Jon Reznick 01 Hard Road by J. B. Turner

Author:J. B. Turner [Turner, J. B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

The sky was pitch black six miles out on the Straits of Florida. Reznick saw a faint light in the distance and cut the outboard engine. He anchored the dive boat over a mile away from the target. The heavy swell was affecting his balance. Anxiety over the fate of his daughter wasn’t helping. But he knew that he had to focus on the task in hand.

He checked the luminous dial on his watch which showed it was 6.28pm. He picked up the night vision glasses and peered through the darkness in the direction of the light. A luxury yacht was bobbing in the choppy waters. He scanned the yacht and could just make out the word Pòtoprens. This was it.

Reznick did a slow sweep across the yacht and saw a man sitting on the deck drinking from a can, feet up on the stern side of the boat. For the next five minutes, he just watched. But no sign of the other man or his daughter.

Damn. Ideally he wanted both guys on deck at the same time. Far easier to deal with.

Reznick quickly assembled his M24 sniper rifle, aligning the night sights, securely attaching it to a mobile tripod. He crouched down and pointed the rifle in the general direction of the yacht. Then he pressed his left eye up close to the rubber eyepiece and peered through the electronic green sights. Using the scope’s cross hairs, he zeroed in on the man’s chest. But the heavy swell meant he only had the target in sight for a couple of seconds at a time.

The rifle had an optimum range of one mile. He recalled being on a patrol with a British unit in Afghanistan and their sniper had killed two Taliban machine gunners from one and a half miles away. The time it took for the bullet to leave the rifle and kill the target was three seconds. Reznick could factor in around two seconds, maybe a fraction less.

One man in range, the other out of sight. If he fired now, it would alert the other man and spell the end for his daughter.

The sniper option was too risky.

Goddamn.

He watched the man on deck finish his drink, before crushing the empty can with one hand. The man was oblivious to being watched in the middle of the sea, darkness all around.

Reznick turned to the neat pile of diving gear at the back of his boat. This was his Plan B. He remembered an exercise with Navy Seals ten years back when he had done one hundred foot per minute. But that was in inshore waters. And he was ten years younger. He reckoned eighty foot per minute would be a more realistic figure. So that would take him a full forty minutes or so to reach the boat.

“Fuck,” he muttered to himself.

He kept on staring through the rifle’s night sights. The man in the seat got up as the second man from below, holding a bottle, came up onto the deck and took his place.

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