Glass Tiger

by Joe Gores

  You won’t lose one today, Hatfield thought as he walked away. Not with his own boys 750 yards out, all the hardware and all the jargon of the trade in place. In his ear receiver, he could hear their pre-op adrenaline-charged chatter. To him, they sounded like a pack of coyotes warming up for the hunt.

  Franklin’s voice. ‘Ray One to TOC. Request Compromise Authority and permission to move to Code Yellow.’

  Yellow: the penultimate position of cover and concealment before Code Green, which meant, in this case, if they got visual on Corwin. Green was the moment of truth. Hatfield, Tactical Operations Commander for this operation, spoke into his bone microphone – called a ‘mic’ by the troops.

  ‘Copy, Ray One, stand by.’

  Walt, ever eager to use his weapon, broke in, ‘Walter Two. Is that an affirmative on Compromise Authority?’

  Compromise Authority was a euphemism for permission to open up with their MP5 machine guns, their snipe rifles, their flash bangs, their .40 Glock semiautomatics. All the toys. This was what his boys lived for, and he loved them for it.

  ‘Copy, Walter Two. Affirmative on Compromise Authority if the situation moves to Code Green.’

  They would protect the president, all right. But not from threats by the towel-heads and survivalists O’Hara was worried about. From the Halden Corwin whom Thorne had warned them would be there. Like Wallberg, Hatfield believed Thorne.

  But his men were not facing out and up, as Thorne wanted, but in and down. If Corwin was fool enough to show, he wasn’t fool enough to set up beyond five hundred yards out. Hatfield’s men would nail him. Hatfield would rub Thorne’s nose in the take-down – before he had the bastard deported back to Kenya to rot in prison while Jaeger made sure that the President thought Thorne was in Tsavo.

  Hal Corwin would be dead. Thorne would be out of the picture. With the man who would be next Secretary of State as his ally, Terrill Hatfield would be the next Director of the FBI.

  22

  Thorne went in light: his scope-mounted rifle slung across his back, his binocs hung around his neck, a handful of shells in his coat pocket, his knife and canteen on his belt. He also went in slow. Working his way up the valley between flanking stands of blue spruce, he began to feel that maybe Hatfield was right. No vehicle hidden under the trees. No tire tracks, no footprint, no broken branch. If Corwin wasn’t here now, he wasn’t coming.

  Maybe Thorne could relax a bit. Hatfield, despite all of his obstructionist bullshit, would have his men 750 yards out, scanning the tall crags behind them.

  Thorne briefly checked out the bird and animal sign under the reeds edging the pond. Soft-padded mink tracks, pattering mouse tracks, a dozen long-toed coyote tracks beside the cattails with their brown heads just starting to form. Tiny coins of duckweed floating on the surface with their filaments of root trailing down into the water. Pondweed, punched down into the mud by sharp-edged mule deer hoofs…

  He stopped dead.

  Among the deer tracks, a single human boot print, water seeping into it. The track pointed north, toward that edge of the massif. The direction he had always thought Corwin would take, the direction he had taken himself when scouting sniper sites on the other side of the ridge.

  Thorne came erect, scanning the massif. Movement caught his eye, right at the edge of the open ridge face. He fumbled out his binoculars, raised them, adjusted them.

  Too late. Nothing. Had there been? Bighorn? Elk? Man?

  He began trotting up the rising terrain toward the northern edge of the ridge.

  Corwin had come in an hour before, also light. Binocs around his neck, canteen and old Smith and Wesson .38 revolver on his hip, cased and loaded rifle over his shoulder, in his pockets his cellphone in a waterproof case to call Janet when it was all over, an empty plastic water bottle, and a roll of masking tape.

  Above to his right, the sheer rise of granite; below to his left, a sheer thousand feet of freefall. Out of habit, he checked his backtrial before rounding the northern edge of the massif on those few yards of exposed bare rock.

  Someone! He slithered behind a plate of stone, jammed his binoculars to his eyes. The figure by the pond sprang into tight focus, just coming erect, staring up at the rock face, raising his own binocs. Scanning. Now moving. Starting up from the valley floor, coming fast. It was the hunter who had uncovered his practice sites, who had ferreted out Mather’s ambush site.

