Locked On

40

John Clark was new to trout fishing, and he recognized he had a lot to learn about it. On a couple of occasions he’d managed to catch a few rainbow and brown trout in his neighbor’s creek, though the streams and brooks on his own farm had so far yielded him nothing but frustration. His neighbor had told him there was good trout to be caught on Clark’s own property, but another local contradicted that, explaining that what were called trout in the little streams like those on Clark’s farm were actually just creek chubs, a member of the minnow family that grew up to a foot in length and could be feisty enough when on the line to fool amateur anglers into thinking they were battling a trout.

John figured he’d get a book on fishing and read it when he had the time, but for this afternoon he just stood out here alone in his waders in his neighbor’s creek, whipped his line back and forth, dumped the fly in a slow-moving pool, and then repeated that process, over and over and over.

It looked a lot like fly-fishing, except for the fact that he hadn’t caught a damn thing.

John gave up for the afternoon and pulled his line in an hour before dark. Though he hadn’t managed to fool any fish into biting his fly, it had been a good day nonetheless. His gunshot wound had all but healed, he’d gotten a few hours of fresh air and solitude, and, before his afternoon of relaxation, he’d put a first coat of paint on the master bedroom of the farmhouse. One more coat this coming weekend and he’d bring Sandy out so he could get a thumbs-up from her to begin painting the living room.

On top of that, he’d neither been shot again nor found it necessary to kill anyone or run for his life.

Yeah, a good day.

John packed up his fishing gear, looked up to a gray sky, and wondered if this was what retirement felt like.

He lifted his tackle box and his fly rod and shook off the thought like he shook off the cold breeze rolling down from Catoctin Mountain to the west. It was a good half-hour’s slog through the woods back to his farmhouse. He started the hike to the east by climbing the stones out of the creek up to an overgrown trail.

John’s farm was in Frederick County, west of Emmitsburg and within a mile of the Pennsylvania state line. He and Sandy had been looking for rural property since they’d returned from the UK, and when a Navy buddy who’d retired to a small dairy farm up here to make cheese with his wife told John about a “For Sale” sign in front of a simple farmhouse on fifty acres, John and Sandy came up for a look.

The price was right because the house needed some work, and Sandy loved the old house and the countryside, so they’d signed the contracts late last spring.

Since then John had been too busy at The Campus to do much more than drive up during a rare free day off to work on the house and to do a little maintenance and fishing. Sandy came up with him now and again, together they’d visited Gettysburg just a few miles up the road, and they hoped to get away soon for a weekend trip to Amish Country in nearby Lancaster County.

And when they retired, they planned to move up here full-time.

Or when Sandy retired, Clark reminded himself as he pushed his way up a thick copse of evergreen brush that covered the hill leading away from the tiny stream.

John had bought the property for their golden years, but he had no illusions that he would be one to just fade off into the sunset. That he would live long enough to retire and make cheese until his body slowly crapped out on him from age.

No. John Clark figured it would all end for him a lot more suddenly than that.

The bullet through his arm was about the fiftieth close call of Clark’s life. Six inches inside its flight path and that 9-millimeter round would have gone right into a lung, and he’d have choked to death in his own blood before Ding and Dom could have carried him down to street level. Another four inches to the left and it would have pierced his heart and he would not have even made it out of the attic. A couple of feet higher and the round would have nailed the back of his head, and he would have fallen dead like Abdul bin Mohammed al Qahtani had dropped in the elevator of the Hôtel de Sers.

John was certain that, sooner or later — and John was running out of “later” — he’d die on a mission.

When he was young, really young, he’d been a Navy SEAL in Vietnam working in MACV-SOG, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — Studies and Observations Group. Clark, along with others in SOG, had lived within a hairsbreadth of death for years. He’d had many close shaves. Bullets that whizzed by his face, explosions that sent lethal shrapnel into men within arm’s reach, helicopters that lifted five hundred feet into the air before deciding that they did not feel like flying anymore that day. Back then these brushes with death just pumped him full of adrenaline. Made him so fucking ecstatic to be alive that he, like many others of his age and in his profession, began to live for the drug called danger.

John ducked under the low limb of a young poplar as he walked, careful to keep his fly rod from snagging on the branches. He smiled a little, thinking about being twenty-two. So long ago.

The bullet that nearly dropped him dead on the Paris rooftop didn’t exactly fill him with the same giddy thrills he’d felt as a young SEAL in ’Nam. Nor did it fill him with dread and fear. No, John wasn’t going soft in his old age. More like fatalistic. The bullet in France and the farmhouse in Maryland had a lot in common.

They both told John that, one way or another, there is an end to this crazy ride.

