| |
The trombone case rested in the Fiat, lying on the folded-down back seats at an angle. On top of it were a used backpack, a long coat, a sweater, a bedroll, a couple of pillows, two moderately interesting paintings and some other bric-a-brac that he had obtained at the massive flea market held yesterday at the Plainpaleis. It was all tossed carelessly in, the better to withstand scrutiny if he was checked for any reason.
Driving carefully within the speed limits, he eventually parked in a paid place north of the airport, watching for the faint light of dawn coming up in the east over Lake Geneva. He had enjoyed his day off yesterday, just relaxing, the first such day in many years where he didn’t have to be concerned about thugs with knives or raids by the SS. Maybe when he retired, if he ever did, he would retire to Switzerland. Its precision, its discretion, its cleanliness and order conformed to and epitomized the values of the sniper. It agreed with him.
Loading the backpack, he slid the trombone case into it and wrapped the blanket around its protruding end. He packed water bottles and food into the pockets – wonderful bread baked fresh that morning, butter from wildflower-hay-fed Swiss milch cows, cold cut Black Forest ham, Gruyere cheese, chocolate and fresh fruit. It might be a long day. Or two.
The most important thing he packed was his ghillie jacket. He did not have the time nor need to make a full suit, so he had contented himself with taking a commercial hooded jacket of dark grey and stapling torn strips of green and brown material to it.
He hoisted the heavy mass easily; there was no need to save weight, as he would probably abandon most of the gear in place. In the faint growing light he covered the half-mile through the woods to his chosen hide, a hut perched on a hill overlooking the flight path of all of the aircraft flying in and out of Geneva.
The lowing of cattle mingled with the clanging of copper cowbells as he crossed an open pasture surrounded by thin strips of woods. The animals ignored him, well used to humans and their movements. One curious cow and calf had to be shooed away as he walked up to the wooden structure he had chosen.
It was one of many hütten that dotted the landscape, each a kind of mini-barn the size of a two-story cabin, with an overhanging roof. They held tools and implements of the farmer’s craft – cowbells on spare collars, scythes to cut any hay that machines could not reach, stakes and fence posts and rolls of wire and hammers and pliers and gloves, all conveniently stored for use. The upper floor of this one was perfectly sited, its small square window overlooking his field of fire out to six hundred meters, encompassing the eastern half of the airport and the flight approach.
He was ready to break in but found no lock or barrier at all. Slipping inside, he put down the pack and climbed the ladder, hearing the rustle of some small animal, perhaps a bird. The shed smelled musty and, mixed with the scents of cowpies and wood, reminded him of childhood visits to his uncle’s farm in Oregon.
Back on the ground floor he retrieved an ancient hatchet from its peg above a workbench, reaching up with his long arms and placing it on the loft floor to the left side of the ladder. He then fastened a short line to the pack and, climbing once more to the loft through the small hatchway, he hoisted its weight up carefully and quietly.
After putting on soft-faced knee pads, he cleared a space in front of the window, on the rough boards of the loft that comprised the second storey. He unrolled his camping pad, then his bedroll, and unpacked his bulging backpack to set out his food and the trombone case in the growing light. The window faced south so the breaking dawn angled its glow slantwise. Slivers and circles of sunshine poked through the cracks and holes in the walls, though not in the well-maintained metal roof.
He took out the Zeiss binoculars, the best optical model he had found. He didn’t trust the new electronic models, even though they could do fancy things like interface with computers, take pictures and video. Besides, he had the camcorder for that work.
He set the two devices up on tripods, the camcorder in the direction of the airport, the binoculars down toward the farmland and broken woods, both well back from the window so no glint would be seen. Adjusting the camcorder, he linked it to the airweight computer he had purchased yesterday. Soon he had a continuous recording feeding the hard drive, showing the front of the hangar containing the Chairman’s airplane. He didn’t have to work very hard to figure out which one it was. To a trained observer, with a Swiss security force of at least twenty personnel and eight vehicles they might as well have put up a neon sign pointing right at it.
