Ghost Target Read online

  “He’s obviously armed and dangerous. The question law enforcement officials are debating right now, I’m told, is whether this man can be taken alive.”

  “Serious stuff, John Bledsoe. We’re fortunate to have you on the ground at Fort Benning and we will be back to John soon.”

  Taken alive? Was there a shoot-to-kill order on him? Who was feeding information to the reporter? Harwood wondered. The FBI had talked to Rangers in Fort Benning and now were on the way to Hunter Army Airfield. But the reporter had what seemed like real-time information. Harwood’s heart raced. He ran through everything again, his memory faltering like a sputtering boat engine. Two dead generals. Both killed when he was less than a couple of hundred meters away. Sports drinks that made him dizzy.

  Blue lights continued to spin outside. Anxiety welled in his throat. What to do?

  It was almost two in the morning as he pulled on his shorts and top, slipped on his socks and shoes, and hefted his rucksack. He took one glance around the room, looked out the window again, and saw a SWAT vehicle bouncing into the parking lot.

  He didn’t want to get within a mile of the police, especially if they were on a manhunt carrying his Rolling Stone cover photo. He was acutely aware of the heightened racial tensions begotten by media sensationalism of law enforcement clashes with the African American communities.

  The flashing lights hypnotically grazed his retinas. Alarm bells were ringing in his mind. As his vision retreated from the light show outside, he focused on his own dark reflection in the window. Studying his face, he zeroed in on his eyes, soulful and searching. In the window, he believed he saw flashes of Jackie’s face, then Samuelson’s, then Command Sergeant Major Murdoch’s, and then that of the Chechen, bearded and grimy in the crosshairs.

  Then the elevator. The slick businessman.

  Then the Chechen.

  The contours of the jawline, the broad planes of his face, the height of the man all seemed to fit together, as if he had placed tracing paper over the businessman’s face and penciled in the beard, the dirt, and the pakol.

  Could the Chechen be here in America? Stalking him?

  Framing him? Calling the reporter?

  If the shooter was leaving behind spent casings, that would be either stupid or intentional. Harwood went with intentional. The Chechen wasn’t stupid.

  Footsteps thundered toward his room. Thumping on the door. His door.

  Was it the police? Was it the Chechen?

  He retrieved his nine-millimeter Beretta pistol from the outer pouch of his rucksack, jacked the slide to chamber a round, and wished he were wearing boots. When he heard a battering ram against the door, he paused. Heard it again. Paused again. Then, on the third loud bang with the ram, he fired a single shot into the deadbolt of the door leading to the adjoining room. He aimed at an extreme downward angle, so as not to injure any occupants.

  The door and jamb splintered as he shouldered his way into the next room. A quick scan showed a pristinely made bed, no switched-on lights, and no luggage. The room was unoccupied. The hall door to Jackie’s room gave way and footsteps pounded into the room. He vaulted over the corner of the king-size bed and carefully opened the door from the unoccupied room to the hallway. Leading with his pistol, he peeked around the corner and saw no one in the hall. He dashed the ten yards to the fire stairwell and began bounding down the concrete steps four at a time, the rucksack on his back heavy and cumbersome.

  The galloping footsteps rumbled into the same stairwell two floors above him and began cycling down the stairs in his direction. As he reached the second floor, the ground-floor door opened with a bang. Black-helmeted SWAT members began filing inside the base of the fire stairwell, preparing to assault upward.

  Who was chasing him from above?

  He wasted no time and dashed into the second floor, which was filled with a workout room, pool, conference rooms, and an open stairwell down to the lobby. To his right was an opening to the rear of the hotel. The stairs went in both directions. On the fly, Harwood made a quick decision to go through the front of the hotel, thinking the police had used the rear parking lot as a rally point. If they were just marshaling in the stairwell, perhaps they had not blocked the front entrance yet.

  He flew down the carpeted stairs—maybe twenty of them—and dashed past the registration desk, where a clerk was seated in a chair, watching a movie on the television. As he flew past the desk, the young clerk stood up and shouted, “Hey!”

