by Rawlin Cash
Then, pulling the hockey bag behind him, he walked down the corridor, through the lobby, and right past six firefighters coming the other way. He entered the Watergate’s central courtyard. The building swept around him on all sides and an escalator went down to a grocery store on the basement level. To the east was a covered passageway that led toward the embassy.
Hunter didn’t look up. He walked right for the passageway and stopped inside it. He could see drones buzzing outside. There was a line up of taxis on the street. Across the street, leafless trees lined the inside of the fence of the Saudi compound. The fence looked harmless, about twelve feet high with metal posts. It would be easy to get over but would trigger an alarm. The building was on high alert and full to the brim with armed guards. They didn’t worry Hunter, but he knew the sniper would take him out before he made it into the building. The drones would target him, the sniper, even if he didn’t have a line of sight, would fire. He’d be hit.
He didn’t have the specs for the Saudi sniper system. He had no idea how maneuverable the bullets were after they left the gun. The American systems under development had spoiler systems and micro gyros but they were nowhere close to deployment. The bullets that had been recovered at the assassination sites were being examined but as far as Hunter was aware, they hadn’t been able to make any conclusions as to their capabilities yet.
The maneuverability of the bullets was an unknown.
Hunter scanned the distance to the embassy and his mind went over the options. He could commandeer a vehicle and ram the gate. He could steal some firefighter overalls, there were trucks in the courtyard and some of the firefighters were wearing face masks. That would allow him to move in the street without fear of being targeted, but approaching the embassy would be difficult. He’d be vulnerable.
His preferred tactic would be to draw Jamal out into the open, or at least get him to take a shot to give away his position.
In a battle between two snipers, getting the other man to give away his position was the most basic tactic of all. If you couldn’t find him, you couldn’t kill him. It was that simple.
Hunter called Fawn.
“I’m outside the Saudi embassy,” he said.
“I’m watching now,” Fawn said.
“All these drones, are they ours?”
“No. They’re Saudi. They’ve been authorized by Meredith to fly in a five mile radius of the embassy.”
“Are they cleared to fire?”
“Yes they are. They get eyes on you, they’ll light you up.”
“What about collateral damage?”
“Stay away from crowds, Hunter. They’ll kill them all if you’re in there.”
“Jesus.”
“President’s orders.”
“So she’s in on all this?”
“It’s a long story. She says she’s being blackmailed.”
“So you’re with her?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s cooperating with us?”
“Yes.”
“Can we use that?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“I’d like to get Jamal into the open.”
“He’s not an idiot.”
“He’s a hitman but he’s no sniper. He doesn’t have the patience. He doesn’t have the training.”
“He’s killed two presidents.”
“He’s no sniper, Fawn. I’ve been watching him. He’s a gunman but he’s not a sniper.”
“So what would you like to do?”
“Do we trust Meredith?” he said.
Fawn hesitated before answering, “I don’t know.”
“Any way we could get these drones out of the air?”
Fawn’s voice sounded skeptical. “I could talk to her.”
“Why wouldn’t she do that?”
“She’s got a daughter. They’ve threatened her.”
“This is going to take too long,” Hunter said.
“I know.”
“Is there any way I can get into that embassy without walking across the street?”
“I’m looking at the schematics now.”
The drones were getting lower. Hunter knew they were peering at the faces of the people on the street through high resolution optics. He’d seen it in war zones. He never thought he’d see it in Washington. The people were oblivious. The drones were hundreds of feet up. Their high-powered lenses were focusing on faces, running the imagery through facial recognition algorithms. A match would instantly create a target for any weaponry capable of drone guidance. If one of those things got a glimpse of Hunter’s face, all Jamal had to do was point roughly in the right direction and pull the trigger.
“You could expose yourself,” Fawn said. “Draw him out.”
“Fuck that,” Hunter said. “Just get me those schematics.”
“They’re locked. I’m trying to get in but it’s taking time.”
Hunter sighed. He was on edge. He was tempted to start firing at the drones. He counted at least seven. He could try to take them out and then go for the embassy but it would take too long and the drones would fire back.
He was pinned down as effectively as any Taliban fighter he’d ever been up against. The weight of all that technology was coming down on him now.
“You could stand down,” Fawn said. “Come at him another time, from another angle.”
“I’m not crazy about that idea,” Hunter said.
“Now is no time to rush.”
“Fuck that. I’m not stepping down.”
“I thought snipers were super patient.”
“I’m patient if it means getting my target. I’m not going home.”
“Where are you right now?” she said.
Hunter trusted Fawn. They’d been through enough things together where she could have made a move against him if she’d wanted. But it wasn’t in his nature to ever truly trust anyone.
“Why?”
“There’s a Saudi medical center a few blocks away. I can’t get schematics for the embassy but I’m checking for that building.”
“You think they might be connected?”
