Five minutes later the door opened and Kelly returned to the car. She leaned across my window ledge and said, “The phones are taken care of, but there’s something else you might want to get.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s got a SunPassUltra we can use.”
“Just to pay the tolls and drive in the SunPass lanes?”
Nick said, “Get it, if it’s really an Ultra. Not just anybody can buy them; you have to pass a security screening and have a background check. They don’t even advertise it. And it’s not just for tolls and SunPass lanes. It means we can breeze through a lot of security checkpoints. We can even park in VIP places, like at the airport.”
“Herman calls it the StasiPass,” added Kelly. “The Stasi were the East German secret police, back when they had the Berlin Wall. It’ll be good for getting over to Miami Beach with no aggravation. It’ll really help. But if you want it, I’ll need another five thou.”
I refrained from mentioning that I already knew who the Stasi were. Kelly was only twenty, give or take a year, and Germany had reunited before she was born. I still had some doubts about the SunPass. “But it won’t match your car, will it?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Ultras can put them in any of their cars. The state doesn’t care as long as the balance is kept up. Every time a car with a SunPass goes through a toll area, it just deducts the fee from the account. Anyway, Herman promised me it’s safe. This one can’t be traced.”
Nick said, “So if somebody steals one from a car, then they can just drive right into the security zones?”
“If the government wasn’t stupid,” she replied, “then it wouldn’t be the government, now would it? But most of the time if a SunPass is stolen the owner knows it right away, and the police will flag it. I think most car thieves would rather chuck it out the window than drive around with it turned on. So, are we getting it?”
I gave the money to her, and she was back in a minute with a brown paper shopping bag. The beige plastic box was about the size of a pack of cigarettes, with pair of suction cups on one side and some buttons and LED lights on the other. She stuck it to the lower left inside corner of her windshield, then turned the GTI’s ignition key and started the engine.
“Hold on a minute,” I said. “I want to check everything before we go.” I pointed to the SunPass and asked her, “Is it a real one?”
“It looks real to me. Right size, right color.”
“Is it hot?”
“Do you mean, is it stolen? Or do you mean, is it turned on and working? I’m sure it’s working, or Herman wouldn’t sell it to me. See, the green light is on. And he always puts in fresh batteries.”
It took me a moment to realize that she had sidestepped the question of whether it was a stolen or counterfeit unit, but I let it pass. Did it really matter? Instead I asked her, “But is it safe? I mean, it’s not transmitting a code that says ‘stolen SunPass, stop this vehicle’?”
“Of course not! That’s the whole point, isn’t it? That’s why I go to Herman. We trust each other. His stuff is clean. It’s cloned or something. The phones, too. He’s old, but he’s a real techno-geek. He stays current with the technology, and he only works within his areas of expertise. He only sells things that work, that are safe. But just to a few special clients like me.”
She passed the paper bag to me. I looked inside and saw three silver Motorola flip phones and chargers. I handed the bag behind me to Nick, delegating the next assignment to him. Kelly twisted around in her seat and told him, “We’ve got very basic dumb phones. They don’t even have cameras, and you can’t send texts or anything. Put the numbers into memory, okay? We should only be calling each other, right, Dan?”
“And maybe the Delaneys, later on. But I don’t want their number in the phones. And don’t set up voicemail either: anybody can retrieve voicemails, forever.”
Nick asked her, “What’s the deal on these phones, anyway? How can they work if they’re untraceable?”
“Herman has boxes full of old phones like these. He switches things around and changes their chips and SIM cards. When he puts a special phone together the accounts are valid, or at least they’re still functional. He made me promise I’d smash them and throw them in a canal before the end of the month. But until then they’ll be fine. And we should only make calls in South Florida. Any problem with that?”
I said, “None that I can see. Nick, when you get the numbers loaded, do a comm check. Call each one from each one.”
