by Reed Hill
There was a pause, so Margolis spoke up, “This is FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Intelligence and Planning, Kevin Margolis. I’m the duty officer this morning for the Strategic Information and Operations Center for the Bureau, and I have been running a CIRG for the past twelve hours that we think demands further attention.”
A moment later a woman’s voice came on the line, “Rose Hughley, Assistant Director DHS for Operations, and Planning.”
“Doug Rice. I’m the Deputy Assistant Director – Immigration and Customs Enforcement – for Border Enforcement.”
“Nancy Jackson-Smith. Assistant Director for Border Protection – Customs Department for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
Those sounded awfully similar, Margolis thought, as the phone beeped, indicating someone new joining the call.
“Fred Young, Deputy Assistant Director for Intelligence – Central and South America – for Central Intelligence Agency.”
“Felicia Romero, Senior Policy Analyst, for DHS – Intelligence and Analysis Division.”
“Air Force Major General Phillip Pritchard, Director of the Northern National Security Emergency Preparedness Directorate – 1st Air Force, Tyndall Air Force Base.”
“Allen Peters, Deputy Assistant Director for Operations – Southwest Sector – Drug Enforcement Agency.”
“Martin Boorhees, Deputy Director, Office of Special Intelligence – Sector 8 – Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and I have with me Assistant Director for Operations, Martha Hewitt also from BATFE.” A woman’s voice said, “Hello, everyone.”
At this point, there was a long pause so Kevin jumped in, “I think we have a couple of others that we’re waiting on, but let’s go ahead and get started. We all have busy schedules and I know we all have daily briefings to prepare for our bosses, based on overnight traffic.”
Margolis bought a little bit of time, to give the last couple of people he had invited time to join, and he referenced his phone system cheat sheet. “I’m going to enter the code now and begin recording for transcription, so please hang on for a moment.”
As he started pushing buttons, one of the participants cleared his throat very vigorously. After a pause and some muffled sounds of a phone receiver crackling, a man’s voice quickly stated, “From your initial briefing, this is clearly domestic and is not within the jurisdiction of the CIA. I’m going to drop off – best of luck to you all.” A moment later came the short beep suggesting that Young had left the call.
There were a handful of nervous laughs and titters as Margolis kept punching the code, “Okay, well thanks for coming Mr. Young.” Margolis chuckled dryly, “Keep America safe abroad I guess. I assume the rest of us are all staying on the call?”
Margolis continued, “Okay then, let’s begin. Today is Tuesday July 5, 8:10 a.m. Eastern time. This is Kevin Margolis, Deputy Assistant Director for Intelligence and Planning for the FBI initiating an interagency briefing on the status of Critical Incident Response Group number 017A-265.
“Then if everyone will click on their encrypted attachment and unpack the protected file: password is 1JX5RDG8963. This is an eyes only document. The Bureau requests that you make no physical copies unless expressed permission is granted by FBI.”
As Margolis, began to recite the attendees for the recording, he thought how odd it was for Young from CIA to suddenly drop off the call, and he made a mental note to include that in his summary. The conference call summary was definitely going upstairs for the 9:30 a.m. briefing for the Directors, and he would make a clear note about CIA not attending.
*****
Outside of Fort Stockton, Texas - July 5th, 2017 – 7:10 a.m.
“Sergeant Mathews, Sergeant Mathews. This is Corporal Andreson, you copy?” the AN/VRC 97 crackled to life, so he grabbed the mic and responded. “This is Mathews, go ahead, Andreson, over.”
“People in my deuce are complaining about the heat, and it’s pretty damn clear, these folks are tired, sar’nt.”
“Roger that,” Mathews replied, “Let’s pull it over and pass out the rest of the water, let them stretch their legs for ten minutes, over.” Staff Sergeant Ken Mathews pulled the deuce and a half to a stop very slowly so that the rest of the caravan could easily pull in behind him. He jumped out and began motioning for the long line of trucks and Humvees to pull to the shoulder of the dusty two-lane. He wondered just how many there were in the dozen trucks and fifteen Humvees. Maybe four hundred, all but the thirty soldiers were women and children.
