Terminal Impact Read online

  “Gentlemen,” Gunny Valentine said, walking to the front of the classroom, on cue, and taking a position to the left of the colonel. “Staff Sergeant Terrence Martin and Staff Sergeant Bill Claybaugh, whom you now know well after our two weeks of evaluating and testing each of you for fit on this team, will lead our two nine-man squads. I will lead the platoon. Captain Mike Burkehart, a Force Recon mustang officer, whom I have known for many years, joins us Monday as the platoon officer-in-charge. Lieutenant Colonel Snow will command our platoon, and two others like it.

  “Do not write letters or make phone calls home telling Aunt Sally or your best friend Jody Boy, or your girlfriend he’s keeping warm while you’re gone, or your mama and daddy what you’re about to go do, or that this team even exists. Everything we do is classified top secret.

  “You’re deploying to Iraq as a MARSOC detachment, augmenting Marine Corps Scout-Sniper operations in al-Anbar Province should anyone ask. Do not say any bullshit like, I’m going on a secret mission, or go buy a T-shirt that has TOP SECRET stenciled on the back. Am I clear?”

  The whole room answered, “Yes, sir!” as if they were back in boot camp and Gunny Valentine was their senior drill instructor.

  “Our weapons systems will include the standard M40A3 sniper rifle,” the gunny continued, “shooting our faithful 175-grain Sierra .30 caliber bullet launched by 7.62-by-51-millimeter cartridges. Added to that we will be shooting the M40A3 sniper rifle with the Remington 700 long action, similar to the one the Army shoots, and that gun will be chambered for the .300 Winchester Magnum caliber ammunition, also shooting the same Sierra MatchKing bullet as our .308, but one hell of a lot flatter, hotter, and farther. We will also have six Barrett Mark-82 .50 caliber long rifles, and six Barrett .50 caliber Bullpups.

  “Bill Ritchie, out in Utah, at EDM Arms, has built us a dozen .338 Lapua Magnum rifles that he guarantees will drive nails at two thousand yards. That’s the gun I am looking forward to carrying in my hands. We’ve also got a set of M40A3 rifles with threaded crowns chambered for .338 Lapua Magnum as well, for special applications.

  “Zarqawi got away from me because I was shooting that weak-ass .308 NATO, and had fifteen hundred meters to cross. Too much drop, and I dropped it between his feet. That’s not happening twice.

  “Rifles will be here Monday,” Jack concluded. “We have the coming two weeks to get them and our ammo tuned to our liking. Then we’re off to the sandbox. You’ve got the weekend free, so go have some fun. Someone said that C. J. Quinlan has a HOG party at his Rally Point tomorrow evening. I might see you there.”

  Billy Claybaugh barked from the back of the room, “If you get put in jail, you better break out or kiss your ass good-bye. If I have to come to the Onslow County brig or some other drunk tank up or down this coastline, I will fucking kill you. I will rip out your throat and piss on your collarbones.”

  Several Marines shot him the finger as they left the classroom.

  In the back, Cotton Martin had Gunny Valentine’s cell phone. It had buzzed and he was exchanging text messages with someone.

  When Jack first saw it, he thought he recognized the phone and checked his pants pockets to be sure. Gone!

  “What are you doing?” Jack asked, running to Cotton and grabbing for the phone.

  “Getting you laid.” Cotton grinned and held the flip-top Moto with the tiny screen high over his head. “You’re pissed and grouchy, all crabby like an old hen with PMS. You need to get your pipes cleaned, brother.”

  Jack kneed him in the nuts and grabbed the cell phone when Martin doubled over.

  “Fucking asshole,” Jack grumbled, looking at the string of text messages. “Do you know who the fuck this is?”

  “Same chick I saw in the pictures on your laptop. Liberty Cruz,” Cotton said. “Billy says she’s FBI. One fucking hot agent, if you ask me.”

  “You’re looking at my laptop?” Valentine bleated.

  “Billy-C was looking at your pictures, and I saw all the eye candy over his shoulder. That tall dark drink of fine wine you got on there. Shots of her in that tiny bikini were killer,” Cotton said, pulling at his belt and shaking his balls back down his pants legs. “You fucking hurt me. You know that, Jack?”

  “I hope you die,” Valentine said, and flipped the phone shut as he walked outside.

