Jack Coughlin - An Act of Treason

It seemed an eternity before a few responses came, residents asking for more detail before they unlocked the portal for a stranger. Finally one person upstairs hit the button and the lock buzzed and slid back. Kyle pushed on the door, but Lauren’s body was in the way. He put his shoulder to it and managed to open it enough to squeeze through, weapon first, shifting his eyes to the hallway in case Hall decided to snap off more shots. He heard footsteps pounding down the stairs, Jim Hall escaping.

Adrenaline surged through Kyle, telling the warrior to go after the target, to take down the threat no matter what. Finish what you start. Finish Jim Hall now, because you might never get another chance. But this was Lauren lying at his feet, with a couple of terrible bullet wounds that were bleeding profusely, silently weeping and trying to eat the pain. He dropped the gun.

On his knees, Swanson felt for a pulse and found a weak one. He gripped her hand, and somehow she smiled. He ran his hands over the wounds, front and back. The first bullet had struck her in the thigh, the second in the back. He knew from his own past that the two bullets had done a lot of damage, too much for any first aid to mend. She needed a hospital and a surgeon. He would not leave her to die alone on a cold marble floor in Switzerland. He ripped off his jacket and tied the sleeves around the thigh wound, which was spilling dark blood like a waterfall. Kyle bit his lower lip, knowing the sign that her femoral artery was hit. His shirt became a bandage for the back wound. No exit wound meant the bullet was still in there. Shit!

The hiccupping sirens of approaching police and ambulances could be heard, but in his heart, Kyle knew they might lose this race. He wrapped his arms around Lauren, sat back against the wall, and pulled her close, pressing the makeshift bandages. “It’s okay, sweetheart. I’ve got you now,” he whispered. He was at a loss to do any more and felt hot tears of his own. He stroked her hair and looked deep into the beautiful eyes that were growing dim. “Hey, did I ever tell you about a place called Flo’s Hot Dogs, back in Maine? I’ll take you there soon.” And he explained to her the mysteries of making a great hot dog.

BAVARIA

T HE GLOVES CAME OFFafter the shooting of Agent Lauren Carson and even the CIA joined the hunt-only in a support role, but it furnished a ton of support. The orders from the president were explicit: Find Jim Hall. Every alphabet agency in the U.S. government, and their counterparts overseas, put him at number one on the international list of active terrorists. Any country knowingly providing him aid and comfort could expect harsh retribution and a cutoff of all financial aid from the United States.

Still, it took five months before the German police talked to a woman in a small Bavarian village.

She was angry, she said, because a friend worked as a housekeeper for a rich American man up at that house in the mountains and he paid her too much money. She was nothing but a showoff, throwing that money in everybody’s face with her new clothes and the new car. Nobody else could make that kind of money as housekeepers, and it was unfair. A police visit to the friend’s place turned up a few hundred-dollar bills with sequential serial numbers.

Technology then came into play, with the isolated house, a large cabin that was perfect for withstanding a winter in the Alps, targeted by satellites and drones. The German intelligence service contacted Switzerland, where this suspect had made such an imprint, and asked Commander Stefan Glamer for any ideas.

Glamer gave them one. He knew a man admirably equipped to handle the situation, he said, a specialist, the best there was at this sort of thing, and it would be kept quiet. The Germans liked the idea. Glamer placed a call to General Brad Middleton in Washington.

F OUR NIGHTS LATER, INcold and frigid darkness, Kyle Swanson was dropped off by helicopter in a touch-and-go two miles from the cabin. He humped in overnight, nearly invisible in his winter white combat gear, using a GPS system that led him right to a ridge from which he could see the house. He came to a stop in a tree line five hundred yards from the cabin. New snow veiled the rocks and underbrush.

Jim Hall obviously knew that Kyle would be coming after him, sooner or later, but the months had passed quietly since Bern, and the harsh winter had clamped onto the Alps, providing an extra barrier of protection.

Kyle studied the place through his binos from the tall trees that shadowed him from the bright starlight illuminating a cloudless sky. There were no lights in the windows. After so much secure time, Hall had let his guard slip. Hell, Kyle thought, the guy can’t stay up and alert all night, every night. He edged closer, into a thicket only about three hundred yards away.

A little dark shape darted nearby, a curious fox that smelled the strange scent but did not follow it. Kyle was glad to see him. Abundant wildlife meant that motion detection sensors would have been useless as a defense mechanism. This time, his binos showed cameras perched at all four corners of the cabin, but he believed the harsh weather had likely corrupted their lenses over the past few months. The dustings of snow and ice would blur his image anyway.

Using a laser rangefinder, he studied the cabin from all sides, charting it with precision in his notebook. A driveway was clogged with snow all the way to the garage, and a snowmobile bulged beneath a blue tarp next to the front deck. Beside one wall were twin white tanks of propane gas for indoor heating. No smoke came from the brick chimney, telling him that the fireplace had been doused for the night and not yet relit. A small covered porch ended at one edge with an adjacent shed that was empty, indicating that the nearest supply of dry cut logs had been used. These days, Hall would have to trek out about ten yards from the steps to the secondary, larger stack. Kyle estimated that more than a cord of split wood was left. A path had been worn in the snow with the routine of bringing the logs inside. Everything seemed in place, and matched precisely with the information that the cleaning woman had provided the police.

As a precaution, Swanson slowly turned and scanned in a circle all about him, comfortable that he was invisible and alone, but checking nonetheless. This was an omnidirectional target, so there should be no one scouting behind him. The silence of the mountain was almost tangible. Kyle continued forward, ever more cautiously, and closed to within a hundred yards, then followed a snow ridge into a swell created by the blowing snow, only seventy yards from the house. That would do it.

He crawled forward to come in directly behind the two-foot-high mound, then quietly began to tunnel into the back side, out of sight of the windows and cameras. The new snow was soft and gave way easily to the small entrenching tool and his busy hands and feet. Kyle constantly estimated the depth of his burrowing, and finally his fingers punched through the outer crust and he stopped. He could see the front porch through the hole, which he carefully widened to become a small window at the front of his snow cave. He pulled a square of white cloth from his pack and secured it across the mouth of the hole, with a little space left at the top. It resembled the veil of a burka worn by a Muslim woman, covering everything but for the eyes.

Kyle squirmed backward. He would leave the rifle in its drag bag to protect it from the weather for now, but when it came time to work, he would be able to sight over the top edge of the cloth and fire through the sheer white material. He had become part of the landscape, and the only possibly visible element was the scope, which was also cammed out. In addition, the rising sun would be at his back and shining into the eyes of anyone on the porch. It would be impossible to spot his hide site.