Chapter 31
Turkey/Georgia Border
The night air swirled furiously, brushing his cheeks and sweeping through his close-cropped hair. The darkness before him was absolute.
Ding held steady.
He was splayed out in a prone firing position, his legs scissored wide for stability on the cold metal ramp.
One leg was bent to keep his boot from hanging into the buffeting slipstream.
The edge of the deployed ramp was immediately to his right, a three-hundred-foot drop to unforgiving terrain—dirt and rock fused solid by a million years of heat and erosion.
To his left the rest of the team stood watching: they were rigged up and ready to go.
Cast members waiting for their cue to go onstage.
And in front of him? Ding saw nothing at all.
The ground below swept past in a rush, a blur of desert shadows.
He resisted an urge to lean forward to catch a glimpse of his target.
For that he relied on Clark. He was standing up front, directly behind the pilots, and would provide range estimates as they approached the GAZ.
When the chance for a shot came, it would come fast. Ding had to be ready.
His breathing was rhythmic, his mind clear.
“Five hundred yards!” Clark called out.
Ding was two feet back from the starboard edge of the ramp, the SIG grounded on a makeshift stand.
He wished he had a bipod, or for that matter, a better long rifle, but the scavenged wheel chock and a half-full sandbag felt solid beneath his weapon.
In his favor, if all went as planned, he would be shooting from a distance normally found on small-arms firing ranges.
With his body and elbows on the ramp, vibrations from the twin turboprop engines translated straight into his bones. There was a change in the vibration as Ross pulled the power back. He felt the aircraft begin to descend. The night air was cool and dry.
“Three hundred yards.”
Ding’s breathing slowed. He tuned out everything. The wind and the propeller wash. The sensation of hovering above the earth. Thankfully, the air tonight was smooth, only an occasional burble of turbulence.
He’d been told they would descend to between fifty and one hundred feet above the ground, a variance that depended on the terrain ahead and the copilot’s nerve.
Flying low at night over unfamiliar ground was a major challenge, even with the enhanced vision devices the pilots were using.
Ding had calculated that his lateral offset, the distance the bullet would travel to reach its target, would be less than one hundred yards.
How much less depended, again, on the terrain conditions and the skills of Captain Ross.
The airplane would also be flying at minimum speed, meaning the controls would be mushy and minimally responsive.
Ding would also have to add a correction for a shooting platform that was inducing an eighty-mile-an-hour crosswind.
It would be like shooting in a hurricane.
Given those extreme variables, he’d done his math as best he could, estimating a corrected sight picture for his scope. He would at least have an accurate range to target—Hyori was behind him with the laser range finder.
Ding was secured to the aircraft by a tether, a standard precaution for working near the edge of a ramp in flight.
The airplane descended and the shadows below gained definition in the light of the low moon.
Ding’s senses were fully alert, his mind a balance of focus and serenity.
This shot would be a challenge. But then, every shot was in its own way.
He was confident in his skills, and also those of Captain Ross.
“We’re aborting this pass!” Clark called out suddenly. “Hang on.”
Ding felt the tether attached to his midsection go taut, one of the team members taking out the slack. The C-41 banked left, away from their target, and the engine noise rose. They didn’t seem to be climbing, only veering into a tight turn.
“What the hell?” Ding said.
Clark replied, “Headlights coming in the opposite direction. They were going to be too close at intercept, so we’re going to do a quick orbit. We’ll be back on track in two minutes.”
As he’d done so many times over the years, Ding fell back on a sniper’s most important attribute—patience.
He never doubted that it was the right call.
He didn’t want to take out the GAZ’s driver only to have the truck slam into a family traveling on vacation.
Soon they were back on course, the C-41 flying straight and level.
“Two hundred yards to intercept,” Clark called out.
The tether went slack. Ding recalibrated, putting himself in the zone for a second time.
“I’ve got a visual,” Hyori said in a perfectly level voice.
Moments later, Ding saw it as well. To his left, a dark shape barreling up the road, the beams of its headlights juddering over asphalt. He saw a car pass in the opposite direction. It kept going and soon was out of sight to his right.
“One hundred twenty yards,” Hyori said, taking over distance callouts with the range finder. “Altitude seventy feet. Predicted lateral distance will be forty yards. She’s bringing you in tight.”
If she brings me in much tighter, I can just club the driver with my gun, Ding thought, but didn’t say. His finger touched the trigger.
He got his first good look at the driver’s-side window.
The window was up. He’d been hoping the driver would have it rolled down, removing the chance of deflection on the slightly oblique angle.
That, however, had always been a long shot given the chill of the night and the noise of the engine.
He doubted this model of the GAZ would have ballistic glass, but even so, the opaqueness of the window and potential reflections might make it hard to see the driver’s silhouette.
“Fifty yards,” Hyori said. It was the last briefed callout.
The rest was up to Ding.
He had a clear view of the window through his scope.
They were going to pass close—very close.
