“Yes, sir. Agreed. We will keep each other informed.”
Sybelle and Rick Newman flanked Swanson as they left the headquarters building and walked down the neatly kept road. “Can we do this in only another two days?” Rick asked.
Kyle Swanson looked up at the sky and adjusted his cap against the hot afternoon sun. “I don’t know. I had to tell him something to give him some hope, and he is right that his task force cannot sit on the sideline forever. We can try. See what happens.”
HARGATT
The commander of the insurgents smelled opportunity. A few minor attacks during the day had drawn some American blood, but they had not responded in force as usual. The presence of Juba made a difference.
Juba, however, just wanted to kill the Swanson Marine, while the commander had a much wider agenda. The big force stationed at the camp three kilometers southeast of Tikrit had enforced the uneasy peace, allowing the time and space needed for the political process to move forward. The residents of the villages and towns in the entire area were feeling safe beneath the umbrella of tanks and helicopters and soldiers. They were imagining what peace might be like, and for the commander, that was the most dangerous thing of all.
“Are those houses ready?” he asked the man in charge of helping plan attacks.
“Almost. The people have been removed, and we have begun the storage.”
“How long?”
“Transporting and placing the gasoline, the explosive plastics, the propane tanks, and artillery shells require caution and skill. We should be finished in a few hours,” said the aide.
“Let me know as soon as you are done. We don’t have much time.” This would be a fine operation and should not interfere at all with Juba’s own personal vendetta. The commander had a war to fight, and he would ask a favor of Juba tonight.
It was a fine day outside, the temperature holding around one hundred degrees, but dropping as evening approached. He wondered where Juba was.
Juba had carefully cleaned the Styer Mannlicher rifle during the long afternoon hours, caught a power nap during the hottest part of the day, and then went back on the prowl. It was cooling off, and he was ready to work again, far across town from where he had been that morning.
Hargatt was not a large city, but big enough to draw in potential customers from the surrounding area, and many of the buildings remained in surprisingly good condition. He drove down the broad main avenue, an unremarkable presence in the late afternoon crowd of pedestrians, cars, and trucks. There was a tension in the air, and people in the shops were talking about the growing violence. There was some confidence, too, that the Americans and the police would bring things back under control.
The symbol of that confidence stood at the end of the wide boulevard, the blocky new police station that had been built with a $3.4 million grant from the United States government. The location obviously had been chosen carefully to show that the Iraqi police force had come of age as a trained unit and was present, ready to help. It was a point of pride for the emerging new government, and Juba considered it a worthy target. He could crush that rising spirit of safety.
A three-story building was on a corner about a thousand meters away, a place of shops and small offices. He parked around back and jogged up the steps and into the building. The doors were unlocked because the merchants were begging for work and did not want locks to keep customers out.
The door to the sewing shop on the top floor was not only unlocked but slightly open, too, to create a cross-draft through the stuffy rooms. A middle-aged woman with a wrinkled face was at a sewing machine, a round cushion full of needles and pins pushed high on her arm. Juba smiled in greeting, closed the door, turned, and shot her twice in the head with a silenced pistol. He spun the CLOSED sign around, locked the door, dumped the body out of sight, and arranged multicolored bolts of cloth into a crude rifle rest away from the open window. He retrieved the Steyr from his car, settled into the back of the room, and checked the scope; a clear view of the police station. Several American Humvees were parked out front, indicating that there were some discussions going on, probably about him.
He studied the building at the end of the street and sketched a range card while he waited. After an hour, he drank some water, then returned his eye to the scope, watching people go in and out of the ornate main entrance of the station. Some American soldiers, probably the drivers, were talking with some Iraqi policemen. Laughing. Cordial. Friends.
A stir rustled the small crowd. The soldiers shook hands with the cops and climbed behind the steering wheels of the Humvees. Two men were at the door, then at the top of the steps. Juba focused on the Iraqi officer dressed in dark blue trousers and a light blue shirt with rank epaulets on his shoulders. He was squaring away a blue beret on his head. A final check of the range card, eye back to the scope, a squeeze of the trigger, and the explosion of the shot filled the small room as the big gun kicked back against his shoulder.
Without waiting to see the fate of the policeman, Juba worked the bolt smoothly to rack in a second round and shifted his aim to the U.S. Army officer. He was wearing a vest, but that would not matter, and Juba brought the scope to center mass and fired. Two targets down.
The third round was fed into the chamber, and he looked for one more victim. The bodyguard with the sunglasses? The young sentry in the guard post? One of the Americans rushing out of the building with their weapons ready, searching for the sniper? He paused a few seconds to let the scene develop, like the image on a photograph in a darkroom. One American was pulling the fallen officer back inside, his weapon dangling uselessly as he hauled with a hand on each of the man’s wrists. A medic? Juba shot him in the heart.
This time, he left the rifle in the room as he walked away. The military and the police would be looking for anyone carrying anything suspicious, and Juba had access to other rifles to use in the future. He disappeared into the crowd that was running away, scurrying for their homes.
28
COB SPEICHER
THE ARMY SOLDIERS WERE starting to mutter beneath their breaths in the chow lines and in the barracks, feeling that they were losing control of the area. It was no longer a secret that the dangerous terrorist and sniper Juba, once an evil legend down in Baghdad, was out there roaming their turf with a big motherfucking rifle. The fact that everyone now knew his name and background did not detract from the reputation but made it even more ominous. The guy was no rag-head shooter popping off rounds from a rooftop but a former master sniper and color sergeant in the British Royal Marines, one of us, a real professional, not one of them. Could shoot the hairs off a gnat’s nuts. He had done Baghdad, he had done London, he had done San Francisco, and now he was doing Task Force Hammer and every soldier venturing beyond the wire felt a target on his back. Count the bodies, button up tight, do your job, and keep an eye peeled for the nearest armor in case Juba comes to play.
Albeit, the Army could not do its mission that way. It had to have men in the gun turrets when they went out because you could not sail blindly into dangerous territory. Then the soldiers eventually would have to dismount and go on foot patrol, out in harm’s way with a pucker factor of ten. Snipers cause problems even when they are not around.
In his office at the sprawling camp, Colonel Neil Withrow was in a tense and private meeting with his XO and his top intelligence officer. The blinds were twisted to let in light but keep out the heat, and an air conditioner churned hard to keep the air clean and the temperature in the eighties, which was twenty degrees or more lower than outside. The machine was overmatched.