. . . . . .
Later that same afternoon, John Grant locked his motel room and went out to where he’d parked the rental car. He drove west along Interstate 70 from Baltimore, stopping along the way only at a truck stop for a quick cup of coffee.
Afterward, Grant followed the route that he had mapped out in his head until he found the turnoff that would take him north along the eastern edge of the park. He drove past the exits designating the beginning of the Cunningham Falls State Park, southern neighbor to the Catoctin National Forest, on the west side of the north‑south arterial.
He left Route 15 at the Route 77 interchange and took the westbound ramp onto Route 77, which tracked the border between the two parks. About a mile and a half on the right side, Grant found a sign directing him to the Catoctin Mountain Forest visitor center. He pulled past the single-story stone building and parked the car in one of the designated spaces.
Even so late in the season, the park drew many visitors; it was their last chance to commune with nature before winter set in. Hence Catoctin Mountain Forest was alive throughout the month with photo seminars, demonstrations, and nature hikes. They even had a special program that explained the art of making bootleg whiskey, complete with demonstrations using the park’s own still.
Inside the visitor center, the National Park Service displayed examples of the local flora and fauna. As he walked through the front door, a stuffed squirrel eyed him from its position on the “L”‑shaped glass counter. Grant already knew where he was going. Nonetheless, he picked up a fold‑out map from the counter, wondering how helpful the park ranger would have been had he known Grant’s true purpose in coming to the park.
When he got back to the car, Grant unfolded the map, placing it across the hood. The park stretched approximately seven kilometers, or about four and a half miles, on the diagonal. At its widest point, slightly west of where Grant was, it ran for another 3.5 kilometers. The road the visitor center was on, Park Central Road, continued due north past an area called Misty Mount and then cut west, following a somewhat jagged path through the park.
He figured he’d find a spot to leave the car, and hike in from there. Before doing so, Grant wanted an overview of the park. From what he’d been told, he knew his objective’s southern perimeter was only yards from Park Central Road. Grant left the visitor center parking lot and turned right. He followed Park Central Road past Misty Mount. When he passed the signs for Hog Rock, Grant dropped his speed to twenty miles per hour. Almost immediately, he saw the signs warning against standing, stopping, or parking. He was in the right place.
Warning signs heavily marked the road into Camp Three. Closest to Park Central Road, the signs simply said, “Stop. Restricted Area. Do Not Enter. Violators Will Be Fined”. Further up the drive, the warnings took on a more ominous tone. “Warning–Restricted Area. Keep Out. Authorized Personnel Only” atop a detailed explanation of the authority under whose direction Camp Three was protected.
Through the trees, he could barely make out the chain-link fence. Grant speeded up, not wanting to draw the attention of the park police, who frequently patrolled the area. Grant stayed on Park Central until it tee’d into Foxville‑Deerfield Road. There he turned right again, and continued north past Owens Creek toward Lantz.
A half mile south of Lantz, Grant found what he’d been looking for–a good place to stash the car. The side road dead‑ended at an abandoned house, and there were no signs that anyone had made use of the house or its driveway in quite some time. Grant followed the dirt road until he located a secluded spot, where he parked the car. From the trunk, he removed his backpack.
In the military, Grant had become accustomed to carrying seventy-pound packs for days on end. His pack, weighing in at thirty pounds, was an easy carry. He slipped his arms through the shoulder straps and made a few minor adjustments before heading off into the woods.
He could have approached his objective using a more direct route, but stealth was imperative, and his plan certainly gave him that. He checked his compass, and then took off in a south‑southwest direction. According to his calculations, he had under a mile to go. Unfortunately the Park Service did not cut trails where Grant was going, which slowed him up. But then, there was no rush. The car would be safe, and staying off the park’s designated parking areas ensured that no inquisitive park ranger would run a license plate check on it.
En route, he stopped to take a drink of water. Off through the woods, Grant heard the sound of foraging deer; probably a doe teaching her offspring a few final lessons before they went off on their own. He hooked his canteen back on his webbed belt and moved stealthily toward them. Grant checked the air currents and decided to approach the deer from downwind. If they were going to evade his pursuit, the deer would have to rely on their hearing. Conscious of every step he took, Grant carefully checked the ground before placing his foot down. Had he stepped on even one dry twig, his quarry would be long gone. He soundlessly moved aside any branches in his way, inching closer to the deer.
The three deer were grazing on the tender stalks of grass. Their white tails, which they wave in the air like distress flags, were hanging motionless–they were unaware his presence. Had he wanted to, he could have walked up and touched them. However, he was content to test his stealth abilities, using the techniques the Special Forces had taught him over twenty years ago. Not surprisingly, he hadn’t lost his touch.
One of the deer stopped eating, and turned to face him. It was a beautiful doe, ears up, scanning the forest for any sound of danger or man, the two being synonymous. The two smaller deer were, as he had expected, this year’s crop of fawns almost ready to forage on their own.
