Filed to story: American Sniper: The Last Round (Carl Oliver) Book PDF Free
“He was spotted in July. Guess where?”
“I don’t like games, mister.”
“It would have been your first and only guess. Downtown Baghdad, in the presence of a General Khalil al-Wazir, who is head of Al Mukharabat, the Iraqi secret police. Now, Sergeant, into the present. Let me tell you about Rainbow. Do you know what Rainbow is?”
“I don’t know what Rainbow is,” said Carl, wanting the man to be done with it.
“Hardly anybody does. It’s a satellite, exceedingly sophisticated, stealth impregnated, that sits in very high orbit above the Middle East, seeing all that it can see and sending the pictures back to us. Very helpful the past few years. The Iraqis and the Syrians and the Libyans suspect it’s there, but they can’t verify it because they can’t pick it up on their cheap Eastern Bloc radar. But they’re careful. When they do their secret things, they do them at night, when Rainbow isn’t nearly so effective. But strange things do happen. Who would play lotteries if they didn’t? Now look at this.”
He snapped the picture control and brought up a series of photos. They appeared to show, one after another, a hazy series of markings on the earth as seen from high up.
“That’s Rainbow working over central Iraq about two hundred miles above Baghdad, near a military installation at Ad Dujayi late one night a few weeks ago, trying to get a line on our old friends, the Medina Division of the Republican Guard. And what do you see? You see almost nothing. And then?…?a miracle.”
He clicked again.
The photo was dramatically clearer. What Carl saw was towers, very like the one he had perched in that morning, overlooking networks of roads or amphitheaters at varying distances, the geometry of each setting subtly different from its brothers.
“Lightning. Nature’s flashbulb, something nobody could predict; it lit the ground at the instant that Rainbow was snapping away. And yet the clouds weren’t sufficient to blot out our view of this rather elaborate arrangement.
“But what’s really interesting about this setup is they take it down every day. It must take hundreds of men. And just to keep our satellites from getting the snapshot we’ve just seen. Look, here’s what the daylight reveals.”
He clicked again; what Carl saw was simply a random pattern of roads across a desolate plain.
“Now can you solve the puzzle, Oliver. These photos. Solaratov in Iraq. Do you see it yet, Oliver?”
“Sure,” said Carl. “They’re prepping a shot. Those are buildings and streets. He’ll have handled the range and angle solutions already. It’ll be familiar to him.”
“We should have come to you in the beginning. It took a young man in the Agency, a photo analyst, weeks to come up with the same answer, and those are lost weeks. But he finally had the bright idea of coding the grids of buildings to streets by angle with the help of a computer and having the computer run a check on those same streets and angles. Oliver, it’s the Inner Harbor from the U.S.F.&G. Building in Baltimore, it’s the back porch of the White House from a roof at the Justice Department-the Justice Department!-and it’s Downing and Huguenot streets in North Cincinnati, and finally it’s North Rampart and St. Ann in New Orleans.”
“All right,” said Carl. “So it is.”
“Sergeant, those places have one thing in common. They are all sites of speeches to be given over the next several weeks by the president of the United States.”
Dobbler watched the two of them. They were both children of the superego. They had nothing in them that would ever tell them to stop, hold back, wait, consider. They were both forceful men, without ideological underpinnings, who approached the world simply as a set of problems to be solved.
He remembered when the colonel had found him working in a mill clinic in Rafferty, Massachusetts, prescribing aspirin and bandages to the children of mill workers.
The colonel had simply walked in, so vivid a presence that no nurse would hold him back, laid down the Boston Globe front page that carried the news of Dobbler’s sentence the year before across three columns, and said, “If you can keep your dick in your pants, I can get you some really interesting work. Lots of money. Fun, travel, adventure. Some of it’s even legal.”
“W-what do I have to do?”
“Supervise recruitment. Analyze prospects from a psychological-psychiatric perspective. Tell me which of ’em will jump when I say boo.”
“Nobody can do that.”
“No, but you ought to come closest. Or would you rather stay here and hand out bandages for the rest of your life?”
“It’s part of my arrangement with the cour-“
“Not anymore.”
The colonel laid a parole board exemption before him.
“Are you with the government?” asked Dr. Dobbler.
“You might say that,” said the colonel.
Carl let the silence hang in the air until it seemed to crack.
“They’re still trying to win that war,” said the man. “They think they can win it with one shot. And Solaratov’s the hired gun.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Oliver, you’ve done something damn few men have done. You’ve stalked and hunted men, hundreds of them. You are one of the world’s two or three best. Maybe an Israeli or two, maybe an SAS man somewhere, this Solaratov, Caleb Hitchcock, but nobody else in the world is in your class. We need a man who’ll attack our problem for us the way a sniper would. We want to know how he’d put an operation together, where he’d shoot from, what sort of ordnance he’d use. We want you to brief our security people, who’ll find ways of making sure the information is inserted into the federal security mainstream and acted upon. Because we want to catch this piece of terrorist shit and turn him and empty out all his little secrets and use him as a club against his masters in Baghdad. We’ll smart-bomb them back to dust and cinders.”
Carl said nothing for a time. He was thinking things through and still he didn’t like all this, didn’t like the fact that these boys still had Agency on them like a smell. He wasn’t sure if he trusted them enough to have a cup of coffee with. But then he knew he didn’t really have a lot of choice. It was all set up, set up years ago.
He remembered the numbness and collapse as he went down and the way Donny scrambled down after him, his whole life ahead of him, and the way the light vanished instantly from Donny’s eyes as the bullet bit through to his spine. He finally turned to the colonel.
He said, “Put me on the rifle, Colonel. And I’ll body-bag this sly old boy for you.”
For the first time in many years, Carl the Nailer smiled, feeling just a bit reborn.
Aroused, Dobbler wrote.
The funeral was on a Thursday, with all the office guys there, and most of their wives, even some of the office girls, and maybe a few dozen other people from the law enforcement community in which Nick moved, and their wives too. And some people who’d simply read of Myra in the Times-Picayune obit.
There must have been fifty or sixty. They stood quietly in the sunlight, not really moving or talking, but just by their radiance being there with him, trying somehow to help him and do something for Myra. It pleased Nick that so many showed up. Myra had been such a quiet little mouse about her life, taking what she was given; there should be medals for the Myras of the world but somehow there never were, so a graveyard crowd was the next best thing.