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  Then the staff sergeant scooted close to Jack and wrapped his tattooed, muscled arm around the corporal’s neck. “Listen to me,” Walter said, wrinkling his brow, “this is your daddy talkin’ to ya. A Navy SEAL ain’t nothin’ but a sailor tryin’ to be like a Marine. You got that?

  “Fuck me to tears, boy. Stop thinking such silly thoughts. You need to pack your trash and go down to South America with us men and kill yourself some of them cocaine cowboys we been huntin’. You got the good eye, the trigger, and the Hammer!”

  Jack looked at Elmore. “Sir?”

  Captain Snow took a little coffee and thought what to say, then spoke slowly.

  “Staff Sergeant Gillespie in his crude and rude way told you right, son,” he began. “BUD/S is a basic school, just more of the same thing you learned at Amphib-Recon. Yes, they get into a bit more detail, but at the end of the day, you will learn little to nothing new, and it will not put points on the board for promotion. It’s virtually meaningless, given your training.

  “Navy personnel who graduate BUD/S go from there to advanced training, just like we do, either as Underwater Demolition Technician, frogmen, which most of them end up doing, or move into the kind of training you’ve already accomplished, that allows them to be designated a special operator of the Sea, Air, and Land.

  “I disagree with Staff Sergeant Gillespie’s assessment that a SEAL is nothing but a sailor trying to be like a Marine. Maybe a sailor trying to be like a Force Recon Marine, perhaps. But do not grow a superior attitude about them or Delta Force operators, either. They’re all good men, very well trained. But so are we. Don’t forget that.”

  “So, you say no to my request?” Jack asked.

  “I think you should focus your goals in a direction that will benefit our Marine Corps foremost and yourself secondly,” Snow said, and drew smiles around the table.

  “Without question, Marine Corps first, sir,” Jack agreed. “Don’t get me wrong.”

  “You’re ambitious, Jack, and you want to be the best at what you do.” Elmore smiled at the corporal. “Like I said when we first met, you remind me of me. Some years back. The better warrior you are, the better for our Marine Corps.”

  The captain looked at the photographs, then at Jack.

  “That shot you made,” he continued. “Over eight hundred meters and a running target. You shot him center mass, in the chest, one shot. That impresses me.”

  “One shot, one kill.” Jack smiled. “That’s what Gunny Carlos Hathcock always taught his snipers. Right? One shot, one kill.”

  “The deadliest thing on the battlefield is one well-aimed shot,” Gunny Ambrose added. “We all know Gunny Hathcock.”

  “Corporal Valentine,” Captain Snow said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Trust me.”

  The “trust me” phrase drew a round of laughs.

  “Seriously, son.” Elmore smiled. “Trust me. I want you with us in South America. I can use your skills. There’s an old thorn in my side in Medellín, Colombia, I want to check off my to-do list. His gunslingers killed Leroy Griffin, the sniper we called Dirty Harry. Good Marine. Outstanding sergeant. I want you to put a bullet in the motherfucker’s ear.”

  The whole table erupted into hoots and fist pounding. Hearing the Christian gentleman Elmore Snow say a very, very rare motherfucker meant serious business.

  “A year with us down there, you’ll pin on sergeant, and I will personally see to it that you go to Quantico for the Scout-Sniper Advanced Course and Instructor Course, too,” the captain finished, and put out his hand. “We have a deal?”

  Jack thought about it and began to smile as he looked around at the Marines who surrounded him. A small team, but a family.

  “Jack,” Gunny Ambrose added, “I’ve chased Elmore Snow around this planet since he was a staff sergeant, and I was a corporal. We go back a piece. Always exciting. Always rewarding.”

  “Deal, sir,” Jack said, and shook Elmore Snow’s hand.

  _ 2 _

  A double-spanned bridge crosses the Euphrates River in northwestern Iraq, taking Route 19 across it from the east westward where it joins Route 12 and slants northwestward to Syria. The bridge plants its longest span briefly on a small island community called Hawija Haditha, near the west bank, then it crosses a shorter span into the city of Haditha proper.

