Binder - 02

by David Vinjamuri

  14

  A voice crackled in my ear just as I saw the smoke rising from the ridge.

  “Orion, targets on the move, heading north. They’re moving on a trail and closing on your position.” I clicked my earbud to acknowledge. I focused on my breathing, slowing it, calming myself and bringing my heart rate down. I’d set a small brush fire downhill to the north of the snipers. It took a little while to get going, but by the time they noticed it, there was enough smoke to obscure their view of the parking lot where my GTO was tucked in beside the old Land Rover. The fire was spreading up the hill, still small but growing. In a drier season it could have turned into a wildfire, but I wasn’t giving it odds in the damp. It was hard enough to start. The smoke gave the shooters two clear choices: head straight down the hill and back to their car or climb up to the ridge, loop around the fire and find another spot with eyes on their target. Either way, I figured I’d accomplished the most important goal of not getting shot. I’d gambled that these guys wouldn’t be easily put off their target, and I was right.

  I crouched behind a hundred-foot oak as the two men flew by me, moving quickly to keep me from escaping under the cover of smoke. The spotter came first, wearing a heavy red plaid wool shirt over jeans. He had a gun in one hand and a pair of binoculars with a folded tripod still attached in another. Three steps behind him was the sniper, clad in black with his rifle in both hands.

  I stepped onto the trail just as the spotter tripped over the 550 paracord I’d strung at ankle length across the trail, anchored between two trees. He went sprawling forward, one forearm coming up reflexively to protect his face and the other splayed out to the side, trying to keep a Kahr Arms .45 out of the mud. He dropped the binoculars on his way down.

  The sniper jumped the cord and spun, spotting me as he turned and firing his M24 rifle from the hip. I moved as I saw the weapon come around and the slug missed me. It was jarringly close, though, and chips of bark hit my cheek. Then I placed the dot of the laser sight back on my target and squeezed the trigger on the Heckler & Koch 416. It bucked twice against my shoulder and the sniper’s arm jerked back, his rifle dropping to the ground. I’d hit him in the shoulder and the upper arm, more or less where I was aiming. It was the kind of Hollywood stunt I’d never attempted before.

  In my old line of work, I only shot a guy to put him down. Rifles aren’t scalpels, especially when the target is moving. If you’re trying to disable someone without killing them, you use other means. But I didn’t have a Taser or a shotgun with beanbag rounds in the bag of tricks the Activity had delivered to my new motel room early that morning. And I was trying to avoid killing these guys, because that would complicate my dealings with the FBI. So I took the chance. It wasn’t a crazy bet, mind you. I’d fired over 100,000 rounds from an HK 416 in the last decade, which made it less than a winning-the-lottery kind of proposition. I hoped that I’d missed the axial artery, or all of that risk would be in vain.

  “Drop the weapon, hands on the ground,” I barked as I saw the spotter start to roll over, the .45 still in his hands. I put three rounds in the ground next to him. “Last warning,” I said. He dropped the gun. “Hands away from your bodies and both of you step away from the weapons.” They spread their hands and backed away slowly. The sniper was bleeding profusely from the wound in his arm. I pulled a black Velcro band from a pocket and tossed it to the spotter.

  “Sit him down by that tree.” The man complied. Without any prompting, he looped the tourniquet around the sniper’s arm above the wound and tightened it. That told me all I needed to know about these two men. I had the spotter slip on flexicuffs and lay flat on the ground, then I pulled the slack from them as I knelt with my 1911 Kimber Custom .45 pressed into his neck. Then I duct-taped the sniper to the tree. I took a Glock and a fixed-blade knife off him while he regarded me with dead eyes, then I treated his wound. One of the slugs was still inside his arm, but it wasn’t for me to remove. I stopped the bleeding, covered and taped the wound and adjusted the tourniquet high and wide around his arm.

