The Cassandra Conspiracy (13 page)

He could have used a camouflage stain, but he found that it took much too long to get off if he needed to remove it quickly. The spando
-flage was the perfect solution, going on in an instant, and coming off just as fast. With the head cover on, he would more likely be tripped over than seen by anyone coming across him. If the site did use video motion detectors, the guard force would dismiss his movement as a nuisance alarm. Now fully camouflaged, Grant slung his pack back on and settled down to wait.

A few minutes later, Grant heard the voices of two sentries patrolling the inner perimeter. They spoke in normal tones, and he could easily hear their banter from his position. Obviously the men were not concerned about being overheard. It was a routine patrol; they were not aware of his presence and had not been responding to an intrusion alarm. Grant noted the time, then sat back against the tree. Thirty minutes later, another sentry team passed his position. Grant pulled back to the wire fence line that ran parallel to the chain link fence. He wanted to see more of the site, but not at the risk of arousing suspicion. Most of the trees had foliage above eight feet, but little on their lower branches. He risked being spotted if he stayed too close to the perimeter fence.

When he reached the first corner, he found what he expected–a light green wooden guard post positioned at the intersection of the two fences. From his position, Grant couldn’t tell if the guardhouse was occupied, but he didn’t doubt for a minute it was. Keeping well back from the fence line, he continued in a counterclockwise direction, carefully mapping his progress around the site.

Only this time he didn’t use the Park Service’s map, but another he withdrew from the leather wallet suspended by a neck chain under his shirt. Unlike the Park Service’s map, this one had been made by someone who had been a frequent visitor to the site. It showed the exact layout of the camp’s buildings, their relative positions, and the path the roads and trails took through the camp.

He knew exactly what he was searching for. He had to locate a supported position from which he would have an unimpeded line of fire. The right spot would offer support for his rifle so that neither muscle tension nor pulse, if transferred to the rifle, would throw off the shot. Second, his optimum position would reduce his silhouette’s size against the horizon, giving him more cover and better concealment. Snipers called their shooting positions “hides”, and Grant knew he had to find the perfect hide for this job. Sooner or later he would.

With his goal in mind, Grant traversed the perimeter of the site until he found what he felt would be a good area from which to operate. Once he found it, he marked down the map coordinates. With that out of the way, Grant moved slowly away from the site perimeter. He needed to be up high so that he’d be firing down on the target. That meant a tree or some other natural elevation, and trees were definitely not his first choice. Besides, it would be difficult to find a tree significantly higher than the others in the area. As he moved, he kept a wary eye on the woods around him. If he were stopped now, the markings he had made on the map and his sketches would leave no doubt about what he was up to.

Suddenly, Grant saw a glint of light reflected off an object from a point high up in the trees. Startled, Grant stopped and crouched down; glad he had not removed his spando-flage head cover. Grant shifted his position, unsure what it was that had caught his eye. Maybe it was a foil balloon that had somehow gotten lodged in the trees. He moved closer to the tree in question. What he spotted wasn’t a copse of trees at all, but rather one of the Park Service’s fire lookout towers. He slipped out of his pack and moved closer to the tower.

The watchtower’s height exceeded the highest trees in the stand by at least a hundred feet. But then that wasn’t surprising, since the forest ranger had to be able to spot a forest fire quickly. In size, the tower appeared to be about fifteen feet by fifteen feet at the top, widening at the base to provide the support the high tower required. Along one side, the side nearest the fire road, wooden stairs crisscrossed their way up its side, stopping at some kind of landing at the top. There was only a single set of stairs, and Grant did not see any ladder or other means of emergency egress. As a rule, he never placed himself in situations where he didn’t have a back way out. That could be a problem.

Grant went back to where he had stashed his knapsack and dug out his Zeiss binoculars. The binoculars had originally belonged to a German submarine commander who used them to determine how much damage his U-boat had done to Allied shipping. Grant’s father had given them to his only son before the boy left for Vietnam.

To get a better view of the cabin at the top of the tower, Grant moved away from its base. After he had put a hundred feet between his position and the tower, Grant focused the binoculars on the cabin at the tower’s top. It was square, with large glass windows along all four sides. He would be better off if he had been able to view the top of the tower from a higher elevation, but from where he was, he saw that a small catwalk surrounded the cabin. Grant noticed that the cabin was in use, the Forest Service intent upon keeping a close eye out for any fires even this late in the season.

The tower would make a perfect hide. It was well situated, had a commanding view of the high ground, and might just be within range. Under better conditions Grant would have scaled the tower and used his binoculars to determine the actual distance. A simple calculation
using the height of a known subject in yards times one thousand, and divided by the number of graduations on the reticle of the binoculars
would produce a good estimate of the range to target. With the tower occupied, he had to come up with another approach that would give him an estimate of the overall distance from the tower to his intended target. From the dimensions on the compound’s drawing, Grant determined that from the fence line his target would be slightly over eleven hundred yards away. Now he needed the approximate distance from the tower to the fence line.

Grant took out his compass and sited along the path that he wanted to take back to the fence. He opened a small pocket on the side of the pack and took out his pedometer. The little unit had often been the butt of jokes when he was in Southeast Asia, but after a while the others in his team had realized that it was handy to have around. Placing it on his belt, he began walking toward the fence.

Periodically he made small notations on the pad that he always carried on planning missions. After a few minutes, he saw the fence line ahead of him. He continued walking until he reached it, and then wrote down the distance off the pedometer’s scale. From his estimation, the tower was twelve hundred feet away. He wrote this figure down and underneath of it he wrote down the distance from the fence to the target. The total range from the tower to the target, therefore, was fifteen hundred yards, slightly under a mile.

