Target America: A Sniper Elite Novel

by Scott McEwen

  Couture glanced at Lewkowicz, his eyebrows soaring. The president of the United States had—in so many words—just threatened a Russian president with nuclear war for the first time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

  There was a long moment of silence before Patrushev made his reply. “I will order all surface vessels withdrawn from the Sea of Japan until this crisis is resolved. Will that be satisfactory, Mr. President?”

  “Yes, it will, sir. I am grateful for your consideration in this matter.”

  “Very well,” said Patrushev. “I wish to you good luck in finding the device—wherever it was manufactured.”

  “Thank you, sir. Is there anything more I can do for you at this time, Mr. President?”

  “It is I who will remain at your service, Mr. President. Please do not hesitate to call if I can be of any further assistance to you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You are welcome,” Patrushev said. “Good-bye.”

  The president of the United States hung up the phone and looked at General Couture. “He’s agreed to pull the Russian surface fleet from the Sea of Japan. What’s that tell you?”

  Couture didn’t hesitate. “It tells me he knows the nukes are Russian—and he’s worried a second detonation could lead to war. What about Korea?”

  “The North plans to attack South Korea the minute they hear there’s been a detonation in DC. Patrushev said the Chinese are trying to talk them out of it, but he doesn’t expect success.”

  Tim Hagen came into the room. “I have news from Montana, Mr. President.”

  “Is Shannon’s family safe?”

  “Nobody knows yet, sir, but the Gulfstream didn’t divert to Creech as ordered. It landed at a private airfield in Montana, and Shannon’s team took off in a private plane.”

  The president was too rattled by the prospect of war on the Korean Peninsula to get worked up over Gil Shannon’s whereabouts. Going to war with North Korea within minutes or hours of losing Washington, DC, would make for a logistical nightmare. Kim Jong-un may have been unstable, but his military advisors were clever. North Korea would never get a better opportunity to try to reunite the peninsula.

  “Fine. Leave it alone. We’ll worry about Shannon later.”

  “But, Mr. President—”

  Couture cut him off. “I believe the president of the United States just gave you an order, Mr. Hagen. I suggest you obey it.”

  Hagen looked at the president, expecting support.

  “Go and greet the cabinet for me when they arrive, Tim.” The president sat back with a sigh and began to massage his temples. “We’re very busy here at the moment.”

  63

  MONTANA

  With Oso Cazador locked in the Chatham house, Marie and Dusty saddled up a pair of horses and set out for the ranch in a thickening fog. Marie’s breathing was less painful with the elastic bandage wound tightly around her rib cage, but the jouncing of the horse caused the occasional stabbing pain.

  “I’d sure feel better if you headed back,” Dusty said.

  Marie held the reins with one hand as they rode, the other inside her jacket over her cracked rib. “I think maybe we should skirt north.”

  “Is the old Indian trail still there?”

  “Yeah. You know about that?”

  “That’s how I used to get to the Fergusons when we were kids. I was a trespassin’ little son of a bitch, Marie.”

  She laughed in spite of her pain and fear. You never knew where you might find a friend in this world.

  “I was always worried I might run across your daddy up there,” he went on. “I was scared to death of that guy.”

  “He was a grump, but he was harmless.”

  They rode along through the fog, the horses puffing steam from their flaring nostrils. Marie was shivering with cold, and she was grateful for the heat of the animal between her legs.

  Dusty dismounted at the northwestern border of the Chatham ranch and used a pair of side cutters to snip the barbed wire fence. “I can still remember when this fence line used to run another couple hundred yards over that-a-way.” He pointed in the direction of the McGuthry ranch.

  Marie smiled. “If we survive, I’ll let you move it back to where it was.”

  He laughed and pulled the wire back out of the way so it wouldn’t snare the horses’ legs, and they crossed over to pick up the old Indian trail, following it through the rocks just below the foothills toward Marie’s ranch.

  • • •

  BACK AT THE Chatham residence, Oso quickly concluded that Marie wasn’t coming back for him anytime soon. The scent of the house and the man who lived in it were foreign to him, and he was growing increasingly anxious about being alone in the foreign environment. Already missing the familiar comfort of his leather chair, he decided that it was time to leave and got up from the floor near the back door to hunt for a way out.

  He caught the scent of fresh air coming from the back hall and followed it to the source at the end of the corridor, where the door to the laundry room stood ajar. He nosed his way inside and stood in the dark, listening. A distant flash of lightning illuminated a half-open window above the washing machine. The screen was down, but that didn’t concern him. He had learned young there wasn’t a screen window or door on earth that could keep him in if he really wanted out. It hadn’t taken Marie or Gil very long to learn that frustrating little fact of life either.

  He jumped onto the washing machine and, with his head, pressed against the screen until it bowed outward. Then he gave it a shove, and the screen tore away from the old wooden frame. After that, it was just a matter of shouldering up the sash and leaping out into the fog. He put his nose into the air, but Marie’s scent was undetectable in the mist. That didn’t matter. He knew his way home.

