Target America: A Sniper Elite Novel (8 page)

15

CHICAGO

The declaration of martial law in the cities of New York, DC, and Los Angeles the week before hadn’t shaken the local populations up all that much. Many citizens had, in fact, welcomed the decision. And it helped that the army hadn’t marched in like jack-booted Nazis. General Couture—following the example set by Lieutenant General Russel Honoré (aka the Ragin’ Cajun) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—had made it crystal clear that the army’s mission was to protect the citizenry and to look after them, not to treat them as the subjects of an occupation. For the most part, the soldiers did very little other than maintain a constant presence, making routine patrols into the outlying areas while leaving the duties of law enforcement to the police whenever possible. In general, there was a sense they were all in the same boat. Because if a nuclear bomb did happen to go off, the shock wave, fire, and radiation would make no distinction between military and civilian personnel.

However, the same type of accord did not exist within the Windy City. For reasons that no one had so far been able to pinpoint, there had been immediate friction between Chicagoans and the 82nd Airborne
Division, particularly on Chicago’s South Side—the side that Jim Croce had once sung about as “the baddest part of town.” Where the other four cities had lost about a third of their populations to voluntary evacuation, the vast majority of Chicagoans chose to stay put, and they simply resented a military presence in their neighborhoods.

“We Chicagoans can take care of ourselves!” the city’s angry mayor declared to CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “We don’t need an army of occupation rumbling through our streets—this isn’t Baghdad. And we’ll be damned if we’re going to let these terrorists scare us from our homes!”

The next night, gunfire was exchanged in southern Cook County, Illinois, between looters and soldiers. By the end of the third day of occupation, the official civilian death toll stood at thirty-two, which compelled the mayor to go back on television, this time urging his constituents to cooperate with the army. But the genie seemed to be out of the bottle by then, and some on the military side expected the violence to increase once disgruntled citizens became better organized.

For this reason, the 82nd began to circle the wagons in the southern zones outside the city, setting up FOBs (forward operating bases) from which patrols could operate. Division headquarters remained downtown. Signs sprang up at the FOBs with proverbial names such as Fort Apache and Fort Necessity, provoking General Couture to blow his stack during an early-morning inspection, ordering the signage taken down immediately.

“This is not an us-against-them paradigm, Major!” Couture growled at a veteran combat officer fresh in from Afghanistan. “And you’d better get that through your head. Nobody told you this was going to be a walk in the park—
no occupation ever is!
—but we’re all Americans here, and your men
will
conduct themselves accordingly, or you
will
find yourself in a world of hurt! Do I make myself clear?”

His ass chewed out by a four-star general, the major snapped to attention, answering, “Yes, sir! Crystal, sir!”

Fifteen minutes after Couture cleared the zone, the Fort Apache sign went back up. The FOB was attacked that same night, and eight more civilians lost their lives. The next day, an actual civilian militia began to form on the north side of the city, where there was talk of
marching on division headquarters. Nobody really took the talk seriously, but the threat of a nuclear bomb had obviously become a secondary concern in Chicago, and this forced the president (by this time commanding from Andrews Air Force Base) to recall General Couture for the purpose of discussing at least a partial withdrawal from the city, fearing the occupation there was doing measurably more harm than good, and that the discord might spread to the other occupied cities.

 • • •

DANIEL CROSSWHITE AND
Brett Tuckerman knew next to nothing about any of this. For the past week, they’d been too busy knocking over drug pushers well outside the military cordon to the south, not far from where they had returned the little girl to her home.

The little one’s parents had been completely stunned to answer the door at seven in the morning and see their long-lost daughter—now almost a year older—standing on the porch between two unshaven white guys in dark sunglasses, clutching a truck-stop teddy bear and a big bag of McDonald’s hotcakes.

“Remember . . . we were never here,” Crosswhite said gravely. He handed the bag of hotcakes to the little girl’s father, and then he and Tuckerman disappeared on foot down the block.

