Sniper Elite: One-Way Trip

CHAPTER 3

Gil and Marie were spreading fresh hay in the stable when his mother-in-law called him on his cellular to tell him he had a call on the house phone.

“Be right back,” he said to his wife, slipping the phone back into his pocket.

Marie didn’t even look at him. She cut the twine on another bale of hay and broke it apart with her foot.

“It’s probably nothin’, babe.”

She stopped and stared at him. “It’s never nothin’ with the Navy. It’s only been a month, and you’re supposed to get two. You’re telling me their ships won’t float without Gil Shannon aboard?”

He grinned, knowing she knew damn well he was no deckhand. “Well, they float well enough… but the crews won’t go out of sight of land unless I’m aboard.”

She shook her head and went back to work, his sarcastic sense of humor no longer holding the appeal for her that it once did.

Gil found the cordless on the kitchen table and took it out onto the back porch. “This is Shannon.”

“Gil, its Hal. Something’s happened, and I thought it important enough to call. Can you call me back on your sat phone?” Master Chief Halligan Steelyard was a fellow member of DEVGRU (United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, aka SEAL Team Six) and one of Gil’s closest friends. He’d been in the Navy since Chester Nimitz was a baby, and he was something of his own institution among the SEALs.

“Give me one minute.” Gil hung up the phone and then went to the bedroom where he kept a secure satellite phone and called Steelyard back. “So what’s up?”

“Sorry to bother you at home with this,” Steelyard said. “Sean Bordeaux and five of his men bought it yesterday in an ambush here in Nangarhar Province, south of Jalalabad.”

Gil had worked with Bordeaux a number of times in the past and considered him a friend, but this loss wasn’t the kind of news that rated a satellite call from a guy like Steelyard from halfway around the world. “What else, Chief?”

“A Night Stalker pilot was taken prisoner in the same ambush,” Steelyard went on. “Taliban caught the bird on the ground during a Ranger training op, shot everybody up, killed the copilot, and stripped the bodies. It’s a problem because the pilot they took is a woman, pretty thing, twenty-nine years old… the only Night Stalker female. It’s not going to play well in the media, especially if she shows up bleeding on Al Jazeera. I thought you’d like a heads up because I expect it’s only a matter of time before you get the call from SOG.”

SOG was the CIA’s Special Operations Group, a more evolved version of the once infamous and now extinct MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — Studies and Observations Group) that Gil’s father had once been a part of. Though the CIA still recruited through SOG from all branches of the US military — the same as they had during Vietnam — the modern CIA was no longer permitted its own “in-house” specialists. So operators like Gil Shannon were often pulled from their assigned Special Mission Units (SMUs) for the purpose of carrying out one-man operations that were often so highly classified that no one else in the Special Forces community ever knew a thing about them… at least not officially.

Gil’s current, primary unit assignment was to DEVGRU the same as that of Chief Steelyard. Being so highly classified that the US government preferred not to admit its existence, DEVGRU was one of only four SMUs within the United States military. The other three SMUs were: Delta Force of the US Army, the 24th Special Tactics Squadron of the US Air Force, and the Intelligence Support Activity — also under the auspices of the US Army.

Gil patted his jacket pocket for his tobacco. “Are we talking about Warrant Officer Sandra Brux, Chief?”

“Yeah. Know her?”

“She’s flown top-cover for us a couple of times,” Gil said. “They’re gonna tear her up, Chief. How’d this happen?”

“It’s a CID investigation right now,” Steelyard said. CID was the Army Criminal Investigation Command — originally known as the Criminal Investigations Division first established under General Pershing during the First World War. For the purposes of continuity, the agency was still referred to as the CID. “But I had a talk with our guy in NCIS who’s connected.” NCIS was the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. “He says CID just took some Pakistani intel guy into custody who’s been selling information to the other side. I’m thinking he may have tipped off the enemy about the Army’s plan to snatch an Al Qaeda cleric who’s been making them nervous. Listen, I’ll get back to you in a few days. Sound good?”

