Ghost Target

by Nicholas Irving

  But that was just his mind playing with him, and now was no time to open any of those trapdoors. He had an escape plan. He needed to survive for at least the next twenty-four hours so he could find Jackie and Nina, which was the only way he could see to also save Monisha.

  “You’ve got a weapon and that’s hostile intent, Reaper!” the lead FBI man shouted.

  Hostile intent or not, Harwood took another glance at the cops outside and said to Samuelson, “We can do this.” Harwood raced out the door with Samuelson on his heels, hooking an immediate right toward the river. Fifty yards from the river, maybe five to ten seconds for him to get around the back side of the building. He prayed that one of the two boats he had seen was operational and had keys tucked away somewhere.

  “Where we going, Vick?”

  “River. Follow me.”

  The police were focused inward on the charred Mustang, like a football huddle. As they rounded the corner, Harwood slowed, flipped his rucksack to his front, and began reaching into the outer pockets.

  Approaching the ramp to the docks, he leapt three steps at a time until he was on the pier. Shouts and footfalls thundered behind them. He chose the 25 Mako farthest away and nearest the river because it looked older and unkempt.

  “Untie the lines. Look for a key,” Harwood said. He tossed two gray smoke grenades onto the path they had just taken and then pulled the pin on a stun grenade and heaved it into the smoke. It wouldn’t kill anyone unless they were standing on it, but still, he needed to buy some time.

  Samuelson was tearing up the cushions while Harwood shifted to looking above the console and slapped the four fishing-pole cones above the shade screen until he heard a rattle on the fourth cone.

  Gunfire sounded off nearby and bullets snapped past their heads.

  “Got it,” he said, tilting the cone downward, the keys sliding into his hand. One bullet shattered the windshield directly to Harwood’s front.

  “They’re coming through the smoke,” Samuelson said.

  The grenade and smoke had bought them maybe a minute, but it was precious time. He inserted the key into the ignition, ensured the gearshift was in neutral, and then cranked the motor, which started on the first try. He backed the boat out and rammed the gearshift forward, spitting a giant rooster tail onto the law enforcement officials chasing them.

  They sped north, passing beneath the Talmadge Memorial Bridge that spanned the Savannah River. Soon they were out of direct fire range of any of the weapons carried by the FBI or Savannah Police Department. However, an SPD helicopter would likely be in the air soon, not to mention that of Ramsey Xanadu and perhaps even the FBI, which meant he needed to downsize his footprint quickly.

  Zipping along the smooth brown waters of the Savannah River, they confronted giant merchant ships that were coming into and departing from one of the busiest ports in the country. He bounced through the wakes, which made his teeth chatter. The massive port infrastructure with cranes and containers stacked to the sky loomed ominously above them. A giant dispenser was disgorging a steady stream of corn from one of the berth-side ships into railcars.

  “Okay, we’re going in here,” Harwood said.

  He shot the boat into a tailspin and idled it next to the tall berth made for handling large container ships. He nudged the throttle forward until he reached a series of rungs that served as a ladder.

  “Tie the boat off here,” he directed. Samuelson grabbed the rope and tied a bowline, the basic knot they’d learned in Ranger School. Harwood grabbed his ruck and ascended hand over hand on the rusty cleats until he reached the top of the pier. Above them cranes were moving in and out with large containers swinging beneath like rectangular wrecking balls. He rolled onto the concrete and saw a series of railroad spurs to his left.

  “This way,” he said when Samuelson reached the top.

  They ran along the railroad, leaping from tie to tie, sometimes stumbling on the gravel. After a mile of running, Harwood pulled up short next to a row of stationary railcars. Breathing hard, he knelt over as Samuelson caught up to him.

  Helicopter blades chopped in the distance. Whether the helicopter was from the Savannah Police Department, the FBI, or Xanadu, they all amounted to the same thing: lethal. The sun was well overhead by now, beaming at high noon. Steel wheels screamed on iron rails with an ear-piercing pitch. One of the trains loaded with containers was slowly beginning to pull to the west, away from the river and the port.

