Under Siege

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Ike Randolph’s body was in the trunk of the car when Harrison Ronald parked it on E Street in front of the FBI building. Freeman had told him to get rid of it, dump the body in the street somewhere. The mutilated corpse would certainly be a little point to ponder for anyone who someday might entertain the notion of crossing Freeman McNally.

Yeah, Freeman. Whatever you say, man. Four of them had tossed the body in the trunk and Harrison had driven away. He hadn’t waved good-bye.

And he pondered the point.

The sun was up.

Sunday. Eight a.m. The streets and parking places were empty. In a few hours the suburban malls would open and the last-minute Christmas crowds would pack the parking lots and surge through the sprawling temples of retailing. The shoppers would swarm over the downtown malls too, but that was two hours away. Right now the only people on the streets were alcoholics and derelicts. Paper and trash from overflowing cans swept by the car, carried by the wind.

Harrison sat behind the wheel with the engine off and listened to the silence.

He had made it. He was still alive.

His hands shook.

The relief hit him like a hammer and he began to sob.

He was tired, desperately tired. The tears rolled down his cheeks and he lacked the energy to move.

Done.

Well, hell, I gotta get to Hooper. Give him the keys to Ike Randolph’s hearse, then get some sleep.

He remembered to lock the car, then climbed the stairs to the FBI building and walked through the open foyer to the quadrangle. He went down the stairs to the quadrangle plaza and crossed to the kiosk where the Federal Security guard stood. The uniformed man watched him approach.

“Tom Hooper. Call him.”

“And who are you?”

“Sam … Harrison Ronald Ford. Evansville, Indiana, police. He’s expecting me.”

“If you want to stand over there, sir, I’ll call up and see if he’s here.”

He walked away so the rent-a-cop could watch his hands. He was too tired to stand. He sank down against the wall and crossed his arms on his knees and lowered his head to rest on them.

He was sitting like that, crying, when Thomas Hooper spoke to him six or seven minutes later.

“There’s a corpse in the trunk of the car.”

“Who?” Freddy and Hooper stared at Ford.

“Ike Randolph. They tortured him. He’s a real mess.”

The FBI agents looked at each other.

“We gotta ditch the body.”

“Why?” Freddy asked, incredulous.

“We gotta, man,” Harrison insisted.

“Now listen. We go to the grand jury on Monday. Monday evening or Tuesday they hand down murder indictments and we scoop up Freeman McNally and his lieutenants and lock them up. They won’t get out on bail. There’s no bail for murder. Then we give the grand jury all the rest of it and let them come up with a couple hundred counts.”

Harrison was tired. “You listen. Freeman gave me tonight off. But if that body don’t show up someplace, he’ll smell a rat. The very first thing he’ll do is check my apartment to see if I’m there. I won’t be, man, I can guarantee you that. I ain’t ever going back there. Then Freeman’ll know. Maybe he’ll skip. Maybe he’ll be waiting with heavy ordnance when you go to bust him. Maybe he’ll put out a contract on me. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder!”

“We can’t just go dump a corpse in the public street and—”

“Why not?” Tom Hooper asked.

“Well, hell, we’re the cops, for Christ’s sake.”

“We dump the corpse and wait half an hour and call the police. Why not?”

Hooper was thinking of the grand jury and the lawyers. Just because the FBI wanted a quick indictment was no guarantee there would be one. It might take a week. And as he sat staring at Harrison Ford, he realized that he was going to play it Ford’s way or the undercover man might go to pieces. Ford might not last a week.

“Where you parked?”

“Right in front of the building on E.”

“Come on, Freddy. Let’s go get this over with.”

“At least let’s pull the car into the basement and let the lab guys photograph the body.”

“Are you fucking out of your mind?” Harrison roared. “The only reason, the only reason, I’m still alive after ten months of this shit is that nobody knew I was undercover. Now you’re going to let the lab people see the car and the body and me? Do I look suicidal?”

