by Scott Blade
scott blade
THE LAST RAINMAKER
A Jack Widow Mystery
a Black Lion Media publication©
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Novels by Scott Blade
The Jack Widow Series
Gone Forever
Winter Territory
A Reason to Kill
Without Measure
Once Quiet
Name Not Given
The Midnight Caller
Fire Watch
The Last Rainmaker
A Cold Dry Place
S. Lasher & Associates Series
The StoneCutter
Cut & Dry
Other Novels
The Secret of Lions
Copyright © 2018 Scott Blade
Black Lion Media Publishing
All Rights Reserved
Visit the author website:
scottblade.com
The Jack Widow book series and The Last Rainmaker are works of fiction, produced from the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination and/or are taken with permission from the source and/or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or fictitious characters, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This series is not officially associated or a part of any other book series that exists.
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Published by Black Lion, LLC.
A decade ago, Hong Yeoja, then a young girl of fourteen, fled the clutches of a horrifying reality in North Korea. But her journey only began there. She trekked across miles of frozen river, evaded armed North Korean border patrols, desperately bartered with corrupt Chinese officials, skirted human sex traffickers, and endured through despair, and consuming urges of suicide.
It took her two years to finally escape to the United States.
To freedom.
Currently, she is alive and well with a husband and son.
Hong Yeoja is not her real name. It means Jane Doe.
I thank her for sharing her story with me, and leave her in peace.
CHAPTER 1
THE SNIPER’S SCOPE trained on the target at an impossible range. Impossible for ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the world’s population, more decimal places even.
Not for James Lenny. He was a man in the most elite sniper club imaginable.
Lenny was British, mostly. He had some Irish in there. Some Scottish, on his mother’s side. Maybe some Welsh, but British was how he identified himself.
He was a little worn around the middle, not much, but a little. He considered himself to be in decent shape for a man his age. His fifty-fifth birthday was only five days away. He wasn’t looking forward to it.
He stood six feet tall, only not then, because right then, he wasn’t standing.
Lenny lay prone, on a worn, heavily threaded sniper mat that had seen a lot of action, a lot of wartime, a lot of desert floors, and a lot of other various types of dirt.
His legs were apart, feet apart, an open scissor position, elbows planted in the dirt, feet and toes turned awkwardly so that the arches were flat against the ground. Bright orange ear plugs were jammed in both ears. He wore a hunter green camo Castro hat, turned around backward to keep it from obstructing his aim. He wore camo pants to match, and a black t-shirt, under a dark canvas jacket. A pair of sunglasses were folded and stored in a case on the edge of the mat.
The sun beat down from high above him. No worry of it interfering with his target.
Woodland sounds surrounded him, calmly, atmospheric, almost diplomatic. Old world flycatchers cawed in the distance. Their wings fluttered on the wind. Leaves blew and quivered. Clouds were sparse in the sky above. No sign of rain. Not yet. Which was good for a cool, Irish spring day. The green of the land was everywhere, to the point of being all-consuming, nearly overwhelming, inundating, like being inside of an emerald.
Lenny’s body was completely still, his left hand wrapped around his right shoulder, wrapped around the stock of an Arctic Warfare Magnum rifle, a measure of reinforcing the sniper shot.
He was ready to take the shot. Ready to squeeze the trigger. Ready to explode his target into a million wet, red, fleshy pieces.
The AWM, also known by its technical designation as the L115A3 Sniper Rifle, was Lenny’s rifle of choice. Nothing beat military instruments manufactured right here in the UK, in his opinion. Snipers are notoriously brand loyal, and patriots are country loyal, and he was both things.
The Americans also made pretty good weapons, he thought. Sometimes.
When it came to military munitions, the Americans were among the best. Right there with the Germans. Both second to the British.
He would never admit that to any of the American soldiers he knew, of course, or to the Germans. And he certainly would never disclose that opinion to any of the guys from his old sniper unit.
Not that any of them took his phone calls anymore.
He could understand why. His post-traumatic stress disorder made him socially awkward, a little hard to be around. He could see that. It wasn’t lost on him.
He tried not to focus on that. It was pointless now. He focused on the thing he loved most in the world, his rifle.
The AWM was a bolt action sniper rifle, great for extreme long-range shooting, and completely wasted at any other range.
His was chambered with a Magnum round. The Magnum bullets made the weapon system terrifying to his enemies, worse than regular bullets.
Sure, a regular bullet fired from his rifle would kill a man. But a Magnum would destroy him. It would blow a target apart. It would make identifying the body nearly impossible.
