Pandora's Grave Quotes

“The .338 Lapua Magnum bullet shot from the Barrett’s muzzle at a speed of 2,750 feet per second, striking its target almost before the sound had reached his ears. Farouk’s head exploded like a ripe melon, blood and brains spraying over the surrounding worshipers as he went down. He never had a chance to react, no final words, no prayers for mercy. Quite literally, the 300-grain slug was the last thing to enter his mind.”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“LONGBOW to EAGLE SIX, the target is sweating profusely,” Thomas announced. Harry couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “You can see that?” “Listen, a 14x Leupold and I can count the drops for you. Interested?”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“he only Protestant church in the Old City, it was still in use as both a tourist destination and a functioning house of worship. And as Harry had said, security was virtually non-existent. Above the church, high above the neo-Romanesque architecture of the Berliner Friedrich Adler, rose the bell tower. From its lofty height, one could gaze down on well-nigh the entire city. And have a clear shot at almost anyone in the Haram al-Sharif…”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“Hamid checked the silenced Heckler & Koch MP-5SD submachine gun for a third and final time before slapping a thirty-round magazine of 9mm hollowpoints into the mag well. Four more magazines were held in pouches around his belt”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“The two CIA men had donned flak jackets and unslung their own rifles, accurized AK-74s. The sight of the Eastern Bloc weapons had raised a few eyebrows at first, but there were no comments now. Just silence. And they waited.....”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“Tex swiveled the FN-FAL on its bipod, identifying the source of the hostile fire. Two men, kneeling on the bow of a boat in the marina. The scope’s cross-hairs centered on the forehead of one of the shooters and he squeezed the trigger. Target eliminated, Tex thought coldly. The man collapsed, the top of his head nearly blown away by the heavy bullet. Next target. Before he could draw down on the second shooter, a rifle boomed from somewhere in the marina and the man toppled over the rail, his body falling into the lagoon.”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“After a moment’s thought, he opened the diplomatic case and threw in an extra set of identification papers, under a Belgian passport. It had served him well in the past and it never hurt to plan ahead. The case also contained his Colt .45, two loaded magazines, and a box of Federal Hydra-Shok hollowpoints. Being able to carry the gun through security was one of the benefits of his diplomatic immunity. If he was forced to use it…well, that was another story”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“He was on the fifth floor of the hotel, two hundred and fifty yards from the meeting site, according to the laser range-finder that he had brought with him. He could have made that shot over iron sights, but the scope gave him an added measure of security. The Texan was nothing if not cautious. Finishing his work, he laid the rifle on the bed and slapped a loaded magazine into the mag well of the gun. Ready to go.”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“A Belgian-made FN-FAL rifle was disassembled in the trunk of the car, along with a hundred rounds of 7.62mm NATO. The other half of the purchase was strapped to the Texan’s ankle: a short-barreled .357 Magnum. Some might have considered a semiautomatic a better choice, but he had always been partial to wheelguns. In any case, it was a back-up gun.”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“Avraham Najeri’s fingers slid over the receiver of the Galil assault rifle with the intimate touch of a lover. He sighed. Guns were such beautiful things. Instruments of death to be sure, but beautiful nonetheless. There was a certain poetry to them”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“Someone has a sense of irony,” Kranemeyer observed, glancing down the transcript of the call once more. “Saddam Hussein also enjoyed using the Kurds as test subjects. Ah, the joys of being a minority in the Middle East.”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“Thomas Parker glanced at his watch. Five hours. He laid down his cleaning brush and picked up the scattered parts of his 7.62mm SV-98 sniper rifle, starting to reassemble the gun. It wasn’t his favorite weapon, but it would do the job. Anything of American manufacture was out of the question. He re-mounted the scope, brushing a fine layer of dust off the lens. Sand seemed to permeate everything. The scope wasn’t standard-issue, it had come from an American lens manufacturer whose name had been carefully ground off the side. It gave him magnification up to 10x and night-vision capability. More than he needed, but with it, he had placed bulls-eyes at fifteen hundred yards.”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“The surface-to-air-missile system was the flower of Russian technology. A further development of the competent SA-15 “Gauntlet”, as code-named by NATO, the TOR-M1 9M330 had been supplied to Iran in December of 2005. It was a system capable of detecting and tracking forty-eight targets, and engaging two targets simultaneously with over a 92 % kill probability, making any sort of low-level attack a virtual suicide mission. The twenty-nine transport launcher vehicles, or TLVs, which Tehran had purchased had cost them the equivalent of over a billion dollars in U.S. currency”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“A pistol materialized in the man’s hand as he leaned down, pressing it against Quasim’s forehead. “Good-bye,” the young man whispered, a smile crossing his face. A smile as cold and dark as his eyes. Fire erupted from the gun’s muzzle. Fire and blackness…”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“If something went wrong out in the desolate mountains of Iran, that was the end. No one would be coming to rescue them. Their country would refuse to acknowledge that they even existed — that they ever had been her citizens, much less her warriors. That was the whole idea. Deniability. Even if the mission was a success, if they made it back to the extraction zone with the missing archaeologists, they would receive none of the credit for it. They would slip away like wraiths into the night, going back to their jobs until the call came again. Glory was dangerous”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“There was no one waiting for him back in the States, no one to inquire into the circumstances of his death. He had a brother — but he lived in Montana. They saw each other only a few times a year, and all too often Harry was gone when his brother came calling. A brother, a sister-in-law, a nephew, they were all the family he had left. Little enough. He had known brief relationships with women in the past, sometimes with women he had known in Cypress, other times with female analysts at the Agency. Never anything of a lasting nature — as much as he had tried. The girls from Cypress couldn’t be told what he did for a living. The analysts knew all too well, and the skills that enabled him to survive in one world barred him from the other”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“The assassin turned, tucking the Colt into his waistband and adjusting the loose sports shirt he wore so as to cover it. Then he walked calmly back through the crowd, listening to the screams of people shouting for the police. His steps quickened as he moved away from the immediate area of the nightclub. A car bearing the lettering Policia passed him as he jogged along the sidewalk, lights flashing and siren wailing. A quiet smile of amusement crossed his face at the sight.”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave

“He never saw the dark-haired man moving through the crowd toward him and his bodyguards, nor the suppressed semiautomatic pistol that suddenly materialized in that man’s hand. A single .45-caliber hollow-pointed slug smashed into Calderon’s right temple, killing him before the cry on his lips could even be uttered. One of the girls nearby screamed at the sight. Alerted, his bodyguards turned on heel, their eyes wide with shock at the sight of their employer lying on the asphalt, blood trickling from his skull. Then one of them fell, pierced through the heart. The crowd began to scatter like a covey of quail, panic spreading through them, a primal impulse for safety. The second bodyguard went for the Sig-Sauer on his hip, but he was dead before it could clear the holster. Three corpses on the pavement”
― Stephen England, Pandora's Grave