“They’ve got these nice rockers out here,” he said, pointing out a row of rocking chairs.
He entered the home as an enlisted aide opened the door and ushered him into the general’s anteroom. General Frank Bishop was a two-star general and had the privilege of leading the troops at one of the country’s largest training bases. As Bronson was studying the assortment of plaques and awards displayed on the wall, a disheveled teenage boy walked through, hands stuffed in his jeans pockets, hair covering his eyes, black long-sleeved T-shirt hiding a skinny frame.
“Hey, dude. You a cop?” the kid asked.
“Something like that,” Bronson replied. “What’s your name?”
“Why you asking?”
The kid stood there as if he owned the place. Perhaps he did. This was probably the general’s son.
“Brice?” Bronson guessed.
“Dude. Stay out of my shit, okay?”
So it was him. The kid looked like a burnout, nothing he would expect a general’s son or daughter to appear to be. General Bishop walked in and sat down in a large leather chair.
“Brice, what are you doing here?” the general asked his son. There was no loving tone in the question. It was nearly a rebuke. Restraint, coupled with anger.
“Nothing, man.” And the kid was gone, like a phantom. He disappeared through the doors and into the bowels of the historical home. In his wake was a mile of emotional distance between father and son that anyone could plainly see.
“Kids today. So stuck in their phones and Snapchat it’s hard to get them outside to play sports.”
General Bishop didn’t appear to be the athletic sort, but perhaps he was into golf. Bronson said nothing.
“Please,” Bishop said, waving his hand at a less prominent chair opposite him. Bronson sat and looked at the general.
“You’re saying a Ranger did this or a Ranger’s rifle did this?” General Bishop asked. Bronson had done his homework. Bishop had served four tours in Iraq, mostly as a mechanized infantryman. The bulk of his career was spent rotating between Germany, Fort Hood, Texas, and the Republic of Korea. He had a wife and two sons, one in college now, at Georgia Tech, in Atlanta, and Brice, who attended high school in nearby Columbus. He wore the new army camouflage uniform that Bronson understood was pretty much roundly disliked by the troops, though the general seemed comfortable. The two black stars stood out prominently on the front of his uniform as he rocked in a black and gold West Point rocking chair. He wore a high and tight haircut, and what little hair the general had on top was gray. He puckered his lips as he sipped some tea, squinted his eyes as if he couldn’t believe he was even having this conversation, and looked at Bronson.
“Sir, we don’t know if both of those are true, but we know the rifle that killed some Taliban commanders killed General Sampson last night, almost exactly twenty-four hours ago,” Bronson said, realizing it felt good to be in front of the curve. He felt the momentum, hoping this general would release him so he could talk to the Ranger unit members who had been in Afghanistan at the time that his weapons tech, Corent, had inspected the lead and identified the rifle as one used by the Rangers.
“And we know this how?” General Bishop said. He quit rocking and leveled his eyes on Bronson. The general wore oval rimless glasses that made his eyes seem larger than they were. Bronson detected an air of arrogance about the man. He had seen aloof generals before, never ones to muddy their boots or get their hands dirty, figuratively or literally. Bishop seemed like the kind of officer who always kept someone between him and the problem. Good for career advancement, but bad for the men and women who labored beneath him.
“Sir, I explained all of this to General Taylor, and his team actually authorized me to speak with the Rangers who were in Afghanistan. We are burning daylight, as the saying goes, and every minute we spend rehashing everything is a minute that we don’t spend catching the murderer of a general.”
Just then Wilde came barreling into the room, opening the French doors with a rushed flurry. “Sir, I need to speak with you,” she said.
“Talking to me, young lady?” General Bishop asked. “I’m the only ‘sir’ in this room, mind you.”
Wilde stood motionless until Bronson smiled and covered for her.
“General, we have a similar protocol in the FBI. Nothing to get spun up about. Excuse me a second.”
“I say who is excused and not excused, Agent,” Bishop said, standing, as if to block Bronson from colluding with Wilde. Bishop was a small, thin man. A bookworm. Bronson’s physique dominated the room and General Bishop. He stepped past the general, avoiding contact, and walked with his assistant onto the covered porch of the antebellum home.
