Commander-in-Chief

14

John Clark woke early on Sunday morning, long before his wife, and he dressed for warmth. He slipped a weathered gun belt through the loops of his jeans, holstered his large SIG Sauer P227 .45-caliber pistol, and pulled on a thick flannel lumberjack shirt.

After a pit stop in the bathroom and a drop into the kitchen to fill a thermos with coffee from the automatic pot, Clark headed out the back door of his Emmitsburg, Maryland, farmhouse. He pulled on a pair of muddy and weathered boots and made a beeline to his garage. Here, in a locked storeroom, he filled an old canvas pack with several hundred rounds of .45-caliber ammunition, several extra magazines, hearing and eye protection, and a gun-cleaning kit. A small medic pouch and his thermos also went into the pack; then he slung it over his shoulder and headed back outside.

Clark walked nearly ten minutes to his own private shooting range, down deep in a dry gully that ran to the creek on his farm. Here, several steel plates of different shapes were set up in front of a hay-bale backstop, and behind that the wall of the gully kept any examples of poor marksmanship from straying too far, although Clark was certain he’d never once placed a single bullet in the mud.

An old wooden workbench on wagon wheels sat in the middle of the gravel-covered ground, and here John Clark took his time disassembling and cleaning his handgun, and sipping his coffee, while the sun rose.

Even this early, John heard the occasional crackle of gunfire in the distance. There were hunters on land nearby, and instead of being annoyed by the noise, Clark welcomed it, because as far as he was concerned it gave him carte blanche to conduct target practice on his own property whenever the hell he pleased.

Sandy had made John promise to never open fire before seven a.m. unless he was using a weapon with a silencer. John, who was a loving and dutiful husband, always added a half-hour to his wife’s moratorium, so he never started before seven-thirty.

As his watch beeped the half-hour, Clark loaded his gun. His everyday sidearm was the New Hampshire — manufactured SIG Sauer P227 .45-caliber Enhanced Elite model. It carried ten rounds in the magazine, along with an additional round in the chamber.

Clark was the only member of The Campus who carried a .45 and the only one who carried a SIG. All the others carried Glocks or Smith & Wessons in nine-millimeter, but Clark had been a fan of the big and fat .45-caliber round since Vietnam.

Ryan and Caruso teased him a bit for being old-school with his pistol, and even Chavez liked to joke that Clark could run a little faster and jump a little higher if he didn’t wear a howitzer on his belt, but Clark didn’t find the eleven-round SIG to be as heavy as the eight-round Colt 1911 he’d carried for decades, so he felt secure in his choice of weapon.

He let the others chide him; it was his opinion that reasonable people could disagree on caliber, but the most reasonable people agreed with him that the .45 was the way to go.

Clark brought this and other weapons out to his homemade gun range regularly, but today he’d decided he would make a major shift in his daily training.

Clark’s eyesight was fair for a normal sixty-seven-year-old man, but Clark was not a normal sixty-seven-year-old. Few men his age ever found themselves needing to shoot at anyone shooting back at them. And Clark was fast for his age, but few men his age ever called on their speed to engage a threat with a firearm.

In both cases, John Clark was one of those few.

He knew he was getting slower and less sure with his weapon; it was a fact of life that his skills would deteriorate with age. Sure, he was still a hell of a lot better, at all handgun distances, than the vast majority of those who carried a weapon for a living, but to Clark that wasn’t good enough.

It was about carrying out his missions, but it was more than that.

Clark thought about the death of Sam Driscoll, and he knew objectively that Sam’s death had had absolutely nothing to do with any mistake Clark made. But with the news that Chavez and Caruso had found themselves outgunned in Germany two days earlier, Clark realized he could possibly find himself back out in the field, and his ability to handle his share of the duty and protect his team from harm was paramount to him.

And he wanted to be ready, despite the negative effects of his age on his skill sets, so he told himself he needed to work his ass off to maintain and even increase his own abilities in the field.