Each pusher they’d taken down over the subsequent five nights was forced to rat out the locations of his associates’ hideouts, and the money had piled up fast. They were about ready to blow town the night before, but the last pusher they worked over ratted off a competitor whose house was located a half mile inside the military cordon.

“That motherfucker got half a mil easy!” the pusher had sworn, his bloody face mashed between his expensive white shag carpet and the sole of a Fort Lewis combat boot.

Now Crosswhite sat in the back of the van watching the run-down house through his night vision goggles. “What do you think?”

Tuckerman picked his teeth with a toothpick. “Looks like a shit hole to me.”

“Could be intentional if they’re really holding that much cash.” Crosswhite reached over and jerked the black hood off the head of their battered informant, who sat against the bulkhead with his hands flex-
cuffed behind his back. “If you’re setting us up, asshole, I’m gonna stuff you headfirst down a sewer pipe. You got that?”

The man nodded wearily, duct tape over his mouth, nose broken, and one eye swollen nearly shut. Blood and snot oozed over the tape as he breathed.

“Let’s do it then.” Crosswhite put the bag back over the dealer’s head and yanked the cord tight, tying it in a knot. Then they flopped him over onto his belly in the middle of the satin bedspread they had taken from his bed and roughly rolled him up in it. A sharp blow to the side of his face through the bedspread with the stock of an M4 knocked him cold.

They dismounted the van and moved swiftly toward the house, scanning the darkness through infrared as they made their way around back. A sharp burst of 9 mm gunfire from a first-floor window struck Tuckerman in his chest and shoulder armor. The two men returned fire, spraying suppressed .223 caliber fire through the window. The shooter’s head disintegrated, and the body dropped with a thud inside the house. Someone else opened fire from another window, and they dove for cover behind an old brick barbeque pit that hadn’t been used to cook a meal in a half century.

“It’s a goat fuck,” Tuckerman said, switching out the magazine on his M4. “Wanna split before the army hears this shit and rolls in?”

“No, I want my half a mil,” Crosswhite said, reloading quickly.

“Dude, there ain’t no money. This was a fuckin’ setup.”

“I don’t think so. Look.” Crosswhite pointed up at the eve of the house, where a small infrared camera was mounted below the rain gutter. “They’ve got real security here, and that means money.”

“It also means we should split.”

“You go if you want. I’m takin’ this place down and retiring to Guate-fuckin’-mala.”

Tuckerman chuckled. “When we get killed, it’ll be your fault.”

“Roger that.”

They each pulled the pin from a high-explosive grenade and then hurled them through the windows. Even as the grenades were exploding, they were pulling the pins on two more, hurling them into the house on the tail end of the first pair of explosions. Glass blasted out
ward in blinding white flashes, and the entire house groaned within from the force of four nearly simultaneous detonations.

Tuckerman and Crosswhite dashed from behind the barbeque pit and blew the back door off its hinges with plastic explosives. Three busted bodies littered the kitchen floor, one of them missing most of its head, and the smell of cordite hung heavy in the air. They found two more busted bodies in the dining room and a matching number of scattered Tec-9 machine pistols, which they kicked contemptuously aside. The inside of the house was now a shambles, but there was a lot of expensive stuff in the place: leather sofas and chairs, a big-screen hi-def television, stereo . . . the works.

“Let’s get the money.” Crosswhite put a burst of fire through the basement door and kicked it apart with his boot. They took off their goggles and switched on the rail-mounted flashlights attached to their carbines, making their way down the stairs, careful to watch for booby traps. Procedure and all common sense dictated that they clear the entire house before cornering themselves in the basement, but both men had seen enough combat by this point in their lives that they felt safe enough trusting instinct, and instinct told them the fight was over.

In the basement, they found what they had been told to look for: a steel gun locker in the corner with a combination dial on the front.

“Looks tough,” Tuckerman said, chewing the inside of his cheek.

“It’s a gun locker, not a bank vault.” They put plastic explosives on the dial and all three hinges, set the timer, and ducked upstairs.

