Dead Shot by USMC (Ret.) with Donald A. Davis Gunnery SGT. Jack Coughlin Read Free Book Online

and he saw tears in her eyes just before she slapped him so hard that his ears rang. “Don’t you dare speak like that to me, Kyle Swanson! Do you believe that you are the only one who loved Shari? That your heart was the only one broken when she died? I still cry when I think of her. I am thankful that she was in our lives at all.”
    “So how did you get over her, Pat? What’s the secret?” He was growing angry. He did not like to talk about Shari, even with Jeff and Pat and Double-Oh.
    She had a hand on each hip and glared at him. “You think that Jeff and I got over her? How wrong you are. You never get over that kind of loss. You just…eventually…come to accept it as something you cannot change. The sun comes up in the morning, the clock ticks, and Shari will still be dead. You cannot climb into the coffin with her.” Pat pulled her wrap tight around her shoulders. “Wake up, Kyle. Shari’s been gone for more than a year, and you are condemned to live with the rest of us now. I want you back, the real Kyle Swanson, not some war junkie who is on his way to becoming an otherwise useless alcoholic.” She turned, shook her head, and walked away to the main cabin.
    Swanson fell back in his chair. Jesus Christ. She just beat the crap out of me. Kyle had been disturbed for months when he could no longer mentally recall every detail of Shari’s beautiful face, nor smell her fragrance, although he could still imagine her touch and her laugh. He was losing her. She was fading over time. “What’s your opinion, Jeff?” he asked.
    “What she said.” He drank some coffee and unblinkingly returned Kyle’s stare.
    “And you?”
    Master Gunny Dawkins picked up his briefcase and pulled out a folded map. “I’m your friend, not your confessor. Whatever it takes, as long as it takes. But if you get fucked up on booze or dope and get mekilled, I shall be very unhappy. Now can we please move past this Oprah moment and talk about the fucking mission?”
    Double-Oh laid out the map, pointing at a grid location close to the southwestern tip of Iran. “This is where the defector said the so-called Palace of Death was located, almost within rock-throwing distance of the border. We know from the satellites that there’s nothing important down there except the port town of Khorramshahr. Beyond that is just a lot of dirt, which is why the boss wants to put some boots down and take a look.”
    “Could the walk-in just have been looking for a quick cash payment with his allegedly secret information?” Kyle asked. “Peddling bogus information to Americans is not exactly new in Iraq.”
    “Not bloody likely if someone went to the trouble to assassinate him in the Green Zone. There was a reason.” Jeff sat back and folded his hands over a growing belly, the price of success. He was no longer young and jumping out of airplanes.
    “That was a perfect stalk and shoot,” Double-Oh looked over at Kyle. “We’re sure it was Juba. The description from the hotel people matches what we know about him, and he did everything but leave his autograph. So somehow he’s involved, too.”
    “Lots of loose ends,” said Kyle. “But why Iran? It would be a lot more credible if an Iraqi scientist emerged from Syria, since that’s where Saddam stashed his big weapons, up around al-Baida, and in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Iran and Iraq hated each other after eight years of war and a million casualties. I cannot see this level of cooperation, even so many years later.”
    Sir Jeff picked up the map and studied it. “Unless…” They could almost see the wheels turning in the man’s brain. “At the end of that war, there were months of negotiations before the two sides agreed to the solution brokered by the United Nations. Very little was changed in the long run, but some deals were made concerning captured territory and the shared use of the Shatt al-Arab waterway.”
    “History lesson number 42,” said Kyle. “What is your