John climbed over a split-rail section of the fence at the southwest corner of his property. Once on his own land, he hiked through a small wood of loblolly pine where the slope of a hill led down into a tiny valley where a shallow creek wound from north to south near the fence line.

He looked down at his watch and saw it was four-fifteen. He didn’t have any cell phone coverage out here, so for the three hours that he’d been out for his impromptu fishing trip he’d been “off the grid.” He wondered how many messages he’d have back on the landline at the house, and he thought back again to his past, fondly remembering a time before mobile phones, when he didn’t feel guilty for a walk in the damn woods.

Being alone here in the wilds of Maryland made him think of being alone in the bush in Southeast Asia. Yeah, it was a long time ago, but not so long if you’d been there, and Clark had damn well been there. The plants were different in the jungle, obviously, but the feel was the same. He’d always liked being out in nature; he’d sure gotten away from that in the last several years. Maybe once the OPTEMPO at The Campus died down to a reasonable level, then he could spend a little more time out here in his woods.

He’d love to take his grandson fishing someday — kids still liked stuff like that, didn’t they?

He stepped into his creek, felt his way forward through the knee-deep water, and found himself especially thankful that he’d worn his waders this afternoon. The water was ice-cold, spring-fed, and deeper than usual. The current wasn’t as fast-moving as it often was, which is why he crossed here as opposed to a hundred yards or so upstream, where large flat stones protruded just an inch or so out of the water across the width of the creek to make a natural, if slippery, bridge. But today Clark had no problem crossing right through the center of the stream, and even wading through a deeper pool created by a limestone depression, he found the water not more than waist deep.

John moved through the deepest part of the creek, stepped through a weed bed that sprang out of the limestone, and then he stopped.

He noticed something shining in the water, reflecting the setting sun’s rays like steel.

What is that?

There, surrounding a clump of grass poking out of the knee-deep water, was a shiny pinkish film. As the water flowed downstream, the pink film trailed in the direction of the current, individual globules broke away from the rest of the form and floated on.

Unlike many Vietnam veterans, Clark did not have flashbacks, per se. He’d done so much in the intervening forty years since ’Nam that his years in country weren’t any more traumatic than many of his later experiences. But right now, while looking at this viscous substance clinging to the grass, he thought back to Laos in 1970. There, with a team of Montagnard guerrillas, he had been crossing a stream not much deeper than this one, under a primeval rainforest. He’d noticed black film trailing downstream by their crossing point, and upon inspection he and the others determined it to be two-stroke engine oil. They then turned upstream, and found a spur of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that led them behind a group of North Vietnamese Army regulars who’d lost a scooter in the heavy current while trying to cross the stream. They’d fished out the bike, but not before its oil leaked out into the water, ultimately giving them away.

Clark and his team of Montagnard guerrillas had wiped out the enemy from behind.

Looking at the oil in the creek in front of him, he couldn’t help but think back to Laos. He reached out and put his fingers into the thin film of pink, then brought them to his nose.

The unmistakable smell of gun oil filled his nostrils. He even thought he could determine the make. Yes, it was Break-Free CLP, his own favorite brand.

Immediately Clark turned his head to look upstream.

Hunters. He couldn’t see them, but he had little doubt they had passed on the natural footbridge a hundred yards north sometime in the past half-hour or so.

There were white-tailed deer and turkey all over his property, and at this time of the evening the deer would be in abundance. But it wasn’t deer season, and Clark’s fence line was damn well posted. Whoever was on his property was breaking a multitude of laws.

Clark walked on, crossed the rest of the stream, and then picked up the trail that led through the woods to the open fields around his house. His walk through the forest seemed even more like Southeast Asia, now that he knew he was not alone out here in the bush.

It occurred to Clark that he’d have to break out of the woods right in front of open pastureland in order to get to his house. If there were hunters there, especially the kind of hunters who trespassed and killed game out of season, then, John recognized, it was not beyond the realm of possibilities that he could get shot a second time this month.

And this time it wouldn’t be from a 9-millimeter pistol. It would be from a shotgun or a deer rifle.

Christ, Clark thought. He reached into his waders, pulled out the SIG pistol that he kept with him at all times, and pointed it to the dirt trail at his feet in order to fire a round to indicate his presence.

But he stopped himself before pressing the trigger.

No. He wasn’t sure why, but he did not want to alert anyone to his presence. He wasn’t worried about a group of turkey hunters intentionally turning their weapons on him, of course not. But he didn’t know these guys, what their intentions were, or how much Jack Daniel’s they’d been sipping on their little afternoon hunting sortie, so he decided to track them instead.

