He was using an Ingram Mac-10, probably a 9-millimeter, and the man didn’t know how to use it well. His first round was roughly on target, but the next eight merely decorated the sky as the notoriously unstable weapon jerked out of control, not even hitting the mower. Sergeant Braden fired two rounds back, but the range was over ten yards, and the Chief’s Special had only a two-inch barrel, which gave it an effective combat range measured in feet, not yards. With the instant and unexpected stress added to his poorly selected weapon, he managed to hit the van behind his target with only one round.
But machine-gun fire is a highly distinctive sound – not the least mistakable for firecrackers or any other normal noise – and the neighborhood immediately realized that something very unusual was happening. At a house across the street a fifteen-year-old boy was cleaning his rifle. It was an old Marlin .22 lever-action that had once belonged to his grandfather, and its proud owner had learned to play third base from Sergeant Braden, whom he thought to be a really neat guy. The young man in question, Erik Sanderson, set down his cleaning gear and walked to the window just in time to see his former coach shooting from behind his mower at somebody. In the clarity that comes in such moments, Erik Sanderson realized that people were trying to kill his coach, a police officer, that he had a rifle and cartridges ten feet away, and that it Would Be All Right for him to use the rifle to come to the aid of the policeman. The fact that he’d spent the morning plinking away at tin cans merely meant that he was ready. Erik Sanderson’s main ambition in life was to become a U.S. Marine, and he seized the chance to get an early feel for what it was all about.
While the sound of gunfire continued to crackle around the wooded street, he grabbed the rifle and a handful of the small copper-colored rimfire cartridges and ran out to the front porch. First he twisted the spring-loaded rod that pushed rounds down the magazine tube which hung under the barrel. He pulled it out too far, dropping it, but the young man had the good sense to ignore that for the moment. He fed the.22 rounds into the loading slot one at a time, surprised that his hands were already sweaty. When he had fourteen rounds in, he bent down to get the rod, and two rounds fell out the front of the tube. He took the time to reload them, reinserted the rod, twisting it shut, then slammed his hand down and up on the lever, loading the gun and cocking the exposed hammer.
He was surprised to see that he didn’t have a shot, and ran down the sidewalk to the street, taking a position across the hood of his father’s pickup truck. From this point he could see two men, each firing a submachine gun from the hip. He looked just in time to see Sergeant Braden fire off his last round, which missed as badly as the first four had. The police officer turned to run for the safety of his house, but tripped over his own feet and had trouble getting up. Both gunmen advanced on Braden, loading new magazines into their weapons. Erik Sanderson’s hands were trembling as he shouldered his rifle. It had old-fashioned iron sights, and he had to stop and remind himself how to line them up as he’d been taught in Boy Scouts, with the front-sight post centered in the notch of the rear-sight leaf, the top of the post even with the top of the leaf as he maneuvered it on a target.
He was horrified to be too late. Both men blew his little-league coach to shreds with extended bursts at point-blank range. Something snapped inside Erik’s head at that moment. He sighted on the head of the nearer gunman and jerked off his round.
Like most young and inexperienced shooters, he immediately looked up to see what had happened. Nothing. He’d missed – with a rifle at a range of only thirty yards, he’d missed. Amazed, he sighted again and squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened. The hammer was down. He’d forgotten to cock the rifle. Swearing something his mother would have slapped him to hear, he reloaded the Marlin .22 and took exquisitely careful aim, squeezing off his next shot.
The murderers hadn’t heard his first shot, and with their ears still ringing from their own shots, they didn’t hear the second, but one man’s head jerked to the side with the wasp’s-sting impact of the round. The man knew what had happened, turned to his left, and fired off a long burst despite the crushing pain that seized his head in an instant. The other one saw Erik and fired as well.
But the young man was now jacking rounds into the breech of his rifle as fast as he could fire them. He watched in rage as he kept missing, unconsciously flinching as bullets came his way, trying to kill both men before they could get back into their car. He had the satisfaction of seeing them duck behind cover, and wasted his last three rounds trying to shoot through the car body to get them. But a .22 can’t accomplish that, and the minivan pulled away.
Erik watched it pull away, wishing he’d loaded more rounds into his rifle, wishing that he could try a shot through the back window before the car turned right and disappeared.
The young man didn’t have the courage to go over and see what had happened to Sergeant Braden. He just stayed there, leaning across the truck, cursing himself for letting them get away. He didn’t know, and would never believe, that he had, in fact, done better than many trained police officers could have done.
In the minivan, one of the gunmen took more note of the bullet in his chest than the one in his head. But it was the head shot that would kill him. As the man bent down, a lacerated artery let go completely and showered the inside of the car with blood, much to the surprise of the dying man, who had but a few seconds to realize what had happ –
Another Air Force flight, as luck had it, also a C-141B, took Mr. Clark out of Panama, heading for Andrews, where rapid preparations were being made for the arrival ceremony. Before the funeral flight arrived, Clark was in Langley talking to his boss, Bob Ritter. For the first time in a generation, the Operations Directorate had been granted a presidential hunting license. John Clark, carried on the personnel rolls as a case-officer instructor, was the CIA chief hunter. He hadn’t been asked to exercise that particular talent in a very long time, but he still knew how.
Ritter and Clark didn’t watch the TV coverage of the arrival. All that was part of history now, and while both men had an interest in history, it was mainly in the sort that is never written down.
“We’re going to take another look at the idea you handed me at St. Kitts,” the Deputy Director (Operations) said.
“What’s the objective?” Clark asked carefully. It wasn’t hard to guess why this was happening, or the originator of the directive. That was the reason for his caution.
“The short version is revenge,” Ritter answered.
“Retribution is a more acceptable word,” Clark pointed out. Lacking in formal education though he was, he did read a good deal.
“The targets represent a clear and present danger to the security of the United States.”
“The President said that?”
“His words,” Ritter affirmed.
“Fine. That makes it all legal. Not any less dangerous, but legal.”
“Can you do it?”
Clark smiled in a distant, smoky way. “I run my side of the op my way. Otherwise, forget it. I don’t want to die from oversight. No interference from this end. You give me the target list and the assets I need. I do the rest, my way, my schedule.”
“Agreed,” Ritter nodded.
Clark was more than surprised by that. “Then I can do it. What about the kids we have running around in the jungle?”
“We’re pulling them out tonight.”
“To be reinserted where?” Clark asked.
Ritter told him.
“That’s really dangerous,” the case officer observed, though he was not surprised by the answer. It had probably been planned all along. But, if it had…
“We know that.”
“I don’t like it,” Clark said after a moment’s thought. “It complicates things.”
“We don’t pay you to like it.”
Clark had to agree to that. He was honest enough with himself, though, to admit that part of it he did like. A job such as this, after all, had gotten him into the protective embrace of the Central Intelligence Agency in the first place, so many years before. But that job had been on a free-agent basis. This one was legal, but arguably. Once that would not have mattered to Mr. Clark, but with a wife and kids, it did now.