  Six kilometers north, the massive earth-filled Haditha Dam, nine kilometers long and 187 meters high, impounds the mighty Euphrates’s flow from its Turkish headwaters after crossing Syria into Iraq. Its river twin, the Tigris, also begins in the Taurus Mountains, fifty kilometers east of where the Euphrates gathers itself, both collecting waters from ancient Mount Ararat and surrounding peaks. With the Tigris on the east side and the Euphrates on the west flank, defining between them ancient Mesopotamia, the basin of Noah’s great flood, the cradle of civilization and the Garden of Eden, they carry life-giving moisture and fruitful promise across desert lands southward to their Persian Gulf outlet, which empties into the Indian Ocean. No other river systems on earth have more greatly cultivated humanity’s rise and mankind’s civilization than these two.

  Strategically and economically vital, the Haditha Dam stores two cubic miles of water in 193 square miles of surface area that forms the Buhayrat al-Qadisiyah reservoir. Within the nearly two-hundred-foot-high, concrete, double-decked spillway systems at the dam’s center, six Kaplan hydroelectric turbines capable of generating 660 million watts of energy turn day and night. Restored in 2004 by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, Haditha Dam sends 350 megawatts of power into Iraq’s grid, the second greatest share of electrical power for the nation. Mosul Dam in Iraq’s Kurdish region, on the Tigris River north of Baghdad, produces the greatest share, 750 million watts.

  Should al-Qaeda manage to blow the dam or kill the power, it would devastate Iraq’s electrical grid. If insurgents managed to break open the dam, floodwaters would fill the Euphrates River valley, wiping out cities along its banks. Thus, Iraqi government and American forces keep a close watch on its security and structure. However, six kilometers south, in and around Haditha, jihadists, who traveled down Route 12 from Syria, gathering from places like Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, eastern Europe and western Asia, and other conclaves that breed radical Muslim zealots, keep the city wild, woolly, and dangerous.

  American forces assigned to this sector do not sleep but catnap while another warrior keeps watch. As Jack Valentine says, “It’s a target-rich environment.”

  This day at Haditha Bridge’s most visible point, nearest the city from Hawija, hundreds of terrified onlookers lined Haditha’s riverbanks and streets. They watched the Jordanian-born Palestinian terrorist, Ahmad Fadeel al-Nasal al-Khalayleh, who had named himself Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, mount the roof of a wrecked taxi with its dead driver still sitting inside, his brains splattered across the windshield, and rant at the people on a bullhorn, while waving an AK-47 automatic rifle. He shook it in the air and occasionally let go rounds to punctuate his tirade, cursing the city’s noncombatant citizens.

  From the Iraq war’s onset, and even before it, in the 1990s, Zarqawi led a Sunni Muslim blood-and-torture campaign, al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, against Shia people, Christians, and anyone from the West occupying any part of the Islamic world or just pissing him off in general. From birth, as a Palestinian, he hated Israel and its long-standing Judeo-Christian ally, the United States.

  At the onset of the Iraq War, that jihad grew into Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, al-Qaeda in Iraq, escalating a greater, nationwide insurgency against the predominately Shia-led, post–Saddam Hussein Iraqi government and its American overseers. Today, as Zarqawi shouted threats, waving his rifle, demanding Haditha’s allegiance to his AQI army, he declared all-out war.

  Haditha listened as the stockily built, average-height man with the cropped-short beard and hair, a black knit kufi on his head, and wearing a solid black shalwar
kameez, with a Ninjutsu hood hanging down its back, and a green, deep-pocketed Russian ammunition vest over the top of the ninja-style terrorist outfit, proclaimed in Palestinian-accented Farsi, the language of poor Persia and the Shia, “I am Emir of al-Qaeda in the Country of Two Rivers! You will bow down to me and serve my army, or you will die!”

  Below Zarqawi, a long line of noncombatant Haditha men and their sons, even their youngest male children, singled out because of their community leadership and cooperation with the Americans and government, knelt on the bridge where the gathering crowd could see them. A hundred gun-wielding al-Qaeda jihadists were scattered around the throng, keeping the people standing in place, while other Zarqawi gunmen combed the surrounding blocks and marched more people to the riverbank-and-streets viewing area and forced them to watch.

  Behind the kneeling men and boys, AQI insurgents dressed in executioner black, like Zarqawi, hoods and masks covering their heads and faces, exposing only their eyes, stood ready with long knives drawn.