“Another general has been killed. Savannah. About thirty minutes ago. Same MO. Head shot. Police pulled a seven-point-six-two slug from the wall. It flattened out, but there might be something there. Found the casing, too. Just like yesterday,” she said.
Bronson looked up, took in the tranquil surroundings, listened to the birds chirping in the magnolia trees. He looked over his shoulder through the parlor’s single-pane windows, which were sweating from the humidity clashing with the air-conditioning.
“Okay, thanks,” he said to his executive assistant. “Hang on a sec.” He walked back into the house, where the general’s aide was blocking the parlor door.
“General’s on the phone, sir,” the aide said.
Bronson bulked up, leveled his marine’s steel gaze on the aide, and said, “Move, son, before you get hurt.”
The aide reluctantly moved, Bronson opened the door, and the general stood up and evidently shut down his phone in the same motion.
“Do you disobey every rule, Agent?” General Bishop barked.
“Not disobeying anything, General. Just telling you I’m leaving and heading to the Ranger headquarters. General Dillman, U.S. Army retired—”
“I know who General Dillman is!” General Bishop’s neck was turning red, his carotid artery pulsing. What about his presence in the general’s home would elicit such a reaction? Bronson wondered.
“Then I’m sure you know his head just exploded in the proverbial spray of pink mist about an hour ago?”
Bishop stared at him, perhaps a second too long.
“Oh, so you do know?” Bronson asked. He could see Bishop’s mind spinning.
“Word travels fast, Agent. Now how can I help the investigation?”
“You mean after you’ve obstructed justice?”
“Don’t push it with me. I know people,” General Bishop said.
“People who can blow my head off? Let’s have a seat, then,” Bronson said, moving toward a chair.
“Enough! Colonel Rogers is expecting you. He will give you access to whatever you need.”
Bronson turned on his heel and sped out of the door, collected Faye Wilde, Max Corent, and Randy White, jumped in the black Suburban, and zipped across Fort Benning with blue lights flashing. They stopped in front of the colonel’s headquarters and saw that they had a welcome party of soldiers wearing digitized-camouflage uniforms and tan berets, the distinctive Ranger headgear.
“Colonel,” Bronson said, as he exited the Suburban and walked through the phalanx of Rangers. Rogers met him halfway down the sidewalk, shook his hand, and escorted him into his drab office.
“Special Agent Bronson, thanks for coming. We’re here to do whatever we can. I didn’t know Dillman at all. Knew some of my guys who left the service went and worked for Milk ’Em, but I didn’t know Dillman. I did know Sampson. Not a bad guy. Not a good guy. Just another guy. Made general. Maybe a little full of himself. If we have a weapon connected to these crimes, I want to help. Have a seat.”
Bronson stepped back and held his hands up. “Whoa. You have already been more helpful than anyone I’ve talked to about this thing. If the level of cooperation goes up as I go down in rank, let me at some privates right now,” Bronson joked.
“In time.” Rogers smiled. “Show me what you�
��ve got.”
Corent, Wilde, and White had all walked in with him. They hovered in the back of the office near the door, eyeing the plaques and mementos that bespoke a heralded military career. Corent came forward with a packet of documents, which included pictures of the casing and lead from Fort Bragg and the earlier work he had done several months ago in Afghanistan.
They walked the colonel through the analysis.
“Seems legit to me,” Rogers said. “Carlsen!”
A Ranger lieutenant came barreling into the office. The stocky, fit young man looked like a heavyweight wrestler from Minnesota, with his large frame, translucent white skin, and blond Mohawk haircut.
“Carlsen here works in my operations shop. He pulled the names of our sniper teams in country during the window of time you’re talking about,” Rogers said. “It’s eight teams of two. So that gives you sixteen people to check out. We’ve already checked them out, of course. Three of the sixteen are KIA, two are in Walter Reed, one is DUSTWUN. Of the remaining ten, six are still in the service and four have transitioned out. Five of the six are still with the Rangers.”
