No, the way you took this unit down was you got what they were here protecting. You got that and you made off. That got their attention. They had to get it back; that was why they existed, and if they didn’t get it back, it wasn’t just failure, it was something worse, some professional shame that only the best can feel, some place beyond shame. So they came looking for you somewhere out there—out there lay behind Bob, and it was the largest parcel of privately owned land in America, a wonderland of mountains and gulches and high meadows and glades and forests and mesas and canyons—you got them out there, hunting you, and like many a man before, they discovered you were hunting them. But to play that game the way Bob had set it up, he had to get the goddamned thing, and he didn’t even know what it was, much less where it was. Probably in a safe. And how do you get the safe open? Maybe if you asked politely, they’d oblige.
He eyed the building, whose details were vanishing in the setting sun. It was the old ranch house, refurbished for this duty. Its barn was a garage that housed four jeeps and a dozen wheeled off-road buggies, ATVs. The house itself was an old piece of prairie design, familiar from a thousand and ten westerns, rewired, rewindowed, redoored, remade as a modern security vault. Bob saw cameras everywhere, and a network of lights, and some kind of bar code entry mechanism, and alarm circuits at all the windows, all seemingly high tech, maybe higher tech, maybe nowhere-near highest tech. Men—none of them Graywolf commandos, but all of them tough-looking townie cowpokes—hung about, all armed not with the ubiquitous M4s but with Ruger Mini-14s, which looked a little more ranchlike in the hands of boys in jeans and boots and hats. There was a regular patrol rotation, and every hour, three vehicles left to run perimeter; there was another complement of two after dark and one during daylight that staffed the entry gate, which was miles away. There was a big kitchen and a day room, and that was the downstairs. Who knew what was in the basement? Upstairs were sleeping quarters for the night shift. People came and went by a utility route that led off to the right and into an arroyo, because the grand people in the big house didn’t want to be troubled by the sight of Johnny Lunchbucket showing up for work every morning.
Swagger had picked a zigzag approach, meaning a long night’s crawl in the bulk of a ghillie suit. His entry point was the basement window, southeast corner. The building wasn’t properly speaking patrolled or guarded, except by the presence of those living within. There seemed no steady, regular surveillance, no pattern of lights. He could pick out no motion detectors or Doppler radar screens. Security developmentwise, it was mid tech, definitely late twentieth century. Constable had laid out the bucks for it fifteen years ago, and that was that; maybe an upgrade was on his to-do list but he hadn’t gotten to it yet.
The problem was the window. Kick it in? Noise, alarm. Cut the wires? Probably couldn’t reach ’em. Set some sort of diversionary element—a charge, a fire, an alarm? Get too many cowboys awakened. Pick the lock? He had picked locks before and knew how to do it, and this lock was probably pretty easy; it was just wired.
No, the only way was to cut a hole in the glass, reach in, and cut the wire, then get through the lock.
Then he’d slide in and see what was what. He had no weapons, but he had five smoke grenades and five flashbang munitions, all of which would create considerable confusion if necessary. Here was the official version of the plan, the one he had to convince himself he’d believe in, the one they’d try to beat him away from, and he knew, if he gave it up, it was the first step toward losing this one. The idea seemed to be to find “it,” booby-trap the place with smokers and flashbangs, disable most of the vehicles—not exactly high tech, he’d just pierce each tire with an icepick—and disappear with one. By the time they got the vehicles up and running, he’d be long gone and they’d have to call in the big boys, the trackers and the snipers, the Graywolf pros, to hunt him down.
But he knew that hope was a dream. The reality: this’ll be a bad one.
There’s going to be a lot of pain ahead, getting through this one.
You’re going to pay for this one.
Then he thought, man, I am too old for this shit. I do not need this shit. I saw the six-zero a few years back and I ought to be rocking this way, then that, not putting gunk on my face and slithering in a suit that looks like a bush downhill a thousand yards to try to get in and out and away and gone, but instead probably getting my ass kicked hard and long until I ain’t hardly human no more.
