Back Blast: A Gray Man Novel

by Mark Greaney

  The path ran along a creek and then ended at the remnants of a washed-out wooden footbridge over the water. A sign on a pole told Court this was Accokeek Creek, and the 11th Union Army had spent the winter of 1863 camped nearby. Court’s interest in the Civil War was surpassed by his interest in survival, so he worried he might have wandered into some sort of historic park that attracted visitors. But if he had, he was all but certain he’d come in through a back entrance, and he had the distinct impression there was no one around for miles.

  Court turned off his bike’s engine and rolled it to the creek’s edge, then began pushing it upstream along the bank to get around the stone fence and find some cover from the storm.

  He found the woods thicker here than he’d first thought, so he continued moving on the creek’s edge, knowing he had succeeded in finding a remote location in which to hide, but wondering if he had overachieved by getting too far away from civilization to be practical. He’d been in search of a roof, and it seemed now he’d have to settle for a fallen tree or maybe just foliage with thick leaves.

  His mood darkened with the frustration growing in him.

  After a time he found evidence of an old set of stone stairs rising out of the creek and up a hill. They were barely visible under the brush along the creek bed, but it made him wonder if more development was close by. He pushed himself and his motorcycle up into the woods and away from the water.

  As he climbed he saw that, although this path had long ago been cleared of trees, it had not been used in some time, and the farther he got from the creek, the deeper the grasses and foliage grew.

  He’d gone no more than fifty feet when, ahead and off to the right of the overgrown path, he saw something big looming in the woods. He looked closer, then he rubbed rainwater out of his eyes to do a double take.

  It was a two-story building, covered with vines and surrounded by oak trees. The first floor seemed to be made of stacked stone, and the second floor and the steeply pitched roof were wood plank, much of it bowed or rotten.

  Court left his bike where it was and pushed into the trees to investigate the building.

  The door had a lock on it, but that wasn’t going to slow Court down, because the door was lying on its side on the porch, ten feet from where it had once been affixed in the doorway.

  The stone steps up to the porch were covered in vines but good and solid. Not so the porch itself, which sagged down several inches when he stepped on it. He moved along the edges until he found a crossbeam under the rotten wood, then walked along this like a tightrope to the door.

  He stepped through the doorway and into a large, dark room.

  This was an abandoned grain mill; he could tell from the setup. It was at least as old as the Civil War battlements supposedly out here in the forest, but probably unrelated to the 1863 encampment of Union forces. The big, dark room was open to the elements because of all the windows and the missing door, and he could hear dripping rainwater here inside, but the roof high above him seemed mostly intact.

  He pulled his flashlight from his pack and walked the beam all along the inside. A small amount of graffiti on the wall and the beams above, and a larger amount of twentieth-century trash, told him he hadn’t discovered anything that had not been discovered hundreds of times by others, but he had serious doubts anyone happened by here with any regularity.

  It was a roof over his head, and it was nothing if not secluded, but this wasn’t going to be comfortable, at least not until he scrounged up a few more items.

  He looked at his watch. It had taken him a little less than an hour to travel here from D.C., which made this a suitable location as far as he was concerned.

  This was now home.

  He dropped his pack against a wall and changed into dry blue jeans and a mostly dry dark gray thermal shirt. He didn’t have any more socks other than the ones he was wearing, which, like his tennis shoes, were soaking wet, so he just told himself to forget about any real comfort and be glad for what he had.

  When he was settled in, meaning sitting on a raincoat with his back against the wall, a tiny fire for warmth in front of him, he pulled out his smartphone and began calling up CNN and a few newswire services on the Internet.

  It took him fewer than five minutes of surfing to come across the Washington Post article purporting to have information about a homegrown terrorist targeting the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Court almost ignored it, thinking it was going to be nothing more than a bunch of bullshit conjecture, just like everything he’d seen during the daytime hours of CNN and the other cable networks. A bunch of people who knew nothing about the event pontificating just to fill airtime. But quickly he realized the writer of this article had spoken with CIA personnel. Key personnel, in fact.

  Soon Court was certain Denny Carmichael had been involved in the background interview the reporter cited as her principal source.

  He read through to the end of the article, and now Court’s jaw muscles tensed and he looked up from his screen, furious.

  They were making him out to be nothing more than a delusional psycho who held an imaginary grudge against the CIA, who then bumbled over to the Middle East for training and support before returning home to begin his reign of terror.

  Court scrolled back up to the top of the article looking for the byline. Catherine King. An e-mail address and phone number were listed as well.

  Court decided he wanted to talk to King to find out about the access she’d been granted and the people she’d interviewed. This might help him learn of others involved in his situation, someone he could target next.

  But Court knew something else, as well. The CIA had planted intel in the article so that he would do just that.

  Court shook his head in disbelief. All these years, all this cat and mouse, and Denny Carmichael still thought Court was just some knuckle-dragging door-kicker, not smart enough to see he was being set up.

  Court smiled a little and decided he wouldn’t go after Catherine King. No, not yet.

