Lethal Shadows

By Terry Cole

Among the two piles of hay that normal people would never notice is our sniper team. My spotter Xiao He and I are lurking there to carry out a blocking mission. Our target is the Taliban armed convoy heading to our peacekeeping force headquarters. The scenery here is quite beautiful. The two of us have been lurking here

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lethal Shadows
• Release date: May 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9798869398727

Book preview

Among the two piles of hay that normal people would never notice is our sniper team. My spotter Xiao He and I are lurking there to carry out a blocking mission. Our target is the Taliban armed convoy heading to our peacekeeping force headquarters.

The scenery here is quite beautiful. The two of us have been lurking here for nearly a morning, and we don't feel like we are on peacekeeping missions.

Maintaining peace! It's been a long time and I haven't seen any figures. Are all the Taliban dead? Xiao He moved his stiff body and put down the sight in his hand. I also relaxed my tense nerves, but my eyes refused to leave the sight of the M40A3, for fear of missing the target.

Xiao He put a piece of chocolate into his mouth and handed me another one. I shook my head and continued to remain silent. I have been a veteran sniper for eight years, so I can keep my composure. Although Xiao He has been my partner for eight years, his hot temper still makes him unsuitable for the boring job of a sniper spotter.

Lizard, lizard, target appears, target appears. The voice coming from the radio on Xiao He's back made our nerves tense. The base had received instructions from the drone overhead and was waiting for us to shoot.

Xiao He reacted quickly and put the sight to his eye. Two Taliban armed vehicles had appeared on the road below the mountain. Each vehicle was loaded with a Browning M2 heavy machine gun. The machine gunners were showing off their power and attacking the United Nations food trucks on the street. The peacekeeping troops wearing blue helmets on the trucks were simply fighting back.

Ka-ka! I loaded the M40A3 and Xiao He began to read the numbers. Point B, deep zone, terrorist armed vehicle.

distance.

Xiao He moved the pencil in his hand across the range card, looking for the distance to the target. 870 yards! Adjust to a quarter mil.

After the calibration, the head of the Taliban machine gunner in the sniper scope was extremely eye-catching. I pulled the trigger calmly, Bang!

The M40A3 7.62×51mmNATO bullet shot out of the slender barrel like an arrow from a bow, and then accurately flew into the target's head in less than 0.5 seconds. A stream of blood spurted out of the unfortunate head.

Bang! Another shot, and the driver of the armored vehicle became my victim.

I also destroyed all the remaining armored vehicles without any mistakes. My principle is to make every bullet show its full potential.

Headquarters, headquarters, mission accomplished, requesting retreat, requesting retreat. Xiao He called the headquarters. He seemed much happier. However, the moment he finished calling, a row of shells hit the cliff in an orderly manner. Rocks of all sizes rolled down the mountain. We were startled and continued to pay close attention to the situation down the mountain.

Things are not going well. The enemy, in five armored vehicles, are attacking us with all kinds of firearms. The shells just now came from several 60MM mortars. Our situation is very bad.

Bang! I opened the skull of a guy who was operating a machine gun, but a shell came quickly and, although it was an accidental hit, it still dealt us a heavy blow.

Headquarters! We are under attack from several enemy long-range weapons! Support! Support! Xiao He's tone was almost crazy, but the people on the radio were not so easy to talk to. They did not respond, and then the channel was interrupted.

Damn it! They turned off the channel! Damn it! Xiao He was furious. He picked up the M4 carbine with an M203 grenade launcher at hand and fired at the bottom of the mountain. This was crazy.

An armed helicopter came from a distance, and its chain-fed machine gun launched indiscriminate fire attacks on us.

Get down! I yelled at Xiao He, but it was too late. The powerful firepower of the chain machine gun turned Xiao He into a sieve. His gun fell off the cliff, and he himself was riddled with holes. He spit out blood, with white foam in his blood, and fell to the ground.

Xiao He! I dropped my sniper rifle and hugged Xiao He's body. I couldn't believe that my teammate, who had been with me for eight years, had become a corpse. I also couldn't believe that our motherland had abandoned us...

My name is Sun Zhen, a sergeant sniper of a special formation in China (for confidentiality reasons), I am 28 years old, male, and come from the Northeast of China, but I was born without the violent and resolute character of the Northeast people, so the army trained me to be a taciturn special sniper. I lost my father since I was a child, then my mother, and then my brother. All the bad things in the world happened in my childhood. I was adopted by an orphanage when I was 13 years old, and joined the army at the age of 16. Now I am a full-fledged veteran, but I am only a sergeant. I took the initiative to retire after this peacekeeping mission that reserved a permanent blow to me. The army gave me a pitiful retirement allowance and sent me back to China...

Three years later.

A small coastal town in China.

I seem to have gotten used to this absurd life of being unemployed, having no income and relying on government subsidies. Why do I say it is absurd? Because I am only 28 years old, in my prime. In terms of physique, I am much stronger than others. In terms of wisdom, many years of career as a sniper have made me a savvy of this society, but they have also made me a guy who is incompatible with the noisy society.

