“Everything you say could be true.”
“And everything I say could be untrue. Pray, brother, even if you don’t believe. That is all that remains. You are in the hands of God.”
“You are said to be a practical man. Perhaps the practical thing to do would be for you to jump out and head cross-country on foot. We can pick a rendezvous site, and if I clear the roadblock, I will head there and pick you up.”
“Outside is the one place I am not going. I have no idea where we are. I hardly speak the language. I am being hunted by all men and women with badges. No, it’s much better to wait this ordeal out, and if indeed we get to a police blockade, to bluff our way through on the strength of our excellent credentials, all of which are professional. You have a glib tongue in Arabic and Spanish, I’m guessing that you speak English as well.”
“I do.”
“Then our weapon will be your charm.”
“Right now, I feel as charming as a goat.”
“You will astonish yourself as you rise to the occasion. I know. I have been hunted as many times as I have hunted, and under the duress of being the prey, one is capable of amazing feats.”
They reached the crest of another hill. As before, what lay ahead was a long, slow transit by a barely moving convoy through the rain and the dark, across a valley, and up another hill, beyond which, no doubt, lay exactly the same.
Alberto saw it first.
“God be praised. Or cursed! Look, do you not see it?”
Juba squinted, trying to focus through the smeared light.
It was a blinking light at the top of the hill.
“Roadblock,” said Alberto.
* * *
• • •
It seemed to take hours, when, in actuality, it took hours. Finally, they edged up to the crest and could see the light just over it, casting an intermittent blaze against the low clouds, illuminating the slanting rain and the engine vapors and the tire spray.
“All right,” said Alberto, “should I drive? Should we switch?”
“No, this is fine. If it goes bad, and we have to make some kind of escape attempt by auto—we’ll almost certainly die, of course—but if that happens, we have a slightly better chance with me driving than you. I have taken many advanced courses in tactical operations, and high-speed driving is part of them. My skill might let us escape, where yours definitely would not.”
“Fair enough,” said Alberto. “I can hardly see in this rain anyway.”
And now it was here. They reached the crest, and, over it, just a few dozen yards, the commanding sign, even if its message was blurred in the cascade of water. Beyond, on the downslope, they could see the traffic speed up and separate.
Juba began to calculate the strategy he would take if escape became necessary. This old car, with its worn tires and problematic acceleration, trying to outrun speedy American police cruisers! The only chance would be to veer across the median, head in the other direction, look for a soft spot where he could get off this highway, and perhaps onto a smaller country road, and, if far enough ahead, abandon this car and head cross-country. But he didn’t like the chances at all.
“O Jesus, please show mercy,” prayed Alberto.
“You are not even of the faith!” exclaimed Juba.
“I never said I was. My father was Catholic, my mother Egyptian. I studied for the priesthood!”
“God laughs at me,” Juba said. “He sends me to death with an infidel.”
“I am, at this point in my spiritual life, quite flexible. If you want me to pray to Allah, I will happily do so. O Allah, I beseech Thee—”
“Shut up.”
With a lurch, the 18-wheeler ahead pulled free and began to speed up, and Juba knew police would be on him with their flashlights in seconds.
But there were no policemen.
There was nothing except the sign, by the side of the road, blinking furiously as it beamed its message to the traffic it had slowed to a jam in the rain and dark.
“What does it say?” asked Juba.
“It says ‘Welcome to Wyoming, Speed Limit 75.’”
56
The ranch
Aftermath
Almost instantly, four FBI SWAT members emerged to take over the scene. They had been dispatched by Nick to follow the tracks of the bloody cowboy boots through the tunnel. Emerging, they caught his footprints to the north before they melted in the rain, followed, and there came upon Mrs. McDowell and Swagger.
At almost the same time, the long-anticipated secondary convoy, with its med technicians, forensics teams, interrogators, dogs, and locals, showed up—a long, well-lit convoy pouring in from 193, and its commander stopped to be debriefed about where the shooting had taken place. And finally the rains really let go, falling in slanting, pelting anger, turning dirt to mud, and warm to cold, and set the breeze to howling. Time to get under cover.
So it was not for a few hours before Nick and Bob—somewhat recovered from the verge of death by a carotid puncture at the hands of a man who thought he was a snake—settled in with Mrs. McDowell, herself soaked, but somewhat warmed by coffee from the kitchen that one of the cooks had started running. Why not? Nobody was working for Señor Menendez anymore. Nick ran the meet, Chandler took notes for the after action report.
The story Mrs. McDowell told: her ex-husband’s sister was married to a colonel in the Maryland State Police, and one of his responsibilities was to oversee liaison with FBI, with whom he was on very good terms. When all the news about the killing and gunfight in Wichita broke, not only had she concluded Juba was the triggerman, she’d caught a glimpse of an agent she knew from the coverage on CNN.
“Agent Chandler. She’s so beautiful, the CNN cameras had to show her.”
So she knew that Juba was in play, and she asked her ex-husband’s sister to ask her husband for any news or info. He responded by saying that all the feds were agitated because an urgent directive had come out requesting certain SWAT teams to report to Salt Lake City for possible deployment in a big raid. Baltimore’s field office was all ticked off because they hadn’t made the list, though they regularly came in first or second in the FBI SWAT Olympics held every year.
