“It’s me,” Bradley said through the door. “I’m coming in.”
Lauren listened as he slipped his magnetic key card in the lock and opened the door. His face was taut, and as he stood there straddling the threshold, Lauren knew something was brewing.
“We’ve got to go,” Bradley said. “Now.”
Jonathan Waller was summoned to Director Knox’s office at seven o’clock in the evening. Waller had just arrived home and spoken to his girlfriend, who was on her way over to have a romantic dinner with him. And she was bringing “a special something” for dessert. The way the Scarponi case had been going, they had not had much time together. Unable to reach her while she was en route, Waller left a note on his door containing a huge apology. He could only imagine her reaction when she got to his house expecting a long-awaited evening together, only to find a note and no
significant other.
He pulled into the Hoover Building’s underground parking garage at five after seven and was admitted into the director’s office a few minutes later. Knox was in sweats and running shoes, his suit coat hanging in the far corner of his suite, on his bathroom door.
“You’re not my favorite person right now,” Knox said to Waller before he could sit. The director was leaning against the windowsill, his arms folded across his chest.
“No, sir.”
“I’d like to give you a chance to make amends for the abominable work you’ve been passing off as a member of the Bureau, to show me you can follow orders and procedure and complete an assignment without screwing up.”
Waller kept his mouth shut, something Haviland often said he should do in times like these—but rarely did.
“I’ve assigned you to part of the group that rides with me during Agent Payne’s transport tonight to Vandenheim Air Force Base.”
Waller nodded, pleased that he was being given the opportunity, but confused all the same. He had assumed he was automatically going to be included. Not wanting to stir up problems, he again held his thoughts. “Thank you, sir. I’d like that.”
“I thought you might. There’s a briefing that starts in ten minutes, in Strategic Planning One. I’ll be there as soon as I can shower and throw my clothes on.”
Waller thanked Knox again, and then headed to the elevators. If Waller was to have any hopes of getting a favorable final evaluation from the director to his superior, SAC Lindsey—if he was to have any hopes of salvaging his career—then he had to make sure the role he played in Payne’s transfer was significant. Without screwups. Without variance from established procedure.
He walked into the elevator and pressed 4, then chuckled. Well, best he could hope for was to avoid screwups.
Thunder was blasting the countryside and a light rain had begun to fall as darkness descended on the outskirts of Bristow, Virginia. The Advanced Paramedic Response ambulance was tooling along Route 28 at fifty miles per hour, its headlights beating down on the one-lane road.
In front of and behind the ambulance were unmarked FBI escort vehicles, navy blue Ford Crown Victorias. Hanging back a mile and a quarter was a black Lincoln Navigator, running with nothing but its windshield wipers on. It was closing ground on the ambulance, and Anthony Scarponi, driving the tank of a vehicle, was like a hungry animal closing in on its quarry. Before leaving the States for good, he was intent on making this hit his last big hurrah.
“Looks like the mole came through for us,” Scarponi said. “A PR ambulance with two escorts, just like he said.”
In the front passenger seat was Rocko McCabe, a Vietnam War veteran, a man who had never quite recovered from his posttraumatic stress disorder. In and out of VA hospitals for twenty years, he had come under the tutelage of Scarponi during one of the assassin’s trips to the United States in the late 1980s.
McCabe had long, flowing hair drawn back into a ponytail. His face was leathery with deep-set grooves, worry lines he had acquired during his army days when he was a sniper—a legal, and lethal, assassin. If there was one thing the drugs, depression, and poverty hadn’t taken away from him, it was his steady eye for a rifle scope. It was the one skill Scarponi considered essential to his colleague’s employment.
The M20 three-and-a-half-inch bazooka was straddling McCabe’s lap in pieces. They had three eight-pound armor-piercing rockets in the vehicle with them, though one close-range shot from McCabe’s hands would be more than enough to take out an ambulance carrying Harper Payne on a one-lane road in northern Virginia.
“I’ve been waiting for this day for six years,” Scarponi said. “I’ve dreamt about it more times than I can remember.” His hands were pearl white from gripping the steering wheel. “There’s something about revenge that’s so... I don’t know, fulfilling.”
