Back Blast: A Gray Man Novel

by Mark Greaney

  Court was all the way up to the two vehicles when he slowed and stopped. He let go of his arm now, and raised the rifle. “Show me your hands.”

  “What the hell?”

  “Where are the keys?”

  No one spoke; they were all clearly stunned. Court glanced in one of the cruisers and saw the keys in the ignition. “Drop your weapons on the street, kick them away.”

  All four did as instructed, and Court leapt into the cruiser, fired it up, and then raced off.

  He knew this drive would be a short one. The helicopter pilot above would be informed of the situation in seconds, and it wasn’t tough for a cop in the sky to track a cop car on an empty street.

  He pulled under a covered parking space in an apartment complex just seven and a half blocks away, parked the squad car, and leapt out, leaving the rifle behind. Just as the helo above neared his position, he sprinted through the parking lot, then he climbed a fence and dropped down into a drainage canal that ran at the back of the apartment complex.

  He knew where he was going, after having studied satellite maps of his neighborhood to plan for rushed escapes.

  He raced along the canal, ran to a large culvert, and ducked in. As he moved through pitch-darkness he pulled out his phone to light his way, and with this he saw a smaller drain, waist-high and not more than four feet in diameter, that ran off at a ninety-degree angle. Water gushed down from it into the culvert.

  This wasn’t sewage; it was just runoff water from the streets, but there wasn’t anything clean about it. Court climbed up and into the long, narrow shaft, and he knelt low. This killed his wounded ribs, but he ignored the pain and moved as fast as he could from the area.

  He wasn’t sure where the drain went—this wasn’t on the sat maps—but he had a flashlight, and he had a sense that he was moving to the east. If he just stayed in here for a few blocks and climbed out he’d find himself somewhere in the middle of the city, and from there he was sure he would be safe from the immediate threat.

  50

  Denny Carmichael opened this morning’s copy of the Washington Post. DeRenzi had brought it in as soon as it arrived by courier, and Denny had been awake and waiting for it, even though it was only five a.m.

  It took him no time to find the article he was looking for, just below the fold and taking up an entire half of the front page, as well as another half of A19.

  Carmichael assumed Catherine King must have raced back from the CIA headquarters in McLean to the Washington Post’s office in D.C. to make her deadline last night. She couldn’t have possibly filed the story before midnight, which meant the newspaper had done some impressive work to get the article in the edition that went to press just a few hours later.

  It was all there, under the headline “CIA suspects D.C.-area shooter is ‘known personality.’”

  The description of Gentry was close to what Carmichael had handed King. She’d also reported the fact that he had spent time in Miami, along with information that he’d been trained, possibly by jihadists, likely in Yemen.

  For some reason there was no mention about him coming from Jacksonville, Florida, but Denny wasn’t too troubled by this.

  Nor was he bothered by the fact that King’s article clearly faulted CIA for not letting police know after the Brandywine Street incident that they had suspicions about who might be involved in the attack. Carmichael didn’t care. After all, in one form or another, CIA had been blamed for everything bad that had ever happened since the 1950s.

  Other than this small trifle, there was very little editorial comment from King in the piece, which greatly pleased Denny. She did add a small caveat at the end when she wrote that the investigation was ongoing and first reports, even from top government officials, often proved to be erroneous.

  Carmichael shrugged. King thought she had couched her piece with skepticism, but she had done exactly what Denny wanted her to do.

  She had published an article that would bait Gentry into targeting the writer of the article.

  —

  At any other time, the impenetrable blackness around him and the rainfall beating against the aluminum roof above him would have lulled Court into peaceful sleep. But his heart rate and the adrenaline pumping through him, even now, a full hour and a half after listening to the sounds of a tactical unit preparing to smash in his door, still prevented him from calming down enough to relax and doze off.

  He sat Indian style in his small storage unit, his back to the concrete block back wall, his suppressed Glock in his lap, and his Yamaha motorcycle right in front of him for cover. He faced the closed metal sliding door, stared at the black in front of his eyes, and listened to the calming rain.

