Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

Terrill Hatfield said, ‘My men are in place, seven-hundred-fifty yards out, ready to do the necessary.’

‘Seven-hundred-and-fifty yards? Jaysus, Terrill, Al-Qaeda has no expertise at long-distance assassination.’

‘But some survivalist who hates the President might,’ said Hatfield. It sounded weak to his ears, but O’Hara nodded.

‘Well, with your men covering distant threats, and my boys covering for close work, we’ll be fine. I’ve kept four-and-a-half Presidents alive, starting with the elder Bush and counting our newly-elected Wallberg, and haven’t lost one yet.’ He checked his watch. ‘Home Plate’s speech starts at three p.m.’

You won’t lose one today, Hatfield thought as he walked away. Not with his own boys 750 yards out, all the hardware and all the jargon of the trade in place. In his ear receiver, he could hear their pre-op adrenaline-charged chatter. To him, they sounded like a pack of coyotes warming up for the hunt.

Franklin’s voice. ‘Ray One to TOC. Request Compromise Authority and permission to move to Code Yellow.’

Yellow: the penultimate position of cover and concealment before Code Green, which meant, in this case, if they got visual on Corwin. Green was the moment of truth. Hatfield, Tactical Operations Commander for this operation, spoke into his bone microphone — called a ‘mic’ by the troops.

‘Copy, Ray One, stand by.’

Walt, ever eager to use his weapon, broke in, ‘Walter Two. Is that an affirmative on Compromise Authority?’

Compromise Authority was a euphemism for permission to open up with their MP5 machine guns, their snipe rifles, their flash bangs, their .40 Glock semiautomatics. All the toys. This was what his boys lived for, and he loved them for it.

‘Copy, Walter Two. Affirmative on Compromise Authority if the situation moves to Code Green.’

They would protect the president, all right. But not from threats by the towel-heads and survivalists O’Hara was worried about. From the Halden Corwin whom Thorne had warned them would be there. Like Wallberg, Hatfield believed Thorne.

But his men were not facing out and up, as Thorne wanted, but in and down. If Corwin was fool enough to show, he wasn’t fool enough to set up beyond five hundred yards out. Hatfield’s men would nail him. Hatfield would rub Thorne’s nose in the take-down — before he had the bastard deported back to Kenya to rot in prison while Jaeger made sure that the President thought Thorne was in Tsavo.

Hal Corwin would be dead. Thorne would be out of the picture. With the man who would be next Secretary of State as his ally, Terrill Hatfield would be the next Director of the FBI.

Thorne went in light: his scope-mounted rifle slung across his back, his binocs hung around his neck, a handful of shells in his coat pocket, his knife and canteen on his belt. He also went in slow. Working his way up the valley between flanking stands of blue spruce, he began to feel that maybe Hatfield was right. No vehicle hidden under the trees. No tire tracks, no footprint, no broken branch. If Corwin wasn’t here now, he wasn’t coming.

Maybe Thorne could relax a bit. Hatfield, despite all of his obstructionist bullshit, would have his men 750 yards out, scanning the tall crags behind them.

Thorne briefly checked out the bird and animal sign under the reeds edging the pond. Soft-padded mink tracks, pattering mouse tracks, a dozen long-toed coyote tracks beside the cattails with their brown heads just starting to form. Tiny coins of duckweed floating on the surface with their filaments of root trailing down into the water. Pondweed, punched down into the mud by sharp-edged mule deer hoofs...

He stopped dead.

Among the deer tracks, a single human boot print, water seeping into it. The track pointed north, toward that edge of the massif. The direction he had always thought Corwin would take, the direction he had taken himself when scouting sniper sites on the other side of the ridge.

Thorne came erect, scanning the massif. Movement caught his eye, right at the edge of the open ridge face. He fumbled out his binoculars, raised them, adjusted them.

Too late. Nothing. Had there been? Bighorn? Elk? Man?

He began trotting up the rising terrain toward the northern edge of the ridge.

Corwin had come in an hour before, also light. Binocs around his neck, canteen and old Smith and Wesson .38 revolver on his hip, cased and loaded rifle over his shoulder, in his pockets his cellphone in a waterproof case to call Janet when it was all over, an empty plastic water bottle, and a roll of masking tape.

Above to his right, the sheer rise of granite; below to his left, a sheer thousand feet of freefall. Out of habit, he checked his backtrial before rounding the northern edge of the massif on those few yards of exposed bare rock.

Someone! He slithered behind a plate of stone, jammed his binoculars to his eyes. The figure by the pond sprang into tight focus, just coming erect, staring up at the rock face, raising his own binocs. Scanning. Now moving. Starting up from the valley floor, coming fast. It was the hunter who had uncovered his practice sites, who had ferreted out Mather’s ambush site.

Corwin belly-crawled around to the other side of the ridge, into the cover of the pines, shrubs, and broken expanses of rock, adrenaline pumping. The tracker was at least fifteen years younger than he, hard and fit and fearless. No way to outrun him. He cursed his shortened leg, damaged knee, splinting in his chest.

Corwin took the revolver from his belt, from his anorak pocket took the empty plastic water bottle and the masking tape. He taped the mouth of the bottle over the gun’s muzzle.

An unmuffled shot might just carry too far in this thin mountain air despite the fact that his pistol fired a .38 short, a relatively low-powered round without a lot of punch or noise. The plastic bottle would trap the escaping gases of his shot, muffle the sound without impeding the bullet’s flight in any way. It was a home-made silencer, good for only one shot, up close.

Thorne went around the end of the massif in a rush, dropped to the ground in thick cover. Waited, panting, for his pulse to slow. The worst kind of a stalk, where you weren’t sure the prey was even out there. The movement he had seen from below could have been a deer, a bighorn sheep, a chimera.

But he knew it was Corwin. Dorst had been right. Alison and Eden receded in his interior ladscape, replaced by the need to match himself against this master woodsman, whatever the outcome. He went down through the scattered tree-growth, slowly, silently. Whenever he passed anything that might conceal a man, he scouted the possible ambush from the side before moving on.

Corwin climbed up on a ledge and stood there for two minutes, pistol in hand. Caught a glimpse of distant movement, no shot possible. He had to push it, make it happen. He crossed the stream on a fallen log, deliberately leaving wet footprints on the decaying wood. From the end he leaped into the brush beyond, snapping twigs, rustling leaves, setting up his ambush.

Thorne heard muted snapping and rustling and froze. Moved on downstream. Wet tracks where Corwin had crossed a fallen log to the lower side. Thick growth over there where Corwin would wait for Thorne to cross the log. Still hiding in plain sight.

Thorne crawled away upstream, slowly, silently on splayed elbows and knees. Found a place well out of sight of the log that was narrow enough so he could leap over the rushing water.

He went back downstream on the lower side, moving with the silence of his years in Tsavo, expecting every moment to see some darker shadow in the undergrowth, his Randall Survivor in hand. Bring on the nightmare. But he saw no shadow. No Corwin.