Linnett spent ten minutes looking for pieces of arctic clothing, boots, femurs, skull, Bowie knife, beard or snowshoes.
The skis were lying there, but one was broken. That had been done by the falling horse. There was a she
epskin sleeve but no rifle. No snowshoes, no Afghan.
Two hours to dawn and it had become a race. One man on snowshoes, twelve on skis. All exhausted, all desperate. The Alpha team had their GPS positioning system. As the sky lightened fractionally in the east the team sergeant murmured: ‘Border half a mile.’
They arrived twenty minutes later on a bluff overlooking a valley running from their left to right. Below was a logging road that formed the Canadian border. Right across from them was another bluff with a cleared area containing a cluster of log cabins, a facility for Canadian lumberjacks when the timber concessions resumed after the snows.
Linnett crouched, steadied his forearms and studied the landscape through binoculars. Nothing moved. The light factor increased.
Unbidden, his snipers eased their weapons from the sleeves that had contained them throughout the mission, fixed their scopes, inserted one shell each and lay down to stare across the gulf through their telescopes.
By the norms of soldiering snipers are a strange breed. They never get near the men they kill, yet they see them with a clarity and an apparent proximity greater than anyone else today. With hand-to-hand combat almost extinct, most men die not by the hand of their enemy but by his computer. They are blown away by a missile fired a continent away or from somewhere under the sea. They are destroyed by a smart bomb loosed by an aircraft so high they neither see nor hear it. They die because someone fires a shell from two counties away. At the nearest, their killers, crouching behind a machine gun in a swooping helicopter, see them only as vague shapes, running, hiding, trying to fire back. But not as real humans.
That is how the sniper sees them. Lying in total silence, utterly immobile, he sees his target as a man with three days’ stubble, a man who stretches and yawns, who spoons beans out of a can, unzips his fly or simply stands and stares at a lens a mile away that he cannot see. And then he dies. Snipers are special – inside the head.
They also live in a private world. So total does the obsession with accuracy become that they lapse into a silence peopled only by the weights of projectile heads, the power of various powder loads, how much a bullet will wind-drift, how far it will drop over various distances, whether yet another tiny improvement can be made to the rifle.
Like all specialists they have their passions for rival pieces of equipment. Some snipers like a really tiny bullet like the M700 round out of the Remington .308, a slug so small that it has to be sheathed in a detachable sleeve to go down the barrel at all.
Others stay with the M21, the sniper version of the M14 standard combat rifle. Heaviest of all is the Barrett Light Fifty, a monster that sends a bullet like a human forefinger over a mile with enough speed times weight to cause a human body to explode.
Lying prone at Captain Linnett’s feet was his leading sniper, Master Sergeant Peter Bearpaw. He was a half-blood Santee Sioux with a Hispanic mother. He came from the slums of Detroit and the army was his life. He had high cheekbones and eyes that sloped like a wolf. And he was the best marksman in the Green Berets.
What he cradled as he squinted across the valley was the Cheyenne .408 by CheyTac of Idaho. It was a more recent development than the others, but over three thousand rounds on the range it had become his weapon of choice. It was a bolt-action rifle, which he appreciated because the total lock-down of a closed bolt give that tiny extra stability at the moment of detonation.
He had inserted the single slug, very long and slim, and he had burnished and buffed the nose tip to eradicate the tiniest vibration in flight. Along the top of the breech ran a Jim Leatherwood X24 scope sight.
‘I have him, Captain,’ he whispered.
The binoculars had missed the fugitive, but the scope sight had found him. Set among the cabins across the valley, encased on three sides by timber, with one single glass-panelled door, was a phone booth.
‘Tall, long shaggy hair, bushy black beard?’
‘Roger that.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘He is in a phone booth, sir.’
Izmat Khan had had little communication with his fellow inmates at Guantanamo, but one with whom he had spent many months in the same ‘solitary’ block had been a Jordanian who had fought in Bosnia in the mid-nineties before returning to become a trainer in the AQ camps. He was hardline.
As security slackened around the Christmas period, they found they could whisper from one cell to another. If you ever get out of here, the Jordanian told him, I have a friend. We were in the camps together. He is safe; he will help a True Believer. Mention my name.
There was a name. And a phone number. Izmat Khan did not know where it was. He was not quite sure of the complexities of Subscriber Trunk Dial, for which he actually had enough quarters, but, worse, he did not know the overseas dial code out of Canada. So he punched in a quarter and asked for the operator.
‘What number are you trying, caller?’ said the unseen Canadian telephonist. Slowly, in halting English, he pronounced the figures he had so painstakingly memorized.
‘That is a UK number,’ said the operator. ‘Are you using US quarters?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s acceptable. Put in eight of them and I will connect you. When you hear the pips put in more if you wish to continue the call.’
‘Have you acquired the target?’ asked Linnett.
‘Yes, sir.’