  Footsteps were still behind him, thundering along the carpeted hallway he had just navigated. He pressed the spring-loaded bar, which unlocked the door, and provided him access to the sidewalk on the sparsely populated street. He saw a newspaper delivery truck passing by slowly and ran quickly into the street, leapt up onto the rear bumper, and grabbed the cargo-door handle. The driver must not have noticed, because Harwood felt no change in momentum. No acceleration or deceleration. Steady as she went. He looked over his shoulder and saw a man running out the front door. Harwood flashed back to his earlier run and thought about the man who had almost hit him with the old Buick. Was it the same man? Hard to tell from nearly two hundred yards away.

  The baseball hat looked the same. The beard. A thin but wiry guy wearing dungarees and Doc Martens boots. Just like the silhouetted man in the parking lot at Fort Bragg. The man stood at the door to the hotel and watched him vanish into the night on the rear bumper of a panel van filled with newspapers.

  Harwood took a deep breath.

  He pounded the door of the van in frustration, forgetting that the driver had no clue he was hitching a ride. Turning his head toward the rear door, he noticed two vertical rectangular windows. Newspapers were stacked to about midway. On the front page, he saw the headline SECOND GENERAL KILLED BY SNIPER IN TWO DAYS.

  The subtitle read, FORSYTH PARK SHOOTING POSSIBLY LINKED TO ARMY RANGER.

  Further confirmation that someone might be trying to frame him.

  The van made a turn onto a major thoroughfare and began to accelerate. Harwood leapt off the bumper and ran as fast as he could to prevent stumbling with the forward throw of the vehicle’s momentum.

  Hooking a right onto the next road, he entered a grouping of warehouses. In the air hung the unmistakable musty scent of fish spawning and silt churning with the ebb and flow of the river and the ocean tide. The van had taken him in the opposite direction of Hunter Army Airfield—toward the river—where his duffel bag full of clothes was in his room. A distant tug belched, confirmation that Harwood was near the Savannah River and its burgeoning port. Lots of ships and lots of places he could go.

  Harwood jogged a block to the south and turned left toward the river, a natural barrier. He slowed to a walk, the river sounds taking over. Tumbling water. Engines churning brown silt. Shouts of dockworkers preparing for a long day, or perhaps closing out a long night. When a ship came in to port, stevedores worked until it was unloaded. Same for when the reverse was occurring. The loading process was nonstop.

  Harwood stared at the Riverwalk, spotlights every fifty yards. He stood alone in the shadow of a warehouse at the intersection of River Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. He thought briefly about what the civil rights icon had meant to him as an African American. For Harwood to reflect at all about race, politics, or religion was unusual. The heft of the pistol in his hand reminded him that he was a soldier. He had a mission. He killed bad guys so the good guys could live in freedom. There was no need to make it any more complicated than that.

  But he realized that his life today was quite different than if he had lived thirty or forty years ago. Men such as Martin Luther King Jr. had helped pave the way for men such as him. He didn’t make too much of that and he didn’t discount it. Just as Harwood believed that General Dave Grange, the famous Army Ranger, and General James Gavin, the renowned World War II paratrooper, were icons in the military community, he didn’t make too much of them, either. He appreciated their example, but wanted to make his own way.
r />   He was the Reaper. He’d done his duty and was all about carrying his own weight and carving out his own niche in history.

  The gray Buick spun around the corner and barreled directly at him, then fishtailed into a perfect 180-degree Rockford turn so that the passenger door was two feet from him. The car was pinning him to the warehouse wall, its nose almost touching the sheet metal and its trunk close to the brick porch that jutted out from the building. The Buick was the long leg of a triangle that blocked Harwood’s exit unless he wanted to leap over the hood, which was an option.

  Until he looked up.

  The bearded man with the baseball cap was leveling a pistol at his chest.

  “Reaper, get in the damned car now,” the man said.

  The interior of the car was dark. The driver’s facial features were a theater mask, half in the shadow and half in the dim glow of a distant streetlight. A reddish-brown beard, unevenly cut hair, and familiar voice.

  “Lower the pistol and I’ll do it, Sammie,” Harwood said.

  “Sammie? My name’s Abrek. Now, I’ll make this easy,” Samuelson said. “You may have left me behind, but I damn sure ain’t leaving you behind. Now get in the car before I shoot you.”