  “That one, Sammie,” Harwood said. They raced across the uneven tracks until they could grab on to metal rungs not unlike those they had climbed on the berth. Harwood slid in between two cars and stood on the tongue of the coupler. Not a hard leap. He helped Samuelson up and they grabbed whatever handholds they could find. They were well concealed and there didn’t seem to be anyone who could observe their position. The train picked up speed, gaining from five to maybe fifteen miles an hour.

  Another helicopter joined the search, buzzing along the river. Two helicopters, leaving only one remaining. The calculus of who was looking for him didn’t matter anymore. If it was the FBI and Savannah Police Department, well okay. If it was Ramsey Xanadu and either of the other two, then maybe something good for him would come of that. Like the FBI shooting down Xanadu’s helicopter.

  But part of Harwood wanted to come face-to-face with Xanadu since the barbarian had wounded Monisha. Also, the battlefield geometry indicated Harwood might first have to go through Xanadu to ultimately get Basayev. As the train picked up speed, warehouses slipped by in his periphery. Harwood didn’t want to get too far away from his main objective, so after a mile he motioned to Samuelson and they jumped and rolled into a ditch at the base of the tracks. Some forward throw, sharp edges and pain, but nothing too bad.

  Once the final railcar had passed, Harwood led Samuelson to the wooded area to the east of the rail. He moved to the far edge where they could see the western portion of Forsyth Park. The witch’s-hat roof of General Dillman’s house poked up beyond the green canopy of the park.

  He found a clearing, dropped his ruck, and turned to Samuelson.

  “Thanks, brother.”

  Samuelson stared at him. “No p-problem, Vick. I just get confused sometimes. Khasan really did a number on me.”

  “I understand. Take off your hat and let me see your head,” Harwood asked.

  Samuelson’s head was grotesque. Harwood picked through the hair. Part of Samuelson’s skull had been dented, like an automobile after a fender bender.

  “I’ve seen it, bro. Pretty gross,” Samuelson said, holding his stained red and white trucker’s hat in his hand.

  “What did he do to you?” Harwood asked.

  “He just wrapped it, man. Threw some alcohol in there and put a compress on it. Think a doctor stitched it.”

  “How’s your memory?”

  “My what?”

  After a pause, Harwood said, “Okay, I get it.”

  Samuelson smiled. “Haven’t lost all my brains, Reaper. Just some of them.”

  “What was that bullshit back there? Abrek? All up in my face? You know I was as knocked out as you.”

  “I don’t know, bro. Super confused sometimes, you know? He said my name was Abrek. Means ‘warrior.’ But the more you called me ‘Sammie,’ the more I started to remember. Still, you know, you got picked up by dust-off and I didn’t. That’s some bullshit.”

  “I agree.”

  “But not your fault.”

  “So, the Chechen?”

  “He’s working something, man,” Samuelson said. “I think you’re right about the nuke.” The pupils of Samuelson’s eyes were normal black circles. His brown irises didn’t flinch as he spoke and looked directly at Harwood. Samuelson’s face was pockmarked from shrapnel, but didn’t twitch with any tell of a mistruth. “I didn’t know he was going to tie you up. Try to burn you.”

  “It’s okay, Sammie. I’ve got a plan.”

  “So, tell me,” Samuelson said.

  And the
Reaper told his spotter everything a foxhole buddy needed to know.

  Samuelson’s only reply was “Damn.”

  CHAPTER 23

  They moved cautiously throughout the day. The sun now hung low in the Western sky.

  Sirens wailed all around them. Helicopters buzzed the skies. Dog teams barked in the distance.

  “They want you pretty bad,” Samuelson said. “Ready?”

  “Yeah, but thinking. Where’s the one place Basayev didn’t take you?”

  “What do you mean? How am I supposed to know that if he didn’t take me?”

  “Think about it. He’s known where I am the entire time.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He’s got to have a command center somewhere. And it must be portable. Movable like a tactical operations center. You can be here one minute and there the next minute, because you never know where I’m going to pop up.”

  “But we knew ahead of time,” Samuelson said.

