Targeted: Volume 12 (Bob Lee Swagger Novel) - Softcover

Hunter, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1668009811 ISBN 13: 9781668009819

Verlag: Emily Bestler Books, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Master sniper Bob Lee Swagger protects a group of hostages during a perilous standoff in this razor-sharp, white-knuckled political thriller from Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times bestselling author, and “one of the best thriller novelists around” (The Washington Post) Stephen Hunter.

After his successful takedown of a dangerous terrorist, Bob Lee Swagger learns that no good deed goes unpunished. Summoned to court by the United States Congress, Swagger is accused of reckless endangerment by a hardheaded anti-gun congresswoman. But what begins as political posturing soon turns deadly when the auditorium where the committee is being held is attacked.

Swagger, the congresswoman, and numerous bystanders are taken hostage by a group of violent criminals. Soon, the very people who had accused him are depending on him to save their lives. Trapped in the auditorium and still struggling with injuries from his last assignment, Swagger must rely on his instincts, his shooting skills, and the help of a mysterious rogue operator on the outside in order to ensure that everyone makes it out alive.

A heart-pounding and crackling action-packed novel, Targeted proves that Stephen Hunter is “a true master at the pinnacle of his craft. No one does it better” (Jack Carr, Former Navy SEAL Sniper and author of The Terminal List).

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen Hunter is creator of the Bob Lee Swagger novels as well as many others. The retired chief film critic for The Washington Post, where he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, he has also published two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work, American Gunfight. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

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Chapter 1: Mordor CHAPTER 1 Mordor
It was just July, and Northern Jersey was crud-luscious. Petroleum by-products in the form of iridescent goo accrued on all surfaces, leaving them slippery and gleaming. Vegetation of no species or color known to earth rioted and crept everywhere. Three-foot-long bull crickets, albino and pink-eyed, chirped in the marshes as if meat was on the menu for tonight. It sounded like saws on radiators. Brooks burbled, rivers gurgled, sewers clotted, algae mutated. Superheated sea zephyrs floated in over the swamps and townships, bearing the fragrance of small, dead mammals or large, dead Italians.

The rust was general except on wood, where rot was general. To the north, in the refinery zone just below Newark, various vapors and gasses drifted to the ionosphere, forming a plate on the industrial entities below, trapping an atmosphere full of carcinogens and other poison fogs. Here and there spurts of flame lit the clouds, giving the landscape a wondrous satanic cast. It looked like Mordor.

A few miles off the turnpike that bisected this slough of despond and connected Philly to New York, Ace’s Truck Stop addressed the darkness with flickering fluorescent lights—those that weren’t out, that is—and eighteen pumps of diesel and only four of gas. It was strictly for lower-tier trucking companies, not the big boys closer to the big road, on tighter schedules. If you wanted fuel and state troopers, you stayed on the turnpike; if you wanted fuel and discretion you came here.

Around 4 a.m., a high-end Peterbilt hauling sixteen wheels’ worth of van slid into the station, though not progressing immediately to the pumps. The truck—it was a huge beast, definitely the King Tiger of cross-continent haulage—kept its options open for a few minutes. In time, the doors popped open, and a lean figure debarked and quickly disappeared under the van. In a few seconds he emerged, and to watch him move was to know him. He was lithe, slim, quick, attentive, perhaps more lizard than man. A high-capacity pistol clearly nested under the shoulder of his otherwise unnecessary coat, and a Tommy Tactical baseball cap sat atop his crew-cut crown. He moved with a kind of unself-conscious precision, still the schoolboy athlete. He looked like he knew what he was doing. And he did, which is what made him different from most men: formed by Texas high school football, Ranger School, Special Ops, and nine years with Combat Applications Group Delta, then ten years in service under contract to various alphabet-lettered entities the world over, some of which were even legal. Now in service to only himself, he sold boutique security to those who could afford it, and was known to have never lost a shipment. He got $8,000 a day, all expenses and all ammo; of the latter, he’d used up quite a bit as a variety of dead caballeros the nation over could testify, if the maggots ever cleared out of their throats. Call him Delta, after a onetime employer. Everyone else did.

