End Game Read online

  That had been the only thing keeping him going through his rehabilitation.

  Yet when he’d been released from rehab, Jessica Reel had not been there. No calls. No e-mails. No texts. Nothing.

  So much for being unbeatable together.

  They’d obviously been meaningless words.

  He landed back in DC and went immediately to his apartment, a nondescript space in an unremarkable building near Dupont Circle.

  Robie had nothing of a personal nature in his apartment.

  And that was when he saw it.

  The envelope on his bed.

  There was no writing on it.

  It had not been there when he had left for London.

  Robie’s first instincts were defensive. He slipped the gun from its holster and held it at the ready.

  He gripped the envelope with his free hand and shook the letter out.

  It was one page folded over.

  The handwriting was one he was familiar with.

  The words were few and still managed to cut through him like the KM2000 had through neck arteries back in London.

  It’s complicated. I’m sorry. JR

  Robie put his gun away and folded the letter back over and placed it in his pocket.

  He walked over to the window.

  It was dark now and the rain had started. With the inclement weather he could be back in London.

  Yet this was a perfect time for Robie to take a walk. He didn’t like crowds. And right now he was in no mood for sunny and fair weather.

  He made his way along his favorite route, which led him to Memorial Bridge. Arlington National Cemetery was across the bridge, and the Lincoln Memorial was behind him. He stood by the rampart and looked down at the waters of the Potomac.

  The river was flowing far more freely than his thoughts.

  What exactly did she mean by “It’s complicated”? They both knew everything about their lives was complicated. So what had changed between Mississippi and the note being left on his bed?

  He looked around.

  The last time he had been here, Blue Man had appeared out of the darkness and given him some much-needed advice. Robie could always count on Blue Man. He always told him not what he wanted to hear, but what he needed to hear.

  As if on cue a figure appeared out of the darkness.

  Only this time it wasn’t Blue Man.

  Robie’s gun came out and he pointed it at the approaching figure.

  The person stopped.

  “They told me you might be here.”

  “Who are you?” asked Robie.

  Drawing closer, the person was illuminated by the lights on the bridge.

  It was a woman.

  But it was not Jessica Reel.

  “I know you,” said Robie, peering at her.

  She nodded. “I work with Blue Man.”

  Robie looked around. “Where is he? Why did he send you?”

  “He didn’t. I mean, he couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Blue Man has disappeared.”

  Chapter

  4

  SAND.

  And not from a fun day at the beach.

  It was in your mouth, your lungs, and your nose.

  And possibly in your dreams.

  Or here, more likely, in your nightmares.

  Gritty, omnipresent, there was no way to avoid it.

  Jessica Reel was using a tactical scout sniper periscope to safely get eyes on those she would later try to kill.

  Iraq looked like Iraq had ten years ago, at least to her. Buildings were reduced to rubble, people were dying violently. Armies massed and attacked, and terrorists counterattacked, deploying an array of weapons either stolen or bought from countries around the world.

  Everything was for shit here, although the politicians tried to put a positive spin on it all. Or blame others after the spin no longer worked.

  Right now, the fighting was divided neatly into urban and desert.

  Reel wasn’t sure which she preferred. Urban was more complicated and potentially more lethal. One wrong step and a hidden IED takes you away from life in a millisecond. Or someone you thought was an ally confronts you with a C4 suicide pack strapped around his waist. Or a kid hiding a gun under his shirt walks up to you asking for candy, and you have a single moment to decide whether to kill him or not.

  In the desert there was nothing between you and them except sand either flat or with some height. And killing from long range could come at any moment. Reel knew this for a fact, currently being a major source of her country’s long-range kills.

  She lowered the periscope and made some notes in her DOPE (data of previous engagements) book. In it she had made references and notes on every shot she had fired during this deployment. All the hits and the rare misses.

  She learned the most from the misses.

  She was part of a fifteen-person team that had only two snipers, of which she was one. She was also the only female in the group. They didn’t care that she could run three miles in under eighteen minutes or that she could do twenty or more dead-hang pull-ups or perform two hundred crunches in four minutes. That was what the Marines required at their sniper school. Years ago Reel had passed every test there and been the first female candidate to complete the course successfully.

  They only cared whether she could do her job, which meant pulling the trigger and eliminating someone on the other team whose only goal was to kill Reel and her team.

  Still, there had been some grumbling about her from some of the men, mostly the younger ones. Younger ones these days were those barely freed from their teens. After the first two days when Reel had laid down nine out of nine targets, the grumbling had mysteriously vanished. And she was suddenly one of the guys.

