Kill Zone Read online

  ALSO BY

  JACK COUGHLIN

  Shooter: The Autobiography of

  the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper

  (with Capt. Casey Kuhlman and Donald A. Davis)

  ALSO BY

  DONALD A. DAVIS

  Lightning Strike

  The Last Man on the Moon (with Gene Cernan)

  Dark Waters (with Lee Vyborny)

  KILL ZONE

  GUNNERY SGT.

  JACK COUGHLIN,

  USMC (RET.)

  with

  DONALD A. DAVIS

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  KILL ZONE

  Copyright © 2007 by Jack Coughlin with Donald A. Davis.

  Excerpt from Dead Shot copyright © 2008 by Jack Coughlin with Donald A. Davis.

  Cover photograph of soldier © Lynsey Addario / Corbis

  Cover photograph of gun © Jim Sugar / Corbis

  All rights reserved.

  For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  ISBN: 0-312-94567-1

  EAN: 978-0-312-94567-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / November 2007

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / December 2008

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PROLOGUE

  A DUSTY HAZE HUNG OVER the little cluster of mud and brick huts just before dawn, and the smell of cooking fires filtered back to the snipers. A boy with a stick herded a few goats across stony ground to the east, trying to find something on which the animals could graze. The land was barren and bleak, like the lives of the few people who lived here. A single guard with an AK-47 walked about, trying to stay awake.

  It had taken Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson and his spotter, Corporal Eric Martinez, seventy-two hours since being dropped by helicopter to reach the hidden overlook position. They had humped through valleys and steep ridges, following faint trails that led them to a rough road running through the no-name village.

  They had moved only during darkness, for although they wore the same sort of clothing as the locals, they obviously were quite different. Swanson was a Massachusetts Irishman with reddish-blond hair, and Martinez was an olive-skinned Mexican. With such distinctive faces, plus being weaponed up, they could not take the chance of being examined too closely.

  They made scheduled radio checks every two hours. Swanson led the way in silence as they closed in on the road until they spotted the lights of the village in the distance. He looked at the map for a final time, smiled, folded it up, and put it into a pocket.

  It was still the darkest hours of the night when they discovered the deep cave on the ridge above the village. It had an exit at the far end, which allowed them to crawl in undetected. They gathered weeds and bushes from the rear side of the ridge and stuffed them into the folds of their loose clothing to create crude ghillie suits, and became invisible in the night. They took their positions, set up the rifle and the spotting scope, and lay motionless fifteen yards back in the gloom of the small cavern.

  The target was in one of those huts below them on the road that led from Afghanistan into Pakistan.

  At 5:00 A.M., Martinez reported on the radio that the hunter-killer team was on station and expected the target to move soon. Swanson gave him some map coordinates, and a routine confirmation was returned. Without contradictory instructions at that final radio check, the mission was to proceed, so the snipers went black. The radio was turned off to save the battery, and the backup satellite phone was also shut down.

  They would have preferred to conduct the entire operation at night to help with their escape, but the world isn’t perfect in combat. A window of opportunity such as this would be open for a very short time. It had to be done now.

  They ran laser ranges on every hut and worked out firing solutions on all of them, including the front door of the target hut, its single window, and the old pickup truck parked out front. There was a scramble of junk in the bed of the pickup to make it appear to be just another vehicle carrying scavenged items for resale at some bazaar.

  Kyle Swanson smoothly glassed the area, the huts, and truck. The images jumped in magnification, seeming close enough to reach out and touch. He looked at the guard wandering aimlessly about. Still good.

  A light came on in the window, the yellow flicker of a lantern. “We have movement,” whispered Martinez.

  A big man came through the door. The snipers, working from a picture, examined him closely through their scopes to get positive identification. The bearded face of Ali bin Assam was unmistakable in the brightening morning light. “It’s him,” said Martinez.

  Ali was a top military operative of al Qaeda, one of the operational guys who planned the dirty work, then had others carry out the attacks. He was responsible for a lot of innocent people being dead, and American intel had picked up his scent after a suicide bomb attack in Baghdad had misfired a week earlier. Swanson and Martinez were assigned to hunt him down and kill him.

  Now Swanson laid the crosshairs of his rifle on the dark figure.

  “I see the target,” said Martinez. He quickly glanced at the logbook. “Four hundred eleven meters to the doorway.”

  “Wind?” Swanson asked softly.

  Martinez looked at the smoke drifting over the hut. “Two minutes left.”

  Swanson fine-tuned until Ali bin Assam filled the scope. “I’m holding center mass.”

  “Roger. On scope.”

  The terrorist looked up at the brightening sky and seemed pleased with the coming of morning. The new day held the promise that he would soon be safe in the tunneled sanctuary of Pakistan’s forbidding Tora Bora mountains. He raised his big arms and stretched, his back bending.

  “On target,” said Swanson as he took up the slack on the trigger.

  “Fire when ready.”