Mathews was starting to shake the regret he had been feeling, given how desolate this stretch of Interstate 10 had become. He had been improvising when he and the gaggle of survivors started sweeping through the main parts of post housing and rounding up all the families that they could see. Picking up a Humvee here and truck there, they managed to clear probably one hundred homes in the enlisted post housing complex before the gunfire got too heavy. The idea was to get them the hell out of the warzone that Fort Bliss had become, but he didn’t have much more of a plan than that.
They had followed Interstate 10 out of El Paso east, and kept going until they couldn’t hear any gunfire. The first hour had been very dicey, as they encountered several random instances where gangs of thugs on foot had taken shots at them. Those first fifty or sixty miles had been very dangerous, but things improved dramatically as I-10 turned from following the border and headed east. They saw a number of vehicles in groups of three or four passing them, heading toward the city, and thankfully none had turned to follow them. Mathews had been stunned when two USAF fighters – F-16s he thought but he couldn’t be sure – were shot from the sky above them as they approached the I-20 exit. The sight of those downed fighters confirmed to Mathews that he was doing right thing.
Mathews wasn’t sure what disturbed him more: all the overturned and burning cars on the interstate, or the fact that most of the exits within eighty miles of El Paso had graffiti the likes of ‘Gringos get out while you can,’ or ‘Anglos off our land,’ and even worse, ‘Gringos leave or die.’ His minded wandered to Marta. Even though they hadn’t been together for more than five years, he still hoped she was somewhere safe. She was a good woman. If only she could have handled the deployments... He made a mental note to call her when things quieted down a bit. The last he had heard was that she had moved to Eagle Pass after the divorce. Mathews wished he could talk with her now.
“Sergeant Mathews?” a young Speedy Four brought him back to the desert and their circumstances. The drivers of the lead few vehicles jogged to the front of the column where Mathews was signaling to them. “Sergeant, they’re asking if we can take a minute and walk around.”
“Go ahead and tell them we’ll take ten minutes here. We need to keep moving, so remind them not to wander off. It’s not safe.” This part of west Texas was pretty damned desolate, and he felt for these people and what they had likely lost. “We’re pretty exposed here, but we’re less than an hour from Ft. Stockton, where we can get off our feet and find these folks some real shelter.” He could see a few soldiers, some of whom didn’t look old enough to be shaving, starting to hand out the last bottles of water from the backs of the trucks as scores of kids in their pajamas, clutching stuffed animals, and mothers, in robes and sweats, wandered up to take them. Thank God I didn’t just make a run for it.
The first stop had been difficult. He had just wanted to get the hell out of there. He was panicking, with his entire unit slaughtered at the southwest gate, and he had barely escaped, under fire, pulling Jenkins into a Humvee. A black lady in hair curlers had appeared in his headlights while he was trying to stop the bleeding to Jenkins’ chest. She was waving to him to stop with one hand while holding her son in his Spiderman pajamas in the other. He went past her, but as the thump of Jenkins’ pulse ceased, he had stopped the truck. Mathews didn’t even recall pressing the brake pedal down, but he had screeched it to a halt, and the hysterical woman climbed with her son. Jenkins was gone, but maybe h
e could still do some good.
He saw that lady and allowed himself a smile. She took a bottle of water and handed it to the little boy, who was grinning and laughing despite being clearly very dirty and sweaty. He probably was having fun ‘playing soldier’ out here – thinking he was being like his daddy.
Thank God I stopped.
*****
Burleson Road
Austin, Texas - July 5th, 2017 – 7:14 a.m.
Danny Haslett adjusted his grip on the rifle with his latex-gloved hand and re-focused his breathing to slow his heart rate. With one last systems check, he could be satisfied and give himself a mental thumbs-up. His weapon was built from a Remington 700 bolt-action platform, like the M40A5 he used in the Marines with a black polymer stock and tripod system. His buddy at Dark Water Arms in Houston helped him smith it from the ground up, and it shot like a wet dream. It had a sweet Shilen trigger with a two pound pull, zero creep and no over-travel – smooth as a prom queen’s silk panties. The 26” Schneider stainless bull barrel made it damn heavy, but it was worth it. He petted the scope like a kitten. It was a Leupold Mark 4 with a variable 8.5-25x50 M5 with the illuminated tactical milling reticle, for precision in low light.