  Every member of the team was only about one thing: the mission.

  The second unspoken goal, but of no less importance to all of them, was survival. None of them wanted to die in the desert. All of them wanted to get back home.

  Reel included, though she really had no home to go back to.

  And a sniper who could consistently kill people trying to kill you was a valuable friend indeed.

  Tikrit, Ramadi, Fallujah, and finally Mosul had been taken back from the enemy. Although, like putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, it was proving nearly impossible to make the situation right. The terrorists had had a long time to inflict maximum destruction on these cities and the people living there. Most of the places were simply uninhabitable, because basic things like water and sewage lines were no longer operating and electrical power was spotty at best. And added to that the cities were still filled with hidden explosives and other death traps.

  But rebuilding was not Reel’s job. Her mission was to kill as many of the enemy as she could. That could be her only focus.

  Her group consisted of Americans, Brits, French, Australians, and two Iraqi force members who still looked at her with unfriendly eyes, even though she could outshoot and outwork both of them. And maybe that was why they looked at her the way they did, other than her being a woman—which in this part of the world was disqualifying for most occupations, and certainly one that required wielding a gun.

  The boom of mortar fire and RPGs constantly filled the air along with gunfire and IEDs sending the unwary or the unlucky to early graves. Overhead, called-in air strikes happened with great frequency, with the U.S. providing most of the muscle in the sky.

  Reel had been here nearly six months, a loan-out from a civilian agency that provided military support. The other members of her team had been assigned to this duty.

  Reel had volunteered for it.

  She sniped during the day for the most part unless there was a particular mission on. At night, she was still on duty, but would alternate with her co-sniper. Each often acted as a spotter for the other, and sometimes, due to the dictates of combat, they went solo.

  She knew one thing clearly: She was the single most lethal person on this battlef
ield, able to precisely and consistently kill at over twelve hundred meters. The other side knew this as well. Thus, the bull’s-eye on her was a large one.

  And if she were ever captured?

  Well, in addition to being an American and a woman, snipers historically were not known for receiving a kind reception from their captors.

  If she were about to be captured, Reel had long since decided to eat a round instead.

  The time came and she readied her rifle.

  Years ago her head had been turned into a ballistic computer, analyzing the key physical forces on a bullet fired long-range: altitude, temperature, humidity, and wind, particularly wind two-thirds of the way to the target. But now, with second- and third-generation long-range sniper systems, these calculations were done faster and more accurately by machine than a human ever could. Automation was even hitting the ranks of the elite snipers, not just working joes on assembly lines in Detroit. Thus devices like a ballistic computer, projected reticle display, digital compass, and meteorological and inclination and related sensors traveled everywhere she did. She had ballistic software downloaded on her iPhone. It was all fed into her optics, which had cost twice as much as her gun.

  As the old saying among long-range shooters went: Buy once, cry once.

  Now covered with a ghillie suit the color of sand, she lay on the ground and went to work.

  The key attribute for any sniper was patience. You worked in a bubble of focus, staying sharp and alert despite exhaustion. And you didn’t move. For this reason, she wore a diaper under her clothing so she wouldn’t have to get up to relieve herself.

  She’d already zeroed her weapon at the range she would be shooting. Her computer had allowed Reel to laze her target, and a ballistic-solution crosshair had been spit out.

  When holding her weapon Reel never gripped anything, because muscular exertion caused the limbs to do something no sniper could tolerate: It caused appendages to shake, however imperceptibly. It was also called the death grip in sniping circles; if you missed because you were shaking, the other side would get a chance to take you out.

  Thus, her left forearm ran straight and true along her weapon’s stock. Angled right or left you used muscle to hold the gun. Vertical on vertical meant gravity was doing the job for you. Her toes were pointed out, the sides of her feet flat to the sand. She looked like she was about to do some yoga move. She could and had held such a position for hours, because virtually no strength was required.

  Her main snipe rifle was based on the tried-and-true Remington 700 platform with some customization. Her spare was a Barrett M82. For this tour of duty she had switched over her ammo from the legendary .338 Lapua magnum rounds to the .300 Winchester Magnum rounds. Her rifle barrel held a right-hand twist, which meant the bullet coming out of it would cheat a bit in that direction, a phenomenon known as spindrift, which she had accounted for. And she was shooting over such a long distance that the earth’s rotation also came into play; it was known as the Coriolis effect. It really only mattered if you were shooting pretty much straight north or south. The bullet would fudge slightly to the left if the target was north and to the right if the target pointed south. If you didn’t compensate for it, the earth’s constant movement would rotate your target right out of the kill zone. A millimeter error of calculation on this end would result in the shot’s being a foot off on the other end.

