Ghost Target

by Nicholas Irving

  Chop, lift, toss, scrape.

  Harwood retrieved his thermal spotter’s scope from his rucksack and looked through the dense foliage. A figure about three hundred yards away from him and the police, like the third point of a triangle, was digging with a shovel. Beyond the digger was a mini power substation about twenty yards to the east.

  Chop, lift, toss, scrape.

  The police were looking in that direction, almost impatiently, it seemed.

  Mind swimming, Harwood looked at his rucksack. He needed what he carried. Was he addicted? He didn’t want to be, but that was what an addict was all about, right? Not being able to help himself.

  He looked toward the police officers, then at his rucksack.

  * * *

  The sniper was feeling good, with a nice soft spot in the woods and clear fields of fire. There was even a decent escape route. These were important kills, at the nexus of everything happening. The sniper waited for the sounds that were expected.

  While police officers were always a good possibility, they were a risky placement on the kill list. Given the tensions in the country today, killing a police officer or two would create a firestorm. The sniper smiled. Yes, killing two police officers would create a bigger mess than killing two generals. How about that, the sniper mused.

  The rifle felt cool in the sniper’s hands. After all, it had been fired, broken down, cleaned, packed, reassembled, and now loaded.

  The sniper heard the noises. Chop, lift, toss, scrape. Those were reassuring sounds. The mission was advancing. Waiting for the sound of metal striking metal, the sniper dialed in the scope. There it was.

  Clank.

  Followed by another probe that produced a distinctive ping that hummed liked a tuning fork.

  “Sounds like a treasure hunt,” the sniper heard one officer say.

  “Well, it kind of is, supposedly,” the other said.

  “We’re just supposed to help him on the base, that’s it, right?”

  “That’s all I’ve been told. Not originally part of the deal. I thought we was just looking the other way on the planes coming in.”

  “This is different. Sneaking someone in. Not sure I’m down with that.”

  “We could leave. I’m good with bailing on the deal.”

  But the sniper wasn’t good with them bailing on the deal. There was no bailing. They were either in or they were dead. Honestly, they were dead either way. The sniper just disliked ending their usefulness so early.

  With the possible defection of the police officers, the sniper placed the crosshairs on the head of one officer and practiced the one-two timing rhythm required to kill both officers. Killing just one would absolutely be no good. A radio call would ensue quickly, followed by a rapid response probably including dogs. No. Now, both cops needed to go down immediately.

  One-two.

  The sniper focused on the officer to the left, head as big as a basketball in the Armasight Zeus Pro 640 thermal scope, which the sniper had chosen instead of the Leupold during reassembly. Using hot black, the warm items were dark, cooler items were white. The engines of the cars were shimmering black, while the trees and leaves across the street were a perfect background of white, highlighting the ninety-eight-point-six-degree blackness of officer number one’s brain.

  The trigger gave way under the sniper’s practiced pull and the weapon coughed slightly. In the thermal sight, officer one’s head exploded in a black mass, like a canful of black paint a modern artist might throw against a white canvas. The sniper was quickly on officer two, who stood there one second too long before figuring out what had happened. His head exploded also, but with more of a backward spray. The sniper had overcompensated and, instead of hitting center mass, had torn a rear chunk of the brain off the back of the officer’s head. It was a fatal shot, nonetheless.

  The sniper put the thermal scope back on the digger near the substation. The figure was up and moving toward the cars. The sniper saw it all. The police officers were sized up. One was selected and stripped. Clothes were changed. The freshly unearthed object was placed in the trunk. The car was driven toward the main gate.

  Casings in the pine straw. Clues left behind. Rifle disassembled. Rucksack packed. The sniper was on the move.

  * * *

  Harwood came out of his spiraling memory as he cinched his rucksack. He saw the two police officers fall as if puppet strings had been cut. Thought about being framed.

  What was going on?

  There was rustling in the woods, animals moving through the forest. In less than half an hour the area would be swarming with cops, probably dogs. A figure moved toward one of the police cars. An engine rumbled. The nearest police car cranked and headed toward Hunter Army Airfield. Harwood needed to move.

  He shouldered his rucksack and moved west, away from the scene, hoping that Samuelson would be able to find him again.

  CHAPTER 10

  Harwood’s phone showed no messages from anyone. It was midmorning and he had been on the run through the woods, hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck, and made it to Statesboro, where the driver worked maintenance at Georgia Southern University. Hopping out of the back of the truck, Harwood nodded at the man, who said, “Always gotta help a brother out.”

  “Roger that. Thanks, man,” Harwood said.

  He walked two blocks, found a Burger King, bought two breakfast sandwiches and two large Powerade drinks, carried them across the street, dodged traffic, and found a wooded area where he could eat, hide, and think. Any number of people had seen him. But he looked like just another college kid around here and he had already noticed on his short walk that there were plenty of black males to confuse him with, if someone were looking for him.

  Harwood sat in a copse of trees. Behind him was a baseball field about one hundred yards away. The street hummed with traffic fifty yards to his front. Secure for the moment, he processed the last day. Instead of hiding, he should have been training snipers today. But now, he was wondering if he was being framed and if Samuelson had picked up his gear.

