by Joe Gores
Corwin pointed the Barr & Stroud prismatic optical rangefinder like a camera at the only place in the meadow where they could put a podium. It was 1,210 yards. A hellacious long shot: nobody would be looking up here before he pulled the trigger, and after he fired, it would be an hour of confusion before they scoped out exactly where the shot had come from.
By then he would be long gone, in the stream to confuse the inevitable bloodhounds. And instead of riding it down, he would climb uphill through the icy water to emerge into shielding trees, cut diagonally up across the face of the mountain below the tree line, go back around to the western side. No exposure, not even to choppers. Back to Janet’s 4-Runner by dark, start driving long before they could get their perimeter checkpoint system operational, be hundreds of miles to the west by dawn.
Not even the unknown tracker, even if he somehow got the location right, could know where Corwin was planning his ambush. He would have dozens of square miles of meadow, forest, and precipitous rock face to comb for shooting sites, with nothing to indicate that Corwin had ever been in any of them.
—
When Thorne stepped off the helicoptor at Camp David, he was picked up by a six-foot, hard-bitten man in a golf cart who said he was Ray Franklin, Hatfield’s hot-shot who had been outfoxed by Corwin not once, but twice. And, concomitantly, embarrassed by Thorne not once, but twice. Franklin was from a crack FBI field unit, and Thorne had made them all look foolish.
Flanking the narrow blacktop was dense forest; beyond were Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Camouflage tarps covered the Secret Service Command Post and the roof of the comm center.
‘Were they already in place before 9/11?’
Franklin sucked hard on a Marlboro. He was just as hostile as his boss. ‘Yeah. Towel-heads aren’t the only ones gunning for the President besides your shit-heel buddy Corwin.’
They didn’t speak again until Franklin swerved into the woods to stop at a one-story 3,000-square-foot rustic cabin with a half-log exterior. Reverence entered his voice.
‘Behind those logs is a solid-concrete inner shell with Kevlar plugs. Bomb and weapon resistant. The basement is stocked with supplies and reinforced to ground-zero specifications in case of a nuclear attack.’
The door opened and Hatfield gestured at them impatiently.
‘Thanks for the ride,’ Thorne said.
‘Fuck you,’ said Franklin.
Dominating the big informal room was a burnished dining table with a halfdozen chairs around it. Framed cowboy art, landscape photographs, and western-motif tapestries covered the walls. Two overstuffed sofas were covered with textured pillows.
The president, Jaeger, Hatfield, and the Bobbsy Twins, Crandall and Quarles, were already at the table. For the moment, no Johnny Doyle. When Thorne began his presentation he realized that he didn’t have many friends in the room. Hatfield’s play obviously was to get Thorne’s input, downgrade it in the president’s eyes, then present it as his own.
Thorne began, ‘Mr. President, in your website announcement of locations where you will be giving speeches on your trip, I noted one in the Bitterroot Mountains of western Montana.’
‘Yes, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is releasing two young grizzly bears back into the wild there. It’s an experiment, not popular with everyone, to show my support for the environmental movement.’
‘Corwin will be there,’ said Thorne.
‘The Secret Service will be there too,’ said Hatfield. ‘In force. The local ranchers claim the grizzlies will attack their livestock, and Montana and Idaho are loaded with anti-government militia and survivalist groups. Security will be very tight. A fucking squirrel won’t be able to get close to the President.’
‘Corwin doesn’t have to get close. He’s a sniper.’
‘Was a sniper – forty years ago. We’re talking about a mountain meadow surrounded by mixed hardwood and conifer stands. In the forest, Corwin has no shooting lanes. The surrounding peaks are too far back for a sniper shot, and he can’t get close enough for a knife or a bomb or a grenade. So it has to be a handgun, and a snap shot at that, from the crowd. Forget it.’
Thorne made his voice incredulous, though it was what he had expected from Hatfield.
‘We’re talking about the life of the president of the United States here! I was brought in because the computer told you that the scenario I worked out would probably be the one Corwin will use. Well, this is where I would strike. A sniper shot from outside the Secret Service security perimeter.’