  I’d been lucky and I knew it. You can’t play games with veterans these days. When I first made Special Forces in 2000, the U.S. had been at peace for a decade. Outside of the special ops community and a few other guys who’d been deployed to Somalia, almost nobody in the Army under the age of thirty had seen combat. Our regular infantry was well trained but inexperienced. Rangers were fitter and had a much better understanding of small unit tactics, but all of it was theoretical. Only the guys in the elite units like CAG (which replaced Delta Force) and DevGru (the successor to Seal Team Six) were combat veterans.

  By the time I left the Army, as the war was winding down in Iraq, it was a different story. There were National Guardsmen who’d spent more time under fire than virtually any enlisted man who’d ever served in Vietnam. They were as competent as the Special Forces guys I trained with before 9/11. The Tier One guys, like those I worked with in the Activity, were at another level. Most had deployed on and off for the duration of two wars. Afghanistan and Iraq produced the best generation of warriors the world has seen since Julius Caesar took a professional army on an eight-year tour of Gaul two thousand years ago.

  All that experience matters. The first time you get shot at, everything seems to happen at once. Your adrenaline pumps, rounds seem to come from everywhere and depending on your personal body chemistry, you either want to dive into a hole or run screaming with your M4 blazing toward the source of the gunfire. You don’t consider that the woman holding a child in the room you’ve entered might be wearing a suicide vest or clutching the trigger of an AK under the bed sheet. You give the man who doesn’t slow his vehicle at a checkpoint an extra second’s grace before you shoot him. Those are the mistakes that get you killed. If you survive it’s because you saw someone else make them before you had the chance.

  The sniper and spotter hadn’t expected an ambush, but they reacted like veterans when things went south. Retreating along the trail was a mistake, but as soon as the spotter tripped, the sniper turned backward with his rifle raised, covering their vulnerable point and trusting that his teammate would manage to cover his back. His hip shot with a rifle was better than ninety percent of civilian shooters could manage with a pistol at a range from that distance.

  So I knew before the FBI arrived that these guys wouldn’t be carrying identification and that they weren’t going to talk. While I was waiting, I took pictures of them with my smartphone, paying special attention to their faces and the tattoos on their neck and chests. I used the same phone to take their fingerprints before transmitting everything to the Activity. The rifle worried me the most. It was an M-24, and not the civilian Remington 700. All of the other equipment the two men were carrying was mil-spec. It meant that the National Front employed some serious men. And Alpha and I both knew the only way to find Heather would be to walk straight into their lair.

  15

  “Mr. Herne, you have a fascinating background. High school football and track star, turned down a Michigan football scholarship to enlist in the Army. Won the Best Ranger competition at age 18, Special Forces by 21 and then the Silver Star and a Purple Heart in Afghanistan. Six more years with a logistics unit and an honorable discharge as a Master Sergeant, followed by undergraduate studies at Georgetown where you graduated cum laude in three years. And now you’re an intelligence analyst with the State Department. Very impressive.” Jason Paul looked up from the folder and pulled the vintage horn-rimmed reading glasses off of his face, folding them with care and sliding them back into a velvet case sitting on his desk.

  Paul’s office was as elegant as Roxanne had promised. The oriental carpet on the floor was silk, with a level of workmanship I recognized from my time in Afghanistan. His desk was solid walnut, buffed to a high sheen. The whole setup looked oddly out of place in the ramshackle pile of pre-fabricated buildings that made up the offices for Transnational Coal. I was dubious about the wisdom of going ahead with the meeting, but Alpha had ins
isted. The office building stood just inside the entrance to the mine, at a spot where you couldn’t get much of a glimpse of the rest of the operation aside from the top of a horseshoe-shaped canyon that formed the boundaries of the active mining area.

  “It’s nice to know that Google works on your computer, Mr. Paul,” I said, not flinching from Paul’s blue eyes as they turned a shade cooler. Paul was just as Roxanne had described him. Telling me the story of my life was an attempt to put me off balance. I couldn’t play along; if Paul thought he’d intimidated me, I wouldn’t get anything useful from him.

  “I’m told you’re looking for a young woman with the protest group. I’m not sure how I can help you,” Paul continued, ignoring the insult. He poured a cup of coffee from a silver pot into a bone china cup sitting on a sterling tray on his desk. He put down the pot, then raised the cup and slid a saucer underneath it. He handed both to me.

