The Ides of Matt 2016 Read online

  Protocol said to lock it up in the secure vault resting under the table, then report it to command and send an armed guard to take the lieutenant into custody. Reality said to lock it up and suggest to his boss that the man get a refresher course in proper handling of classifieds.

  Instead, I eased it open.

  “Eyes only!”

  Viper? Hell. I was holding a damned grenade with no sign of the pin or handle—and three of five seconds gone.

  Should have slapped it closed. Should have the fucking lieutenant shot.

  Instead I read the damned thing.

  2

  Mira slipped into the hangar. The way that woman moved was like nothing else I’d ever seen. There weren’t all that many Spec Ops women, but she made it look natural…natural and dangerous as hell. We’d quietly shared enough two-week leaves for me to know that both assessments were accurate about her in every way. Dusky skinned enough to pass as a native anywhere in the Middle East, her night ops black hair curled down to her shoulders. Her face was forgettably normal (which was ideal for an operator)—forgettable unless you knew the woman who hid so carefully behind it.

  She didn’t ask why I called and woke her. Instead, she sat down on another chair and waited.

  I turned the folder over in my lap and showed her the front.

  A shrug.

  I peeled back the front flap enough to reveal the “Eyes Only.”

  Her gaze shot up and she inspected me carefully. I could see her connecting pieces, putting together the question that I wasn’t willing to speak aloud. I wasn’t asking the question of my lover. I was a sniper asking a question of my spotter.

  A sniper has to move undercover in any environment—hard to do as a single man, much easier with a woman at his side. He also needs a spotter to watch his back and cover the wider view. She excelled at both roles. Whether we were on overwatch protecting door-kicker troops working the street below or out in the weeds, Mira didn’t miss a thing. We were one of the top teams operating.

  Mira would of course integrate all this into her consideration about the question I had asked by flashing the folder. She knew she could stand up and walk away with no hard feelings, but she also knew I wouldn’t have called her lightly.

  This time I couldn’t read what was going on behind her dark eyes any more than the damn lieutenant’s light ones, but she reached out and took the file.

  Based on the data in the folder, I began studying city maps and drone overflight images on the dual screens while she read.

  3

  We’re not supposed to be here, Kurt!” Only Mira’s eyes showed through the narrow slit of the niqab headpiece she’d worn as we worked our way across Riyadh looking like any other Arab couple.

  “Then leave.” It came out harsher than I intended, but I was feeling the pressure too. “Sorry.” The “home” we were surveying would have been a mansion in Los Angeles, a damned big one. Here it was called a palace but that didn’t make it any smaller.

  I could tell by the narrowing of her eyes that Mira was scowling at me, which I ignored just as I had been for the other fifty times she’d said it since last night. Though once she’d read the file there hadn’t been any question of not going in together. Something about complaining made her feel like she was in control whenever the situation was spinning out of control, but I knew that about her and usually let it slide.

  Didn’t matter anyway.

  Once we stepped past this point we’d be in it deep and the only way out was going to be even uglier than the way in. In truth, all bets were on a one-way ticket.

  We weren’t supposed to be here—no one could know. Literally… No. One. That’s what the Unit specialized in, but even by our standards this was beyond dark and creepy.

  The objective was inside this monstrosity. Four stories with a double-height first. Delta named the sides of a building from the front entrance around clockwise by the alphabet for easy reference—front door wall was “A,” next wall to the right “B,” and so on. Don’t know if this place would have fit in the alphabet. Shining white, two big wings, attached garages that would fit twenty cars, bathhouses between the two pools, a clubhouse by the putting greens… The place was absurd. Thankfully, that worked in our favor as the target would never think guards were needed every foot. It was old enough that the cameras and sensors had been installed later, making them both easy to spot and fewer than they should have been.

  Mira was right though, this was the last check-in, the last point to turn back.