The blast shook the floor, and they scurried back down to find the locker laying over on its side with the mangled quarter-inch steel door still wedged crookedly in place. The steel locking pins had held for the most part, but banded stacks of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills were falling out through the opening. They pulled a pair of nylon gym bags from beneath their body armor and went to work filling them with cash.

Three minutes later, they were dashing out the back door with red and blue lights dancing in the trees and on the walls of the neighboring houses. They darted across the backyard, hurling the heavy bags over a fence and jumping over after them, snatching them up again and scrabbling over a pile of car tires, old asphalt shingles, and rotting drywall
to make their way deeper into an increasingly deteriorated and largely desolate neighborhood.

They could see army Humvees between the houses racing up and down the streets, and it quickly became apparent the army was cordoning off the block. “I got a feeling we’d better get ready to look like a pair of harmless civilians in a hurry,” Tuckerman said.

“I think you’re right.”

They hid the bags of cash beneath the foundation of a collapsed garage, filling in the opening with broken cinder blocks to conceal the bags and dashed down the alley.

A searchlight snapped on at the end of the lane, and a voice boomed out “Halt!”

Both men froze in their tracks, knowing the next sound they would hear would be machine gun fire—if they were lucky enough to hear anything at all.

Two paratroopers with red, white, and blue 82
nd
Airborne patches on their sleeves came forward into the light dressed in universal camouflaged ACUs, carbines pulled tightly into their shoulders. “Weapons on the ground!” one of them bellowed. “Now!”

“Take it easy,” Crosswhite said, noting their unit insignia and muttering to Tuckerman, “Let me do the talkin’.”

“This should be good,” Tuckerman mumbled, dropping the M4 and putting up his hands.

Crosswhite’s weapon clattered to the asphalt half a second later. “Don’t shoot,” he said coolly. “We’re all on the same side here.” He lifted his hands casually, no higher than his shoulders. “Captain Daniel Crosswhite, Special Forces.”

Tuckerman couldn’t help releasing an ironic snigger that very nearly caused Crosswhite to lose his military bearing and bust up laughing.

16

WASHINGTON, DC

CIA Director Shroyer sat in the back of an armored limousine facing White House Chief of Staff Tim Hagen as they traveled north along the interstate toward Baltimore, where the CIA had set up a temporary headquarters well away from Langley, Virginia, now considered a potential target for nuclear attack.

“. . . And with the national election only two months away,” Hagen was saying, “our victory is far from assured. Public sentiment is shifting against the president for the first time since before the Sandra Brux abduction, and it’s shifting fast enough to cause him genuine concern. Even small-town America is frightened of being nuked, and so far we’ve done nothing to alleviate their fear. The declaration of martial law has backfired in a big way—as I knew it would—and pulling the 82
nd
out of Chicago isn’t likely going to help. It’s going to make the president look weak, whether or not voters agreed with the occupation in the first place. We need a resolution, George, and we need it fast. We have to find that fucking bomb.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Shroyer loosened his tie. “It’s worse
than looking for a needle in a goddamn haystack. What about the FBI? NSA? Why aren’t you climbing up their asses? We’re supplying them all the intel we’ve got, but our resources are limited with the search being inside the US. You know CIA doesn’t have any official jurisdiction.”

Hagen leveled his gaze. “Which is exactly why you and I are having this conversation.”

This caught Shroyer off guard. “Excuse me?”

“The president feels the urgency of circumstances may call for some
behind the scenes
tactics,” Hagen explained. “With FBI and NSA having so much constitutional red tape to deal with, it’s very possible they just don’t have the necessary flexibility to bring this crisis to the immediate resolution we all require.” He took a moment to check an incoming text, and then continued. “He feels that since no one in Congress will be expecting CIA to operate independently within our borders, that no one will suspect them should anything
untoward
take place during the hunt for the bomb. Our nation is in a desperate state of flux, and, as everyone knows, desperate times often call for desperate measures.”

