Perez knew he was had, and he was kicking himself for having gotten chummy with enlisted personnel, having certainly known better. There was nothing to do now but try and make sure the op was a success and hope they all became legend.
He looked at Steelyard, trying to appear more enthusiastic than he felt. “So what do you want to call the op, Chief?”
“Operation Bank Heist.” Steelyard grinned and stuck the Cohiba back into his mouth, putting out his hand. “If it’s any consolation, Commander, we probably couldn’t pull this off without you.”
Perez knew there was no probably about it, and that Steelyard and Chou had set him up for the op from the very beginning, knowing that an unauthorized mission of any real scale would need a man on the inside back at the Head Shed to run interference and keep the op from being discovered by the higher-ups. That was why Chou had invited him to view the video in the first place. Perez felt too stupid to speak, so he nodded and shook Chou’s hand and left the hangar.
Steelyard and Chou smiled at each other.
“Warms my heart to see him stepping up to the plate like that,” Steelyard said.
Chou chuckled. “Well, Chief, all we can do now is hope he doesn’t suddenly grow himself a spine.”
CHAPTER 17
Gil lay prone beneath his hide fifty yards across the desert road from the ruins. The hide was a shallow trench, not much wider than his body, dug perpendicular into the back slope of a subtle defilade running east-west across the jagged, semirocky terrain. His firing aperture was six inches wide at two hundred yards, leaving him a visual arc of more than 90 degrees. This arc would allow him to sweep the target area for anyone attempting to flee on foot in any direction.
If Al-Nazari were traveling today as he normally did, there would be three SUVs in his caravan. He would ride in the middle vehicle with the woman, his driver, and his bodyguard. The lead and rear vehicles would carry three to four gunmen each. Gil would allow all three vehicles to cross the bridge, and then kill the lead driver, shifting immediately to the second, and then the third. There was no way to predict which way the vehicles would veer once their drivers were taken out, but firing at two hundred yards gave him plenty of time and room to adjust his fire.
The first three shots were key and would be the most difficult to place, firing at moving vehicles. The rough surface would keep their speed down, but a jouncing target was tough to hit at a distance. With this in mind, Gil had spent time during the night filling in some of the larger potholes in the road seventy yards out from the stone bridge. If one of the drivers dropped below his reticle as he squeezed the trigger, he would lose valuable seconds.
What the remaining security people would do after the drivers were dead was open to conjecture, but this wasn’t a concern. They would be trapped inside a wide-open kill zone with nowhere to run and precious little cover save for the dry creek bed. The SVD’s 7.62 mm, armor-piercing rounds would cut through any part of a vehicle except for the engine block, and with Gil’s hide located at a slightly lower elevation than the kill zone, he should be able to fire beneath the vehicles well enough to hit anyone attempting to take cover behind the engine compartments.
He had been briefed to expect no more than twelve targets in total, but he considered this speculation. There was no accounting for luck in combat, and Murphy’s Law held sway no matter the weather. He also had to count on the enemy possessing at least one sniper rifle, with optics at least as good as his Russian PSO-1 sight. This was the reason for not taking cover in the ruins across the road. Most of his targets would be carrying AK-47s, and the moment they realized they were under sniper fire, they would begin pouring rounds into the only visible cover they could see. A man with a sniper rifle, given time enough to find even lousy cover, might manage to get off a few rounds. The danger of an RPG, of course, spoke for itself.
Gil preferred to fight like the Comanche whenever possible, and the Comanche believed firmly in the safety of the earth. He sipped sparingly from his CamelBak, watching the road. “Typhoon main, this is Typhoon actual. Still no eyes on my location?”
“Negative, actual. Cloud cover is still too dense. Over.”
“Roger, main.”
Just then, the lead vehicle came into sight.
“Main, this is actual. Targets are inbound at this time. Over and out.”
He pulled the stock of the Dragunov firmly into his shoulder and brought the lead truck into sight, a dusty black Nissan Armada. He knew all three vehicles would reduce their speed dramatically just before crossing the bridge because the road dipped severely on the downward approach, and Gil had dug away the natural taper of that approach to create an abrupt six-inch drop, not near enough to damage the suspension or to cause alarm, but more than enough to force the vehicles into slowing down as they crossed into the kill zone.
The lead driver wore dark glasses and some kind of ball cap, and Gil could see that he had not shaved that morning. As expected, the lead did not speed away from the bridge after crossing, but instead drove slowly, waiting for the others to cross, keeping the caravan intact.
After the third vehicle was across the bridge, Gil gave them time to put some distance between the caravan and the potential cover of the creek bed. When the bridge was fifty feet from the bumper of the rear vehicle, he drew a breath and squeezed the trigger.
The round struck the lead driver in the base of the throat, causing him to slump over into the passenger’s lap.
Gil was already shifting his aim to the second vehicle, instantly spotting Al-Nazari in the backseat on the passenger side. He did not hesitate to squeeze the trigger. Al-Nazari’s head exploded like a pumpkin on a fence post, and the forward momentum of the vehicle brought the profile of the driver’s head into view as he turned to look into the backseat. Gil squeezed the trigger a third time and blew the driver’s face away.
The driver of the third vehicle barely had time to jerk his shifter lever into reverse before Gil shot him through the sternum.
In less than four seconds, he had disabled all three vehicles and eliminated his primary target. Everything he did from this point on would be to ensure his own survival. He was reminded briefly of the motto he had learned to live by during his late teens as a choker setter for the Louisiana Pacific lumber company in the mountains of Montana: In for your job — out for your life! When the grizzled old foreman blew the horn, Gil and the other setters would rush in to set the cable chokers around four freshly felled trees. If they weren’t clear again by the time the foreman blew the horn a second time, they’d be dragged off down the mountainside, crushed to death beneath a turn of trees.
Once, during his first week on the job, he’d been caught walking down the mountain alongside a turn being dragged downhill. The foreman had screamed at him, violently waving him away. As Gil jumped clear, the turn twisted, flinging a massive tree over the top to impact against the ground where he’d been walking.
“Never walk beside a turn,” he muttered, squeezing the trigger a fifth time for a fifth kill. None of the vehicles had slewed off the road, but the rear vehicle continued in reverse until it hit the abutment of the stone bridge and came to an abrupt stop. Gil pumped the remaining five rounds from the magazine into the vehicle, killing the remaining three passengers and preventing their escaping into the cover of the ditch.
As he was loading a fresh magazine, he spotted the woman ducking from the driver’s side of the second vehicle. He shot her through the passenger door, and she dropped to the ground. Shifting his aim, he prepared to engage the remaining four gunmen piling out on the passenger side of the two lead vehicles. They fired wildly at the ruins on the far side of the road, unable to determine Gil’s actual position.