“So we have two points of confirmation. Do the firing pin and barrel markings match something in our system?” Bronson asked.
“Yes and no,” Corent said.
“Don’t give me that. You know how I hate fuzzy stuff. It either does or it doesn’t,” Bronson said.
“Well then it does. But here’s the catch. Remember several months ago when we were in Kandahar working a connective lead between Al Qaeda and that train-derailment plan in Philadelphia?”
“Yeah. What about it?” Bronson asked. He was proud of that mission. They had interrogated an Al Qaeda detainee who had coughed up not only blood but enough information for Bronson and his team to stop a planned attack on the Acela Amtrak line between Washington, D.C., and New York City.
“Well, the Rangers and the Green Berets were in a pissing contest about who was killing more bad guys and they had me look at a few rounds that had passed through the gray matter of Taliban commanders. You know me. I logged it all in, even though it was on the down low. Didn’t get any names—you know how those guys are—but got the unit. Rangers.”
“Rangers? As in Army Rangers? Badass, kickass, God-and-country, U.S. Army Rangers?”
“Yes, those guys,” Corent said, sitting down again at his desk. “Turns out, the same rifle that killed a bunch of Taliban just killed General Sampson.”
Bronson worked through that tidbit of information as he loosened the Windsor knot of his teal Hermès tie and opened the neck of his white Boss shirt with its English spread collar. He rolled up his sleeves so that they were flawless and perfectly aligned on each muscled forearm and then leaned forward on Corent’s desk. “Say that again,” he said, staring the man in the eyes. “Because if I heard you correctly, you are asking me to go up against some nobility that will fight back hard.”
“You heard me right. It’s the same rifle. I checked five times. There’s no doubt. I wouldn’t have mentioned it to you if there was.”
Bronson stood upright and turned to look at the HD screen again. He saw the cartridge and the mangled lead bullet side by side now.
“Did you get a serial number of the weapon?”
“They didn’t give me any of that. Like I said. It was on the down low. But we’ve got the date and the time that I performed the tests. Gives us a starting point,” Corent said.
“Narrows it down to about two hundred Rangers,” Bronson said.
“Well, actually, it narrows it quite a bit more,” Randy White said. White was the team’s intelligence expert. Like Bronson, he had served in the military. A former military intelligence officer in Bagram, Afghanistan, White had operated with conventional and special operations forces. White was a large man, who had put on a few too many pounds at the Bagram dining facility during his tours. As a workaholic, he made excuses to skip workouts, while at the same time creating products of record that led to the kill or capture of over one hundred Taliban commanders. He kept his head shaved and had chosen to use his combat pay to buy a single diamond stud earring, which he wore in his left ear.
“Talk to me,” Bronson said.
“We’re forgetting this guy’s a sniper. It’s a sniper rifle, right, Max?”
Corent looked down and then up. “Yes, of course. In my excitement, and confusion, I left out that important piece of information. It’s a sniper rifle and the striations show it most likely to be an SR-25 at that.”
“So, how many Army Ranger snipers were in theater on the specific day? I’m guessing no more than ten, twenty if you count their spotters,” White pointed out. “And of those teams, how many used an SR-25?”
“Just a sec, Randy. Remind me. The striations?” Bronson asked.
“The grooves and lands, the flat parts between the grooves, leave spiraling on the lead of the bullet. All that combined is called striations.”
“Got it. Now to Randy’s point. That’s at least a ninety percent reduction in the field of possibilities right there,” Bronson said. “Good work. Now the hard part starts.”
“What’s that?”
“Penetrating the Rangers. Be easier to get inside Al Qaeda. That’s a real brotherhood there,” Bronson said.
“Oh and the Marines would just cough up the information?” White countered.
“Touché. No, we wouldn’t. But we have to start somewhere so let’s go straight to the Special Operations commander. One of his generals was just killed and it looks like one of his guys might have done it. Keep it in-house; they’re more likely to provide the information if we go directly to them.”