  He would, instead, go after whoever it was tailing Catherine King, hoping it would be the same group of Arabs he’d been up against since at least the night he witnessed Leland Babbitt’s murder.

  If the CIA was using foreign operatives here in the U.S., Court felt they would be at the center of the reasons behind his targeting. He’d love to get hold of some of these men after him, to squeeze them for intelligence, because they would surely have the answers.

  He’d speak with King later if he needed to, but for now, he would seek out the hunters on his trail, because in Court’s long career, he had learned one lesson above all: it’s no big trick to turn a predator into prey.

  52

  Catherine King parked on the cobblestone street just steps from the front door of her O Street two-story Federalist home and climbed out of her bright blue Prius. She retrieved her purse, her briefcase, and her yoga mat from the backseat, then she headed inside without a glance at the street around her.

  Zack Hightower watched her through the Leupold scope affixed to his collapsible sniper rifle. Once she was inside her front door, he scanned the length of O Street, looking for any idling vehicles in the area. Seeing nothing of interest, he began training his optic on the lighted windows in the nearby apartment buildings.

  Zack had no trouble admitting to himself that the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., was a shitty place to set up a sniper’s hide, but he was confident he’d found the absolute best location to secrete himself. He was on the roof of Gaston Hall, part of a massive neo-Gothic seven-story structure that served as the focal point of Georgetown University. From here he had a perfect vantage point for two hundred yards down the length of O Street, as well as many portions of various cross streets in a four-block area.

  Eighty feet off his right shoulder was the clock tower of Healy Hall. The tower was several stories highe
r than his position here, and he could have made his way up there to set up his operation. It would have given him sight lines on more rooftops, street corners, and windows, and with any other target Zack would have plopped his ass right in that tower so he could have as many opportunities to see his target from distance as possible. But not today. No, right now he was hunting Sierra Six, and Six was the smartest prey Zack had ever tracked. The clock tower was an obvious place for a sniper to position himself, and Six would see it the second he arrived in the vicinity of Catherine King’s home. Six would spend as much time as he needed hiding out, using all sorts of gadgets and tactics to get a look up at the obvious hide site, and if Zack put himself in the clock tower Six would know it and Zack would be dead fucking meat.

  Zack liked his chances here on the rooftop. This building was attached to Healy Hall to make an L-shaped structure the width and length of a city block. There were hundreds of square yards of territory up here, much of it steep, but there were also standing seams and walkways, far enough back from the building’s edge to allow him to avoid silhouetting himself, and there were dormers and crosses and antennae and satellite dishes and other bits of cover and concealment available to where Zack felt he was completely invisible from ground level.

  Zack agreed with the assessment of Jordan Mayes: Gentry would come for Catherine King, looking to find out just who she’d spoken with and just what she knew. And at the speed Gentry’s operation had been progressing, Zack could well imagine he would make his move tonight. If that happened Zack put his chances at nearly one hundred percent that he’d see his target from this position. He knew how Gentry thought and how he moved, and he was damn certain he knew where Gentry would go, even to the point of which backyards around here he’d skulk through on his way towards his objective.

  And Zack and his rifle would be ready.

  He didn’t feel any better about taking out Court Gentry now than he did when he told Brewer that she was playing for the wrong team in all this, but that wouldn’t slow Zack down for an instant. If he saw his target he would put a bullet through it, just the same as he would if he were taking potshots at the practice range.

  He had been using the streetlights to see around O Street, but now he decided to dig deeper with his optic, to look into the recesses of alleyways and shady door stoops, to check blackened buildings and dim rooftops. He reached into his big backpack and pulled out his universal night sight. Made by FLIR Systems, it attached just forward of his regular optic on the rail of his rifle. After turning it on he simply looked through his Leupold day scope, and a television image of the scene below him enhanced all the light in the area so he could see deep into the darkest shadows. He had to avoid pointing the night sight at the bright lights on the street, but for the areas away from lights, the device was ideal.

  Zack scanned the rooftops of the neighborhood carefully. It was still early, probably way too early for Gentry to move, but he had wanted to arrive here in his position well before employing his weapon. He needed time to memorize the surroundings, to take a mental snapshot he could refer to at any point during his hunt.

  He’d finished a narrow scan of O Street and had just begun to move away from the rooftops on 35th Street NW when he noticed a faint flash of light coming from a building on the southwest corner of 35th and O. Everything in the area, save for the streetlights and a few windows, was dark or close to it, so the flare had stood out, especially since it seemed to come from the roof of an otherwise blacked-out building. Zack angled his scope down to street level so he could see what type of structure he was looking at and saw the building housed a coffee shop, which was closed for the evening.

  There. Another faint flash. He could tell it was definitely coming from the flat rooftop above the coffee shop. Like the last time, it was gone just as soon as it appeared.