I do not want to do this.
But he looked around, and as usual, nobody else was there. If not him, who? Tell the feds. Telling the feds just opens a can of worms and lets lawyers and politicians and bullshit artists of all stripes into what is essentially clear-cut and demands action and justice.
So here I am and here I go.
His face blackened, he began the long crawl down.
It took six hours and he arrived at 0230. The temp had dropped, and a keening wind knifed down from the mountains. There was no moon, but tides and pinwheels of stars splattering the vault of dark threw off enough dim glow to let him navigate, and he’d committed the plan of the place, the location of the trees, the spotlights, the shadows, to memory. He slid between cones of light, riding the shadows, moving with a kind of slow swimmer’s urgency as if through mud. You’d have to look hard at him to see movement at all, and he doubted the cameras were high-res enough to pick him out of the shadows in what was undoubtedly black-and-white. Every time he heard some odd noise, he froze, waiting to see if anything would develop, and of course it never did. At one point, around eleven, a couple of cowboys came out and smoked on the porch, had a good laugh at a supervisor’s expense, and one took a nip from a secret flask. Then they ducked back in. At two-hour intervals, there was some clambering as a security shift climbed into vehicles, tested engines and lights, then left for a perimeter patrol, making a lot of noise as they went. Each circuit took four hours, so the first crew was back while the second and third were still out, prowling around inside the barbed wire in the dark in far distant places. It was a hell of a big spread.
Now he scooted the last few feet until he was flush against the house. He lay, stifling his breathing, waiting for discovery. Why didn’t they have dogs? A dog might pick up scent, where a man never would. But maybe Tom Constable, ever conscious of his image, didn’t want the world to see him as guarded by baying howlers, long in teeth, red in fang; he was the modern billionaire, too cool and streamlined and ironic for that. So his muscle was hidden under down-home cowboy wardrobes, townies and locals in jeans just like in olden days. It made him more interesting for the celebrity magazine people whom he always had out for his big parties.
Bob touched the lowlying window. And what if he got through it and came across that drunken cowboy? Did he kill him? Choke the life out of him? Some nineteen-year-old townie punk who just needed a job and ended up on the night shift at Big Tom’s. That wasn’t right. Oh, “knock him out,” that good one from the movies. Yeah, and brain-damage him forever, or siphon off IQ points the boy couldn’t spare? What then? Cross that one when he came to it. He had a couple of Kimber pepper sprays aboard, which wouldn’t put a man out but should put him down. But if it came to that, the whole thing had gone to hell anyway.
He slid out of the ghillie until he felt like he was lying next to a dead buffalo, a puffy weaving of silks and cottons configured to look like the great outdoors. With a good one you could go to ground and a hundred men could walk right by you and never catch on that you were the sniper, you were here to kill them. This one was very good. He hated to leave it behind, even if he had others.
The wind cut his cotton shirt, which was sweat-soaked after the long, hard creep, and the cold penetrated as he finally came free. He nestled next to the low window. He pulled a small waist pack around from his backside, unpeeled the Velcro fasteners to display a cache of small tools and one piece of Double Bubble bubble gum. He opened the gum and threw it in his mouth—it was cold and hard, dusted with sugar—and be
gan to knead it to something malleable with his jaws. He took out a small SureFire and checked each corner for wires and went four for four. He went to the latch, saw that it snapped shut. He ran the cone of illumination across the room he was about to penetrate and saw that happily it didn’t contain sleeping men but mostly housed stacked junk—some kind of storeroom. Very good.
He removed a glass cutter’s tool from his pouch, tapped the glass to make certain it was no super security plastic, and was rewarded with the vibration of regular window pane. He turned the tool so that the auger installed at the other end of the grip was upmost and crudely drilled deep into the glass, feeling it yield to powder as he rotated, until finally he’d opened enough edge for the cutter to bite. Quickly he sliced a four-inch wound in the glass, cranked the thing horizontally and cut another. In short enough time, he’d cut a four-by-four square in the window. He plucked the gum from his mouth, applied it to the window gently, pressing hard enough to make it stick but not hard enough to break. Then he pulled, and the sixteen-square-inch glass rectangle plopped out. He gently set it down.
