Jack Coughlin, Donald A. Davis
Long Shot
1
This had to be a head shot. Under normal circumstances, a sniper goes for the chest, which not only provides a larger area and is thus an easier target, but the chest also is the gateway to the vital organs of the body. A big bullet in there goes spinning and bouncing around, breaking bones and shearing veins and pulping muscles, and collapsing the frail human machine that made life possible. Kyle Swanson knew that as he ignored the easy shot and instead dialed in on the head of Roland Lewis Martin from Bellwood, Indiana. The CIA sniper knew a lot of other things, the total of which meant that young Mister Martin had richly earned the .50-caliber bullet that would soon tear off his entire skull and leave his quivering body with a bloody stump of a neck.
Martin was a nice-looking young man, at least as seen through the powerful scope mounted on the Excalibur sniper rifle. Only twenty-nine years old, he still had the muscular build of his days being an offensive tackle on the Bellwood High Blue Jackets football team. The continued physical conditioning was a testament to the exercise he had received in his years of fighting for ISIS, the murderous Islamic State jihadists. His hair was black and cut short, and his cheeks wore a stubble of beard. The broad nose had been broken twice, healed a bit crookedly, and his teeth gleamed plastic and bright after so many caps and root canals. His white cotton shirt was open at the neck, showing the deep tan. The sleeves were rolled up, exposing the blue tattoo of a snake that coiled from his wrist to his elbow on the right arm. Martin had picked that up in Yokohama during his short career in the U.S. Navy, which had taught him computer science. The black slacks were clean and pressed, with matching socks and leather loafers. A tiny earring twinkled on the left lobe. The tip of his left little finger was missing due to a childhood tractor accident. In all, he looked pretty good; a capable poster boy for ISIS, a former cold-blooded killer turned recruiter.
Swanson had decided to use the new clear polymer-encased M33 ball ammunition for the job instead of the standard brass, primarily for the lighter weight. The 687-grain bullet was a shade under five and a half inches in length, would leave the muzzle at a velocity of 11,091 foot-pounds of energy to cover the 200 yards to the head of young Mister Martin in only two-tenths of a second, actually .231 seconds. It would strike with enough power to take down a tree. The plastic covering on the bullet interested Swanson. Trying out new things was part of his day job.
Rain was on the way and the air seemed heavy, even apprehensive, as if the weather knew something was going to happen and wanted to serve up an appropriate background of thunder and lightning. The skies would burst and the dark clouds would empty and the Eternal City of Rome would be cleansed once again. So far, not a drop. That was a good thing. The three young people at the table of the sidewalk café could remain outside, talking, as the ISIS recruiter slowly reeled in his catches in the sunlight. The sniper watched as a girl with long brown hair leaned close to Martin. She appeared to be in her midteens. Her friend, a brunette only a couple of years older, snapped their smiling picture on her cell phone, then showed it to them. They all laughed. Martin topped off the wineglasses of his American visitors. An unfolded street map of Rome lay on the table.
From his prone position on the third floor of a rather common yellow neoclassical villa on Quirinal Hill, Kyle Swanson could see an edge of the elegant Trevi Fountain, into which the girls and Martin had tossed a few coins and wishes before they all settled in at the corner café a few blocks away. It was hard to find a place from where you could not see any monuments or splendid ruins in Rome, for they were everywhere, old stones with stories to tell. The three million people in the city passed through the historic paths with a leisurely pace that was bred into them. Nothing ever happened fast in Italy. The brothers Romulus and Remus probably took their time while being suckled by the she-wolf in the founding legend. The dolce vita was the city’s charm, and it was practiced from the Vatican to the Coliseum. Of course, Romulus murdered his brother later on. Brutus assassinated his good buddy Julius Caesar. Various Popes were poisoned, strangled, stabbed and one was thrown into the sea with an anchor tied around his neck. Life was not the most expensive thing in Italy.
“One minute,” said the spotter beside Kyle. A dark-haired Oklahoman with the lean build of a marathon runner, Dan Laird had been with the CIA Directorate of Clandestine Operations for almost five years after leaving Delta Force, and was no stranger to pressure. He was busy handling the spotting scope, the cameras and the communications. “Everything in the green.”
“Umm,” Swanson hummed in reply. He breathed with his mouth open slightly, feeding measurable amounts of oxygen into lungs that had been conditioned by years of aerobic training. His heart rate was under control, with his pulse steady at forty-five beats per minute. His mind was clear, focused as much as his eyes. A lot of things could go wrong in a minute, or even in a second. The fleshy tip of his right index finger rested lightly on the trigger of the long rifle, and the world before him was in slow motion. The target was right where he was supposed to be, his back to the street, unmoving in his chair, nothing beyond him but a meticulously parked truck that would eat the big bullet. The wanted terrorist filled his scope, but Swanson ignored that fact, for to dwell on the madness of this evil man might have stirred the sniper’s emotion, and that might alter the target picture; this was no time for buck fever.
Young Mister Martin had been dug out by the intelligence analysts of the Central Intelligence Agency some months ago, and at first they did not realize who they had found. He had been posting in chat rooms and using American idioms to woo impressionable girls in the United States into coming to visit him. Don’t believe all of that crap in the media. All Muslims aren’t evil just because there are a few crazies. Look at me! Do I look crazy or scary? Come on over for a visit and we’ll have some fun in Rome. His accompanying picture showed a handsome guy leaning against a white Mercedes convertible beside a beautiful beach. The man was a hashtag Romeo, and several American girls who had bought his Twitter act never returned home again. Once ensnared abroad, it was simple enough to drug them and smuggle them straight across the Tyrrhenian Sea to Tunisia and into lost lives they would never have imagined in their most horrible nightmares.
But as the ISIS trolls reached out for new brides and potential agents in the United States, the terrorist group was itself being trolled by even better hackers who were on the payrolls of many governments, and those were the bleary-eyed wizards who had hooked Roland Lewis Martin. When his picture beside the luxury car was studied, it was determined to be a Photoshop digital stage set. That aroused enough suspicion to wash it through multiple facial-recognition and other identification databases, which pointed up the blue snake tattoo, the missing fingertip and the pierced ear, matched his height, erased the beard, fixed the proper eye color by erasing the contact lenses, chalked in personality traits, and discovered that this target was really Abdul Ansari Mohammad, the jihadi American who had decapitated a captured U.S. journalist in Iraq on live video.
Washington moved to set the trap, and tagged Swanson to do the hit. For many years, he had been the deadliest sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he was the trigger-puller for a top-secret special ops team known as Task Force Trident, and won the Congressional Medal of Honor and a salad of other decorations. That was all in the past, and while his current day job was vice president of the multinational defense industrial company called Excalibur Enterprises, he had another job, too. Like Laird, he performed special missions for the CIA.