Ruined

“I once killed a man and his wife in Northeastern Nigeria with a Romanian FPK sniper rifle,” the patient said flatly. “Never even met them before that day, and I ended them both. It was just a job.”

The man absentmindedly ran a fingertip around the edge of his sweating glass before taking another sip of sweet tea.

“The target was some kind of local magistrate. The details were in the mission brief. I’m not sure why the Intel guys always felt compelled to tell us the stories. We didn’t care. There weren’t a dozen of us in the program back then—all former DevGru or Delta hitters. We had spilled enough blood to get comfortable with it, but we still would have been better off not knowing. As I said, it was just a job.

“This guy was making noise about seizing the regional oil reserves. The revolutionary idea that ultimately killed him was to keep the wealth with the schmucks who dug it out of the ground. The locals were poor as dirt, and they liked what he had to say. The spooks determined that it would be most effective if we could scrape him in public, something flashy and exciting. But it had to look like a local hit.

“My spotter was a guy named Jeff Woods. Jeff was a great guy. We had worked together for a couple years and knew each other better than brothers. Jeff was a real lunatic back in the World, but he was stone cold downrange. Jeff’s dead now. He got decapitated by a command-detonated EFP IED in Iraq a couple months later on another agency op.

“We infiltrated the night before and set up in an abandoned house. The roof was gone so it was hotter than hell when the sun came up. Jeff ranged us at 625 meters. That’s the far end of what an FPK would reliably do, but we had to make it look local. Boko Haram operated thereabouts, and they were some bloodthirsty scum. So long as we used locally sourced iron and didn’t leave a footprint, they would be the obvious shooters.  

“Boko Haram literally translates ‘Westernization is Sacrilege,’ and they didn’t need a reason to blow a man’s head off. Most of those nutjobs couldn’t read, but they absolutely worshipped death. Every-freaking-body seemed to be on the wrong side of their particular brand of god. They were the only mob on the planet too vile for ISIS.

“The man was punctual, I’ll give him that. We were supposed to do him in the middle of some kind of speech to a local crowd—plenty of spectators with cell phone cameras to document the event in spectacular detail. The problem was the way he had arranged this particular meet-and-greet.

“It really all came down to 10th-grade geometry. In that part of the world having a whole bunch of wives is the mark of a real man. In the States I think it would likely kill a dude, but women are different over there. This guy had several and a herd of kids to match.

“He was standing on this squatty dais in the middle of the town square, and he had his wives arrayed all around facing outward. They were all wearing garish bright African clothes and those big fake grins. I can remember how white their teeth looked through that crappy 3.5-power communist gun sight.

“The trouble was that one of these women, a pretty girl in her late twenties, was standing right between me and the primary. We were holed up in this blown-out building. No amount of shifting or moving around inside the house could get me clear line of sight past her. The spooks naturally had a drone up watching the whole thing, and Jeff had them on the satcom. When I realized I couldn’t get a clean LOS without breaking cover, I had Jeff ask Langley for guidance.

“The Agency guys screwed around for maybe five minutes. By now this man had been talking for nearly fifteen, and we didn’t know how much longer he was going to be there. After what seemed like a lifetime those pogues at Langley just came back and told me to use my discretion. I chewed on that one for maybe half a minute and made my decision easily enough. This was a mission. We had gone to a lot of trouble to set this up, G2 the op, and E and E into position. We might not get another chance. Additionally, it was hot, and I had already spent enough time in Africa for one life.

“I pulled in tight on the FPK, centered that crummy three-post reticle on the woman’s face, and then cheated up a bit to compensate for the range. The day was indeed hot--Africa hot, but there wasn’t any wind. It was actually a really great day to shoot, just like being on the range in Virginia in the summertime. I let my breath out halfway and squeezed that gritty Romanian trigger, sending one of those heavy Combloc rounds right through her face. 

“That woman dropped like a sack of cement. I’ll never forget the look in her eyes. This chick was dead before she knew she had been shot. She went down instantly, and I got a good flash of the primary’s bright white shirt. Recoil’s not bad on an FPK so I centered on him, used the same holdover, and punched the next one through his chest. Flesh and gore went all over the place, and that’s when the screaming started. There is always screaming.

“Jeff and I abandoned the gun and some sundry crap to make it look like a Boko Haram hit and didi’d out of there. Naturally the local constabulary came after us, but we had such a head start that it didn’t make any difference. We cleared the first terrain feature and made it to the PZ, a tidy little clearing we had reconned on the way in. A Task Force Little Bird picked us up just as advertised. A couple of hours later we were sitting in a hotel room in Abuja sipping a cold Coke and debriefing the spooks on the eyes-on particulars.

“They were thrilled--said it had been perfect. They were even pleased about the woman. They felt her involvement would help galvanize the man’s followers against Boko Haram and make it easier to keep them in the fold, ideologically speaking.”

The man set his glass of tea down carefully on the edge of the desk and leaned back in his chair, raising his face to the ceiling. His sightless eyes were a mass of scars, but they could obviously still see the details of that day clearly. The VA psychologist knew when to talk and when to shut up. This was the latter. He gave the man time to continue at his own pace.

“Doc, Africa’s just dirty with orphans. The whole bloody continent is awash in them. You can’t go anyplace without tripping over the filthy little cretins--begging, panhandling, stealing, running around in the dirt just trying to stay alive in that craptastic place. In some parts it seems like there’s more orphans than adults.”

The man took a deep breath and paused before continuing. He leaned back forward in his chair and let his elbows rest where he remembered the edge of the desk to be.

“But at least a few of them are there because of me.”