Clandestine-IsaacHooke-FreeFollowup (37 page)

Two pairs of boots crunched over the rubble beside him. The ambient light brightened momentarily as a flashlight passed over his position; the illumination filtered through the crack he'd left for his eyes, blinding him. Then the light, and the footfalls, moved on.
 

Ethan exhaled softly.

The searchers had split up, judging from the occasional shouts from the different parts of the courtyard. Unlike the rest of the city, the acoustics there were surprisingly good, with minimal echo and distortion, allowing him to pinpoint sound sources with relative accuracy, and he knew two separate groups were moving westward toward the mosque; muted voices, meanwhile, came from the northeast and southeast, telling him that militants had stayed behind to guard the iron gate and the wall rupture, respectively.
 

A louder exchange abruptly drifted to him from the gate. It sounded like the militants on watch were greeting someone.

The conversation ceased and someone new approached. Alone.

The two other groups were returning from their search of the mosque at that time, and converged on the newcomer close to Ethan's position.

"Salaam," the newcomer said. It was Suleman.

"There is no one here, brother," another militant said in Arabic.

"He has to be here," Suleman said. "We had men watching both exits. I know this place very well—I was pinned here a few days ago, and there is no other way out. Did you check all the outbuildings? The mosque?"
 

"We did. Most of the buildings have collapsed. As for the mosque, much of it is gone, and
what's left is mostly open space, with a few closets and side rooms. We searched them all. I tell you, he is not here."
 

"
He is here!
" Suleman hissed.
 

The two-way radios crackled to life. "We need reinforcements in the industrial area, north of the mosque! The yellow-faces are attempting a sortie. Hurry!"

Ethan recognized William's voice and mentally thanked his friend.

"My brother, I am sorry," the militant said. "We are needed elsewhere. He is just one man."

"He is
not
just one man," Suleman said. "It is what he represents. If we let him go, we send a clear message to the American pigs that it is all right for them to infiltrate our ranks with their dirty spies. That it is all right to kill us in the dark and sabotage our equipment and assassinate our emirs."
 

But the others were already retreating, judging from the footfalls.

Suleman cursed them, something about a pig raping their kaffir arses while they burned for all eternity. The usual.

Ethan listened as Suleman's footfalls receded—his boots crunched morosely over the rock, dirt and glass. A distant clink sounded whenever the man experimentally poked his rifle into a rubble pile.
 

The footsteps slowly shifted toward the northern wall and faded as Suleman traversed the gate. Gunfire came from somewhere outside the courtyard, masking his retreat, and when it ended, Ethan no longer heard the man.  
 

He badly wanted to vacate the courtyard, but there had seemed something off about Suleman's exit. His footfalls had seemed too loud. Too dramatic. Like Suleman merely wanted him to
think
he was leaving. It was a tactic Ethan would have used himself. He remembered the certainty he had heard in Suleman's voice, the
conviction
, when he had told the other militants that Ethan was still in the courtyard.
 

And so he remained still, hidden beneath those bricks. The wind picked up, and the entire courtyard descended into darkness. Likely the breeze had brought with it the black smoke from the southern villages, occluding the stars and moon.
 

The nearby shelling stopped entirely, so that he existed in an eerie microcosm of sensory deprivation. The smallest sound might betray his position, but it worked both ways—Ethan kept his ears open, listening intently.
 

The silent, dark minutes passed.

The sporadic shelling and machine gun fire started up again, though the detonations and muzzle flashes were obscured by the mosque and surrounding walls so that no light reached the courtyard. Sound however did penetrate, of course, and the ground shook as a mortar detonated nearby.

Ethan told himself he was overthinking everything. Suleman had gone.

But he waited another ten minutes anyway.

Just when he was about to begin extricating himself, he heard a subtle shifting noise, like the sound a brick might make when disturbed on a rubble pile. It came from the eastern side of the courtyard.