  Swanson exhaled and gently pulled straight back on the trigger, and the long rifle fired. The 7.62mm bullet tore through Ali just left of center, ripped through vital organs and arteries, and took out a chunk of the heart. He staggered back and collapsed against a dirty wall as blood poured out of him.

  The guard stared down in surprise at his fallen leader, and Swanson turned the rifle on him, jacked in a new round, and hammered the gunman with a chest shot. The body crumpled to the ground, where it quivered briefly like a piece of Jell-O.

  “Two hits,” Martinez confirmed. “Two targets down.”

  To make sure, Kyle Swanson put another round into Ali’s head.

  The shots echoed across the little valley, but no other fighters emerged from the huts, and no return fire came searching for the snipers. In this harsh land of easy death, no one wanted to get involved in whatever had just happened, and they all stayed inside except for the little boy, who had abandoned his goats and taken off running. They let him go.

  Martinez backed out of the rear entrance of the cave and ran down to the fallen targets while Swanson covered him. He opened a kit containing test tubes, snipped a hair sample from Ali, and shoved a long cotton swab to the back of the dead man’s tongue for a saliva sample. He bottled them both and locked them in the small box. The DNA would be used later for positive identific
ation.

  When he was clear, they started to hump back to a flat area about 800 meters away, where the daylight extraction could be done by a Black Hawk helicopter accompanied by a pair of Apache gunships. There was no need for secrecy now, just speed. The jig was up and the snipers had to get out of there.

  Martinez turned the radio back on and gave the map coordinates to call in the birds, but a raspy and angry voice broke into his transmission. “Where have you been?” the voice demanded. “We’ve been trying to get you for the last thirty minutes! Abort the mission. Say again, abort the mission!”

  Martinez stared in shock, but Swanson winked at him and grabbed the receiver. “Too damned late! Mission accomplished.”

  “Fuck!” There was panic in the disembodied voice. “You gave us the wrong coordinates on that village. You were on the wrong side of the border. Fuck! Choppers are inbound. We’ll deal with this when you get back.” The transmission was terminated.

  Swanson handed the receiver back to Martinez. “Let’s go home.” They set out in a trot down the ravine toward the landing zone.

  “Gunny, we in trouble?”

  “Eric, you just remember we took out a real bad motherfucker today. We may get some shit for it, but when they quit shouting, old Ali’s still going to be real dead, and that’s a good deal. He was a worthless piece of shit who had a lot of American and Iraqi blood on his hands. Anyway, we can’t unshoot him, can we? Can’t change a thing. I’ll take any blame, but my guess is they will just bury it. The CIA never admits mistakes.”

  “Did you know we were on the wrong side of the border?” They heard the buzz of the approaching choppers, and Swanson popped a smoke grenade to signal their location.

  “I was always lousy at map-reading,” Swanson grinned. “That bastard needed killing and now he’s dead. That was the job. Fuck the border.”

  CHAPTER 1

  THE BOATMAN STOOD WAITING in the cold fog, a ragged apparition resting against a long oar that disappeared into the black water. He smelled of death, and his robe pulsed in the stiff wind. “Do you have another one?”

  “No. Not this time.” Kyle Swanson recognized the five silent passengers seated in the low craft, for he had brought them all here, one by one. They stared at nothing, with empty and lifeless eyes, and did not know him.

  “Then I still have an empty seat,” said the Boatman. “Will you furnish someone else soon?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. Maybe not.” Over the Boatman’s shoulder, he saw tongues of fire raging along the far shore.

  “No.”

  The spectral figure shook its head and exhaled a foul odor. “I cannot leave with an empty seat.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Swanson looked about, but there was no one else around. He carefully put down his fully loaded M40A1 sniper rifle, unsnapped the web gear, and let the pack fall away. He took off blocks of C-4 explosive and tossed them aside. Two razor-sharp knives, gleaming blades streaked with blood. A silenced 9 mm pistol. A sawed-off shotgun. An M-16 and an AK-47 and a Claymore mine and its clacker. Smoke, fragmentation, and thermite grenades. A small satellite radio. All the tools of the sniper’s trade. He wanted to hold on to something. “Can I keep my boots?”

  “You will have no need for boots, but it does not matter.”

  “They’re comfortable. I just got them broken in good.”

  “Keep them.” A favor. Bare, cracked teeth showed in the skull. The Boatman usually had little to say, but he and Kyle Swanson had known each other for a very long time.

  Swanson took off his boonie cover and put it on top of the stack, tucking it so that the eagle, globe, and anchor emblem of the United States Marine Corps remained visible. Then he removed the plastic-laminated photograph of a beautiful young woman with dark hair and eyes, kissed it, and placed it on the pile.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Very well.” The Boatman extended a long, bony hand. Swanson grabbed it for support as he stepped aboard and took a seat among his latest five kills. Ali bin Assam, looking gray and with a big hole through him, was beside him.

  Swanson felt the small vessel rock gently as the Boatman shoved off, pushing hard on the oar to begin the passage across that black river to whatever was over there where the flames danced along a brimstone beach.

  At least I still have my boots, he thought. At least I still have my soul.