  Zarqawi gave his dark minions a nod, and they commenced sawing off the heads of the men and boys, and even the smallest children.

  On a desert hilltop more than fifteen hundred meters away from his target, on the east side of the river, two hundred yards east of where it bends like an elbow toward the southwest, Gunnery Sergeant Jack Valentine blinked at what he saw in his twelve-by-fifty-millimeter Schmidt and Bender telescopic gunsight.

  “You seeing this shit?” Sergeant William “Billy-C” Claybaugh fumed, watching through an experimental, twelve-to-forty-power refracting spotting scope. The optical system had a Leupold Mil-Dot reticle and range grids built in it for distance and moving-target speed calculations. Sitting on a squatty little tripod, the new scope, sent to them by brothers in the Marine Corps Scout-Sniper Association, in one of their black-plastic-footlocker “care packages,” had a Leupold sixty-millimeter-diameter, nonreflective, light-gathering objective lens with laser filter to guard against eye injury from amplified light on the battlefield. At the back end, the scope also accommodated an assortment of high-tech attachments, such as night vision and infrared. Still years away before anyone considered that this new system or anything like it had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting in the sniper-kit inventory, it was the envy of everyone using the old twenty-power M49 scope.

  “I’m taking the shot. That’s gotta be Zarqawi!” Jack said, watching as heads and bodies fell off the bridge. Both Marines could hear the echoes of Zarqawi’s rants as the men and boys fought their best fights, hands tied behind their backs, dying horribly.

  “Don’t do it,” Billy-C argued. “Listen, Hammer. We got no backup. Just that motorized dip-wad platoon out of Hit supposedly cleaning up some IED mess somewhere between Barwana and Haqlaniyah.”

  “I’m taking the shot, Bubba,” Jack insisted. “I cannot abide watching murder. Not little babies. Give me the fucking range. Now!”

  “Feet or meters?” the sergeant came back, looking in the lenses.

  “Both,” Jack answered.

  “I’m reading 5,143.21 feet,” Claybaugh called out. “That’s 1,524 meters, give or take a cunt hair.”

  “Wind!” Gunny Valentine snapped. “Hurry, Bill, or we’ll lose him!”

  Leaning on his side and holding his handheld Kestrel weather meter into the air, Billy-C called out, “Southeast to northwest, 12.6 miles per hour, right up your ass. At least we have that going for us, but then again, it has a little chop, dropping to eight, bouncing to twelve. Temperature, too fucking hot, ninety-one. Humidity, 8 percent. Barometer says 30.06. You might hold to favor a bit on the left side and up, given air density, the long distance, bullet drop, and clockwise spin.”

  “You think too much, Billy,” Jack said as he fired his 7.62-by-51-millimeter NATO, Remington model-700, short-action, M40A3 sniper rifle.

  Both Marines saw the bullet splash the roof of the taxi, striking between Zarqawi’s feet, blowing dirt out the car’s open side windows.

  “Fuck!” Jack huffed, slammed the bolt, and tried a second shot, but the al-Qaeda leader had already taken cover, and it missed, too. Meanwhile, Zarqawi’s army opened fire, hosing the streets and sky in every direction as Haditha’s civilians ran for cover.

  “Hey, Gunny! You gonna shoot or what?” a voice crackled on the small green two-way radio that lay next to Jack Valentine at the thousand-yard berm.

  He jerked awake and yawned. The memory of the horror at the bridge already fading. Then he picked up the radio, and said, “Keep your panties on. When you hear that target go pop, you can pull it. Until then, don’t worry me. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” the voice crackled back.

  Jack looked through his riflescope and mumbled under his breath, cross and groggy, “Fucking newbies.”

  Then he settled into his work, focusing on the new rifle’s sight reticle, letting the black bull’s-eye on the target more than a half mile away get good and fuzzy in his crosshairs.

  North Carolina early-morning dankness smothered the Carlos Hathcock thousand-yard high-power rifle range at Camp Lejeune, used by the Second Marine Division and Marine Special Operations Command Scout-Sniper School where Gunnery Sergeant Jack Valentine was senior sniper and chief instructor. Cool breezes coming off the nearby Atlantic sent swirls of thin fog across the long green to the targets.