“That’s some good, fast work there, Colonel. Thank you,” Bronson said.
“Like I said, we’re here to help. I don’t know General Bishop very well, but I imagine you didn’t have much fun visiting with him. I do, however, know General Taylor in Tampa very well. He called and said to help. So I’m helping.”
Rogers handed the list to Bronson, but kept his hand on it until Bronson looked him in the eyes.
“I love my soldiers, Special Agent. Fuck with them, you fuck with me. So be sure of what you’re doing before you start this,” Roger said.
“I appreciate the sentiment more than you know,” Bronson said. “I was a marine. Didn’t have patience for commanders who didn’t have the stones to say what you just said. Total respect. And will proceed with due care.”
Rogers released the list of names and nodded. “Roger that. Now I’ve got my five waiting for you outside the conference room. Carlsen here will send them in one at a time. I’ve asked him to sit in on the briefings.”
Bronson paused. It was unusual to allow non-FBI personnel in the interview of a potential subject, but given the circumstances and the trust Colonel Rogers had placed in him, he relented.
“No problem,” he said.
Carlsen and his massive frame escorted them to the conference room, which was surprisingly more high-tech than he anticipated. There were two flat-screen television monitors on either end of the room, perched high up on the wall. An odd-looking device with telescoping and recessed cameras sat in the middle of the long conference table. It was a twenty-thousand-dollar secure Polycom 360-degree videoconferencing unit. Whiteboards and maps of Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan dotted every square inch of the walls. He took a middle seat and his team sat behind him in what was a secondary row of chairs.
“Okay, let’s bring in … Corporal Irving Jacobson,” Bronson said.
Lieutenant Carlsen leaned into the hallway and barked, “Jake. In here, now.”
A stout, short soldier walked into the conference room and took the seat directly across from Bronson, as if the Rangers had rehearsed the interviews. Perhaps they had? Bronson wondered.
“Have a seat, soldier,” Bronson said.
The young man sat down across from Bronson with his back erect, his hands on his knees, and his face expressionless.
“Are you a sniper or a spotter, Ranger Jacobson?”
“Sniper, sir,” Jacobson said. His response was crisp.
“What type of rifle did you use?”
“I have an M24 Remington, sir. Use seven-point-six-two-by-fifty-one match-grade, sir. I’m old-school,” Jacobson said. He offered a thin smile.
“You’re maybe twenty years old, but you’re old-school?”
“Roger that. Born with a rifle in my hand, my daddy said. Hunted badgers in Wisconsin as a kid. Best shot in the unit now.”
“Now?”
“Well, I was third. Behind Samuelson and Harwood, but they’re gone now. And Samuelson was a spotter.”
“Where did they go?” Bronson asked.
“Samuelson most likely was KIA, sir, but no one really knows. The Reaper? He’s dinged up pretty bad and training unit snipers now.”
“The Reaper?”
“Yes, sir. Mortar attack about three months ago damn near killed him. That’s when Sammie went missing.”
Bronson leaned back in his chair, thinking, Interesting. He looked over his shoulder at Corent and asked, “What type of rifle are we looking for again?”
“SR-25,” Corent said.
“That’d be either the Reaper and Sammie or Mickey Child and his spotter Brad Steele,” Jacobson said. “They used the SR-25. We all got to pick our poison.”
Bronson looked at Lieutenant Carlsen. “Are any of these men available?”
“Child is. Steele rotated out a few months ago. But Child’s in the waiting room.”
Looking back at Jacobson, Bronson said, “You’ve been very helpful. Just to make things formal, where have you been for the past two days?”
“Right here. Training. Doing PT. Lifting. Shooting. Watching movies at night. Maybe some Xbox. That’s about it,” Jacobson said.
Bronson looked at Carlsen, who nodded and said, “I can confirm that. He’s the Call of Duty champion around here.”
“Thanks, Ranger Jacobson.” Then to Carlsen, “Can we get Child in here?”
