The Second Shooter

by Chuck Hustmyre

  "Those are two questions you shouldn't ask," Garcia said. "Just remember what curiosity did for the cat."

  Blackstone leaned forward. Garcia could almost see his hackles rising. "I'm a lot harder to put down than that FBI pogue."

  Garcia smiled, thinking, you may be harder, but you'll still go down if I need you too. He didn't say that, though. Instead, he patted Blackstone's shoulder and said, "Relax. He was a liability. You're an asset."

  Chapter 42

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2013

  A loud POP echoed through the motorhome and yanked Jake out of the fitful nap he had managed to fall into just past midnight. He sprang upright on the Winnebago's old sofa in time to see the headlamps illuminate a reflective green sign that read DALLAS 110. Then the sign disappeared as twin geysers of vapor and green fluid spewed up from under the hood and coated the windshield.

  Stacy, who had been curled in the front passenger seat, woke up, startled. "What was that?"

  Favreau, who had been asleep in a chair, was instantly alert and had a pistol in his hand.

  "Is anybody hurt?" Jake said.

  "I'm not hurt," Gordon said in an anxious voice as the motorhome started seesawing back and forth across the highway. "But I can't see."

  "It's the radiator," Jake said. "Ease on the breaks and pull to the shoulder."

  "I can't see the shoulder!"

  Jake shuffled forward, bracing himself in the swaying cabin with anything he could grab hold of. "Keep straight, apply the brakes slowly, and turn on the windshield wipers."

  Gordon did as Jake said and within a few seconds he had the motorhome back under control and was catching enough glimpses through the streaks of green goo between whacks of the windshield wipers to angle toward the shoulder. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief when the motorhome lurched to a stop.

  When Gordon finally let go of the steering wheel his hands were shaking. He glanced over at Stacy. "Image the irony."

  "What irony?" Stacy said, also a little shaken.

  "Outside of the conspirators themselves, we're the only people in the world who know what's going to happen tomorrow in Dallas," Gordon said. "And outside of a handful of others, the only ones who know what really happened there fifty years ago. Imagine the irony if we had died tonight on an empty stretch of highway in a crash caused by a busted radiator hose."

  "That's not irony, or karma, or any kind of cosmic juju," Jake said. "A bullet probably nicked the hose back at the trailer park. We're lucky we made it this far."

  Gordon turned in the driver's seat to look back at Jake. "I think it's more than that." He smiled. "History is a jealous bitch. And she guards her secrets."

  A few minutes later all four of them stood in front of the open hood as steam billowed into the air and radiator fluid poured onto the asphalt. After a cursory examination, Jake was able to determine that the radiator hose had not been shot, just worn through. Neglect, not bullets, had sprung the leak.

  "Now what do we do?" Favreau said.

  Jake looked at Gordon. "You got any duct tape?"

  ***

  The call came at 2 a.m. and dragged Max Garcia out of his dream about sipping a Cuba libre on a beach. He picked up his cellphone. "Yes."

  "Do you know who this is?"

  Garcia recognized the smooth, bourbon drawl of Allan Chessman, the CIA's deputy director of operations. A man Garcia had known for thirty years. And sleep deprived or not, he also recognized the code phrase Do you know who this is? and knew it meant the line was not secure so no names were to be used. "Of course," was all Garcia said.

  "Do you know why I'm calling?" Chessman asked.

  Garcia sat up in bad. "Did you talk to him?"

  "I did."

  "And?"

  "He was adamant," Chessman said. "Although, intransigent might be a better word to describe his position."

  "Because of his campaign promise?"

  "I think it goes deeper than that."

  "To what?"

  "This may sound like an oversimplification, but I think it's accurate," Chessman said. "The man does not take advice. No matter what the subject, whether it's strategy for a war or a Fed interest rate hike, he cannot accept that someone has a better understanding of the situation than he does."

  "In this case, he might be right."