  Corwin belly-crawled around to the other side of the ridge, into the cover of the pines, shrubs, and broken expanses of rock, adrenaline pumping. The tracker was at least fifteen years younger than he, hard and fit and fearless. No way to outrun him. He cursed his shortened leg, damaged knee, splinting in his chest.

  Corwin took the revolver from his belt, from his anorak pocket took the empty plastic water bottle and the masking tape. He taped the mouth of the bottle over the gun’s muzzle.

  An unmuffled shot might just carry too far in this thin mountain air despite the fact that his pistol fired a .38 short, a relatively low-powered round without a lot of punch or noise. The plastic bottle would trap the escaping gases of his shot, muffle the sound without impeding the bullet’s flight in any way. It was a home-made silencer, good for only one shot, up close.

  Thorne went around the end of the massif in a rush, dropped to the ground in thick cover. Waited, panting, for his pulse to slow. The worst kind of a stalk, where you weren’t sure the prey was even out there. The movement he had seen from below could have been a deer, a bighorn sheep, a chimera.

  But he knew it was Corwin. Dorst had been right. Alison and Eden receded in his interior ladscape, replaced by the need to match himself against this master woodsman, whatever the outcome. He went down through the scattered tree-growth, slowly, silently. Whenever he passed anything that might conceal a man, he scouted the possible ambush from the side before moving on.

  Corwin climbed up on a ledge and stood there for two minutes, pistol in hand. Caught a glimpse of distant movement, no shot possible. He had to push it, make it happen. He crossed the stream on a fallen log, deliberately leaving wet footprints on the decaying wood. From the end he leaped into the brush beyond, snapping twigs, rustling leaves, setting up his ambush.

  Thorne heard muted snapping and rustling and froze. Moved on downstream. Wet tracks where Corwin had crossed a fallen log to the lower side. Thick growth over there where Corwin would wait for Thorne to cross the log. Still hiding in plain sight.

  Thorne crawled away upstream, slowly, silently on splayed elbows and knees. Found a place well out of sight of the log that was narrow enough so he could leap over the rushing water.

  He went back downstream on the lower side, moving with the silence of his years in Tsavo, expecting every moment to see some darker shadow in the undergrowth, his Randall Survivor in hand. Bring on the nightmare. But he saw no shadow. No Corwin.

  Out-thought again. Anger stifled angst. Boldly he leaped up onto the log to examine the tracks. Yes. They went both ways. Corwin had recrossed to the uphill side, had gotten into the water to wade upstream while Thorne went downstream, the sound of his passage masked by water rattling over pebbles.

  Corwin came out of the thigh-deep water in a rush. Rolled into a clump of willows on the down-side bank, crushing them slightly, but not enough, he hoped, to attract notice. He let himself relax, became at one with pale stems and pale leaves. His silenced revolver was ready. A quick shadow flitted by overhead and a Steller’s jay landed on a nodding branch over the water, head cocked, staring at him.

  Across the stream, the tracker stepped partway out of cover, eyes searching uphill – in the wrong direction. Didn’t realize Corwin had recrossed the stream. The ambush had worked.

  Corwin pulled the trigger as the jay yelled and fled. The tracker’s arms flew wide and his cap flew off as he fell in that unmistakable bag-of-bones way that meant a mortal hit, his rifle clattering on the rocks a dozen feet away.

  Corwin had seen it a hundred times: a man couldn’t fake a fall l
ike that. He started to wade into the stream to make sure the man was dead. But there was blood on the waxen face, on the rocks under the head, and he was out of time. He melted into the cover on the downhill side of the noisy torrent.

  Thorne came out of it slowly. Shooting pain in his head. He didn’t know where he was, had no memory of anything. But his lizard brain down at the base of his skull knew movement might mean death, so he just opened his eyes without moving his head. Above him, sunlight through hardwood branches, pine boughs. Not Panama. Not Africa. Not the desert. The sound of an endless freight train rolling by was a rushing torrent. The mountains.

  It was coming back, in fragments. A muted POP like a breaking twig. Ambushed. A home-made silencer, empty soda bottle, water bottle, one shot only. Corwin! How long had he been out? Fifteen, twenty minutes? Why had he been unconscious?

