren’t so special.”

Gibson didn’t take the taunt. “By the time the recruiters hit the college campuses for juniors and seniors, they may find some with unique skills, all of them very bright, but some ten valuable years of learning have been wasted. By the time I was a junior, I was already running missions and helping my dad.”

Swanson nodded his chin toward the young fighter crouched in the corner, who apparently didn’t understand a word of English. He seemed bored. “You and I both have seen guns on boys in Africa who should have been in about the third grade. And how about your little punch boy over there, Luke? Doesn’t the fact that he’s probably illiterate kind of blow your élitist theory out of the water?”

“Children can be useful tools, that it true. Even a mosquito can bite. I created a group of boys called the Lions of the Caliphate. They cannot think and plan or see beyond tomorrow, and then they die as cannon fodder. Anyway, I don’t have to prove myself to you, Swanson. I’ve already beaten you several times.”

Water? The word made him look at the bottle on the table. This place had water and food supplies. A scan of the walls showed old nails and random screws sticking out. Propane plus nails equal bomb? Possible. A couple of lightbulbs showed that there was electricity. A broom and who knows what other housekeeping supplies would be around. In the right hands, this place had a lot of possibilities. Although he was bound like a chicken, he was beginning to feel better.

“You said you came here, to this house, as a boy, Gibson. Why did dear old dad haul you to such a dump? Some parents take their kids to Paris or London or New York, but you end up in the ass-end of nowhere?”

Gibson moved to the kitchen and came back with a fresh water bottle. He opened it and drank. “One of the family assignments was to establish safe houses for the agency in interesting places when the Middle East started to heat up. Along the way, we created some rabbit holes where we could also hide.”

Swanson grunted, as if in admiration. A safe house meant weapons, money, comm gear, identity papers. Probably under the rugs. Also, his Excalibur sniper rifle had been laid on a nearby table, along with his other gear and ammo.

Gibson turned a chair around and straddled it to face Kyle. “I know what you’re doing, Mr. Secret Agent Man. You’re noting things you might be able to use in an escape. We went to the same schools on that shit, remember?”

“I’m tired of your bragging about your weird family business,” Swanson snapped. “What’s the point? You get me here, then you kill Marks…” He stopped in midsentence. The words of the Boatman came back, and things started to snap into place.

“This cannot be done alone.” All the while, Swanson had believed the subconscious voice was urging him to take Gibson on as the partner he needed for a complicated mission. No, it had been about the partner and the target working together in a complex ballet of death to lure him into a kill zone. “You and Marks were a team!”

“Almost. I need specialized help now and then. He was handy when I decided to reel you in and teach the CIA a lesson.” Gibson opened a tall armoire and tossed a couple of bundles of clothing on the table, then undressed while continuing to talk. “It was the damned agency, you see that? I worked for them all my life, as my family had for generations, then they betrayed me. I was the one who did the high-value targets, I was the one with the best assignments and rewards, I was the loyal soldier who could go anywhere and do anything. Anything! So what did they do to piss me off so much? You, Kyle Swanson, Marine Corps legend and top shooter for Task Force Trident, became available — out of the corps and still in your prime, plus your connections to Excalibur. That’s a helluva weapon, I gotta say. But, presto, you were number one from the day you walked in the door.” The belts and boots and jumpsuit were thrown into a pile, and he donned loose pants, a tunic, and sandals like those worn by the kid in the corner. Changing into local garb; getting ready to fade away.

“No such thing, Luke. I’m pretty much full time with Excalibur and only do occasional contract work for the agency. There is no rating system of who’s who in the sniper world. The number of kills is a media fantasy. You know that.”

Gibson pointed a finger at him, the smile gone. “And YOU know that they always turn to you first in a clutch. That fucking Marty Atkins thinks you’re a god of war. Atkins is the one who promoted you over me.”

“So you’re going to ruin Marty? That’s silly. He’s a bureaucrat, and someone just like him will take his place. It isn’t a personal judgment, Luke — just who he has available and where at the right time. I hardly know the man.”

Gibson was growing agitated as he adjusted his new clothing for comfort. “So I decided to set things straight, once and for all. Top of my list is that you have to go. I’ve already ruined your reputation. Understand? Next, Marty has to go. Then I’ll send the whole fucking CIA right down the sewer.”

Swanson cocked his head and said, “Gee, Luke, you seem upset.”

Gibson slapped him hard across the face and the chair tumbled to the floor, with Swanson bouncing along with it.