It was possible the loose brick was displaced naturally by reverberations from the shelling.

Somehow Ethan doubted it.

Suleman was out there, stalking him.

The game was afoot.

Ethan waited for a mortar to strike nearby, then lifted his free arm and removed a brick from his face, letting the shudder of the explosion mask the sound of his movements. He continued to wait for impacts and machine gun bursts, and in that way he slowly extricated himself from the pile.

He positioned himself on the dirt beside the rubble, and winced—his right knee was still tender from the brick he'd dropped on it earlier.
 

The drifting smoke had cleared somewhat overhead, allowing the starlight to filter down. The moon however remained shrouded. Because of the starlight, he was able to discern the outline of the rubble beside him, which blocked half the courtyard from view.

Lying flat, he slid Beast from his shoulder and tentatively peered through the 10x scope. The magnification was workable for the football field dimensions of the courtyard. In those sections of the grounds not obscured by the rubble pile beside him, he saw a green-black world of collapsed outbuildings, broken cobblestone and twisted shrubs, hemmed in by impenetrable regions of black wall.
 

Suleman could be lying in wait anywhere among that mess, indiscernible from any other mound of debris. And in the starlight, Ethan would appear the same to Suleman.

He discerned the slight illumination marking the northern gate, but couldn't see the rent in the eastern wall from his current position. If Ethan wanted to trap someone in the courtyard, he would have chosen a hide with both exits in sight. Given the separation between the two, he probably would've picked a spot near one of the exits themselves, in case someone tried to sneak past him.
 

Where are you?

Ethan considered retreating toward the mosque and reverting to his original plan of using the debris to scale the western wall, but it would take him forever to crawl that way without making a sound, and there was no guarantee he wouldn't slip up somewhere along the line.

He decided to move slightly away from the debris beside him for a better view of the courtyard. He very carefully low-crawled forward, literally at a snail's pace, taking three minutes to cover the five feet. When he was in place, he folded down the Harris bipod, set the legs on the ground, and then brought his eye to Beast's scope.
 

He swept the field of view along the battered landscape; the sniper rifle swiveled on its bipod courtesy of the rotapod adapter. He was able to discern the entire eastern half of the courtyard, though that only meant more caved buildings and broken shrubs. He did, however, pick out the rent in the eastern wall, but he couldn't discern a thing on either side of it. He continued scanning the area, but there were simply too many areas the starlight didn't reach. A base level of brightness was required for night vision to work, and those shadows just weren't cutting it.

Where's a damn PEQ-2 when you need one?
Then again, an infrared illuminator would've only given him away in the current predicament.
 

He listened to the nearby rumble of DShKs and mortars, and his mind wandered. Perhaps the sliding brick had indeed been a natural displacement. Surely Suleman would have made another noise by then?

Ethan shook his head. He refused to underestimate the man a second time. Suleman was there.

He steeled himself for the long wait. Patience. That was the key to any sniper duel: the hunter with the most patience won.

Ethan moved his field of view between the two exits, knowing that Suleman could be anywhere in that darkness, even right beside him. He tried to memorize the location of every shrub, rubble pile, and outbuilding. His hope was to spot an anomaly: some bush that shifted ever so slightly between glances; some cobblestone pile that moved a foot a minute.
 

Unfortunately, Suleman would very likely stay put. That was what Ethan was doing, after all.

Time was running out. Ethan had to find a way to draw the man out. He couldn't afford to remain there all night. When news spread of the bloody escape of the kaffir spies from the forward camp, more militants would be willing to listen to Suleman. The man could be texting for reinforcements on FireChat at that very moment, with the light from his cellphone shielded by very careful arrangement of his clothing.
 

His cellphone...

Ethan had an idea.

A
mortar shell struck unnervingly close, scarcely beyond the walls of the mosque so that the ground shuddered violently. Ethan's lungs rattled in his ribcage.
 