  The Reaper lifted his pistol slowly and tucked it away as he slid his rucksack off his shoulder. “Abrek? You’re Sammie.” Harwood stared, certain it was his former spotter. “I’ve been worried, man. I blamed myself. Thought you were dead. And all this time you’re … where the hell have you been?”

  “It’s Abrek to you, Reaper. Cops are coming. Let’s go.” Samuelson’s excited voice gave Harwood incentive. He was stuck.

  “Not before you tell me where you’ve been. I don’t have anything to hide from the cops. And it’s Sammie, not Abrek or any other bullshit name,” Harwood said.

  “Maybe I’ve got something to hide. Want to jack me over twice in one year? Leave me dead on the battlefield and now let the cops haul my ass in?”

  Samuelson played the guilt card effectively. Harwood nodded and said, “Okay, you win. I owe you this. I don’t know what you’ve done, or who Abrek is, but I owe you. I know that much.”

  When he opened the back door to toss his rucksack into the rear seat, there was a banged-up SR-25 lying exposed on the floor of the car.

  “Yeah, that’s a sniper rifle. Now get your ass in the car,” Samuelson said.

  “You kill those generals?” Harwood asked, sliding into the front seat.

  Samuelson stared at Harwood with a furrowed brow, a true look of puzzlement on his face. “Seriously?” he asked. “You don’t know?”

  A police cruiser sped past them on a perpendicular road, most likely going to the hotel, Harwood thought.

  Blue lights bounced off Samuelson’s windshield. Harwood turned and stared at the man with the beard, who called himself “Abrek.” This was Samuelson. Not Abrek. The same blunt nose, crooked teeth, unibrow, and deep set brown eyes. His stringy brown hair, however, was longer on one side than the other.

  “Did you leave anything at Hunter you need?” Samuelson asked.

  “My duffel bag and shaving kit. Why?”

  “They’re looking for you, Reaper. The cops.” Samuelson kept driving, turned onto Interstate 516, and kept within the speed limit. “I’ll grab your stuff.”

  Samuelson’s stony gaze remained fixed forward. His sentences were clipped, as if rehearsed. Harwood was still thinking about the name, “Abrek.” He had no idea what it meant, but guessed that perhaps the Taliban had recovered him and nursed him back to health. Stockholm syndrome. Harwood’s mind spun to the obvious question.

  “How did you know what room I was in, Sammie?” Harwood asked.

  After a pause Samuelson said, “You d-don’t know what’s going on, do you?”

  “Damn it, quit being so cryptic and just tell me,” Harwood demanded. A stutter?

  “L-Let’s just say: Your thirty-three kills in the ’Stan?”

  “What about them?” Harwood was thinking, keep him talking.

  “T-Twenty women went missing from Helmand and Kandahar Provinces. D-During your missions.”

  “Our missions,” Harwood corrected.

  “You and LaBoeuf. I didn’t come on till later.”

  As red taillights flashed in front of them, Harwood felt cheated. He had always visualized his reunion with his spotter to be a celebratory affair, not a middle-of-the-night escape from Alcatraz with a man who called himself Abrek.

  “What does that even mean?”

  “Everything, m-man. Everything.” After a pause, Samuelson said with more precision this time, “Khasan wants his wife back.”

  “Khasan? As in Basayev?”

  “Khasan saved my life.”

  Harwood stared at Samuelson. His former spotter reminded him of a cultist, with his distant stare and cryptic answers.

  “He brainwashed you, Sammie. Listen to me,” Harwood said.

  Samuelson began rocking back and forth in the driver’s seat.

  “N-Not like that.”

  “It’s exactly like that!” Harwood barked. “Snap out of it. He’s using you. You’re Sammie Samuelson. Not Abrek!”

  Harwood stared at Samuelson, who remained silent for the next five minutes as they rode along the interstate, took the ramp to Hunter Army Airfield, and pulled into a vacant, abandoned gas station. The cinder-block building’s windows were shattered, jagged edges poking up in hard triangles. The lot was dark. Samuelson shook his head like a dog drying off from a swim.

  “Okay, Reaper. We’ll stop here for a minute while I get my shit together.”

