She shifted around until she found a comfortable shooting position sitting behind a low deadfall pine trunk. The top of the log was at the level of her ribs while she sat cross-legged with her knees just under it. She moved some rocks from under her, because she knew she had to be comfortable enough to stay in her position for hours if necessary.
Finally, she took off her black daypack, unzipped it and withdrew the long pistol case, laid the case across her lap, and removed the Tennyson Champion. From one of the case’s outside pouches she slid out the suppressor and screwed it onto the threaded end of the pistol’s fourteen inch long barrel. From another pocket she took out the plastic cigarette-pack-sized case which held her father’s hand-loaded .223 caliber match quality cartridges. She put the half-zipped gun case back in the daypack, which she also left unzipped beside her. She planned to take only one shot, and then hit or miss, she was going to unscrew the silencer and drop it in the bag, then plunge the Champion muzzle-first into the pistol case within the pack, zip it up and throw it on her back, and escape down the hill to her motorcycle.
Ranya knew that she had to be down the hill, out of her sniper’s garb, packed and on the bike and out the area within five minutes of the shot. With state police bodyguards on the scene, she could not depend on confusion to delay the pursuit. The call would go out over police radio almost immediately. Any police in the area might begin to block key intersections, which is why she had a route planned out that used only local neighborhood streets. She had a yellow-highlighted section of road map already cut out and taped onto her gas tank to assist her. Her worst fear though was that a police helicopter would already be airborne over Richmond, which seemed likely, and in that case it could be over Fox Hill in mere minutes. Her escape would be a narrow run thing at best.
She snapped open the top of the plastic cartridge case, and selected one bullet, pulling it out by its sharp conical tip. She closed the case and put it into the breast pocket of her coveralls and buttoned the pocket: it was critical that she not drop, forget or leave behind anything at all.
Enough light from the house reached her position to permit her to examine the single .223 cartridge. It was made of gleaming golden brass, a bit over two inches long, thicker than a pencil, then necked down in two sharp angles to hold the narrow .223-inch wide projectile. A half inch of the sharp copper-coated projectile extended from the mouth of the brass case, at its tip was a tiny hole, opening into a small internal cavity. The 50-grain projectile would leave the Champion’s fourteen-inch barrel at almost 3,000 feet per second, and when its hollow tip struck flesh or bone it would virtually explode, dumping nearly six-hundred foot-pounds of energy into her target. This was as much destructive energy as her .45 caliber pistol fired point-blank.
If Sanderson was getting death threats, he might be wearing a Kevlar vest, and he might even be wearing a thin armor plate in a pouch in the front of the vest, a plate which would stop the tiny high velocity .223 hollow point. Because of this possibility, Ranya decided to go for a head shot if possible. She knew that from its steady rest across the pine log the Champion would absolutely be able to hit an apple-sized target at the house 250 yards away, but Sanderson would be moving. Her best chance would come right at his front door, when he might stand still for a few moments. If she could not get a head shot, if he didn’t stop, she would go for his torso.
But Ranya really wanted to take the head shot, because she wanted to erase Sanderson’s self righteous smirk forever. In death, her father had not been permitted the dignity of an open coffin viewing, and Ranya had been left scarred with the hideous memory of what she had seen on the ground between her house and the store. Ranya meant to give Eric Sanderson the same gruesome sendoff that federal agents had given her father. She wanted to blow his telegenic face and head into shreds, so that there could be no public viewing of his formerly handsome corpse in the capitol in Richmond. She wanted his bodyguards and aides to experience some of the horror she had been forced to endure, when they saw Sanderson’s head disappear. Besides, their shock might slow down their reactions and their radio calls, and every second of their delay was a second added to her escape.