“Sounds good, Chief, yeah. Thanks for the heads up.”

“You bet.”

Gil went back downstairs to find his mother-in-law in the kitchen making sandwiches. “Thanks for calling me in, Mom.”

His mother-in-law smiled. “Are you leaving us again?” Her name was Janet, and she was sixty-five years old, short with long gray hair she wore in the braid of a horsewoman, like her daughter.

“No,” he said. “That was just an update to keep me in the loop.”

“Think Marie will buy that?” Janet asked.

He laughed. “There’s not much space between you two, is there?”

She shook her head, offering him a plated roast beef sandwich with potato chips. “Like a beer with that?”

“Yes, I would,” he said, wishing in earnest that he did not personally know Sandra Brux. The two of them had shared some laughs one night half a year earlier, swapping stories about the challenges of holding a marriage together.

Later that night, after his mother-in-law had washed the dinner dishes and gone to bed, Gil sat alone in the rocking chair in front of the fireplace rolling a cigarette.

Marie came to sit on the hearth in front of him, a glass of white wine in her hand. “I’ve seen you like this before,” she said quietly. “You lost a friend today, didn’t you?”

He looked up from the cigarette. “It’s worse, actually.”

“How so?”

“The Taliban captured one of our helicopter pilots yesterday.” He licked the edge of the cigarette paper and smoothed it into place to make it look almost store-bought. “A Night Stalker. For the enemy that’s a hell of a trophy. Almost as good as capturing a SEAL or a Green Beret would be.”

“And you know him, I assume?”

“It’s a her,” he said quietly, poking the smoke between his lips and lighting it with a match. “She’s twenty-nine. Pretty. It’s gonna play like hell once the media gets hold of it.”

Marie nodded, taking a sip of wine. “Another Jessie Lynch,” she said sadly. “So when are you leaving?”

“They didn’t call me for that.”

“That’s not what I asked you,” she said.

He sat holding his temples with the same hand the cigarette was in. “They don’t even know where she is yet, baby.”

Marie set the wineglass aside with a sigh and rubbed her knees. “Gil, I’m sorry, but I don’t have the patience for these little go-rounds no more. Are ya leavin’ or not?”

He looked at her, his voice not much more than a whisper. “It’s what I do, baby. I can’t explain it, but I feel like the only other thing I was ever meant to do was love you. And how’s a man’s supposed to make peace with that?”

Her eyes filled with tears, and she wiped them away. “What about my peace?”

He looked down, unable to meet her gaze. She was the only person he had ever feared intellectually. “That’s a fair question,” he said. “If you ask me to wait for the call, I will. It might easily be another month… probably will be.”

“Look at me,” she said. “You’re at the top of your game, aren’t you?”

He considered that for a moment. “Yes, ma’am. I believe I am.”

She lifted the glass, finished the wine, then reached for his cigarette, drawing deeply from it and giving it back. She exhaled and turned to stare into the flames of the fire. “That girl put herself on the line for this country, and now she’s living a nightmare. I reckon she deserves the best this country’s got in return.” She turned to look at him. “But this time you will make me that promise. This time you will promise to come home alive. Otherwise, you do not have my blessing.”

He puckered his lips to suppress his smile, knowing that she had him over the barrel. “I promise.”

“You promise what?” she said, arching her brow.

“I promise to come home alive.”

“And you will keep that promise,” she said, pointing her finger. “Otherwise, when I eventually arrive in heaven, I will not speak to you. I will not speak to you for at least a thousand years, Gil Shannon. Do you understand me?”

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “That long?”

“Do you understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am, I do… and I believe you mean it.”

She stood up from the hearth, straightening the tails of her denim shirt. “You’d better. Now, I am going upstairs to have my bath. Will you still be awake when I’m finished?”

He looked up at her and smiled. “That depends. Do I get a kiss before you go up? A little something to prime the pump?”

She leaned over to kiss him affectionately on the mouth, then turned and left the room.