Knave's Gambit

by Deforest Day

  Chapter Nine

  Nick Paloma had the WaPo spread on the desk in the Dispatch Office, reading about the tanker truck accident, when motion caught his eye on the monitor above his head. Not one of the bank of monitors covering downtown DC and the scurrying traffic, but the CCTV showing activity outside the building. He’d installed the rooftop camera in one of his paranoid moments. He’d be the only one doing the sneaking up, thank you very much.

  A Suburban, black on the black and white tv, stopped. A black and white man climbed out. Black clothing, white face. Nick chuckled as the man raised his middle finger to the camera, disappeared from view, then reappeared in the office doorway.

  Nick stood to meet him. “Frisky Fisky. You here to pick up the training rounds?”

  “Yes, and drop off this.” Sgt. David Fiske, Tac II of Metro Hostage/Rescue, handed Nick a Schmidt & Bender box. “Handle with care; it’s a loaner. Their new 4-16x50 scope, with parallax adjustment and bullet drop compensator. Twenty five hundred bucks worth of optics.”

  “Smokin’ J. What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Mount it on my Browning seven millimeter. I’m headed to Wyoming in a few days, elk hunting. And when I come back from vacation, there’ll be a PowerPoint for the brass. Maybe get all of our sniper rifles fitted with them.”

  “Just what we need in DC. Cops able to shoot the tits off flies at half a mile. Where’s the Browning?”

  “In the Suburban. Along with ten brand new M-16A4’s, ten Aimpoint CompM3 Red Dot lasers, and ten thousand rounds of 5.56 ball ammo. All courtesy of Homeland Security. Seems they had some money left over last fiscal year, and we were first in line with our begging bowls.”

  He dropped a triplicate form on the desk. “Here’s a P.O. for mounting the lasers, and sight ‘em in. No hurry on that job, since I have no idea what we're going to do with them, but I need my rifle tomorrow.”

  Nick scanned the DC Police Department Purchase Order, silently whistled. A month’s pay for a day’s work. God bless no-bid contracts. “I’ll even load a box of 7mm-08 Hornady brass for you. Drop your elk at 400 yards. If you hit it.”

  “You want to come along? Show me how it’s done? We’re packing in, back country. Horses, mules. Ten days. Get away from this fuckin’ nut house for a while.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. I got no beef with the elks. Nut house is right. I just had a go-round with the VA. About Mary’s benefits? The fat witch said Mary was fifteen days short of eligibility when she died. So her daughter gets nothing. I’m ready to go Postal on the whole damn government.”

  The Sergeant knew enough of Paloma’s history to see he was only half joking. He recalled watching Noodles and a pair of drivers peel Nick off a snot-nosed lobbyist claiming his Beamer was towed without cause. “Don’t do it with my gun.”

  It took Nick and the sergeant two trips to carry the weaponry to the Cannon Works. He stowed the SWAT gear in the locker room, then went to work on Sergeant Fiske's rifle. First he locked the Browning in his gun vice and leveled it, then removed Dave's Leopold scope and rings from the rifle.

  The Schmidt & Bender loaner came with its own ring and base combination, and he had re drill and tap the mounting holes in the rifle barrel to accept the larger torx-head screws.

  Nick used Locktite to secure the screws, and tightened them to thirty inch-pounds. With the 7mm Hornady loads the mount would take a pounding, and he didn't want it to move until Dave took the scope off, and returned it to Schmidt and Bender. Knowing Dave's powers of persuasion, that wasn't going to happen. An hour later the wedding ceremony was complete.

  The Browning A-bolt Micro was a good choice if you were planning to carry it all day, over rough terrain. But the light weight meant the recoil would pound hell out of your shoulder. No big deal when the adrenaline was flowing and a bull elk was in the cross hairs. One shot, one kill. A much bigger deal, when you were setting out to run a dozen rounds through the action.

  He slipped a recoil pad over the butt stock and put on his old and well-padded Palma match jacket, then walked the length of the building, setting big game sight-in targets at two, three, and four hundred meters. Ear protectors and shooting glasses completed the preparations.