He finished his security run-through on Ace’s. No other vehicles inside. The pumps deserted, needing only credit cards to open them to commerce. A small convenience store supervised by a sleepy Nigerian studying thermodynamics in a glass booth, amid racks of candy bars, salty fried chips, antacids, condoms, off-brand soda pop (“Rocket-Kola”), and suchlike. In shadows, nothing. No discordant notes, no anomalies. More important, Delta got no vibes from those weird little twitches tuned to the subtlest whispers of aggression that had saved his life many a time.

He turned, waved, signaling the tractor-trailer inward for $500 worth of diesel. It kicked into gear, issuing sounds like a Jurassic apex predator clearing its throat of phlegm and blood after a nice sit-down of Thanksgiving bronto, and edged ahead. Its shiny paint scheme of red, white, and blue magnified the wan beams that came from the overheads so it seemed to move in its own penumbra of sparkles and neon, and someone expertly guided it to the trough, clearly a trucker of mature and assured skill.

Delta watched it come. Then the lights went out.

Anzor slithered to the edge of the canopy that covered Pumps 18 through 22, and shot the security man in the head. He used a rifle called an AK-74, the 74 designating, as had the previous model’s 47, the year it was adopted by Soviet bloc forces. The Soviet bloc has long since disappeared, but the rifles may be found in abundance the world over. The 74 distributed a .22-caliber bullet at 55 grains, designated the 5.45 X 39, smaller, lighter, faster. The point is to allow soldiers to carry more man-killing ammunition for the same weight, following the principle adapted in 1966 by the Americans in Vietnam with their M-16 round, the 5.56mm.

The Nigerian, lost in the nuances of mechanical statistics of perfect gas, did not hear the sound of the shot, because the rifle was suppressed. The tube at the muzzle takes the snap, crackle, and pop out of the gunshot by running its excess gasses through an obstacle course of switchbacks and arroyos inside, and it slows as it negotiates, so that when it finally emerges it has lost energy and does not shatter eardrums and windows but instead resembles a loud burp.

In any event, that’s why the Nigerian did not look up when Anzor entered the store. So he did not see a bulky man in dark sweat clothes and a watch cap pulled low to his ears. Neither did he see him lift the rifle, acquire a sight picture through a Sovbloc red dot. If the Nigerian saw anything at all, it may have been a peripheral of the burst of gas that emerged after the bullet, which penetrated the glass booth, leaving an almost perfect image of a spiderweb, and struck him above the left eye.

Meanwhile four other men, equally dressed, equally armed, had descended from other canopies. Like Anzor, they were immensely strong, formed by long, sweaty hours in the gym in pursuit of gargoylesque muscle mass to make their tats gleam more menacingly in the sunlight when an opportunity for such display came. These four also knew what they were doing. They moved quickly to the cab of the Peterbilt and poked at the windows with their AK-74s.

The drivers understood that they were taken. They did not expect mercy nor did they receive it. They were marched back along the body of the van, and the executions proceeded without much ceremony at the doors. One muffled shot each, behind the ear. That was the business they were in.

Again things went according to plan, their bodies then heaved by two of the raiders through the open van doors. No clues would be left for law enforcement to discover who had employed the drive team and what the probable highjacked cargo might have contained. The victims would know, of course, but too late to react intelligently. They would thrash about and beat, torture, and kill in their immediate sector of the jungle, but they would not solve the mystery until the criminals wanted it solved.

Two men used a stolen credit card to pump the four hundred gallons of diesel into the beast while the one among them who had more or less mastered such a sophisticated and gigantic piece of machinery climbed into the still-warm driver’s seat, familiarized himself with a panel, and turned to await the go signal.

Meanwhile, Anzor had returned from his sanitation responsibility in the store, just as the men were climbing into the rear of the van.

“Anzor,” Uncle Vakha said in his native language, “go check the security. Make sure he’s dead. Bring his wallet and weapon.”

Anzor, the youngest of the cousins, ran to his task. He was eager to please the patriarch, and quite excited at the way things were going. He had not fought in the war, and his kills were limited to drug...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Emily Bestler Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1668009811
• ISBN 13: 9781668009819
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande