“I’m surprised there were so few wounded. Usually, it skews the other direction, with a ten-to-one ratio of WIA to KIA. He must have trained them to shoot for center mass and wasn’t interested in simple out-of-actions.”

“According to my Captain Assiz, he had no use for that. The Qur’an says slay the infidel, not wound him, and he believed in it totally.”

The story continued. The Corps brought in a countersniper intelligence team that applied special analytical skills to the problem and realized that the snipers always shot to pattern. The lack of improvisational skills again. Nothing left to chance. Do it by the program. They operated between 1600 and 1800, usually used cars for cover, the streets littered with wrecked and burnt-out vehicles, and fell back on a straight line to the nearest available building, where shelter had been prepared.

“Tommy was dead by then,” said his mother. “It was too late. But on a certain day, the snipers went out early and placed themselves according to the doctrine. As soon as four o’clock came, every abandoned car on every company or battalion perimeter in Baghdad was taken out by TOW missiles, the wreckage sprayed with SAW fire, followed by grenades. Of the twenty-two, the Iraqi resistance lost seventeen that day. The snipers were never a problem after that.”

“What happened to Bossman?”

“He vanished. He knew the tables had turned and that his program was now defunct. He’d done the best he could, but the game of snipers was over, and it was time to go on a nice vacation and begin to recover to fight another day in a war that’s fourteen hundred years old.”

“But his usefulness wasn’t quite finished, if I’m not mistaken,” said Bob. “After he was gone, the fighters put together a propaganda video. He became famous. Everyone feared him. The exploits of the twenty-two snipers were all attributed to one. It was said he killed hundreds of Americans. He was given a name, and the name was marketed. Great marketing, by the way. Madison Avenue quality all the way.”

“You know the name, then.”

“I heard it. He was called Juba the Sniper.”

•   •   •

Darkness came. Julie arrived home from her office in town, from which she ran the Swagger empire of layup barns, and met Janet McDowell, and the two immediately bonded. Janet came easily out of her manhunter personality and warmed to Julie, who insisted she stay for dinner. Janet went with Julie into the kitchen, and the two worked quite happily together.

After dinner—a good time—Bob and Janet returned to the porch. It was time for the rest of the story.

“After he’d fled Baghdad, you lost him. How’d you pick him up again?”