Gibson decided that he had heard and seen enough of the Rashidi boys. They had just confirmed the intelligence gathered over the past few years. “Put up our radio link,” he said over his shoulder to Marks without taking his eye from the powerful spotting scope that was poking through the tumbled foliage. When Marks confirmed that the encrypted signal was available, Gibson said, “Tell them it’s a go on this end.” Then he made some final minor scope adjustments to his old-school M24 (SWS) sniper rifle and chambered a 7.62 × 51-mm. NATO cartridge.
The house, five hundred meters distant, loomed large in the magnified image, and Gibson scanned left to right, then up and down. Al-Rashidi should have heeded the Prophet’s warning against becoming arrogant, for it had been his undoing. The Egyptian prided himself on his relationship with Osama bin Laden, who had left notes about him and the special project in his private files. Unfortunately, when an American commando team killed bin Laden and found that information the careful and loyal Mahfouz al-Rashidi stood exposed. The little warlord in the small house in the no-name wasted valley became a person of interest. He had reached too far.
Then he was groomed as carefully as a teenage girl tends her hair and eye makeup. Money began to flow in exchange for information about who was doing what in his valley. He liked the new power and importance, and his sons had been happy to get out of the Wakham, with money to spend. Mohammed developed a liking for the whores of Paris. Ali enjoyed the perfumed boys of Islamabad. Kalil was up to his neck in gambling debts to London bookies, and young Stephen Rush, whose real name was Syed, was a cocaine freakazoid. The boys had all gone Western, but told their jihadi father what he wanted to hear, not necessarily what was true. All hated having to come back to this crude shack and were about as capable of planning a coordinated attack as a herd of turtles.
No matter, thought Gibson, who knew their backgrounds. It was time to end this game and take all five of them off the map. He slowed his breathing and steadied the rifle. Forty thousand feet above him, an MQ-9 Reaper drone had been loitering for two hours in sky circles on sixty-six-foot wings under the control of a pilot and a sensor operator back in the United States. When Gibson passed along the permission from Marks, the drone slid into a straight path above the target and jumped up as it released a pair of GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munitions, smart bombs that weighed five hundred pounds apiece. The JDAMs rode the laser beam flawlessly directly through the roof of al-Rashidi’s home and exploded with a thunderclap that rolled far down the valley.
Gibson had been expecting it, but it was still quite a show. With the thud of detonations, the building actually blew apart in a canopy of debris and dirt. A tower of smoke rolled up and fire flashed horizontally. He kept his eye on the scope as the concussion pushed against the mountains.
He had been doing this kind of thing for a long time, and it still surprised him that anyone could live through such an attack, but, invariably, someone did. Even Hitler walked away from a bomb blast that killed or wounded almost everybody around him in a closed room. And, sure enough, down in the smoking rubble a figure stirred. An arm — not much more than a claw in Gibson’s scope — was raised, and then fell, and rose again. A man was digging out. The head emerged. It looked like Kalil, but the sniper couldn’t be certain because the face was so badly burned. It really made no difference. The torso wiggled and struggled and emerged from the ruins. It stood slowly, holding on to a torn wooden beam for support, and Gibson shot him through the chest. The target fell and there was no more movement.
Gibson pulled the rifle back. “Tell them mission completed.” Marks passed along the message to send the drone back to its base and bring in the extraction chopper. There was no hurry to get away. No cavalry would be riding to the rescue for the al-Rashidi gang. Gibson pulled out a packet of chocolate, took a sweet bite, and thought, Happy New Year, Mahfouz, old buddy. That thought was followed quickly by Damn, I’m good at this.
1
They were burying colonel Francisco Miguel Castillo of the Mexican Marines today. The funeral was a peculiar affair, because the dark secrets of Mickey Castillo were no secrets at all. His business was known throughout his hometown of San Luis de la Paz, a small city that straddled the old Spanish Silver Road in Central Mexico. The people had eagerly followed the career of the popular local boy who had become a Special Forces hero and his nation’s star operator in the war against the deadly drug trade. He was their champion, descended from the Chichimeca warriors who were never defeated by the Europeans.
The Castillo family owned several homes, including one in the capital and another on the Gulf, but Miguel had chosen to live at a spread of his own within ten miles of the ranch house in which he was born. It was to this place that he had come in later years to escape the pressures of his job, a place where he could be at ease. But more than cattle branding went on out at the old ranch beside the Manzanares River, and strong men other than vaqueros were regular visitors. Neighbors often heard the bap-bap-bap of rapid gunfire and the whumps of explosions out on the private acres where Castillo and his mysterious friends trained and practiced at all hours. Those sounds were comforting lullabies to the townspeople, for they made them feel safe and protected. The crime rate always went down when the colonel and his friends were at the ranch and arrived to check out the restaurants and bars in the evening. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. The residents who provided sanctuary for the colonel didn’t share information about him with outsiders.
The impossible happened. The colonel had been gunned down during a raid against a cartel headquarters belonging to the powerful narcotics kingpin Maxim Guerrera, near Juárez. It was just a lucky shot by a cowardly thug whose submachine gun continued to chatter bullets even as the man holding it fell mortally wounded by marine fire. Two bullets hammered Castillo just above his chest armor and below the helmet, severing his brain stem, and he died. He was thirty-five years old.
The information was included high in the morning briefing of Martin Atkins, the director of intelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency. Atkins always approached his office at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, with a sense of trepidation in the mornings, for his coffee invariably arrived at his desk with a little taste of 2 percent milk and an avalanche of bad news from around the globe.
The Sandbox was usually at the top of the list, with bombings, assassinations, and assorted outrages committed by jihadist organizations ranging from the big boys like Al Qaeda to some loner with a bomb and a car and a death wish. That was a staple.
Then his team would shift focus to the real players — China and Israel, a nuked-up North Korea and Russia — and the stalwart allies, such as the United Kingdom and Western Europe. Things were generally quieter in those channels, although more long-range and serious, for the stakes were so much higher. His briefers had worked throughout the night to prepare his early-morning checklist of horrors. Atkins would help whittle it down to be combined with similar top-secret material from other intelligence agencies that would be given to the director of National Intelligence, who, in turn, would brief President Christopher Thompson.