  "He's a dilettante."

  "Who happens to sit in the Oval Office."

  "You've been out of the game a long time," Chessman said. "The rules have changed."

  "Yet, you're using the same playbook we used fifty years ago."

  "It worked then," Chessman said. "It'll work again."

  "It ripped the country apart."

  "That's not the way I remember it."

  "How would you know?" Garcia said. "You were still in diapers."

  "The VP is onboard."

  "In exchange for what?"

  "We promised to give him something he could walk back to the Taliban and AQ."

  "Is that all he wanted?" Garcia asked, surprised the vice president's asking price for complicity in treason and murder hadn't been steeper. The man spent thirty-five years in the Senate, many of them on the Intelligence Committee. Garcia knew him well.

  "We also promised to fund his campaign in 2016."

  That sounded more like the man Garcia knew. "What are you giving him?"

  "Not another 9/11," Chessman said. "But something on US soil. Enough to justify another troop surge."

  "Jesus. For how long?"

  "Well, if he wins in '16, it could be quite a while."

  "This is going to be a disaster."

  "Is that what you said last time?"

  "As a matter of fact, that's exactly what I said."

  "And history proved you wrong."

  Garcia was tired of arguing. "What do you want from me?"

  "Make sure the Frenchman doesn't fuck it up."

  "Why do you think I'm here?"

  "You're running out of time."

  "I'll find him."

  "Do it quick," Chessman said. "And then get out of town. They'll be a lot of blowback."

  "You think?" Garcia said, hoping the sarcasm in his voice conveyed more than his words.

  But Chessman had already hung up.

  ***

  Gertz knelt on the balcony of the high-rise apartment as the sun was starting to peek above the horizon to his left. He rested a pair of 15x80 Steiner binoculars on the railing and looked south. He focused on the rear of a seven-story building a mile away. On the first floor, a pair of glass doors opened onto a short set of concrete steps that led down to a small parking lot. He estimated the angle of deflection from his balcony to the double doors to be about thirty degrees. The deflection had to be factored in, as did the wind, even with such a heavy bullet.

  He looked up from the binoculars and stared across the mile of city between him and the building. "That's a very long shot," he said to himself in German. Then he pressed his eyes again to the precisely ground ocular lenses of the Steiner binoculars and refocused on the distant building.

  The plan, already a complicated undertaking with a hundred moving parts, had gotten progressively more complicated in the eight weeks since Gertz had arrived in the United States.

  He was a shooter, not an actor, so it had come as a surprise to him that in addition to establishing his residency and his routine in a leased high-rise apartment with a clear, if distant, line of sight to the target, and becoming an expert with a rifle that could engage targets at such a range, his employers had also wanted him to befriend the patsy, a brain-damaged ex-soldier named Ray Fluker, by playing the part of "George," a rich but generous American playboy. Something that had proved to be no simple task because Fluker, it turned out, was not an easy man to meet, much less become friends with.

  It had taken Gertz three tries to accidentally "meet" Fluker, who lived in a dilapidated motel on the ragged outskirts of Dallas and who apparently did absolutely nothing other than shuttle between work and his motel room. Fortun
ately, the ex-soldier had a kind heart, so when he saw "George" trying unsuccessfully to change a flat tire on his Mercedes-Benz, he offered to help. It took some more time, but the reluctant Fluker had finally opened up.

  And as if all of that wasn't enough to keep Gertz busy, there was the shot itself. When Gertz's employers had first approached him in Germany, they told him he would be positioned on an apartment balcony approximately twenty stories high and would fire at a stationary target at a range of one thousand meters. As described, that shot was going to be very difficult because it was at the outer edge of the performance envelope for most military-grade sniper rifles chambered for the .308, the .30-06, and even the 7mm Magnum.