  64

  MONTANA,

  Gil’s Ranch

  Special Agent Spencer Starks was not looking to become a hero. Far from it. To begin with, most heroes wound up dead, and he had no intention of concluding his FBI career as the thirty-seventh Service Martyr in the Hall of Honor. On the other hand, he believed fully in the old dogface axiom that had been drilled into his head during basic training: “Do something—even if it’s wrong!”

  And those dudes back at the crossroads didn’t have the slightest clue. That didn’t make them bad guys, it just made them the wrong guys for the job, and it was probably a good thing they knew it. The problem for Starks was that even if he wasn’t exactly the right guy for the job, he wasn’t exactly the wrong guy, either, and he couldn’t just stand around back there listening to their hemming and hawing while people were fighting for their lives five miles up the road.

  Sure, he might get there too late to do any good, but somebody had to try, and since he was the only combat vet on the scene, the responsibility fell to him.

  At least, that’s how he saw it.

  Starks was making pretty good time driving through the fog with the parking lights on, and according to the odometer, he was almost at the ranch. He was glad for the fog, thinking it might allow him to approach the scene without drawing fire. The main gate appeared out of the mist, and he pulled the car to the side of the road, killing the lights and the engine. He dismounted with a pair of Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, one slung around his back, and the other in his hands with the stock extended.

  The night was dead quiet, and he couldn’t see more than five feet in any direction. Missing the protection of an Abrams tank and its Chobham armor, he knew that to continue directly up the dirt road would be unwise, so he took the iPhone from his pocket and checked to make sure that the compass app was functioning correctly. The agent took a bearing and left the road moving east, hoping the house would be more or less directly north of the main gate.

  His load-out consisted of six magazines for the machine guns and three mags for his laser-sighte
d Sig Sauer .40 caliber pistol. He promised himself that he would withdraw if he lived long enough to run out of machine gun ammo. If he couldn’t get the job done with ninety machine gun rounds, he wasn’t likely going to turn the tide of battle with a pistol.

  He came to a barbed wire fence and followed it north. Suddenly Starks stumbled over a dead body. Crouching down to examine it in the dim blue glow of his iPhone screen, the first thing he noticed was a vicious bite wound to the back of the neck.

  “Looks like a Montana werewolf got your ass.” He rolled the body onto its back and noted immediately the Arab features of the face. “Welcome to America, asshole.” Starks peeled the night vision goggles off the dead man’s head and was about to move out, when he heard someone trotting toward him in the fog.

  He slid to his belly, resting his thumb on the laser button of the MP5.

  A figure appeared out of the fog gripping an AK-47. Starks’s laser sight appeared green in the night vision. He fired a six-round burst, and the man flew backward off his feet.

  Starks jumped up and pounced on the body, bashing in the face with the stock of the MP5, as he had been trained to do as a soldier. Quickly stripping the body of the rifle and ammo pouch, he slung the MP5 and moved forward with the AK-47, feeling suddenly invincible as he muttered his uncle Steve’s old catchphrase from an all but forgotten war: “Charlie owns the night—but we’re taking it away from him.”

  65

  LANGLEY

  Flanked by a pair of security officers, CIA Director of Operations George Shroyer and Deputy Director Cletus Webb walked into the computer lab, where Pope was still sifting through the data he had pulled from Kashkin’s hard drive.

  Pope looked up from his computer and smiled. “Have you come to revoke my clearances, George?”

  Shroyer shook his head. “No, not yet.” He signaled the two security men to wait outside in the hallway. “But that’s coming. I just spoke with the president. He’s grateful for what you’ve done to help us track the bomb to DC, but he’s decided the time has come for you to think about retiring from government service. The reason we’re here is to begin your debrief.”

  Pope glanced at the clock on the wall. “Debrief at two o’clock in the morning, George?”

  “Well, frankly, Bob, we’re all a little nervous about what else you might be up to.”

  Pope looked at Webb and smiled. “Are you nervous, Cletus?”

  Webb shook his head, returning the smile. “No, Bob. I’m your biggest fan, but the president is right. You’ve taken things too far; you’ve become a loose cannon.”

  “The loose-cannon metaphor implies that I’m equally dangerous to both sides, and that’s not true.”

  “You’re right. Poor choice of words.”

  Shroyer cleared his throat. “DOD is moving the ISIS machine into downtown DC as we speak. It’ll begin sweeping the city within the hour. So we’re very confident.”

  The ISIS was the Integrated Standoff Inspection System specifically designed to detect SNM (special nuclear material, such as plutonium and certain types of uranium) at a distance. The multimillion-dollar machine was enclosed within a fifty-three-foot trailer towed behind a semi-tractor. It worked by aiming gamma rays at containers suspected of holding SNM. These rays of high-energy photons penetrated the suspect container and excited the radioactive particles within the nuclear material by inducing a reaction called photofission. The result was a burst of high-energy particles that could be detected by the ISIS up to a hundred meters away. However, the machine’s primary application was scanning shipping containers from overseas.

