Chasing the Ghost

by Bob Mayer

  CHASING THE GHOST

  book VII of the Green Beret Series

  by

  Bob Mayer

  CHAPTER ONE

  Years ago, Horace Chase was told that an effective sniper was a man who could shoot another human being on nothing but an order and stop; also on order. The stopping is important.

  He’d been told he was one of those people.

  Which was why, years later and several shots in between, he was currently sitting on top of his rucksack, on top of the snow, on a foothill leading into the Medicine Bow Mountains of Wyoming, looking through a night-scope mounted on top of a sniper rifle, scanning his new kill zone. The chopper that had just dropped him off flew away to the north. It was just after dark and the moon had not yet risen.

  Chase felt almost at peace for the first time in a long while.

  He turned off the scope, pulled his head back and looked up at the stars and then the surrounding terrain. The High Plains were off to the east; the Rocky Mountains leading north up to the Grand Tetons behind him. Closer at hand was a rock spur, behind which he was hidden; and laid out below him was a valley, running perpendicular to his position. According to the map there was a road running through the valley.

  The road was only noticeable because it ran straight and level next to a small creek. It was unplowed and nothing had moved on it since last snowfall, which he had checked over the radio on the chopper flight here earlier today. To the right/south the road came up a wide valley. To the left/north, it climbed to the pass and the valley narrowed to an opening between two peaks, both taller than the one Chase was on. He had about five miles of visibility to the south and less than a mile to the north. There were a network of trails beyond the pass that he knew his targets if they came through his kill zone could turn onto. This would make observation and tracking from the air near impossible.

  The intelligence on the targets he’d received on the flight up from Boulder, Colorado, had been terse and to the point: A Larimer County Sheriff’s Deputy had pulled over a truck on north-bound Route 287, about eighty miles south of where he was sitting. According to witnesses, the deputy had been shot several times with an automatic weapon by one of the occupants of the truck. It then sped away, leaving the deputy on the side of the road, like so much road kill. An update just before exiting the chopper reported that the deputy was DOA at the hospital in Fort Collins.

  There was a crackle of static, and then a voice spoke in the small receiver in Chase’s right ear hooked to the satellite radio in his ruck. “All team members, this is Hammer.” Chase recognized the call sign and the voice: Fortin, his team-leader. “The latest. The dashboard camera in the deputy’s patrol car was checked. It confirms Wyoming plates on the truck. The passenger used an automatic weapon. AK-47. We ran the plates. The registered driver is in the FBI database; a Patriot.”

  Chase knew that the Patriots were a small, but dangerous, militia group in central Wyoming that had defied both the local, state and federal authorities’ dozens of times over the past decade.

  His team-leader’s voice continued. “We have no idea why these Patriots were in Colorado, but we want to make damn sure to catch them before they got back to their stomping grounds or else they’ll just hunker down in their bunkers in the Mountains with their heavy fire-power. Vehicle is a red Chevy Blazer. Two men inside. According to the video camera on the sheriff’s dashboard, the driver shot the deputy first as he approached. Then the passenger got out and finished the job with a burst of AK-47 fire. The passenger is a big man, approximately six-two, large bushy black beard, wearing khaki pants and a black windbreaker.”

  There was a brief moment of static, and then Fortin continued. “The Wyoming State Police thought they had the border sealed up tight, but the truck just ran a roadblock on the Wyoming border. Three state troopers wounded. They’re ours now. Out.” The radio went silent.

  Chase pulled a pair of binoculars with a built in laser range finder out of his pack. He got the distance to the road. Eight hundred and ninety two meters. He adjusted the sniper rifle’s scope for the distance. He checked wind. He’d been on enough ranges and parachute drop zones to be able to estimate wind speed within a mile an hour. Five or six miles per hour out of the north. At the distance, Chase was from the road, which meant a three-click adjustment left on the scope.