“Forget it, Freddy,” Hooper said. “We’ll just be creative on our reports. Won’t be the first time. Not for me, anyway.”

In the car they talked about it. They drove down toward Fort McNair. On the east side of the army post was a huge, empty parking lot. Weeds growing up through cracks in the asphalt. Beer cans and trash strewn about.

The parking lot was bounded on the west and north by an eight-foot-high brick wall. Across the wall were huge old houses, quarters for senior army officers stationed in Washington. To the east, sixty yards or so away, were small private houses, but brush and trees obscured the view. A power relay station surrounded by a chain-link fence formed the southern boundary of the two-acre parking area.

They didn’t waste time looking the place over. Ford backed up toward the brick wall and popped the button in the glove box to release the trunk lid. He left the engine running. All three men got out and went around back.

Freddy took one look and heaved.

“For the love of—”

“Look at his hands! They burned his fingers off!”

“Come on, you shitheads,” Ford growled. “Grab hold.”

They laid the corpse on the ground and got back in the car. Ford jerked the shift lever into drive and fed gas. Freddy retched some more.

“What I can’t figure,” Harrison mused, “is why Ike? Why’d he think Ike was the stoolie?”

“Remember Senator Cherry?”

“The mouth.”

“Yeah. We told him Ike was our man inside.”

Harrison Ronald braked the car to a stop and slowly turned to face Hooper, who was sitting beside him in the passenger seat. “You mean Ike was a cop?”

“Naw. He was just a hood. But we figured that since Cherry was talking out of school and there was little chance we could shut him up, we’d better do something to cover your ass. So we gave him a name — Ike Randolph.”

Harrison faced forward. He flexed his fingers around the wheel.

“And Freeman killed him. That’ll put him in prison for life. Too bad about Ike, but—”

“Freeman didn’t kill Ike.” Harrison Ronald said it so softly Freddy in the backseat leaned forward.

“What say?”

“Freeman didn’t kill Ike. I did. Oh, Freeman tortured him, mutilated him, but he wanted to spread the fun around. He’s that kind of guy. I killed him.”

“You?” Freddy said, stunned.

“It was Ike or me, man. If I hadn’t pulled the trigger, I’d be a hundred and eighty pounds of burned dead meat this very minute. Just like Ike.”

“Drive. Goddammit, drive!” Hooper commanded. “We can’t sit here like three fucking tourists in the middle of the street. Everybody in town will get our license number.”

Harrison put the car into motion.

“You killed him,” Freddy said, still wrestling with it.

“What in hell did you think was gonna happen?” Harrison roared, sick of these two men and sick of himself. “Fuckhead! You white fuckhead! You knew if Cherry talked Ike Randolph was a corpse looking for a grave to fall into. And now he’s dead! Well and truly dead, dead as I would be if anybody had whispered my name.”

“Why didn’t you dump the body before you came to us?” Freddy asked.

“I wanted you to see it. Ike was a pathological asshole, but he didn’t deserve that. I wanted you coat-and-tie FBI paperpushers to see it and smell it and get it smeared all over your clean white hands. So sue me.”

The ceiling was at least five thousand feet Henry Charon estimated as he drove up the interstate toward Frederick, Maryland. Hazy, five or six miles visibility. Not like out west where you can see for fifty miles on the bad days.

He knew where he was going, a little park along the Potomac. There should be no one there in December, a week before Christmas. The place had been deserted last week when he found it after consulting an aviation sectional map and a highway map. He had drawn some lines and done some calculating.

Just before he got to Frederick he exited the four-lane and turned south on a county road. The two-lane blacktop wound southward through fertile farming country of the Monocacy River valley. Neat homes and barns stood near the road and cattle grazed in the fields.

Henry Charon turned right onto a dirt road just past an abandoned gas station and proceeded west for 4.2 miles. The road he wanted was sheltered by a grove of trees. There!

No fresh tracks in the mud. And not too much mud. That was good.