The passenger in the backseat was Griff Daniels, a buddy of McCabe’s during their service days. Unlike McCabe’s, Daniels’ head was clean-shaven—though at the moment, he had a five-o’clock shadow poking through his scalp. It was actually Daniels who had introduced McCabe to Scarponi thirteen years ago. In Vietnam, Daniels’ expertise was also in long-range sniping, and he and McCabe often challenged each other to shooting contests—where the targets were anything and everything. Cans, helmets, trees, tanks, commies. And civilians.
“What’ll you give me if I take out this ambulance?” McCabe asked, a Merit dangling from his bottom lip.
“A fucking medal,” Daniels said. “How’s that?”
“Focus,” Scarponi said sternly. “No screwups.”
“Have I ever let you down, boss?”
“It’s not you, it’s that contraption I’m worried about.” Scarponi nodded at the two-piece aluminum smoothbore tube McCabe was busy assembling.
“Couldn’t you get something a little more... low-key?”
“Lots of ways to take out a truck. But you wanted a clean hit. No doubt, you said. No doubt. This beauty will take out a tank. A fucking ambulance? There’ll be nothing left, inside or out.”
“I haven’t seen one of them things since Korea,” Daniels said. “Where the hell did you get it?”
“This old coot owed me big bucks about ten years ago,” McCabe said as he snapped the front barrel hook into place. “Got him a shitload of weed for some war wound he got in Korea. Said they gave him a Purple Heart that didn’t do shit for him, but the VA wouldn’t give him enough painkillers to keep him sane.”
McCabe threw the barrel latch handle into place and examined the connection. “Anyway, after he used all the weed, he was gonna stiff me on what he owed me. I convinced him that would be a quick way to end his shitty life, and he offered me this baby as a trade,” McCabe said, tapping the launcher with his right hand. “It’ll do the job, boss. I know how important this is to you.”
“It better,” Scarponi said. “The backup plan is a whole lot messier.” He depressed the accelerator and the 5. 4-liter engine powered the heavy SUV up to seventy, effortlessly moving the Navigator to within 125 yards of the trailing escort vehicle. On a moonless, overcast, rainy evening, Scarponi knew that it would be difficult to see a dark vehicle following at this distance. Suddenly he felt the blood surging in his temples, the flood of adrenaline in his veins. His pupils were dilated and his focus was on the large ambulance looming in the distance ahead of him.
“Coming up on marker eighteen,” McCabe said. “About three-quarters of a mile to go.”
“Then it’s time,” Scarponi said. He dialed his cell phone and spoke with his advance scouts, who had located two other FBI undercover cars stationed in the brush alongside the road, no doubt waiting to hand off surveillance to other agents once the ambulance passed. “Take them out,” Scarponi said. “Repeat, begin Operation Bleach.” He received confirmation, disconnected the call, and matched speed with the Crown Victoria, holding his position at one hundred yards. “Okay, boys, line up your shots carefully. We only want to do this once.”
“If I can’t hit a target like that, at this distance, with this howitzer, you should put me out of my misery.” McCabe snuffed out his cigarette while Daniels lifted his Heckler & Koch MP5 semiautomatic submachine gun that was fitted with a laser sight. He opened the right rear window and waited. “I’m in position,” he shouted above the wind noise.
Scarponi retracted the moon roof. After the top had rolled aside, McCabe quickly maneuvered his feet so he was standing on the center console, his back against the roof’s opening. Satisfied with his footing, he reached down and hoisted the twenty-three-pound rocket launcher into a position such that it was sticking straight up, almost parallel with his body.
McCabe stood up fully, the cold, driving rain pummeling his face. He pulled down a pair of clear plastic goggles to deflect the oncoming fifty-five-mile-an-hour headwind, then maneuvered the five-foot tube through the opening and moved the bazooka’s rear support onto his shoulder. The high-explosive antitank rocket was loaded and ready for launching. He rested the front-tube-mounted bipod on the roof of the Navigator and settled the right lens of his goggles against the weapon’s reflecting sight.
“Ready,” McCabe shouted.
“Copy,” Scarponi yelled back. He moved the Navigator to the left of the road, giving Daniels an unimpeded shot at the rear window of the Crown Victoria. The plan was to take out the driver of the escort vehicle with a precision shot to the head. The car would undoubtedly swerve off to the side. Meanwhile, McCabe would have a clear shot at the ambulance, which was several feet higher than the trailing car. To work effectively, they would shoot simultaneously.
