“A smart-ass goat-boy bastard.”
He laughed, and she did, too.
The area around Manassas was, like much of northern Virginia, rolling hills, suburbs and mini-malls, and roads that gridlocked during rush hour. Still, there were areas where the pine and oak trees still held their own, and there were a few stone fences and old houses standing against the weather.
Howard had driven for about thirty minutes, until he found an empty, tree-lined rural road narrow enough for his purpose. He drove along until he was a half mile or so ahead of the Neon, then turned right into a narrow tractor path leading to a cattle-guard gate in a barbed wire fence. He shut off the engine. There were no houses nearby, just some brown and white cows grazing in the pasture.
What he planned to do was get out, head through the cow pasture and into the little patch of woods opposite it, and then circle behind the Neon, which he figured would stop and wait to see what he was up to. Once he was behind the shadower, he’d creep up on him with his revolver in hand, and find out exactly who he was and what he wanted. A simple plan, but one that should work.
Behind him, the Neon pulled off the road about four hundred meters away, turned sideways with the passenger side facing Howard, and stopped.
Howard waited a few seconds, then got out of his car.
He was still on the driver’s side closing the door when there came a chink! chink! as the passenger’s and driver’s side windows shattered, followed by the sound of a rifle shot. The bullet, traveling faster than the sound, missed him by maybe two inches.
Shit!
Howard took two steps to the front tire and dropped into a crouch behind it. He pulled his revolver. The engine was the best protection, and the heavy steel wheel would probably deflect a sniper’s bullet aimed lower.
Another shot, another round pierced the car’s doors, through and through, and if he’d been there, it would have gutted him.
This was bad.
There was no other cover nearby. It was fifty meters through an open pasture to the tree line, and trying to cross the road the other way would be equally stupid, he’d be exposed. A decent shooter could nail him. And his handgun, while a fine weapon, was not going to do the job at four hundred meters unless God intervened in his favor.
He risked a quick look.
Another shot echoed over the pasture land, and the round smashed into the car’s side above the front tire but stopped when it hit the engine. Made a terrific clang.
If the guy came toward him, he’d still have the advantage for another three hundred, three hundred fifty meters, and if he circled around, Howard was really in deep shit.
He could call for help, but it would never get here in time. What the hell was he going to do?
Memory was a funny thing. Up until that moment, he had forgotten what he had in the car’s trunk. He felt a sudden surge of hope and possibility flow over him when he remembered.
Howard scooted toward the rear of the car.
Another shot hit the car amidships and must have struck a frame support or something in the door; it didn’t go all the way through to his side.
He reached the back tire. He had his keys, and the trunk release was on the electronic alarm and opener. He took a deep breath, put his revolver over the car’s trunk, pointed it at the Neon, and triggered off three shots as fast as he could.
At the same time, he popped the trunk control, lunged under the still-rising lid, and grabbed the hard-shell case inside. He jerked it out and fell back behind the tire.
The sniper’s next shot was great; it hit the passenger-side tire, lanced through the steel-belted radial, hit the driver’s side tire and penetrated that, then punched a hole in the comer of the hard-shell carrying case, almost jerking it from Howard’s grip.
The car dropped to its rims, and he wasn’t going to be driving it anywhere any time soon.
Howard popped the latches and dumped the parts of the.50 BMG rifle onto the ground. The bullet had missed anything important. He put his handgun down and, with a speed aided by adrenaline, assembled the rifle in what had to be record time. He loaded the magazine with five cartridges of the match-grade ammo, chambered a round, and lit the red-dot attachment on the scope. It was sighted in at three hundred meters, he recalled, so he’d have to adjust his aim a bit. Or maybe not. This thing shot pretty flat for a long way.
Time to make an assumption here. The shooter was probably using a scoped deer or sniper rifle, 30-6, maybe.308, something like that, and if it was, it would likely be a bolt action. So he was going to have to manually chamber a round after each shot, which meant that Howard would have half, maybe three-quarters of a second between shots.
Not much time to get set up. And if it was a semiauto, that would be really bad. But it was what he had.
Howard took a grip on the heavy rifle. He stuck his head up, held it there for an agonizingly long time, maybe half a second, then ducked.
The shot came, hit the trunk, zipped through, but missed by a good six inches.
Then Howard leaped up, dropped the.50’s bipod on the trunk’s lid, slamming it shut, and put the red dot on the middle of the Neon. He squeezed the trigger, a shade too quickly, and the recoil from the weapon knocked him back and almost off his feet. The blast of sound was like a bomb; it deafened him. Even as he fought to regain his position, he chambered another cartridge, the empty extracted and smoking to his right.
That would give the son of a bitch something to think about!
Howard looked through the scope. On high magnification, he could see the bullet hole where the side of the Neon had buckled in around it; it had blown paint off in a hand-sized crater, but there was no sign of the shooter. If the guy had any brains, now he would be behind the front tire with the engine block protecting him. When the.50 went off, it sounded like the wrath of God, and the assassin would know that the odds had just shifted dramatically into Howard’s favor.
Howard’s ears were ringing and he couldn’t hear anything over that. He looked down, saw the earplugs that came with the rifle, and risked the second it took to scoop them up. He shoved them into his ears.
No sign of the shooter.
Fine. Let’s see how
He put the red dot on the top of the front tire and squeezed a shot off, more careful now.
The bullet hit a few inches high and must have shattered and sprayed the engine compartment. Vapor came out from under the hood, maybe from the radiator, maybe coolant for the AC. He’d bet that car wasn’t going anywhere, either.
Now it was time to get the troops out here. He pulled his virgil and hit the emergency sig control in a rapid sequence.
“Sir?” came a voice.
Howard smiled.
“Hold on a second.” Howard shot the Neon again. Hit the front tire this time. The car sagged.
“I want a helicopter with a squad of troops ready to shoot landing twenty meters east of the GPS location of my virgil in fifteen minutes maximum. This is not a drill.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Here is the situation….”
But when the chopper from Quantico arrived and a dozen of Net Force’s finest hit the ground, fanned out, and surrounded the mortally wounded Neon, the shooter was nowhere to be found. The car was much closer to the tree line than Howard’s car was, and somehow, the would-be assassin had managed to slip away without Howard spotting him.