Ranya wrapped her long fingers around the carved wooden grip of the Champion, pulled back the trigger guard extension tang to unlock the breech, tipping the long barrel down so that she was looking into the empty chamber. She lifted the barrel back up and snapped the breech shut, and then laid the barrel across the pine log. On top of the long barrel there was mounted a 2.5 to 7X variable magnification pistol scope. Ranya flipped up the small hinged lens covers at each end, and rotated a knob on the black scope to turn on its internal reticle light. She had already adjusted the magnification to its 7X maximum, now she adjusted her sitting position again so that she could comfortably examine the house through the scope with the pistol resting across the log.
The crosshairs glowed red-orange, and the front porch filled the ocular lens as she sighted on the brass and iron doorknocker, which when it was magnified seven times appeared to be only 100 feet away. With a two-handed grip, she settled the thin crosshair on the center of the doorknocker, and began to slowly exhale while softly touching the trigger with the pad of her right index finger, only squeezing when the crosshair was directly on the center of the knocker. At three pounds of pressure, she felt and heard the sharp metallic click as the hammer dropped on the empty chamber, a certain hit within an inch of where she was aiming. An experienced shooter like Ranya could generally “call” her hits or misses as soon as the trigger was pulled. Dry firing, Ranya hit the knocker and doorbell again and again with imaginary shots, practicing for Eric Sanderson.
When she was satisfied that she had adapted to the Champion’s crisp trigger, and she was comfortable shooting the 250 downhill yards to the house from her sitting position behind the log, she loaded a single .223 caliber hollow-point cartridge into the chamber and closed the breach for the last time. She laid the heavy pistol, with its fourteen-inch barrel and scope and seven inch long suppressor across her lap and waited, studying the house, the driveway, and the car with the unseen bodyguards.
No lights had come on in the house after it had grown dark outside, and she was certain it was empty. Perhaps Sanderson was out of town; there was no way Ranya could know. She had a small water bottle in her pack. She drank a little, putting it away carefully each time in case she had to flee with no warning. She shifted and stretched her muscles to keep from getting too stiff, but she never left her position sitting behind the log with the Champion across her lap. An occasional mosquito buzzed around her eyes; crickets accepted her presence and chirped close around her. At 9:00 PM she washed down a caffeine tablet with some of her water. She thought about Brad Fallon and his lovely white sailboat and his escape plan of sailing to the islands. She wondered about Phil Carson and his civil war talk. She wondered if Phil was also in the woods tonight, and whether he was burying or digging up his serious weapons. She remembered a saying she had heard, that when it gets bad enough to have to bury your guns, it’s time to dig them up. She thought about snorkeling with Brad in transparent blue-green tropical water over coral reefs.
At 9:55 she saw several sets of headlights bouncing and turning up the road from the right and onto the driveway. He’s home!
Her pulse and breathing quickened as she laid the Champion across the log, holding it securely in her two-handed grip. She thumbed back the hammer. A full-sized SUV was in front, a sedan behind. The SUV paused by the unmarked car which was parked down the driveway; they were getting the “all clear” no doubt. If they only knew!
The SUV pulled into the circular driveway and came to a stop facing Ranya, its headlight beams aimed into the hill. Then the dark sedan, a Lincoln or Cadillac, came to a stop at an angle partly hidden from her view behind the SUV.
The Champion’s pistol scope had a long eye-relief distance. Ranya’s face was a foot behind it; she switched between looking over the scope at the entire scene and through it at the vehic
les. According to the ballistic data card that her father had prepared and placed in the case with the pistol, the scope had been zeroed in at two-hundred yards. Its bullets would drop barely an inch from there to the 250 yards, which Ranya estimated was the distance to the front porch. She only needed to hold the crosshairs on the center of his head, and squeeze the trigger.
Car and truck doors clunked open and shut. The sounds of talk and music and laughter floated up the grassy hillside, to where Ranya Bardiwell sat holding a long-range target pistol. A female stepped out in a full-length sequined gown; it was blazing gold in the home’s security lights. Then some men in dark suits—aides or bodyguards—were getting out of the SUV. Finally, Eric Sanderson himself came into Ranya’s view from around the SUV. He was wearing a tuxedo, his blow-dried black mane with the silver sides giving him away.