I am a homeless person. If you now call someone without a car, money or a green card a homeless person, then you can only use the standard from 30 years ago to measure me. I don’t have the above three things, and I will never have them in my lifetime. But this is nothing to most people. However, I have no home, no mother, no relatives, no friends, and no place to live…

If I had some money in my pocket, I would stay overnight in a hotel as shabby as mine, but this situation has never happened to me in a century, and my current shelter seems to have been fixed - on a park bench.

I have been called a stinky beggar by many people, including the elderly and children. I do stink. I have been drinking to drown my sorrows in the past few years, and I smell like alcohol. But I can say responsibly that I am definitely not a beggar, because I have property and skills. Property is a joke, this is a souvenir left when I retired - a saber, which has rusted because it has not been maintained for a long time. Skills are needless to say, military career has brought me fighting skills and strength as big as an ox, and some soldiers taught me the skills of drinking, playing cards and playing tricks, but I don't want to use them, I am tired of war and tired of life.

Today, I got up at the urging of the sanitation worker. The first thing I did when I got up was to check if the saber on my waist was still there, and the ten-yuan bill in my pocket for drinking. After confirming that it was still there, my first task was to go to a restaurant in the town to have a drink.

The restaurant had just been closed when two staff members lifted the shutter of the store. They had always excluded me, not only because I came too early, but mainly because in their eyes I was a beggar and beggars were not allowed to enter the store. But the boss was a miser and he would never kick me out as long as I had money to spend.

I walked into the pub with swagger, found a seat and sat down. A female waiter looked at me with contempt and handed me a menu while covering her nose. I didn't care about her expression because I was used to it.

Two bottles of Tsingtao. I didn't look at the menu and directly told them what I wanted. The female clerk shook her head and took out two bottles of Tsingtao beer worth three dollars and fifty cents from the counter. I looked at the Tuopai beer worth five yuan on the counter reluctantly, then bit open the beer bottle with my teeth and took a sip. I have such a frugal habit when drinking, and I try to drink slowly to get back the seven dollars I spent.

Time passed by me minute by minute, and the restaurant gradually became crowded. Customers avoided sitting close to me. They excluded me and shouted at me by my nickname - stinky beggar.

An old man took out a bottle of Erguotou from the counter and sipped it carefully with one of his croquet friends. They saw me looking at him, so they glared at me in dissatisfaction and glared at the boss at the counter. Their eyes seemed to say, Damn it, who allowed you to let the stinky beggar in?

I tasted the bitter almonds in the beer and smiled bitterly. I was such a fucking loser.

At ten o'clock in the morning, a black extended Cadillac drove into the street, attracting countless onlookers. Pedestrians stopped to move forward, because the town was too small and hadn't had a good car for several years. The extended Cadillac in front of me was the best of the best. Even a stinky beggar like me gave it face and took a look. But what does this have to do with me? I continued to drink.

What happened next was very strange, the car suddenly stopped in front of the restaurant, the door opened, and a few guys in suits and black sunglasses got out first, then one guy opened the back door and made a 'please' gesture, a foreigner wearing sunglasses got out of the car, and a few guys respectfully bowed 90 degrees, and then the foreigner and a few guys who looked like bodyguards walked straight into the restaurant.

The whole restaurant was in an uproar. What was going on? I raised my head even though I had been indifferent to the incident. My overly nervous right hand knocked over the beer bottle, which fell to the ground with a particularly crisp and clear sound.

A waiter saluted flatteringly. I have never seen him serve so seriously, just for a little Benjamin Franklin in the pocket of a rich man. The foreigner, who seemed to be rich, reached into the lining of his suit, and the waiter held his hands with a lewd look on his face.

However, a scene that no one expected happened. What the foreigner took out from the lining was not a stack or several stacks of Benjamin Franklin, but a silver-white pistol. I could recognize it at a glance. The slender gun body, perfect rifling, and gorgeous, silver-white gun body. This is the product of the Israeli IM company's painstaking efforts - the Desert Eagle.

Bang! The waiter was knocked far away by the 0.44-inch Magnum bullet. The foreigner shot the waiter who was struggling on the ground without any hesitation. Then, the silence turned into an uproar. The women were screaming, and the men also burst into women's screams.

The two foreigner's bodyguards took out short and powerful submachine guns from their respective suitcases and fired at various parts of the restaurant. Pedestrians and vendors on the street heard the gunshots and shouted, and some people ran to call the police.

Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta several perfect submachine guns burst into neat shooting sounds, a row of diners were injured or killed, the boss who was counting money just now had become a corpse, hundred-yuan bills mixed with fifty-yuan and twenty-yuan bills were scattered all over the floor. In a blink of an eye, there were only a few people left in the entire restaurant, including me.

Bang, bang. Several guys struggling on the ground were shot to death by submachine guns. Because I used to be a special forces soldier, facing this situation, although it is a rare event, I still maintained the calmness that a special forces soldier should have. My left hand, which was not completely numb, pressed down the saber on my waist, ready to throw it into the body of some unlucky guy at any time. Even if I die, I will take someone with me.

A few guys calmly replaced the magazines in their submachine guns. I also saw the model of the weapons in their hands, MP5 micro submachine guns. Back then, I knew HK's products very well. The PSG-1 sniper rifle they produced was my favorite. HK's weapons were all European products with eye-watering prices, but these people each had one. From this I could see that they were definitely not bank robbers with 64 pistols and domestic submachine guns. They were well-equipped foreign terrorists. Their purpose was definitely not