Next he spent some time surveilling the ground under the flight path, ignoring the airplanes taking off and landing from time to time. There were only three real possibilities for his enemies to place their forces.
Two were private farmhouse complexes, each composed of a main house and several outbuildings and barns in a rough rectangle, all connected by the traditional whitewashed brick or stone wall. This arrangement turned the farms into fortresses, and had been effective from the Dark Ages through Napoleonic times and even into the mechanized wars of the Twentieth Century. Each Swiss male was ready to defend his family and his country against all invaders at a moment’s notice; it was this commitment to heavily armed neutrality that had kept the Swiss safe and prosperous for centuries.
My kind of place.
The other location was a light industrial affair, a cluster of buildings, a half-dozen two-ton trucks and stacks of materials. Closer examination through the binoculars confirmed that it was some kind of building materials and contracting yard. He didn’t see any untoward activity at any of the three; that was a good sign. It meant he had time.
He took a break to finish his coffee and eat sparingly, then prepared the tools of his trade.
Opening the trombone case, he gazed at the musical instrument inside. It was old but appeared functional, another flea-market purchase. If need be, he could even blow a few notes on it. There's been no telling if he would've had to show it to a curious policeman or security officer, but fortunately he'd never been stopped. Even so, there was a mouthpiece, polishing rag, a mute and a half-filled bottle of mineral oil in the accessories niche.
Releasing a hidden catch, he lifted the whole arrangement out to reveal the SIG SG 510 beneath. Its front half had been wrapped in ghillie rags that broke up its outline but did not impair its functionality. There were two full twenty-round magazines, and the remainder of the hundred rounds were stored in holders nose-down, ready to be loaded. He swung down the arms of the bipod attached near the front, to place their feet firmly on the floor of the loft. Lining the weapon up in roughly the direction of the materials yard, he then fixed the day sight to the top. He tapped the angle cosine indicator, a device fixed next to the sight that indicated the vertical angle of the barrel, to make sure it was floating freely. It would give him an instant reading of the down-angle as he set up the shots.
Now came the most dangerous part of the exercise short of its execution. To ensure proper zeroing of the weapon, he eventually had to fire it. If possible, a sniper always fired several rounds after any adjustment in the weapon – for example, having affixed a new, untested sight. There had been no chance to do that. In fact, Skull did not want to take the risk of visiting a firing range to try it out. Besides, the results might have been misleading, since he would have, by law, had to purchase and fire new, unmatched ammunition from that range, using it all up before leaving.
However, it simply had to be done; perhaps with one shot, but best with two. He settled himself in behind the weapon, feeding in the first magazine filled with the best ammunition selected by the deliberately unnamed old armorer, and choosing a point of aim high up on a tree trunk well away from any human being, at a distance of about five hundred meters. He pushed disposable foam earplugs into his ears to save his hearing, then noted the angle on the cosine indicator; about twelve degrees down.
Then he waited.
The buzz of a turboprop passed overhead, but Skull continued to wait. The whine of an executive jet came next, but still he waited. It was only with the roar of a midsized commercial airliner, two engines at full thrust for its heavily laden takeoff, that he relaxed his mind, his vision and his breathing and loosed the shot.
Recoil slammed his shoulder but he ignored that and held the weapon firmly inward, his cheek welded to the stock and his eye as close to the padded sight as could be without striking his brow, focusing on his aim point. Normally a spotter would fulfill this role but today, as every day for the past ten years, he played the lone wolf.
Observing the explosion of bark three inches above and to the right of his point of aim, he adjusted the sight accordingly. He then gently placed the butt of the weapon on the bedroll surface and got up to stretch. Walking the perimeter of the loft, he peered through the cracks and knotholes in the rough wood of the walls, looking for anyone who might have heard the shot, however improbably, above the din of the ascending aircraft.
Cows lazily cropped grass. A small combine mowed and baled hay in the distance.
He lay back down and took up the rifle again, to once more wait for the loud roar of a commercial liner. His patience was rewarded after almost an hour, when he fired and confirmed his shot’s fall exactly at the crosshairs. He now had a true zero for five hundred meters; he would adjust for any other range and for wind by using the fine crosshairs within the sight.