Wire cutters snipped the central wire to which each of the corner devices was linked; then he popped the lock, opened the window, jimmied his body, and slid through. He closed the window behind him, though a breeze now pulsed through the open square in the glass. Nothing could be done about that; the cowboys wouldn’t notice, or so the theory went.
He waited, his eyes adjusting to the quality of indoor darkness, with no starlight or far-off spotlights. It was clear he was in the kitchen supply depot, as industrial-sized plastic bottles of ketchup, mustard, and relish stood everywhere, as did other wrapped-in-plastic foodstuffs. A glowing stainless steel door admitted the cookie to the walk-in freezer where perishables were kept. Bob ignored it, slid to the door, unlocked it, and opened it a crack. Not much to see: institutional green walls, a few other closed doors probably giving admittance to other storage facilities, at the far end a hold tank, where drunks or paparazzi could be secured until LE came out from town to haul them away. At the close end he saw stairs, slipped quietly to them, eased halfway up—would there be a crack as the old wood adjusted to weight bearing? no, not this time—and slipped up a bit further.
He could see into the big room, well-lit but empty. Junky Walmart furniture mostly broken down from daily use, piles of magazines from Guns & Ammo to Pussy & Juggs. In other words, the debris and squalor of men living together. Coke cans, paper plates, candy bar wrappers, like any day room in any guard post anywhere in the world. The guys were upstairs, he guessed, having a feeling of dense sleep above him, hearing the wheeze of one, the fart of another, the dream-driven toss of a third.
He slid along the wall, peeked into the kitchen and saw the cookie hadn’t arrived yet to throw the day shift breakfast on. Beyond it lay the security HQ office, he could tell, because although he did not see into that room directly, he saw the gray glow of security monitors on the wall through the doorway. A man or two would be in there; so would the arms safe and, he’d bet, in that would be the package, the whatever. Wouldn’t that be the safest spot on the ranch: in a room guarded 24/7 by armed guys with orders to shoot to kill? It made sense, if anything made sense.
He didn’t let rogue thoughts fly. He suppressed the notion that a) Tom Constable had simply destroyed the object (he wouldn’t; holding it would thrill him too much; he would think there’d always be time to destroy it; it had some kind of meaning to him), or that b) he’d lock it in a safe in his bedroom, where his various wives and now visitors stored their jewels, or c) he had it with him, wherever he was, just to keep it near and dear, or d) he put it in a safe deposit box in the biggest vault in the world. Nope, none of those: couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, no way.
Bob stepped around the corner.
“Hello,” he said.
“Huh?” said the security officer, rising from a soft chair where he’d been watching not the bank of monitors on the wall but a television showing some kind of spaceship thing.
Bob hit him in the face and eyes with the Kimber pepper and down he went, coughing spastically, and before he could reorient, Bob had him trussed in plastic cuffs pulled tight.
“You shut up, partner, or I’ll have to hurt you harder.”
The man spluttered, groaned, bucked, and Bob put a knee against the back of his neck.
“I can close you down the hard way if you don’t do what I say.”
The man went limp. But then he said, “Mister, do you have any idea what you’re fucking with? You are going to be so messed up.”
“Anyone else here? A partner, another patrolman? You alone, bub? Tell me or I’ll hit you with two or three more shots of pepper, and son, you won’t like that a bit.”
“I’m alone,” the man said. “Down here. But there are six very tough guys upstairs, so my advice to you is to run like hell and hope you get off the property before you get them pissed.”
“I didn’t come this far for the fun of it,” Bob said.
