Ghost Target

by Nicholas Irving

  And aiming a pistol at him.

  “We could both just shoot each other right here, homes,” the young man said.

  “Jermaine, don’t do this,” the grandfather said.

  “I got this, Pops,” he said. “Whatchu doin’ here? This is our turf, dude.”

  “Honestly,” Harwood said, lowering his pistol just a bit, trying to indicate he wasn’t a threat. “I was just looking for a place to crash. Question is, what are you doing hiding in that closet and using kids and your grandfather as a human shield?”

  “Not doing that,” Jermaine said. His inflection of cockiness dropped a note. Beyond Jermaine was an entire room filled with televisions, smartphones, and computers, all still in the box. This was a fence house for stolen goods. There were four single beds with fresh linens. The grandfather and children were props, buffers, which pissed off Harwood. He’d seen enough abuse and misuse of children in his foster youth that this situation triggered immediate anger.

  “Exactly what you’re doing, Jermaine,” Harwood said. He lifted the pistol back up, aiming it at the thief. “Whatever operation you’re running here, don’t involve the kids in it. Grandpa? He can make up his own mind. But not the kids.”

  “I know who you are, Reaper,” Jermaine said. “Stared at you through the crack in the door. I follow Black Lives Matter every day. Twitter feed. Facebook. You name it. You can judge me as a gangbanger or whatever, but I do what I have to do to provide.” He held up a smartphone, indicating his source of information. “So, here you are. A hero to the movement. And you’re threatening me?”

  “Not threatening you. Just disapprove of kids being used.”

  Only seeking temporary respite until he could get to Atlanta, he was now oddly confronted with the might-have-been version of himself. Was there a way to turn this situation to everyone’s advantage? “We’re on the same team here,” Harwood said.

  “Are we?” Jermaine shot back. His knuckles tightened around the grip of the gun, which Harwood saw was a Ruger American Pistol, noting its Picatinny rail and dual magazine release. It was a good nine-millimeter weapon that had set Jermaine back some coin. Between the product in the back room, the smartphone and social media capabilities, and the upscale armament, it was obvious Jermaine had a network. Networks could be useful. They could also be loose-lipped liabilities.

  “Yes. I see what you’ve got here. I’m not judging. Kids and the elderly need protecting, not the other way around. I’m no threat to you. Maybe we could help each other.”

  “Cops are all over your ass. No threat to me? Us? They could come busting in here any minute,” Jermaine said.

  “Give me some credit. I wasn’t followed.”

  “Police around here ain’t what I’m worried about. You must not be following social media. People tracking you everywhere. I give us five minutes before you get us busted.” He paused, looked at his kids and grandfather, and said, “We’re going to do this. I’m going to wand your ass for microbugs and then we’re going to sneak out the back and…”

  The unmistakable sound of helicopter blades snapped through the air in forward pitch, pushing the aircraft at high speed toward a known destination.

  “Yeah, we’re done here,” Jermaine said. “Follow me.”

  Harwood followed Jermaine through the two “closet” doors into a room filled with boxed goods and a single computer and monitor, which showed an eBay auction for a fifty-five-inch LG flat-screen television, probably the one he nearly tripped over as they fled into the backyard. They scurried beneath a cordon of oak trees into a vacant lot where a black Dodge Challenger waited. The eBay business must be decent, Harwood thought. Jermaine punched the remote; no lights flashed, but he heard the door locks snick open.

  “I’m getting you and whatever tracking device you’re wearing to a safe place. And then I’m going to redirect social media away from you. Ain’t cool what you did coming in there and threatening me and my family. Those are my kids. We struggling. Ain’t proud of what I’m doing, but I’m doing. Know what I mean?”

  Jermaine started the car. Harwood held his rucksack in his lap in case he needed to open the door and do a barrel roll out at high speed.

  “Roger,” Harwood said.

  “Roger? My name’s Jermaine. Ain’t no Roger. We’re going a mile. I’m stripping your ass down. We find the bug and then I’m taking you somewhere else.”

