Hell on Wheels (Black Knights Inc. #1)(48)
“Yes,” he ground his back molars together, “the dude definitely pissed me off.”
The sound of his wife talking to their housekeeper out in the hall caused him to glance down at his eighteen karat, yellow-gold Cellini Prince Rolex.
He was due in session in twenty minutes. Time to wrap it up.
“Call me when it’s done,” he told Johnny and didn’t wait for a reply before ending the call.
Now, he’d go listen to his peers drone on and on and on about making emergency supplemental appropriations for border security.
What a colossal waste of time.
In his not-so-humble opinion, the Chinese had it right all those years ago. Build a wall, supply it with armed troops in guard towers, and kill anyone stupid enough to try and cross that big-assed line you just drew in the sand.
Chapter Eleven
After hauling his ass into the attic of the empty house—Christ, he needed to lose about fifteen pounds in order to make the fit through that narrow opening even slightly comfortable—Nate secured his camouflage M-40 A5 USMC issue sniper rifle on its bipod and hunkered down.
He used a string of detcord coiled in a spiral to blow a loophole in the attic wall beside the window and, as always, the feel of the weapon in his hands was like coming home. It simply became an extension of his arm.
Those armorers at Quantico sure knew how to put together one smooth-working machine…
Sierra was his rifle of choice when honing in on a target within a thousand yards.
The ol’ girl could do a far sight better than that, evidenced by the time his mark had pulled a fast one and left via a warehouse a good two hundred yards farther away than he or Grigg had planned for. Still, that greasy al-Qaeda operative was leveled by 671 grains of diplomacy before his cache of bodyguards ever heard sweet Sierra’s barking report.
As he lowered his eye to the scope and took a brief pass of the park across the way, he tried to forget those days in the field.
Talk about boring. Hours and hours of systematic recon inevitably followed by about half a minute of insane, ball-shrinking activity.
Grigg had loved to quote other snipers. And one of his favorites had been, Sniping is poetry in slow motion, up until the moment you pull the trigger.
From the pull of Nate’s trigger, it was twenty measly seconds to the time when their gear was stowed and hidden and they were hell and gone from their hide site. Twenty seconds of balls-to-the-wall, get-it-done-or-die activity. Toward the end, they were doing it in eighteen.
They were that damned good. That fast…
A man was walking in the park, he observed as he instinctively switched to tactical breathing. Three big breaths and then exhale.
The guy had on a University of Louisville baseball cap, a blue button-up shirt, and nondescript, white sneakers. His hands were shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans as he strolled along, head down between his shoulders, watching the sidewalk in front of him.
Perhaps the guy was simply out enjoying the balmy summer day, but then again, Nate hadn’t lived to the ripe ol’ age of thirty-three by taking chances. Saturday-in-the-Park Dude appeared to be about the same height and build as Mystery Man. Can you dig it? Yes I can. And I’ve been waiting such a long time…And, geez, he’d been spending far too much time around Ozzie—who broke into lyrics every other sentence. At least Nate could say he had better taste than the kid. In his not-so-humble opinion, Chicago beat out ’80s glam rock any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
“Come on, look up. Let me get a peek at you,” he whispered into the silent, sweltering attic.
Sweat beaded on his forehead and dripped down his temples. The dust and insulation particles floating in the air made his lungs itch. There was a decaying mouse carcass in the corner perfuming the space with the sickly sweet scent of death.
The guy in the park didn’t cooperate with his whispered demand.
Go figure. No way was Nate getting that lucky.
Then an elderly woman passed by with her overweight wiener dog—the poor thing looked like it was about to split its skin—and Mr. Saturday-in-the-Park bent to give the little chubber a scratch behind the ears.
Nate saw his chance.
Pulling out the high-powered guidance laser from his jacket pocket, he kept his eye on the scope and, with a flick of his thumb, the red line of the laser streamed to life. Focusing on his target, he aimed the thin stream of light.
One thing was for sure: it would be enough to scare the shit out of Mr. Saturday-in-the-Park if he was anything other than a complacent civilian out for a little stroll. Because the mind of a complacent civilian didn’t immediately associate a red laser dot as coming from a weapon. Oh no. That type of instinctual reaction was only earned through training and experience, through having lived in a heightened state of awareness where the first thing to come to mind in any situation was not the possibility but the probability of an unknown threat…
Automatically his heartbeat slowed.
The world around him faded to black, the discomfort of the steamy attic forgotten as every cell in his body focused on only one thing. The five S’s of the snipers’ mantra: slow, smooth, straight, steady, squeeze.
Well, he’d forgo the squeeze part.
After all, if the guy was CIA, he was on a government-sanctioned mission. So even though Nate would’ve liked to add a nice, neat hole between the man’s eyes for having the colossally bad taste to point that piece at Ali, he kept his finger poised outside the trigger guard.