Last Man Standing by David Baldacci
On every mission HRT undertook, the senior member was given the HRT flag to carry with him in his gear. When the mission was completed, the flag was to be returned to the HRT commander by the senior member of the team. Well, now that happened to be Web.
“Follow me,” said Bates.
An FBI van was parked at the curb. Bates popped open one of the back doors, reached in and pulled out a flag folded military style. He handed it to Web.
Web held the flag in both hands, staring down at the colors for a moment, every detail of the slaughter once more working through his head.
“It’s got a few holes in it,” Bates observed.
“Don’t we all,” said Web.
5
The following day Web headed down to Quantico to the HRT facility. He drove along Marine Corps Route 4 past the campus-style FBI Academy that was home to both FBI and DEA grunts. Web had spent thirteen very intense and stressful weeks of his life at the Academy learning how to be an FBI agent. In return Web was paid peanuts and lived in a dorm room with a shared bath and he even had to bring his own towels! And Web had loved it and had devoted every waking moment to becoming the best FBI agent he could because he felt he had been born for the job.
Web had walked out of the Academy as a newly minted and sworn agent of the FBI with his Smith & Wesson .357 wheel gun, which required a staggering nine pounds of pull to fire. Rarely did one shoot oneself in the foot with the weapon. Recruits now carried .40 Glock semiautomatics with fourteen-round magazines with a much easier trigger pull, but Web still had fond memories of his Smith & Wesson with the three-inch bull barrel. Fancier didn’t necessarily mean better. He had spent the next six years learning how to be an FBI agent in the field. He had sweated through the infamous FBI paperwork mountain, ferreted out leads, drummed up informants, answered criminal complaints, kept his butt on wiretaps, undertaken all-night surveillances, built up cases and arrested people who badly needed to be. Web had gotten to the point where he could concoct a battle plan in five minutes while he was driving a Bureau car—or Bucar, as it was always called—a hundred and ten miles an hour down the highway steering with his knees and shoving shells into his shotgun. He had learned how to interrogate suspects, establishing baselines and then asking them tough questions designed to knock them for a loop, to later gauge when they were lying. He had also learned how to testify without being cracked by slick defense lawyers whose only goal was to not discover the truth and instead to bury it.
His superiors, including Percy Bates (when Web had been transferred to the Washington Field Office after several years in the Midwest), had filled his personnel file with commendation after commendation, impressed with his dedication, his physical and mental skills and his ability to think on his feet. He had worked outside the rules at certain points, yet most of the really good agents did, he thought, because some of the Bureau rules were just plain stupid. That was also something Percy Bates had taught him.
Web parked, got out of the car and headed into HRT’s building, which would never be termed beautiful by anyone who could actually see. He was welcomed with open arms, and tough, hardened men, who had seen more death and danger than the average citizen could possibly imagine, broke down with him in private rooms. HRT was not a place where anyone rushed to show his vulnerabilities and emotions. No man wanted to be firing guns and risking his life next to the shy, sensitive type. You left your warm fuzzy aura at the door and just brought your alpha male kick-ass side to work. Everything here was based on seniority and ability; those two attributes usually, though not always, paralleled each other.
Web returned the flag to his commander. Web’s chief, a lean, muscular man with salt-and-pepper hair and a former HRT operator who could still outwork most of his men, accepted the flag with dignity and a handshake that dissolved into an embrace in the privacy of the man’s office. Well, thought Web, at least they didn’t hate his guts.
The HRT’s admin building had been built to hold fifty personnel, yet now a hundred people called it their home away from home. There was a two-holer for all those folks, so the pee lines were long even for elite crime-busting Feds. There were small offices behind the reception area for the commander, who was at the rank of an ASAC, or assistant special agent-in-charge, and his down-the-line chain of command that consisted of one supervisor for assaulters, and one for snipers. The HRT operators had honeycomb cubicle areas across the hallway from each other, split between snipers and assaulters. There was only one classroom in the building, which also doubled as a conference and briefing room in the space-challenged complex. There was a line of coffee mugs on a shelf on the rear wall of the room. Whenever the choppers landed here, the force of the blades would make the mugs vibrate. Somehow that sound had always been very soothing to Web. Team members coming home safe, he supposed.