  And he fully expected at any moment for the door to fly open and a team of shooters to rush in behind it with blinding lights and laser-targeting devices.

  Court had made it to his storage unit over a half hour earlier, after running a short SDR by using two early-morning cabs and walking through back alleys and commercial parking lots. Once in his little unit, he checked the area around him before closing the door, then he used the light of his phone to find his second bugout bag here in his cache and to check the bike to make sure it was ready to roll.

  Then he just sat down and did his best to relax.

  He hadn’t known who was hitting the Mayberry house at first, but after the engagement he determined they were a local police tactical unit. Their body armor said ERT, and while that was nothing conclusive—a gang of Arab goons had worn uniforms that proclaimed them to be D.C. Metro cops, after all—the tactical unit’s movements confirmed to Court they were exactly what they purported to be. The cordon of regular patrol officers in the area around the Mayberry home only sealed Court’s suspicion he’d been discovered in his hide site by local law enforcement.

  That was a bit embarrassing for a tier-one operator like Gentry, but he’d known from the beginning he would be up against a lot of different opposition forces, and he’d be taking a risk operating inside the city.

  If the cops hit this storage locker now he would lift the Glock and he would point it at them, but he wasn’t about to kill a cop. He might squeeze off a couple of rounds into their body armor just to make himself feel good, but there was nowhere to run, so if the cops hit, he’d die right here, sitting Indian style and enjoying the sound of the morning spring rain.

  But he wasn’t just barricading himself here to die. Instead he was waiting a few minutes more for the early part of the morning rush hour, where he wouldn’t be one of the only vehicles out on the street, and then he would climb aboard the Yamaha 650 and get the hell out of town.

  But not too far. Despite this morning’s setback, he still had work to do here in the District.

  For now he just worked on calming his body, relaxing himself, and waiting for the right time to run.

  —

  Matt Hanley was the last to enter the conference room, and as soon as he did so he realized the meeting had begun without him.

  Not that he cared. If he had his way he wouldn’t be here at all, but he’d been summoned by Carmichael, and Carmichael was his superior, so he had no choice but to attend.

  As he sat down at the table in an open wingback chair, he looked around at the attendees. Suzanne Brewer was in the middle of a presentation. She stood in front of a digital map of the city and addressed the room, perfectly coiffed and dressed.

  Mayes and Carmichael were present, of course, as were many of the other Violator Working Group members, along with a team of techs sitting in chairs against the back wall.

  And there was one more attendee. Down at the end of the conference table sat a big man with short blond hair, much of it turning gray. He wore a suit and tie, his face was cleanly shaved, and he had a small notebook in front of him.

  But Hanley wasn’t fooled—he knew a shooter when he saw one.

 
Hanley turned away from the man, presuming him to be a JSOC liaison or someone similar, but as soon as Brewer finished her presentation and sat back down, Hanley’s head swiveled back to the man at the end of the table.

  Matt hadn’t seen Zack Hightower in five years, and he was almost certain he’d never seen him without a beard, so he forgave himself for not recognizing him. Calling out across the length of the table he said, “Morning, Sierra One. Welcome back to the land of the living.”

  Zack Hightower had worked for Matt Hanley for several years, till the day Hanley was told all the men in his Goon Squad unit were dead except for Gentry, and Gentry was the culprit for the deaths of the others.

  “Hey, Matt,” Zack said. He seemed embarrassed to be alive. He added, “Sorry about that.” Zack then nodded over to Denny Carmichael, who was looking down at some papers. He shrugged. “Orders. You know.”

  Hanley just stared Hightower down and said, “Your funeral sucked, by the way.”

  Zack gave a half smile and looked down to his empty notebook, and one of the techs in the room, a man who had no idea what was going on, broke out in a surprised laugh.

  The executives at the conference table, in contrast, remained silent, until Suzanne Brewer said, “Matt, you haven’t missed anything, I was just getting started with the morning briefing. The short version is this: Gentry’s in the wind. Again. Local PD had him, but they lost him.”

