In the Crosshairs

5

“Again?” Marty Atkins, back at CIA headquarters in Virginia, was on an encrypted call to Berlin, his voice incredulous. “You were attacked again by the same guy? In another country? Impossible!”

“Not impossible, Marty. I just picked a shard of metal out of my coat. It was about as hard and real as I care to get.”

Luke Gibson was also near the speakerphone. “Positive identification, sir. I saw him clearly. It was Nicky Marks who threw the grenade.”

There was a pause while everyone digested that information. “I also think it was a bullshit piece of playacting, sir,” said Gibson. “If Nicky had really wanted to kill us tonight, we would be dead meat. Instead, he flips a grenade from a passing car — almost like a kid with a firecracker.”

“Why?” Atkins remained confused.

Swanson said, “To get our attention? To send a message? Who knows? The point is, Marty, that, once again, all three corners of this incident have CIA connections, just like in Mexico.”

“With you as the common link,” the director of intelligence said.

“He knew exactly where we were. That means there’s a leak in the information stovepipe, boss.” Gibson rubbed his palms, but showed no other sign of concern.

The director of intelligence knew that a bad situation had just gotten worse. “I’ll tighten the information flow on this end and try to deal directly with the two of you from now on,” he said. “This new incident may be a break we can use. Right now, you’re all in the same city. Kyle, I want you and Luke to work together until we nail this guy and find out what he’s up to. Swanson is the lead.”

Swanson tensed. He had just been saddled with a partner not of his choosing. “Yes, sir.”

“Gibson, are you on board with that?”

“Yes, sir. We’ll find him. We have to work with the Germans, though.”

Atkins was somber about that idea. The incident had happened on German soil, so there was no way to remain totally independent. And Gibson was right: they would need help. “Very well, I’ll contact the GSG Nine and you work with them. Keep it away from the locals.”

Over the years, Swanson had forged a good relationship with the élite counterterrorism and special-operations unit known as the Grenzschutzgruppe 9 der Bundespolizei, which was always shortened to GSG 9. It was excellent, but the promised stoppage of information at the Washington end had just as quickly been opened on the other, and the short hairs began to tickle his neck. How could they hope to keep the incident away from the police when GSG 9 was technically a police unit and not a military team?

“Marty, I don’t like the way this is going,” he said. “This guy has tried to kill me twice in a week and I’m getting pretty tired of him, but we’re moving too fast. I want to work alone; no cops, no partner — particularly someone like Gibson here, whom I just met — and with much less bureaucracy. It will be impossible to close the information channels, but the fewer people involved the better.”

Gibson looked across the table. “I saved your life tonight.”

“I appreciate that, and no offense intended, Luke, but it changes nothing. We are not a team.”

Atkins stopped them. “With no backup, you’ll be a sitting duck for Nicky Marks. It’s an order, Kyle. You and Luke work it out. And you have to be debriefed by the GSG Nine people. It’s not exactly a secret that somebody threw a grenade in the middle of Berlin tonight. They’ll want answers.”

Swanson scratched an ear. “What’s happening is that we’re playing by rules being set by Nicky Marks. He tried to kill me twice and failed, because I was sloppy. If we throw a full deck of operators at him, he’ll just run away. If we don’t, then he’ll be emboldened to try again, whatever his reason. Next time, he loses. If you want me to be the lead on this, let me lead.”

“What do you think, Luke?”

“If Swanson wants to take that chance, fine by me. He’s hung up on the whole ‘partner’ thing, but that’s okay. I can be his backup and his single contact with the agency. He doesn’t want a high profile, so I can deal with the cops and the stuff he might need. After all, I’m the one who knows Marks best.”

“Done, then. You guys make it work. Let’s find out what’s making Nicky Marks tick.”

The sniper could smell the green of the subtropical jungle of the Yucatán Peninsula. The playground of Cancún was on the toe of the north-facing boot, but outside the tourist haunts the ancient forests still ruled. An underlying stench of rotting vegetation was the predominant odor, and everything was so green the color was almost tangible. It was a palette that spread from bright harlequin to somber avocado, accented by the shadows of the sunlight that fell through the leaves in graceful lines and the long vines that crept around the jungle floor. The sniper’s clothing matched the tangled surroundings. A handmade Ghillie suit stuffed with twigs and leaves and vegetation belied any telltale sign that a human being was underneath it all. Even the skin of the rifle and the optics tube were camouflaged.