  Thirty minutes and ten shots later he had the weapon dead on at three hundred. With the mil-dot reticule it was a piece of cake to put three shots in the ten-X ring at 400. A quarter of a mile. With enough energy left in the 140 grain Nosler bullets to blast splinters out of a stack of railroad ties.

  He’d never seen a scope like this; the tall tales of thousand meter sniper kills in Afghanistan took on a measure of truth. He headed up to the roof to see if he still had the skills that had earned him a third place trophy at the Service Rifle “rattle battle” competition way back when. Before Bosnia.

  Nick's footsteps rang on the iron stairs as he climbed five flights. He put his shoulder against the flaking paint on the steel door. The rusty hinges squealed, sending a flock of pigeons clattering skyward. He stepped onto the acre of gravel-covered tar.

  The wind blew off the Potomac, swirling between the empty buildings. It ruffled the paper and plastic trash beneath the Interstate, spawned dust devils on the barren ground.

  At this height he was level with 295. The roadway ran parallel, fifty feet to his left. Traffic was a racing torrent, three lanes each way, rushing into DC, across to Virginia, at sixty miles an hour. The steady thrum of tires on concrete was louder than the roar of the jets overhead. The slipstream of the big rigs buffeted him.

  He knelt, put the fore stock on the low parapet; three courses of block, topped with terra-cotta tiles.

  Eight hundred meters, nearly half a mile. The sharp stones dug into his knee. The distant light pole, a slender arch, curved over the Interstate.

  He put his eye to the scope. The pole became a tree trunk. He could see the thick bolts connecting it to the guardrail.

  He swung it forty degrees right, down twenty. A Coast Guard cutter headed up river. The bow wave glittered. The helmsman’s wristwatch flashed in the sunlight.

  He swiveled the weapon left, past the light pole. Traffic rushed toward him, close enough to touch. Sniper humor: Reach Out and Touch Someone.

  A kid in a rust bucket held the wheel with one hand, thumbed his iPhone with the other. The driver of a UPS truck scratched his chin. A woman with big hair picked her nose. Sweet Jesus! It was the fat witch from the VA. Claims Adjudicator.

  —o—

  Bucky Rayford looked forward to lunch. Not lunch, exactly. Lunch hour, when he would park the Kenworth and the forty feet of stainless steel behind his cab.

  His ten thousand gallons of gasoline would be in the underground tanks of the BP station, and he would be across the street, in Faith Allissio. Faithless Faith. He grinned, checked his mirrors. Time to start working his way into the lane for the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge.

  A sharp pain stabbed his chest. Bucky yelped a hard ukk in his throat as he failed to suck a final breath past the crushing iron band. Putting hot peppers on his sausage and eggs breakfast muffin was a mistake. It was—

  He fell forward. The seat belt stopped him before he hit the steering wheel. Didn’t stop him from slumping sideways.

  The Kenworth drifted right. A horn blared. Then another, followed by the agonized screech of tires on concrete. A muffled thump.

  The truck veered left from the impact with the UPS step van, crushing a passenger car and a pickup. The rig jackknifed, and both tractor and trailer slewed sideways toward Virginia, using all three lanes to do it.

  The cab scraped the guardrail. Slowed. The trailer rolled, tore itself free from the Kenworth. Stainless steel glittered in the bright sun. It pinwheeled, trailing a shower of sparks. Seams ruptured. Ten thousand gallons of gasoline poured onto the roadway. An 87 octane wave chased the speeding traffic. The lucky ones. Gas poured down storm drains on both sides of the highway.

  The gasoline exploded in a roiling red and yellow fireball. Forty cars and trucks sped into
the maelstrom.

  Nick grabbed the Browning and ran for the stairs.

  Chapter Ten

  The view from the presidential toilet, through thick, bullet-proof glass, is of Lafayette Square, across Pennsylvania Avenue. In the past the space has been used as a racetrack, a graveyard, a zoo, a slave market, an encampment for soldiers during the War of 1812, and more recently, political protests.

  SHORTSTOP watched giant puppets of himself, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Washington pantomime perverse sexual acts, and wondered how he was going to survive the months between Tuesday's election and the inauguration in January. Maybe visit the troops stationed abroad. With six minor wars, and peace-keeping missions in a dozen other countries, the options were many.

