Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 4
Ramadi, Iraq, April 2009
The apartment was on the sixth floor and had been a kitchen once.
She could tell from the cabinet frames still bolted to the wall and the rusted pipe stub where a sink had been and the table — solid wood, scarred but level — that she’d dragged six inches to the left to center it in the window’s shadow. Ten feet back from the blown-out frame. Far enough that from the street below she was nothing, darkness inside darkness, invisible the way she’d learned to be invisible on the firing line when the only thing that existed was the sight picture and the target.
The Mk 22 sat on its bipod on the table and she lay behind it and breathed and watched the street.
The briefing had been straightforward. Known IED construction activity in the market district. Two suspected cells operating out of ground floor locations on parallel streets. The ground element would move through and flush. Her job was the high ground and whatever emerged.
She’d been in position forty minutes when the woman appeared.
Middle aged. Heavyset. Moving along the wall of a building two hundred and sixty meters south with the particular unhurried pace of someone who did not want to appear to be in a hurry. She carried a canvas bag over one shoulder and stopped in a doorway and set the bag down and crouched over it and Min-Ji watched through the scope as she removed a 20mm shell casing and a length of wire and a block of material that the intelligence briefing had described in enough detail that there was no ambiguity about what she was looking at.
She keyed her radio.
“Sand Viper. Single female, two-six-zero meters south, doorway on the east wall. IED components. She’s building.”
“Copy. Confirm components.”
“Confirmed. Twenty millimeter casing, wire, primary charge material. She’s got her hands in it.”
A pause. Three seconds. The woman’s hands kept moving.
“Sand Viper you are clear to engage.”
Min-Ji settled her breathing. Forty-five beats per minute. The dam at the edge.
The trigger broke.
A kill is a kill.
“Target down,” she said. “IED components unsecured in the doorway. Recommend EOD.”
“Copy Sand Viper. Good kill. EOD is on it.”
She was already sweeping the street.
She filed it on the walk back to the FOB.
The details organized themselves the way they always did. Two hundred and sixty meters... 300 Norma. Single shot. A woman crouched over a doorway with her hands in something that would have killed Marines.
A kill is a kill.
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