  With his nine-power scope he couldn’t see the exact source of the light, but in his pack next to him he carried a pair of one of the best binoculars on the planet. He reached in quickly, retrieved his Swarovski Optik SLC 56, and brought the long binos to his eyes. He steadied them by resting his elbows on the standing seam roof below him, and brought them into focus on the corner of O and 35th Street NW. Through the fifteen-power magnification he scanned the rooftop of the coffee shop where he’d noticed the light before.

  Another flash, just to the right of his field of view. He shifted his binos to center them on the location.

  What the hell?

  He could just barely make out a smartphone, lying by itself, faceup, on top of the roof, slightly angled up towards Zack’s hide.

  In seconds he saw another flash, and realized the intermittent lights were due to incoming text messages.

  He sighed. He’d gotten his hopes up for nothing. It looked like some asshole had thrown the phone from the street up onto the roof, God knows why, and now someone else was texting the owner.

  Zack started to put his binos up and return to the search, but he paused a moment. Inside his pack he put his hand around his spotter’s scope, already affixed to a tiny tripod. On a whim he pulled it out, set it up next to his rifle, and peered through it. It took him several seconds to line it up with the rooftop, and then zoom its variable 125-power magnification to the smartphone, but when he did, it was like he was looking at the screen from a distance of only one and a half yards. He realized he’d be able to read any more texts that came through.

  Just then, the phone flashed. Hightower squinted into the eyecup of his spotter’s scope, straining to see the text message.

  How’s it hanging, Zack? You still got that obnoxious 125x scope?

  Slowly Zack Hightower pulled his eye out of the cup of the spotter’s scope, and he placed his forehead on the cold metal roof. “You’re right up here with me, aren’t you, Six?”

  From ten yards behind him Hightower heard a voice he knew well. “Figured I’d find some asshole up here. Can’t say I expected you. Thought you were dead.”

  Zack’s elbows were tight under his body, his forehead still lying flat on the roof. While keeping his arms perfectly still, he moved the fingers of his right hand under the collar of his black tunic. He took hold of a throwing knife attached to a necklace, but he did not pull it free from its sheath. Zack said, “Just up here hunting old ghosts, bro.”

  “Me, too,” replied Court. “I’ve got a gun on you. In case you’ve forgotten, I don’t miss very often. Whatever you are thinking about doing, just know that.”

  Zack nodded to himself, then he said, “I figure I’ve got a fifty-fifty chance.”

  “You give yourself too much credit.”

  Zack shrugged, then he launched his body to the right by pressing his left arm and left knee into the roof with all his might. Court fired a single suppressed round, and the bullet slammed into the midsection of Zack’s Kevlar chest protection just as he rolled onto his back. Zack’s right arm shot down from his neck. In one motion he yanked the folding knife free of the scabbard, the scabbard itself opened the blade, and he hurled it across the dark roof in the direction of the flash of gunfire. Zack saw his target react, contorting his body to the left, and the spinning knife flew just past Court’s face, missing him by less than a foot.

  Zack absorbed the baseball bat punch to the solar plexus from the round hitting his Kevlar, and he snatched his HK pistol out of the drop holster on his right hip. He brought it up to fire on his target, just in time to see the dark figure tumble backwards, down onto the tiles of the roof. He heard the pistol bounce along on its own, clanging down and then off of the seven-story building.

  But he didn’t know if Gentry himself had fallen down the sloped roof.

  Zack sprang to his knees, keeping his pistol trained on the last place he’d seen his target, and he moved laterally a few yards, careful to not appear over the roof’s edge exactly where Gentry would expect him. Slowly he moved to the end of the flat standing seam and looked down at t
he angled tile roof. It was dark below; he could make out little other than the trees in the courtyard at the back of the building. Right in front of him, just as the roof began to increase in pitch, was a small platform for a satellite dish, an old VHF antenna, and, alongside the VHF, Zack saw a curious-looking metal bar that came up from the platform with wires attached to it. The bar went up about one foot, then bowed down and angled out of site, down the side of the roof.

  Zack took one more step forward to look on the other side of the platform, his gun up and ready, in case Gentry was hiding there.

  He wasn’t. Zack then looked farther down the steeply angled roof. There, ten feet below him, he saw a figure lying against the tile. He held something in both hands.

  At the exact same instant Hightower realized Gentry was holding on to the long radio antenna, bending it down at an impossible angle, Gentry let go, and the bent metal aerial torqued upwards at high speed. After a brief whipping sound the antenna smacked Zack Hightower right between his eyes, sending him flying backwards, end over end, tumbling along the flat part of the roof. His HK sailed from his hand as he continued back, until he landed flat on his face on the eastern angled portion of the roof.

  Here he slid down several feet, then stopped when his boots arrested his fall.

  He tried to get his arms and knees underneath him to push himself back up, but his arms and legs gave out. His eyes and nose stung, his mouth bled, he was stunned and disoriented, but he knew Gentry was still somewhere up here with him.

  He told himself he had to shake off the hurt and find his fucking handgun. He had to get back into the fight before the Gray Man closed on him and shot him dead with his own weapon.