As he made the circuit of the loft once more, he froze as he observed a tractor coming up the road with a flat trailer carrying bales of fresh wildflower hay. Taking out his earplugs, he watched the two men, one driving and one riding on the back, pull into his field. They drove the tractor to a point in the middle of the area, then dumped off the hay bales. The cows and their spring calves hurried over to eat.
The tractor’s next stop was the water trough, filling it from a tank of perhaps two hundred gallons fixed to the trailer, then the vehicle turned toward the shed.
Skull cursed to himself, quickly surveying the ground floor from the top of the loft’s ladder. Other than the missing hatchet, he didn’t see anything out of place. He picked up the tool, now a weapon, and lay down on the bedroll, his eye to a crack in the floor where he could observe the door.
One man came inside; he had the hale, energetic look of a Plague carrier rejuvenated from age, the slightly deliberate movement of someone who had once been old and wasn’t completely comfortable being young. He picked up a hammer, tongs and some soft copper rivets, and left the shed.
Soon Skull could hear him hammering on something, probably the water trough, making repairs. He didn’t move, merely tried to relax as the men chatted away in French as they ate a midmorning meal and watched their cattle eat and drink; he caught a few words here and there.
Half an hour later the man dropped off the tools and they drove away. Skull let his breath out with relief. More best-laid plans had gone awry from chance and circumstance – from Murphy’s Law – than from enemy action.
Setting his Patek to chime every hour and his computer to notify him if it noted movement on the video feed above certain parameters – the door opening, for example, or vehicles moving – he dozed, conserving his strength and concentration.
Every hour he surveilled his zone of fire, the ground where his enemies must, by the immutable laws of physics, take their positions. Assuming his logic was sound – by no means certain – the only hole in Markis’ security, the only place they had no control, was on his aircraft’s departure. He had to believe the Swiss would attempt to cover it; it was elementary security to occupy the ground beneath the travel path of high-value aircraft. Therefore his enemies must have a hide, a secure place to avoid the Swiss security long enough to engage and shoot down the plane.
No security could cover every place to engage an aircraft, but only certain locations yielded a high kill probability, and then only with certain weapons. Such weapons had to be portable, they had to be available, and they had to be effective. This reduced the possibilities to some form of MANPADS, man-portable air-defense systems. The layman usually called them Stingers, after the US-made weapon of that name, shoulder-fired missiles designed to chase and blow a low-flying aircraft out of the sky.
Engagement envelopes of these missiles against jets were very limited; depending on the make and model, they had to fire from specific angles, usually directly to the rear, and at certain narrow ranges. Too close, and the weapon would be flying too slow or perhaps would not even have armed itself before impact, resulting in a miss or a hit with no detonation. Too far and the missile would run out of fuel and fall to Earth. Too much deflection – left or right angle from the bearing of flight – and the missile may not “see” to effectively engage the heat of the target. Prepare the weapon too soon or too late, and the supercooled heat sensor in the nose of the missile would not be at its narrow critical temperature. If the system was one of the few that used lasers or radar illumination instead of infrared to guide the missile, then there were also system-specific limitations that yielded a roughly similar set of results.
All these technical items added up to a limited ground footprint, a long oval that predicted where a firing team could set up, and allowed Skull to take his position overlooking that footprint, hopefully to interfere.
That is, if his long and delicate chain of assumptions was correct. If he heard on the news tomorrow that Markis had been blown to bits by a car bomb in downtown Geneva, he was going to feel very, very embarrassed. On the other hand, then he could take a couple weeks off in Switzerland, get in some skiing, maybe some mountain climbing.
He kept up his routine throughout the day; once night fell he switched to a night scope and fitted a low-light vision attachment to the camcorder, and changed the batteries from his many spares. By midnight he decided that it was very unlikely that Markis would be taking off for the rest of the hours of darkness. He did leave the computer running, his silent watcher. Sleep claimed him for a time, light but refreshing.