  Chase put the M-21 to his shoulder, turned the scope on and sighted in on the road. He held it there for a few seconds, and then scanned left and right, the scope illuminating the view. Nothing moving. There were no headlights, no sign of civilization along the road or anywhere within view for that matter. There wasn’t even a phone or power line. Chase could have been on the dark side of the moon. He pulled back the charging handle, letting it slide forward, loading a round into the chamber.

  Chase put the crosshairs on the two-inch thick branch of a pine tree on the far side of the road. He cleared his mind, letting go of everything other than the sight-picture inside the scope, the press of the stock against his shoulder and cheek, his finger lightly resting on the trigger. Chase could feel the steady beat of his heart, a rhythm that he picked up. He let out a breath and then didn’t inhale. Right between heartbeats, his finger gently squeezed the trigger.

  The 7.62 match grade round splintered the branch.

  The rifle was zeroed.

  Now the wait. One of the tenets on his counter-terrorist team was to always play a wild card. To do something, anything, that the bad guys wouldn’t expect. Chase, freezing his ass off on this mountainside, was certainly the unexpected.

  There was a crackle of static, and then Fortin spoke again, this time directly to Chase. “Snake Eater, this is Hammer. Rest of the team is on the ground in their positions. We’ve got the FBI HRT team on the ground. They can be at your location in ten minutes. Your mission is to delay if the targets come by you.”

  Ten minutes could be an awfully long time, Chase knew, but it was better than being two hundred miles behind enemy lines.

  “Hammer, this is Snake Eater. Roger that,” Chase acknowledged, the mike wrapped around his throat picking up the words and sending them to the satellite radio. “I’ll be hanging around.”

  “Out here.”

  It was going to be a long and cold night even for late April. Chase pulled a parka out of his pack and put it on underneath his combat vest, then sat the pack between his butt and the cold ground. He’d managed sixty-eight hours in a similar situation with two other men on his Delta Force team on the Afghan-Pakistani border, deep in bandit country before some drug smugglers stumbled across his element. That led to a ten-hour long firefight before a Night-Stalker chopper got them out of there, all three bleeding but alive.

  Chase closed his eyes. He rolled his head on his shoulders. He didn’t like the situation. A good sniper needed surveillance in position well before having to take a shot, usually at least twenty-four hours. If the bad guys came up the valley, he’d have scant minutes to react with only an hour or so of surveillance.

  He put the night-scope back to his eye and scanned beyond the road, to the ridge on the other side. He worked in small sections, left right, from the top of the ridge down. He paused when he saw a line in the snow coming over the ridge, directly across. Slight, but visible even at over a mile’s distance.

  It could be a deer, he thought, as he followed the line down about thirty yards. It disappeared into a copse of trees.

  And no line came out of the copse.

  Something had gone into those trees. And not come out. Since the snow fell during daylight. Chase scanned the dark patch of woods but saw nothing. His kill zone was the road, but he kept his attention on the copse for almost ten minutes, only occasionally shifting back to the center of the valley.

  Ch
ase blinked. A pair of headlights appeared to the south, moving north on the closed road about five miles away. Chase spoke: “Hammer, this is Snake Eater. I’ve got movement on the road. Coming this way.”

  There was a long silence. Too long. Chase looked through the night-scope. A Chevy Blazer, two figures inside.

  “This is Hammer. Go ahead.” Fortin sounded distracted.

  “I’ve got the target closing.”

  “Shit.”

  Now Chase knew he truly was in trouble, as he’d never heard Fortin swear.

  “Need back-up,” Chase prompted.

  “The HRT team is up around Casper, near the North Platte. State troopers got called on a possible sighting.”

  Four miles.

  “They’re in the wrong place.” The North Platte, if he remembered rightly from the map, doubled the distance the support team was from Chase. Twenty minutes. The truck was moving slowly through the snow, but not that slowly. They’d pass by in about ten.

  “They’re also low on fuel,” Fortin added. “They have to land in Cheyenne to top off.”