Figuring that action was coming up, Mrs. McDowell had flown to Salt Lake City, where, at a Radio Shack, she had bought a police scanner, with which she quickly found the FBI Clear Channel and was able to follow the assembly of a major raid task force in Jackson Hole. She also had her Glock.
“It’s completely legal,” she said. “I’ve owned it for five years, and I have one of those crazy Utah licenses that let me carry in thirty-three states. I can’t carry in Maryland, but I can carry in Florida, Texas, Wyoming, and a batch of others. I declared it and flew out with it. I drove out to Jackson Hole, monitored the FBI channel, could tell you were setting up to jump, and just followed the raid in. I parked on 193 and walked down the access road. I see this fight, I run to it, and this snake monster is on top of someone—I couldn’t tell it was Bob Lee Swagger—but it didn’t matter. I could see his blade gleaming in the light, and I sort of assumed if he had a snake face and was about to stick a knife in somebody’s throat, he was probably a bad guy.”
“So?”
“So? So I shot him in the face.”
“Twice,” said Swagger. “The first got his attention, but the second made sure he was listening.”
“I’ve got guys lined up in the rain to see this guy,” said Nick. “He was a piece of freak pie.”
“Janet, by the way,” said Swagger, “thanks for saving the bacon. Between you and Chandler, you’re going to keep me alive until the next century.”
Chandler said, “You want backstory on the Snake?”
“Sure,” said Nick. “I haven’t had a laugh all day.”
“We ran the prints, and I got some preliminary info from DEA out of the
Mexican State Police. Called La Culebra, Spanish for ‘the Snake,’ he was born in Mexico City as Antonio Jorge López and was known from the age of fourteen as a knife fighter. Very colorful teenage years. Worked freelance; his specialty was cutting out the hearts of snitches. He was so good, he signed on permanently with the late Raúl Menendez. He started this reptile bit a few years ago, since he was no longer on the road. Obviously crazy, but useful in cartel culture: when Menendez met with other cartel big guys, he liked to have the Snake standing close by, in his mask, which is a play on lucha libre, a form of Mexican professional wrestling where everybody’s masked. Anyhow, DEA suggests that there may be some sexual dysfunction as well, since a number of prostitutes have disappeared everywhere La Culebra puts up for a bit.”
“Janet, you couldn’t have picked a better candidate for your first kill,” said Nick.
“I had hoped to find you guys drinking beer over Juba’s corpse,” Mrs. McDowell said.
“And we’d hoped for the same,” said Nick. “But the bastard seems to have given us the slip once again.”
“Are you going to tell me what this is all about?” she asked.
“Nope. I am legally enjoined from doing so. You have no security clearance.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“It isn’t. But I have to play very much by the rules, for now. I can’t say a word, except to officially express the Bureau’s appreciation for saving one of its delinquents. And promise a nice letter for your Glory Wall.”
“I don’t have a Glory Wall.”
“It’s your letter, do with it what you want. Now, I’m going to have you give a deposition to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department, have them buy you a big, hearty Wyoming breakfast, and put you on a plane back to Baltimore. When it’s over, maybe Swagger can brief you unofficially. He owes you that much.”
“I can guess most of it already. Juba’s here to take a really long shot. We all know who it’s got to be.”
“See, that’s what I can’t have,” said Nick. “If we assume we know, we fall into the trap of confirmation bias, where we only see what supports our interpretation because we want to be right. I purposely haven’t addressed the target issue yet, and I’m not ready to without hard evidence. Speculation is counterproductive. That’s the real reason I’m chasing you out, Janet. I don’t want you tearing down the weeks of professional discipline these guys have shown. That may be their best attribute: the ability to keep an open mind.”
“Janet,” said Chandler, “Nick’s right. We can’t go in all oriented to something. This is too important. That’s also why nobody on this team is political. We’re professional, we’re trying to solve a problem, that’s all it is.”
* * *
• • •
Like a guest star brought in for a flashy scene or two, she was indeed gone the next day, driven off by two junior agents to Salt Lake City and put on a late flight back to Baltimore. It really was the right decision, cruel as it may have seemed, because much had to be done and there wasn’t time to bring anybody new up to speed.
The various teams went to work. Nick spent a long, awkward time on the phone with the Director and an assistant attorney general, but somehow managed to survive. And, gradually, some sort of intelligence picture emerged.
Meanwhile, Swagger accompanied a crew of agents to the meadow where the drone pix showed that the shooting range was located. Fresh from the rain, it looked like Paradise Found—a sunny roll of lush land sparkling with droplets that had collected on the grass—a pure mile of open space. Above, of course, azure sky, clouds like melting vanilla, piercing late-summer sun, and, rimming all this glory, the Grand Tetons.