  “Wake up, Sammie. You’re better than this.”

  “Don’t pull rank on me, Reaper. Now, give me your room key and wait for me here,” Samuelson said.

  “You’ve got a rifle in the backseat of your car. You’re not getting on the airfield,” Harwood said. “I’ll walk from here and get my own stuff.”

  “See that?” Samuelson said, pointing a quarter mile up the road at a dark silhouette of a vehicle. “C-Cops. Ambush. Waiting for you.”

  Harwood looked at Samuelson, confirming again that this was his long-lost spotter. The man had literally manifested out of nowhere to now commandeer him allegedly away from trouble.

  “Sammie, what do you know about these generals.”

  “Reaper. Go.”

  “Who’s framing me?”

  “Just leave me for dead and here I am helping you. Give me your key and get the fuck out of my car.”

  Harwood felt his mind race three months back, memories fluttering like bats alighting from a cave. The mortars, the Taliban on the ridge, the kidnapped women, and the Chechen. He took a deep breath, sighed.

  “Roger that. You’re my spotter. You call the target.”

  “Target is getting your ass out of my car. I’ll find you.”

  “How?”

  Samuelson nodded at the iPhone secured in Harwood’s armband. “Smart enough to stay alive in the ‘Stan. Smart enough to let me find you.”

  Harwood understood. Snagging his rucksack from the backseat, he spotted the sniper rifle again. Didn’t know what to think, but decided to give Samuelson the benefit of the doubt. With his ruck slung over his shoulder he walked around to the driver’s window. Harwood looked at the run-down, defunct convenience store and gas station, the gravel lot and the woods behind the shuttered building.

  “I’ll be back there. Flash your lights three times when you pull in so I know it’s you. You’re not the only one packing. I’ve been praying I’d find you, now hurry up and get back here, Sammie. You hear?”

  “Roger that, Reaper.” The words were hollow, without eye contact. He gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead at the police a quarter mile away.

  Samuelson gunned the engine, the Buick’s tires spit gravel, and the car leapt onto the pavement. Samuelson drove the speed limit, tapped his brakes, red lights flashing briefly, and then continued past the gate to Hunter Army Airfield without turning in to the base.
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  Once the vehicle was out of sight, Harwood moved quickly behind the building and walked into the woods, using the flashlight function of his iPhone to find a relatively cleared area upon which to camp until Samuelson returned. He pressed one knee into the soft pine straw, cleared some low shrub branches out of the way, and shut off the phone light.

  The time was almost 5 A.M. The sun would be rising soon. While it was pitch dark where he was in the woods, there were some streetlights near the road where it fronted the gravel parking lot. He was about 150 meters from the road.

  Samuelson was alive. Just now the notion was sinking into his mind, his heart. Having felt like a failure on the battlefield, he now could at least feel some relief that he had not left a fallen soldier behind to die. During the rehabilitation months after the mortar attack, the army psychiatrist at Walter Reed continued to emphasize that Harwood had not left behind a fallen comrade. That he, too, had fallen and had been rescued.

  Little good that did for a soldier who had been mentored by the toughest of them all, Command Sergeant Major Murdoch, who had once told him, “You decide to leave a fallen comrade you might as well suck the end of your pistol.”

  But that was the psychiatrist’s point. Harwood hadn’t decided anything. He had been unconscious from his own traumatic brain injuries. But still, what had happened to Samuelson? Where had he been? Apparently, the Chechen had rescued him? Named him Abrek? Brainwashed him?

  About thirty minutes later, two cars pulled into the gravel lot where Samuelson had dropped him off. They were standard police cruisers with light racks, white cars with writing on the side. One looked like a Crown Victoria and the other a new Dodge Charger.

  Harwood put his other knee into the pine straw to steady himself, his mind still swooning from the lack of sleep and the activities of the last several hours. Steadying himself, he placed his hands on the soft matting. Sounds of animals rutting in the woods to his flanks filtered through the dizziness.

  Car doors slammed with hollow thunks. Two uniformed officers spoke with each other across the hood of one car. Nearby to the east were the metallic and gravelly sounds of digging. Rhythmic.