  As Harwood chewed on the breakfast sandwiches, his strength returned. A solid workout, then sex with Jackie, and then up all night fleeing Savannah—Harwood was famished. He inhaled both sandwiches and sucked down one bottle of the power drink. Stashing the other bottle in his rucksack, Harwood took inventory of his equipment. Everything he needed was in there, though if he was ever stopped by the police, he was done.

  The hiss of heavy traffic on the road continued. The air smelled of pine straw and sap in the thicket of tall pines. Pulling his phone from his pocket, he found that he had four bars of connectivity. He tapped Google and connected to CNN to read the top stories. He used his thumb to scroll through the links on the Syrian civil war, the new president’s latest conflict with Congress, and a story about a mall shooting in Chicago. The fourth URL had a picture of an SR-25 sniper rifle and a photo of Vick Harwood. It was a full-body photo of himself dressed in his nasty uniform, cradling his SR-25 sniper rifle—Lindsay—like a baby, and staring directly into the camera, giving the viewers of the photo a clear image of his face. The picture was maybe seven or eight months old and had been snapped by a fellow Ranger, who had posted it on Facebook after they had rotated back from Afghanistan. Either the Ranger had coughed up the picture or he had an open Facebook page where anyone could pull the picture into their photo files. Regardless, the entire world knew he was the prime suspect in these murders. This wasn’t some local news show. It was international.

  Damn.

  Harwood was lucky to have made it this far. He read the story, which basically said that he was a key person of interest in the killing of two police officers and two generals, one retired and one active duty. The article also said that the FBI had a special task force on the case, meaning the pressure on him would increase.

  Part of his rehabilitation had been to attempt to return to his self-sufficient, driven self. Relying on others had never been Harwood’s strong suit, yet here
he was being buffeted about by forces out of his control.

  “When in charge, be in charge,” Harwood muttered to himself, a maxim taught to him by Command Sergeant Major Murdoch. He needed to find his moorings. Now was as good a time as any.

  Not now, but soon, he needed to contact Murdoch, the man responsible for his current assignment as an instructor. If nothing else, he would let the senior enlisted Ranger know that he was not intentionally AWOL and that he also was not responsible for the murders.

  Knowing the capabilities of the intelligence community, though, Harwood needed to shut down his communications sooner rather than later. Law enforcement agencies were no doubt tracking him at this moment, or at least about to be, once they could gather his information and home in on all his email, phone, and text messaging.

  Still, despite the security that being off the grid would provide, there was a trade-off in situational awareness. He would have to go old-school by watching television where he could and finding Web news when possible.

  Before shutting down, though, he checked social media. Twitter already had a hashtag that appeared to be generated by the Black Lives Matter movement: #HeroHarwood. He winced. He did not believe killing noncombatants made anyone a hero. As a black man, sure, he’d had his share of scrapes with others, but that only drove him harder to prove to everyone else what he already knew: that he was the best and his skin color didn’t matter. He looked at the hashtag stream on Twitter and saw it scrolling with epitaphs such as Cap some more #HeroHarwood #BLM … revolution has begun thanks to #HeroHarwood #BLM … rally around our new leader #HeroHarwood … We’ve got our own army now #HeroHarwood. And the tweets kept scrolling as thousands of Twitter users voiced their opinions.

  Next, he checked Instagram, and it was more of the same, only his photograph had been cropped, zooming on his face so that it was right there for all to see. Soulful brown eyes, strong jawline, curly black hair, lips together but angled in a slight smirk. Harwood had once liked that picture, but now he hated it, wished it didn’t exist. He had lived by the Ranger creed for the past six years of his enlistment:… Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to fight on to the Ranger objective and complete the mission, though I be the lone survivor.

  Today, at this moment, Harwood was alone and had to fight on to defend not only his good name, but that of the Ranger Regiment and all the men who had fought for freedom. Though he truthfully could not remember much about the past two days, he knew—believed—in his heart that he had not committed those murders.

  He opened the flap of his well-worn black rucksack and looked at the red, white, and blue American flag stitched on the inside, a reminder of home when he was in combat and now a reminder to him that he was a loyal patriot.

  Not a murderer.

  He snapped a picture of the flag. Pressing his thumb lightly against the picture, he inserted the photo into an iMessage and typed Jackie’s name into the address window. In the text field he typed, Love you, RLTW. He waited for a full minute to see if Jackie replied, which she usually did immediately. In fact, a minute later, the message turned green instead of the typical iMessage blue. Sent as a text message, his phone reported. He tried again with the Wickr app, to no effect. Either her phone was off or her battery was dead. Perhaps she was on a phone call, but typically that didn’t turn his messages green. They seemed to go through. Interesting.

  After no response, he used Google to search for mentions of Jackie’s appearance to see how it might have gone. Instead of reports, there were multiple articles referencing the fact that Jackie had missed an appearance in the Buckhead area of Atlanta this morning. Checking his iMessages again, he saw that she had still not responded. Instead of being reassured, Harwood was concerned, but there was nothing he could do.