Hatfield had come prepared. He snapped his fingers; Johnny Doyle appeared with a topographical map to spread out on the table. All carefully choreographed. Had Hatfield’s hostility blinded him to the dangers of this site? If he had considered it in private, he now was rejecting it in public.
‘The closest places from which he could get a clear shot are seven-hundred-fifty yards out.’ Hatfield jabbed his finger at the map. ‘There and there and there. Corwin wouldn’t waste his chance on a shot he’d be sure to miss.’
‘I agree. But he will be using a high-powered rifle with a sniper scope from an elevated rock-face beyond seven-hundred-fifty yards out.’ Thorne was doing his own finger-jabbing. ‘Here, say, or here. It’s what I would do if I had his skills.’
‘What the hell do you know about his skills? After he left Vietnam, we have no hard facts about—’
‘But in Vietnam,’ said Thorne quickly.
When Corwin was in a bodybag he’d file a report with the facts he’d dug out, but not before. They knew nothing about Victor Blackburn’s intel, nothing about Corwin hiding out in his old cabin near Portage, nothing about those thousand-yard practice shooting sites. Thorne wanted to keep it that way.
‘He’s fifty-six fucking years old,’ sneered Hatfield, ‘and half-crippled. His hand and eye coordination have to be going.’
‘Do you want to take that chance? Let the Secret Service handle the upclose and personal. It’s essential that your men set up at seven-hundred-fifty yards, looking out and up, not down and in. I can be on site, monitoring—’
‘Like hell you can! You’re here in an advisory capacity only – your own request. No field work. Well, you’ve advised. Ray Franklin is waiting outside to take you back to the chopper. You will return to D.C. forthwith to await further instructions.’
Thorne looked to Wallberg for support. It was the man’s own life that was at stake here. The president wavered, then looked away. Hatfield had convinced them that he had it under control. None of them understood how formidable Corwin was.
Jaeger said, ‘Thank you for your input, Mr. Thorne.’
Thorne walked out. It was up to him to go to Montana and assess the site in person rather than on paper.
‘I say we ship his sorry ass back to Kenya,’ said Hatfield when he was gone. ‘His usefulness here is ended.’
‘What if, just what if, he’s right?’ asked Wallberg. ‘What if Corwin is there and does try to shoot me when I—’
‘Then my men will tag him before he can fire. This is my game, Mr. President. I know that nobody can make a thousand-yard down-angle shot while dealing with those mountain updrafts.’
‘With the Secret Service and the FBI’s hostage rescue men on site,’ Jaeger added unctuously, ‘we will have security, and containment of the fact that there’s a lone gunman from the President’s past stalking him with murderous intent. That he’s a deluded psycho is irrelevant. If the fact that he’s out there became known, the political fallout would be unthinkable.’
21
Thorne told the Mayflower’s front desk that he could be reached c/o Victor Blackburn at Fort Benning, Georgia, then sent Victor an e-mail.
Victor: Check me into the BOQ, then make yourself scarce for a few days. We’re out in the woods getting drunk like all good Rangers should. Details later. Thorne.
He back-doored his minders, walked out to the depot on L Street, and caught a through bus to Atlantic City. From there he flew commercial to Missou
la, Montana, rented a car, drove to Hamilton, and checked into the Super 8 Motel under his own name. The risk was small: officially, he was at Fort Benning.
The next morning he drove south on 93, turned onto narrow 473 well short of towering white-clad Trapper Peak so he could approach the meadow the way the presidental party would enter. Using his temporary FBI credentials for site access, he spent the day working his way up and down the granite rockface, and through the tumbled massive boulders on the slope overlooking the meadow. Hatfield was right: no ambush sites up to 750 yards out.
The next day, he drove south of Trapper on 93, went west into Idaho on narrow unmarked dirt tracks, then north again seeking a way up to the western side of the Bitterroot ridge whose eastern slope facing the meadow he’d combed the day before. He found a subalpine valley and hiked up it, looking for man sign. None. But this was the way Corwin would have to have come to prep his shot. If he was here at all.