Bronson turned to the fifth member of his team, Faye Wilde, and said, “Get me General Taylor, Special Operations Command commander in Tampa. We’ll start there.”
Wilde was fresh out of Liberty University with her political science degree, and Bronson thought it would be good to have a young, eager worker bee on the team to do things like look for impossible-to-find phone numbers. But Wilde was good and after five minutes said, “Sir, General Taylor is waiting for you.”
Bronson walked into his office, shut the door, picked up the landline phone, and said into the handset, “General, this is Special Agent in Charge Deke Bronson. I’m heading the task force dissecting the information on General Sampson’s murder. Can I have five minutes of your time, sir?”
Bronson listened as the general coughed and said, “You can have all day long if you catch that son of a bitch for us.”
“I’ve got some sensitive information, sir, and it sounds like I’m on speakerphone. Can we go point-to-point?”
Bronson paced in his office, stared outside at the parking lot full of cars and trucks, windshields winking in the sun.
“All right, son, what you got?”
“Sir, we’ve got a ballistics match to a sniper rifle,” Bronson said.
“Go on,” Taylor said.
“We have positively identified the weapon as belonging to an Army Ranger sniper team that was in Afghanistan four months ago. Your guys asked us to do some ballistic and rifling checks,” Bronson continued. He provided the exact dates and then said, “Our firearms forensics expert doesn’t have the name of the individual. He only knows that the rifle belonged to the Ranger unit in Kandahar at the time.”
After a long pause, Taylor said, “That’s impossible.”
“No, sir, I’m afraid not. My guy is the best there is. Handpicked because of the Dallas shootings. We were in Kandahar. Some guys came in with some lead they’d plucked from dead Taliban commanders’ heads and asked for my guy to identify the weapon. They wanted to know who had the most kills.”
Bronson listened to the faint static of the phone line, wondering if Taylor was asleep.
“Shit,” the general said. “What do you need?”
“I need access to the unit that was there. Talk to the commander and some of the others. Find out if this is a rogue shooter, a missing weapon, whatever,” Bronson said.
The general perked up at the mention of a missing weapon.
“Roger that, Agent. I’ll bet you your paycheck that the weapon was missing or even discarded in combat.”
“That could be, General. We have this lead and we’re running with it as fast as you’ll let us.”
Bronson’s subtle dig—that the only thing that would make them move slowly in finding the general’s killer was another general getting in the way—was not lost on Taylor.
“I’m not slowing you down, son. We’ve been on the phone less than five minutes. Make sure you log that in. Now, the Ranger regimental commander’s name is Colonel Bart Owens. Bart’s a reasonable guy. I’ll call him and give him a heads-up. The only problem is that several of the people you want to talk to have probably rotated out of the Rangers or are currently in combat. I’ll do everything I can to help you get the access you need to solve this crime.”
“Thank you, sir.” Bronson figured the general was speaking as if he were recording the conversation, which he wasn’t. Not prone to political bullshit, Bronson was focused on mission accomplishment, not r
acking up evidence in case he needed it. He didn’t have the bandwidth to purposefully gather information on a neutral party on the off chance that they might become a foe. He knew people who did that sort of thing, and every ounce of energy they put toward that collection effort was a unit of measure they could not put toward finding a solution or accomplishing the mission.
Taylor gave him the number for the Ranger commander, whom he called, which led to another call, to a captain, and soon they were in a van headed toward the hangar where Bronson’s government Gulfstream jet awaited.
“What are we putting on the back burner as we focus on this new mission?” Bronson asked Wilde.
“Sir, we’ve still got three unsolved police murders in Wichita, Des Moines, and Phoenix.”
Bronson nodded as the vehicle stopped on the tarmac next to the airplane. “This is priority, then.” Climbing up the steps of the aircraft, Bronson leaned in between the two pilots in the cockpit and said, “All set for Fort Benning?”
“Roger that, Agent. Be there in less than two hours.”