Moving…get the crosshairs on him. Stand still Eric, oh what now? He’s back behind the SUV, no shot. Now here he is again, and two more ladies are with him; stand still Eric! They’re all moving to the porch, he’s behind them, find his head, lay the crosshairs on his head, move with him… The other two ladies are in front of him now; young blondes, a matched-set in black mini-dresses. They must be his daughters, up from college for the weekend, they matched his bio.
The group walked to the front porch and up the steps. His wife, his aides, his daughters, his bodyguards; all of them milling and turning and blocking her view of Sanderson. They stopped at the front door, his body obscured but not his head, his black and silver hair a beacon. On the door step now, the women smiling, no doubt full of fine food and wine. All four of them now in a tight shifting knot, aides trailing on the steps below. Sanderson’s back to Ranya for a clear shot, her finger on the trigger, one pound of pressure taken up. His head between his two daughters, in front of his wife’s face. A blond daughter leaning on his shoulder, tipsy and laughing; Ranya’s crosshairs on the back of his head. Two pounds of pressure on the trigger, the crosshairs jiggling faintly in time with her heartbeat. Steady…exhale…aim…squeeze…the sequined wife facing him, smiling in her scope…
Stop. Pressure off the trigger, finger clear.
I can’t do it, not in front of his daughters. Ranya closed her eyes, her head down, uncocking the hammer with her thumb and easing it forward and putting the pistol on safe. She looked again, but not through the scope. She looked down at the contented family scene as Eric Sanderson, his wife and his two daughters disappeared behind their front door, and the lights came on inside.
Sanderson was a pig, he was filth, and his hands were on her father’s murder one way or the other. He was using her father’s murder to advance his own political career, all that was true, but Ranya just could not splatter his skull and brains all over his wife, and especially not in front of his daughters. In the end she found that she just couldn’t do it, there was a line that Ranya discovered she couldn’t cross. She unscrewed the suppressor from the muzzle, slid the pistol into its case inside her back pack, and checked the area for anything left behind. Then she crept back into the brush, stood up and walked carefully in the darkness down the hill through the trees to her Nighthawk.
Okay Eric, you son of a bitch, you just got a reprieve. Enjoy your father’s company, girls. Your presence tonight saved his miserable life.
14
Ben Mitchell was retired at more than half of an Army Sergeant Major’s pay, but he earned even more than that as a craftsman and artist. He had started his second career by building military plaques for other soldiers, and that had evolved into building exotic custom coffee tables topped with an inch of clear Lucite, which contained linked ammo, medals, fighting knives and other souvenirs; all made to the customer’s order.
From his military customer base, his reputation had somehow spread to restaurants, and he was usually back-ordered for months. He knew that he could expand his operation and take on employees, but he didn’t want the hassle of dealing with all the government paperwork and oversight that employees would bring. As a sole proprietor, he could work right out of his garage workshop in Reston Virginia, twenty miles west of Washington DC.
He was long divorced, living alone, and able to set his own hours. He worked when he wanted, and he took off and vacationed when he wanted. Since Sunday night when he had found out about Mark Denton’s murder, he had stopped building custom tables and gone completely into the “operational” mode. Even at over sixty years old, Ben still considered himself to be an “operator.” Without a doubt he was slower and weaker than he had been on active duty, but he believed that what he had lost physically he somewhat made up for by becoming smarter and sneakier with age.
Like most career specops guys, he had made a near religion out of being ready for any conceivable contingency. Off of his bedroom his former wife’s old walk-in closet had become his “war room,” shelved on both sides and containing every piece of gear and uniform article that might be required to operate in any terrain and climate from the arctic to the desert to the jungle. He had a free fall parachute, packed and ready and unused for a decade. He had early model night vision goggles, he had skis, and he had enough rope to rappel down the Grand Canyon. Inside a standing gun safe he had firearms ranging from a .22 caliber Colt Woodsman pistol (threaded to take a “hush puppy” silencer) to a scoped bolt-action Remington 700 in 7.62 NATO. Most of the contents of his war room were just gathering dust as the years passed and Ben grew older and further away from being an operator, and in reality, his war room was becoming more of a private museum than anything else.