For the next two mornings, Thorne, seeking sniper sites, worked his way up over the ridge and down the far side toward the meadow. The more acute the downward angle, the harder the shot. By the last day he could safely work the mountain before Hatfield’s Feebs arrived, he had three maybes: 950 yards out, 1,095 yards out, and a literal long shot at 1,210 yards out.
The last was a sniper’s dream, a narrow V-shaped slot between two granite walls camouflaged by stunted pines. The floor was dry packed dirt. Behind, a narrow mountain torrent rushed down slope from the melting snow lingering in shaded areas far above. Good escape route for Corwin after the shot.
But the distance: over 1,200 yards! Twelve football fields laid end to end down the mountain face. Your slug would drop some twenty-five feet while the swirling, unpredictable winds of the 7,500 foot elevation played games with it. Utterly impossible.
Still, this was Corwin…
Day after tomorrow, Thorne was quite sure, both he and Corwin would be working their way over the summit and going down the far side toward the meadow. Two reluctant killers, one bent on murder, the other bent on stopping him. Stopping him how, if it actually came to that? With his Randall Survivor?
Reluctant as he was, Thorne had no choice: Hatfield had mesmerized himself and all the president’s men with the idea that if Corwin showed at all, he would try wet work, up close and personal. He also remembered Sean Connery’s scorn-filled line in The Untouchables about bringing a knife to a gunfight.
In a downtown Hamilton gun store, Thorne professed total ignorance so the clerk could sell him a bolt-action Winchester Standard Model 70 in .30-06 caliber with a Weaver K-4 scope. Thousands were sold every year. No waiting period, no papers to sign. Just another guy who liked to go out in the woods and blast away. Nothing to alert Hatfield’s men if they even bothered to check.
At four-thirty a.m. on speech day, Corwin checked out of his motel. He needed time to hide the 4-Runner and walk back. Afterwards, he’d call Janet’s cell to find out where to leave it. He’d be in everybody’s cross-hairs until they figured he had died or disappeared for good, but she would be well and truly out of it. As long as he was in her life, she would never find a man of her own.
For a moment, his resolve flickered. Today, he planned to commit murder. All those countless nights full of grotesque dreams and memories came back to him full-force. Would he have the seeds for any more killing?
Two rangers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were working with two college students from the Wildlife Biology Program of the University Of Montana’s School of Forestry at Missoula to release a young male grizzly named Smokey, and a female, gender-misnamed Winnie the Pooh, into the wild. Not that the bears knew they had names. They were wild, and wanted to be.
‘Just two lousy bears being released,’ groused Laura Givens. She was twenty and earnest.
‘It’s a start,’ objected Ranger Rick mildly – yeah, his name really was Ranger Rick, Rick Tandy. He was twenty-two, and more interested in getting into Laura’s pants than arguing with her.
Sam Jones, the other ranger, was thirty-five and secretly sided with the ranchers on this one, as did many in Fish and Wildlife. More grizzlies they didn’t need to pull down and maul their livestock.
‘Just two-hundred and seventy-eight bears to go,’ he said.
‘It should be six-hundred and twenty-eight bears to go,’ exclaimed Laura, eyes flashing. ‘That’s how many we need for a full recovery of the population.’
Sean McLean was twenty-five and completing his PhD. He said in support, ‘There are sixteen-thousand square miles of virgin territory here – just a couple of highways and a few unimproved roads through. Enough land for our bears to reproduce, and eventually bridge the gap between the existing populations. But you Feds are giving us only the area north of U.S. Highway 12 to work with.’
‘So two bears is a great sufficiency,’ said Sam. ‘What do you say to that, everyone?’
Neither Laura or Sean spoke. The bears, stalking their cages, growled in unison.
The press was in the back of Air Force One, the players were in the front. Wallberg distractedly riffled the pages of his speech. He and his entourage would be choppered from the Air Force base near Missoula, to an LZ near the speech site, and then motorcaded in armored limos to the meadow where the grizzlies would be released.