  I flicked a “Move Out” sign, but more as a question. At Mira’s nod, we shed our outer robes. From here on, blending in wasn’t the issue, being invisible was. Dark camouflage, night-vision goggles, and minimal gear other than our weapons and a lot of extra rounds. We headed in.

  They didn’t train snipers in The Unit to waste time. Our training was all about achieving results. I wasn’t the first operator to have used that as an excuse in marginal conditions and I wasn’t about to be the last. Because we delivered, Joint Special Operations Command did a fine job of looking the other way.

  When we were rolling up Iraqi terror cells back in the war, the Status of Forces Agreement prohibited US counterterrorism raids without an Iraqi court-issued warrant. To solve this, Spec Ops built courtrooms in every major city in-country and made sure they were manned by US lawyers and a local judge 24/7. Still, the ops in the field sometimes outstripped the speed of the courts. When we had a known terrorist in our sights, the lawyers back-timed the judge’s signature and the judge turned a blind eye.

  Were mistakes made?

  Very few and only very quiet ones.

  The Unit wasn’t SEAL Team Six. ST6 made noise about their ops—Captain Phillips, bin Laden, Jessica Buchanan; high profile wasn’t in our program. With command’s and the Iraqi courts’ authorization, four thousand al-Qaeda leaders were removed in the last four years of the Iraq War. It all happened so quietly that local al-Qaeda required years of inattention by Iraq Security Forces in order to rebuild into any level of viable threat. Noise wasn’t the Unit’s way. Wasn’t really ST6’s either, but the newsies had latched onto them so hard they could barely take a shit without hitting the headlines—better them than us.

  This op wasn’t exactly authorized either.

  No warrant had been issued.

  No war existed here.

  No order had been issued.

  Except for what was in that goddamn folder, which probably no longer existed. When I hand-delivered the thing back to Lieutenant Bruce, an “Oh, thanks Master Sergeant,” was all I got for my trouble.

  That and a headful of crap I wished I never knew.

  This was a friendly country, an ally, even the kind that The Unit usually cultivated—a dangerous one.

  The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spent more per capita on their military than any other country. Number One. The Big Kahuna. The KSA spent three times the amount that Singapore, Israel, or even the US did. Five times more than anyone in the next tier down. A higher percentage of their annual GDP than anyone except North Korea and that place was fucked anyway.

  Mira and I slid in through the garage: Bentley, Rolls, Lambo, Porsche, not a whole lot of American other than a Humvee and a Tesla. No Japanese at all. Got to admit that the Lamborghini Countach was a classic that almost stopped me in my tracks—it was a low-slung craft of beauty.

  Mira nudged me with the butt of her rifle. “Boys and toys,” she whispered but I could hear the laugh in it.

  I hadn’t felt much like laughing since I’d spent the hours reading that goddamn document before I called Mira.

  The KSA was run by one king and seven thousand princes, all blood relatives. Family reunions must be hell. Especially with how these guys got along. Internecine conflict didn’t begin to describe it. And when huge bulks of oil fortunes were on the move, it got messy. Defense Ministers took billio
n dollar bribes from foreign military vendors like it was cotton candy. Lately the Saudis had been going through Ministers of Defense and the Interior so fast it was a wonder anyone was left in the royal family, because sure as shit if you were one of the top thirty, you were related by direct blood to the king and your motives were suspect.

  Some of the princes were pro-American, some anti-. That didn’t bother me any and it hadn’t bothered Mira when I was giving her the lay of the land. It’s not like that was any news to us. Both of our fathers had done the Desert Storm dance, staging in The KSA to clear Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. They’d both brought back plenty of stories and a gutful of hate.

  But I hadn’t meant to suck Mira all of the way in. I had just wanted her take on the file’s contents. Was I reading too much into that “Eyes Only” report or…apparently not.

  Saudi Prince Abdul Malik Hassan was demanding heavy “donations” for feeding the US with prime intel. Turned out that he also was taking prime intel on our movements and selling them back to every bidder.