Within a minute he’d tested them all and gave us each a phone. The ring tones were just a pleasant default chirping instead of music. The numbers on the tiny screen were listed under N, D and K. I would have chosen different code names, but I didn’t comment. As often happened, I had to balance my desire to do everything my way against lowering morale by overcorrecting the troops. I felt reassured that the three of us had a secure and anonymous means of communication for when we split up. Secure comms were a big force multiplier, and my optimism ratcheted up a few notches.
We continued our trek, winding through the employee lots and service lanes. The rent-a-cops at the other end of the Target shopping center complex heard the exiting vehicle and automatically raised the barrier at our approach.
On the way out of the next shopping center on another side street, we had one more stroke of good fortune. Kelly spotted a ‘jug boy,’ in this case a dreadlocked Rastafarian wearing a black, red and green Bob Marley T-shirt. He was sitting on a folding chair on a tiny traffic island in the middle of an otherwise empty parking lot. Tucked under the chair was a red one-gallon plastic fuel can, his only advertisement. The man plausibly looked as if he was waiting for a friend to arrive and take him somewhere, perhaps to buy gas for a lawn mower. Kelly pulled up next to him, smiled and pointed at the empty jug. The Rasta man grinned back, showing a prominent gold tooth.
It went down like a minor drug deal. We drove to where the Rastafarian pointed, behind an independent transmission shop. The bay doors were open on the front and back. Kelly parked in the alleyway between the shop and a high wall. Nick and I stepped out of the GTI to check the gasoline and to encourage good behavior by all parties involved. Ten gallons cost an even six hundred bucks, paid to a sweating mechanic in greasy shop coveralls. An oval uniform patch identified him as Logan. He disappeared into the service area with the cash and returned lugging a jerry can in each hand.
Nick poured the gasoline into the GTI, and the mechanic took the empty jugs when he was finished. I asked Logan about home delivery and he looked amused. I offered to pay significantly above the sixty dollars a gallon, but I was turned down flat. He had plenty of customers coming to him without the hassle and risk of making house calls, forty gallons was out of the question, and high octane was unheard of. I hoped that Mike Delaney would have better luck with refueling the Pantera.
When Kelly finally turned the GTI back onto Oakland Park, the placard-waving demonstrators were still blocking traffic in front of Target. But this time they were in our rear-view mirrors as we headed to I-95, just a few blocks ahead.
7
We passed through the darkness beneath a dozen lanes of interstate highway and looped around the clockwise ramp. Kelly accelerated the GTI up the curve, slinging me into the left side of the bucket seat. As we reached the southbound entrance, a work truck pulling a trailer loaded with lawn mowers and yard tools loomed ahead of us, reducing the effective length of the acceleration lane to just a hundred feet. Instead of slamming on the brakes, Kelly punched the gas and swung the GTI out into a gap.
Traffic was medium-heavy but moving fast at just after nine in the morning. Highway signs announced the Fort Lauderdale exits, the international airport, Hollywood and finally Miami, twenty miles south. Most of the signs were scrawled over with illegible graffiti, despite razor wire anti-climbing barriers encircling the steel support columns. More graffiti could be seen on most of the walls and buildings on both sides of the highway.
&
nbsp; Kelly said, “I could do ninety through here easy, but I’m guessing you don’t want me playing NASCAR today. Even if I can drive like Kyle Bush on crack.”
“You guessed right.”
“That’s too bad, because this kind of traffic is when the GTI really shines.” She snapped the stick between the top three gears as she exploited holes in the traffic but never went faster than five miles over the limit, which was seventy. She frequently switched between the four southbound lanes to press an advantage, but not often enough to draw unwanted attention.
After a few minutes I was able to predict her passing patterns most of the time. She was a very consistent second-level thinker, with some promising third-level indications, but perhaps we differed merely on finer points of strategy. In the drone world of first-level thinkers, even second-level thinkers appear to have clairvoyance in traffic, in the same way that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. I wondered if Kelly Urbanzik played chess. Urbanzik struck me as a chess-playing name. Slavic, maybe Russian. Wherever the Urbanzik clan originally hailed from, there were probably a lot of smart, feisty people living there.
