Others wore black masks or wrapped keffiyeh to cover their faces. This would be the Al Qaeda contingent. The foreign fucks. Here to kill Americans and collaborators and to take advantage of the instability in the region.
A glint of metal rose into the air and swung down. A sword hacking at a figure on the ground. Even through the powerful sniper scope Gentry could not tell if the prostrate man had been dead or alive when the blade slashed into him.
His jaw tightened again. Gentry was not an American soldier himself, never had been. But hewasan American. And although he had neither responsibility for nor relationship with the U.S. military, he’d seen years of images on televisionof carnage just like that which was happening before him, and it both sickened and angered him to the very limits of his considerable self-control.
The men around the aircraft began to undulate as one. In the glare from the heat pouring out of the arid earth between his overwatch and the crash site, it took him a moment to grasp what was happening, but soon he recognized the inevitable outpouring of gleeful emotion from the butchers around the downed helicopter.
The bastards were dancing over the bodies.
Gentry unwrapped his finger from the trigger guard of the huge Barrett and let his fingertip stroke the smooth trigger. His laser range finder told him the distance, and a small group of canvas tents between himself and the dance party flapped in the breeze and gave him an idea of the windage.
But he knew better than to fire the Barrett. If he charged the weapon and pulled the trigger, he would kill a couple of shitheads, yes, but the area would turn so hot in an instant with news of a sniper in the sector that every postpubescent male with a gun and a mobile phone would be on his ass before he made it to within five miles of his extraction. Gentry’s exfiltration would be called off, and he would have to make his own way out of the kill zone.
No, Gentry told himself. A meager measure of pay-back would be righteous, but it would set off a bigger shit storm than he was prepared to deal with.
Gentry was not a gambler. He was a private assassin, a hired gun, a contract operator. He could frag a half dozen of these pricks as fast as he could lace his boots, but he knew such retribution would not be worth the cost.
He spat a mixture of saliva and sand on the ground in front of him and turned to put the huge Barrett back in its case.
—
The camera crew from Al Jazeera had been smuggled over the border from Syria a week earlier with the sole purpose of chronicling an Al Qaeda victory in northern Iraq. The videographer, the audio technician, and the reporter/producer had been moved along an AQ route, had slept in AQ safe houses alongside the AQ cell, and they’d filmed the launch of the missile, the impact with the Chinook, and the resulting fireball in the sky.
Now they recorded the ritualistic decapitation of an already dead American soldier. A middle-aged man with handwritten name tape affixed to his body armor that read, “Phillips—Mississippi National Guard.” Not one of the camera crew spoke English, but they all agreed they had clearly just recorded the destruction of an elite unit of CIA commandos.
The customary praise of Allah began with the dancing of the fighters and the firing of the weapons into the air. Although the AQ cell numbered only sixteen, there were over thirty armed men now in step with one another in front of the smoldering metal hulk in the street. The videographer focused his lens on a moqtar, a local chieftain, dancing in the center of the festivities. Framing him perfectly in front of the wreckage, his flowing white dishdasha contrasting magnificently with the black smoke billowing up behind him. The moqtar bounced on one foot over the decapitated American, his right hand above him swinging a bloody scimitar into the air.
This was the money shot. The videographer smiled and did his best to remain professional, careful to not follow along with the rhythm and dance in celebration of the majesty of Allah to which he and his camera now bore witness.
The moqtar shouted into the air with the rest. “Al lahu Akhbar!”God is greater!He hopped in euphoria with the masked foreigners, his thick facial hair opened to reveal a toothy smile as he looked down at the burnt and bloody piece of dead American meat lying in the street below him.
The crew from Al Jazeera shouted in ecstasy as well. And the videographer filmed it all with a steady hand.
He was a pro; his subject remained centered, his camera did not tremble or flinch.
Not until the moment when the moqtar’s head snapped to the side, burst open like a pressed grape, and sinew, blood, and bone spewed violently in all directions.
Thenthe camera flinched.
—
Gentry just couldn’t help himself.
He fired round after round at the armed men in the crowd, and all the while he cussed aloud at his lack of discipline, because he knew he was throwing his own timetable, his entire operation out the window. Not that he could hear his own curses. Even with his earplugs, the report of the Barrett was deafening as he sent huge projectiles downrange, one after another, the blowback from the rifle’s muzzle brake propelling sand and debris from the ground around him up and into his face and arms.
As he paused to snap a second heavy magazine into therifle, he took stock of his situation. From a tradecraft perspective, this was the single dumbest move he could have made, virtually shouting to the insurgents around him that their mortal enemy was here in their midst.
But damn if it did notfeellike the right thing to do. He resecured the big rifle in the crook of his shoulder, already throbbing from the recoil, sighted on the downed chopper site, and resumed his righteous pay-back. Through the big scope he saw body parts spin through the air as another huge bullet found the midsection of a masked gunman.
This was simple revenge, nothing more. Gentry knew his actions altered little in the scope of things, apart from changing a few sons of bitches from solids into liquids. His body continued firing into the now-scattering murderers, but his mind was already worrying about his immediate future. He wouldn’t even try for the LZ now. Another chopper in the area would be a target too good for the angry AQ survivors to ignore. No, Gentry decided, he would go to ground: find a drainage culvert or a little wadi, cover himself in dirt and debris, lie all day in the heat, and ignore hunger and bug bites and his need to piss.
It was going to suck.
Still, he reasoned as he slammed the third and final magazine into the smoking rifle, his poor decision did serve some benefit. A half dozen dead shitheadsare, after all, a half dozen dead shitheads.
TWO
Four minutes after the sniper’s last volley, one of the Al Qaeda survivors warily leaned his head out the doorway of the tire repair shop where he had taken cover. After a few moments, each second giving him increased confidence that his head would remain affixed to his neck, the thirty-six-year-old Yemeni stepped fully into the street. Soon he was followed by others and stood with his compatriots around the carnage. He counted seven dead, made this tabulation by determining the number of lower appendages lying twisted in the bloody muck and dividing by two, because there were so few identifiable heads and trunks remaining on the corpses.
