NO SAFE PLACE

by Steven M. Roth

  Anthony happily fell asleep that night as he anticipated wearing his birthday-sweater to school the next day.

  The next morning Anthony held his shoulders back and kept his head and eyes up as he strutted between classes. It was all he could do to keep from laughing. He moved briskly along the middle of the corridor, not warily shuffling along as he usually did, not hugging the row of lockers lining one wall, as on other days.

  As the morning slipped away and headed toward afternoon recess, he was aware that his schoolmates had noticed his sweater and that they sensed his recently-acquired pleasure and pride. He knew this because today, unlike all other days, his classmates did not ignore him, did not treat him as if he were invisible.

  He could hardly wait to get home after school and tell his parents.

  Several boys had smiled at him, he would say to his mother and father, or at least they had giggled when he walked by and caught them looking at him. At lunch in the cafeteria, he would report, two boys seemed to so enjoy his new-found pleasure that they laughed hard when they looked over at him and then back at each other. He would tell his parents that he even nodded at some boys today, acknowledging their attention, proud to finally be recognized and approved of by his classmates.

  His father would drape his arm around his shoulder and say, “Good boy, Anthony. I’m proud of you.”

  His mother would softly cry.

  Then Anthony finished daydreaming and went to recess.

  In spite of his special treatment today, Anthony instinctively reverted to his usual practice during recess and warily lurked alone in the broad shadow of the school near the perimeter hurricane fence. He could not bring himself to take a chance on being turned away if he tried to join the games. Not today. Not when he finally had his classmates’ newly-offered approval. He would not risk destroying today’s magic.

  “Do you believe that fool, Vista,” one boy, who passed nearby Anthony, said to another to another boy. “Did you see him prancing around and wearing that crappy sweater Kenny’s mother gave to Goodwill instead of throwing it away? What a dork.”

  Anthony fell back against the fence. Tears stung his eyes.

  He yanked the sweater up over his head, not caring now if he stretched or snagged it. He crumbled the sweater into a ball and threw it to the ground at his feet, then kicked the balled-up sweater against the fence.

  Anthony walked away from recess, away from school, and left his birthday sweater on the playground, over by the fence, the sweater now abandoned by him.

  Two days later, very late in the night, after his parents were asleep, Anthony returned to the playground and retrieved the sweater. He carefully stuffed it under his shirt, close to his chest. When he arrived home, he hid the sweater in his closet.

  He never told his parents why he’d stopped wearing his birthday sweater. When they asked, he said, “No reason. I just did,” and let it go at that.

  For now.

  CHAPTER 10

  Fort Lauderdale

  March 5

  Pete belted himself into the front seat of the car. “Listen, Dad, you have to believe me. What I do when I hack doesn’t hurt anybody. It really doesn’t. There’s even a name for it. Ethical hacking. You break into networks, find security holes, then point the flaws out to the system administrators so they can plug them before the bad guys find them and get in. Everybody does it.”

  “Everybody? Have you ever pointed out a security flaw to an administrator?”

  “Not yet, I’m not that advanced, but I will be someday. Technically, I’m not yet a white hat hacker because I haven’t been a black hat hacker. I’m just lurking in the networks. There’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing.”

  “Yes there is, Pete. Just doing it is wrong. Legally and morally. And now that I know you’re doing it, I’ll worry you’ll get caught. You could spend years in federal prison.”

  Trace paused a beat to decide how hard he wanted to come down on Pete this first time around on this subject. He decided to be blunt, but not rough. “I want you to stop hacking, right away, not sometime later. Stop today. Promise me.”

  “I won’t get caught, Dad. I’m careful. Don’t worry.”

  “If you keep it up you will be caught. It’s just a matter of when, Pete, not if. Besides, you’re knowingly breaking the law. That’s not the way your mother and I’ve raised you. He paused, waiting for a reaction from Pete that didn’t come.

  “I wasn’t making a suggestion about stopping or giving you an option. I expect you to stop.”

  “Come on, Dad, will you? Just lighten up.”

  Lighten up? I hate that expression, Trace thought. “No, Pete, I won’t lighten up. Not about this. This isn’t a game. I expect you to stop hacking, and I want you to promise me you will.”

  Pete scowled. “You don’t understand hacking at all, Dad. It’s not what you think.”

  Trace swallowed his laughter and suppressed his smile. “I understand it better than you know.”

  Pete glared at Trace. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means when I transferred from the SEALs to the regular Navy, the Service sent me back to college for one year to obtain a master’s degree. I took mine in computer science.”

  “I already know that.”

  “What you don’t know is that my job, when I returned to active duty after I finished the year in school, was to hack in to computer networks operated by our country’s enemies.”

  “You’re serious?” Pete said.

  “I’m serious. I hacked for the Navy.”

  “I’m impressed, Dad.”

  “Don’t be. It was my job in the military. I was doing it to protect our country. I was sanctioned to hack by the government. Doing it that way was not a crime.”

  “Do you still remember how to do it?”