  “Hadn’t thought about a tracker. Have some memory lapses from Afghanistan. So, I apologize if your family felt threatened.”

  Jermaine paused. “No need. Never apologize. You’re doing what you need to do. I read your background on Wikipedia. You and me, we’re not too far apart. I’d probably be a sniper or some shit if I’d joined the army. Now, me? I’m capping people who need it here in the U.S. You? You’re capping people who need it somewhere else.”

  Harwood didn’t necessarily agree with the “capping” logic, but Jermaine’s predicament did resonate with him as he had previously thought. The young man was a father and a son and Harwood wished he could help him find a legal path to providing for his family.

  After ten minutes, Jermaine fishtailed into a vacant lot somewhere in east Macon near Interstate 16. Harwood had been getting his bearings and now he knew exactly where he was.

  “City Park,” Jermaine said.

  “About an hour up to Atlanta. Give me a ride?”

  “Ain’t no Uber here, Reaper man. First things first,” Jermaine said.

  Harwood stepped out of the car and set his rucksack on the gravel of the parking lot. In the distance the helicopter blades sliced the night sky. Jermaine came around the corner holding something in his hand. For a brief second, Harwood thought it might be a pistol and began to reach for his own, but stopped when he saw he was holding a small multichannel bug detector with two stub antennae. He began moving the device slowly around Harwood and then the rucksack, where it immediately alighted on the lower back left rear pocket.

  “Bingo,” Jermaine said.

  Harwood reached his hand into the pocket and found a small, circular black tracking device that looked like a coin. It was magnetic and had attached itself to a spare knife that Harwood carried in the back of his ruck.

  “Don’t throw it away. Let’s go,” Jermaine said.

  Harwood knew what the play was, but couldn’t go through with it if it meant putting innocent lives at risk. Placing this device on another car could jeopardize the safety of people riding in the car. A train rumbled in the distance, the tracks thirty yards to his front. The Ocmulgee River flowed just beyond.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Harwood said. “What do you have in your trunk?”

  Wasting no time, Jermaine popped his trunk, which was filled with more brand-new items, including a box of GoPros, chest and surfboard mounts, and backdoor flotation devices.

  Harwood grabbed his ruck and jogged to the river, picked his way through the slight wood line, found the bank where the eerie glow of the industrial lighting above highlighted the dark brown river. The water rolled south toward Savannah and he figured this was his best option. He looked up. The rotor wash of a helicopter and roar of a train competed for the night’s attention.

  He stepped into the murky river and hoped for the best.

  CHAPTER 14

  Ramsey Xanadu leaned outside of the fifteen-million-dollar black Sikorsky S-97 Raider prototype helicopter that his boss General Buzz Markham had secured for their stateside operations.

  The wind slipped effortlessly across his shaved head as he searched the horizon with night vision goggles, looking for a pulsing infrared beacon on the tracking device Basayev had placed in the Reaper’s rucksack. Xanadu had been able to hack the Chechen’s primitive device, realizing it might not have been a coincidence that he had gained access so easily.

  After receiving the call from Markham, which was essentially an order to kill Vick Harwood, Xanadu had directed the Raider into operation from Hunter Army Airfield, where the private military contracting compa
ny MLQM leased space for its air fleet. The advanced blade concept aircraft created a lower audible signature than most other helicopters and provided a more stable firing platform from the rear cargo hatch. The sleek, angular design was perfect for slipping quietly through the night—the proverbial black helicopter—on clandestine missions.

  The pilots, both MLQM employees, were homing in on the tracking device, where Xanadu would take the easy shot on an unsuspecting Harwood. They buzzed along the Ocmulgee River, a feeder to the Savannah River. The pilots kept low, between the trees, which also helped with deadening the noise beyond the sparsely populated river basin.

