“I don’t have time to be a teacher and—“
“Who taught you? Who was your mentor in the covert world?”
Gant felt a weight on his chest. “My brother, Tony.”
“And he taught Neeley. And Neeley taught me. It’s your turn to teach. I have great expectations of Doctor Golden.”
The phone went dead.
The Sniper looked through the thermal scope. He was strangely depressed. The target was clear in the sight. Lying on his bed in the pre-fab building, reading a magazine.
It should not be this simple.
Not after all that had happened. The pain and terror of those ten months spent in the prison in Colombia. Perhaps the Spotter had a point. Perhaps something closer, more personal and slower would be better. The Sniper could remember every single devious and painful physical and psychological torture that had been inflicted on his body and mind over that time period. He had no doubt he could replicate the worst of them.
But that wasn’t the plan. Always best to stick with the plan, the Sniper thought. Not sticking with the plan was what had started all this a year ago.
For a moment the Sniper paused, even shaking his head, as if that could make things clearer. Orders. Betrayal.
Colombia. The mission. Take out the warlord. Who he was now looking at through his scope. Why hadn’t he done that?
The Sniper removed his off-hand from the gun and rubbed it along the side of his head, tracing the scar. He could feel pain, throbbing deep, right into his brain, searing through skin and bone into his very essence. Just like the probes and blades of the interrogator had.
The questions that made no sense. That there was no correct response to.
He’d told everything he knew to stop the pain and it hadn’t stopped it. And the pain of that betrayal of the Code that he had sworn to uphold had cut as deep as the knife.
Why hadn’t they come for him and his team?
The Sniper centered the reticules on the target’s head. He had already adjusted for the elevation difference and the slight breeze. With a little luck the body wouldn’t be found until early morning when all the detainees had roll call. By then the Sniper and Spotter would be long gone, moving on to the next phase of operations.
Why had they been abandoned?
The Sniper felt the rhythm of his breathing and of his heartbeat.
He shut down the murmuring in his brain.
Then he heard the inbound aircraft.
Gant was behind one of the imaging specialists, staring down at the thermal display the man was working. He had used the Talon two years previously in the same manner, to hunt for a target on the ground using heat signature and it had worked quite well. He had checked the satellite imagery faxed to the plane of the area around the CIA secret compound and traced out the most likely spots for a sniper to set up.
The pilot had the plane flying as slow as possible, just above stall speed, as he began to follow the path Gant had traced. The thermal hot spots flashed by quickly, barely giving Gant time to try to identify them. Deer were easy. There were numerous specks of heat — squirrels, rabbits, etc.
Needle in a forest, Gant thought as the pilot put the plane in a lazy, slow bank. Gant could almost sense the plane slipping, losing altitude but he trusted the pilots as he kept his focus on the screen, his hands gripping the back of the imager’s seat.
“We’ve got a query from the compound,” the pilot announced the intercom. “We’re violating restricted airspace.”
“Click me in,” Gant ordered, keeping his eyes on the screen.
The headset crackled for a second and then Gant heard what the pilots had been receiving: “Unidentified aircraft, this is the United States government. You are flying over restricted airspace. Break off on a heading of nine-zero degrees immediately or face dire consequences.”
Who the hell came up with this crap? Gant wondered. He let go of the imager’s seat and hit the transmit. “This is the United States government, security clearance Alpha One One Six. I am over-flying your position in an Air Force C-130 to search for possible intruders.”
There was a long silence and Gant could well imagine the confusion in the small headquarters for the compound.
“Identify yourself,” the voice finally came back with.
“I gave you my clearance,” Gant said. “Check with your higher for my authorization.”
Gant frowned as he spotted two glowing objects flash by on the screen. Two human forms, lying prone on the ground. He contacted the pilot and indicated for him to circle round.
“What are the intruders after?” the voice from the compound inquired.
Gant considered whether he should answer that question — tell them the intruders were a sniper team and who they were there to kill. He decided against it. “Do you have a reaction capability off the island?”
“We have two vehicles at the landing.”
“Get your reaction force ready. I’ll be on the ground shortly.”
The Sniper was looking up as the familiar sound of the four turbo-prop engines of a C-130 cargo plane grew closer. It was a sound anyone who had ever served in an airborne unit could easily recognize. Finally, he saw the silhouette of the plane fly directly overhead, less than five hundred feet above them. And he recognized the jutting radar pod and Fulton Extraction whiskers on the front of the plane, indicating it was a Special Operations Combat Talon. This was not a random C-130 flight. He glanced over at the Spotter who had a set of night vision goggles glued to his eyes.
“What do you have?” he asked.
The Spotter lowered the goggles as the plane began to bank. The Sniper already knew they had been spotted and the plane was circling back for another look.
“Blacked out MC-130 Talon with no identification markings,” the Spotter said as he lowered the goggles. “And it’s coming back for another look,” he added unnecessarily.
First Virginia and now this, the Sniper thought. Whoever was after them was fast, very fast. Faster than they had worst-cased. He briefly wondered if the ambush at the empty cache site in Alabama had achieved anything.
Déjà vu. If he’d had a sense of humor, the Sniper might have appreciated the irony of his current situation as it indeed mirrored what had happened in Colombia when they’d tried to take out the same target. However, whatever reservoir of humor he’d gone into that mission with had been quickly drained under the brutal hand of the torturer.
“We should exfiltrate,” the Spotter said.
The Sniper nodded but he had already put his eye back on the thermal sight and was zeroing in on the target. Nothing was going to stop him from fulfilling the mission this time.
Gant tightened down the straps on his parachute harness one last time and looked across at the load-master holding on to the static line cable attached to the pallet holding the off-road motorcycle. Both men took a subconscious step back as the back ramp cracked open, revealing the night sky and allowing the swirling wind to blast them. Gant had spotted a clear cut opening less than a quarter mile from the two heat signatures and that was where he had directed the pilot to drop him.
It wasn’t a very big opening, perhaps a half-mile long by a quarter mile wide, so Gant had also ordered the pilot to take the Talon down low, below safety restrictions, to less than four hundred feet above ground level. Gant edged forward, to the very lip of the back ramp, his eyes focused on the red light glowing up in the darkness of the interior tail of the plane.
“The ramp is open,” the Spotter reported, tracking the in-bound Talon through the night vision goggles. “We’re going to have company.”