Bob looked around the room, and yeah, there was the secure steel door of what had to be an arms vault, snug behind a combination lock the size of a dinner plate, very old-style.
“You keep the rifles in there, right? But because the guys go in and out, you only keep it day-locked, right? You don’t want to fuck with the big combination six times a day, right?”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“We’ll see about that.”
He raised the man to his feet and shoved him ahead.
“Key or more pepper?”
“Shit,” the guy said, and gave it up. He nodded toward the desk drawer. Bob reached in, pulled out a big key ring. He went to the arms vault and inserted a key in the day lock and pulled on the heavy door. That easily, it swung open.
Bob pushed the guard in, then followed.
“Y’all planning for the invasion?” he asked.
Serious weaponry: not the Ruger Mini-14s but a rack of M4s, all with high-tech red-dot optics, several crates of 5.56 NATO and 12 gauge, four short-barreled pump shotguns, some chemical crowd control gimcracks, a rack of gas masks. On a metal shelf in the back, he found some papers, someone’s copy of Atlas Shrugged, and a nice but well-beaten briefcase with the initials JTS, for John Terrence Strong, he guessed. He opened it, saw only a small cardboard package, four by four, white, that bore on its corners yellowed strands of old Scotch tape.
Got it, even as he realized the absurd ease with which all this had happened.
He grabbed the case, pulled the guard with him, closed the vault.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” he said to his captive. “If I had a brain in my head I’d snap your spine and be done with you, cowboy. But I’m a nice guy, see. So you and me, we’s walking out the door like buddies, to the motor compound in the back. Then I’m popping tires on all the other vehicles, and you and I are going for a ride. I’ll toss you out somewheres along the way, and tomorrow night you can have dinner with the wife and kids. You’ll be out of a job but not out of the rest of your life.”
“Mister, you are in so much trouble. You put that goddamn briefcase back or—”
“Let’s go, bub.”
He led the now cooperating man through the back entrance, and as he stepped through the door, someone hit him a perfect shot in the brachial plexus, the nerve group that ran from his shoulder to his neck, and his body went useless and puttylike on him. He fell, and the others were on him in seconds with their hard professional knowledge of leverage and application of force and pain. In another second, his own hands were snared in flex-cuffs. He was hauled roughly to his feet.
Whack! the man he’d taken hit him in the face, and for his troubles was shoved hard to the ground by another dark figure.
“You’ll be minding your manners now, mate,” said his persecutor.
Then he turned to Swagger, smiling. “Well, damn me eyes, look and see what the cat has brought in from the meadow.”
It was Anto Grogan.
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36
Nick was alone in the house, as he had been for much of the week. Sally was finishing up some big case and wouldn’t be home until much later. Nick had read, watched DVDs, listened to music, and otherwise filled the time of his exile. But enough with the Lean Cuisines nuked, stirred, renuked, and stirred again. No more macaroni and cheese!
He looked out the window. Finally, they’d all gone away, the entourage of reporters who’d set up shop in the front yard to bedevil him. The weather had turned cold, it was late on a Friday night and nothing happened in Washington on a Friday night, so all the boys and girls of estate4.com had gone home early.
He should have shaved, but what the hell. He slipped on a sports coat, went into the garage, and pulled out. God, for just a few seconds the liberation was its own reward, the sense of being outside the house, away from the same four walls. He drove aimlessly through Fairfax and finally decided, since it was late and the line would be down, to head to Ray’s the Steaks in Arlington. He slid through the Northern Virginia night without much difficulty, found parking on the street, and headed into the old house that had become one of the most popular restaurants in the area.
“Is the kitchen still open?” he asked the maître d’.
“You just made it, sir.”
“I can eat in the bar if it’s easier.”
“No, we’ve got tables. This way, please.”
He followed the man through the three-quarters-full room to a corner table for two, approved of its darkness and obscurity, and took a seat. In a bit, he ordered a drink, since he sure wasn’t on duty and wasn’t carrying anything except his credit cards.
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 88