  Xanadu thought about the Reaper, his interactions with him in Afghanistan and Iraq, and how he was now chasing him in the United States, of all places, the three-million-dollar bonus sufficient incentive. He had a nice home on Edisto Island and a condo above one of the more popular nightclubs in the Battery of Charleston. He scored easily in the Charleston pickup scene and enjoyed the escape to the ocean. He wanted a larger boat, which usually impressed the types of women he was pursuing. Not looking for anything but casual sex, Xanadu spent a great deal of time honing his body in the gym, pumping iron, climbing ropes, and boxing. He had modeled for a few romance-novel covers because his six-pack was really an eight-pack. And while he was desirable to men and women, Xanadu had a temper. Hauled in three times for beating women, he had a record as a domestic abuser, which, when coupled with his financial misdeeds, had ultimately resulted in his dismissal from the CIA. For a short period, he was disappointed, but then MLQM called him seeking a man with his skill sets. He was an expert marksman with everything from a pistol to a fifty-caliber Garand to an eighty-one-millimeter mortar. Xanadu had been the consummate infantryman to special operator, which included an ability to make radios, computers, and cell phones perform in the most austere conditions.

  He had led teams of three to four men in Iraq and Afghanistan in efforts to secure MLQM’s forward operating and logistics bases. Believing in active patrols as opposed to static defenses, Xanadu used his Hispanic/Persian heritage—though he was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—to blend with the local populations in Iraq and Afghanistan. His Persian mother had taught him both Arabic and Farsi, which came in handy in the two U.S. combat zones.

  His father had beat his mother, so he had learned that habit from his dad, though one day he had come home and his mother was aiming a pistol at his father, smoke wafting from the barrel, his dad dead on the floor. She had trained the pistol on him, and Xanadu had backed away and left, never to see his mother again. His takeaway: If you’re going to beat women, don’t let them hang around long enough for them to shoot you.

  When the alarm beeped that they had a signal on the tracking device, he chambered a belt of 7.62 mm linked ammunition in the minigun mounted on a gyro-stabilized firing platform on the starboard side of the aircraft. The platform was similar to the stabilized fire control system of an Abrams tank, which could be driving forty miles per hour along the bumpy desert but giving the gunner a solid, stable view of its target.

  As the helicopter slowed, Xanadu looked through his night vision goggles. The ping from the tracking device was coming from the west bank of the river, which put him on the wrong side.

  “Go past and loop around,” Xanadu said into his headset to pilot Stu Benton.

  “Roger, that’s the plan.”

  The pilots kept low and powered forward for another half mile, then lifted above the trees, the lights of Macon blinding Xanadu’s night vision goggles momentarily. They lowered back into the riverbed and now had the machine gun aiming to the west as the helicopter flew south, coincident with the river.

  “Up ahead four hundred meters,” Benton said.

  “Roger that. I’m ready. Once I’m done, we keep flying. Pedal to the metal. Understand?”

  “You got it.”

  The audible ping increased in speed as they got closer to the tracking device. Through his goggles, the infrared beacon flashed brightly every few seconds.

  Xanadu drew a bead on Harwood and began to aim, realizing he probably had one chance to kill the sniper this easily.

  Tightening his grip on the trigger housing, he fired. The miniguns spat a fusillade of lead that raked the water.

  * * *

  Basayev, the Chechen, drove the Land Rover as if it were a European sports car. Samuelson was hanging on to the grab handles with white knuckles. Basayev powered along Interstate 16 at ninety miles per hour, not caring if any cops were tracking him. In the passenger seat, Samuelson stared blankly out of the window.

  Basayev’s meeting with a man named Xanadu in a Sangin safe house had confirmed for him that Harwood, the Reaper, was at the helm of a sex-slave ring operated out of Kandahar using blacked-out airplanes at night. Xanadu had told Basayev that his mission was to capture the Reaper and find all the missing women, to include Nina, who he assured him was still alive. Basayev and Xanadu knew they could not openly work together, but they could use cutouts and open-source technology when it made sense, as in the case of the tracking device Basayev bought at RadioShack.

  The device was emitting a strong signal as they approached from a few miles away.