The motor rumbled and vibrated when she jammed the gas pedal down, but the reward was acceleration that pushed me back with a few Gs of force. Between the engine and the road noise it was loud inside the car, and you had to speak up to be heard. Listening to music was out of the question if you wanted to conduct any kind of a conversation.
Concrete Jersey barricades on both sides of the travel lanes reflected and amplified the combined noise. On the other hand, the gale wind gusts buffeting the car’s interior were refreshing in the absence of a working air conditioner. But instead of my familiar sea air, we were breathing the stale exhaust of the thousands of vehicles stampeding up and down the interstate with us.
“What kind of engine does this thing have?” I asked Kelly loudly. The Volkswagen GTI had a strong reputation for performance…when parts were not falling off the German-engineered but Brazilian-made automobile.
“It’s the VR6 turbo, not the two-liter four-cylinder. It’s really a screamer. I wish you’d let me show you what it can do in traffic.”
“Not today. No matter what, we don’t want to get pulled over. Not for speeding or anything else.” Like reckless lanechanging. Kelly was keeping that to a minimum now, only hopping across the stripes when there was a worthwhile gain to be had.
Nick said, “Cop cars coming up from behind. A lot of them.”
We were in a middle lane and Kelly slid over to the right. Five marked Crown Victorias traveling almost nose to tail cruised past us in the fast lane, their red-and-blue light bars flashing. The lead unit bumped his siren with quick yelps to encourage the less observant to clear a path.
I wondered if they were heading to a raid or a crime scene in progress, or if it was now standard procedure for them to travel in convoys to provide safety in numbers. I had not noticed any solitary police cruisers. If they needed to travel in groups for their own safety, that meant much wider areas with no police presence at all.
“Do they do that a lot now?” I asked Kelly. “Convoy up?”
“Five or six cars is fairly typical,” she responded. “They do a lot of swarming tactics. They call it a blitz-raid.”
I worried that the SunPass unit was chirping out an electronic warning signal to every cop and Fed in a hundred miles, but I kept this concern to myself. Adding my private worries to my team’s stress was not going to assist us in accomplishing our mission. You took all reasonable precautions, and then you pressed ahead. You had to avoid paralysis by analysis. We’d even gone over some basic SOPs. Now it was time to move the ball down the field. Today’s the day. Carpe diem. Git ’er done. Take the shot. Send it!
I asked Kelly, “Do you know the Fontainebleau?”
“Sure, it’s the C-shaped hotel on Collins next to the Eden Roc. Killer swimming pools, like in a movie. Waterfalls and everything. Sinatra, Elvis, all of those guys used to hang out there. I’ve been by it a million times, but I only went there once. For a wedding. It has huge meeting halls.” Her ponytail and escaping wisps of hair flicked around her face and chin. Behind her the morning sun lent her light brown hair a subtle red tint, almost a very dark strawberry blond.
“What do you think about me sneaking my pistol into the Fontainebleau? I might get my only chance at Richard Prechter there.”
“Oh, that’s a great idea—if you want to be on the six o’clock news with all the other photogenic morons who got arrested today.”
“No way, huh?”
“No friggin’ way. Ever since the Washington Hilton got blown up, and then after what happened in San Francisco, famous hotels like the Fontainebleau have gotten very paranoid. They check your bags, and they use metal detectors. Guards all over the place, and they can check your ID and ask to see your key card, things like that. It’s almost like an airport. At least that’s how it was when I went there last year. Is that going to be a problem, if you can’t take in your gun?”
“Not really. I just want to know my options.”
Nick said, “People expect tight security at places like that. It’s a status symbol. It keeps the riff-raff out. All the big hotels in Miami Beach are like that.” Then he changed the conversational direction and asked me, “Dan, why do you carry a nine-mill, anyway? Why not a forty caliber, or a forty-five?”
“Oh, I’ve had them before and I like them, but nine-millimeter ammo is easier to find anywhere you go. Nine-millimeter pistols too, for that matter.”
“What about stopping power? I never trusted the M-9s they gave us for guard duty.”