  “Frankly, Pete, I doubt there’s anything you can do with a computer I haven’t already done,” Trace said. “All I’d need now to hack would be to come up to date on current tools to use. The concepts would be the same now as then.”

  Pete shook his head, stared at Trace, but said nothing. He seemed to shrink into the corner between his seat and the car’s door. He narrowed his eyes.

  “So now that we know you’re being hypocritical in making me stop hacking, can we change the subject?” Pete said.

  “We can for now,” Trace said, “but that won’t change anything we just talked about. And I’m not being hypocritical. I explained why I hacked. That situation was different from what you’re doing.” Trace paused, then added, “As I said, I expect you to stop hacking and not to do it again. Understand?.”

  “In that case I want to say something else about it,” Pete said.

  Trace nodded. “Go on.” He slowed the car’s speed.

  “First off,” Pete said, “I won’t get caught so you can stop worrying about me. Second, I don’t do it very often. And when I do, I use an anonymous proxy server to disguise my ID. I assume you know what that is. They probably even had those years ago when you were hacking in the Navy. My hacks can’t be traced back to me.”

  Trace briefly glanced over at Pete and shook his head. I probably should cut this off now so I can concentrate on driving, he thought.

  “That’s not the point. Pete. Or, rather, it’s only one of the points. I’ll say it again. It’s wrong to hack. Period. It’s against the law, and the penalties are severe when you’re caught. Not only that, hacking also is an invasion of privacy.”

  Trace paused again, then said, “This is the last time I’ll say this. I expect you to stop. Today. As of right now. This isn’t up for debate.”

  “Come on, Dad. That’s just the tech lawyer in you talking. Just you being Mr. Lawyer. Always so law-abiding and proper. I won’t be caught. Believe me.”

  “Pete . . . .”

  “Oh, all right. You made your point.” Pete rolled his eyes and looked over at his father. Then he turned back to the door and stared out the window.

  “We’ll tal
k about this again later,” Trace said. “We’re not done with this.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Odessa, Soviet Union

  1982

  Notwithstanding Viktor Rutkowska’s freshly acquired positive attitude and his formidable desire to succeed at his new posting, sniper school proved to be so unremittingly demanding and so psychologically isolating that the program would have broken him had he not loved the coupling of skilled shooting with the sniper’s survival skills he learned in his training.

  The first thing the instruction addressed, even before the trainees received their weapons’ instruction, was the shooters’ attitudes. They were taught, in sundry ways, not to think of the past and not to think of the future. For a shooter, the instructors drilled into them, there was only the present.

  As the shooters’ classes proceeded, Viktor quickly became infatuated with the variety of weapons he learned to use, with the endurance skills he acquired, with the competition among himself and his fellow trainees, and with the virtual competition fostered among the trainees and their simulated enemy targets.

  Sniper training was rigorous, dangerous, and unforgiving. Mistakes were not merely embarrassing, they often were cause for dismissal from the program, with only occasional second acts allowed. If you survived your mistake, if you were permitted a second chance and did not take a bullet during one of the live shooting exercises you were forced to engage in as punishment, you then might barely make it through the dressing-down you would receive from your instructors. There was no room in the shooter business for errors.

  Sniper school was not just about hiding in a tree and locating and taking out a target. It also taught the trainees to move as a group and to confront the enemy as a single unit, with the stealth of a lone sniper, and with the highly choreographed skills of a trained shooter performing as part of a precision, lethal team. This was why the instructors, unlike the trainees, never referred to the recruits as snipers. That designation was too limiting, reflecting merely one of the functions each of the team members would be called upon from time-to-time to perform. Instead, the instructors referred to their trainees as shooters, as a precision team of assassins, the members of which occasionally would fulfill the role of snipers.

  As shooters, Viktor and his group first were taught to approach an enemy as a single, cohesive unit, with every member of the team acting as one living organism. They would approach the enemy calmly, moving in one direction, three men covering, the others running, then switch roles. They practiced this maneuver until it was second nature, drilling in mock engagements that were brief, but highly risky.

  Viktor and his comrades were taught to live and think as if they always were in a war zone, to never permit their guard to lapse, to sense their environment just as four-legged predators stalking their prey might sense it, and to be wary of and responsive to every sound reaching their ears. In time, those who survived the training would be able to determine the type of weapon an adversary had used, and, in some cases, determine the adversary’s location just by hearing the sound of his weapon firing or the sound of the fired round passing by when it missed its target.

  The Spetsnaz instructors constantly reminded the trainees that they were special, were the elite, were the most dangerous men in the entire Soviet military apparatus because they were expert marksman who were able to act, move, stalk, and hide with supreme patience. They were the consummate assassins, having received elite Spetsnaz training, having resources others in the military could only dream of if they were even capable of imagining such treasures.

  “You will be,” the instructors had said, “the most deadly and elite killers in the world, members of that small, honored fraternity who wear the small Spetsnaz tattoo under their arms, the tattoo showing your blood type in Cyrillic.”