  He sat up, slowly. Abominably aching head. His cap was a yard away, his rifle a dozen feet away. Must have thrown his arms wide as he went down. Blood on the rocks. Carefully probing fingers found a flap of loose skin on his forehead. Hit his head as he fell. He looked across the rushing stream. A crushed clump of willows on the other side.

  How had Corwin missed at a range of six yards?

  Then he heard again the Squawk! and midnight flash of Steller’s jay and Yes! More pieces slipped into place. Alerted, he had been letting himself go limp and fall like a dead body even as the slug snatched away his cap. His head hit the rocks, knocked him unconscious. Blood flowed, so he really did look dead. And Corwin hadn’t wanted to risk a second, unmuffled shot.

  Thorne stood up, dreadfully dizzy, squinched his eyes at his watch. One-eleven. The speech was scheduled for three p.m. Follow the stream down the slope. Hurry!

  Corwin dropped awkwardly into his spider hole, unslung the rifle from his shoulder and leaned it against the rock wall still in its carry-case. He rested his butt against the same wall, hands on knees, panting. He was winded but here. Unseen. He reached under the overhang to bring out his tripod and set it up.

  He slid his bolt-action model 70 Magnum, made by Winchester in 1951, often called the Rifleman’s Rifle, from its worn fleece-lined soft-leather carry case. Its metal was heat-treated to withstand the high temperature of thousand-yard shooting. Already attached was his old tried-and-true Unertl 36-power scope that was nearly as long as the rifle barrel. Already sighted-in.

  Finally, he attached the rifle to its tripod. Took out his H & H Magnum shells in .300 caliber with their four-inch-long Sierra 280-grain slugs. He slid a single shell into the chamber. He didn’t plan on needing more than one.

  Thorne glassed the meadow far below. There were Hatfield’s FBI Hostage/Rescue boys right where they were supposed to be, 750 yards out from the empty podium – facing the wrong way!

  And somewhere among those tumbled boulders and sharded granite and twisted pine shrubs above them, between Thorne and the Feebs, was Corwin, prepping his shot. Thorne’s self-delusions were gone. He had always known, deep inside, that he would be brought to this. Him or me. Or be Sharon’s glass tiger and let the president die.

  23

  Not quite mugging for the cameras, President Gus Wallberg shook hands with Ranger Rick and Sam Jones beside the steel-barred cages that held Smokey and Pooh. He had already chatted and posed with Laura Givens and Sean McLean for the media.

  ‘We’ll be opening the cage doors to release the bears when you start your speech, Mr. President,’ Ranger Rick explained.

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ objected Jaeger. ‘At the end of his speech, not the beginning.’

  Jaeger could just see a pair of grizzly bears charging the podium in the middle of the President’s speech and being cut down by automatic weapons fire on the six o’clock evening news.

  ‘We know these two bears really well, sir,’ said Rick. ‘We’ll have to coax them out. The timing will work out.’

  Wallberg wasn’t so sure. Vicious black deerflies buzzed around them, and he had forgotten that wild things smelled so… well, wild. He gladly started away, encased by a moving diamond of Secret Service agents.

  Jaeger had been right. If Corwin was lurking here, he would die. Nothing bad could happen to Wallberg on this day.

  Corwin was in the classic prone, the rifle rock-steady on its tripod. He moved his optic almost leisurely across the assemblage in the meadow below. People filled his scope.

  The president had just mounted the viewing platform where the governor of Idaho was stepping toward the podium to introduce him. Jaeger waited to the president’s right in an almost belligerent pose, Crandall beside him in a similar stance. To Wallberg’s left, slightly behind, were his wife and Quarles.

  Corwin was in the zone: as he waited for Wallberg to approach the podium, his pulse dropped into the low sixties that he knew from a lifetime of experience gave him his best shots.

  This was the shot of that lifetime.

  Thorne’s only edge was that the most deadly shot, the head-shot, was also the riskiest. The head was highly mobile and the brain was protected by a great deal of bone. Any slight movement, and a high-velocity round fired at distance could ricochet, even miss altogether. Corwin wouldn’t risk it. He wouldn’t shoot until Wallberg had started his speech, and then it would be a body-mass shot.