  “Heather Hernandez stopped protesting in September. There was an internal rift in Reclaim at that time, and understanding what happened may help me find her.”

  “I’m still not sure how I can help. I don’t know anything about the internal workings of those groups,” Paul said. He’d just lied to me for the first time.

  “I know that Reclaim staged a protest in July. Can you tell me about that?”

  “About two dozen activists marched to the mine entrance. They ignored the guard’s warnings and held the gate open while a private vehicle was admitted. Then they continued into the mine. Some of them lay down in front of haulers and loaders. When the vehicles stopped, the protestors climbed on them and put banners on the windshields. We called the police and they were arrested.”

  “Did this happen again?”

  “They came again in subsequent months but we’ve continued to update our security procedures and they didn’t cause that level of disruption again.”

  “I’d like to know what else they might have done that affected your operation.”

  “Nothing, Mr. Herne. And miners didn’t attack the activists if that’s what you’re implying.”

  “So you’re saying it’s sheer incompetence that’s responsible for your dismal performance here? The output of this mine was down 15% in August and over 30% in September. Bad enough to bring the CEO of Transnational here on the corporate jet three times between July and the end of September. That’s two more trips than he made in the previous three years.”

  “And how do you know all of this?” Paul remained composed, but ropy tendons in his neck contracted.

  “You know my background, Mr. Paul,” I said gesturing to the folder he’d been reading my history from. “Why don’t you tell me?” The speed with which the Activity had unearthed these details didn’t surprise me; it was just another sign that the private errand I’d been sent on had become a government matter.

  Paul coughed and stood abruptly. He walked over to the mahogany sideboard against the wall.

  “This is a very complex surface mining operation,” Paul said as he poured scalding water into a cup before dumping the liquid into a small silver basin. “We operate twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. We have some of the most expensive mining equipment in the country on this site and it’s constantly in use. The cost of this operation is so high that any drop in production can swing the entire operation to a loss.”

  Paul poured more water from a different kettle into the cup then opened a small stainless steel canister. He scooped loose tealeaves and gently tapped them into an infuser, then dunked it into the water in the cup.

  “Something disrupted your business. And if I’m not mistaken, it’s something the activists did that you didn’t report to the police.” I said this with as much conviction as I could muster, looking flatly into Paul’s eyes.

  “With an operation this large, small events can have a cascading effect,” Paul answered. I noticed that he’d scrupulously avoided talking directly about money. After a moment he took the infuser out of the tea, added a teaspoonful of raw sugar to the cup and stirred it. After the sugar dissolved, he added a dash of cream. He walked back over to his desk and sat down, putting the teacup and saucer delicately down on his leather blotter.

  “Mr. Paul, the FBI has two men in custody who tried to kill me with a sniper rifle this morning. There are another two men in the Lincoln County jail and two more in a hospital in Charleston who tried to attack me last night. In less than an hour, I’ll be leaving this state to deal with more urgent matters back home. But before I do I’ll advise the FBI on whether the girl I’ve come looking for has been kidnapped and whether they should treat this mine as a crime scene. The violence used by my attackers has persuaded federal authorities to take my investigation seriously. So if you think a bunch of college kids and ex-hippies can hurt your profitability, just wait and see what happens when a hundred federal agents shut down every piece of machinery on this site.”

  Paul adjusted his cuffs one by one, ensuring I could see the pearl cufflinks through the functional buttons of his hand-tailored suit. When he was done, he leaned forward with a half-smile on his face. “I’m not someone you should be threatening, Mr. Herne.”

  Then Paul leaned back and continued, “But there’s no harm in sharing this with you. During August and September, some of the activists infiltrated this site several times at night. The first few times, they targeted smaller trucks and other minor equipment. The last time, early in September, they set a charge that badly damaged the engine of our dragline. We call it Big Jack, and it can lift almost 100 cubic yards at a time. It was out of operation for over a week. That’s what caused the production shortfalls. I called the Reclaim leaders in here and showed them evidence of what they’d done and told them if they didn’t stop, I’d hand it over to the police.”