  Ballistics confirmed, her spotter satisfied, all data dialed into her optics, she was ready to execute.

  Her finger went to the trigger. She would press with the soft part of the finger midway between the tip and the first joint. This was the area of the finger that moved the least sideways.

  She slowly squeezed the trigger on the down breath right at the point where she no longer needed to exhale or to start inhaling again. This respiratory phase was the stillest your lungs would be without duress or discomfort and that meant it was the most calmly immobile your body would be. When you inhaled, the muzzle dropped, when you exhaled, the muzzle rose. But the sweet spot was on the exhale breath, and in between a heartbeat; that was what every good sniper strived for.

  Reel kept a smooth, consistent trigger-press pressure all the way through the shot and then led the trigger back to its forward position.

  The bullet blasted out of her barrel and was immediately subject to the rules of drag, and also of gravity, meaning it had begun to fall back to earth. The Win Mag round covered 30 percent of its max flight in a heartbeat. Two-thirds of the way to the target, drag was minimized and gravity became the biggest obstacle to a clean shot.

  And that was why Reel had fired at an angle equal to the target being nearly sixty feet tall. By the time it got to the end of its flight path, it would impact the target at fifty-four inches off the ground, meaning directly into the brain of the five-foot-ten-inch man seated at a rough wooden table on the other end.

  Before the ISIS field commander that had caused her side endless grief even fell dead, Reel’s scope had come directly back to her such that after recoil she saw the same image through her optics. If this had been on the range for practice she would have received high marks.

  Since it was combat for real, someone’s life had just ended.

  Her shot had covered nearly fifteen hundred meters, or a little under a mile. A superior distance, it still would not have put her in the top ten of longest kill shots. The current number ten on that list was a Marine sniper who had done the deed from over sixteen hundred meters. For many years number one on that list had been a Brit who had killed two Afghans from nearly twenty-five hundred meters with a single bullet. But that shot had recently been bested by a Canadian elite special forces fighter who had recorded a kill shot in Iraq at more than thirty-five hundred meters.

  After Reel’s shot killed the man, things got interesting.

  There were few events that got the adrenaline going faster than knowing that a sniper was in town. Seconds after the dead man slumped forward on the tabletop, his comrades were running and ducking and throwing themselves behind whatever they could find that would stop their fate from being the same as their deceased commander’s.

  And with her spotter constantly feeding her data and Reel inputting that data into her optics, she kept firing.

  Six trigger pulls later her rounds had found five fleshy entry points. The only one that hadn’t was the one that had impacted the rifle barrel of the targeted man, who had moved his rifle to the front of his chest after Reel had already fired. The round glanced off the barrel and buried itself in the sand.

  That was the major problem with sniping at this great distance. The targets had to be stationary. If they moved right after you fired, the round would miss, because it would take the bullet a few seconds to get there. The bullet fired by the Canadian elite special forces member had taken nearly ten seconds to reach its target.

  Yet being only a hundred yards away from an enemy carried another set of complications. Reel and her team would be subject to a variety of counterattacks and the threat of being physically overrun. Right now Reel had her spotter and four other soldiers with her. The target they were attacking held a hundred ISIS fighters and an assortment of hand-me-down armored vehicles in which they could counterattack.

  Being nearly a mile away gave Reel and her team a lot more latitude. And time for exfiltration, which was a fancy military term for getting the hell out of Dodge.

  Her work finished for now, Reel filled out her DOPE and put away her weapon. They drove back to their base, only to be told that they would be heading out on another mission that night. They would support a SEAL team attack on a compound where it was rumored the number two man in ISIS would be, along with three hostages, one of whom was a U.S. Marine captured two weeks prior.

  Reel and her team attended the briefing. She snatched some shut-eye, and then they geared up and moved out.

  Just another night in the neighborhood.

  Only it wouldn’t be like any other night for Jessica Reel, ever.


  Chapter

  5

  SEAL TEAMS DID everything in the fast lane.

  The stealth chopper came low and fast over a rise in the sand, its engine and prop wash as quiet as the best and brightest of American engineering could make them.

  Ten SEAL Team Six members fast-roped down to the interior of the compound. Moving as one unit, they hit the sole entrance of the building and disappeared inside.

  A football field’s length away, Reel, her spotter, and other team members watched the proceedings closely.

  Reel lay in the sand behind her sniper rifle. Her optics held on the interior of the courtyard, which could be seen through an opening that had once held a gate.