Glass Tiger (16 page)

Corwin must have done awful things as a merc – they all did. Things he couldn’t forgive himself for. The kind of things Thorne had never had to stew about, because he was still working for the government after he left the Rangers.

Even so, Corwin had been able to live with those things, because Terry and Nisa had always been behind him, his core, his center, his anchor, his Ground Zero.

Then Terry was killed. Nisa blamed him. Guilt, no longer suppressed, washed over him like blood. Bad dreams, too, Thorne was sure, much like his own after Alison and Eden were killed.

After Corwin himself had been shot, and partially crippled, Nisa came back into his life. She even started helping him on his hunt for his attacker. Redemption!
A second chance! Then she turned on him again, turned instead to the man who had tried to kill him.

Love and hate were like the tusks of fossil mammoths curving back on themselves so completely that their tips touched. Perhaps love and hate had touched in Corwin. He killed them because together they had taken his last chance at redemption.

It almost explained everything. Except where he was and what he was doing during those five months between his flight from Portage and his reappearance in the California Delta. Except why Mather had tried to kill him in the first place.

And then, the jackpot question: why Corwin, after Nisa and Damon were dead, decided to go after Gustave Wallberg, soon to be President of the United States.

Carrying only an old
WWII
.38 revolver, his survival knife, and his rangefinder for a final check of distance, range, and elevation, Corwin left the Motel Deluxe in Salmon, Idaho. He had rented his room there for two weeks under somebody else’s name. His tripod was hidden up on the mountain, on site. He had zeroed-in on his first day there, so as usual, he left his rifle, ammo and scope in the room. No need to bring them back to the sniper nest until That Day.

A maze of narrow, unimproved roads lay west of 10,757-foot Trapper Peak, still mostly white-clad, framed by shorter peaks that had not retained their winter snow. Some ten miles north of Trapper, Corwin turned on to a minor national-park road, then a dirt road, then turned again into an abandoned logging trace. After half a mile on that, he bounced the 4-Runner off the track, covered it with fir branches cut the first day, and left the ignition key in front of the left rear tire as always.

He hiked with his slightly-limping gait five miles back to a subalpine valley on the near side of a range of granite peaks from the meadow where the president would soon speak. His way led him past a small mountain pond rimmed with ice and up around the northern edge of the massif. That was the only exposed rock he had to cross. He came back south on the far side in the cover of a mixed conifer-hardwood forest to follow a narrow, black, icy, rushing melt water torrent down the slope.

He was totally focussed on his hunt, giving no thought to whoever might be hunting him. He felt he’d covered his backtrail too well for anyone to decipher it.

Camp David, Maryland, was a U.S. Navy facility, maintained solely for presidential recreation and occasional meetings where the press was barred. It was inside a camouflaged electrified fence; thirty remote-operated, 128 all-weather scanning cameras were hidden in the trees. In camouflaged bunkers around the grounds was a platoon of forty highly-trained and attack-alert Marine sentries equipped with night-vision glasses.

Kurt Jaeger had arranged for Terrill Hatfield to drive him from the helipad to the Presidential cabin in a golf cart, the camp’s usual mode of transport. He wanted to have a totally private conversation with the FBI man.

‘I gather you don’t think much of Thorne, Terrill.’

Surprisingly, Hatfield said, ‘If anybody is going to find Corwin, it’ll be Thorne. I want him to do that, but I want to take Corwin down. Myself. I want to be Director of the FBI.’

‘I want to be Secretary of State in Wallberg’s next term.’

After this exchange of confidences, unexpected on both sides, they rode in silence for two minutes. Then Hatfield said, ‘We use Thorne to find him, then we send Thorne back to Kenya to rot in jail as a poacher. Out of sight, out of mind.’

‘Out of the President’s mind at any rate,’ agreed Jaeger. ‘Whom meanwhile we will have saved from a mad stalker.’

Corwin was facing east, the sun at his back, forty-five minutes before the president would be scheduled to arrive on speech-day. They would be in light, he would
be in shadow, in a narrow V-shaped slot between two granite walls that were flanked by stunted pine shrubs. Not like the succession of cramped spider holes he’d worked out of in Vietnam.

He would be firing from the prone, the most stable of positions, with a tripod. The pines would make the opening invisible to scanning binoculars directed up the cliff-face from the meadow far below. The floor was dry packed earth. Where the slot came to a point a dozen yards behind him, the torrent he had followed down the cliff face would be his escape route.

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.’

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.

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 Missoula, 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.