  “That’s right. You knew my sniper training schedule from someone in Special Operations Command, who coughed it up.”

  “No. Basayev hacked their training schedules. We knew where you were going to be because he easily got through the firewalls.”

  “Which brings me back to my earlier point. He probably can’t hack from a phone, though I suppose it’s possible. He needs a computer, Wi-Fi, a satellite, all of the above.”

  Samuelson nodded. “Yeah, I didn’t see that.”

  “That you know of. What’s the name of the boat you guys chartered from the Bahamas?”

  Samuelson strained. His eyes focused outward, then inward. He was coming up blank.

  “He gave me some sedatives during that part of the trip. Said my head injuries and the swells wouldn’t mix well together. Some happy horseshit like that,” Samuelson said. “I was peaced out big-time for most of that.”

  “Right. That’s because he’s got a command and control ship parked around here somewhere, probably linked to Ku-band satellite for imaging, drone control, and fully functional intelligence. I mean, why come to Savannah if you’re not coming by boat. Lots of ingress and egress.”

  “I can believe that. I never left my quarters. They brought me chow and everything. I had an Xbox in there and my own television and DVD collection. Caught up on movies I hadn’t seen.”

  “That’s because he was scheming. He’s got one plan to get his wife back and another plan to do some damage.”

  “Not following you,” Samuelson said.

  “One thing I know about Basayev is he’s never off the clock for long. He’s being funded to do something.”

  Samuelson nodded.

  “It’s no accident he left you to decide to save me or not. He needed to know where your loyalties were as his endgame approached. Monisha’s bait, but she’ll be a bargaining chip later. So, we need something to trade.”

  “Like Nina.”

  “Like that,” Harwood said.

  “But what if he’s got Jackie?”

  “He doesn’t have Jackie.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I can’t. But I can go with probabilities. If he had her he wouldn’t have let either of us live. Or needed Monisha, for that matter. Also, I think Jackie has her own agenda and that’s where we’re going now.”

  “Where?”

  “To find Jackie,” Harwood said.

  “You know where she is?”

  “I believe I do. Follow me.”

  They stepped from the forested area that had served as a final rally point. It had taken them several hours of sliding through alleys, dense forests, and warehouse districts to find the marina east of Savannah on the Bull River. Now they knelt behind a ten-foot-wide-by-four-foot-high generator that serviced the motorboats and sailboats sitting dormant in their riverfront slips. Beyond the marina were a widening river and marshes that eventually led to the Atlantic Ocean.

  The marina’s name had been on the floating key chain that Jackie had scooped up at the last second from her nightstand in the downtown Savannah hotel. The rucksack, the rifle barrel, the key chain. It all made sense to him now. As much as it hurt him to admit that he had been played, he had to consider that as the most likely course of action.

  Harwood knelt on the wooden pier and scouted the dozens of boats sitting idle in their slips. There was no way to determine which boat was Ten Meter Lady other than to check them individually by walking along each pier.

  “A lot of boats, brother,” Samuelson said.

  The marina had ten docks that poked into the water perpendicular to a concrete berth. Each pier had a gate, which required a numeric code. There appeared to be twenty slips along each dock. Two hundred boats.

  Jackie’s would be a transient boat, though, and she would want a slip that she could easily transit. She would want one that went unnoticed by most passersby and onlookers. Marinas attracted an unusual number of gawkers, who liked to study the boats, dream of their own one day.

  The pier farthest to the left had three slips with boats they couldn’t see because larger boats dominated the sight line from the main entrance. There was a construction site opposite that pier and it was closed to non-construction personnel. A few backhoes and bulldozers sat idle, as if resting before another hard day’s work. The swim from the construction site to the pier was maybe fifty yards.

  “Follow me,” Harwood said.

  They walked around the marina, found the construction site, and scaled the chain-link fence, which had black silt barriers running head high along the entire fence line. They moved through footing trenches three feet deep and piles of rebar until they were crawling under the fence opposite the last row of boats.