“Who knows? Maybe there’s a tunnel. If there’s something that goes in the direction of the embassy, we could assume that’s where it’s headed.”
“I could get to the medical center,” Hunter said.
Fawn was quiet for a moment, then she said, “no dice.”
“No tunnel?” Hunter said.
“No schematics. They’ve all been removed from our files.”
“How is it possible that a foreign country owns buildings this close to the White House and the CIA can’t pull up the plans?”
“Anything’s possible with the money they have.”
“Fuckers,” Hunter said.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Hunter. Unless you can get Jamal to come out, there’s no way I can see you getting eyes on him. They’re not going to let anyone walk up to the gate now.”
“Fuck,” Hunter said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to stand down. We know Jamal and the Crown Prince are in that embassy. If you can’t get our own government to go in there and get them given the fact that they just killed our president, then that’s on you guys. I’m out.”
“What?”
“Uncle Sam could take out that embassy in a second.”
“Hunter, they’re not going to do it. Meredith won’t order it.”
“Get her daughter into protection, get some generals in the room, and go in and get Jamal out yourselves.”
He hung up.
Then he put his phone on the ground and crushed it under his foot.
Fifty-Two
Fawn looked at her phone. She tried calling Hunter back but the line was dead. She knew he’d probably destroyed the phone but she put in a trace request anyway.
Hale and Meredith were back in the Oval Office. Meredith was afraid that any more time in the kitchen would alert the Saudis. She was also a
fraid to take steps to bring her daughter into protective custody. A secret service detail had been assigned to her as normal protocol, but Meredith refused to do more. She knew the Saudis would strike if she tried anything, and Fawn knew it too. If the government couldn’t protect the president, how on earth were they going to protect one girl in Florida?
As far as Meredith Brooks was concerned, patriot or not, if she just did what the Saudis wanted for a few days, regardless of the extent to which it caused a crisis, she might get through this attack without losing her daughter. She’d already decided that was the only thing that mattered?
Strategically, Meredith was useless. She was scared, she would do anything to keep her daughter alive, the Saudis had chosen well. No doubt they had run personality analyses on every member of the line of succession before settling on her. She was the one who would do their bidding. A single mother. A dead father. A fraught relationship with her daughter. The guilt that came from that. She was the one they could control. She was the perfect candidate.
If Hale and Fawn were to get any kind of upper hand on the Saudis, they would have to use Meredith without her knowledge.
Fawn went back into the Oval Office.
Hale looked at her.
She shook her head.
“What is it?” Meredith said.
Fawn didn’t want to speak in the Oval Office knowing that the Saudis had bugged it, but she also suspected that anything they told Meredith would get back to the Saudis anyway.
“It’s a no go,” Fawn said.
Meredith nodded.
“We might as well leave,” Hale said.
Fawn was of the same opinion.
“Just don’t do anything rash,” Hale said. He was referring to the declaration of war with Iran, but from the look on Meredith’s face, Fawn knew she was thinking of her daughter.
Hale’s car was waiting for them but Hale was afraid it was bugged too.
“Let’s walk,” he said to Fawn.
They left through the visitor’s gate and instinctively walked in the direction of the Saudi embassy. It was less than a mile away. They stopped at the first restaurant they encountered and grabbed a table.
“She’s done,” Hale said. “She’s going to do whatever they want. Anything anyone says to her will get back to the Saudis in minutes.”
“I know.”
“So what we need to do is feed her a story that we want the Saudis to believe.”
Fawn sighed. “We need to get rid of her,” she said.
“And we will, but only after we get through the immediate threat.”
“I never thought it would come to this,” Fawn said. “I never thought anyone would get this much control over us.”
“They only control her for as long as we let them. I’ll get a meeting with the joint chiefs. We have protocols for a situation like this.”
“A situation where the president is compromised?”
“Of course. It’s called a quarantine. If any part of our leadership is compromised, we can quarantine it, filter the information we share with it, and look at the orders issued as if they’re being transmitted by an enemy.”
“I didn’t know we had mechanisms like that.”
“Of course we do. We have a plan for everything. The problem is whether or not they’ll work.”
“Right.”
“Just because we know she’s a Saudi puppet doesn’t mean we can instantly neutralize her. The safeguards work well in most instances, but the quarantine orders come from the top. If the president’s the one compromised, there’s no mechanism for releasing them.”
“None?”
“Well, nothing fool proof.”
“What’s going to happen if she orders a war with Iran?”
“Right now, any order she makes will be obeyed. There’s a list of people I’d need to get on board to quarantine her, and if any of them have also been compromised, or if any of them don’t believe she’s been compromised, we’re going to be at risk of splitting the government.”
“That can’t happen.”
“Well, if it does happen, we’re the ones who’ll end up on the wrong side. Almost every safeguard we have has a presumption in favor of the president. And that’s what she is, like it or not.”