  “It’s right there,” Samuelson said, pointing at the iPhone. It displayed a map of Macon, the river, and the road on which they were traveling. With each flash of the tracking device, the red dot moved fractionally downriver, as if Harwood were floating. It would be a moving target, but he had always been superb at picking off those. He looked up at Samuelson, whose stony-eyed gaze was distant, as if the young man was having a flashback.

  “Find anything good in Harwood’s bag?” Basayev asked Samuelson.

  “N-Not really,” Samuelson stuttered. While nursing the young man back to health, Basayev had thoroughly indoctrinated Samuelson; though there was always the chance that the spotter’s memory could come rushing back. Basayev needed to finish his mission before that happened.

  “So that means he’s got all of his equipment still. We need to be careful. Do you understand me, Abrek?”

  “Careful,” Samuelson said. “Yes.”

  Letting him pick up Harwood had been a calculated risk. How much would he remember? Would seeing Harwood live and up close trigger a memory that would give up Basayev and his plan? It was a testament to Basayev’s skills at brainwashing that Samuelson had returned to him, mission accomplished.

  “The beacon’s just across the river,” Samuelson said.

  “I see a good spot over here. Let’s park there and look,” Basayev said. He pulled off Interstate 16, made a left underneath the highway, passed a couple of gas stations, and found a small access road that led to the river. Parking along a gravel turnout, he had a clear view across the river and into the park.

  “Okay, let’s get set up,” Basayev said. A helicopter whooshed through the middle of the river moving from south to north, pulled up, banked, and then slid over them in a hovering crawl south. Basayev didn’t know if this was a police helicopter or perhaps even something Xanadu was orchestrating. Many people wanted the Reaper killed or captured, depending on who was doing the killing or capturing.

  The noise dissipated as the helicopter crabbed downriver. They dismounted from the Hummer and found a spot with clear observation across the river. “Okay, the ping is coming from that direction,” Basayev said, pointing to the south. “Spot for me.”

  Samuelson lay on the ground and sighted through his infrared spotting scope, and immediately told Basayev he noticed the bright flash of white.

  “There,” Samuelson said. “It’s f-flashing and moving slowly downriver. About fifty meters. Just sort of d-drifting away. Want me to call out to him? He can just swim to us.”

  Basayev looked through his own scope and found the flash, but something didn’t seem quite right. He internalized his thoughts. Could this be a diversion? If the tracker was going south, was Harwood going north? Or was the tracker still on Harwood as he floated downriver? It was i
mpossible to tell. The thermal scope did not show a warm body mass connected to the tracker, but the cool river water could be blocking the thermal signature of Harwood’s body. It would be a sign of excellent tradecraft if this was Harwood’s play. To confirm his normally solid instincts, Basayev said, “Keep an eye on the tracker. I’m checking something out.”

  He stood and leaned across the warm hood of his Hummer. Staring through the thermal scope, he switched from hot white to hot black and back to hot white, checking to see which thermal mode worked best with the ambient backlighting from streetlights and automobile headlights.

  On one sweep of the scope, Basayev saw a figure with a rucksack running beneath a bridge north of Central City Park. There were too many trees and structures to be certain, but his gut told him that it was Harwood.

  “Reaper,” he whispered. “I’ve got you on the run.”

  For Basayev, that was good enough for now.

  CHAPTER 15

  Harwood had put the tracking device in a GoPro surfboard mount with orange flotation device from Jermaine’s stash of pirated goods.

  He had tossed the device into the south-flowing river and run north. A helicopter was sliding quietly through the night. It wasn’t a Black Hawk; he knew that sound well from many combat missions. These rotors were like whispers compared with the Black Hawk’s thundering report. He was huddled against the back of a bridge that abutted the Ocmulgee River. The helicopter cycled north of him and then turned south, presumably following the floating beacon. Of course, that meant it wouldn’t be long before his pursuers figured out that it was just that, a GoPro floaty with the tracker inside.

  A truck across the river rumbled as it skidded to a halt. Doors opened and closed. Voices echoed across the water. With all this activity, it was time to move. He stood and began jogging north along an asphalt trail.

  Harwood wondered, who was framing him, and why?