Dawn was coming, and, with luck, so were the Americans. After planning and prayers, luck helped. At first light, Juba slowly removed the loose stones that would create a ragged window facing the crossroads, one by one, inch by inch, until the hole was about two feet wide and two feet high, just behind some scraggly underbrush outside. When a sniper fires, it is an automatic response for the people in his target zone to look up in order to sweep the rooftops, where the attacker may have the height advantage. Juba had chosen a place with a two-story building nearby. That was where he expected them to concentrate during the critical moments that he was firing three shots, no more, following standard doctrine that shooting more than three times from the same place allowed the enemy to pinpoint your position. And kill you. Three and out.
The previous day, during his scouting ride, he had noticed that the children in the neighborhood were eating candy from America, scribbling in notebooks with ballpoint pens, and playing with silly plastic toys. Gifts from U.S. soldiers. A relationship was being built. Good.
There was a distant grinding rumble, and as he expected, his juvenile early warning system began to shriek as a dozen kids took off running toward the intersection. A pair of bulky M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles surged down the road, raising big roostertails of dust behind them, where three up-armored Humvees trailed. Juba made a mental note that the 25 mm Bushmaster chain guns on the Bradleys were his biggest threat. Don’t give them a chance to engage.
The kids were running alongside the vehicles, dodging the tracks and the wheels with ease and calling up to the soldiers in broken English. Sure enough, little packages of gaily wrapped candy showered down on them. The convoy pulled into the crossroads and into a line along one axis. The policeman steered traffic around them. Everyone was relaxed, and Juba focused his rifle on the second Bradley, which had a number of aerials sticking up from it, clearly the command track. The turrets were open, but the gunners were at ease, bantering with the kids. Then the soldiers got out, their rifles hanging loosely, some squatting down to the children’s level. They came here often to rendezvous with other convoys before heading out on individual missions. Only two troopers took sentry positions, one at each end of the convoy. Iraqi adults stayed away, clustering in doorways or just going about their business.
Luck. Juba let his mind wash itself clean of outside noise. The command track was a tempting and militarily significant target, the place where the officers lurked. Kill the officers, tilt the battlefield. No. That was not what he wanted today. Just take the easy ones and go before they knew what hit them. Give them something to remember, to enrage them, to drive them crazy with rage. He brought the Steyr rifle to him like a lover and remembered his schoolboy Shakespeare, a line from Julius Caesar, “This foul deed shall smell above the earth.”
The scope was on a small boy, about seven years old, with dark hair and a smiling face, all white teeth and dirt, who stood beside a kneeling American soldier, talking to him. The rifle stilled its movement. The boy turned enough for a back shot, and Juba pressed the trigger with four pounds of pressure. The snap of the gunshot was loud inside the hide but was barely heard on the outside, and the big bullet smashed hard into the child, knocking him in a bloody heap onto the American soldier, who grabbed the boy and fell atop him to shield him from further harm. He was already dead. One!
The moment of frozen realization that danger was upon them occurred when Juba squeezed the trigger the second time and brought down an American who had been smoking a cigarette, the bullet ramming through his armored vest and into his vital organs. The man staggered, a look of disbelief on his face, and fell. Two!
Now came the chaos of children screaming, soldiers yelling and getting their weapons up, and the ugly Bushmaster cannon looking for somebody to shoot. Sniper! Where?
Now he wanted a good shot, a difficult shot, to put his seal on this attack, and he found it with the soldier who had made the mistake of grabbing a telephone handset from a radioman. The officer, calling in for help with this ambush. He was on his belly beside one of the Bradleys, peering out around the track, searching for the threat, just enough for Juba to see his eyes beneath his helmet. Easy, smooth trigger squeeze and the Steyr snapped again. Three!
The firing began in his general direction, but there was no target. The bullets were just chewing dirt and rearranging rocks. The soldiers and the Bradleys would be on the move in seconds. Juba wrapped his rifle beneath his loose robe, tore away the old awning, and walked into the morning sun, down the alley and around the corner. No one was on the streets because of the sudden eruption of gunfire. He got into his car and drove away.
Fifteen minutes later, he was snuggled beneath some bushes that lined the top of a hard mud fence some four feet high at the edge of an irrigation ditch. He peered over the berm and saw the crossroads, which had become a beehive of activity as the Americans swept into the neighborhood he had just left. It was hard for them to keep their professionalism, for the murder of a child does something to the American psyche. Snipers have to know about emotions. They were after the shooter who killed the kid, and he was somewhere in that neighborhood. Even their new defense perimeter was oriented toward the original hide, the place of the perceived threat, and not toward his new location behind them.
He had a plain view of the medical personnel working frantically with the three victims, who were laid side by side, trying somehow to keep them alive long enough to get them back to the aid station at COB Baharia. Juba was not depending on luck now but on expected responses. Suppress the threat and evac the wounded. The troops were in the village, and no more shots had been fired, so a medevac chopper was coming in.
He heard it before he saw it. Then the helicopter zoomed in low toward the battle site, flared to a stop in the air, and settled to the ground, the rotor wash throwing up a blizzard of dirt. Red crosses were painted in large white squares on the green chopper. Mercy flight. Juba aimed.
Two soldiers picked up a stretcher that carried one of his earlier victims. A medic leaped from the helicopter to give them a hand, and Juba shot him in the stomach to tear out the liver and a kidney. One!
The Bushmaster gunner atop one of the Bradleys was facing toward the village, exposing his back. Juba put the scope on him and fired a bullet that hit center mass. The soldier threw his hands up on impact and fell straight down into the vehicle. Two!
The medevac pilot had realized they were under attack and started winding up his bird for an emergency takeoff, but Juba had a clear view through the side window. Tight head shot. The pilot turned his head, and Juba, using the dark sunglasses as his aiming point, once again gently squeezed the trigger. The bullet crashed through the pilot’s helmet and destroyed his head. Immediately, the helicopter began to power down while the stunned copilot took command. Three!
Juba ducked away behind the wall, carried his rifle back to the car, and quickly vanished into the streets again. I am here, Shake. Come and get me!
27
CAPTAIN NEWMAN HAD THE Trident team in a tight security perimeter while Kyle Swanson and Sybelle Summers probed through the sniper hide behind the mud wall like crime scene specialists on a TV show. As soon as the attack was reported to the base, orders rocketed back to hold in place, and an uneasy silence engulfed everything up to a mile away on every side. Extra troops were dispatched to bolster the available firepower, and the Trident team hustled in aboard a helicopter.