Hot Blood by Stephen Leather

Author:Stephen Leather
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9781844568536
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2008-09-17T23:00:00+00:00

The Sniper liked shooting at night. For one thing, it was cooler. During the day, lying in wait for hours meant putting up with the interminable Baghdad heat, always in the high forties and often the fifties. Even if he was lucky enough to find a place in the shade, it was still unbearably hot and he had to keep drinking to replenish the water he lost through sweat. The nights were more comfortable: there were fewer patrols and fewer locals, which meant there was less chance of him being spotted. There were only two downsides of killing at night: fewer Americans were around to shoot at – mostly they stayed in their vehicles – and the flash from the barrel of his rifle could be seen.

The Americans had helicopters over the city all the time, and above them the unmanned planes they used for surveillance, with cameras so powerful they could look down through cloud and see everything. At night his body temperature was more visible to infrared sensors, so he shot from a concealed position whenever he could. He’d found an abandoned apartment on the fourth floor of a building that overlooked one of the city’s busy intersections. He had a locksmith friend who had made him a key to get into it.

Tonight’s kill was to be special. The Sniper was hunting a specific target. A month earlier an American Humvee had killed a four-year-old girl. It had been in the middle of the day and the child had been with her mother, walking on the pavement. The woman had stopped to cross the road. She’d seen the Humvee speeding towards them, followed by three troop-carriers, but the little girl had been looking the other way and had stepped into the path of the convoy. The Humvee hadn’t even slowed and she had died immediately. Bits of her body were scattered over fifty yards.

When the Humvee stopped, the driver had stayed in his cab. A lieutenant and four soldiers had piled out of a troop-carrier but there was nothing they could do. A group of angry Iraqis had gathered and youths threw stones at the soldiers. As word of the little girl’s death spread, the crowd grew and within minutes several hundred men and women were screaming at the Americans. More stones were thrown and the lieutenant had pulled his men back. The convoy had driven off, leaving the mother kneeling in the road, weeping for her dead child.

Afterwards there had been no apology from the soldier who had been driving the Humvee, no acknowledgement from the army that they had been responsible for the little girl’s death. The father had queued for hours to get into the Green Zone to talk to someone about what had happened, but had been refused entry. He had phoned but no one in authority had spoken to him. He had hired a translator to write a letter in English but it was ignored. The driver of the Humvee had never been put on trial.

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