  But when in the speech? Think, dammit! Of course. Corwin would wait until Wallberg made the gesture any politician on earth made at least once during a speech: turning and raising an arm to shoulder height to gesture. This would expose his underarm. A shot into the underarm vent of the Kevlar protective vest would rake the chest and explode the heart.

  And where was Corwin? At 950 yards? At 1,195 yards? At 1,210 yards? Or at some site Thorne had never even considered? As Morengaru had taught him, he closed his eyes to look through the tracks to the animal he was stalking. Here, he was stalking himself. Where would he fire from?

  He opened his eyes. If he had Corwin’s genius behind the gun, he would take his shot from 1,210 yards out.

  Thorne scrambled down through the rocks, rifle in hand, striving for speed and silence at the same time. He was staking everything on a tumble of boulders about a hundred yards above the 1,200 yard ravine where he now believed Corwin was hidden.

  Corwin’s breathing slowed. He moved his scope across the assemblage one more time, then back to his target. Everything fell away. Against all conventional wisdom, he would shoot just as Wallberg started his speech, and it would be a head shot.

  The rangers slid up the steel barred cage doors. The bears were suspicious. Yes, over there was the forest, and freedom, but what if this were just another of the humans’ tricks?

  Jaeger stared out over the crowd, but saw only Nisa Mather. His sexual obsession hadn’t ended with her death. Sharkey in LA would find him a woman who at least superficially resembled her, a woman he could possess phsyically, repeatedly, could bend to his will as he never could bend Nisa while she was alive.

  Gus Wallberg looked out over the meadow, over the bears in their cages at the edge of the forest, over the faces upturned below him. But he saw only the millions of people at their TV screens that night. He felt the same surge of power he had felt when giving his acceptance speech, in his gut and in his groin, felt what sex was supposed to give him but never had. He lusted for their power, they offered it, he took it. Now it was his.

  ‘My fellow Americans, today we begin a grand journey…’

  Thorne dropped to his right knee, brought up his rifle, released the safety, sat back on his right foot and braced his left elbow on his left knee, his upper arm jammed into the kneecap just above the elbow. He began taking controlled breaths to slow his pulse. He looked through the optic. There he was!

  But Christ! In the scope, Corwin was taking up trigger slack! He was going for the head shot even as Wallberg started speaking! Thorne’s finger contracted ever so gently against the six ounces of slack in the trigger pull. The rifle bucked in his hands, and even before it steadied again he knew he had made his shot. But
in the exact micro-second he had fired, Corwin’s rifle also had recoiled. He had gotten off his shot, too.

  As Corwin’s rifle recoiled he was struck a great blow in the side. No pain, not yet: just the dizzying sensation of a giant fist swung against him. He had felt it all before, eighteen months ago. Then, Mather. Now, the tracker, not dead after all, had done him. So what? He had seen the red mist. The halo of blood around the ruined head. Nothing else mattered.

  He crawled in a half-circle like a stepped-on landcrab, to face the rear of the V and the life-saving torrent. He was already going into shock, but he would make it. The stream would carry him down, far away from all pursuit forever.

  Thorne paused to momentarily scope the scene below. Men shouting, women screaming, Secret Service agents springing to the platform. Smokey and Pooh, terrified by the noise, smashing out of their open cages and charging toward the forest and freedom.

  The forest Rangers were making motions as if to draw their sidearms, but by presidential fiat they were unarmed this day. The students were slapping high-fives: the bears were free.

  People were milling on the platform around the man lying on the planks with little of his head left.

  Corwin was in the burn again on that icy November night, crawling for the cabin a thousand feet away. Blood stained the earth beneath his turtle-slow body at each movement. Dark, rich blood. Arterial blood? If so… No. He would make it. Get into the icy water so it would stop the bleeding…

  Dead men. So many great shots. So many dead men.

  Terry. Laughing with him in front of the fireplace on Marshall Avenue while Nisa, age ten, lay on the floor swathed in a blanket, watching TV cartoons.

  Nisa, an adult, dead herself. No! No…

  Crawl. Would the tracker get to him before he could get to the rushing torrent? His vision dimmed. Tired. Drop your head into the dirt. No. Crawl. Arm. Leg. Again. Again. He was trying to float up out of his body. No! Just a few feet now… He had done it all before.