Sniper One Page 9

  The desert travelers were closer now, and Patton could see that they wore camouflage uniforms. He saw no guns, but officials made him uneasy. He made it a point not to stare.

  The travelers were tall for Jordanians, unshaven, and appeared weary. They wore no packs, but one had blankets rolled behind his belt. Patton wondered if they might be Jordanian irregulars or some kind of guerrilla fighters. His unease increased.

  The men eyed the Mercedes with interest, and Patton felt the weight of their eyes, but neither spoke and were passing the car when George burst from his relative's hut and sounded off like a San Francisco fog horn.

  "You about ready to go, Bill? I'm done here, and we can make Amman before dark."

  Ready to go. Bill Patton started for the driver's seat.

  The travelers had stopped, and one turned toward George while the other studied Bill. Belatedly, the younger Patton saw the pistol butt in the belt of the man facing him.

  The older traveler, who had chosen his father spoke, and Bill Patton felt relief roll over him in a powerful wave.

  Colonel Greg Maynard said, "Excuse me, Sir, but are you American?"

  "Yep, and proud of it. I can tell that you are as well. You talk like a mid-westerner. Missouri maybe?"

  Maynard's grin was as wide as his face. "Close enough." He made introductions.

  "I'm United States Army Colonel Greg Maynard and this is Gunnery Sergeant Shooter Bell, United States Marine Corps." Then he explained what American military men were doing in the Jordanian desert.

  George Patton was vigorously enthusiastic.

  "Crashed in the desert and had to walk out. Well isn't that the damnedest!" The Colonel and the Gunny agreed that it was.

  "So what you need now is a ride into Israel, right? And we've got the transportation sitting right here, though we'll make a vehicle change in the capital. Why, we'll have you in a fancy hotel before the evening is over. Why...."

  Maynard held up a hand. "Steady now. What we need to do is get to our consulate in Amman. Trying to cross the Jordanian border without any papers is too risky. Our ambassador will know what to do with us. Will you take us there? It would save our tired feet a lot of hiking."

  George's enthusiasm was unaffected. "Pile in. You can have the whole back seat."

  "This is my son, Bill Patton. He'll do the driving. I do the navigating, and we haven't been lost yet.

  "Bill, get the air conditioning on so these American heroes can start feeling human again."

  Clicker said, "You may want the windows open. We've been out here for quite a long time, and if we weren't sweating we were freezing. I doubt we are exactly fragrant."

  Maynard exclaimed, "Good God, this is comfortable. I think I'll buy a Mercedes when I get home."

  Bill Patton had the car moving. The trip was starting to get exciting. He needed to get into it.

  "Ah, Colonel, seeing you've been out on the desert you probably aren't up to date on how the war is going."

  Both survivors perked up. "How are we doing?" Colonel Maynard asked their question.

  Both Pattons laughed with some special joyfulness, but the older man allowed his son to answer.

  "Well," he drew out the news. "It's all over."

  "What?"

  "Hard to believe, but we just stomped the Iraqis into the ground. Destroyed their armor and sent their whole army running back to Baghdad."

  "We got Saddam?"

  "Well, no, we didn't do that. Something about the other Arabs not wanting us to occupy an Arab capital, but we whipped them so good that they won't be able to threaten anybody, and the Iraqi army will probably overthrow Saddam and...."

  Maynard was stunned. "My God. What did it take, three days, maybe four?"

  "Damn, and we missed it all." The Marine did not sound pleased.

  Maynard was still bemused. "If it was that fast, almost everybody must have missed it."

  Clicker sniggered. "You haven't figured the best part yet, Colonel."

  "Like what?" Maynard was still catching up on the idea of the war being a wipeout.

  "If we'd have known, we could have just sat it out at the radar site because the Marines do not leave men behind, and people would come looking until they found me or what was left of me.

  Clicker speculated. "I figure they will begin searching for me about tomorrow, so we had better check in and let our survival be known."

  Greg Maynard groaned. "All of those miserable miles, all of that water can lugging, and all of the misery of having to listen to you humming the Marine Hymn hour after endless hour. All for nothing."

  Bell's mood was lighter. "Not for nothing, Colonel. How else could two grunts like us get to ride in a Gen-U-Wine Mercedes-Benz like this one?"

  Chapter 7

  Spring 1999

  Big Horn Mountains, Wyoming

  From their kitchen window Sidney Maynard could watch her men almost to Clicker's lodge. Between the big house and Clicker's, the land had once been a golf course. Now the once- in-a-while bush-hogged acres provided ground cover for quail, grouse, and pheasant. The game birds were stocked, and Clicker Bell decided how much they could be hunted without depleting the flocks.

  Clicker made all of those kinds of judgments, and the Sixplex unfailingly supported Bell's decisions. If Clicker said they could shoot elk with more than four points (Western count) that is what the Sixplex and their guests hunted. If a visitor deliberately shot something smaller, that guest was never reinvited to the ranch. Of course, accidents happened; antlers were misjudged or a wrong identification made.

  Humans erred and normal blunders were accepted as part of hunting and shooting.

  The old golf course had ended a few hundred yards short of Bell's lodge, and from there on the forest was thick. Sydney noticed that Clicker had restricted bush-hogging along the woods and that the forest was therefore creeping into the field, further separating the lodge from the ranch house.

  Although she thought of Clicker and her father as her men, Sydney Maynard had not yet captured the elusive Bell. Just thinking about the chase made her grin. She had set her cap for Clicker Bell, and he knew it. And, she had hooked him, Sydney was almost sure of it, although Bell made none of the overt courting moves a girl should expect.