  Once the instructors had weeded out those recruits who did not have the required attitude (since everyone who entered the program had the necessary natural, if yet unformed, shooting skills) and were satisfied that the remaining trainees had achieved the necessary robotic state of mind, the training turned to advanced weaponry.

  A shooter’s weapons were his lifeblood. Before going on a training mission, Viktor and his comrades would check their weapons, prepare their backpacks, adjust their body armor, and load their firearms, with each man carrying six long magazines, four or five hand grenades, and an automatic pistol.

  A Spetsnaz shooter never carried his pistol in his belt, as often was the practice among others in the Soviet military. Instead, a Spetsnaz shooter would put his pistol in a holster which he securely taped to his thigh so he would be free to move around without making noise. Before a mission it was the practice for each man to jump up and down in place to see if anything, including his pistol and ammunition, made any sound that might give his presence and location away.

  When the men stalked an enemy as a team, each man carried a Kalashnikov assault rifle as his primary weapon. But when they went off on missions as snipers, with only a single spotter to accompany them, each man carried, instead, a classic, precision Dragunov rifle with its long barrel modified to suppress both sound and muzzle flash.

  Each sniper used modified ammunition that contained less gunpowder than was typical for the Army’s issued rounds. This assured that the bullets would travel at less than the speed of sound and, in the unlikely event the sniper missed his shot, assured that he would not, by reason of the sound of his bullet, alert the missed target that he had become the sniper’s prey and also would not disclose the sniper’s location.

  The weapons were modified, too, to be as silent as possible when the shooter moved. All the metal on the sling was removed and replaced with leather strips. The grip and stock were wrapped in black electrical tape.

  After his Spetsnaz training, Viktor survived Afghanistan. He left that posting in 1989, two months before the end of Russia’s invasion, with eighty-seven confirmed kills as a sniper and untold hundreds of kills as a shooter working with his team. Viktor had out-performed the life expectancy of a sniper in Afghanistan by more than seven years. After a short respite in which he returned to Mother Russia to teach as an instructor of Spetsnaz shooters, Viktor was transferred to Chechnya to engage in the first Russian/Chechen War.

  CHAPTER 12

  Steubenville, Ohio

  1981

  In the weeks after the incident with his birthday sweater, Anthony nurtured his anger and encouraged it to grow by reminding himself of past slights. Late at night, as he lay awake in bed, Anthony drew upon his vast storehouse of accumulated grievances he held against his schoolmates, and dwelled on those he considered the most egregious. Eventually, he focused his ire on Kenny and Kenny’s mother, and contemplated punishments for them.

  Anthony believed, as an act of elemental faith, that Kenny had deliberately humiliated him in front of their classmates by disclosing the Goodwill store source of his sweater. He believed, too, that Kenny’s mother was complicit in his disappointment and humiliation since she set these events in motion by donating the sweater to Goodwill.

  He would teach them to mess with him.

  One evening, five weeks after his eleventh birthday, Anthony slipped away from home at approximately 3:15 a.m. He was wearing his birthday sweater.

  He walked to Kenny’s house, keeping close to the houses along the way to avoid being seen by anyone, even at this dead-of-night hour.

  He walked quickly. His heart raced with anticipation as he neared Kenny’s house.

  As he walked, Anthony patted his pocket and felt the clump made by the two pieces of clothesline he’d cut into ten-inch lengths. He put his hand into his other pocket and gripped the black, laminate Cub Scout penknife his mother had purchased for him at a yard sale when he was eight years old, his mother hoping by this second-hand purchase to lessen Anthony’s disappointment because she could not afford to buy him a Cub Scout uniform or to pay the monthly dues required for him to be a scout. Anthony had not been assuaged, but he did love his penknife anywa
y, even all these years later.

  He arrived at the house next door to Kenny’s and looked up and down the street. The houses all were dark, the street empty.

  He crouched-jogged over to Kenny’s front porch, opened the storm door about ten inches, and waited. No lights flashed on to interrupt his mission.

  He tied one end of the rope around the inner handle of the storm door and pulled the knot as tight as he could make it. Then he slipped the untied end of the rope through the handle of the inner front door. He pulled the rope taut, again snaked it through the storm door’s inner handle, and tied this loose end into a knot around the first knot. He squeezed his hand out from between the tethered doors.

  He tested his handiwork.

  Anthony tried to open the storm door, but could not pull it out more than a few inches. It held firmly in place, secured by the rope and the closed, tethered inner front door. He knew that Kenny, or someone in Kenny’s family, would experience the flip side of this barrier when they hurriedly tried to open the front door from inside the house.

  He walked around to the back of the house and repeated this process with the back door and its outer storm door. He assumed there also was an exit door from the house into the attached garage, but decided he’d leave that alone. He had no desire to be arrested for breaking and entering into the garage if he was caught. Besides, with only one more step to perform in this initial family-revenge scenario, Anthony knew Kenny and his family would experience frustration, anger, and, hopefully, fear long before they eventually thought to use the garage exit.