Point shooting was a technique that involved focusing on the target, not the weapon’s sights, in order to quickly and accurately engage a threat. Clark had been trained in point shooting; all operators who spend time in close quarters battle training need the ability to bring a rifle or a pistol up for a snap shot when there was no time to engage through the sights. But Clark knew his advancing years meant it would be greatly beneficial for him to adapt point shooting to engaging targets farther out than the very close distances he’d been accustomed to. If he could teach himself to draw his pistol and hit chest-sized targets at twenty, thirty, even forty feet, he could greatly decrease his engagement times with a firearm.

So much of point shooting involved orienting the body and using the body to aim the weapon. Without the benefit of the sights, proper body alignment to the target helped get the barrel of the gun pointed in the right direction. From there it was just a matter of refining fundamentals. Proper grip on the gun, perfect trigger control, a good understanding of how to manage recoil and get the gun back on target.

Clark exhaled a long, full breath that turned into vapor in the cold, and he reached over to the table and tapped a button on the top of his automatic shot timer. Once the button was pressed, it would wait a random amount of time — somewhere between three and ten seconds — and then it would beep loudly. This served as his starting gun, his indication that the steel target forty feet away was a threat.

Clark lowered his hands to his sides, and he eyed the target, waiting to explode with action. He always started his training rounds cold, meaning he did not warm up at all. He knew if he ever needed to employ his weapon in the field, he wouldn’t have a chance to tell all the bad guys to take a smoke break while he shot some paper targets off to the side, just to make sure his synapses were firing and he was ready to go.

The shot timer beeped. Clark dropped his hand to the pistol and drew it from his belt. As he did so he turned his body toward the target, so when the gun cleared leather and he began to raise it, he was already oriented in the right direction.

Clark fired one round in nearly half the time it would have taken him to bring the weapon up to his sightline and focus on it.

He saw a massive splatter of mud in the wall of the gully, behind and a foot to the left of the steel target.

Clark sighed and reholstered his weapon.

He didn’t let it get to him. This was why he trained. If he had succeeded his first time out, he would have known he wasn’t making the training challenging enough.

Clark ran the drill again, and again he got the same results. On the fourth try he was slower, but at least he dinged the edge of the steel target, just where the “right elbow” of the “man” jutted out from his body.

He spent an hour dumping more than two hundred rounds at the steel man-sized target forty feet away. One draw at a time. It was hard to keep himself from bringing the weapon up to eye level for each shot, but it got easier as he retrained his muscles to respond to the new technique.

At the end of his training, he was speckled with mud from splatter that came back at him, and his clothing and hair smelled like gun smoke. On top of this, he wasn’t where he wanted to be with this skill, not even close. But he was a hell of a lot better than he’d been when he woke up.

He cleaned his gun at the table, then reloaded it, and he was just slipping his hot pistol back into his holster for the last time of the morning when his cell phone rang in his pocket. He didn’t even look at the caller ID on the screen, so sure he was it was Sandy letting him know that she had breakfast almost ready and the table set on the back porch. She’d dutifully listened to an hour of gunfire on a Sunday morning, and as he brought the phone to his ear he decided he was going to make it up to her. “I’m on the way back, honey. How about we go to that antiques place up in Gettysburg after breakfast?”

There was a delay, then Clark heard the Kentucky drawl of Gerry Hendley, director of The Campus. “Uh… John?”

“Oops. Sorry about that, Gerry. Thought you were Sandy.”

“I’m not, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like antiques.”

Clark laughed. “What’s up?”

“I hate to do this to you, but Mary Pat asked if she could come to the office today for a meeting.”

Clark said, “Does this involve the shootout in Germany?”

Gerry said, “Not sure. Dom and Domingo just got back in town last night, but she asked that everyone come, so I’ll call them next.”

Clark did not hesitate in his response. Mary Pat rarely came to the office. After all, she was the head of all U.S. intelligence, a cabinet-level official. “Just tell me when and I’ll be there.” He looked down at himself. “I’ll be honest, though. I could stand a shower first.”