Imagine the destructive force of a Magnum, combined with the extreme range of an AWM rifle. The combination of the two made survival after getting hit by one round a miraculous act of God. A man who walked away from such a devastating shot was nothing short of immortal. Plain and simple. No one survived a bullet like that.
No one.
Superman couldn’t survive a bullet like that. Man of Steel, meet the bullet that tears through steel.
Lenny and the mates from his old unit used to have a running joke.
Only God survives the bullet from one of their rifles.
Something like that.
The thought made him smile. Made him nostalgic for the good old days.
The AWM was his personal favorite for those reasons, and a few ot
hers. But mostly it was because he had used the same gun, the same weapon system, way back in his military days. It was like an old friend.
It got him an impressive kill count. The best in the world, once upon a time, a limited time.
It was his favorite possession in the world.
The most important thing in combat was his rifle. The most important thing in his life was his rifle.
The second most important thing?
His boots.
He wore a brand-new pair of combat boots. Unlike the rifle, he liked to update his footwear on a regular basis. Nothing destroys your chances for success in the field like broken-down, worn-out, faulty footwear. He had learned that the hard way, ten years ago in Afghanistan. Not personally, but one of his squad mates, his best friend, had been complaining about his boots sticking him in the bottoms of his feet.
The guy was always rubbing the soles of his feet at night before bed.
One morning, at sunrise, he jerked the soles out to try and make them more comfortable, more accommodating of their mission.
The next morning, his unit was clearing out a cluster of abandoned structures, and the guy got himself shot because he turned a corner and inadvertently stumbled down a hidden incline. He had no grip in his shoes and his feet were loose on the inside.
The combination of loose gravel and no grip from the inside of his shoes led him to his death. He ended up on his back in a circle of concealed insurgence. Five guys total. All armed with AK-47s, abandoned way back in the eighties by fleeing Russian armies.
He found out the hard way that AK-47s were every soldier’s worst nightmare in that part of the world.
The AK was a reliable weapon, a very reliable weapon. Lenny had heard stories about Afghan fighters discovering them, buried in the sand. They had dug them up, after twenty-plus years. Ten times out of ten, they worked the same as the first day off the factory floor, making the Kalashnikov family one of the most powerful weapons manufacturers in the world.
They had no equal.
Before Lenny and the rest of his squad could get down to their teammate, the guy was dead. Filled with countless seven-six-two millimeter boat-tail bullets and countless bullet holes.
It was a massacre.
Lenny was never able to look at Swiss cheese the same way again.
Of course, his unit took care of the insurgence, in a take-no-prisoners kind of way. They killed them all. British ammunition. British weapons. British fingers squeezed triggers and left the enemy lifeless. The British way.
Directly behind Lenny’s boots was an unmanned spotter scope, set up on a tactical tripod. The tripod’s legs were extended all the way out and planted firmly in the dirt, between lush green blades of grass.
At the base of the tripod were a clipboard and an expensive pen. The clipboard was scribbled with technical information about the shot, the target, the direction, and the wind. All nice and neat.
The scribble was in Lenny’s handwriting.
The spotter scope was unmanned and the scribble was all his, because Lenny was all alone out there, the way he liked it. This made his shooting take longer than it would if he had a spotter with him. But it also made the range much more challenging. That was what he looked for. A challenge. He wanted to recapture a long distant shot that he had made once before. Only once. And only back in Afghanistan.
No, he wanted to surpass it. He wanted to beat the new world record. It was rightfully his.
It should’ve been his. He used to be seen as a hero. The guys in his elite sniper unit used to look up to him. They worshipped him. He was the guy who shot the world record. He was a king. A god. A man who deserved to be up on the wall.
That all faded away. That was all crushed.
At first, they acted like they felt sorry for him. At first, some of the new guys still looked up to him.
Now, they had forgotten him.
Lenny hadn’t had anyone to spot for him. Besides, part of him wanted to do it without the help of a spotter. Unlike the current record holder, who used a military spotter.
And he wanted the world to know it. That was why he also had two Canon XA11 high-definition video cameras on tripods. One was planted to the right of the AWM’s barrel, about a meter away. It was on and recording and focused on him. His face, the weapon, and his body from his knees up were visible and in frame.
Then at the end of the range, focused on the target, was a twin camera. This one was zoomed past the back of the target, so that the muzzle flash from his shot would register with the actual explosion of the organic target.
Everything was set. The only issue that Lenny had now was that his mind continued to wonder, which was part of his PTSD. Ever since being discharged, against his will, he had had a problem keeping his mind on the task at hand.