He had painstakingly dura-sealed the weapon, scope and suppressor in a flat blend of desert tan, olive and wolf gray. It was a ½ MOA weapon that was as good as the rifle he had used when he was with 4th Recon Battalion. Danny could hit the 10-ring consistently with it from about any distance he had tried, and he was damn proud to own it.
His laser range finder indicated that he was 1,244 yards to the target – the dark glass door of the Bergstrom Airport-South private terminal. His simulated targeting on the previous two dumb sheeple entering through the door indicated that most of them stopped for a moment at the spot where he had his scope trained. Somebody important would mostly likely wait right there for some stooge to open the door. It would be ideal if some other asshole was at the door to greet him – they would probably stand there for a few seconds shaking hands or chatting each other up. He took another quick glance of the photo that lay in the dust, wedged in place in a small spike of catclaw brush for quick reference – it was some black bitch he didn’t know, kinda butch with really short hair.
The tip of the camo-painted suppressor extended just to the limit of the outstretched limbs of the last few trees. It was a custom job from Freddy at Dark Water, about the size of a cardboard paper towel tube. Contrary to what the dumbasses on TV said, suppressors didn’t silence the weapon; they just muffled the noise of the propellant gas as the bullet left the barrel. The bullet itself still made a bunch of noise as it carried a small ‘sonic boom’ of a bullet, traveling at over twice the speed of sound.
His eyes dropped down to the prepaid wireless for a quick weather status. The hunter’s weather app showed the temperature up a degree to seventy-five, but the humidity remained steady at twenty-seven percent and the air pressure showed 29.81-R. The flags above the terminal flapped here and there and the app showed 8-10 mph out of the south-southwest for Austin, Texas, but he thought there might be a smidge more than that out on the tarmac with the open field.
He had only two rounds in the detachable box magazine, despite the fact that it held four. There was no reason to think he could ever get a third shot off, and even assuming a second was a stretch. He had recently stumbled on half a case of Lost River J40 match rounds that a guy was willing to sell him out of his trunk for a buck a round. He didn’t know where the guy had obtained the military-grade sniper rounds and he didn’t much care. He loved them, and he zeroed his rifle for the rounds. They were a copper-nickel alloy and seemed to fly true. He was putting ten out of ten on a paper plate from a thousand yards in normal wind conditions and did nineteen for twenty yesterday, so he felt like the gun and the round were honed in. Danny Haslett grinned. If he could just get the damn shooter to do his part, he was golden.
He was lying prone with his legs splayed out and feet flat against the dirt, focusing his vision through the scope with his left eye closed. The various sized and spaced hash marks on the vertical and horizontal stadia of the mil dot reticle fed him the information his brain automatically processed for range to target. The rifle was zeroed to thousand yards, and the laminated rolodex of range charts he had pulled from his small backpack indicated a 4.5” holdover on the rifle as currently set up. Aiming half-a-head high was going to put him dead-balls on target. Let’s get this party started.
Danny Haslett was fully-joyed and good to go.
Chapter 5
Bergstrom International Airport – South Terminal
Austin, Texas - July 5th, 2017 – 7:25 a.m.
The tires chirped on the C-37A Department of Defense jet as it touched down, and U.S. Attorney General Rosa Ross-Brown checked her image in her compact’s mirror and shoved it away in her maroon leather handbag and began to gather her files into her small black briefcase. While the small corporate jet taxied toward the terminal, Ross-Brown unbuckled her seat belt and slipped her feet into her pumps, glancing over at her tall assistant. The pilot’s monotonous tone came through the speakers, “Welcome to Austin. The local time is 7:25 a.m., and we’ll have you to the terminal in just a minute, ma’am.”
