The Shadow Game (8 page)

‘. . . and finally to my beautiful wife, Sabine, without whom I could not have done this . . .'

Brendan Ryan's voice faltered. His mouth felt dry, but his eyes were glistening. The hard man of the Labor Party despised public displays of emotion, yet here he was in his own theatre of tears.

It was 8pm, a Saturday, and Ryan had just been declared victorious in a by-election for the federal seat of Batman. A narrow strip in Melbourne's inner north, Batman had returned a Labor member at every election, bar two, since Federation.

But this time the seat had been a battleground between the soft and hard left. Ryan had vociferously deplored the Greens' rise in this once proud working-class enclave which had ensured that his decision to vacate the Senate for a seat in the House of Representatives had not been all smooth sailing.

Even as he thanked Sabine, his glamorous, brilliant wife, he thought about the hell she'd inadvertently put him through during the campaign. The Liberal Party had run dead, but their dirt unit had played a role in his struggle. It unearthed a series of embarrassing emails sent by Sabine when she'd been working the forex desk for Deutsche.

The emails pointed to a string of complex corporate transactions. They were a decade old, but that hadn't stopped them finding their way into the hands of an investigative type with the
Herald Sun
. Despite scant evidence of any wrongdoing, Murdoch's big-selling tabloid had enjoyed beating up on Sabine.

The paper's scoops had taken the wind out of Ryan's campaign, already dented by a lack of rank-and-file branch support for a candidate imposed on Batman by Labor's federal executive.

In the end, Ryan's union base had spent enough to ensure victory. He'd secured fifty-one per cent of the two-party preferred vote, scooping up preferences from a motley group of single-issue candidates and micro-parties.

As he stood on this makeshift stage in an uncomfortably warm community hall in Northcote, gazing out at a few dozen fair-weather supporters and a handful of juvenile reporters, an almighty sense of weariness swept over him. For a moment he wondered whether it was all worth it.

Sabine squeezed his hand and whispered a comforting ‘It's okay, my love' in his ear. Ryan stiffened and lifted his head. He smiled. Yes, politics was tough but the thrill of victory felt glorious.

Doubt and trepidation gave way to resolve. He'd taken on the worst the Tories could throw at him. He'd touched up the
Greens and seen off those grubs who worked for Murdoch and his Melbourne shit sheet.

Canberra beckoned with all its comforts, all its spoils and intrigue. There he would do what he did best, plot and scheme. And he would turn his sights on the real enemy, the Labor leader Catriona Bailey.

He knew they were hunting for him.

The counter-snipers scouring the landscape always ran the same playbook: every window, every rooftop with a clear line of sight was a threat.

The advance team had arrived two days before game day. He knew everything they would do: the checklist they would follow; how they would react to real and perceived threats. Twenty-four hours out their number had swelled as they set up a defensive bubble that radiated more than twelve hundred metres from the engagement zone.

By zero hour there would be helicopters in the air and gunmen stationed in the buildings around the target, searching for any signs of trouble through their scopes.

They were setting up a defensive screen for a shot that was
rarely fired, an adversary who mostly didn't exist. They were searching for ghosts.

Multiply their task by a week, by a month, by years – and even the elite would be in danger of losing their edge.

Their complacency was his friend.

Today the danger was real. If they missed him they would live with it for the rest of their lives.

He had been planning this moment for weeks; when it came, it would be measured in heartbeats. Fifteen years of training would collapse into a few seconds and a shot that would reverberate around the world.

The monitor on his wrist showed his heart was beating at seventy. Normal for most, but twenty beats above his resting average.

He breathed in deeply, visualising his opponents' final preparations: the counter-snipers locking down buildings, starting with the one hundred per cent location, the lair from which even someone of moderate talent could not miss. Then they would fan out until all threats had been eliminated.

He'd chosen the impossible hide, high up and nearly two kilometres from the target, beyond what was considered the effective range of his weapons system. As well, he would be shooting between buildings that would partially obscure his quarry.

Only a handful of snipers could consider this position, and he was one of that handful.

Carefully he unpacked his favourite gun, a hand-made bolt-action British rifle, the Accuracy International PSR. His was a
‘take-down' version: the barrel and butt could be removed from the rifle with a hex key, halving its size to fit in a rucksack.

He would be shooting .338 Lapua Magnum ammunition with enough power to punch a hole through body armour from one thousand metres. In the current atmospheric conditions, his bullet would slow from supersonic to transonic speed once it passed 1750 metres. That made it less stable, adding another variable to a multitude that he'd had to consider in planning the shot.

The first was gravity. From his eyrie it would take the bullet nearly five seconds to reach the game. His Schmidt & Bender scope had been zeroed to one hundred metres, but at two thousand he was effectively lobbing the bullet, aiming nearly four metres above the target.

Then there was the Coriolis effect. As the bullet left the muzzle of the gun it would be leaving the face of the Earth, the planet rotating under its flight path. Beyond one thousand metres, if you were shooting west, the target would move up and towards you, so bullets frequently missed low. Facing east, targets dropped and moved away, so bullets might miss high.

Then there was the wind, which channelled down streets and blew at a whim up and down the faces of buildings. Any city was a problem, this one more than most.

He reached into a pocket on his vest and pulled out his smartphone, checking the ballistics solver app restricted to those in law enforcement and the military. It was linked to his wind-velocity meter.

The final crucial variables were air density and temperature. An increase in air density meant more resistance, which would
slow down the bullet sooner. An increase in temperature would make the powder inside the case burn faster and lift the muzzle velocity of the bullet.