He had been married once, but that had not worked out either. Now, he was alone.
He shook off the regrets of the past and stared through the scope, his safe place. He watched the target. He took long, deep breaths, until he slowed his heart rate. He was in no hurry.
The wind blew, lighter than normal. He was positioned in high, lush grass on the apex of a hill, which was the only way to be accurate at the great distance in front of him. He needed the hill, the downward slope, and the curvature of the Earth to make a shot this far away.
Most of the terrain around him and between him and the target was grassy. There were mountains, far to the west, which started with groups of pebbles that turned into stones that turned into boulders over the course of two thousand-plus yards. There were trees to the west, the south, and the east. Behind him, about two hundred yards was a cluster of thick trees, just beyond the gravel road.
The road was the only way in or out. Lenny’s four-by-four truck was parked between him and the road, about fifty yards back.
Lenny watched the target, held his breath. His index finger on his right hand squeezed the trigger back, slowly. Then, he felt the powerful kick of the gun as the three-thee-eight Lapua Magnum round, a devastating long-range bullet and his personal favorite, rocketed out of the muzzle.
The AWM bucked, and kicked hard, and the bullet was off.
The gunshot CRACKED! Echoing across the landscape like a thunderclap.
Lenny watched through the scope at the target.
The target was a ten-pound verdant watermelon, with a huge bullseye spray-painted on it in red. He had trucked it in the bed of his pickup, trucked it down the range on a dirt motorbike, also in the bed of his truck.
Nine other melons remained stacked in a crate, waiting their turn. He planned to shoot only eight more today; the last one he was going to take home and enjoy. A celebration for accomplishing the unaccomplishable.
To be honest with himself, however, he had attempted to break the current record many, many times before. And each time he had gone home with a watermelon that he could not enjoy. Symbolic. He’d ditched the watermelon out in the street leading to his house. The neighborhood dogs got plenty of watermelons to eat, year-round.
This time, he felt, would be significant. This time he would get the bullet on target.
Lenny breathed out, forgetting that he had been holding his breath for a moment.
The bullet had traveled a distance of more than twenty-seven hundred yards and it missed. Not surprising. Just disappointing.
He looked once again through the scope and checked the watermelon, checked the red painted bullseye. He could see the melon stuck on a six-foot stake in the ground. He saw the curved, green shell, the red paint, the bullseye. He saw the stake. Nothing had been hit by the bullet. All of it swayed in the wind, but remained whole and intact.
He racked the bolt on the rifle back, withdrew the brass, rested it back in an open box of three-three-eight Lapua Magnums beside him. He never left them out in the field, even if it was his own personal practice range. He believed in recycling. Besides, he was taught not to leave a trace of where he had been. Not that he was up to no good at the moment. But old ha
bits die hard.
Lenny racked the bolt again. The magazine sprung the next three-three-eight bullet up and into the chamber. Lenny moved his head away from the scope for only a moment, and removed his left hand from embracing the stock. He let the AWM rifle slope back, the barrel tilted up on the bipod, and facing the sky in a forty-five-degree incline. He never let go of the stock. He used his left hand and grabbed an open bottle of water, took a pull from it, and returned it back down on the northwest corner of the mat. Then he returned to his firing position.
He breathed in, deep, and breathed out, slow. He repeated this again, and again. Then, he slowed his heart rate, once again.
Adjusting the scope’s elevation and parallax and focus knobs, just a bit, he saw something else.
Sudden. Unexpected.
It popped out at him, startled him.
The watermelon and the stake were pitted down at a two-hundred-eighty-yard slope, with a dirt wall more than twenty yards behind them. A standard safety precaution to keep the bullet from traveling beyond the intended target and accidently hitting a pedestrian. Which would’ve been bad on many levels. Primarily because the bullet would most certainly kill the person.
Lenny had never heard of anyone surviving a three-three-eight Magnum round before, not once. Best case scenario for the victim of a three-three-eight Magnum round was getting an arm or a leg blown off, without damaging his center mass. A center mass hit was a kill shot, guaranteed. No walking away from that.
The second worry that Lenny had, just as loud in the back of his brain, was that his rifle was illegal in the UK. Although, he was way out in the countryside, about fifty miles west and slightly north of Cork, Ireland. He was in a rural area, where the authorities were more likely to overlook the possession of an illegal firearm, being that every family and farm within fifty square miles had firearms on their property. Still, it wasn’t a legal weapon. Not for him. Not with his PTSD.
He couldn’t help but feel the fear of getting caught with it, war hero or not. He would get jail time. No doubt.