The whole aerial circus reminded him of a stunt he’d seen at an airshow, a biplane picking up a flag from a moving car.
All too late, he realized that minimum range was a double-edged sword.
It gave more room for slop when it came to aiming, yet also increased the relative motion between himself and his target.
He tracked the window as smoothly as he could, an odd blend of supported prone shooting and tracking a flushed quail. Nearly abeam, he discerned a vague silhouette inside the cab. In the last instant, the silhouette shifted.
The driver turned his head.
He was looking directly at Ding when the trigger broke cleanly.
—
The sound came out of nowhere and lasted only milliseconds, but it put Conza instantly on edge. He didn’t realize what it was in that moment. He only knew it struck a basal chord of fear somewhere deep in his brain.
Imminent danger.
The next sound, seconds later, was instantly recognizable.
Boss Man started screaming. The driver shifted to the right—no, slumped was more accurate—his entire camo jacket coming into view.
In the dim light, Conza got a glimpse of what was above the jacket—a devastated cranium covered in blood and brain matter.
And just like that, everything coalesced.
The initial sound, the movement, the screaming. The situation.
A bullet had arrived, penetrating glass, flesh, and bone. Someone had taken out the driver.
Before Conza could react, the truck swerved to the right, pitching him against the sidewall.
Then it reversed violently to the left. Out the front window, the truck’s twin headlights skipped over a reeling desert landscape.
Everyone and everything inside the GAZ was thrown to the right.
Equipment and bodies slammed into panels and doors.
Having started on the floor on the left side, Conza didn’t have far to go—he smacked into the big electronic contraption that was bolted to the floor.
The truck went into a spin, sliding sideways, and then its wheels struck something unforgiving.
With a massive groan everything tipped toward the right.
For a long moment Conza’s tiny world seemed to freeze, the GAZ poised to roll on its right side.
He was half falling, half leaning on the massive metal box.
Then a crack like a gunshot—one of the big bolts anchoring the great device to the floor snapped.
The box shifted and the GAZ’s fate was sealed.
The roll continued. Conza threw himself on top of a metal container the size of a dining room table, his bound hands scrambling for a grip and his legs spread wide.
The move was full of pain, but not nearly what he risked suffering if he tumbled toward the far sidewall.
The container broke free of its anchors and slammed down like an anvil as the truck upended. Gravity took hold and the crunch of crumpling metal overrode every other sound. Conza hung on for dear life as the box truck skidded and lurched across the desert on its side.
Finally, with deathly suddenness, the world fell still.
Conza had ended up on the top of the great box, the fingertips of his bound hands clinging to its edge in a death grip.
He struggled to orient himself. Dust and smoke swirled through the cargo bay, obscuring everything.
Slowly it began to clear, and he saw debris strewn wildly, a carnage of hardware and broken lumber.
He looked back and saw that one of the GAZ’s two loading doors had burst open.
It gave a bit of ambient light and vented the swirling dust.
Conza’s gaze snagged on a slight glint. Slightly to his right was a jagged shard of sheet metal—a panel from the device had been ripped away, but its ragged base remained attached.
It was nothing less than providence. Conza rolled toward it, twisted to put his wrists on either side of the sharp edge, and began sawing the band of his plastic cuffs. In less than a minute he was free.
The half-open back door beckoned. Then he heard a low groan from up front.
Conza turned to get a better look and saw Boss Man in the passenger seat.
He was breathing, but not moving. He shifted a bit higher, his body protesting, and saw Beanie.
Or what was left of him. He’d been thrown to the right-hand sidewall and was now crushed beneath the huge electronic device. He was clearly dead.
Which left only Neck Tat.
Conza crawled forward and peered down into the gap between the container and the front seats.
A stunned Neck Tat looked straight up at him.
Two hands lunged out, reaching for Conza’s throat.
In an instinct honed by years of close-quarters combat training, Conza let him have it. But not without a price.
He bladed his hands, working them under his adversary’s upper arms and over his collarbone.
Conza then pushed ahead, letting himself fall.
Gravity did the rest, his two hundred pounds creating leverage, his triceps forging outward.
The smaller man’s grip broke, and in two seconds Conza was exactly where he wanted to be—behind his opponent with a deep rear choke hold.
The pain in his ribs was excruciating, but having the creator of that pain in his grasp was profoundly motivating.
He hooked his right leg around the man’s waist and turned up the pressure on his trachea and larynx.
The man fought for a moment, but with his airway cut off all coordinated countermeasures gave way to panic.
Conza upped the pressure, his left bicep crushing the man’s neck.
Arms flailed and legs kicked. Conza didn’t relent, not even when the man stopped moving.
He did it for the Black Hawk crew. For those aboard SAM 719.
And, if he were honest, as payback for the pain these men had caused him.
His strength was fading, his arms quaking, when he heard a crash from behind. Conza was suddenly blinded by white light.
The next thing he heard was “Well I’ll be damned, if it isn’t John Conza. We gotta stop meeting like this.”