Bronson hung up his Zegna suit coat, stowed his go bag full of clothes, checked his personal phone for text messages from women—there were two—and then sat in the big leather chair. The rest of his team filed past him to the comfortable seats beyond the main cabin.
Faye Wilde was the last to board, her strawberry-blond hair bouncing off her shoulders as she hustled up the steps.
“Good work, sir. Less than twenty-four hours and we’ve got a major break,” she said.
“Be good to solve this today. Be good for all of us,” Bronson said. He smiled at his young apprentice as she stared at him. “Anything else?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” she said. Faye lifted her smartphone and showed him the screen. “I had an algorithm scan every significant activity report in Afghanistan over the past year using the word ‘sniper.’ Got nothing. Then I Googled ‘Afghanistan’ and ‘sniper’ and got a Rolling Stone article about an Army Ranger. He was called the Reaper.”
“The Reaper?”
“Yes. Thirty-three scalps in ninety days. Apparently he was a killing machine.”
Bronson thought for a moment, looked out the window, and said, “Or still is.”
CHAPTER 7
Vick Harwood checked into the enlisted visiting quarters at Hunter Army Airfield, where he unpacked his duffel bag, changed into his running gear, chugged one of Jackie’s sports drinks, shouldered his rucksack, and immediately took off for a run to Forsyth Park in the Victorian District of Savannah.
Harwood wore a thin plastic wallet hung loosely around his neck with his army identification card visible through the window. He nodded at the security guard at the gate as he jogged through the personnel portal with metal rotating bars like an old-time amusement park entrance. Once on the busy street, Harwood found the dilapidated sidewalk and did his best to avoid turning an ankle.
During his drive, he had stopped for gas and texted with Jackie, who was staying downtown and doing some publicity tours her agent had set up for her. Harwood was proud to be dating not only a beautiful woman but also a bestselling author. Jackie had parlayed her Olympic gold medal into a nonfiction book about a woman persevering in a man’s world. Guns, Girls, Gold, and Guts, she had titled it, and the book was a page-turning bestseller that was in its fifth week on the New York Times bestsellers list. Jackie was a self-described martial-arts expert, but weapons were not her only forte. During their three-month relationship, she had shown Harwood steadfast support despite his bouts of memory loss and post-traumatic stress.
As he ran along Bull Street and crossed Victory Drive, he dodged a twenty-year-old Buick that the owner had spray-painted black and gray. The driver—a white man with a beard and wearing a baseball cap low on his forehead—was unapologetic. He was riding low in his seat with Jay Z blasting from heavy bass woofers in the back. The driver’s eyes locked onto his. Harwood had a flash of recognition, as if he’d been eye to eye with the man previously. The beard seemed off, though. Harwood struggled to recall the face, the image, something from somewhere recent. Regardless, the car blew down the street and was a diminishing speck before he could think any more about it. He just nodded and kept powering along on his run, feeling the ligaments stretch a bit more each time he exercised. The rucksack was heavy, but he intended it to be. Not only did it carry necessary equipment, tools of his trade, but it was a physical reminder of the mental load he carried every day. The fifty-pound rucksack was a metaphor for the fact that he had left his spotter on the battlefield. Unconscious or not, Samuelson had been his responsibility. Newbie or not, Samuelson was still an American soldier whom the army and the Rangers had entrusted to him. One month as a teammate or not, he still had learned that Samuelson had a seventeen-year-old sister who adored him and schoolteacher parents who loved God and country.
Samuelson’s tight-knit family was something that Harwood never had to begin with. The irony was that he survived, with no survivors, and that Samuelson, while not technically declared killed in action, was most likely dead, with his sister and parents as his survivors.
Yes, that rucksack pulling his shoulders straight back was loaded with more than fifty pounds of gear. Stuffed inside was a dense mass of guilt, a black hole of culpability so heavy that sometimes it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other.