  Chase didn’t say anything. It was his situation, but Fortin’s problem. Chase could sit still and let the truck pass and he wouldn’t have a situation, then Fortin would. They could always say nothing; no one would have expected Chase to be here.

  “How long?” Chase asked.

  “They’re reporting twenty-five minutes.”

  “The target will be out of sight by then. There are other roads once they cross the pass. We might be able to track them in the snow, probably not. They might split up. Or they’ll go to ground and cover up.”

  Three miles.

  Chase shifted from the truck to that track on the far ridge and then to the copse of trees. He could feel his pulse picking up and he closed his eyes briefly and forced his breathing back to normal.

  The radio was silent. It occurred to Chase that the State Patrol might well have been called in after a Chevy Blazer near the North Platte, but that it was a decoy. Contrary to many, Chase had a lot of respect for the capabilities of some of these militia groups. The really hard-core ones had a lot of ex-military men in them. There were some guys who weren’t too happy about being double-crossed about going into a war in Iraq.

  Chase shifted left and immediately saw a second pair of headlights carving into the valley from the north, coming over the pass. A black HMMWV with a plow had cut a path through the deep snow in the pass. Chase didn’t believe in coincidences. More Patriots, meeting their buddies, clearing the way for them. He twisted the focus, not thrilled with what he was seeing. The HMMWV had been modified with the rooftop used on military versions, meaning it had a circular hatch, which was now open. On the ring around the hatch, a machine-gun was mounted.

  “Hammer, this is Snake Eater. I’ve got a second contact,” Chase reported. He knew Fortin was probably on the radio, trying to get more help, permission to proceed, etcetera, etcetera, but Chase didn’t have time for bureaucratic bullshit right now. “HMMWV came up from the north with a plow and a machine-gun in a turret. These are definitely our people.”

  “Wait one.”

  Chase needed more from Fortin than that but he held his tongue, knowing his boss knew that. Or hoping he did.

  Someone was now standing in the HMMWV’s hatch, holding on to the machine-gun, which Chase recognized as an M-60.

  The numbers for that gun had been drilled into Chase as a plebe at West Point: length 43.3 inches; weight 23 pounds; maximum effective range mounted 1,968 yards; rate of fire 550 rounds per minute cyclic. It fired the same 7.62 mm NATO round that Chase’s rifle did, but a hell of a lot faster, rattling off hundred round belts while his magazine held twenty rounds and only firing as quickly as he could pull the trigger.

  There was a flag tied off on the large radio antenna poking up from the rear of the HMMWV. Chase stiffened as he recognized the shape and image on it: a Cavalry guidon with a large shield in the center. The First Cavalry Division. That had been Chase’s first assignment in the Army, when he was still in the Infantry.

  Chase turned off the scope and glanced over his shoulder. No way could he make it over that ridge under fire and he didn’t have much cover here. And there was that trail in the snow across the way.

  Chase pressed his eye against the site and turned it on. He sighted on the man in the hatch. He wore a heavy coat and black watch cap. A scarf was covering the lower half of his face. Chase knew the smart thing to do would be to take him down first. Take out the most dangerous threat.

  “Can you stop them?” Fortin finally asked.

  “I can stop the Blazer,” Chase acknowledged, “but they can make it on foot to the HMMWV. And I would be engaged by the M-60.” Which meant he’d have to take them all out.

  Chase had been school-trained at the Special Forces school where it wasn’t called sniping but SOTI: Strategic Observation and Target Interdiction. Most people who didn’t know better thought that was army-bullshit for blowing someone’s brains out from long range, but actually, they really did focus more on shooting things than people. One well-placed shot can ground a hundred million dollar jet fighter or take out a microwave relay tower. Occasionally a person might be a strategic target, and they were trained to do that too. In fact, Chase knew shooting people was easier than shooting things, with the objects; you had to know the vulnerable points. With people, a round through the head did the job.

  “The HMMWV is another story,” Chase added. “Might be armored.”

  “Stop the Blazer,” Fortin ordered.

  “And then?” Chase asked.