  Twenty-five of my SEAL Team 6 brothers—I only sneer at them to keep them on their toes—were in a Chinook helo that was shot down in Afghanistan in 2011. Deep research pointed to Abdul feeding the intel to al-Qaeda shooters—no proof. Again when ST6 had been repulsed by al-Shabaab terrorists in Somalia, Abdul’s call had been traced there as well. He had a whole network of brothers, cousins, and sons servicing the intel in both directions—a clusterfuck that involved a dozen princes and twenty more besides. We needed the intelligence reports he gave us, so the CIA had labeled him “Untouchable.”

  There were other opinions in that damn file. The Saudi Defense Minister, the US Secretary of State, the Head of the Joint Chiefs, a scribble that just might be the President’s initials… They all agreed that Abdul had walked way too far over the lines in both directions. But no one wanted to do the deed. No one wanted the CIA to find out they’d done the deed.

  And neither Mira nor I gave a shit about any of them.

  It was the price of what Abdul took…

  I no longer had brothers, not outside the service. No family outside the service.

  My brother Stan found heroin, then God, then tried combining the two so that he could go meet God face to face. He never came back to tell me if it worked. Mom had long since walked away and Dad eventually ate his gun. We weren’t what you’d call…close.

  “Close” is what I found in The Unit, even before I met Mira Stenkowski.

  Five years in Special Forces, tromping ass with the 3rd SFG Green Berets, before I could even apply to The Unit. Delta Assessment Phase spent a month proving that nobody loved me—but I already knew that, so it didn’t knock me out like so many others. Combined with being tough as hell, I made the five percent cut. And they took me in.

  All the way in.

  The Unit did that. These weren’t fellow soldiers. The guys weren’t some inbred clan like Prince Abdul’s. These were men, and now the few women, that I’d stand at the tip of the spear for. Give me the first hit. Take me down first. Because that’s the only way you’re going to get at me and mine.

  But Abdul didn’t believe in belonging.

  4

  For three days we watched him.

  Mira and I crawled in and watched him. We lived in his house. We smelled the food he ate. We watched him fuck his wives at night from so close we could smell the sex on him afterward. We didn’t drink water so that we wouldn’t have to pee. We didn’t eat so that we wouldn’t have to shit.

  Mira and I were a US Delta Force sniper team—so invisible that we weren’t even there.

  But we were and we listened.

  Abdul had a rage in him. That part of him I recognized. That part of him I knew down to my bones. Before The Unit, it had twisted inside my guts like a knife every time I thought of my family. I didn’t beat or kill, but I knew what drove him.

  He got angry at a wife for not being eager to receive him. After he beat her, and used her hard, he stated the fateful “I divorce you” three times—all a guy had to do to end a marriage in this culture. At that moment she lost rights to any of her children and was banished back to her family, never to emerge from the shame again. Mira almost took him down at that point, but I held her back. Abdul wasn’t the only reason we were here.

  A cousin of his—who had demanded a mere hundred grand for selling the allied bombing patterns over a terrorist-held city when he should have earned half a million—was dismissed, without the grace-saving of “based on his request” in the announcement of his departure. His career, his life in Saudi politics was finished. Mira and I laid a bet that his fortunes would be gone in twenty-four hours and his family in forty-eight. End it now, Dude.

  And still we waited in thirsty silence.

  We were the hum in an air-conditioning vent, a shadow behind a palm tree, a breath on the wind. We sucked on pebbles to draw precious saliva to soothe aching throats.

  Three long days we waited and watched. On the long watches I wondered if the goddamn lieutenant had reported us AWOL—away without leave—or if he’d left a simple “on assignment” on our registers. We were past that now. Even the ache didn’t matter, only the mission.

  The self-assigned mission.

  Night four.

  Abdul’s private war council had finally been called.

  Out in the great courtyard of his home, an evening of food and debauchery on a grand scale convened. His war council of thirty of his closest and most trusted—brothers, cousins, sons. All of his sons.

  “Go, Mira. Go now. While you can.” I was assembling my McMillan sniper rifle.