  Harwood powered down his iPhone. Retrieving a small pin from his rucksack, he slid the fine point into the SIM-card slot and popped the card out. He replaced the pin in a small pouch along with the SIM card and safely tucked the pouch into the rucksack.

  The FBI and all the other intelligence agencies could track his last text and knew the nearest cell phone tower that had processed that message. He needed to move, but where? And how?

  Atlanta was his first option, but that was a long way up the road. Plus, Jackie apparently wasn’t there. Command Sergeant Major Murdoch was equally as far on the other side of the state at Fort Benning. Samuelson would not be able to find him with his phone powered off.

  Ever since the mortar attack that had knocked him unconscious, Harwood had been reliant upon medics, doctors, nurses, physical therapists, and others such as Jackie and Murdoch. His sojourn through the foster-care system of Maryland had made him self-reliant almost to a fault. He had shifted from one end of the spectrum to the other. And now, he found himself fighting a riptide of uncertainty.

  Being reliant on others did not suit Harwood. And now that he knew Samuelson was at least alive, he removed the self-emplaced yoke of guilt from his neck. With that lightening, a sense of freedom of maneuver and thought appeared. Decision time.

  He retrieved a baseball cap from her rucksack and pulled it tight over his forehead; then he cinched the rucksack as he performed a 360-degree analysis of his environment. Forest in every direction, but it was a thin layer of insulation from the cold, hard world that was now searching for him. It was possible that if he stepped into the open, people would recognize him and the social media universe would collapse on him, tracking his every move.

  Shouldering his ruck, Harwood walked a mile through the woods until he came to a road that afforded him a view of Georgia Southern University. The school had a good football reputation at the small-college level and he saw the stadium on the far side of the campus.

  In his physical-fitness clothing, he emerged from the trees and began a jog in that direction, as if he were an ordinary student either late for class or doing a workout.

  As he scooted through the parking lots, passed academic buildings, and dashed through a series of sports complexes, the fight-or-flight instinct shot adrenaline into his gut.

  Spotting a road beyond a stand of trees, he saw five students standing in a circle about thirty yards across the parking lot. Wearing backpacks smaller than his, they joked as they looked at their phones. They wore an assortment of jeans, hoodies, and baseball caps, all bearing some symbol of the bald eagle, the Georgia Southern mascot.

  One of the young men in a hoodie turned and stared at Harwood, then spun around and looked at his phone. The student glanced at the others in his group and they all looked at him.

  “That’s him!” one of them shouted.

  CHAPTER 11

  At eight thirty in the morning Mountain time, retired air force general Buzz Markham stood at the window of his hunting lodge on the outskirts of Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

  He held a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and used his other hand to point a trigger finger at two mule deer standing one hundred yards away on the sloping plain outside his compound. The deer were perfectly spotlighted by the sun nosing over the horizon as they grazed in the blissful ignorance of the threat that might one day be posed by Markham and his hunting buddies.

  Hooked onto his left ear was a wireless earpiece that purred with his anticipated call.

  “Talk to me,” Markham said.

  On the other line was the president of MLQM Private Military Contracting Company, Derwood Griffin, a former Department of Defense civilian contracting officer, who retired at fifty years old with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year pension and now collected his one-million-dollar annual salary for securing contracts with the government. For his part, Markham was the CEO of a major hedge fund that held over two billion dollars in assets. He had parlayed his four-star rank into a fortune by sitting on corporate boards, investing wisely, and staying married to the same woman for forty years. A former chief of staff of the air force, Markham was living his dream and he was the chairman of the board of Corporate Leaders Employing Vetera
ns and Retired, or CLEVER. Essentially their group was a gang of loosely knit chief executive officers of both private and public companies whose stated mission was to help veterans find jobs. They also often met to discuss and choose which foreign-policy initiatives they might want to influence.

  Griffin’s MLQM was a portfolio asset of Markham’s wealth-management holdings. Markham mentored other retiring senior flag officers and civilians, coaching them on how not just to get rich, but to build wealth. The two were as different as night and day, Markham would tell his transitioning peers. You could have the nice home on the golf course or even the beach and be debt free, or you could own multiple homes in several countries, have your own aircraft for personal and business travel, and be a player on the world stage of international and national politics. A talking head for several television news programs, Markham was also sought out by sitting presidents, senators, and business executives for counsel on wars, trade, and leadership.

  He had it all.

  That was, until now. He had an empty feeling in his gut that Derwood Griffin did not have good news.

  “Dillman was shot and killed last night. Head blown off by a close-range sniper shot,” Griffin said to Markham.

  “Saw that on the news. Surprised you didn’t call me sooner,” Markham admonished. “Same as Sampson?”

  After a pause Griffin said, “Yes. By coincidence, I was there. Learned he had brought one home. I parked out back, came over, he made us some drinks, and I went up to check on her. He evidently walked onto the porch to take a call, and that’s when he got shot. There was a lot to clean up before the police arrived.”

  “Did you clean it up?”

  “Of course. As much as possible. Cops were on it pretty quickly.”

  “Police forensics are pretty good nowadays as are eavesdropping capabilities, my friend,” Markham said.