  Using his spotter scope, Harwood read the names of each of the boats from left to right. Majestic, Fine Wine, Left Out, Picked Six, and so on, but no Ten Meter Lady.

  “I was certain,” Harwood muttered.

  “Over there,” Samuelson said. Harwood readjusted to the direction Samuelson pointed and saw a tall woman who had Jackie Colt’s physique standing alongside a large Boston Whaler center console boat that was parked at the end of the pier. Not in a slip, but moored at the T.

  Just as he had thought. Easy in. Easy out. Minimal maneuvering. She would be able to get to the T-head from the rolling current of the Bull River and then into the Savannah River in a matter of minutes. The battlefield geometry also made sense. She could get to the intracoastal waterway and the Atlantic Ocean just as easily. The four engines had “Mercury 350cc” written in bold letters on the covers. This was a big boat that could move her quickly up and down the coast. The boat was long, perhaps over fifty feet. It had tall outriggers used for big-game fishing and could easily be mistaken for a deep-sea-fishing vessel. Its shallow draft would allow the vessel to glide through the notably shallow waters of the marshy Savannah River basin. Importantly, there were multiple routes to Tybee Island, which Harwood believed to be her ultimate objective.

  The stability of the boat provided the perfect sniper’s platform.

  Jackie had spoken briefly and obliquely about her brother’s overdose and subsequent painful death. Richard had been on the fringe of the rough crowd in Columbus, Georgia, home of Fort Benning and the U.S. Army’s Airborne School. Her investigation led her to a general’s son, who had melted pure opium in a spoon and given it to Richard for injection. Eyewitness reports said that they had been sitting on the Airborne School’s property beneath the two-hundred-foot towers future paratroopers used for training. After using the needle, Richard had climbed the tower, and shimmied onto the arm of one of the drop mechanisms. From two hundred feet above ground level, he began singing the resurgently popular “Fly Like an Eagle” by the Steve Miller Band.

  And he had tried to do so, falling two hundred feet to the ground, landing atop a stack of metal poles used for paratrooper training. The next morning, the class of Airborne students had found him impaled on their equipment. Before too long the class had created what they thought was a dark
ly humorous cadence about Richard’s ordeal.

  “C-130 rolling down the strip, airborne junkie on a one-way trip … shoot up, stand up, shuffle to the door, fly through the sky … poor Richard’s brains all over the floor…”

  Prior to meeting Jackie, Harwood had even heard the Airborne School troops calling that twisted cadence, but had no idea at the time who Richard was or why his name was invoked in a cadence. Jackie mentioned that she and her parents had petitioned the general to get them to forbid the cadence.

  General Bishop, he seemed to recall, was the commanding general of Fort Benning.

  Yes, Jackie had motive.

  Harwood lowered himself over the metal bulkhead and slipped into the warm, dark water. The musky scent of fish spawning permeated the air. Samuelson slipped in behind him. The rucksack mitigated the movement of Harwood’s arms, so he mostly did the sidestroke as he was taught in Ranger combat water survival training. Soon he had reached the wooden pier that had moored next to it a seventy-foot boat called Non Miserables. The large wood-paneled Chris Craft boat gave him ample room to shimmy on the opposite side of Jackie’s sight line.

  Lifting himself onto the pier like doing a dip, Harwood knelt and stared directly at Jackie Colt’s boat. She was no longer standing on the pier, but a light was on belowdecks. He low-crawled along the pier until he was alongside the hull of the Ten Meter Lady. Motioning to Samuelson to provide him cover, he knelt, then stood and walked to the swim platform and quietly boarded the vessel from the rear. Samuelson prone, rifle aimed.

  Harwood stood in the rear of the boat, behind the center console. Jackie was working diligently in the sleeping cabin forward of the center console. He eased his way around the bridge. She was typing on a keyboard. Her commands pulled up a screen on the monitor that seemed to be a camera feed, and then she started typing into a dialogue box. She was communicating with someone and perhaps watching their actions.

  He held his Beretta pistol in his hand and said, “Good evening, Jackie.”

  She jumped and leveled a Sig Sauer nine-millimeter pistol at him.