  “The HRT team will be there in twenty-one minutes.”

  Uh-huh , Chase thought to himself. The Blazer was less than a mile away, the HMMWV the same distance the other way. Chase looked at the copse of woods and in the glow of the night vision sight, he saw a flicker of light. The smallest of things and it was gone as fast as he saw it. Someone else might have wondered if they saw anything at all, but Chase had no doubt.

  Someone was in the wood-line. Someone was looking through a night-vision scope just as he was and had pulled their eye back from the scope for just a moment, revealing the glow. Mirroring him. Chase turned off his scope and crawled to his right ten yards, taking a new position in case he’d been spotted by whoever was over there. He put his eye back to the scope and turned it on.

  Chase swung back to the pick-up. The driver was flashing the high beams, greeting the HMMWV.

  “The FBI will be too late,” Chase told Fortin.

  “I’m calling off their bird then. You have free fire.”

  The two vehicles were less than half-a-mile apart.

  Chase did the math. Two at least in the HMMWV, if not more out of sight. Two in the Blazer. That was a lot of fast shooting at long range. The guy on the machinegun was the pressing threat.

  Except for the ghost with the night scope in the woods across the way.

  Chase took several deep breaths. He swung back to the Blazer. He could clearly see the silhouette of the two men in the front.

  The two vehicles met. The man with the beard got out of the Blazer, AK-47 in one hand as he went up to the HMMWV. He shook his head and looked angry. Chase sighted on the murderer’s face, his finger on the trigger.

  He could feel the rhythm of his heart.

  He exhaled.

  He shifted the sight back to the copse of woods.

  He could see nothing.

  But someone was there. Mirroring him. Waiting.

  For what?

  A ghost in the machine, Chase thought. Gumming up the works.

  Chase exhaled once more, finger on the trigger, then he pulled his finger away from the thin sliver of metal that dealt death and wondered for a moment if perhaps he wasn’t part of that narrow slice of humanity any more.

  Then where did he fit?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Two mornings afterward, Chase woke just before the alarm went off. He always did, without a single exception, yet he still set an
alarm every time he went to sleep. He lay there, eyes closed, awaiting the noise that would announce the start of his day.

  The alarm on his watch started beeping and it took a few seconds for him to remember that it was probably somewhere under the debris cluttering the camouflage poncho liner he used as a blanket. He pushed his way through the discarded clothes, beer cans, gun magazines, maps, and piles of books until he found the offending device, turned it off and strapped it on.

  He didn't have a real bed or a nightstand. He used to. He used to have a lot of things. That was before he got served with a divorce eighteen months ago while deployed in Afghanistan. Anne had kept the bed and nightstand because she knew he'd never get another on his own and he'd have to start every day remembering she took them. He didn’t think she was being particularly vindictive—she also knew he didn’t care much about stuff like that and she did.

  He crawled out of the windowless room. It was more of a stonewalled cave he called his bedroom. It had originally been the coal storage room in the basement of the house, into another small room, actually an overly wide hallway, which he called his den when he was feeling positive, where his weight bench was crammed. He started his standard exercise routine. Fifteen minutes of stretching and stomach work and then some upper body weights on the rig. He did reps until he felt the pain deep in his muscles. After the sets of curls and presses, he slid off the sweaty surface of the weight bench. He walked barefoot and dressed only in his shorts into the backyard onto the small stone flag patio outside his screen door. The early morning chill cut into his skin and the sweat turned into steam.

  A battered heavy bag, repaired many times with duct tape, dangled from a bolt Chase had drilled into a crossbeam holding up the deck. Chase started the timer on his watch, and then began to work the bag. His arms were heavy from the weights, but he kept them up, pummeling away. He interspersed the punches with snap kicks, turn kicks, sidekicks and the entire repertoire he’d learned over the years, all kicks below chest height on the bag; everything else was just movie bullshit, plus he was too damn old to get his hamstring muscles that stretched out to do Hollywood spinning high kicks to the head any more.