Most often, as in the Ronald Reagan bank robberies, the local police were more than happy to step aside and let the feds handle it. But this was apparently a much more delicate issue and attitude didn't help matters at all.
Though Jeff was a fellow fed, he didn't like the BATF. They always walked with a heavy tread when something more subtle was needed or even appreciated.
After getting is ass reamed out by Director Gerald, he checked his messages on his cell phone. He'd been forced to turn it off when entering the electronically secured conference room despite the number of things happening that he had to be kept apprised of. His wife had left three messages, all increasing in concern as she saw stories on the news.
He dropped her a quick text assuring her that he was fine and would call as soon as he could. She'd be angry, but there wasn't much he could do about it.
Then he found a strange message from a number he'd never seen before.
The caller identified himself as Leo Marston and he said that there was something important to breaking the case wide open at his hotel room. For further confirmation, track the cell number that the call came from.
He sprinted to the technology lab and had them drop everything and run the phone number locations for the last several days. Developed for Enhanced 911, the system could pretty much pinpoint a specific cell phone to about a city block based on signal strengths at various cell towers.
Some of his fellow agents were going to be pissed at having their cases stuffed off to one side.
It would take a couple of hours to generate the data and correlate it based on the recent events happening around the Denver area. Assuming the data discovered about the cell phone confirmed what Leo said, his next step was to figure out a plan. Two HRT members had been killed in the exchange of gunfire in front of the FBI building and four others wounded.
It had been a royal goat fuck of a situation. But HRT now wanted blood and would probably go along with anything he suggested up to and maybe including air strikes to get it.
He returned to his office and booted up the web page that would show him where the GPS locator he put in Leo's computer case had been.
It took a few minutes to come up, but it led straight back to the hotel room where they picked up Leo. And it appeared as though he was still there.
One of the things he hadn't had to turn over to Leo on his release was all the photos taken at the scene. He printed them up despite being able to view them quite well on the computer monitor. He was old school in that way.
He posted the relevant ones on his bulletin board including ones showing the front of the building, the surrounding structures and how the room was laid out. It looked and smelled like another killing zone with limited access, lots of buildings overlooking the area, close to a major street that led to a highway and multiple exits from the several parking lots that serviced the hotel. There was also lots of foot traffic to contend with. It was perfect ambush country.
Was it a trap? Maybe. But he couldn't take a chance that the bastard Leo had something for him. He had pushed him out of the way of a bullet, something that even the elite HRT snipers couldn't see.
He leaned back in his chair and stared at the pictures, wondering how he was going to pull this off.
Leo had never been formally trained as a counter-sniper. But he knew a great deal about hunting the most dangerous game — man, and all a sniper was to him was a man with a rifle. It raised the stakes a bit, but it was something he could handle.
From his reading, the best way to kill a sniper wasn't necessarily with another sniper, but with artillery and air strikes — something he didn't have access to, nor a desire to use. He'd followed as much of the war with regards to snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan as he could, but really couldn't see how he could apply what he'd learned to this environment.
He placed himself on an oblique angle to the front of the hotel room, but behind the building. It did increase the range, and that was an advantage as he knew his rifle would be able to hit a man-sized target at a thousand yards. That is, if his rifle hadn't been monkeyed with.
If he felt that he had enough time, he would have torn his rifle down to the last screw and pin and measured each part with a micrometer. He had been reduced to verifying his scope settings and making sure that the firing pin still would be able to hit the primer. Coloring the primer of a spent shell with a small piece of tape, it looked like it would have enough force to fire a shell.
The trigger pull was still clean, short and very light. In the past, he had rifles that would fire if he slammed the bolt home too hard, but he had found it made them too unreliable. So the trigger pull was set light enough that it wouldn't pull the rifle off target when he squeezed it, but heavy enough to function even in a sand storm.
There was one bullet in the chamber, and the rest of the box of his custom built ammunition sat in their padded case next to the rifle.
His rifle was only single shot, but he had practiced rapid reloading to the point where he could shoot almost as fast as someone with a magazine in their rifle.
He recalled the sound of the bullets zipping around in front of the FBI headquarters and figured that his opponent had a smaller caliber rifle, probably no bigger than say .270, maybe even 7mm. It was a valid assumption that he would be going up against a human being rather than a machine, and he was probably shooting a rather small caliber.
He had the advantage of range and height, being in a tenth story hotel room that he'd rented just for this purpose. From his vantage point, he could see his truck parked in the lot in front of the hotel where he and Jackie had stayed.
Leo wondered how she was doing and what she had been working on since the morning of his arrest.
He'd settled in behind the open balcony door in his hotel room and sketched out all the terrain features he could see in his notebook. The laser range finder provided the distances to various features which were also noted. Using his binoculars, he tried to put himself in the mind of the other sniper, wondering where they would set up.
His over-watch position gave him a theoretical field of view of over a thousand yards. But the longest range he marked out was a mere seven hundred yards. The other sniper, given his caliber limitations, would probably be within three hundred yards. And there were plenty of places to shoot from within that range.
He used the last of his cheese cloth to tape to the door frame. It would look, at first glance, like it was closed. The advantage of using cheese cloth is that the shiny wax gave it some of the characteristics of glass, but he'd be able to shoot through it without possibly deflecting the shot.
Laying down on the spread he borrowed from the bed, he picked up his binoculars and started scanning likely spots for a sniper to hide, his rifle tucked under his arm.
Chapter 28
Allan Wells drove by the hotel where Leo was staying. At the very least, he could probably at least take him out. Being able to shoot FBI Agent Jeff Silver would be a big bonus and might be enough to get him out of heat with the organization.
His practiced eye quickly scanned the surrounding buildings for possible places to hide and snipe from.
There were several good possibilities. He'd shot from a roof before, but the FBI or the cops could defeat that by helicopter over-flights. And Denver was now almost a military camp with the governor asking for the National Guard to be activated to help maintain the peace. Never mind that most of the National Guard were currently chasing terrorists through Central Asia. At least it sounded like he was doing something.