“You speak English?” Kyle asked, peeling back the tape across the mouth just enough to let the man speak.
“Who are you?” The words came out in a garble, as if he were talking around a cigar.
Kyle slapped him hard. “I ask the questions.”
The commander shook his head. He understood the seriousness of the situation. His attempt to trap the Americans had failed, the town had been penetrated, the remaining explosives would be neutralized, and he had been captured. The plan to bleed the Americans badly and write the name of this village in the annals of resistance had failed. Without his leadership, his fighters would fade to other locations and the village would return to peace.
“I will tell you nothing,” the commander grumbled. “Nothing.”
“Then you are of no value to me.” Kyle stood, took out his pistol, and fired a shot that ripped away part of the man’s ear. The commander jerked at the pain and the impact. “Last chance,” Swanson said.
Sybelle spoke. “Kyle. Hold on. No use wasting more time on him. He may have some intel, but the interrogators will wring it out of him. Let’s just leave them tied up here while we go find Juba.”
The commander looked strangely at them and shook his head vigorously, grunting for attention. Kyle lifted the tape again.
“Now you suddenly got something to tell me?”
The man bounced his head in understanding. “The woman just called you by the name of Kyle. Are you the Swanson Marine?”
“Maybe.” Kyle ripped the gag all the way off with a swift pull that yanked out patches of beard.
“If you are, then I can tell you exactly the location of your enemy, my friend Juba. He wants you to find him, Swanson Marine,” said the commander, a slit of a smile on his bloody face. Here was a chance to repay Juba for calling him a fool. Maybe both of them would die. “He is waiting just down that street.”
JUBA WAS IN A mouse hole. Over the past few days, he had used some of the idle hours in the commander’s home to create a unique sniper’s hide, oriented along the most likely line of approach, and now he crawled into a prone position and made himself comfortable.
The moment was finally approaching, and without realizing it, he had started losing perspective. He was so intent on killing Kyle Swanson that his thoughts rejected anything but that one goal. The smart play was to leave now and fight somewhere else, some other day, but he wanted to finish it here. Never would he have a better opportunity. Swanson had to come up that single road and straight into the crosshairs.
Each decision he made now contained a trade-off, because a defender cannot defend against everything. The situation he had created was imperfect, for a mouse hole opening was so narrow that the shooter could not remain too far back in the darkness. The muzzle of Juba’s rifle was no more than a foot behind the opening.
Nevertheless, arranging a battlefield of his choice had been important, for Swanson would have to be the one risking exposure. The biggest advantage was Juba’s intimate knowledge of his enemy, the operational concepts of a sniper and the combat habits. He could get inside of Swanson’s head and think along with his adversary.
Juba had opened all the windows in the three-story house and pulled the curtains almost closed so they would flap in the air. He chipped out several cinder blocks up high as decoy hides and stacked another dummy emplacement on the roof behind a barricade of loose wood. A sheltered animal pen stood to one side of the house. Swanson would have to be wary of all of them and might make a mistake while doing the recon. Snipers always scan a target house from top to bottom, and the higher the defender’s position, the more it stands out and the more likely it is to draw attention. The mouse hole was only on the fourth row of cinder blocks up from the foundation of the house, below eye level. Juba would be watching for a slight movement of a rifle and a scope as Swanson ranged over the possible hides higher in the building, an advantage of a few microseconds.
An added bonus was the spider hole. Almost every house in Iraq had a small pit in which a family could seek shelter if and when bullets started flying outside. Juba’s position was right beside the hole that had been constructed below the commander’s home, which normally was kept covered by a small door and a rug. Once in the pit, there was a narrow tunnel some twenty feet long that led away to a dry well next door as an emergency escape route.
Juba had rolled away the rug and removed the wooden hatch to leave the hole uncovered. He placed the computer in the backpack and laid it on the far side of the hole. Once again, he had downloaded the important information on the memory stick as a backup, and the small device was in his breast pocket.
It was going to be a one-shot battle, and whoever fired first probably would win-but that shot had to score. Otherwise the advantage, however miniscule, switched to the other sniper. Juba would be patient, take the critical shot, and then grab the backpack, roll into the spider hole, and leave. Shoot and scoot, the Americans snipers called it.
He racked a round into the chamber of the M40A1 and settled behind his scope to wait.
THEY WRAPPED BOTH OF the captured men tightly in rings of duct tape. A hand-drawn map of the area had been pulled from the commander’s pocket, and Sybelle and Kyle spread it on the floor, compared it with their own maps, and worked out the grid coordinates of the house where Juba was said to wait.
“I don’t like this High Noon, mano-a-mano bullshit,” Sybelle said. “The guy is too good.”
“Hey, I never said that I want a quick-draw contest. He’s the one fixated on taking my scalp to show he’s the baddest sniper around. That ego is forcing him to stay put instead of hauling ass.” Kyle sat on the floor, with his legs crossed and his M40A1 resting in the crook of his right arm. “I just want to kill the bastard any way we can.”
Sybelle, down on one knee, brushed some hair back from her eyes. She was sweating, and it was still morning. “You’re not going to play fair?”
“Nope. Never happen. As much as I definitely want to personally blow him away, we have a lot of other gadgets in our toolbox.”
When he explained his plan, Sybelle relayed the orders back to the task force.
The big armored force that had been moving awkwardly suddenly fell into exact positions and nosed casually into the village streets, heading in to secure the area, disarm the remaining house lined with explosives, and retrieve the bodies of its dead soldiers. Sporadic small arms fire whanged off the thick armor plate and was answered with booming cannons and machine guns.
Fifty thousand feet overhead, a strange-looking toothpick of an aircraft received new commands from its controller on the ground at Balad Air Base and tipped over to descend to a lower altitude. The MQ-9 Reaper hunter-killer unmanned aerial vehicle had been on station for nine hours and had plenty of fuel left. It wore a pair of GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided six-hundred-pound smart bombs beneath its wings.
“LET’S DO IT,” KYLE said. “You go high and paint the building, and I stay down on the dirt to draw his attention.”
Sybelle gave him a long look. “Take it easy out there, pardner. And remember we have exactly fifteen minutes, not a second more. Do not go in that building.” Then she rolled through a side window and was gone.