  “The ISIS is a good machine,” Pope said, “but it’s untested in this type of application. It wasn’t designed to search a cityscape for shielded weapons.”

  “DTRA says it can do the job,” Shroyer said. DTRA was the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, under the egis of the Department of Defense.

  Pope crossed his arms. “I guess we’ll see. It is all we’ve got.”

  “The president wants you to explain to me exactly what you meant when you told him you’d gained access to the Chinese Ministry of State Security.”

  Pope rocked back. “That information is for the president’s ear.”

  “In this instance, he and I are the same person. We can call him if you think I’m making that up.”

  Pope knew the time had come to play his final ace. “Over the last few years, I’ve allowed Lijuan to share sensitive material with the Chinese; nothing that would give them a technical advantage but enough to make them confident in the material and to keep them coming back to her for more.”

  “What kind of sensitive material?”

  “Communications software, passcodes, access to a CIA mainframe here and there.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Shroyer flared. “That’s high treason!”

  Pope looked back and forth between them and smiled. “Try proving that, George.”

  “What?”

  “I said try proving it. You’ll never even figure out what information was shared, much less how it was done.”

  “Oh, no? We’ll just see what Lijuan Chow has to say about that. She’s being held as a terrorist. Did you know that? Her life in prison can be particularly miserable.”

  Pope felt sick to his stomach. “When was the last time anyone spoke with Lijuan? Is she under constant observation? Or is she alone in a cell?”

  “What does that mean?”

  Pope shrugged. “It’s just a question.”

  Shroyer looked at Webb. “Call the detention center and make sure she’s being kept under observation.”

  Webb left the room.

  Shroyer turned on Pope, pointing a finger. “You’re going to wind up in prison right alongside her if you don’t watch your step. Do you realize that?”

  Pope shook his head. “No, George. I’m going stay right where I am, and I’m going to keep right on helping defend this country—just as I have for the last ten years.”

  Shroyer shook his head. “You’ve lost your damn mind. Do you really think that box of secret files you have is going to save you?”

  Pope stared at him for a long, unnerving moment. “Have you ever seen any secret files, George? Have you ever even heard of me threatening anybody with one? Or have you heard all of the same innuendos as everyone else?”

  Shroyer blinked.

  “I’m going to stay right where I am because I’ve given this agency access to the Chinese Guojia Anquan Bu mainframe. That means we can read their mail now, George, and we can read it in real time. Hell, I’m more likely to end up with your job than I am to end up in prison.”

  Shroyer knew that if Pope was telling the truth, the president would have no choice but to keep him around. The country couldn’t afford to lose his knowledge of the Chinese intelligence network. “How in hell did you manage it?”

  “I allowed the Chinese to steal a communications program they thought was designed for one of our own defense systems. Lijuan passed it on to them, having no idea that I’d written the program specifically for the Chinese—or that I’d written in a very complicated series of back doors.”

  “They’ll eventually find them and take them out—or discard the program altogether.”

  Pope shook his head. “They didn’t even examine the programming; they put it directly into service. They stopped being suspicious of Lijuan’s material a long time ago because I kept it so pristine. I had to give up some very valuable information to gain that kind of confidence, but in the end it’s going to be worth it.”

  Shroyer gaped at him. “It’s you! You’re the one who’s been leaking intel to the Chinese these past ten years.”

  “Again,” Pope said, “try proving it.”

  Webb returned. “Lijuan was found dead in her bunk half an hour ago. The doctor at the detention center thinks it was cyanide.”


  Appearing suddenly ill, Pope removed his glasses and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the desk.

  Webb look at him with more empathy than anger. “Did you know, Bob?”

  Pope massaged the bridge of his nose. “I had a very strong suspicion.”

  “And you didn’t think to warn us?” Shroyer asked accusatorily.

  Pope ignored him.

  “I asked you a question, Robert.”

  Pope’s response was eerily soft. “It was necessary for her to die . . . this way, she can’t ever be interrogated, and the Chinese will remain confident in the integrity of the information she passed on to them—all in accordance with my original plan.”

  “Jesus, you’re a ruthless bastard,” Shroyer muttered.

  Pope looked at him. “Do you know China’s greatest advantage over the rest of the world? Aside from their massive population.”

  Shroyer stared.

  “It’s their patience, George. They are an infinitely patient people. And patience is the very bedrock of wisdom. They’re looking to take over the world, and it doesn’t matter to them if it takes another hundred years. Their sole weakness is their intellectual arrogance, and that’s what I took advantage of. I took advantage of it by making a deal with the devil in exchange for my soul, and I did it because something had to be done to buy this nation time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “Time to realize that we’ve grown lazy . . . that laziness is a prelude to weakness . . . and that we need to make some fundamental changes to the way things are run.”

  66

  MONTANA,

  Gil’s Ranch

  Hal was peering out the upstairs window when a group of armed men suddenly materialized out of the fog, rushing the house with AK-47s. “Here they come!”