  He punched in Liberty Cruz’s speed-dial cell number, and she answered on the first ring.

  “Damn, you must feel guilty about something,” Jack said, “answering on the first ring. What’s up?”

  “I am so excited about this weekend.” She swooned. “I’ve got a room booked in Jacksonville for us, and dinner reservations at Thig’s Barbecue House. You always telling me how you love that place. We’re going to get some of their fall-off-the-bone ribs and swine wine barbecue sauce. Oh, Jack, I have missed you so bad!”

  “Where are you?” he asked, not having a clue about the text-message conversation that had gone on while he had briefed his snipers.

  “I told you, Jack!” Liberty exclaimed. “I’m here in Jacksonville. SERE School. I check in Monday. I had a choice of Florida or Camp Lejeune, and I chose here. You’re here. Why then would I go to Florida?”

  “Sorry, babe.” Jack sighed. “It’s been a rough week. My brains are fried.”

  “You put some pretty serious stuff in those text messages,” Liberty chirped. “I hope you’re not too fried to live up to all that bragging.”

  Jack torqued his jaws and considered how he could get even with Cotton Martin. Billy-C Claybaugh was in on it, too. He was back there, next to Cotton. Both of them sending the text messages. Valentine had hoped for a quiet weekend alone in his little cottage down by the Swansboro docks. Maybe do some fishing, and finish the seascape painting he had been dabbing in oils for the past several weeks. Painting and drawing relaxed his mind, and his artwork was quite good.

  When he retired from the Marine Corps in a few years, he thought of disappearing down to Santa Maria, Mexico. A little village below a trout lake in the mountains of Chihuahua, 150 miles southwest of Juarez. He and his dad used to go there when he was a kid. Crystal-clear water and fat fish. Simple country people and no pressure.

  He also loved Liberty Cruz, ever since high school. Nobody else. He had his one-nighters, but no one of a relationship status. He had Liberty and wished she could understand the beauty of his simple life’s dream.

  Her ambition and obsessive mind-set for accomplishing her agenda of wealth and the big house on the Riviera had kept him from ever asking her to marry him. Yet she was the only woman Jack Valentine had ever loved.

  “Why don’t you pick me up and we’ll just find out,” Jack said. “I’ll leave my truck here at the schoolhouse for the weekend. We’ll bury the phones and get lost in our lust. How’s that sound?”

  Liberty laughed. “Oh, Jack. I’m on my way!”

  “We can swing by my place in Swansboro, let me pick up an overnight kit and clean clothes,” Jack said.

  “Still not wearing underwear, Jack?” Liberty giggled.

  “Nada.” Jack grinned. “Commando through and through. I also have a big watch.”

  “Oh yeah!” Liberty laughed, and hung up.

  —

  When Cesare Alosi checked in with his headquarters in Baghdad, he met three former Marine Scout-Snipers now working for Malone-Leyva. One had retired as a master sergeant, and the other two had left the Marine Corps in the mid-nineties. A bit on the mature side, he thought, but still solid.

  As the stylish boss, in his tan 5.11 operator’s shirt and matching trousers, bloused over roughed-out Army Ranger jump boots, and a black operator ball cap on his head, smelling of the latest Versace men’s cologne, put out his hand, Hacksaw Gillespie had a good laugh as he shook it.

  “Sorry, boss, but you smell too good for these parts,” he mused. “I recommend you keep the flu-flu in the locker,
or you’ll have one of these Iraqi sweet peas trying to park his pork up your caboose.”

  Alosi let go of his paw and put his hand in his pocket. He didn’t bother shaking hands with Kermit Alexander or Cory Webster. All three of the mercenaries, now working for Malone-Leyva as contract hit men and executive bodyguards, wore black “do-rag” bandanas tied over their heads like Hulk Hogan. All three wore moustaches and goatees, too.

  They dressed in cargo jeans and Under Armour T-shirts and wore Advanced Operator vests with the pockets stuffed with gadgets. Their legs were Velcro strapped with semiauto .45 caliber pistols, sporting flashlights on rails.

  “So,” Alosi said, and paused for effect, eyeballing Hacksaw, then Kermit The Frog and Habu last. “You guys are like what? Pirates?”