He stopped by to see Ann Lyle, who worked in the office. Ann was sixty, much older than the other women who worked in administration, and could be truly termed the matriarch and unofficial mother hen of the hardcore lads who called HRT home. The unwritten rule was that you did not curse around Ann or use any other sort of uncouth language or gestures. Both rookie and veteran operators who ran afoul of this policy quickly found themselves the target of retribution ranging from glue in their helmets to taking a particularly hard shot during a training drill, the kind that left you wondering if one of your lungs had fallen out. Ann had been with HRT almost since its inception after working at the WFO for many years and had become a widow during that time. Childless, she let her entire life revolve around her work, and she listened to the young, single agents and their problems and doled out sensible advice. She also served as HRT’s unofficial marriage counselor and had on more than one occasion prevented a divorce. She had come to Web’s hospital room every day while he was waiting to get his face back, far more often than his own mother had bothered to. Ann regularly brought home-baked goodies to the office. And she was known as the primary information source for all things having to do with the Bureau and HRT. She was also a whiz at navigating the Bureau’s requisition morass, and if HRT needed something, no matter how big or small, Ann Lyle made sure they got it.
He found Ann in her office, closed the door and sat across from her.
Ann’s hair had been white for several years now, and her body had lost its shape, but her eyes were still youthful-looking and her smile was truly beautiful.
Ann rose from her desk and gave Web a much-needed hug. Her cheeks were wet from tears. She had been especially close to the members of Charlie Team, who took great pains to show her their affection for all she did for them.
“You don’t look good, Web.”
“I’ve had better days.”
“I wouldn’t wish this on anybody, not even my worst enemy,” she said, “but you’re the last person in the world this should have happened to, Web. Right now, all I want to do is scream and never stop.”
“I appreciate that, Ann,” said Web. “I still don’t know what happened, really. I’ve never frozen like that before.”
“Web, honey, you’ve spent the last eight years of your life getting shot at. Don’t you think that adds up? You’re only human.”
“That’s just it, Ann, I’m supposed to be more than that. That’s why I’m at HRT.”
“What you need is a good long rest. When’s the last time you took a vacation? Do you even remember?”
“What I need is some information and I need you to help me get it.”
Ann accepted this change in subject without comment. “I’ll do what I can, you know that.”
“An undercover named Randall Cove. He’s MIA.”
“That name sounds familiar. I think I knew a Cove when I worked at WFO. You say he’s gone missing?”
“He was the inside guy on the HRT hit. Guess he was either in on it or else got his cover blown. I need whatever you can find on him. Addresses, aliases, known contacts, the works.”
“If he was working in D.C., his home won’t be around
“Understood. But twenty-five miles out still leaves a lot of possibilities. Maybe we can get a record of phone logs, communications with WFO, that sort of thing. I don’t know how you manage it, but I really need whatever you can get.”
“UCs mostly use disposable phone cards with low amounts on them to call in with. Buy them at convenience stores, use them up, chuck them and buy another. No record of anything that way.”
Web’s hopes dimmed. “So there’s no way to trace?” He had never had to track down an undercover agent before.
Ann smiled her beautiful smile. “Oh, Web, there’s always a way. You just let me dig around a little.”
He looked at his hands. “I’m feeling kind of like a guy at the Alamo that the Mexicans somehow missed.”
Ann nodded in understanding. “There’s some fresh coffee in the kitchen and a chocolate walnut cake I brought in. Go help yourself, Web, you’ve always been too skinny.” Her next words made Web look up into that wonderfully reassuring face. “And I’m watching your back here, honey, don’t think that I’m not. I know what’s what, Web. I hear everything, uptown or down. And nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to pull anything on you while I’m sitting here.”
As he walked out, Web wondered if Ann Lyle would ever consider adopting him.