Jacobson stood, performed a textbook about-face, and exited about the same time Sergeant Mickey Child walked in with a scowl on his face as if he would rather be a target on a live-fire range than be in a conference room with some suit from Virginia.
“Sergeant,” Bronson nodded. “Please have a seat.”
“Gonna take long?” Child sat down in the wooden chair. He was a big man whose uniform seemed grossly oversized, as if they had to go up two extra sizes just to make it fit in all the right places.
“Tighten up, Ranger,” Carlsen ordered.
Child sneered at Bronson and looked at the lieutenant with a mix of curiosity and mirth.
“Roger that, sir. Do I need a lawyer?” Child asked.
“I don’t know. Do you?” Bronson said, offering the oldest line in the book.
Child looked at Bronson with narrow eyes, half lidded, like a lizard’s.
“What’s your game, Special Agent? We’ve all been told to cooperate with you. Want me to rat out a fellow Ranger? Not going to happen.”
“Well that would be obstructing justice if you actually know something useful, which seems doubtful,” Bronson said. As he expected, Child was offended.
“What the hell does that mean? I know a lot of stuff,” Child said.
“Oh really? Then let’s hear it. Did you have an SR-25 in Afghanistan and if so where is that weapon right now? And if so, did you have it checked by FBI ballistics in Kandahar to determine kill counts?”
Until Bronson had asked him the last question about the ballistics check, Child had reverted back to being an uninterested party. Now, his eyes were level with Bronson’s.
“What’s this about?” Child asked. “We didn’t do nothing wrong over there. Just asked some guy to confirm who shot who.”
Bronson wanted to correct his grammar, but skipped the lesson and pressed on.
“So you had your rifle checked by my man Corent here,” he said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. “Where is that rifle now?”
“Got pretty dinged up in the ’Stan so had to trade it in for a new one. Then they put me on the Barrett. Ever see one of those, Agent? Make your head explode like a watermelon dropped on pavement from two stories up.”
“Thanks for the visual, Sergeant. I know what a Barrett is. I’m interested in your SR-25.”
“Turned it in to the armorer in Kandahar after your dude there confirmed who shot who. The lieutenant here can help you with that.” Child pushed away from the table and began to stand.
“Serg
eant, where have you been the last couple of days?”
“None of your fucking business is where I’ve been. If you need to know, it’s a small town called Up Your Ass. I ain’t done nothing wrong.” Child stood, knocking his chair over, and walked dead into Command Sergeant Major John Murdoch, the esteemed longtime Ranger Regiment command sergeant major, who served as the senior enlisted advisor to Colonel Rogers.
In the information packet on the Rangers, Murdoch was listed as a four-gold-star combat-jump veteran of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Panama, to include seeing action in just about every conflict in which the nation had engaged over the past thirty-five years of his career. Having turned down advancements to higher-level units, Command Sergeant Major Murdoch was an icon in the Rangers. Lieutenants stood at parade rest when in his presence and sergeants trembled in their boots as he walked past, often carrying his M4 rifle in one hand and a box of ammo in the other. He was single, never married, and lived in a special room in the barracks that the commander several years ago had built for him using Murdoch’s money. How legal it was, no one knew, but there weren’t any inquiries into Murdoch’s presence in the barracks twenty-four/seven. Ranger morale was high and discipline was good. Murdoch lived by the ethos that he was committed to doing one thing right in this world and that was leading Rangers. Of all the bios Bronson read during the plane flight, Murdoch’s was the most interesting, by far. The man had a shaved head and carried the muscled presence of a heavyweight wrestler, which he had been in college. Turning down a stint at the World Wrestling Federation, Murdoch enlisted in 1989 and later that year jumped into Panama for his first combat action. Today, he led the most elite fighting force in the world. Bronson thought, That is doing something with your life.
“Going somewhere?” Murdoch asked. He was toe-to-toe with the petulant sergeant, but had a hundred pounds of muscle and almost a foot of height on the six-foot-tall sniper.
Child immediately shifted from defensive to professional.
“No, Sergeant Major. I just feel insulted that I’m being questioned by the FBI.”
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