The Guilty

Chapter 4

Robie swayed with the motion of the truck in which he was riding. Dust caught at his throat. The heat of the day seared through the canvas top. He felt like an egg about to be overcooked in a skillet.

He rode with one other man. His spotter. Robie didn’t usually use a spotter, but Blue Man had insisted on one for this mission. And Robie had not felt up to challenging him.

In the military, snipers were almost always deployed in two-person teams. A spotter added security and firepower, set up and calculated shots, kept on top of elements like wind that could vary shots. When the shooter got tired, which often happened because waiting to kill was an exhausting exercise, the team would switch roles and spotter would become sniper.

But in Robie’s line of work, spotters were rarely used. The reasons were many, but mainly it was because he was not being sent into combat zones with other soldiers, where the two-person team made tactical sense. Rather, he was acting in a clandestine manner, dropped behind enemy lines with a cover story and localized assets. It was hard enough to do that with one person, much less two, particularly when you were going to parts of the world where no one else looked like you.

Robie looked over at his spotter. Randy Gathers was in his early thirties with sandy hair and a freckled complexion. He was lean and compact, with a wiry build. He was also former military, as almost all of them were. He had met Robie and gone over the assignment in excruciating detail beforehand. It was in some ways like a golfer and his caddy, except the hole-in-one had a vastly different meaning in Robie’s world than it did on the PGA tour.

Their plan was set, their cover story intact. They had arrived here on a freighter with a Turkish provenance, had left the harbor on a rickety bus and then switched to this truck while it was still dark.

Now it was light and they would be at their next location in twenty minutes.

Robie inched up the tent flap and peered out. His gaze went to the sky where it was partially clear, but a troublesome storm front was approaching.

He looked at Gathers, who had his iPad out.

“Supposed to hit tonight,” Gathers said. “Wind, rain, thunder.”

“How much wind?” asked Robie.

“Enough. Do we scrap it?”

Robie shook his head. “Not our call. At least not yet.”

The truck rumbled along and then deposited them at their next stop. They climbed into a car that was waiting for them. The trunk held the items they would need to perform the mission.

Robie took the wheel and drove along routes he’d memorized as part of the mission brief. If they were stopped, which was a possibility, they had the necessary papers to get them through most roadblocks, without the trunk’s being searched. If that didn’t work, they had one option. To kill the people who had stopped them.

Two roadblocks and no trunk searches later, they arrived at their destination.

It was now growing dark, and the wind was picking up even more.

Robie drove up to the overhead door of a large warehouse situated next to a river. Gathers jumped out, keyed in a code on a panel next to the door, and the overhead lumbered up. Robie pulled the car inside while Gathers closed the overhead door and secured it by sliding a locking arm through the roller track. They pulled out their equipment from the car’s trunk, and then Robie and Gathers scrubbed the vehicle down, removing all traces of their presence.

After that Robie looked around the two-story warehouse. The place was cavernous and, except for them, empty. And most important, they were completely hidden from view.

Rain started to ping off the warehouse’s metal roof.

Robie looked up and his gaze seemed to pierce the roof and venture to the outside. He glanced over at Gathers, who was checking their equipment, his manner subdued probably by the prospect of having to perform in such adverse conditions.

Robie glanced at his watch and then sent off a secure communication from his phone. The answer came back as he was halfway up a ladder that led to a catwalk on the warehouse’s second story.

He put his phone away and continued his climb, reaching the catwalk and skirting down the narrow metal path until he reached the front side of the facility.

Gathers followed him up with the gear, two duffel bags’ worth. They both sat down and started to assemble the tools they would need tonight to accomplish the mission.

Spotting scope, weather and wind analyzers, and, of course, the sniper rifle.

There was one other tool required. There were no windows up here, so Robie had to make one.

He used the battery-powered saw to cut two holes of different sizes in the side of the metal. He used a suction cup to grip the metal, and when the cut was complete, he pulled the metal toward him and deposited it in his duffel.

One hole was large enough for his muzzle and his scope to fit through simultaneously. The other hole was for the spotting scope to be used by Gathers.

Each picked up their respective “weapons” and inserted them through the holes. Robie did a sweep of the street while Gathers did the same with his spotting scope. This was going to be a far longer shot than Robie’s last mission, nearly twenty-two hundred meters.

A British soldier currently held the world record for the longest sniper shot. In 2009, he had killed two Afghan insurgents at a distance of nearly 2,500 meters. The shots were so far away that it had taken the .338 Lapua Magnum rounds nearly five seconds to reach and kill their targets.

Robie’s shot would be almost three hundred meters less in distance. But the conditions were far from ideal, and he would be shooting in between a pair of buildings that could create a wind tunnel that might foul the shot. That was another reason that Gathers was here as the spotter. He would feed Robie all the information that he needed. All Robie had to focus on was making the kill when he pulled the trigger.

The good thing about this shot was that the target’s security forces had never even considered the abandoned warehouse a potential threat. It was simply too far away from the event that would be taking place over a mile from here.

Well, Robie hoped to prove them wrong about that tonight.

Robie checked and rechecked his ammo, and then made sure his weapon was pristine and in perfect working order. While he did that, Gathers was soaking up every bit of data that would have an impact on the shot Robie had to make.

When that was done both men sat back. They each ate a power bar, downing it with some G2.

Gathers said, “Heard about your last mission.”

Robie folded up the plastic wrapper from the power bar and stuck it in his duffel along with the empty plastic bottle. Plastic wrappers held fingerprints and used beverage bottles contained DNA. Though his were on no database anywhere, the key principle was that no detail was too small to be overlooked.

“After the shot we have thirty seconds to get out of here,” Robie said. “They’ll be waiting for us with the RIB,” he added, referring to a rigid inflatable boat. “Ten-minute ride on the water, then we load onto a chopper. That’ll carry us to the harbor. We board the freighter, which leaves three minutes after we get there.”

Gathers nodded. He knew all this, but it never hurt to run through it multiple times.

Over the next few minutes Robie caught Gathers glancing at him and decided to just get it over with.

“You have an issue?” he asked, staring across at the other man.

Gathers shrugged. “You know why I’m here.”

“To be my spotter.”

“You work alone, Robie, everybody knows that.”

“Not always.”

“Almost always. You accidentally killed a kid. Could have happened to any of us.”

“But it didn’t happen to you.”

“I’m here because they have—”

“Doubts? Do you have doubts that I can make this shot?”

“Not if you’re the same Will Robie, no.”

“But if I’m not the same Will Robie?”

“Then I’ve been instructed to make the shot.”

Robie sat back on his haunches. This he had not been told.

Gathers obviously read this on his face and said, “I thought you should know. In fact, we can reverse roles now, if you want. No one will know the difference.”

“Have you even made a shot from over two thousand meters, Gathers?”

“Nearly so. On the practice range.”

“Nearly so. On the practice range, where conditions are ideal.” Robie pointed upward where rain was still pinging off the roof. “These conditions are not ideal. In fact, they’re horrendous for a long-range shot. Do you still think you can make the kill here and now?”

Gathers drew a long breath. “Yes, I think I can.”

“Well, let’s hope we don’t have to find out because ‘I think I can’ doesn’t cut it.”