  “Yarrrr!” Hacksaw grinned back, flashing gold-capped front teeth and pointing to a diamond ear stud. Then he slipped on a pair of Ray-Ban black-framed shades. “We got to look badass for the clients. Didn’t you read the handbook?”

  “I wrote the handbook,” Alosi said.

  He walked around the men’s office, which also doubled as transient sleeping quarters, should a team have to work days and nights. The place was a wreck. Trash was on the floor, and beer bottles filled three overflowing garbage cans.

  “Home sweet shit hole,” Hacksaw said.

  “I agree,” Cesare said. “I thought you guys were Marines. You know, squared away. Disciplined.”

  “We didn’t sign on to do maid work or housecleaning,” Kermit snapped back. “You want home sweet shit hole cleaned up, hire a maid.”

  “Yeah,” Habu chimed in, pissed off, already not liking this dressed-up sweet-smelling Don Juan.

  “I’ll do just that,” Alosi said, went to the desk, swept crap out of the chair, and sat. “What are your stories?”

  “I retired from the Corps a few years back, E-eight and glad to leave,” Hacksaw said, stepping up to do the talking. Kermit and Cory were happy to have him do it.

  “Staff Sergeant Webster there ran a sniper gun and our old boss, Gunny Mutt Alexander, spotted for him. I worked as a spotter with another Marine,” Hacksaw said. “We hunted cocaine cowboys down in Colombia and Chile back in the eighties and nineties. Killed a whole raft of them.”

  “Really?” Alosi said, a smile crossing his face, and he cocked his feet on the desk.

  “We was in the Gulf War, the first one, for a short bit, but got back down south where we enjoyed the work more, and the women, if you know what I mean.” Gillespie grinned.

  “Don’t misunderstand Hacksaw. We didn’t party,” Webster interjected. “We worked hard. Killed a lot of bad guys.”

  “You were all Force Recon then?” Alosi asked. “They got the drug-interdiction missions down there, if memory serves me right.”

  “Correct, sir,” Kermit offered. “Captain Elmore Snow led us. Great man. I’d follow him to hell and back.”

  “I’ve heard the name,” Cesare said, then looked at the three, considering their ages and experience. “You ever hear of a Marine Scout-Sniper, Jack Valentine? I think Force Recon, too, gold jump wings and lots of shirt salad.”

  All three men laughed.

  “He’s our bro, bro,” Hacksaw said. “Shit, I spotted his first kill. Down by Hillah, during the Gulf War.”

  “Really?” Alosi beamed. “He’s headed over here, you know. Leading a MARSOC team, they say.”

  “Awesome!” Habu said. “Oh, you’ll like Jack. Everybody likes Jack!”

  “So I gather,” Cesare said, still smiling. “Some more than others.”

  The three Marines didn’t quite know how to take the last comment but let it slide.

  “You know,” Hacksaw said, looking side to side as if someone might eavesdrop. Then in a low voice added, “Jack Valentine put the bullet in Pablo Escobar’s ear.”

  “I thought Colombian National Police shot him when they raided his hideaway town house in Medellín,” Alosi said. “All the Wikipedia and Google stuff says it.”

  “Bullshit! Pure bullshit,” Hacksaw said, and looked at his boys. The other two nodded at their new boss.

  “Jack Valentine shot Pablo Escobar in the ear from three hundred yards using an Australian Special Air Service M55, Tikka sniper rifle with a ten-power Leupold scope, shooting the .22-250 Remington cartridge with a 52-grain hollow-point boat-tail Sierra MatchKing bullet,” Kermit Alexander said. “Like a bolt of lightning. Four thousand feet per second! I was there. So were Habu and Hacksaw, and Sergeant Major Ray Ambrose and our officer in charge, Captain Elmore Snow. We all saw Jack make that shot.”

  “We were down there in Colombia in ’92 and ’93, with the CIA running special operations dovetailed into that Los Pepés uprising they had going on,” Cory Webster explained.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about the Los Pepés thing.” Alosi nodded.

  “Jack got that Aussi gun off a British SAS operator working with our group and the Los Pepés brigade. Sad story there. His whole team got bushwhacked by Escobar’s men,” Webster went on. “Sergeant Valentine had made close friends with that Tommy, an outstanding SAS paratrooper and special operator. Easy to get tight with soldiers like that. When we found him and his lads dead on the road, old Jack got real mad. Trail was still hot, so we went on the hunt.