Harwood narrowly avoided getting run over again. This time by a zipping Porsche that had the right-of-way. An attractive, black-haired female was driving the car and she glanced at him as he performed a spin move to keep from being run over. This time it was the hair that seemed familiar. A lightning bolt in his mind flashed with a memory. Swishing black hair, like that of a horse’s mane. The runner he had passed yesterday at Fort Bragg during his workout? He tried, but couldn’t hold the image long enough to discern. Two cars. Two faces. Did he recognize them? Should he? Or was his mind so damaged that he was reliving his last moments in Afghanistan: the Chechen’s panic, Samuelson’s calm demeanor, and the kidnapped woman’s hair swirling as she was smacked?
“Check your shit,” Harwood muttered to himself. He felt the sweat running down his face and focused on the reality in front of him as opposed to the anxiety of his shame. He zeroed in on the Lil Wayne music he had playing in his earbuds—“Hot Revolver”—and saw he had missed a text from Jackie on his iPhone.
Here. Staying downtown. Let me know when you’re avail. Hugs, J
Jackie gave Harwood something positive on which to focus. Instead of being weighed down by the past, maybe he could start a new life, one that gave him a foundation upon which to build and gain forward momentum. One that would empty the rucksack.
But still. Samuelson. How could he let him go?
Harwood approached Forsyth Park, in the middle of the Victorian District of Savannah. Million-dollar homes lined the streets. American flags hung limp in the August humidity. Some porches displayed the red Georgia Bulldog flags in honor of the approaching college football season. During Harwood’s first year at the University of Maryland, the fighting Terrapins were looking for an outside linebacker, and he was on the cut bubble. The memory flashed and disappeared. Suddenly, he was a couple hundred meters into the park. He flexed his pecs and growled, frustrated that his mind was choppy, like a windblown ocean. Different memories popping up and going down, tossed about by the rips and currents of electrons surging through his brain.
He approached a grove of trees and decided to walk for a bit, having run nearly six miles, although that was not much of a workout for him. As he strode, he gained some balance, some sense of where he was and why he was there. He was going to train some First Ranger Battalion snipers tomorrow and the next day before moving on to the Seattle-Tacoma area to train Second Ranger Battalion snipers. He was a consultant of sorts, best of breed. Thirty-three kills in three months. Eleven a month. One every three days. Truth be told, he killed every time he was in position. And he was deadly accurate, whether from fifty meters or eight hundred meters.
He was the Reaper.
The enemy had come to fear him in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Once Harwood was in position, he eliminated targets, packed his gear, and moved on to the next target. And that was a little bit like what he was doing now. Base to base. Trainees to trainees.
But the killing. Had he enjoyed it or was it just a job? Did he relish watching the head explode into the fabled pink mist—it was actually more white and gray than anything—or did it repulse him? He honestly wasn’t sure anymore. He’d killed, and saved American lives. He was good with that.
But the Chechen had lived. And the Chechen continued to kill. And the Chechen was in that rucksack right next to Samuelson, because the Chechen had beaten him.
“Hey!” someone called out.
Harwood looked up and saw that he had walked straight into a couple walking hand in hand through the small wooded section of the park.
“Sorry,” Harwood said.
“Watch it, bro,” the man said, puffing up for his girlfriend.
“No need, man. Seriously. I’m sorry. Lost in my thoughts,” Harwood said. The white man with the goatee and his girlfriend with the nose ring looked like a nice couple just out for a walk.
“Cool. Just pay attention,” the guy said.
Harwood nodded and placed his hands on his knees as he leaned over, breathing hard. His mind began to spin, but he pushed off his knees, stood upright, and walked to the edge of the low-hanging live oaks, where he saw a large Victorian home about fifty meters away across Drayton Street. A man stood on the covered porch of the home, beneath a rounded corner tower that was topped off with a third-story turret that looked like a witch’s hat. He had a wizened face and gray hair shaved close in a crew cut like the one Harwood’s high school gym teacher had worn. The man was dressed in an untucked checked button-down shirt atop olive shorts. He wore boat shoes and carried a tumbler full of gold liquid, most likely Scotch, in one hand and a cell phone pressed to his ear in the other.
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