Fawn sighed. A waitress came over to them and they both ordered coffee.
“So, what happened with Hunter?” Hale said.
Fawn still wasn’t sure. “I don’t know,” she said.
“What did he tell you?”
“That he was standing down.”
“That doesn’t sound like something he’d do.”
“No it doesn’t,” she said.
Fifty-Three
Hunter waited until nightfall, staying out of sight of firefighters and local law enforcement, and then crossed F street to the Kennedy Center. The drones were still hovering over the area but they were less effective at night and there seemed to be fewer of them. They must have been rotating them out of service for charging and refueling. He counted three in the air and crossed quickly, joining a crowd that had gathered outside the northern entrance for the night’s show.
To get to the roof, Hunter had to go to the east facing side of the building and break the lock of a steel service door. The door was alarmed but he didn’t have time to disable it. He let it trip and then broke the lock on the next door he encountered inside, sending security in that direction.
He was in a service stairwell and he kept going up until he reached the top. The door at the top was locked but it was only connected to the fire alarm system which didn’t have the same safeguards as the security lines.
The light above him used an old, incandescent bulb and he opened the case and unscrewed the bulb. He crushed the glass and took out the filament. Using the metal of the filament, he shorted the fire system sensor on the door. Then he opened the door normally using the push bar. The alarm didn’t fire.
He went through the door and climbed a final flight of stairs. There was a steel gate at the top and he attached the silencer to his handgun and used it to break the lock.
The roof of the Kennedy center was a flat, open, concrete slab. It offered a perfect vista over the embassy but almost no cover from drones.
The roof was exactly one hundred feet above street level. It was 630 feet long and 300 feet wide. The flat surface was interrupted only by a few venting outlets and two recessed entrances to service stairwells. Hunter was in one of these. He climbed the remaining steps and surveyed the sky above the building. A drone hovered over his previous position on the Watergate a hundred yards to the north. Another was across New Hampshire Avenue above the embassy. He couldn’t spot the third. It could have gone in for refueling, it could be at a higher altitude surveying a wider area, or it could be lurking somewhere close by.
He decided to risk it and crawled on his stomach to the closest air duct. It was large, extending three feet out of the roof with a curve on the end that emitted steam. He set himself up, lying down under the duct’s overhang. He had a good view of the Watergate and the Embassy. He could see the entire roof of the embassy as well as the south facing walls. The helipad that Jamal and the Crown Prince had used in the southeast corner of the compound was in full view.
Hunter set up his rifle on a bipod and covered it and his entire body with the black coat he was wearing. He had to ball up his body to get under it. From the sky, under the coat, and with the steam from the air duct, he would be completely invisible to normal spectrum and infrared cameras.
He put his eye to the scope and watched the embassy.
For six hours he remained motionless, his eye to the scope, moving only to scan the exits.
When dawn came he noticed an increase in the number of drones. All twelve were out over the embassy and he took it as a sign something would happen soon.
After another few minutes they began spreading out over the area. Two drones came over the Kennedy Center and patrolled along the east and west edge of the roof, scarcel
y a hundred feet from his position. He held his breath and waited. They moved very slowly and stopped at the northern corners of the building. If he moved a muscle, they’d detect him and a bullet would follow. Three more were hovering over the Watergate and six were stationary around the perimeter of the embassy.
They were silent sentinels and they were watching for him.
Something was definitely going to happen soon. The SB-1 Defiant was still on the pad it had landed on the day before when it brought in the ambassador and the Crown Prince. A flight crew of four men made their way from a side door of the embassy toward it. Three had their faces showing but the fourth was wearing a hat and a pair of aviator sunglasses. It was early in the morning, the light was low, and Hunter thought it might be Jamal or the Crown prince in disguise.
Closer inspection made that unlikely. The man was too short to be the Crown Prince and too slight to be Jamal Al-Wahad. He was just a pilot in sunglasses.
The pilots powered up the chopper and began warming the engines. The drones remained in position, hovering motionless, watching for movement.
The streets were beginning to come to life but carried only a fraction of the traffic they would later in the day. It was a good time to leave the embassy. Light enough to spot a sniper. Quiet enough to control the area.
Hunter knew there was also a chance this was a ruse to get him to reveal himself.
He began opening and closing his fists, pumping blood back into his numb fingers. The night had been very cold. Remaining motionless for that amount of time was a torture of its own. He was stiff and sore and cold. Moving now would be a challenge, but if he took a shot, he’d have to move immediately. As well as the sniper system, the drones carried ordnance of their own and were cleared to fire.
There was movement on the ground.
Four security guards came out through the main door and stood in a huddle. They were sharing a lighter, lighting cigarettes, and weren’t on particularly high alert. They didn’t seem to believe a sniper was still out there. They wouldn’t come out like that if they did.
One of the guards was holding a paper coffee cup and when he finished drinking it, the others used it as an ashtray.