  Fortunately, Gertz wasn't going to have to rely on a weapon chambered for any of those rounds. He had insisted on, and his employers had agreed to provide him with, a Barrett M-82 .50-caliber rifle. Finding a place to train with the huge rifle had been yet another challenge. Even in a state as big as Texas, people tended to notice someone firing a bullet that was the primary armament for US fighter planes during World War II and Korea. Eventually though, after some diligent searching, Gertz had found a place to practice with the Barrett, but it was a hundred miles west of Dallas.

  Gertz's biggest surprise, however, had come immediately after his arrival, during his first face-to-face meeting with his cutout, an American he knew only as Walsh.

  Chapter 43

  Two months ago, sitting at a kitchen table in Walsh's apartment, the cutout had shown Gertz a satellite photograph of downtown Dallas. Two buildings were circled in red. Gertz knew one of the circled buildings. It stood at the corner of North Houston and Elm streets and had once been known as the Texas School Book Depository. Now it was a local government office building and its top floor housed a museum dedicated to the Kennedy assassination. The other building circled in red was north of the old Book Depository and on the opposite side of an elevated highway.

  "We lost the apartment," Walsh said. "The owner took it off the market before we could sign the lease."

  "Is there another apartment in the same building?"

  Walsh shook his head. "That was the only one high enough and on the right side to reach the target."

  "So the operation is scrubbed?"

  Walsh tapped his finger on the northern building. "I found an apartment here."

  "That's the wrong side," Gertz said. He pointed to the green space just below the old Book Depository Building. "He's giving the speech on the south side of the building, facing the plaza. I won't even be able to see him from there."

  Walsh touched an open spot on the north side of the Book Depository, opposite Dealey Plaza. "The backup limousine will be here."

  For a moment, Gertz studied the distance between the two circled buildings. "What's the range?"

  "Fifteen hundred meters."

  "That's five hundred more meters."

  "That's the closest apartment I could find."

  Gertz continued to study the map.

  "The gun has the range," Walsh said.

  "You are adding fifty percent to the bullet's time of flight."

  "That's only one more second."

  "Gravity, deflection, wind, even humidity affect the path of the bullet. When you increase the projectile's exposure to them you increase exponentially the difficulty of the shot and the likelihood of a miss."

  "You came highly recommended."

  "I am one of the three best shooters in the world," Gertz said, "but I cannot guarantee a hit on the target. There are too many variables over which I have no control."

  Walsh stared at him. "Can you make a shot at fifteen hundred meters or not?"

  Gertz returned the stare. Then he nodded. "Yes."

  "Good. Now let's get to work."

  "But I can only make the shot if I can see the target," Gertz said. He jabbed his forefinger on the parking lot on the north side of the Book Depository. "The president doesn't ride in the backup limousine."

  "He will," Walsh said. "Follow me and I'll show you why."

  Gertz followed Walsh into the den, where a homemade workbench had been set up by laying a sheet of plywood across four chairs. On the workbench sat a sleek fiberglass glider with a five-foot wingspan. Next to the glider was a remote control console, similar to the controllers used to play video games. The console had a retractable antenna and two small joysticks, also several buttons and a small LCD screen. Since the remote control was designed to transmit a radio signal, Gertz assumed the LCD showed what radio frequency the device was transmitting on. People who flew remote-controlled model aircraft near each other needed to use different radio frequencies to keep from inadvertently sending wayward signals to other aircraft.

  Jury-rigged to the bottom of the control console by a couple of wires was a red button, the kind you could pick up at an electronics store. Also on the workbench was a laptop computer, a string of black firecrackers, and a roll of duct tape. A USB cable plugged into the side of the laptop ran out to the balcony.

  Walsh pointed to the glider. "I'm going to move the president with that."

  Gertz was not a man who liked surprised. "Tell me your plan," he said.

  Walsh slid open the glass door leading to the balcony and stepped out. Gertz followed him. They were twenty floors above the street. Walsh handed Gertz a pair of inexpensive binoculars, twelve-power Bushnells, not the carefully crafted Steiners he was used to, and pointed north to a speck of green about two and a half miles away. "That's Dealey Plaza."