“That was full-metal-jacket ammo. That was in the military.”
“Well, do you think a nine millimeter is enough to do the job?”
“With good high-velocity hollow points, I think a nine-mill is plenty. It’s more a question of shot placement than anything else.”
That was all the reason I ever gave anybody when it came to the never-ending best-caliber debate. The rest of the story was that I was both faster and more accurate with the lighter-recoiling nine-millimeter, and it was my custom to aim between the running lights whenever possible, out to about forty or fifty feet, depending on some factors. But discussing making deliberate head shots with a pistol sounded either too cocky or too gruesome, so I never talked about it.
My preference was always to finesse a tactical situation so that it would take place at longer range rather than closer, rifle or pistol. It’s part of my scout-sniper background, obviously, but it also just makes more sense to me. Outrange thy enemy is a basic martial truth. This is why I purchased the black-market Glock 17 in Brazil, and not an identical but more compact Glock 19. The extra inch of barrel and slide gives me a better sight radius and more practical accuracy. For this advantage it’s somewhat less concealable, but I’m six-two and two hundred pounds, and I have never had a problem hiding a full-size Glock 17. The only time it won’t fit somewhere is when I’m shirtless in swim trunks, and that is a different game.
Back on Rebel Yell I had a plastic bin full of aftermarket Glock parts. Once again I privately congratulated myself for the foresight to buy the parts years ago, when they were as easy to obtain as clicking a mouse and waiting for the UPS delivery. I could take a bone-stock Glock like this one from Brazil and turn it into a race gun by swapping parts. Instant three-pound match trigger. Glowing tritium night sights and a few other performance-boosting tricks.
From a sandbag rest, sitting at a shooting table and firing quality factory ammo, I can make two-inch groups at fifty feet. Standing, most people can barely hit a mailbox at fifty feet with a pistol or a revolver. Most gun pros can at least hit a license plate. I can hit individual numbers on the plate. That’s standing up at the fifty-foot line at a target range, with nobody shooting back. Everybody gets worse when it comes to the helter-skelter of a running gunfight on the two-way range. But I seem to get less worse than most.
At least so far.
B
ut whether it was over the iron sights of a pistol at fifty feet or through a rifle scope at five hundred yards, I went for head shots whenever I could. For me, taking a deliberate torso shot with a rifle from a steady rest or a bipod meant either the range was beyond five hundred yards or I was dealing with multiple targets or movers. Not that I was the world’s best shot, but with almost any weapon I instinctively knew when I was within range. It was a unique ability I had, to just know when I could get the hit. But I didn’t want to share these private thoughts, especially not with Kelly in the car.
It was a touchy subject. I knew that for many people, former snipers were presumed to be either head cases or head hunters, and I was neither. Yes, I had killed the enemies of my country, but only in order to save the lives of my fellow grunts. An insurgent digging a hole beside a road, with a pair of howitzer shells wrapped in wires next to the hole, was an insurgent I had no regrets about sending to Allah on the express train. Not after witnessing the shredded and burned results of successful IED detonations. No sympathy, no remorse. My well-aimed bullets saved many American, allied and civilian lives.
And unlike pilots, artillerymen and tankers, I knew what happened to the end users of my Sierra Match Kings. I didn’t wonder if my missile, bomb or shell had exploded in the middle of a terrorist meeting or a wedding party. I never wondered if that distant figure magnified ten times in my rifle scope was a farmer carrying tools over his shoulder or an enemy fighter toting an RPK light machine gun. I knew. Even among the grunts, snipers were almost unique in this capability. A machine gunner peering across iron sights or through a low-powered scope might loose off an aimed burst and never learn what happened at the other end, and to whom. But a sniper knows, because he sees it. In living color.
I never lost a night’s sleep over any of the enemies I killed, and there were more than a few. But that was when I was working on Uncle Sam’s account. When I left the military to make my own way in the world, rifles were not my tool of choice, though I would always want a good rifle held in ready reserve. When you’ve lived and died by the application of precision rifle fire at long range, you want to keep that option on the table.
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