Web found an empty computer terminal and logged on to HRT’s database. It had occurred to him, as he was sure it had to others, that his team’s annihilation might have been a simple case of revenge. He spent considerable time going through past cases where HRT had been called up. Memories came flooding back to him of chest-thudding victories and heart-wrenching failures. The problem was that if you added up all the people who had been affected by an HRT mission and factored in family and friends, along with fringe crazies chasing any cause they could get their demented hands around, the numbers ran into the thousands. Web would have to leave that to somebody else to run down. He was certain the Bureau computers were crunching that data right now.
Web passed down the main hallway and lingered in front of the photo displays of past HRT operations. Here there were visual images of many stunning successes. The credo of hostage rescue was, “Speed, surprise and violence of action,” and HRT put big-time action to those words. Web looked at a photo of a terrorist on the most-wanted list who had been plucked from international waters (“grabs,” they called them) like an unsuspecting crab taken from a sand hole and whisked away to stand trial with a lifelong prison term to follow. There were photos of a joint international task force operation on a drug farm in a Latin American country. And finally there was a picture of a very tense hostage situation in a high-rise government building in Chicago. The result was all hostages were saved, with three of the five hostage-takers dead. Unfortunately, it didn’t always work that way.
He walked outside the admin building and observed the lone tree there. It was a species of the state tree of Kansas, planted there in memory of the HRT operator who had been killed in a training accident and who had hailed from there. Each time Web had passed that tree he had said a silent prayer that it would be the only one they would ever have to plant. So much for answered prayers. Soon they’d have a damn forest here.
Web really needed to be doing something, anything that would make him not feel like a total failure. He went to the equipment cage, snagged a .308 snipe rifle and some ammo and headed back out. He needed to calm down and, ironically, firing guns did that for him, as it required a precision and focus that would block out all other thoughts, however troubling.
He passed the HRT’s original headquarters building, which was narrow and tall and looked like a glorified grain silo instead of home for an elite law enforcement unit. Then he stood and looked out at the sheered-off hillside where one of the shooting ranges was situated. There was a new thousand-yard rifle range, and work crews were in the process of leveling an adjacent forest in order to add to the HRT’s ever-growing complex, which also included a new indoor shooting range facility. Behind the outdoor shooting range, the trees were leafy green. It had always seemed an odd juxtaposition to Web: nature’s beautiful colors serving as a backdrop to where he had stood for so many years learning better ways to kill. Yet he was the good guy, and that made it all right. At least that’s what the bill of goods that came with the badge had very strongly implied.
He set up his targets. Web was going to play a game of sniper’s poker. The cards were slightly fanned out across the target holder such that only the tiniest portion of each card, other than the front card, was visible. The goal was to build a winning hand. The trick was you could only count a card that you hit cleanly. If your round even nicked another card, you couldn’t claim the card you were shooting at. And you only got five shots. The margin of error was impossibly tiny. It was just the sort of nerve-wracking task to relax a person, if that person happened to be an HRT grunt.
Web set himself up a hundred yards away from the targets. Lying flat on the ground, he placed a small beanbag under the .308’s stock to support his upper body weight as he settled in. He aligned his body with the recoil path to minimize muzzle jump; his hips were flat against the ground, his knees spread shoulder-width and ankles flat to the ground to shrink his target profile in case someone was aiming at him. Web dialed the proper settings on the scope’s calibration wheel and figured in wind too. The humidity was high, so he added an extra half-minute click. As a sniper, every shot he had ever fired during a mission had been recorded in his log. It was a very valuable record of environmental effects on bullets fired and also might explain why a sniper had missed a target, which was the only time anybody gave a damn. When you hit your target you were just doing your job, you didn’t get a key to the city. There was no detail too small when it concerned killing at long range. A hint of a shadow across your objective lens could easily make the less-than-vigilant shooter wipe out a hostage rather than the person holding him.