  “You called Roxanne, Josh and Amy into your office?” I asked.

  “Yes, I did. And I know that you’re friendly with Ms. Chalmers. Please remember that she could go to jail for ten to fifteen years. That’s what will happen if I turn the evidence over to the authorities. And I will certainly do so if there’s any more disruption to this operation from the FBI or anyone else. You can think about that on your way out,” he said as a guard appeared at the door.

  But Roxanne’s potential prison bid wasn’t what I pondered as I left the mine site. Instead, I was wondering why Paul didn’t have the Reclaim leaders locked up when he had the chance.

  16

  I engaged the clutch lever, downshifted into third gear with a flick of my left foot, let out the clutch and twisted the throttle. I hadn’t perfectly rev-matched my downshift, but the big bike surged forward without a lurch. It always amazes me how power that would be insignificant in a car—in this case, 125 brake horsepower—can make a motorcycle feel like an absolute monster. The bike I was riding is not the one you picture in your mind when you hear the name Harley Davidson. It didn’t have high handlebars or a backward-leaning seat. This bike was the Night Rod Special, a black-on-black design exercise that mostly served to showcase a gorgeous engine.

  I have pretty specific tastes in bikes—I own both Japanese and German motorcycles for different reasons. The Night Rod is not in a performance league with the machines I keep in my garage, but it’s a lot prettier. It’s also American-built, which was part of the reason I was riding it. And it was plenty fast. It wallowed a little in the corners, though, which reminded me that I had borrowed it for serious purposes. The mercury was above 50 degrees, a marked improvement from the morning. As the roar of the bike echoed off the low mountains, I thought about my mother. This part of the country reminded me of home, but the mountains seemed closer together, as if someone had needed to get more of them into the state and ended up rushing the job. It was the peak of the foliage season in Appalachia and though the colors weren’t as impressive to my northern eye as those I’d grown up with, they were memorable.

  I’d driven the GTO from Paul’s office onto Route 119, straight through Charleston and onto Interstate 79, which was the way
back to D.C. I stopped at a truck stop about ten miles east of Charleston to refuel. I walked into the bathroom with my Blackhawk shell, a black baseball cap and sunglasses on. A few minutes later, a man of my size and general complexion wearing the same items left, but it wasn’t me. He pulled the GTO out of the truck stop and onto the highway, back to D.C. The plan was that he wouldn’t stop until he reached Activity headquarters in Rosslyn. I watched my car leave without me from inside the diner of the truck stop. The BMW X5 with blacked out windows that had been trailing me since I’d left the Hobart mine followed the GTO.

  Wearing work coveralls and a different cap, I got into a panel van with two men I recognized. We drove a few miles before exiting the highway and pulling up to a semi in the parking lot of a defunct warehouse. They escorted me to the back of the trailer, where a team of specialists started to work on me. As the makeup artist applied temporary tattoos designed to look permanent, I winced. I never believe those things will come off. My hair was cut and dyed to a light brown, contact lenses gave me blue eyes and small prosthetics subtly changed the contours of my nose.

  While the work was underway I received briefings from an Activity armorer and one of the electronic surveillance specialists who form the core of the Activity.

  Then agent Nichols walked in. She whistled.

  “So this is what it’s like to have a secret budget.”

  “Careful or you’re next,” I warned her.

  “They did a good job with you. You look...different.” She picked a bit of fluff off of the shoulder of the black motorcycle jacket.

  “Thanks for helping me out up there on the ridge,” I said as she pulled a chair to face me. The senior responding FBI agent had handcuffed me and was about to arrest me alongside the shooters when Nichols intervened. Three cruisers from the Lincoln County Sheriff’s office arrived at the same time as the FBI, and the senior agent had his hands full debating who should take the suspects into custody. One of the Sheriff’s people was Deputy Collins, who was apoplectic to see me in handcuffs. In the end, Collins and Nichols made an impression on the older agent: he removed the handcuffs and let me go with a stern warning. I wondered if Nichols would pay a price for not backing her senior man.