John Grant could line up his sniper scope on a man at five hundred yards, quarter the target, test the wind, and then squeeze the trigger sending a high-velocity round into the target’s head. But his quarry could kill him. It was not one‑sided. He was as much the hunted as he was the hunter. Silently so as not to disturb the family, Grant turned around and headed back to his original trail.
Grant continued in the same direction for another hour before he hit the taut wire marking the site’s perimeter. Signs suspended from the wire designated the area as U.S. Navy property, and warned all trespassers to stay out. About a hundred feet away, he could see a more substantial chain-link fence. Grant slipped under the wire, and slowly approached the inner fence.
If he were caught in the “exclusion zone”, he could always explain say that he was just an inquisitive hiker. As long as the police only ran a National Crime Information Center, or NCIC, check, he’d be fine. There were no wants or warrants out for John Grant. But he’d rather not chance it.
There had to be security outposts along the perimeter, most likely in the corners. Grant swung his field glasses left and then right, but didn’t see any manned positions. He surmised that he must be between two guard posts.
Carefully he inspected the fence fabric and its mounting posts. Had the fence been electrified, it would have been insulated from the ground, and the mounting posts likewise would have been mounted on large ceramic insulators. Grant had seen one nuclear weapons storage site in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the entire fence line was “hot”. No one knew when the power was on or when it was off, but the current and voltage were more than sufficient to fry anyone touching the fence. He knew that whenever the government used electrified fencing, it always erected a triple fence, with the middle fence “hot”. Any other approach would have led to lawsuits initiated by the next of kin of those made into crispy critters. The fence posts were well‑anchored directly into the ground, but absent were the telltale white ceramic insulators.
Grant next checked the fence for any electronic security devices. The government used several different types of intrusion detection systems to detect anyone touching, cutting, or climbing a fence. The fence in front of Grant was also devoid of detectors. It was neither alarmed nor electrified. Of course it was possible the government had used s
eismic or pressure detection sensors. But had they done so, they would have been inside the fence. Otherwise, every time a deer set off one of the sensors, the guards would come running.
Just because they didn’t have any intrusion sensors on the fence or adjacent to it didn’t mean there weren’t any television cameras. He knew security operators had a tough time keeping a wary eye on the multitude of cameras that brought back individual pictures to the security control center. The government’s own studies showed that after fifteen or twenty minutes, even the most conscientious operator missed subtle changes in the picture. The more cameras displayed in front of a given operator, the more apt he would be to overlook something critical.
Of course, the cameras could have been equipped with digital video motion detectors. These state-of-the-art units sliced the video coming back to the control center into tiny pixels, typically eight or sixteen thousand little squares. A computer monitored each pixel for any changes, such as those caused by someone moving through the picture. Once detected, the computer sounded the alarm. The only problem was that motion detectors couldn’t distinguish an intruder from leaves blowing in the wind, the sun rising or setting, or small animals moving through the area.
Grant doubted that any cameras in use were fitted with the feature. If they were, the cameras were most likely pointed parallel to the fence line, where there were fewer sources of nuisance alarms, and not off into the woods. Grant still scanned the area inside the fence for signs of closed-circuit television surveillance. Nothing untoward moved. Nothing caught his eye. More important, no alarm response teams were rushing to check out the fence line.
Most likely the security force would patrol the site’s interior areas. Methodically, he moved back deeper into the woods. Grant found a tree trunk that made a convenient backrest, and took off his pack, placing it at his feet. From the pack he removed a spando‑flage pullover head cover. This expandable camouflage netting expanded to over ten times its normal size. The form-fitting mask completely hid Grant’s face while providing him with more than ample ventilation.
He could have used a camouflage stain, but he found that it took much too long to get off if he needed to remove it quickly. The spando‑flage was the perfect solution, going on in an instant, and coming off just as fast. With the head cover on, he would more likely be tripped over than seen by anyone coming across him. If the site did use video motion detectors, the guard force would dismiss his movement as a nuisance alarm. Now fully camouflaged, Grant slung his pack back on and settled down to wait.
A few minutes later, Grant heard the voices of two sentries patrolling the inner perimeter. They spoke in normal tones, and he could easily hear their banter from his position. Obviously the men were not concerned about being overheard. It was a routine patrol; they were not aware of his presence and had not been responding to an intrusion alarm. Grant noted the time, then sat back against the tree. Thirty minutes later, another sentry team passed his position. Grant pulled back to the wire fence line that ran parallel to the chain link fence. He wanted to see more of the site, but not at the risk of arousing suspicion. Most of the trees had foliage above eight feet, but little on their lower branches. He risked being spotted if he stayed too close to the perimeter fence.
When he reached the first corner, he found what he expected–a light green wooden guard post positioned at the intersection of the two fences. From his position, Grant couldn’t tell if the guardhouse was occupied, but he didn’t doubt for a minute it was. Keeping well back from the fence line, he continued in a counterclockwise direction, carefully mapping his progress around the site.