  “Just one valley over, we found the bastards, doped up, counting their loot. We killed every last one of the dirty bastards with no mercy. They threw their hands up, but we shot ’em anyway. We wasn’t police, and they needed killin’.

  “They had the dead Brit’s rifle among the other stuff they stole, so Jack took it. He cleaned it up and put it to good use.

  “That was one hot shootin’ gun, and our boy knew how to use it. When Sergeant Valentine killed Pablo Escobar, that was the last round he ever fired with that rifle. I guess it closed the book for him and that British boy. Grave sealed. Justice served.”

  “What happened to the rifle?” Cesare asked.

  “We shipped it stateside with our gear, and Jack took it home,” Hacksaw said. “Knowing him, it’s tucked away someplace. He’d never get rid of it. Too many memories.”

  “So, once again, history and Google are wrong.” Alosi smiled. “Jack Valentine killed Escobar, not the police.”

  “Colombian National Police couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle.” Gillespie laughed. “But with us working some deep-cover black ops, the CIA felt all too happy to give those shit turds a day in the sunshine. Besides, Escobar’s big brother put the hit on them. We didn’t need that grief. Best let them have the credit.”

  “We found Escobar hiding out in a fancy apartment and called the sheriff,” Habu told Cesare. “Police surrounded the building and Pablo went out the second-story French doors, climbed over the wrought-iron railing off the little patio, and tried to escape down the red-tile roof. I remember it like yesterday. Jack Valentine was on the rifle, and Captain Snow had the binoculars on Escobar. He gave the command to shoot him, and Jack dropped the bastard like a sack of rocks. Blew the wax out of his ears and the holy dogshit out of his head.”

  “I look forward to meeting this man, Gunnery Sergeant Jack Valentine.” Cesare Alosi smiled.

  “Oh, you’ll like him,” Hacksaw said. “Everybody does.”

  “Yes, you said that.” Alosi smiled.

  _ 3 _

  A black Cadillac Escalade with armored doors, floors, and bulletproof glass led two others just like it out of the United States embassy compound, Baghdad. A Marine and Army security contingent joined them as they blew past the blast gates onto Haifa Street rolling west, guns up, throttles down. The high-speed wagon train had just turned onto the Qadisaya Expressway to intercept Airport Street, which led to Baghdad International, when suddenly the Escalade out front slammed brakes to a full stop. There it sat, dead center of the fast track of the high-walled concrete-flanked four-lane.

 
Two up-armored, M1025 sand-tan Marine Humvees, with M2 .50 caliber machine guns on 360 turrets up top, had the VIP sedan, the second black Escalade, sandwiched between them. The third black Escalade followed next, with a fully loaded Cougar HE, six-by-six, Mine Resistant Ambush Protected troop truck close behind. A six-man squad of unhappy Army infantry rode inside the MRAP with its crew while a lone warrior manned an MK19 forty-millimeter grenade-launching street-sweeper machine gun from the truck’s well-fortified dorsal turret.

  Several times daily, caravans like this carried American embassy diplomats, CIA field operators, and staff workers to and from the airport for flights, or meetings with Iraqi state bankers, walled inside airport security, or to and from skull sessions at the Al Faw Palace, a postcard picture of imperial luxury surrounded by a reflecting-pond moat in the heart of Camp Victory. The base sat next to the airport, within the same high walls of security, where the American-led Allied coalition headquartered its bosses and key planners. And the home of Elmore Snow and his MARSOC team as well.

  Jack Valentine rode shotgun while Billy Claybaugh drove the front Hummer, a good interval behind the lead Escalade and ahead of the VIP car. Cotton Martin rode shotgun in the Hummer following the sedan with Sergeant Clarence “Cochise” Quinlan driving. Corporal Petey Preston ran the Maw-Duce in the turret, with Corporal Randy Powell assisting him.

  Elmore Snow and his twenty-two-man MARSOC team had landed in Iraq two weeks ago and had not seen the outside of Camp Victory since. Except for the opportunity to run security on a couple of high-speed caravans from the embassy to the airport. It was something for his operators to do while they waited to slide into the tall grass on their primary mission, hunting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

  Jaws manned the turret on Valentine’s Humvee while Bronco assisted him. Corporal Cortez kept protesting that he should run the .50 and Corporal Gomez should assist him.