He crept behind the debris beside him, letting the piled bricks shield his body from most of the courtyard. He removed his Android from his pocket. The screen was black, and would remain so until he attempted to unlock it. He unwound the scarf from his neck, then carefully removed the jacket portion of his fatigues, exposing the Kevlar vest underneath. He placed the smartphone beside his face and layered the scarf and jacket over his head, tucking in the edges of the fabrics.

He hesitated, then unlocked the cellphone. The brightness was set to the dimmest value from his earlier usage. He would know if any of the light seeped from his cover soon enough, however—when the bullet came.
 

He loaded up a timer app and started a countdown. Soundlessly, he adjusted the volume and brightness levels to maximum, and then quickly locked the Android. The screen blackened.
 

He doffed the jacket and scarf to retrieve the duct tape from his pocket; very slowly, he quietly unraveled a small piece. When it was of suitable size, he carefully tore it away. Then he turned on his radio, leaving the volume too low to produce anything audible, and depressed the send button; he wrapped the tape around it so that the radio remained in "transmit" mode. Probing in the dark, he secured the two-way radio to the smartphone with another piece of tape, being careful not to obscure the Android's screen, nor to press some button that would light it.
 

Satisfied, he snaked forward until he was slightly past the edge of the rubble pile again. He placed the rifle on the ground via the bipod, and with his 10x scope, located a clearing near the center of the courtyard; in the middle grew a particular arrangement of shrubs that could easily be confused with a prostrate human body under the night vision. He panned to the left and right to ensure a relatively clear corridor, and then, keeping his body aligned to the chosen spot, he extricated himself from Beast and threw the phone-radio combination.
 

The jury-rigged contraption clattered loudly on the broken cobblestone of the clearing, landing roughly twenty meters away. He could almost imagine Suleman swinging the barrel of his M16A4 toward the noise.
 

Ethan scanned the eastern portion of the grounds through Beast. His heart was beating rapidly in anticipation. He wondered how close to the foliage the phone had landed. Would it be near enough?
 

Come on. Come on.

His Android seared to life in the center of the courtyard. The screen cast a bright green bloom about the smartphone, which the night vision quickly auto-gated. The cell had landed right beside the humanlike shrubs: the foliage looked even more convincing under the illumination, at least from Ethan's position, appearing as a man lying face down with a backpack beside him.

The triple-report of an A4 sounded from the far side of the foyer as his opponent fired on extinct. The muzzle flash of the unsuppressed rifle had been situated beyond the field of view of Ethan's scope, but he'd caught it with his other eye and immediately swiveled his aim in the general direction.
 

Your first mistake, bro.

Suleman had missed the phone, and the bright screen continued to provide ambiance, enough for Ethan to pick out additional minute details from the surrounding ruins. Suleman would be able to do the same, of course, except that without knowing Ethan's general location, he had a far greater zone to cover.

Focusing on the area that had given rise to the muzzle flash, Ethan spotted the partial outline of a newly visible black-green form that may or may not have belonged to a sniper, located close to the eastern gap in the wall. Suleman? Or another humanlike shrub?
 

In the background, an annoying chime sounded from the Android, repeating incessantly into the radio. If Suleman tried to call for help over the main channel, his transmission would be drowned out by the noise, that or blocked entirely, thanks to the "busy channel lockout" feature of the radios, which prevented outgoing transmissions while the line was active. He'd have to use one of the less-trafficked squad channels, if he dared.

Ethan waited for the sniper to fire at the phone again and confirm his position, or for the target in his sights to move, but his opponent did neither. Suleman obviously realized the trap he had fallen into.
 

Ethan kept his aim on the indistinct figure. He could shoot anyway and hope he was right. But if he was wrong, then his own unsuppressed muzzle would betray him.

And then Ethan noticed the black-green form beneath his reticule seemed to shift slightly. He stared at it very carefully. No, it wasn't moving after all. He must have imagined it.