Ben thought of everything in his war room as simply the tools of his former trade. Like many of his generation of soldiers, he could not accept the possibility of being caught unprepared for any eventuality, in peace or in war, even in the good old USA. If the “balloon went up” Ben would be ready to do… something. Maybe he would be called back to help rush a new crop of youngsters through Special Forces training, and maybe he would be asked to do something more. No matter what happened, Ben Mitchell would be ready for it, just as long as he could fend off the doctors and their lying lab reports…
Two of the most useful tools that Ben had acquired over the years he did not dare to keep in his war room or anywhere else on his property. Ben had long ago filched a pair of satchel charges, each with twenty pounds of military high explosive compound C-4 in a green canvas bag the size of a child’s knapsack. C-4 was the magic stuff that gave an ordinary soldier Superman’s fist. It could knock down a large tree, reducing its trunk to splinters, or blast a concrete wall to rubble in the blink of an eye. It could dig an instant trench, or launch a steel manhole cover like a blazing meteor, which could burn a hole clear through a locomotive.
The white plastic explosive was just too damn useful not to include in his personal load out. Once a soldier became accustomed to having Superman’s fist available, it was hard to envision going through life without some of it set aside…just in case.
Along with the forty pounds of C-4 he had collected an ample supply of waterproof time fuse, fuse igniters, detonating cord, and electric and non-electric military blasting caps. All of these items came packed in vacuum-sealed heavy foil bags, and had a much longer shelf life than Ben Mitchell expected of himself.
Although explosives were tightly controlled in the civilian world, they were simple to come by in the Special Forces. Once a few-hundred pounds of C-4 were signed out of a demo bunker, there was no way for anyone to know how much had actually been blown up at the end of the day. When properly used as it was designed, C-4 simply disappeared in a loud bang and a cloud of dust. Demo ranges were typically sprawling tracts on vast Army bases, and it was no problem to set aside a few bricks of C-4 here and there without drawing any attention.
Ben Mitchell’s forty pounds of C-4 had been cached nearby in Great Falls Park by the upper Potomac, where he had thought it would probably lay undisturbed for centuries after his own eventual demise. But now here it was again on the work bench in his garage… He threw away t
he dirt-encrusted heavy plastic lawn and leaf bags that had protected them.
Inside each green canvas bag, there were eight 2.5-pound bricks of C-4, shaped like foot-long sticks of butter. Each brick of C-4 was contained in its own green canvas “sock,” and each brick was connected to the others with folded lengths of waxy yellow detonating cord. The satchel could be detonated as a single twenty-pound charge, or the eight bricks could be pulled out and strung around a large target, all of them connected into one “shot” by the det-cord which ran through them.
If it was needed for a technical application, the raw blocks of C-4 could be removed from their green socks and inner paper wrappings, and molded into any shape. The white C-4 which Ben examined on his workbench looked, felt and smelled exactly as if it had been issued yesterday, and not fifteen years ago.
Ben’s sunset tour before retirement had been at the Pentagon, and he was familiar with every section of Washington and the DC suburbs. As an intellectual exercise during long commutes, Ben had often theorized about where someone could place forty pounds of C-4 to leverage the greatest impact, looking at Washington from the point of view of a foreign saboteur. Years ago he had decided on that hypothetical target. He never imagined that he would ever actually be planning a one-man demolition raid to strike a symbolic blow at his own government, but here he was, with forty pounds of raw C-4 lying on his work bench in sixteen white bricks.
By Monday afternoon, Ben had constructed five linear shaped-charges designed for cutting through thick steel. Each of them was two feet long by three inches square, rigidly cased in thin sheet metal and wrapped in gray duct tape. Ben was an artisan and he took pride in his work. Under different circumstances, he would have proudly shown the prepared charges to a demo class in Special Forces Training.
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Enemies Foreign And Domestic Page 20