Sniper's Honor(101)

If he had to fight for his life, this was not quite what he would have come up with. However, the British won their part of World War II with this stuff, so in for a penny, in for a pound. Mili Petrova was worth it. He would have fought with a can opener for her.

Now he heard them. At last. It was almost a relief. By canting a little and staying low, he was able to get an eyeball on them.

There were six, seven if you counted the dog, who came first, sniffing bravely for pheromones that weren’t there. It pulled Thug One on a leash and was followed by Thugs Two through Five, in sweatsuits or jeans, really heavy, strong, tough-looking guys. Gangster meat, each carrying a short-barreled AK-74 with the long forty-round plum-colored magazine. Jerry Renn hadn’t flown in an A-Team from Dubai or anything like that. He’d hired off the Moscow street, probably Mob soldiers, cheap and expendable, complete with heavy brows, jawlines stark with testosterone, necks like diesel tires, huge hands, an aura of instant, thoughtless brutality so necessary to instill terror in potential resistants and keep others in the outfit in line, as well as to guarantee the boss’s comfort. Drug couriers or security, rule enforcement, lords of snitch discipline, collection experts, takedown crew, gunfighters, whatever was called for, these men provided it without a lot of thought before or guilt afterward. They were the universal soldiers of the Mob, any Mob. They did it for the blow, the chicks and the gold necklaces. On a good day they got all three, on a bad, nothing but lead at twelve hundred feet per second.

Then came Jerry, last in line, but with a shorty AK as well. That made him one of the boys, that made him killable. Bob tried not to personalize this stuff, but he thought it would be kind of cool to kill Jerry. You could tell he was convinced he was pretty hot stuff, and that Swagger was years beyond effectiveness, an old goat with a bad case of crankiness and a steel ball for a hip. Be nice to blow the smug off his face with eighteen or twenty Sten-gun rounds.

Jerry had added a baseball hat, khaki, and one of those shoot-me-first tactical vests the contractors all wore. All his shit was sand-colored, so he’d spent a lot of time in the sand. He also wore Oakley killer shades, what looked to be a SiG 226 strapped to his thigh in a Tommy Tactical rig, and a nice pair of too-expensive tactical boots. He looked like a model for the iTactical.com site.

At least the six weren’t talking, bullshitting, smoking, joshing, or laughing. They weren’t quite that cocksure, though their postures were far from the kind of Condition Four readiness that kept you alive on combat patrols. It was clear they thought they had this one whipped. An old man with a bad hip, a not quite so old woman, an actual grandma, no weapons, no water, in wilderness about which they knew nothing, mostly moving uphill as fast as possible, but grinding down every step of the way. What was there to worry about?



* * *



Reilly couldn’t think of Paris. She couldn’t even think of Ocean City. It wasn’t fear, not as some experience it: weight, dread, air painful to skin, breath raw and raspy and somehow not satisfying. It was more like: Do I really have to do this? And: I can think of a lot of reasons why this is not a good idea. What would Marty say? “You what? You killed gangsters? Don’t tell Legal.”

So she tried to think of something else, something that she really loved, something that had sustained her over the years. She didn’t want to think of Will or her two daughters or her grandchild, because she feared that would make her shaky and full of remorse.

So she thought of newsrooms.

She knew she had been so lucky to live her life in newsrooms, among funny, ironic, not terribly serious people, some geniuses, some hacks, some fools, some crazy. You got the weirdest memories from a newsroom. There was a reporter who went out on a story and managed to lose a company car. That took some doing, although alcohol was involved. There was a strange old lady, who every day wore a pilot’s leather cap and a dress made from the Maryland flag. There was a failed priest who spent his lunchtime feeding quarters into peep machines in a nearby porn strip. There was a man who slipped off to massage parlors. There were several toupees wearing men beneath them, several princesses of WASP, Jewish, and Asian persuasion, a managing editor whose pants were too high, followed by one whose pants were too low. She’d weathered a storm when one new regime brought in anyone they could hire from Philadelphia, including, she supposed, the delivery drivers. There was a guy who went on to become a TV producer, another who wrote some novels, but most just drifted out of the business into something with regular hours when their wives or husbands wore them down. Then there were the pros who were really good at it and just loved the hell out it, working sixty-hour weeks whether it was necessary or not. They did about 70 percent of the work but never held it against the others who disappeared at the crack of five.