Bob Mayer
Lost Girls
PROLOGUE
In the night there is death.
It was one of the first lessons they had taught the Sniper and he had never forgotten it. Night is a common denominator regardless of terrain, enemy or mission. It will always come with the movement of the planet. He knew how to move unobserved, like a ghost, in daylight, but the night was his special friend.
He was dressed in a one-piece flight suit dyed black, underneath the full body ghillie suit, which consisted of burlap strips woven into green elastic. The natural color and uneven surface of the ghillie suit allowed him to blend in perfectly with his surroundings. He’d been in the same position for three days. His urine smelled of the jungle as he’d eaten only local food procured from it for a month prior to this mission. He’d had no need to defecate because he’d stopped eating two days before being infiltrated by covert Nightstalker helicopter into this Operational Area along the Caribbean coastline of Colombia close to the border with Panama. On one mission he’d gone eight days without the need. It wasn’t just the lack of food either.
His cheek was pressed against the stock of the sniper rifle, his shooting eye closed and resting on the rubber, his other, free eye, open. It was a position he could hold for a very long time.
The other two members of his team were within ten meters of his position. His Spotter was to his left and slightly upslope with a better view of the road that approached the village across the valley. His Security was located on the back slope of the ridge-line, covering him and the Spotter from the rear. He had neither seen nor heard them since they’d settled into position. That ended as the small earpiece crackled with static, a signal from the Spotter.
The Sniper’s open eye spotted the headlights along the narrow mountain road on the ridgeline across from him, over a mile away. Three sets which agreed with the intelligence. Another unusual thing as the intelligence had come from the CIA, a source he’d found to be notoriously unreliable. Working with any of the alphabet soup organizations always entailed a certain degree of carefulness and there were a tangle of them operating here in South America.
He twisted the on knob for the satellite radio in his backpack. The small dish it was attached to was twenty feet over his head, set in the branches of the tree covering his position, with a clear uplink. It was the first thing he had done upon arriving at the site after determining it was secured. He had not moved since climbing down, winding the thin green connecting wire around a vine.
“Falcon, this is Hammer. Over.” He knew his two teammates could hear the transmission also as he radioed back to their superior, as everything he said was picked up by his throat mike and transmitted over the short range FM radio they all had.
The reply was instantaneous. “This is Falcon. Go ahead. Over.”
“Three vehicles moving in. Over.” He closed the non-shooting eye as he turned on the thermal sight bolted on top of the rifle. He slowly opened his left eye and blinked, as it was flooded with a spectrum of colors. He could see the hot engines of the vehicles on the road. Shifting right, he noted the dull red glows of cooking fires damped low in the village. Orange forms indicated people sleeping inside of huts. He’d counted seventy-six the previous night.
His earpiece came alive. “Close to dawn. Over.”
He knew what the Colonel meant. In less than thirty minutes they’d lose their friend, the darkness. He also knew what that sentence implied. They could pull out and leave the mission if they felt they couldn’t accomplish it without being compromised.
The Sniper didn’t move. “Do I still have green? Over.”
“Still green. Over.”
People were stirring in the village as the sound of the approaching vehicles reached them.
The Sniper wrapped his left hand around the stock, forefinger inside the trigger guard. The heavy barrel was supported by a bipod. His right hand was on the scope, adjusting the sensitivity. He’d zeroed in the thermal sight just before infiltration. He’d fired the weapon in many different situations so he knew how the bullet would act with the drop to the village. His nostrils flared as he sniffed and his eyes scanned the nearby vegetation for the slightest movement. No wind.
Two trucks flanked a Land Rover as they pulled into the center of the village and came to a stop. He watched as a dozen men piled out of the back of each truck and began herding the people out of their shacks and into the common area. At this distance there was no noise from the village, just the sound of the jungle all around.
They were efficient. In less than ten minutes all the villagers were corralled like cattle into a dark red blob in the center of the village. Except for two. He watched the heat signatures making their way through the village away from the crowd. Strange. One was human. A child from the size. The other was smaller, lower to the ground and leading the child.
A dog. A half-smile crossed his lips as he realized that. And moving smart. Not dashing. Slinking, hiding, like a ghost leading a ghost. The kid was smart too, mimicking the dog. The Sniper visually followed them as they worked their way, avoiding the men with guns running around.
“Good dog,” he mouthed, the sound not even heard by a rat five feet away or picked up by the throat mike.
Very smart. It must be a very smart dog. And a very trusting boy. The Sniper tightened his left hand around the grip. His finger lightly touched the trigger as one of the men with guns was on an intercept course, but he held back as the dog paused, the boy right behind freezing, and the danger passed. They moved again.
They were in the jungle.
He abruptly shifted back to the village, the heat images getting blurred with the first rays of sun cutting horizontal lines across the scope.
“Time,” Spotter said.
The voice in the Sniper’s ear was flat, apparently without concern, but an unsolicited transmission like that from one of his teammates, the first word spoken since they’d settled into position, indicated the concern.
“Hold,” he ordered.
Three figures were at the forefront of the men holding automatic weapons, facing the villagers. The sniper pulled back from the rubber eyepiece and opened his other eye. There was no more than just the tint of dawn to the east. He pushed a button on the bulky sight on top of the weapon, shifting from thermal to telescopic.
The gun was large, almost six feet long and weighed over thirty pounds. Thirty-two point five pounds without bullets to be exact. He had the number memorized along with many other strange facts that the vast majority of people walking the face of the planet had never been exposed to. A ten round box magazine was fitted into the receiver, holding bullets that matched the gun in size, each round a fifty caliber — half inch in diameter, over six inches long — shell. A round that had been designed in the early part of the twentieth century for anti-tank use. Tanks were smaller and lightly armored then. Flesh and blood was still the same.
Modern science had been applied to the weapon system though. These rounds were specially designed around a very hard, depleted-uranium core that gave them the capability to punch through lesser metal. On one mission he’d fired through a quarter inch steel plate taking out a thermal image on the other side.
He pressed his eye against the rubber and waited as his pupil adjusted and the sun rose, accepting that he had lost the advantage of darkness.
“Time,” Spotter repeated.
The Sniper knew he was violating what they had agreed upon in mission planning, but he was in command and circumstances had changed. Spotter was simply doing his job with the reminder. The Sniper ignored the radio. He could see the three now. The center man was the target. The one on the right was also Colombian, but the face didn’t register. With a twitch he shifted left to the third. An American. He knew it as surely as the weight of his gun. Wearing khakis and a light bush jacket. LL Bean visiting the jungle.