Perched among the curling roots of old trees, the shooter felt invisible to the target, Ramiro Delgado, who hadn’t even glanced toward the brush line in the past hour. He was too busy selling drugs and making money. The Mexican cops wouldn’t arrest an American for carrying or using a small amount of almost any drug, but a dealer wouldn’t be as lucky. A vehicle would come along the busy main road out of Cancún and turn left at the crossroad that led south toward El Naranjal, making two more turns onto roads even less traveled until it found Delgado’s mighty GMC Sierra pickup parked in a clearing.

The informant had said that young Ramiro was rich for his age because he operated an all-service drug emporium on wheels, complete with a sophisticated communications suite. He alerted his clientele of the day’s marketing location by Wi-Fi message. The informant was to be one of the day’s customers.

The drugs that Ramiro Delgado carried in the spacious truck bed would be dealt out on a cash basis, cut and resold on the streets of Cancún and Cozumel and up and down the Yucatán coast. Business had been brisk. The sniper waited, not wanting to attract attention by having to contend with collateral damage. Not that killing two dealers instead of one mattered. It’s just that it was an unnecessary complication.

The slender Delgado spoke with the latest arrival at his truck, as he carefully counted through the wad of U.S. bills, then stuffed it in his pocket and walked to the back of the truck to pull out two cardboard boxes. He sliced one open with a knife and handed a small plastic bag — a bolsita—of cocaine to the buyer, who also took out a knife and opened the baggie.

The customer liked what he tasted and stuffed the tiny bag into a shirt pocket, gave his supplier a fist bump for luck, took both boxes, and drove away. Ramiro had cut the coke earlier, and the contents would be diluted even further in a final bit of processing before being peddled at a price of about half a gram for ten U.S. dollars. By then, the product had been reduced to a point that bore little resemblance to the original pure syrup but still packed a powerful kick.

It made no difference to the sniper. Heroin, syringes, cocaine were all part of the drug food chain that would slake the thirsts of partying tourists and Mexicans alike, and maybe even reach up into Texas and farther north, with the price escalating at every step. What was ridiculously cheap for an American tourist in Mexico would be borderline expensive in Connecticut.

The sniper watched him go, then returned the scope to young Mr. Delgado. How old? About twenty-one? Not even shaving yet. Fuck him.

The wind was quiet as the sniper made the final adjustments on the Leupold Mark 4 scope, the distance exactly lasered, and it was time to shoot. Delgado made a note on a little pad, put the money in a safe beneath the front seat, then started punching information into his computer to summon his next customer. He sat very still in the front seat, concentrating on his work.

The sniper inhaled a soft breath, keeping things calm, let it escape, and barely felt the tightness of the trigger as it began to depress, ever so slowly, until it tripped and the M110 rifle fired, its bark reduced thirty percent by the stainless-steel suppressor on the end of the barrel. Even so, creatures were surprised and began their flights and chatter even as the 7.62×51-mm. round took Delgado in the left side, pulping the heart and spinning around the rib cage when it crunched bone. The body spilled across the seat like Jell-O poured from a mold.

Elizabeth Ledford Castillo took an easy aim and shot a second time, the bullet going into the drug dealer’s butt and up the torso. One shot, one kill — and one more just for the hell of it. No arrest, no trial, no Judge Judy to arbitrate — no mercy for the little worm.

“Enough, señora. We must leave now,” said the former Mexican marine who had been her spotter for the job.

She wanted to rush the other way, across the clearing and to the body, where she could dip her fingers in the blood of Delgado and scrawl THIS IS FOR MICKEY on the truck. Instead, she nodded and began to slide backward out of the hide. “Yes.”

While the marine stood a cautious overwatch nearby, Coastie peeled out of the Ghillie rig and changed into a modest faded blue top, old jeans and boots, then pulled her blond hair back into a ponytail. She washed her face and hands and came back to the real world. It would not do for the grieving Señora Castillo to be seen as some sort of alien creature. She felt good, even a bit bouncy, as she cranked up the four-wheel-drive vehicle and headed off. Not bad for the first time out, she thought. A bit ragged, but not bad at all. The marine stayed behind to clean up the site.

The demise of Mahfouz al-Rashidi, warlord of the Wakham Corridor, not only left a sizable hole in the ground but also threatened to disrupt the tattered nation’s largest industry: opium. Under normal circumstances, the eldest son would have stepped into the breach and kept the chain intact. With all four of the old man’s heirs also killed in the attack, things in the Wakham Corridor were in disarray.