He parked the car and pulled on his parka and gloves. Before he put his feet on the ground, he pulled a pair of galoshes over his hunting boots and buckled them.

It took him half an hour to check the area. No hunters or fishermen on the river, no one in the fields to the north.

The only house visible from the parking lot was a half mile or so away on the other side of the Potomac River, in Virginia. He checked the house with binoculars. No one about.

Occasionally a light plane flew over. Charon didn’t look up. He was only sixteen nautical miles north of Dulles International and seven or eight miles north of Leesburg. Harper’s Ferry was about fifteen miles to the west. So there were going to be planes.

He got the radios from the trunk of the car and went over to the pile of gravel near the bank, where he sat down. From this gravel pile he had an unobstructed view straight up and to the south and southeast from the zenith down to the treetops on the other side of the river, about ten degrees above the horizon. That was enough. More than enough.

He turned on each radio and checked the batteries. He had installed a fresh set in each unit this morning and he had others in the car, just in case. The needles rose into the green.

He selected the VHF frequency band on the first radio and dialed in the frequency for the northern sector of Dulles Approach, 126.1. With the antenna up and tweaked to the right just a little, reception was acceptable. On the other radio he selected UHF, and dialed in frequency 384.9. He was fairly confident they would be using VHF, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

Both radios began spewing out the usual chatter between controllers and pilots. Charon arranged one radio on each side of the rock pile and adjusted the volume knob. They didn’t need to be loud — he had excellent hearing in spite of the thousands of rifle shots he had listened to over the years without ear protection.

He got out the sandwich and coffee he had purchased at a fast-food emporium’s drive-through lane this morning. He ate slowly, savoring each bite. The coffee cooled too quickly, but he drank it anyway. It was going to be a long afternoon.

Perhaps. Who knew?

All the preparation, all the planning was over. He was as ready as he would ever get. He thought about the past three weeks, about the plans he had made and contingencies he had provided for.

One chance in four. He had a twenty-five percent chance today, he concluded. As usual, the quarry had the advantage, which was just the way Henry Charon liked it.

Charon grinned. He finished the coffee and sandwich and carefully placed the paper and cup on the backseat of the car, where it couldn’t blow out, yet where he could dispose of it the first chance he got.

Then he sat down again on the gravel and began listening intently to the radios.

He rose occasionally to scan with the binoculars, then resumed his seat.

This little park was on one of the two routes he thought it probable the helicopter carrying the President might take when flying from Camp David to the White House. He suspected that the helicopter would in all likelihood avoid the airport traffic area at Frederick and Gaithersburg. If so, it could pass those two airports to the east and enter Washington heading straight south for the White House, thereby overflying Silver Spring and Bethesda. On the other hand, if the chopper passed to the west of Frederick it would probably overfly this little park on the Potomac on its way straight down the river into Washington.

As he had studied the map Charon had come to favor the Potomac route. As the helicopter descended into the Washington area noise in populated areas would be minimized by flying down the river. That struck him as just the kind of consideration that a harried staffer would base a decision upon.

Still, he wasn’t a pilot and he knew next to nothing about air traffic control. He hadn’t had the time to monitor the route of other Camp David trips or to do the dry runs that would ensure success at the proper time. This whole thing was pretty shoestring. Yet the longer he spent in this area checking things out, the greater were the chances he would be seen and remembered.

So he would try this. If he got the opportunity, he would shoot. If not, he would look for another opportunity.

One chance in four. Maybe less. But enough.

He sighed and watched the birds and listened to the river when the radios fell momentarily silent. Occasionally he rose and used the binoculars to check the area. There were three picnic tables between the parking area and the riverbank. Near each table was a small stone barbecue grill. In the summer this would be a very pleasant spot for an outing, if you could get an empty table.

It was a few minutes after three p.m. when he heard the call he was waiting for. It came over the VHF radio.