He headed off the trail he’d been traveling on, so that he could get behind where he thought they would have traveled through the woods. It took him a while to find their tracks. He blamed the low, dappled light here under the trees. Finally he saw evidence of two men where they crossed a smaller trail.

After a few dozen yards he detected the pattern of their travel, and he found it odd. Whether they were turkey hunters or deer hunters, moving off the trail here didn’t make much sense. Their quarry would be out in the open rolling fields closer to the farmhouse. Why were they moving covertly here, still fifty yards from the edge of the tree line?

He lost their tracks a few yards on when the dusk and the canopy of evergreen above blocked out all but the faintest traces of usable light.

Clark put his fishing tackle down, climbed out of his waders, lowered to his knees, and moved slowly up to the edge of the wood line. He was careful to keep himself low to the ground and shielded by a large hemlock spruce.

When he reached the edge of the pasture, he looked out over the low grasses, fully expecting to see bright orange — clad figures to the east.

But there was nothing.

He scanned over by his farmhouse, a good hundred yards to the north, but he didn’t see anyone there, either.

But he did see a group of whitetail, eight in number, nibbling on grasses in the field between his position and the farmhouse. They were small females and young fawns, nothing a hunter would be interested in.

Quickly Clark’s brain began computing all the data he’d taken in. The amount of time for the Break-Free oil to drift down from the natural crossing in the creek to where he found it passing his fording point. The amount of time the deer would stay clear of the field, had the hunters crossed here.

It didn’t take long for him to realize that the hunters were here, in the woods with him.

Where?

John Clark was not a hunter, not of animals, anyway, so he defaulted again to his Vietnam experience. A knoll rose out of the southern portion of the pasture ahead on his right. This is where a sniper would logically set his hide to get optimal coverage of the area. Maybe a hunter would do the same —

Yes. There, fifty yards away from where Clark lay, a flash of light where the sunset just over the mountain glinted off glass.

Then he saw the men. They were not hunters, this he could tell from here. They wore ghillie suits, head-to-toe camouflage of tied strands of green and brown fabric to simulate leaves and dry grasses. The two men looked like a pair of leaf piles behind a partially camoed rifle and a spotting scope.

And their lenses were trained on the farmhouse.

“What the fuck?” Clark whispered to himself.

One of the men was wet, this Clark could plainly see. It didn’t take a brilliant investigator to put together what happened. These spotters had moved through the bush, crossed the creek a hundred yards or so north of where Clark crossed, and the man in the soaked camo had slipped on the flat rocks, dunked himself and his .308 rifle. Gun oil from his weapon would keep it from rusting, but that gun oil had given away the presence of the team to their target.

But why am I their target?

Clark thought he could backtrack over to his neighbor’s house. It would take at least a half-hour, but there he could call the authorities, get some Frederick County Sheriff’s Department deputies here to deal with the two snipers. But that would draw way too much attention to John Clark himself, inviting questions as to why a pair of military-trained men with a high-power rifle were on his property.

Or he could take care of this himself. Yes, it was the only way. He planned his route back into the trees, then south, behind the knoll, and then he planned his attack on the two men from behind.

But he didn’t get very far. In the distance he saw big black vehicles, five of them, heading up the road toward his house. They moved fast, without announcing their presence with their headlights, and Clark just lay there and watched them with fascination.

From a hundred yards away he watched the big SUVs park around his property, front and back. Only then were they close enough for him to see that men in black body armor stood on the running boards, held on to railings on the roofs, and clutched M4 assault rifles with their other hands.

He couldn’t actually read the white writing on the back of their uniforms and body armor, but he recognized the equipment and the tactics of the men using that equipment.

Clark closed his eyes and put his forehead down in the cool leaves. He knew who was smashing the front and back doors of his farmhouse.

This was an FBI SWAT team.

John lay there motionless and watched the FBI shatter his back door with a battering ram, then charge inside in a tactical train of men.

Within seconds their team leader announced they were clear, and men stepped back outside.

“Son of a bitch,” John said softly as he backed up, returning to the concealment of the woods. Here he shed his waders and tucked them under a collection of leaves and pine needles. He didn’t bother to take too much time on this project; he’d made no attempt to hide his tracks as he walked here through the woods, and he was about to make tracks in the other direction. When the FBI made it over here to the tree line, they’d see evidence that someone had wandered up on their raid, and then left the area.

After hiding the waders, Clark turned, stood, and began running back up the trail, looking to create some distance between himself and the men after him. He needed to find out what this was all about before he decided what the hell he would do about it.

As he ran, more than just about anything, he wished his mobile phone worked right now. He had a sinking suspicion he’d missed an important call or two while out fishing.