Sniper Elite: One-Way Trip

CHAPTER 48

Inside the stable, Gil felt comforted by the familiar smell of horses and manure. He found the sorrel-colored mount he was looking for near the back, a few hands higher than the other animals and with stronger flanks. He needed the strongest horse he could get for what he had in mind, and after watching this particular horse carry its rider through the grueling paces of an entire buzkashi match during the day, he believed it had more than enough endurance. The trouble would be getting the animal to Sandra undetected. He sure as hell couldn’t bring Sandra to the horse, carrying her over his shoulder, fighting a running gun battle all the way.

He slipped a coarse wool blanket over the animal’s back and pulled one of the buzkashi saddles from a pile in the corner. It had metal stirrups, and both pommel and cantle were higher than those of a Western cowboy saddle, creating a deeper seat designed to help keep a buzkashi rider from falling off.

“It’s not exactly a Hamley Formfitter,” he muttered to himself, cinching up the single girth strap, “but it’ll have to do.”

The door opened at the other end, and Gil instantly faded into the corner, drawing the Ka-Bar from the sheath strapped to his thigh. He watched the man through infrared, noting the AK-47 barrel slung up over his left shoulder. The horses began to fidget in their stalls, tamping at the floor and snorting. Gil realized they were smelling his sudden adrenaline dump.

“Achmed?” said the interloper. “Achmed!”

Gil guessed that Achmed must be the dead guy outside in the donkey cart, so he grunted a response and began coughing as though he were trying to hack something up from deep in the back of his throat.

The interloper came straight toward him in the darkness, unable to see Gil except for the faint silhouette of the mountain cloak. “Achmed,” he said, followed by a bunch of harsh-sounding gibberish that Gil didn’t understand.

When the unlucky fellow came within arm’s reach, Gil grabbed him by the shoulder of his coat and rammed the Ka-Bar up through the bottom of his jaw to penetrate so deeply into the brain that the tip of the blade scraped against the top of the skull. The Pashtun was dead on his feet, though his body hadn’t quite gotten the message, twitching spasmodically as Gil lowered him to the dung-covered dirt floor. He cleaned the knife on his victim’s jacket and jammed it back into the sheath.

He got up and stood on the body to peer out the gap between the roof and the top of the mud wall. Seeing the strobe flashing in his infrared viewfinder farther up the hill, beyond another cluster of buildings, he estimated the distance to Sandra’s quarters at ninety yards. This was too far to walk the horse without better knowledge of the layout. Besides, he wanted to make a careful reconnoiter of Sandra’s quarters before moving in to take it over. At least, he had to consider the possibility that Forogh had been caught and forced into helping the enemy to set up a trap.

The God of War is a fickle son of a bitch, his father had always been fond of saying. Don’t ever trust his ass.

Gil folded the body into a corner and piled it over with saddles before slipping back outside. He backtracked his route for a short distance south, then turned west for the river. Having memorized the sentries’ sectors during his long vigil from on high, he felt confident that he’d cleared the southwestern corner of the village. There were no guarantees, of course, but his instincts told him that he was safe for the moment. After moving north along the river for fifty yards, he turned east again toward the back side of the building where he had dumped the sentry into the donkey cart. As the infrared strobe continued to illuminate the night sky with its intermittent flashes, Gil found it eerie to flip up the infrared monocular and see only darkness over the rooftop where he knew there was light. He glanced farther up at the stars, wondering if the strobe had been picked up by an Air Force UAV yet, guessing that somebody somewhere was probably having themselves a shit hemorrhage by now. He also wondered idly whether the MPs had been sent to his quarters to look for him.

He stood on a rain barrel and crawled onto the roof of the building, setting the .45 beside him. If any innocent Tajiks came snooping around this close to Sandra’s quarters, he’d have to shoot them dead without a thought. From this height, he could just see the windows and doorways to Sandra’s cluster of buildings over the rooftops between there and where he was. He brought up the sniper rifle and sighted on the open doorway next to Sandra’s. Four men with blankets over their shoulders sat at a table playing teka—an Afghan card game — by candlelight. Either they had only recently lit the candle, or the light of the flame had been too dim for his optics to detect from high on the slope.

The door to Sandra’s place suddenly swung open, and Ramesh stepped out. Gil immediately recognized him as the brute who had cut off her finger. In the moments before the door closed again, Gil saw her, and a sense of urgency swept through his veins. She was lying on the bed, doubled up beneath heavy blankets with a man and a woman sitting beside her in the warm glow of an oil lamp. They seemed to be caring for her.

Gil held Ramesh in his sights as he walked eastward toward the decoy building. Forty yards up the slope, he stopped and knocked at a door on the north side of the lane. The door opened and Aasif Kohistani stepped out, pulling his winter coat closed as he led Ramesh at a brisk pace back toward Sandra’s quarters.

Kohistani and Ramesh went into the building. They were inside for perhaps five minutes before coming back out. Ramesh turned west and stepped inside where the sentries were playing cards. Kohistani went east back to his house. As Gil shimmied carefully back from the edge of the roof, he wondered if the Hezbi cleric could feel the shadow of death moving with him up the lane.

The God of War is a fickle son of a bitch, Mr. Kohistani.