The entire area was not the common desert color of brown. At this time of year, it was a shiny bright poppy pink. The fragile ecosystem and the semi-arid climate had created a landscape that was almost perfect for the cultivation of the drug, and far enough away from the war zones that farmers could till their crops in relative safety. The righteous al-Rashidi had turned a blind eye to the trade, for the growers had paid tribute to the warlord who kept them safe. He, in turn, shared the tax upwards with the current reigning power in the region, whether that was the United States, the Taliban, ISIS, the Chinese, the Pakistanis, or the government in faraway Kabul. Over the years, the policy had been mutually beneficial, as the opium trade soared in importance and outstripped the next most successful crops by a three-to-one ratio. Millions of dollars were made by the time the product reached the addicts on foreign streets. Farmers could not only survive; they could get rich.

Now it was springtime, the cold of winter warming to a gorgeous temperature, and as the snow melted in the mountains to spill into the rivers and feed the poppies, al-Rashidi was no longer at the rudder to steady his peculiar ship. Nature did not abhor a vacuum any more than did the flourishing opiate economy of Afghanistan, which furnished ninety percent of the entire world supply.

Qari Abdul Razaq shook his head in worry as he read the reports of a small unit of Taliban fighters that had investigated the attack in the Wakham. There was no doubt that the entire circle of adult males in the family had been wiped out, and the villagers of Girdiwal were already disorganized. Some farmers eyed the situation as an opportunity to settle old scores or grab new land for cultivation, or both. Opium money propped up the Taliban, and couldn’t be ignored.

“We have to make a new alliance,” Razaq said as he spread the two-page document on his desk. He wore clean robes, but his beard was long and ragged, in accordance with Taliban rules that forbade shaving. Razak was hundreds of miles away from the Wakham Corridor, seated in his neat and spacious office in Doha, Qatar, the tiny Gulf State oil boomtown that provided the Taliban with a diplomatic window to the world. Razaq was much closer to the Al Udeid Air Base than he was to the battlefields of his home country, where the U.S. military was still at war with the Taliban, and the ISIS usurpers. The American troops were run by the U.S. Central Command headquartered out at the Al Udeid base, not far from his front door. Qari Abdul Razaq had gone full circle. He had been part of the mujahideen delegation that visited President Ronald Reagan at the White House in 1983 to show solidarity against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan. Then in 1989, when the Russians left, he chose to work in the Taliban rebellion, which did stupid things in the name of religious law. The 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers was carried out by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, although the Taliban had granted them safe haven in the Afghan wilds. So the Americans came charging in, only to quickly spin away to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, then allow ISIS to grow in his place. In Afghanistan today, the U.S. and the Taliban were bitter enemies; in Doha, they were neighbors. It was an international house of mirrors.

“I agree,” responded the civilian-clothed army colonel who represented the Pakistani intelligence service. “And the sooner the better.”

They were speaking English for the convenience of the third man in the meeting, who asked, “And if we put a lid on it nothing changes?”

“Exactly,” answered Qari Abdul Razaq. “We will figure out the loyalties later, but right now we need to put a successor in there so as not to lose the whole crop. We will support him for a year and see how it goes.”

“Avoid a flash point,” said the colonel. His English had a clipped flavor to it, like that of many Pakistani military officers, a unique accent left over from the days of the British Raj and training at Sandhurst.

“Do you have somebody in mind, Qari?” the third man asked.

“Yes. He is a middle-aged mullah of the same village, and his eldest son is a rather shy fellow who would much prefer the safety of the Wakham Corridor with his family than continuing to fight a war in which he is certain to be killed. With our combined backing, they can pick up right where al-Rashidi left off.”

“That should settle things for a while. Let the poppies grow in peace for another season,” said the Pakistani.

“Yeah. All right.” The third man rose and straightened his blue suit. “Do it, and I’ll inform the Prince.”

The Taliban minister threw a verbal jab along with a polite smile. “We would not have this problem at all if your people had not killed al-Rashidi and his boys in the first place.”

“Fat chance. We’re not going to allow a new Osama bin Laden to rise. They shouldn’t have been mucking about with ideas of taking out the Houston oil complex and Hollywood with biochemical weapons.”

“Yes. We had our eyes on him from the start,” said the Taliban negotiator. “We also were not going to allow him or the boys to actually carry out a strike, but had to let them play at a doomsday catastrophe to keep them happy. After all, who gave you the human intelligence on the plan?”

“You did, my friend, indeed you did. In your debt on that.” He started toward the door. “And one last thing: I was never at this meeting.”

“Of course not,” Qari told his American friend from the Central Intelligence Agency. “Please give my humble regards to the Prince.”