  Hanley asked, “How did that happen?”

  “While forty cops cordoned off the neighborhood, two eight-man ERT units hit the house where he was staying. They engaged Gentry, but Gentry managed to get out of the building and past the cordon.”

  Hanley said, “Let’s see . . . yesterday in Dupont Circle, Gentry brutally murdered several men. The death toll this morning must have been three times that, right?”

  Brewer shook her head, not picking up on the fact that Hanley seemed to know the answer to this question already. “Surprisingly, no. Four men were injured, though no injuries were life-threatening.”

  Hanley glanced to Hightower, and he noticed his eyebrows furrowing slightly. But Zack said nothing.

  Hanley next asked, “Could someone please tell me why I’m here?”

  Carmichael spoke for the first time since Hanley had arrived. “Like it or not, Matt, it’s in your best interests that we bring this episode to a close. Suzanne wants to know where Violator will go next for shelter. Today, we suspect, will be a repositioning day for him. He will find some new location, some new bolt-hole, and I’m going to venture to guess it will be outside of the District, someplace safer. You ran the man for several years, and he hasn’t been back in the area since those days. We thought you might give us ideas about his possible new hide site.”

  Before Hanley could respond, Hightower raised a wary hand.

  Brewer turned to acknowledge him. “Zack, it’s not necessary to raise your hand.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Gentry will be south of D.C., in a remote location. Picture a covered ditch, a deserted cabin, a grain elevator on an abandoned farm. He will be very difficult to find once he gets there. Almost impossible. I feel our next moment of opportunity will be when he reengages us, not when we discover his hide.”

  Brewer said, “I understand why you think he will go somewhere more remote, but why south specifically?”

  “He lived and worked in northern Virginia. It’s more familiar to him. He might anticipate us making this assumption, but he is confident in his abilities to hide, especially when he knows the terrain.”

  Carmichael pointed to Hanley. “Your best guess as to his location?”

  Hanley heaved his shoulders, not hiding his annoyance at it all. “I was management. Hightower was labor. Next to Court Gentry, Zack Hightower is the best operator I ever had working under me.” He looked down the table at Hightower. “Before Zack’s untimely death, he was also the best ground-level leader I’d ever seen. In your infinite wisdom, Denny, you’ve resurrected Hightower to sit him in a seventh-floor conference room, dress him in a suit and tie, and ask him questions about Gentry’s new lair. Zack tells you the target has run someplace you’ll never find him, so I defer to Zack’s expertise. I guess you’ll just have to wait for him to come back out to play.”

  Suzanne snapped back. “Play, Matt? Really? A veteran CIA official and three innocent Transit Police were murdered yesterday. I doubt their loved ones see this as a game.”

  Hanley sniffed. “Yeah, about that. Yesterday, a man with Court Gentry’s abilities of escape and evasion was so backed into a corner in a location with a half dozen egresses that he was forced to murder three poorly armed and poorly trained transit cops in cold blood, in broad daylight, in a crowded location. And yet before dawn this morning, sixteen highly trained tactical officers raided his secure, defended ground, and in that instance Court only knocks a few heads together. Killing none. Zero.”

  Hanley was looking at Hightower now. “That is pretty damn curious, wouldn’t you say?”

  Despite Hanley’s challenge, Zack did not say a word.

  Brewer countered, “He did a lot more than knock heads together.”

  Hanley stood up from the table. “But he did a lot less than send a dozen poor bastards to the morgue! A cold-blooded killer is cornered like a fucking rat in a cage and he doesn’t kill his way out?” He turned to Denny. “Not buying it. I’m not buying any of this bullshit. I’m walking, Chief. You have a problem with that, go to the director and have him remove me for insubordination. The way the walls are crumbling around here, you’d be doing me a favor.”

  —

  Carmichael didn’t stop Hanley from leaving, but Brewer chased him out and caught up with him on his way back to his office. “Matt?”