  “That boat sailed the minute we stepped off the reservation, Kurt.” She began lining up magazines for me. Five rounds per mag of .50 BMG sniper-grade ammo; four to a pound and as long as the five dollar bill each one cost. We’d scouted the ideal spot, found it in the bastard’s bedroom. A monstrous bed, satin sheets the size of pool covers, red Persian rugs on white marble floors, gold fixtures in a bathroom big enough to park a couple Humvees in. Wealth dripped out of the faucets and shone from the crystal chandeliers. I’d never seen anything like it and frankly never wanted to again. It was cold in this blazingly hot country. More frigid and heartless than a winter storm blowing in off the north Pacific.

  Mira had quietly spoken with the four current wives—apparently none of them were very fond of their husband-prince and the dismissed wife had been a favorite in their circle. For their own safety in deniability afterward, Mira had tied them up in the bathroom. Then we’d barricaded ourselves in.

  The only opening was the French doors that swung out into the night. An ornate dresser of inlaid English rosewood turned into a shooting stand placed well inside the room. With the flash suppressor and an extra foot of silencer, I’d attract little attention. Only a perfect shot from the courtyard could find me, though we both expected one eventually would.

  Mira’s family had been little better than mine. Just like me, her brothers and now the occasional sister, were in the Special Operations community. We both knew what was coming for us and, without a word, we were both willing to pay the price if it came to that.

  Abdul’s war council spread out in the marble-paved courtyard below me—acres of the stuff. Out in the exact center stood a circle of tables covered with pristine white cloths and laden with an unimaginable bounty. Buckets of iced caviar, great slabs of pâté, whole sides of beef that could feed hundreds, all served by lightly clad women who had clearly been paid to not complain no matter what was done to them.

  The range was so close that I couldn’t miss.

  The Canadian Tac-50 was twenty-six pounds and six-feet of the baddest rifle in the business. Two of the three longest sniper shots ever confirmed as kills had flown out of Tac-50 barrels—each over two thousand yards and I didn’t have a single shot here over two hundred. I’d selected the beast just in case I had need
ed the long shot. Instead I had easy targets and massive rounds to punch with.

  I dialed back my Schmidt-Bender scope all the way to compensate for the thousand-yard zeroing I kept the rifle set for. My bullets were going to drop less than two inches before impact at this range.

  We’d all been scrubbed. There was no serial number on either scope or weapon. The only ID Mira and I carried was phony as hell and identified us as mercenaries gone hunting—traceably hired by the remains of a cell of terrorists Abdul had fucked over in Pakistan. Even if we got out clean, we’d “drop” those IDs somewhere that they’d be discovered.

  US intel services wanted him in place. US and Saudi military—and any grunt with even half a brain—wanted him gone no matter what the CIA said. He was about to be erased.

  I was committing an act of war. Killing thirty of the King of Saudi Arabia’s immediate relatives couldn’t be shrugged off. One or two might be overlooked, but Abdul had built his network too well and just cutting the head off the serpent wouldn’t be enough.

  Worst case scenario? There would be two dead mercs who would never be identified, except by Combat Applications Group Lieutenant Bruce—who’d known exactly what he was doing when he left that “Eyes Only” report for a sniper and his spotter, both with no families outside The Unit.

  I snapped in the first magazine with a gentle click and worked the bolt to load the first round so softly that it wouldn’t have disturbed a cricket.

  Two hundred yards away, I stared straight into Prince Abdul Malik Hassan’s face through my scope. His head filled my view. It was thrown back in a laugh and it would have been so easy to feed a round to him, right down his throat.

  You always heard when an ST6 SEAL died in action. His brothers saw to that, but that wasn’t our way. When my best friend went down in Yemen, his family never knew how it happened. But I knew, now that I’d read the file—they traced it to Abdul giving away our plans. When Mira’s bunkmate lost both arms and her eyesight in the Ukraine, Abdul might as well have pulled the trigger.