Sniper Elite: One-Way Trip

CHAPTER 50

Gil was up and moving the second the last gunman was down, sprinting the seventy-five yards to where they lay. One of them was still breathing, choking blood with an exit wound the size of a coconut in the right side of his back. Gil knifed him. Ditching the Dragunov for good, he gathered up all six of the RPGs the gunners had been carrying and trotted back toward the village with them. He didn’t have an immediate use for six rockets, but he didn’t want them lying around for the enemy to pick up and fire at him on his way out of Dodge. His intended EZ was three full clicks to the north, and he didn’t need any extra hurdles to jump along the way.

He stashed the RPGs behind the rusted bed of a pickup someone had leaned against the back wall of a lone outbuilding, then made his way toward the rear of Kohistani’s house. A roving sentry was coming down the hill, crossing through a beam of light that shined from the back window of a house farther up the lane. The man held up his hand to wave. Gil waved back and stopped, waiting for him to approach, feeling almost as though he could walk among these people with impunity now. The sentry drew within ten feet, and Gil shot him through the eye with the .45. He dragged the body into a gap between Kohistani’s house and the one next door, then slipped beneath an awning to peek in through Kohistani’s window. A candle burned on a table beside a bed where the cleric lay sleeping, an open Koran on his chest.

Gil slipped in through the back door and crept around the corner into Kohistani’s room, taking a seat on the chair beside the bed. He pressed his finger into the candle to snuff out the flame and sat looking at Sandra’s tormentor in infrared. He set the Koran aside on a table and placed a gentle hand on the cleric’s shoulder.

Kohistani came instantly awake, sitting up in the dark.

“What’s wrong?” he asked in Pashto. Without night vision, Gil would have appeared very much like the Grim Reaper sitting there beside him in the heavy mountain cloak. He reached for the matches to relight the candle. “You’re supposed to knock before you come in here.”

Gil didn’t understand a word. He realized the cleric spoke decent English, but he couldn’t risk him calling for help, and there wasn’t much to be said anyhow. He produced a garrote from a pouch on his harness and gripped the wooden toggles in his fists. A garrote wasn’t exactly a combat weapon, but it was a weapon of stealth. A weapon of assassination. And Gil believed that Kohistani had earned himself the right to be assassinated.

Kohistani struck the match, and with catlike speed, Gil looped the strand of piano wire around his throat, giving it a stiff jerk to choke off all air and blood flow to the brain instantly. Kohistani grabbed for the wire, and the match went out. He clawed desperately but it was no use. The wire was slicing through his flesh like a cheese cutter. Gil knelt with a knee on the edge of the bed, applying steady pressure but stopping shy of killing him.

As the cleric slowly died in agonizing, strangled silence, Gil whispered into his ear: “Sandra’s husband sent me here to kill you. I want you to know that before you die.”

In the violent throes of death, Kohistani thrashed wildly about, his legs kicking with fury beneath the heavy wool blankets. Gil gave the toggles a vicious jerk in opposite directions, and the piano wire sliced clean through to the spine. The cleric’s bowels let go, and the room filled with the acrid stench of raw shit.

Gil let go and Kohistani flopped over, falling half out of the bed with blood gushing from his severed neck. This was the most intimate kill of his career, and even as he was slipping from the house like a wraith in the night, he was aware that something within him had just shifted. His heart filled with a violent hatred unlike any he had ever known, and he suddenly found himself wanting to destroy the entire village and everyone in it. He thought of the RPGs and went to retrieve them.

He pulled the bed of the truck away from the wall and began to remove the individual rockets from their launchers, checking them over to make sure they were serviceable. He would only need one launcher. The rockets he could carry over his shoulder in a sling he would fashion from the cloak. He would leave this place a smoking effigy of the village it once had been. No one could stop him when he was on the attack — he knew that now, felt it in his veins. These backward jackasses weren’t soldiers. They were clumsy imposters stumbling their way through a modern war, the full scope of which they couldn’t even begin to conceive. How could they possibly touch him if he decided they were going to die? He was death from within, walking among them without so much as an if you please, come to kill them in midstride as punishment for their sins against humanity.

Was this what war really was? Was this sudden and violent urge to kill indiscriminately the same as what his father had experienced all those years ago in Vietnam, north of the DMZ, where life had blurred into one long and bloody nightmare of death and destruction? Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out! Was this the frame of mind that had enabled an otherwise kind and gentle man to become a mindless butcher of women and children?

If so, Gil understood it now, understood it on a level more visceral than he had ever thought possible, and it was the most powerful feeling he had ever known—bloodlust! He shrugged out of the cloak and was about to use the Ka-Bar to cut it up the back when he thought of Marie, his wife. Suddenly, there she was before him, lying in their bed sleeping, the faint smile still on her face after making love. His eyes flooded with tears and his mind began to clear. The hatred dissipated, leaving the faint residue of shame in its place as the mission slid back into focus.

“Jesus,” he muttered to himself, shoving the rockets back behind the truck bed and getting to his feet. There was plenty of killing yet to be done before this mission concluded.