  Then the hand grabbed his shoulder.

  CHAPTER 2

  KYLE! LET’S GO, LAD. Time to do some shooting.” Sir Geoffrey Corn well pushed gently on Swanson’s shoulder, awakening him with a start. As a former colonel in the British Special Air Services, Jeff understood that warriors sometimes have dreams, and his keen gray eyes beneath bushy brows studied the sniper, who had been twitching in his sleep.

  Swanson blinked in the bright sunshine that made the Aegean Sea glow like burnished copper. The boat was rocking gently, but this was not a death cruise. The fucking Boatman didn’t get him this time. Instead, he was safe aboard the Vagabond, one of Jeff’s favorite toys. One hundred and eighty feet long and twenty-nine feet wide, the yacht was as sleek as a needle and carried five luxurious cabins and a crew of eleven, plus a full-time captain. A pair of 3,240-horsepower engines thrummed quietly somewhere below the polished teak decks.

  Swanson yawned. “Okay,” he said. “Let me wash up and grab something wet to drink and I’ll be ready.” His mouth was dry. “Go tend your flock. Five minutes.” Jeff smiled and slapped him on the back and returned into the air-conditioned main cabin where three venture capital money men, two Americans and one Brit, were having drinks, and resumed promising them an opportunity to buy into a river of gold. When Jeff retired from the SAS, he had made a quick fortune as a consultant to defense industries, then raked together an even bigger pile of money by designing, producing, and selling high-tech weapons on his own. At the age of sixty, he had a knighthood for his outstanding, although undisclosed, services to the Empire, a Bill Gates-size checkbook, and better hair than Donald Trump.

  Kyle Swanson got up, stretched, adjusted his bathing suit, and walked to the hot tub area.

  Jeff’s wife, Lady Patricia, was in a lounge chair. She wore a big white straw hat that provided a circle of shade that protected her face. She was drinking neat whiskey and smoking a thin cigar as she read a Danielle Steel novel. Her shimmering blue one-piece bathing suit was covered by a gauzy wrap. Lady Pat had put up with being a military wife for years and now openly enjoyed the good life. In Kyle’s opinion, she had earned it.

  The venture capitalists had brought along the eye candy for the week of cruising among the Greek islands, their stunningly beautiful young trophy wives, who had been topless almost since the yacht left Naples two days ago. Now they lay bronzing on large towels beside the pool, toasting magnificent plastic breasts that gleamed with oil. Kyle wondered if there was a factory somewhere with an assembly line that stamped out these kids for rich old farts.

  He sat on the edge of the hot tub, stuck his feet in the warm water, and nodded in their direction. “You ought to do that,” he told his girlfriend, Lieutenant Commander Shari Towne. “You know, take off your top for a while. Looks comfortable.”

  “No,” she said, protectively adjusting the top of her red bikini.

  “You’re already way out of uniform, ma’am.” Her long black hair lay wet against her dark shoulders, and just looking into her black eyes made his stomach do flips, because he considered Shari to be the most delectable intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy. She had been born in Jordan to an American father and a Jordanian mother, both of whom worked for their respective governments. Shari was only six years old when her father, a young diplomat based in Amman with the State Department, was killed in a plane crash. Her mother was a public relations and tourism specialist and worked at embassy postings in Cairo, Paris, and Tokyo before her current assignment as head of the public relations department for the Jordanian Embassy in Washington.

  Shari was fluent in
several languages by the time she entered George Washington University and accepted a U.S. Navy commission upon graduation. It did not take long for her to land in Naval Intelligence, where, after compiling a sterling record, she was snapped up to be an analyst for the National Security Council. Her office was only a desk in a basement cubicle, but the address was still the best in town, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: the White House.

  “Go away,” Shari told Kyle, closing her eyes and leaning against the high-pressure jets that churned the water into frothy bubbles around her. She lifted her face to the sun.

  “Hey,” Swanson argued. “Your boobs are real! We ought to show them off.”

  “We? You don’t get a vote on that. You want tits, go over there and ogle the Desperate Housewives.” Her breathing rate had not increased and her eyes remained closed as she insulted him. She added, in Arabic, “Screw you.”

  “Screw me? Now there’s a thought,” Kyle replied in the same language. His smooth line wasn’t working, but the evening held promise. Swanson splashed water on his face, wiped it with a soft towel, and stole a few sips from the glass of iced tea at Shari’s side.

  On the deck above, Jeff herded the potential investors to the railing and explained what was going to happen.

  Kyle glanced at them. Soft men in shorts and bright shirts. “I gotta go to work now,” he said. “Blow up some shit for Jeff’s pals.”

  “So go,” Shari ordered. She opened her eyes and gave him a smile.

  Lady Pat lowered her steamy novel, peered at him above her sunglasses for a moment, and also got in a barb. “And Kyle, dear, please remember that these ladies and gentlemen are Sir Geoffrey’s dear friends, important guests and investors. So do be a good boy and try not to kill anyone, at least until after dinner, would you please?”

  “Does that include smartass broads, m’lady?”