“He chained ’em here,” Swagger said, pointing to the four-by-four-inch post sunk in a wad of concrete and impervious to human influence, immobile even when subjected to the desperate energy of approaching death. The post bore grisly signs of struggle. It was smeared with the dark ochre of dried blood, and a few frags had blasted through the bound bodies and ripped shreds from its surface. One high miss left a perfect pucker drilled into the wood, at the bottom of which lay the expended and battered .338 bullet. Forensics would recover and analyze it.
“Mr. Swagger, we’ll also look for latent prints on this post. We’ll run chemical tests on the ground for blood, and if we find it, we can extract DNA.”
“That’s great,” he said. “You got corpse-sniffing dogs?”
“No, sir, but we have methane probes that are very efficient at locating buried cadavers, if we can just find some recently disturbed earth.”
“One more thing,” he said. He took out his iPhone and quickly prompted an app called My Altitude. Preset to southeast Wyoming’s general elevation as a baseline, it quickly placed this spot at 1,505 feet above sea level. He wanted to save that for future use.
“Now, the shooting platform?” he said. “This bird is so careful, and so committed to preparation, that he’ll have the distance down perfect.”
“Yes, sir.”
It took an hour.
“Got it!” someone cried, as all had moved a mile to the east and began to pick their way carefully through a scattering of elms and oaks, before it gave way to denser pines.
The men congregated at the site of the announcement, and indeed there it was, maybe seven feet up, a stout platform, well-braced and well-built, hammered into the vee of a giant tree. Branches had been clipped to allow for clear lines of fire to the faraway target, and a few wooden slats had been nailed into the trunk as steps to get up and down.
“Do I mess things up if I go up there?” Swagger asked.
“I don’t see how. There’s probably no prints on the bark, as it doesn’t take to prints. DNA? Maybe, but I’m guessing it’s more important to get the distance data than prove that a guy we know was here was here.”
Swagger was gloved and masked, and with a little help, managed to haul his old frame up to the platform. There, he saw what he couldn’t from below: a shooting bench, solid, built at the edge of the platform to provide stability for the rifle as the shooter oriented toward the target. That told Swagger that wherever Juba would be shooting from, he’d be sure he was solidly anchored.
From this position, Swagger looked out across the meadow. He had never made a shot at anywhere near that distance, only an eight hundred and fifty in Vietnam with his .308—so long ago, it was impossible to recall details.
But a mile was different country. It was way the fuck out there, practically on a different planet, with winds that played on the bullet’s flight, humidity that thickened or thinned the air, a trajectory like a rainbow’s arc but without the colors, and time in flight of more than five seconds. Its execution demanded the rifle be placed as if embedded in rock, while, at the same time, administered with so delicate a touch that a heartbeat, a tremor, a microscopic twitch in the trigger push, or a moment of doubt or broken concentration, and the whole thing was off. Even with a 25× Schmidt & Bender, the finest optical system in the world, the human figure was but a dot. For its part, the post was impossible for him to pick out, even if the image was clear. It was just too small, too blended into the jagged background of trees. Through his binoculars, he saw nothing.
First move: the iPhone with the Altitude app. That drill revealed an altitude of 1,572, a difference of sixty-seven feet. He noted that figure as well.
“Okay, hand the thing up.”
The thing was a Tecna LH40 military-grade range finder, borrowed from the FBI sniper school and good out to twenty thousand yards. Oddly enough, it didn’t have the Star Wars look, with dials and buttons and all kinds of sci-fi stylistics. Instead, it resembled a slide projector from the ’60s, with which the family’s trip to Disneyland was documented for the neighbors. It took Swagger a bit of fiddling to get it set up on its tripod on the bench, then some more fiddling to get it on the target and focused, but finally he was ready.
Nothing.
“Can you get a guy to stand by the post. I can’t see it to take the reading,” he called.
He heard the team commander on the radio, and in a few seconds somebody—presumably, one of the men of the cadaver team that was looking in the area near the post for buried bodies—walked out and stood by the post. Swagger put his eye to the device, put the red dot on the tiny figure, and pushed the button to shoot a laser beam that far. The device would measure how quickly it bounced back and, in that way, solve the distance algorithm. He did it five times. The distance consistently turned out to be 1,847.5 yards.
He wrote the figure on the back of his hand in ballpoint under the altitude recordings, as insurance against a seventy-two-year-old memory.
“You get it?”
“Yeah, a little over a mile. Hell of a long way.”
It also might do, he figured, to find out from the household help what times of day the shooting took place, as those could be run against average wind speed, so he would also shoot when the speed of the wind was closest to the speed of the shot he’d come all this way to make. The position of the sun was another issue; he’d shoot when it most precisely matched the position it would be on the day of the shot.
So: he had direction, distance, the difference between the shooting site’s elevation and that of the target, the presence of water between himself and target, the wind speed, the position of the sun. All of these factors Neill could magically enter into a computer program and test for real-world matches, particularly at places, as yet to be determined, where likely targets would likely be. In that way, perhaps they’d unlock the secret and could deploy in time to prevent.
Anything else?
He racked his brain, came up with nothing. But of course Mr. Gold had yet to run his fine mind over the data. The Israeli was back in Washington, not being a necessary raid component.
Game of Snipers Page 31