“Dulles Approach, Marine One’s with you climbing to three thousand out of Papa Forty en route to Papa Fifty-six, over.” Charon knew those areas: Prohibited Area 40 was Camp David, Prohibited Area 56 was the White House-Capitol complex.

“Marine One, Dulles Approach, squawk Four One Four Two Ident.”

A Cessna pilot made a call to Approach now, but his transmission went unanswered. Henry Charon turned off the radio, tuned to UHF, and put it back in the trunk of the car.

“Marine One, Dulles Approach, radar contact. You are cleared as filed to Papa Fifty-six, any altitude below five thousand. Report reaching three thousand and any change of altitude thereafter, over.”

“Marine One cleared as filed. Report any change of altitude. We’re level at three now.”

“Readback correct. Cessna Five One Six One Yankee, go ahead with your request.”

One last scan with the binoculars. He let them dangle around his neck. From the trunk he pulled out a roll of carpet. He put it on the ground and unrolled it. He took a second roll out and did the same.

Charon put one of the four-foot-long tubes carefully on the ground right by the gravel pile after he had inspected it for damage. The second he inspected and kept in his hands.

He arranged himself against the gravel so he had some support for his lower back, yet the exhaust from the missile would pass safely above the gravel. They would find this spot, of course, and the carbon from the missile exhaust would prove that it was fired here. He just didn’t want the hot exhaust deflected onto his back. He put the missile launcher across his lap.

He sat there and waited, counting the minutes. If the chopper was cruising at a hundred and twenty knots, it was making two nautical miles a minute over the ground. He had figured the distance at twenty-four miles. Twelve minutes. With a tail wind or more speed, the time would be less. He would wait for eighteen minutes and if the chopper had not appeared it would have used a different route. And the wind was out of the northwest, so the chopper would have a tail wind today. Eighteen minutes, then he would leave and try something else.

The helicopter might not use this route. There was no way of knowing of course. He would soon see.

And the pilot of the helicopter didn’t make the call to Dulles Approach from Camp David. He had lifted off a minute or two earlier and was climbing out on course when he called Approach. So less than twelve minutes.

The minutes passed as he scanned the sky. Six, seven, eight …

He heard the distinctive noise of a helicopter. He looked. The trees behind him would block his view until it was almost overhead.

He turned on the batteries in both launchers and grasped the binoculars.

There it was! High, to his left. Perhaps a mile east of his position.

He checked with the binoculars, thumbing the focus wheel expertly. Yes. A Marine VIP chopper, like the one he had seen on the White House lawn.

He lowered the binoculars and raised the missile launcher to his shoulder. Power on. Aim. Lock on. He squeezed the trigger.

The missile left with a roar.

Charon dropped the empty launcher and picked up the second one. Power on. Aim. Lock on. Shoot!

With the second missile on its way he tossed both launchers, the rugs, and the binoculars in the trunk of the car.

He looked up. The first missile had already detonated, leaving a puff of dirty smoke against the light gray overcast above. The chopper was falling off to the right, the nose swinging.

Whap! The warhead of the second missile exploded right against the chopper.

The helicopter’s forward progress ceased and it began to rotate and fall, a corkscrewing motion.

Henry Charon picked up the remaining radio.

“Mayday, Mayday! Marine One has had a total hydraulic failure and has lost an engine! We’re going down!”

“Marine One, Dulles, say again.”

The pitch of the voice was higher, but the pilot was still thinking, still in control. The words poured out. “Dulles, we’ve lost an engine and hydraulics. The copilot’s dead. Two explosions, like missiles. We’re going down and … uh … roll the ambulances and emergency vehicles. We’re going down!”

Charon snapped off the radio and carefully placed it in the trunk of the car on top of one of the rugs. He closed the trunk lid firmly.

He scanned the area. Nothing left lying about.

The assassin paused by the driver’s door and looked again for the stricken helicopter. Much lower, falling several miles to the southeast with the nose very low … rotating quickly, like once a second. The crash was going to be real bad.

Henry Charon seated himself in the car, started it, and drove away.