Happily all those calculations were crunched by his software.

Nothing was left to chance.

A flutter of movement to his left startled him. An errant pigeon strutting across the room. He smiled for the first time that day.

The building and the room had been chosen with great care. Like many in this dying city, the high-rise had long been abandoned and now stood as a 38-storey Renaissance-style tombstone for a more prosperous age.

The windows beneath the ornate green copper roof had been smashed by vandals and the walls were smeared with their profanities. Glass and rubbish were strewn across the floor. The stench of urine was overwhelming.

It was perfect.

The large open window gave him a clear view of the target and meant he could position himself deep inside the room. He was six metres back, lurking in contained shadow. There would be no Hollywood-style tell-tale barrel resting on the window's edge. All that was visible was a broken frame. His weapon was propped on the remnants of a table, turned on its side and secured to give him a stable platform.

The marksman was ready. He checked the time. Ten minutes to game time: the culmination of a lifetime serving with the very best in some of the very worst places on this wretched planet.

In a world clouded by the lies and deceit of rulers claiming to speak the truth, the only absolute clarity was through his scope.
Here everything narrowed to one pure purpose: the elimination of a threat.

His mind wandered back to another target. Afghanistan, eight years ago. The tribal leader had been nearly two and a half kilometres out when he'd lined him up in the sights of his Barrett M82A1 .50 calibre rifle. The bullet took six seconds to strike.

In the elite enclave of military snipers, the Afghani kill was still spoken of with reverence.

He glanced over his shoulder to the open door behind him.

The danger in making any shot was that it revealed your position. The sound would be muffled, but not completely silenced, by his suppressor. Its main function was to diffuse the noise and make it difficult to assess where it had come from.

From the moment of impact the clock would be ticking on being captured. Long practice had taught him to move slowly when the heat was on.

After confirming the hit he would drop to his knees behind the table. It would take him sixty seconds to dismantle the rifle and put it in his rucksack. There were three ways out of the building and he had investigated each one. If his escape was blocked through the quickest exit he would immediately shift to the next, and then the last. He would be on the street in three minutes, a long way from the immediate terror and confusion. Then he would blend with the crowd and vanish.

One last time he focused through his scope on the tiny lectern so far away. It was sharp and clear in the sight. It was a good day for hunting, bright with very little wind.

There was movement on the stage. The moment was close. He felt his heart rate begin to rise. Always he felt a surge of excitement as the game drew into the crosshairs.

There he was, familiar, waving at the crowd as he approached the lectern. The sniper waited as the crowd settled so the quarry could begin his speech. He would never get the chance.

The sniper breathed out slowly and squeezed the trigger. A crack echoed in the room.

His heart beat six times. Through his scope he saw the man's head rip to one side as the bullet exploded through the base of his skull.

He fell.

The President of the United States was dead.

Six heavily armed men burst through the door, the sergeant barking out orders to startled congressional staff.

‘Everybody get down.'

They were a fearsome sight, wearing military-style helmets and body armour, their faces covered by balaclavas. Each member of the black-clad Containment and Emergency Response Team of the Capitol Police carried a short-barrel M4A1 assault rifle.

The staff of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives had been bunched around a TV and froze as they struggled to absorb what was happening. Only moments earlier they had been shaken by a shriek from an intern who was the first to see an unbelievable breaking news strap flash up on the screen: ‘President Shot at Detroit Rally'.

The sergeant lifted his weapon to leave them in no doubt: he wasn't asking, he was demanding.

‘Get down. NOW!'

As the staff dropped to the floor he raced to the office of Speaker Morgan McDonald, followed by two of his colleagues. Big Mac, too, was staring at a TV screen and swung around as the police burst into the room.

‘Sir, you are coming with us.'

Big Mac raised his hands and didn't budge.

‘Hang on son, where are we going?'

‘No questions, sir.'

The sergeant and another officer grabbed the speaker under each armpit and manhandled him out of the room. As they emerged, the team formed a phalanx round the trio, leaving the staff terrified and sobbing.

The unit moved at a trot like a deadly black spider through the corridors of the Capitol. Two in front, with guns shifting from side to side, eyes peeled for any sign of threat. Two supporting Big Mac, but scouring the corridors left and right. Two trailing, facing backwards and training their weapons on anyone who moved into their sights.

Minutes later, the team arrived at a fortified ‘safe room' in the basement. The sergeant punched in a security code and a heavy steel door slid open.

Big Mac had never ventured this far into the bowels of America's legislature, but he knew this was one of a series of safe rooms that had been built after 9/11, in anticipation of a terror attack. Only when he was inside and the doors were shut tight did the two men remove their hands from under his arms.

Big Mac was a sweaty mess. His shirt was out, one of his braces had come loose. He'd lost a shoe somewhere along the way.

The sergeant spoke, his breathing laboured after the dash through the corridors.

‘Sir, thank you for your co-operation. The president is dead. At exactly the same time he was killed the White House was attacked by drone. It was shot down and exploded near the entrance to the West Wing. The vice president is in Air Force Two, about an hour out from Washington.'

Big Mac's heart was pounding and his head was swimming. It had been a long time since he had attempted anything more than a brisk walk and he was struggling to catch his breath.

‘We believe this is a co-ordinated attack. After the vice president you are the next in line, sir. We had to secure the leadership.'

‘Thank you, son.' Big Mac panted as he struggled to regain some of his composure. ‘Now can you hook me up with STRATCOM?'