  The Five were still deep underground, in the Situation Room, and safely shielded from nuclear attack and unauthorized interruptions. They were discussing the problems posed and opportunities offered by a South American skirmish. Just one more hot spot to tie down American forces, attract the media, and distract the population.

  The vice president told Mason Drubb to turn off all video and audio recording devices. There would be nothing to archive. Nothing for future generations of scholars to excavate in search of doctorates.

  “Fletch? Your thoughts.” The men were clustered at one end of the conference table, ignoring their assigned seats. The lights were low and the filtered, tempered, conditioned air had an ozone tang as it whispered through the ceiling vents. The images on the monitors flickered silently, jumping from a carrier flight deck to the grainy green ghosts of night vision scopes.

  Fletcher Bainbridge was no less intimidating now that he wore civilian clothing. As a Four Star with thirty years worth of ribbons on his tunic, he had frequently been drafted by the Pentagon to testify before congressional committees. His stare could make the most vocal opponent of the military lose their train of thought, or reduce them to muttered ramblings as the General deflected their demands with withering sarcasm.

  When a Senator once chided General Bainbridge on his faulty memory, he thundered, “Perhaps, Senator, my memory is none too good. For example, when I was pinned down by NV Regulars, trying to keep my radioman alive long enough to call in an air strike on my own position, and bleeding myself, I might add, when a grenade exploded in my hand—” and here he raised the stainless steel pincers for the cameras, clicked the claws for the microphones, “I forget where you were, Senator. I can’t remember; was it in the A Shau Valley? Maybe Da Nang? Or were you patrolling the Mekong Delta, with the Brown Water Navy?”

  The General was well aware, as was most of the press corps in Hearing Room 106, as well as a significant portion of the dozens of C-SPAN viewers, that while the General was studying the dwindling options available to his decimated platoon, the Senator was at Harvard Law, studying Mergers and Acquisitions.

  Attack, always attack.

  Now, as National Security Advisor, he felt his role was no different than a young shavetail in his first combat command. He clanked his claw on the table with metronymic regularity as he said, "L'audace, l'audace, Mr. Vice President. Toujours l'audace." A phrase supposedly uttered by Frederick the Great, although why a German would be speaking French was a mystery to him. As was, in many ways, General George S. Patton himself.

  He continued. “I suggest we drop a couple tons of ordnance on the rascals. We have a supply of Russian artillery rounds at Fort Ord, stockpiled for just such an occasion. Stuff we picked up in Afghanistan. It'll be enough proof for the Times to accuse the Rooskies of meddling in our hemisphere. Have some historian write a sidebar on the Monroe Doctrine.”

  The vice president evaluated the suggestion. Audacious, yes, but there were too many places where things could go awry. “An intriguing idea, General. But do we really want to point a finger at Moscow, and give them an excuse to retaliate in the Baltic? I thought we agreed to focus on Venezuela, draw them into the maelstrom. With the state of their economy, and the constant political turmoil, they can't react with any measured effectiveness.”

  Fletch was a throwback to the tank and artillery duels of the last century. A useful idiot; he knew where the bodies were buried in the Pentagon. Knew who would come on board, cross the Rubicon, or whatever other cliché came to mind when it was time to join their cabal. Or as SHORTSTOP would say, shit or get off the pot.

  He turned next to his old college roommate. “HomSec. Your fiefdom will be critical in our little one act play.”

  The man who had hired Katherine Sinclair gave a slight nod to the man who told the president to name him Secretary of Homeland Security. “Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Three weeks ago I inked a seven hundred and fifty million dollar no-bid with Bearclaw Security. To provide private forces for HomeSec. Outsourcing the work negates any congressional interference. As well as cutting DoD out of the loop.” Edgerton turned to the Attorney General. “No cries of posse comitatus to trouble us, down the road.”

  Gabe Oxenhammer removed his heavy bifocals. The ones his wife said, the day they were picking out frames, made him look like Kissinger. Thirty years ago he'd been a two hundred and fifty pound Big Ten lineman, and hadn't shed an ounce since. “My ducks are in a row, gentlemen.”