Grant shrugged. As usual, there was good news and bad news. The bad news was this would be an extremely long shot. The good news was that the longer the distance, the better his chances of getting away unscathed. Either way, it was the best that he could do under the circumstances.

The next problem was the choice of weapon. From his days in Vietnam, he was familiar with the 7.62 millimeter M40A1 bolt-action rifle. The precision instrument was fitted with the UNERTL Sniper Scope, which yielded the superior accuracy required for long-range kills. The Army issued specially made match-quality ammunition, produced by the Lake City arsenal. The 173-grain boat-tail bullet had a muzzle velocity of 2,550 feet per second and an accuracy specification of three and a half feet mean radius at six hundred yards. If the sniper did his homework, and the target was in range, it went down. Grant was intimately familiar with this gun, but knew its maximum effective range was one thousand yards–far less than he needed. For a long-range shot, he needed a special weapon.

Vietnam–so long ago, yet still so much part of his life.

.   .   .   .   .   .

Vietnam, 1973

During basic training, it quickly became evident to the marksmanship instructors they had someone special on their hands. Some recruits had grown up in the back woods of rural Mississippi or Arkansas, where they hunted from the time they were able to hold a rifle. These boys came into the service and knew how to handle a rifle. Some became snipers, and for them it was the thrill of the stalk, except this time the hunted were Vietcong commanders or North Vietnamese officers.

Barron was different. He had never hunted, nor did he share any interest in hearing the hunting epics some others told. Nonetheless, his marksmanship was right on target. If the bullet could carry the distance, Barron could place the shot in the kill zone. He seemed to have an innate ability to judge distances and determine the effect of crosswinds and temperature on the bullet’s trajectory.

When Barron joined up with the other two members of his recon unit in Vietnam, he had yet to kill his first enemy soldier. Before each mission, Barron wrapped a bandoleer of high-powered rifle rounds around his waist, but inside his shirt. He didn’t want the sunlight reflecting off the sheen of the special factory-produced bullets, and he didn’t want them nicked or damaged before he loaded them into the sniper rifle’s breech. Besides the rifle and ammo, he also carried a combat fighting knife and the regulation Army .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol. Barron had been taught the art of assassination, and he’d do his best to perfect his talents.

With Barron on the team, they performed flawlessly. It didn’t make any difference whether they were out to count trucks along some godforsaken road the Vietnamese called a highway or to check troop movements in their unit’s area of operations. The team performed their mission and reported back. If their orders were to avoid contact, they stayed out of the way of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese patrols. Everything went fine, and Barron earned his sergeant’s stripes. Then, on a single mission, everything went to hell in a flash.

The team had been inserted about fifty miles northwest of Hue in the A Shau Valley, their orders to monitor the traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The first day was uneventful. Just before dusk, they moved off the road to bivouac in the jungle far enough away for it to be unlikely that any enemy patrols would accidentally run across them. Since no one knew they were there, no one would be out looking for them.

As darkness fell, the team heard screams coming from somewhere up ahead.

“Jesus Christ, what’s that?” their team leader asked.

“Sounds like Charlie’s got himself a downed jet jockey or maybe a GI, and is asking some questions,” Barron responded. He knew that the VC were as harsh and inhumane with their prisoners as were the South Vietnamese. Torture was torture– plain and simple. Barron started to take his sniper rifle out of its jungle
-proof case. When he was in the bush, the target rifle received the most protection of any of their equipment except the radio that was their link to a dust-off.

“What do you think you’re doing?” It was part question, part order.

“I’m going to get that guy out of there.”

“Don’t be an asshole. You don’t know what we’re up against. There’s nothing we can do for that poor soul, and getting ourselves killed won’t help.”

Barron didn’t say a word; he just sat there, wiping down the Remington. Their squad leader, in an attempt to drive home the point said, “And remember, we’re under strict orders to avoid enemy contact.”

Barron made no reply. The screams continued through most of the night.

When dawn broke, Barron was gone, leaving the two other team members to hold their position. With the area ripe with VC activity, they couldn’t take the chance of going after him and getting caught up in a firefight. They knew that if an enemy force engaged them, they would be forced to abandon Barron and call for an extraction. They could never do that, so they hunkered down and waited.

When Barron got to a position where he could see the Vietcong campsite, he was horrified by what he saw through his binoculars. The captured American was tied to a crudely erected bamboo frame in the center of the camp. The prisoner’s shorts were covered with blood. Sometime the previous night, the interrogator had castrated his captive.

While Barron watched, the Vietcong officer continued the interrogation, beginning the slow methodical process of skinning him–inch by inch. The GI kept screaming, pleading with the officer to kill him quickly. Barron put down the binoculars. Their orders had been specific: avoid contact at all costs.

Barron slid the Remington from its case. Nestling the rifle in his arm, he removed five rounds from his bandoleer. Carefully, he loaded the cartridges before uncapping the telescopic sight. He’d get only one shot. He could kill the interrogator, but the Vietcong’s return fire would prevent him from ending the GI’s pain. Or he could end the soldier’s suffering, allowing the animal who tortured him to live. Neither was acceptable.

Barron removed a small sandbag from his kit and placed it on the log lying in front of him. Because the sniper weapon was sighted in for greater distances, he carefully adjusted the point of impact. Barron moved his head so that he had a full field of view with no shadows, muttered a short prayer, and lowered the crosshairs on to the dying soldier. Slowly he quartered the target, placing the reticle directly in the center of the GI’s chest. Barron squeezed the trigger, silently willing the bullet to end the man’s suffering.

The rifle’s report galvanized the VC encampment into action. Enemy soldiers bolted from their mats. Barron yanked the rifle bolt, ejecting the spent round and chambering a fresh one. The flurry of activity prevented him from taking his time with the VC interrogator. He brought the rifle up, while keeping his eyes on the target. As soon as his target came into view, he fired.