Ross-Brown moved to the edge of her seat and gave a nod to her assistant, noticing the young attorney checking her wireless. Looking up at her boss she said, “Ma’am, we have some requests coming in for a face-to-face – it’s the Governor’s office. They want to schedule a meeting.”
Ross-Brown couldn’t believe her ears. What does that mean? Her mind was spinning. She sat up and straightened her sport coat, “Find out the details, and quick.”
The jet came to a halt on the tarmac and the two security guards got up and started to make their way forward. Ross-Brown got up and headed for the exit, and the assistant began typing an email frantically on her wireless. I am not going to let this guy out of my sights. He may think he can run and hide from my staff, but he can’t run from me. She was bound and determined to serve the subpoena she held in her briefcase.
“Don’t worry, ma’am. I’ll find out what game they are playing at.”
“Good, good,” the AG said. “Find out what they are up to.” This big old’ fish sure as hell isn’t going to wriggle off my line. Oh no, he isn’t. Not today. “And don’t take any shit.”
*****
Burleson Road
Austin, Texas - July 5th, 2017 – 7:29 a.m.
Haslett breathed and exhaled slowly, trying to push the noisy crickets and screaming cicadas to the back of his mind. The first jet to touch down and taxi toward the south terminal in close to fifteen minutes was a corporate-style aircraft, and Haslett went on alert. It was a white Gulfstream of some kind and bore an American flag emblem and V-series tail code on the vertical stabilizer indicating a government, non-military asset. A quick eyes-down to his pre-paid wireless showed 7:28 a.m. This has to be the one.
His system was flooded with adrenaline upon seeing his task so close at hand. The plane came to a stop, and after a moment, the door stairway dropped down. His heart raced and he closed his eyes for an instant trying to steady the bob of his sight picture through the powerful scope as it bounced and jumped. Slow down. Steady now – like a rock.
A short, black woman in a gray power suit bounded down the steps, carrying a red purse in one hand, a black leather briefcase in the other, followed by a loose gaggle of three aides; two white males and a black female. That’s the bitch. For sure. Very clearly the woman from the photo he had in the dirt in front of him, she was moving at a brisk pace, so he exhaled and trained his mil-dot crosshairs on her body as best as he could. As often happens in these high stress moments, Danny’s world closed down the narrow, foggy realm of the magnified lens and the slow-motion movements occurring in his contracting field of vision in the moments between heart beats. Dear Lord Jesus in heaven, make my hand steady to do your will.
As he let go of a long, steady breath, the woman stopped in
the middle of the black carpet just a few feet from the door and turned to look at those trailing behind her. I am your servant Lord God – let your justice be done. Danny fixed the cross-hairs just at the top of her head and smoothly squeezed trigger with his latex-gloved grip.
*****
The Airman unlocked the door and dropped down the fold-out stairs for the Attorney General, thanking her and wishing her a good day. She stepped out of the aircraft and stomped down while the accompanying goons followed after her, jostling each other to get down the steps and keep pace. They could hardly keep up as the AG marched across the tarmac toward the short, broad building with darkened glass.
Seeing the outlines of a handful of press and camera crews, Ross-Brown held her head a bit higher and walked slowly toward the stretch of black indoor/outdoor carpet in front of the dark glass doors. Sometimes she just couldn’t believe she was actually doing the things she was. It seemed like only yesterday that she was that scared girl being dropped off in a rusty pick-up by her mother in front of the dorms at Palmetto State College. Now she was being dropped off by a Department of Defense jet at a private terminal on the way to taking the Governor of Texas into custody for sedition against the United States of America.
She glanced over her shoulder as she sauntered toward the doors, pursing her lips. Isn’t one of these damn goons going to get the door for me? Slowed her pace, waiting for one of the security detail to walk past her and open the door, but it wasn’t happening. Keep smiling, keep smiling. She stopped on the black carpet and paused for the security guard to shuffle by, and grimaced slightly as she adjusted her jacket and peered up to see the flutter of the American flag and the Texas flag on the tall flag pole next to the low terminal.