Only this time he didn’t use the Park Service’s map, but another he withdrew from the leather wallet suspended by a neck chain under his shirt. Unlike the Park Service’s map, this one had been made by someone who had been a frequent visitor to the site. It showed the exact layout of the camp’s buildings, their relative positions, and the path the roads and trails took through the camp.
He knew exactly what he was searching for. He had to locate a supported position from which he would have an unimpeded line of fire. The right spot would offer support for his rifle so that neither muscle tension nor pulse, if transferred to the rifle, would throw off the shot. Second, his optimum position would reduce his silhouette’s size against the horizon, giving him more cover and better concealment. Snipers called their shooting positions “hides”, and Grant knew he had to find the perfect hide for this job. Sooner or later he would.
With his goal in mind, Grant traversed the perimeter of the site until he found what he felt would be a good area from which to operate. Once he found it, he marked down the map coordinates. With that out of the way, Grant moved slowly away from the site perimeter. He needed to be up high so that he’d be firing down on the target. That meant a tree or some other natural elevation, and trees were definitely not his first choice. Besides, it would be difficult to find a tree significantly higher than the others in the area. As he moved, he kept a wary eye on the woods around him. If he were stopped now, the markings he had made on the map and his sketches would leave no doubt about what he was up to.
Suddenly, Grant saw a glint of light reflected off an object from a point high up in the trees. Startled, Grant stopped and crouched down; glad he had not removed his spando‑flage head cover. Grant shifted his position, unsure what it was that had caught his eye. Maybe it was a foil balloon that had somehow gotten lodged in the trees. He moved closer to the tree in question. What he spotted wasn’t a copse of trees at all, but rather one of the Park Service’s fire lookout towers. He slipped out of his pack and moved closer to the tower.
The watchtower’s height exceeded the highest trees in the stand by at least a hundred feet. But then that wasn’t surprising, since the forest ranger had to be able to spot a forest fire quickly. In size, the tower appeared to be about fifteen feet by fifteen feet at the top, widening at the base to provide the support the high tower required. Along one side, the side nearest the fire road, wooden stairs crisscrossed their way up its side, stopping at some kind of landing at the top. There was only a single set of stairs, and Grant did not see any ladder or other means of emergency egress. As a rule, he never placed himself in situations where he didn’t have a back way out. That could be a problem.
Grant went back to where he had stashed his knapsack and dug out his Zeiss binoculars. The binoculars had originally belonged to a German submarine commander who used them to determine how much damage his U‑boat had done to Allied shipping. Grant’s father had given them to his only son before the boy left for Vietnam.
To get a better view of the cabin at the top of the tower, Grant moved away from its base. After he had put a hundred feet between his position and the tower, Grant focused the binoculars on the cabin at the tower’s top. It was square, with large glass windows along all four sides. He would be better off if he had been able to view the top of the tower from a higher elevation, but from where he was, he saw that a small catwalk surrounded the cabin. Grant noticed that the cabin was in use, the Forest Service intent upon keeping a close eye out for any fires even this late in the season.
The tower would make a perfect hide. It was well situated, had a commanding view of the high ground, and might just be within range. Under better conditions Grant would have scaled the tower and used his binoculars to determine the actual distance. A simple calculation would produce a good estimate of the range to target. With the tower occupied, he had to come up with another approach that would give him an estimate of the overall distance from the tower to his intended target. From the dimensions on the compound’s drawing, Grant determined that from the fence line his target would be slightly over eleven hundred yards away. Now he needed the approximate distance from the tower to the fence line.
Grant took out his compass and sited along the path that he wanted to take back to the fence. He opened a small pocket on the side of the pack and took out his pedometer. The little unit had often been the
butt of jokes when he was in Southeast Asia, but after a while the others in his team had realized that it was handy to have around. Placing it on his belt, he began walking toward the fence.
Periodically he made small notations on the pad that he always carried on planning missions. After a few minutes, he saw the fence line ahead of him. He continued walking until he reached it, and then wrote down the distance off the pedometer’s scale. From his estimation, the tower was twelve hundred feet away. He wrote this figure down and underneath of it he wrote down the distance from the fence to the target. The total range from the tower to the target, therefore, was fifteen hundred yards, slightly under a mile.
Grant shrugged. As usual, there was good news and bad news. The bad news was this would be an extremely long shot. The good news was that the longer the distance, the better his chances of getting away unscathed. Either way, it was the best that he could do under the circumstances.
The next problem was the choice of weapon. From his days in Vietnam, he was familiar with the 7.62 millimeter M40A1 bolt-action rifle. The precision instrument was fitted with the UNERTL Sniper Scope, which yielded the superior accuracy required for long-range kills. The Army issued specially made match‑quality ammunition, produced by the Lake City arsenal. The 173-grain boat‑tail bullet had a muzzle velocity of 2,550 feet per second and an accuracy specification of three and a half feet mean radius at six hundred yards. If the sniper did his homework, and the target was in range, it went down. Grant was intimately familiar with this gun, but knew its maximum effective range was one thousand yards–far less than he needed. For a long-range shot, he needed a special weapon.
The Cassandra Conspiracy Page 10