She counted six heat signatures in the minaret. All awake and alert, unlike last night.
They were waiting.
As were the last two. They’d come just after dark, like last night, and crawled into one of the Dumpsters next door to where the package was. They’d wedged the top open six inches and were peering out with night-vision goggles, the latest American version, most likely stolen by an Afghan soldier from his American counterparts and sold on the black market.
An old woman came walking down the street, the weariness in her step indicating a long day at work. She had little clue about the firepower amassed all around her and disappeared into one of the buildings on the left side of the street.
A voice crackled in Neeley’s ear. “Status?”
She whispered her reply, picked up by her throat mike and encrypted and transmitted back to Hannah while being frequency hopped and relayed through several Milstar satellites. “Go. Status of Pakistani air defenses?”
That was the key question. How far up did the betrayal go and who was involved?
“Inactive. You’ve got a local problem.”
“Roger,” Neeley said. “But we kept this tight, so the only way word was leaked was via the Agency.”
“Naturally. I foresee a Sanction in the future, but for now it is your call whether to proceed or not.”
“I’m on mission,” Neeley said.
“The missile countdown has begun and exfil is inbound,” Hannah said and nothing more, because after so many years and so many missions, there was nothing they could say. It was all down to the execution now.
Neeley pulled her eye back from the rubber gasket, the ease of pressure automatically turning the scope off. She slithered one hand into a pocket and extracted a pill. She carefully put it in her mouth and, twisting her head to the left, took a sip of Gatorade from the CamelBak built into her MOLLE combat vest.
The pill would give her four hours on the edge. Since she hadn’t slept since infiltration, going on fifty hours now, she would need that edge. But if she weren’t out in four hours, the crash would be bad. She didn’t worry about that because if she weren’t out in four hours, she’d be dead.
Her pulse quickened as the speed hit her bloodstream.
She didn’t need to check her hide site. She’d taken nothing out, so there was nothing to indicate she’d been here. Gant’s rule number four: Always pack out what you pack in. They were Neeley’s rules now, as much of her as they had been of Gant.
In fact, there was nothing on her to indicate who she was or where she was from. Well, there was DNA, but it wasn’t like the Taliban or Al Qaeda or whoever was waiting to kill her was going to run that, and even if they did, she wasn’t in any database. She didn’t exist and hadn’t for a long time.
She pressed her eye back against the rubber, the alley coming alive in heat once more. The rifle was an old one. She knew there were better models now on the market, but Gant had also impressed on her that familiar was sometimes better than newest. It was an Accuracy International L96A1. British made, it chambered the NATO standard 7.62 by 51mm round.
The rounds loaded in this rifle, though, were anything but standard.
Neeley had prepared the rounds herself, building them to be subsonic so they wouldn’t produce the distinctive crack of breaking the sound barrier. A bulky suppressor on the end of the barrel would reduce the sound of the gasses propelling the bullet as they escaped the barrel. There is no such thing as a true silencer, but her rifle was pretty damn quiet.
A new voice crackled in her ear. “On station. Target Alpha locked in. Fifty seconds.”
Of course the suppressor combined with the low-power bullets meant a greatly reduced range, but that was why Neeley was in the pile of rubbish, needing to be close to the package.
“Forty seconds.”
Neeley placed the crosshairs right between the goggled eyes of one of the men peering out of the Dumpster.
“Thirty seconds. Missile away.”
Her finger caressed the trigger. While she remained focused on target, part of her mind began to monitor her breathing and heartbeat.
“Twenty seconds. Tracking positive.”
She knew that the Global Hawk that had fired the Hellfire missile was already roaring back toward Afghanistan. The “pilot” flying it was safely ensconced in a bunker on the other side of the world at Nellis Air Force Base on the edge of Las Vegas.
“Ten seconds. Tracking positive. Eight. Seven. Six.”
Neeley slowly exhaled two-thirds of the air in her lungs to her natural respiratory pause and paused her breathing.
“Three. Two.”
Neeley fired in between heartbeats, the round ripping through the target’s NVGs and his skull, splattering the lid of the Dumpster with brain, blood, and bone matter.
The minaret blossomed in an explosive ball, and as Neeley worked the bolt, she wondered if Allah would curse her. Then she figured she’d pissed off pretty much every god on the planet if there was a higher power, so it was a little late to worry now. She fired, killing the other man in the Dumpster while he was staring to the side, trying to see what the cause of the explosion was.
She stood, garbage falling aside, and slung the sniper rifle over her shoulder. She pulled a short, stubby grenade launcher out of a sheath on the side of her pack. She’d bought it on the black market in Kabul, then spent time modifying 40mm rounds for it. She had six rounds in loops on the front of her vest and one in the chamber. The first thing she’d done to the rounds was remove the safety that only armed the round after a hundred feet. These were live as soon as they left the barrel.
As she dashed down the alley, she pressed herself against the right wall and fired the first round. Right into the window where the four men were. It exploded while she broke open the M79 and loaded another round, still moving rapidly down the alley. She put a second round into the room for good measure and a body came flying out of a window, landing on the concrete with a solid thump.
Neeley dropped the thumper on its lanyard and drew her MK23 .45-caliber pistol. As she passed the body, she put two rounds into its head, then pivoted right and kicked open the door where the package lived, weapon at the ready, the muzzle following her gaze.
The package had one arm around his wife and the other around his daughter. His eyes widened as he met Neeley’s and she had no time to deal with his surprise that it was a woman coming for him. She was focused on the two men standing behind the family, scimitars in hand, raised for head-chopping strikes at the neck of the two adults.
One of them started to shout something, but the second syllable never left his mouth because the first .45-caliber round Neeley fired hit right between his eyes. She spared him the double-tap in the name of expediency and to help the wife keep her head. As blood and brain and bone still flew out of the back of the first man’s head, Neeley had shifted right and fired, this time double-tapping, the bullets blowing apart the second man’s head and flinging his body back, the scimitar flying away with the body.
Neeley shifted back left and fired a fourth time, hitting the first man as the body crumpled back, the bullet passing the package’s side by less than an inch.
One of Gant’s rules was always make sure with an extra round.
She was making sure because she’d passed up the first double-tap. She was sure Gant would have approved. Neeley strode into the shack, taking charge with action and presence, not words. She was tall, just under six feet. Her short hair was still dark; she dyed the gray because it made her stand out and she was distinctive enough as it was. Her face was all angles, no soft roundness. The lines deeply etched around her eyes told of years of stress living on the edge.