  Controlling his breathing, holding it as he relaxed and laid pressure on the trigger, Jack let go his shot.

  Two seconds later, down the target went.

  Jack picked up a black, government-issue pen, tried to plot his target call in his data book, and couldn’t get the ballpoint to write.

  “Fucking crap!” he snapped, and threw the pen as hard as he could, still lying prone.

  His target then rose in the air, with a large white spotter sitting in the center of the black.

  “Here, try this one,” a voice behind Jack said.

  The gunny looked over his shoulder, then up at a towering giant of a Marine holding out a clear-plastic Bic pen in his hand.

  “You are one tall motherfucker, you know that?” Jack said, and took the pen and plotted his call but wrote nothing for the hit.

  “So they tell me,” the tall Marine said.

  “How long you been standing there?” Jack said, frowning at the man.

  “Maybe twenty, maybe thirty minutes,” he said.

  “Really? That long?” the gunny asked.

  The tall Marine nodded. “I sat down awhile behind you, too. Then I got to my feet, to give you a nudge, when I heard you snoring.”

  “Snoring?” Jack laughed. “Fuck me. I might have shot you, you know?”

  “Roger that,” the Marine said. “Then the guy in the butts called on your radio, so I backed off.”

  “Lucky you. I had a bad night,” Jack grumbled. “Getting ready to deploy a team to Iraq. Back to some of my old haunts, I’m guessing. Maybe up north of Ramadi, badlands out past Hit.”

  “Yeah, I know the area,” the tall Marine said. “I worked on a sniper team out of Ramadi. Mostly hunted there and down to Fallujah. But we made a few runs up your way.”

  “You ever make it up to Haditha?” Jack asked.

  “Couple times,” the staff sergeant said. “Took Route 12 past Haditha once, on up to Al Qàim, on the Syrian border. Looking for Zarqawi and killing lots of Qaeda up and down the road. Left ’em scattered like dead jackrabbits.”

  “That’s where they pour in the country,” Jack said, and let go a laugh. “Good old asshole Zarqawi. I was just reliving one of my recurring nightmares of him while I was snoring on my gun. I had a shot at him, you know. Too far off for that weak-ass .308. Put one between his toes.”

  “I heard about it,” the Marine said. “I heard about you, too, Ghost of al-Anbar.”

  Jack laughed. “Fucking ragheads. Ghost of al-Anbar my ass. What a joke. They’ve got a name for everybod
y nowadays.”

  “Not me,” the Marine said.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Elmore Snow running MARSOC, his dream finally come true, us fielding as his inaugural special operations team, those sand fleas will hang one on you, too,” Jack said. “By the way, we’re calling my platoon Ghosts of al-Anbar, using Ghost for our call sign. I am sick to shit of that cliché crap like Reaper.”

  The tall new guy with no name yet stared downrange and bit his lip, thinking.

  “They cheated your shot, you know,” he said, looking at the white spotter in the center of the black bull’s-eye.

  “Yeah, I know,” Jack answered. “I put one out in the white at two o’clock, on purpose. Assholes want to hurry up and go to the schoolhouse, so they resort to lying.”

  Jack went back on his gun, focused, and fired. His next shot blew the white spotter off the middle of the target.

  “Now that’s a legit bull.” He smiled at the tall Marine, getting to his feet and offering the man his hand.

  “I see that,” the towering staff sergeant said, shaking Jack’s hand. “Terrence Martin, Gunny Valentine. I’m reporting aboard from Pendleton by way of Okinawa.”

  “They call you Terry?” Jack said, picking up his radio and growling to the crew in the butts, “Pack it in.”

  “No, folks call me Cotton,” Staff Sergeant Martin said.

  “Cotton? How’s that?” Jack said, tossing his data book, brass, and ammunition in a satchel, then taking his rifle and ground cloth in hand.

  “I played college hoops at Texas Tech,” Martin answered. “Bobby Knight named me Cotton because I could hit the bucket from just about anywhere. Drive up the lane or three off the arc. Coach Knight used to say, ‘Nothin’ but cotton’ when I shot. The net on the hoop made of cotton, ya know. Back in the day. It’s polyester or something now.”

  “Nothin’ but cotton.” Jack smiled. “I like that, Cotton.”