  With a heave and a sigh he turned back to her. “Sorry, Suzanne. My comments weren’t directed at you, specifically. They were directed at this entire operation.”

  “I understand. I just don’t understand why you are in Gentry’s camp the way you are. Hightower is the same way. Zack will do whatever we tell him to do, it seems clear he is a good soldier, but I don’t get the feeling his heart is in this any more than yours is.”

  Hanley said, “Every day this goes on, Denny gets himself in deeper. I don’t know what the fuck is happening out there, but the story he is giving you, and the story he gave the Washington Post yesterday, is just the story Denny needs us to believe. It’s not the truth. I respect you, Suzanne, but when the smoke clears after this debacle, those of us who did what we could to stay outside of Denny’s gravitational pull will not be able to do one damn thing to help those who got pulled down with him.”

  Hanley left Brewer there, standing alone in the hallway.

  51

  Court opened up the throttle on his Yamaha 650 as soon as he turned south on I-95. He wasn’t sure where he was going, only that he needed to get the hell out of D.C., at least for the time being. He planned on finding a new hide, somewhere within a half hour to an hour’s drive of the District, and someplace one hell of a lot more secure than Arthur Mayberry’s basement apartment.

  Although he wasn’t sure where he was going, he wasn’t exactly flying blind. He knew this stretch of highway, because the HQ of the Goon Squad had been in Norfolk and he’d lived in Virginia Beach, both just to the southeast. He’d driven up I-95 to D.C. from time to time on training evolutions, either to practice surveillance in Old Town Alexandria or around the National Mall near the Capitol building.

  He passed Prince William Forest Park on his right, the marine barracks of Quantico on his left, and he continued another few minutes until he saw a turnoff for the Stafford Regional Airport. Instantly an idea came to him. Court had learned to fly light aircraft here, a long time ago, admittedly, but he remembered the facility, more or less. Security had been lax around the airport at the time, so he thought there was a chance he could hide out somewhere on the property, eith
er in a hangar or a utility room, or perhaps even in the comfort of a private aircraft. It was a thin plan, because he hadn’t visited the location in some fifteen years, but he knew if he continued on too much longer he’d be in Fredericksburg, and he had no intention of setting up his new hide in a developed area.

  He exited I-95 and headed towards the airport.

  As soon as he began riding along the chain-link fence to the airport property he decided his impromptu plan wasn’t going to pan out like he’d hoped. It was a small airfield with only one runway and just a half dozen or so buildings, and security appeared much tighter than what he remembered. He knew he could wait till nightfall and gain access to the grounds, but it wasn’t yet nine a.m. and he did not want to waste an entire day lying low, only to spend the whole evening developing a new hide. No, Court had things to do; he needed to find a new home right now so that tonight he could act.

  Once he passed the airport he started to turn around to head back to I-95, but a lonely gravel road off to his right caught his eye. He didn’t see a single structure on either side of the road, only oak and pine and thick brush, but he imagined the road led to someplace where no one would be looking for him, and for now, at least, that was good enough.

  Court remembered flying low over these woods, all those years ago. His flight instructor, a retired Air Force jet jockey who taught single-engine piloting to CIA operators, had pointed out the roofs of a few wooden houses, far away from any noticeable roads. He’d told Court there had once been a Civil War camp in the woods, and a few broken-down battlements and other structures remained from that era.

  Now Court wondered if he could find the old buildings and use them as some sort of shelter.

  After only a few minutes of driving north on the gravel road the sky opened up and heavy rain began to fall again.

  He saw a narrow gravel footpath that led off the road, and not a soul in sight, so he made the turn, driving deeper now into the forest. Another two minutes on the road and he found himself looking for any access into the dense woods so he could get under the protection of a tree and out of the rain. But as he peered deep in the woods he saw, on both sides of the footpath, low stone fences that looked like they were at least from the Civil War era, if not well before. He continued on because he wouldn’t be able to get his bike up and over the stone barriers.