  He scrubbed his broad face with fleshy hands. Too many late nights, doing the scut work for the coming event. No way could any of his Justice Department drudges be allowed to research the constitutional arguments. Arguments that could reach all the way to the Supreme Court, should plans go awry. He replaced his eyeglasses and jotted a note on the yellow pad in front of him. Posse comitatus indeed.

  The vice president stood, signaling the end of the meeting. “Edge, keep on top of Bearclaw. I want your security forces in place well before the turds hit the props.” He turned to Bainbridge. “General, I need you to keep SecDef and DCI apprised of our progress here. Last thing we need is for their situation to escalate. If all goes as planned, a slow simmer will suffice.”

  As the two men gathered their papers and peripherals the vice president grasped the attorney general’s arm. “Tarry a moment, if you will.”

  That Mason Drubb remained as well was a given. He was Special Assistant to the President, but he also had his finger to the wind, and knew which way it blew. SHORTSTOP's Sell-By date was fast approaching.

  Secretary Edgerton waited for his car and driver beneath the portico on the South Lawn. Now that he was back on the planet’s surface, and outside the damnable security shield the president insisted on calling the ‘Cone of Silence’, he was able to use his cell phone. The cone had not prevented him from digitally capturing the previous thirty-seven minutes.

  One of his Fifth Floor people, the Army woman who called herself the Snake Eater, had rigged it up for him. James Bond stuff. He removed the ballpoint from his breast pocket, found the switch to turn it off, and dropped it in his briefcase.

  Forty some years ago his college roommate had walked away scot-free from an embarrassment the talented Ms. Sinclair had uncovered in a matter of moments. He wasn’t sure, but thought it possible his nomination to head HomSec was an attempt to right that ancient wrong.

  Maybe not; contrition was not among the vice president’s meager list of virtues. More likely it was the dictum of keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. Sometimes one could be both. He would put the recording in a secure location; if crunch time came, in the guise of a plea bargain, the vice president would not walk away a second time.

  He speed-dialed Woodrow King, CEO of Bearclaw Security, for an update.

  “We’re ten days ahead of schedule, Mr. Secretary. A cadre of our most experienced correctional officers are at The Compound, as we speak. Training the first batch of recruits.”

  “Good men? We don’t want any dead enders. Remember, they’ll be hosting some extremely high profile people.”

  “Hey, don’t tell me my business. You’ve seen how Bearclaw’s Private Prisons Division is run. Top notch guys, with years of Federal Correctional Institution experience.”

/>   “I meant the grunts.”

  “Semper fi. Jarheads. Crusaders. Forged in Fallujah, tempered in the Tigris. The Lord’s crucible.”

  Edgerton winced. Woody had an inside track with the administration largely because of his faith. And sometimes it was over the top.

  A plume of black smoke on the horizon caught his eye. He had a dinner engagement in Alexandria, and wondered if the Woodrow Wilson was involved. His driver would know; it was why everyone who was anyone had a driver, for Pete’s sake. Bearclaw’s CEO was rambling on with details that held no interest for the Secretary.

  “My guy’s on his way to Quantico right now, to select another batch. Gunnery Sergeant Talarico; put in his thirty, and signed on with us. He was the Marine’s top recruiter four years running; knows how to pick ‘em. Hey, funny story. During Iran-Contra he was Colonel North’s driver. Gunny’s the one went shopping for the snow tires!”

  “Fascinating, Woody. Just get it done. Don’t let me down.”

  “Mr. Secretary, I’ve got every reason to come through. Seven hundred and fifty million of ‘em.”

  The Secretary of Homeland Security ended the call and waited for his driver to run around and open the rear door of the Lincoln. If he was a believer in that nonsense he’d pray Woody would come through. If things went awry he would be looking at life without parole. Or worse. And not in one of Bearclaw’s privatized hellholes.

  —o—

  Gunny Talarico, a big man with a face as cracked and creased as an old catcher's mitt, drew on his cigarette and skimmed the first service record on the stack of twenty. He’d been trying to quit, but a fresh smoke helped mask the stale stink of sex, beer, and deodorant permeating Sex on the Halfshell.

  He'd picked up a container of USMC coffee along with the records, and took another sip of the world’s best java. He wouldn’t drink anything in this place that didn’t come straight out of a long neck bottle.