Flexing his fingers, Shroyer glanced out the window at the passing cityscape and then allowed his gaze to shift back toward Hagen. “Is it safe for me to assume, then, that the rest of this conversation will be off the record?”

Hagen shrugged. “My entire trip out here is off the record.”

“In that case, it sounds to me like you’re giving me the go-ahead to resume domestic black operations. Is that what you’re doing?”

“To my knowledge,” Hagen replied innocently, “there has never been a domestic black operation, so I have no idea as to what you might be
resuming
, but in any event, it doesn’t sound like you’re catching my meaning. Maybe it would help if you took a moment to consider some of the more colorful events in recent CIA history.”

“Such as?” Shroyer said dryly.

“Well, are there or are there not certain persons within the
company
who have a fairly recent history of operating far outside their authority—persons of various talents who could be rather easily disavowed, or perhaps even brought to trial, in the event that it became necessary in order to protect the White House?”

Shroyer understood that he could all too easily find himself the sub
ject of a congressional investigation if he were to accept such a cryptic, off-the-record conversation as clearance for the resumption of domestic Black Operations. “I need assurances, Tim.”

“Of course,” Hagen replied. “And I’m authorized to provide them—so long as you can assure
me
that you at least have a viable place to start.”

Shroyer bit his lip and nodded. “The evidence is weak, almost nonexistent,” he admitted, “but we
may
have a thin lead on the Chechen insurgent we’re looking for. It’s complicated, though. We’ll have to go through his Saudi financier to get to him—if he
is
a financier—a low-level member of the House of Saud named Muhammad Faisal. Another rub is that he happens to be a naturalized American citizen.”

Hagen smiled with satisfaction, for of course he had suggested the gambit of resuming domestic Black Ops to the president himself, knowing in his bones that CIA couldn’t possibly have shared 100 percent of their intel with their rival intelligence agencies—
they never did
. He took a small bottle of Evian water from the limo’s built-in refrigerator, unscrewed the cap, and settled back comfortably into the seat with a casual gesture at the secure telephone in the console.

“May I suggest you start making calls, George? There’s no telling how long we’ve got. We may be out of time already.”

Shroyer picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory. “This is Shroyer,” he said. “Get me Bob Pope with the Special Activities Division.” He sat back in the seat and waited nearly a minute before Pope came on the line.

“Bob?” he said. “It’s George. I’m sitting here with the White House chief of staff. Do you have anything more to add to what we talked about last week concerning Muhammad Faisal?”

“Nothing at all,” Pope said. “You told me to stand down on that.”

“Well, the weather’s changed,” Shroyer said, locking eyes with Hagen. “You’re a go. Find the bomb.” He hung up the phone and sat looking out the window.

“Will he be able to find it?” Hagen asked after a few moments.

“Christ, how do I know?” Shroyer said tetchily. “I just hope you know what you’ve cleared me to do—or more precisely, what you’ve cleared me to clear
him
to do. Pope sees all life on earth as some kind of
damn sociology experiment. I don’t even know what the hell he’s talking about half the time. He’s liable to pull anything.”

Hagen absentmindedly brushed a speck of lint from his pant leg. “Yes, well, let me worry about Pope. He’s not as well insulated as he thinks he is.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he’s got a weakness for younger women,” Hagen said, “and one of his little Asian protégées has been playing him for a fool, feeding intel to the Chinese. NSA caught onto her last month. Pretty soon we’ll have enough on him that it won’t matter who he’s got files on. Not even the devil himself will be able to cover his ass.”

A shadow crossed Shroyer’s brow. “Why wasn’t I told?”

Hagen shrugged. “You obviously don’t share everything with NSA, why should they share with you? Either way, no matter how this crisis ends, Pope’s days with SAD are numbered. Let’s just hope he’s got enough gas left in the tank to find that RA-115 before it’s too late.”

Shroyer felt a sudden sense of intuition. “What does he have on you? Why do you suddenly want him out?”

“There’s nothing
to
have on me, George. I play by the rules.” Then Hagen smiled. “But I’ll soon know what he’s got on everyone else.”