Web lightly squeezed the pebbled pistol grip. He pulled the stock to his shoulder, pressed his cheek to the stock, set the proper eye relief and gripped the butt pad with his weak hand to steady the .308’s bipod. He sucked in a breath, eased it out. No muscle could come between Web and his sniping. Muscle was erratic; he needed bone on bone because bone didn’t flinch. Web had always used the ambush technique when sniping. This entailed the shooter waiting until the target entered a predetermined kill zone. The sniper would plant his crosshairs just ahead of the target and then count the mil-dots in the reticle to calculate distance to target, angle of incidence and speed. You also had to judge elevation, wind and humidity and then you waited to kill, like the proverbial spider in the web. You always shot into the skull for a very simple reason. Targets shot in the head never fired back.
Bone on bone. Pulse at sixty-four. Web let out one last breath; his finger slid to the trigger and he fired five shots with the precise motion of a man who had done this very thing well over fifty thousand times. He repeated the process four more times, three times at a hundred yards, and the last hand of poker was played out at two hundred yards, which was the outer reaches of distance for sniper’s poker.
When he checked the targets Web had to smile. He had a royal flush in spades on two hands, aces with king high on two others and a full house on the hand at two hundred yards; and not one mark on any other card. And not one round thrown either, which in Bureau parlance meant not a shot missed. This allowed him to feel good about himself for about ten seconds and then the depression came roaring back.
He returned the weapon to the equipment cage and continued his stroll. Over at the adjacent Marine Corps facility was the Yellow Brick Road, which was a hellish seven-and-one-half-mile obstacle course with fifteen-foot rope drops, bear pits with barbed wire just waiting for a slip and fall and also
And along the way to graduation each recruit had to navigate the hothouse, which was a three-story concrete tower with steel shutters over the windows, welded shut. The interior configuration, with its mesh floors, allowed a fire at the bottom to shoot smoke all the way to the top in seconds. The luckless recruit got thrown into the third floor and had to use his sense of touch, guts and instincts to find his way to the bottom and out to safety. Your reward for surviving that was a bucket of water in the eyes to clear out the smoke there, and the chance to do it again a few minutes later with a hundred-and-fifty-pound dummy on your back.
Crammed in between all that was tens of thousands of rounds fired, classroom drills that would have perplexed and confounded Einstein, fitness grinders that would have left many an Olympian heaving from exhaustion, plus enough paralyzing split-second decision-making scenarios to make a man give up booze and women, crawl in a padded room and start talking to himself. And every step of the way were the real HRT operators grading your sorry butt on every mistake and every triumph, and you just hoped you ended up with far more of the latter, but you never really could tell, because the HRTs never talked to you. To them you were scum, busting-your-ass scum, but still scum. And you knew they wouldn’t even acknowledge your presence until and if you graduated. Hell, they probably wouldn’t even attend your funeral if the tryout managed to kill you.
Web had somehow survived it all, and upon graduation from the New Operators Training School, or NOTS, as it was known, he had been “drafted” as a sniper and spent two more months at the Scout Sniper School of the Marine Corps, where he had learned from the very best the skills of field craft, observation, camouflage and killing with rifle and scope. After that Web had spent over seven years as first a sniper and later an assaulter either being bored to death at long standoffs, often in miserable conditions, or else shooting or being shot at all over the world by some of its most deranged inhabitants. In return he got all the guns and ammo he wanted and a pay scale equivalent to what a sixteen-year-old could earn programming computers during his lunch hour. All in all it had been really cool.
Web walked by the hangar facility, which housed the team’s big Bell 412 helicopters, and the much smaller MD530s, which they all referred to as the Little Birds, because they were fast and agile and could carry four men on the inside and four more on the skids at a speed of 120 knots. Web had ridden the Little Birds into some hellish situations and the 530s had always brought him back out, a couple of times dangling upside down from a rope hooked to the chopper’s swing arm, yet Web had never been picky about exactly how he survived a mission.
The motor pool was behind a chain-link fence. Web stopped and zipped up his jacket against a chilly wind. The sky was quickly becoming overcast as a storm system swept into the area, something it routinely did this time of day at this time of year. He went