  As Walsh explained the new, expanded plan, Gertz focused the binoculars on the plaza and pictured the scene in his head:

  President Noah Omar is speaking from behind a lectern set atop a temporary podium in front of the old Book Depository Building, now the Dallas County Administration Building. A few thousand people have jammed themselves into Dealey Plaza to hear the president speak on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

  Walsh launches the glider from his balcony, two hundred feet above the ground. Taped to the top of the five-foot wing and rigged to an improvised remote-controlled detonator is a string of firecrackers. A small bump in the bottom of the fuselage, just back from the nose, is a fiber-optic camera. Inside the fuselage, farther back under the wing and closer to the glider's center of gravity, is a tiny microwave transmitter that beams a video signal back to an antenna set up on Walsh's balcony, and then by wire to the laptop inside his apartment.

  "From this height the glider has a range of four miles," Walsh says. "And unlike the personal drones people have started buying, it's totally silent."

  The president continues speaking as Walsh uses the control console and the laptop display to pilot the glider over Dealey Plaza. When the glider is directly above the crowd, Walsh stabs the red button jury-rigged to the console.

  The detonator touches off the firecrackers, which begin to pop like machine gun fire.

  "The Secret Service will initiate their emergency protocols."

  Panic sweeps the crowd. The Secret Service drags the president off the podium and into the Administration Building.

  "With the threat vector in front, the security team will use the backup limousine."

  Inside the building, Secret Service agents rush the president down a hallway toward the far exit.

  "As he exits the north side of the building, you'll have your shot."

  In another high-rise apartment a mile north of the Book Depository-turned-County Administration Building, Gertz sits behind the Barrett M-82, .50-caliber sniper rifle. The rifle is mounted on a bipod that rests on top of a small table. Gertz aims through the open sliding glass door that lets onto the balcony.

  He peers through the sixteen-power scope and superimposes the duplex reticle's crosshairs on the glass double doors at the rear of the building, just a few feet beyond the waiting backup presidential limousine. Seconds later, two Secret Service agents throw open the glass doors, while another agent yanks open the right rear door of the limousine.


  "He'll come through the door in less than thirty seconds," Walsh says.

  Gertz takes a deep breath as a phalanx of Secret Service agents burst through the rear doors, shielding the president with their bodies. Gertz expels half of the breath and centers the reticle on the knot of agents. He squeezes the trigger.

  BOOM!

  The massive 661-grain, .50-caliber bullet rockets toward the president's protective cocoon of Secret Service agents.

  "The bullet will take three seconds to travel to the target. The sound will take five seconds," Gertz hears himself tell Walsh.

  The bullet strikes the agent directly in front of President Omar. The shockwave knocks everyone down and the shower of blood covers them all.

  "By the time the president and his agents hear the first shot," Gertz says, "the second bullet will already be on its way."

  Through the scope, Gertz sees several agents pulling the president to his feet. Everyone is splattered with the viscera of the dead. Gertz centers the crosshairs on the dazed president and squeezes the trigger again.

  BOOM!

  As the rifle settles from the recoil, Gertz sees the president of the United States disappear in an explosion of flesh and blood.

  "Then all you have to do is leave the patsy..." Walsh says.

  Gertz stands and walks away from the huge rifle. He stops next to Ray Fluker, who lies unconscious on the floor. Gertz pulls the pin on an M-15 white phosphorous grenade and slips the metal ring onto Fluker's finger.

  Gertz opens the door and steps into the hallway. He pauses and tosses the grenade back into the apartment. He shuts the door. The apartment explodes in white fire as Gertz walks down the hallway.

  "...and exit the building."

  Gertz walks out through the apartment building's ornate front doors as all around him panicked residents run helter-skelter. Once out in the street, Gertz glances up at the building and sees dirty gray smoke billowing from the top.