None of them would know what hit them... least of all Harper Payne.
McCabe took a deep breath and let it out slowly as his hand fingered the electronic firing device.
Scarponi’s excitement was so high he could barely speak to give the order. The imprisonment of the last six years flashed in his mind... the physical and emotional torture, the blackness of solitary confinement, the putrid food, the demotion of his humanity to a piece of rotting garbage. He cleared his throat and said, “Do it!”
McCabe squeezed. “Fire in the hole!”
Jonathan Waller was in a Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopter, infrared binoculars in his hands. The Black Hawk was “America’s helicopter,” a workhorse that had over thirty years’ combat experience tucked away in its twin-turbine engines. With the capability of carrying nearly two dozen soldiers deep into a warzone, the Black Hawk and its myriad incarnations were used by the army’s Special Ops unit, the navy, air force, coast guard, FBI, and Marine Corps.
Waller’s headset was muffling almost all of the cacophonous rotor noise, and with the chopper’s smooth rocking movements, he was lulled to memories of the time when he had taken an air tour of the island of Maui, Hawaii. As they had flown above the ten-thousand-foot ceiling of Mount Haleakala, the synchronized classical music score had built to a crescendo. While the dark countryside of Virginia was nowhere near as dramatic as the clear turquoise waters of the Hawaiian Pacific, it was, nevertheless, hypnotizing.
Until he casually pressed the infrared binoculars to his eyes.
Until he saw the rocket launcher protruding from the top of the Navigator, until he saw the burst of flame pouring from the rear of the bazooka.
“Holy fucking shit!” Waller said.
But it was too late.
The back-blast was enormous, the shock wave furiously slamming against the Navigator with a loud whoomp! Rocko McCabe was thrown backward, his head smashing against the moon roof’s opening just before he crumpled onto Griff Daniels’s lap in the backseat.
“Impact!” Scarponi screamed.
The rocket pierced the back of the ambulance less than a second after it was fired, penetrating the metal as if it were a sharp knife slicing through sponge cake. After a split-second delay, the ambulance’s metal substructure burst upward toward the heavens, a swirling round fireball surging off the blacktop, lighting up the murky darkness brighter than a baseball stadium.
Scarponi veered hard to the right, missing the Crown Victoria that was careening left off the road. The driver’s-side wheels of the Navigator left the asphalt for a second as the vehicle continued moving onto the shoulder and then into the brush. It barreled through the periphery of the burning wreckage, fire licking up its sides, blistering its finish.
Daniels was already spraying nine-millimeter rounds across the windows and tires of the leading escort vehicle. At the instant the FBI agent locked his brakes in disbelief, a bullet blew apart his skull.
“Woo-hoo!” Scarponi whooped as the inferno receded in his rearview mirror. McCabe sat up from the backseat, dazed and disoriented. He turned toward the ruinous fire on the roadway framed by the large back window and smiled. “Right on!”
Waller had pulled the binoculars away from his eyes at just the right instant. Had he still been looking through the infrared glasses, the light flare from the explosion would have blown out his rods and cones for at least the next fifteen minutes.
“My God,” was all Hector DeSantos could say.
Douglas Knox was seething. “Take us in!” he said to the pilot. “Don’t let them get away—”
Waller twisted a knob on the control panel in front of him and yanked his headset microphone close to his lips. “This is Air Unit Five,” he shouted, his voice cracking. “Need backup and medevac at mile marker eighteen!”
Harper Payne, sitting next to Hector DeSantos on the right side of the helicopter, could not pull his stare away from the distant blaze. “He’s crazy. Scarponi, the guy’s lost his mind.”
“Obviously, he thought you were in that ambulance,” DeSantos said.
“ETA for backup?” Knox asked.
Waller repeated the request and waited about ten seconds before he received the reply. They all heard the answer over their headsets: two of the additional units that were stationed ahead of them at mile markers twenty-five and forty were not responding. Required time to get ground vehicles to that location:
at least fifteen minutes.
Payne looked over at Knox and saw the man’s shoulders slump forward in defeat. The chopper vibrated hard as the pilot pushed the throttle to 152 knots—175 miles an hour—and the distance to the burning plume began decreasing rapidly.