‘The grizzly bear is a keystone species, with stringent habitat requirements. They serve as a natural barometer of ecosystem health for hundreds of other species…’
The pages fell to his lap. Corwin had assumed mythic proportions in his mind. Thorne said Corwin would be here. He believed Thorne. He raised the speech, tried to concentrate.
‘Grizzlies cannot survive if their remaining habitat is broken up into small chunks through reduction and isolation…’
Superimposed on the pages was Corwin’s face from The Desert Palms Resort last fall. If only the Secret Service had been a few seconds quicker, had shot a little straighter…
‘Since the pockets of grizzlies in Yellowstone and the surrounding wilderness areas are not contiguous, they are not enough to maintain the population at a viable level…’
That night in the California desert, Corwin had no idea why Mather had tried to kill him. But before election night he must have found out: Mather was dead, and now he wanted Gus Wallberg.
Looking down at the distracted President, Jaeger felt only contempt. A man fearing for his life would hide that fact.
‘Mr. President.’ Wallberg looked up, startled. ‘Before you mount to the podium, you will shake hands and trade quips with the college kids who worked with the bears. Then you will move over to the cages, talk knowledgeably with the rangers…’
‘Uh… what sort of crowd will we have?’
‘Small, probably vocal, maybe hostile – they don’t see it as an environmental issue, they see it as a land-use issue. But with half the Washington Press Corps and all four networks right there, your speech will be on everybody’s dinner-time news.’
Wallberg rubbed his eyes. ‘That’s what counts.’
‘Hatfield and O’Hara have the site sewn up tight. If Corwin should be there and somehow got a shot, your Kevlar vest would stop the bullet cold. Any danger is minimal—’
‘I don’t care anything about any on-site danger,’ Wallberg blustered. ‘I’m trying to concentrate here.’
The man didn’t even try to hide his fear. ‘Sorry, sir.’
Wallberg pulled himself together enough to read aloud:
‘By releasing these two symbolic bears, Pooh and Smokey, into the wild, we will provide a biological corridor to link our nation’s last grizzly populations for genetic interchange…’
He lowered the speech. ‘I see the cage doors opening, the bears hesitating, then ambling forth, touching noses, maybe, then, realizing they are free, trotting off into the forest…’
‘It will bring down the house, Mr. President.’
Walking down the aisle, Jaeger remembered his first sexual humiliation after Nisa Mather had turned him down followin
g Wallberg’s exploratory fund-raiser at Olaf Gavle’s house. Jaeger had pulled Nisa into a bedroom, started groping her. She slapped his face, hard, and stalked away with blazing eyes.
How different it all would have been if she had succumbed to his advances! She hadn’t, so, frustrated and vengeful, he had sought out a campaign worker named Kirsten who had milkmaid breasts, rounded hips, strong thighs, and was blonde all the way down. Then he couldn’t get it up, not even with her naked on a motel room bed. It had never happened to him before. After that night, it started happening to him a lot.
LA was their last stop on this trip: maybe give Sharkey a call. Get a blonde who looked a little like Nisa Mather…
He felt himself stiffen slightly at the thought. His mind was miles away from presidential security concerns.
Shayne O’Hara’s mind was filled with presidential security concerns. He was a russet-faced fifty-year-old who looked as if he should be leading the parade on St. Paddy’s Day clad all in green, shillelagh in hand. But under that bluff good-guy exterior was a shrewd, ambitious man who brooked absolutely no fuck-ups.
Terrill Hatfield said, ‘My men are in place, seven-hundred-fifty yards out, ready to do the necessary.’
‘Seven-hundred-and-fifty yards? Jaysus, Terrill, Al-Qaeda has no expertise at long-distance assassination.’
‘But some survivalist who hates the President might,’ said Hatfield. It sounded weak to his ears, but O’Hara nodded.
‘Well, with your men covering distant threats, and my boys covering for close work, we’ll be fine. I’ve kept four-and-a-half Presidents alive, starting with the elder Bush and counting our newly-elected Wallberg, and haven’t lost one yet.’ He checked his watch. ‘Home Plate’s speech starts at three p.m.’