  At thirty-five, Sydney could not rightly be labeled a girl. She had been married for a few weeks in the early eighties and until recently had held a responsible position in a computer software company. She had been around, but she reminded herself, so had Bob Bell. Clicker had been a career Marine, for God's sake, and everyone knew what Marines did on their time off in strange climes. Bell had never married, but why would he? His career had been one of many floats, exotic assignments, and ... her father did not call Bell "Shooter" for nothing.

  It was curious how Clicker did not resent the nickname of Shooter. Gunnery Sergeant Clicker Bell, USMC, retired, looked upon his military service as honorable and important. In war you killed your enemy—if you could. Some did it better than others, and Greg Maynard, Colonel, US Army, retired, liked to point out that, no matter where sent, a few Marines or soldiers did virtually all of the killing. Everybody fired guns, but there were always a limited few who simply shot people. The rest? Everyone wondered where all of those thousands of rounds it took to kill an enemy actually went. Some calculations claimed that in Vietnam—it took more than ten thousand rounds to kill a single enemy. Other figures went as high as four hundred thousand rounds to put down one enemy soldier.

  The few, like Clicker Bell, Carlos Hathcock, Chuck Mawhinney, and Neil Morris, squeezed triggers and enemy fell—the way riflemen were supposed to shoot.

  Odd, Greg Maynard often recognized, all of his deadly shooter examples were Marines.

  Sydney Maynard knew that Shooter Bell had killed at least seven enemy during the few days that he and her father had been together in the Iraqi desert. Her father still liked to tell the story. Clicker usually shook his head and claimed that the tale got better with each polishing.

&nbs
p; Together, the Colonel and the Staff Sergeant had destroyed the only Scuds taken out in the entire Gulf War. Considering the Allied Air Forces' intense search for the missiles and launchers, the feat was astounding. Both were awarded Silver Stars, and Bell received the Purple Heart for a shoulder wound. Clicker treated that medal with amused respect. He often said, "If that darned radio I was wearing hadn't gotten in the way I could have earned three or four Purple Hearts—posthumously."

  Maynard had almost immediately retired from the military services. He had settled on the Sixplex ranch and never looked back—except for once when Gunnery Sergeant Bell took retirement in 1996 and accepted the position Maynard had been offering for nearly six years.

  In Germany, Bell would have been called both Jaeger and Forest Meister. As Jaeger, Bell was in charge of all game animals and their harvesting. As Forest Meister, Clicker controlled the plantings and the harvesting of timber on the entire ten thousand acre spread and the additional eight thousand acres they rented.

  The six owners found the former Gunny to be a superior administrator and an excellent delegator. When Bell spoke, his hired hands jumped. If they did not, they departed—permanently. On the other hand, Bell ordered, then allowed, his help to do their job without his continual peering and poking.

  Colonel Maynard was the only owner to notice that nearly all of Shooter's hired men were former Marines, infantry Marines at that, former fighting men who had not chosen the Corps as a career. He learned that Bell had served with some of his employees and that the former Gunny had sought them out and offered the jobs. In pretended annoyance, Maynard groused about it to Bell.

  "It's nepotism and it's incestuous, Shooter. Like hiring only your own family. What about local hire? What about...."

  "I've got a local man, Colonel." Clicker rarely called Maynard other than Colonel.

  "One?"

  "Only one. I want disciplined people, Colonel. I hire men that can and will go ahead without me watching everything they do. I want men who can report on time. I hire capable men who...."

  "You hire ex-Marines, Bell."

  "I thought that was what I was just saying, Colonel."

  Then Maynard would throw up his hands in pretended resignation. "I know...."

  And Clicker would finish, " ... Once a Marine, Always a Marine."

  On their walk to the lodge, the Colonel was yammering about how kindly both El Nino and La Nina weather systems had been to their part of the country. There had been storms, of course, but the winters of 1998 and 1999 had been mild, which kept the wild game healthy and stock losses small.

  Clicker agreed, but his thoughts were on Sydney Maynard. He wondered how Greg Maynard really felt about him getting closer to his only child, and he wondered how the Colonel was reacting to the idea that he, only an employee without anything more than his retired pay and a few minor stock ventures, might put a few of his smooth and irresistible moves on his daughter and maybe ask her to be Mrs. Bob Bell?

  The Colonel knew, of course. Sydney flirted with Clicker all of the time, and Maynard knew Bell well enough to detect the retired Gunny's interest.

  They had talked about it, and the Colonel had said, "Sydney likes you, Clicker."

  Bell tried to answer straight and honest.

  "Well, I'm taken with her, too, Colonel."

  "You know she was married once."

  "Yep, she spoke about it."

  That interested Greg Maynard. "She did? Hell, she's never opened up to me more than the announcement that she was leaving the guy."

  Clicker said, "From what little she told me, she should have John Wayne Bobickd him."

  Maynard chuckled. The memory of J. W. Bobick's wife cutting off his instrument while he dozed was deep within the American psyche.

  Not much more had been said, but Bell did not sense reservation in Maynard. Whatever the Colonel's feelings, Clicker intended to begin his campaign. Sydney Maynard was more than he had ever expected to attract, and at forty-one years of age, he was overdue.

  As they made a small turn to enter the woods path that led to Clicker's lodge, Bell turned slightly and raised a hand toward the distant ranch house. Sydney might not be watching, but if she was she would know that he was thinking about her.

  Maynard caught the wave. "Damn, Bell, I wish you and Sydney would quit eyeballing each other and get in some serious courting. That gal is not going to wait forever while some broken-down old Jarhead gets his act together."

  Taken by surprise, Clicker's response was feeble. "Well, I haven't been ... well, it's sort of the boss's daughter kind of thing, you know, and...."

  "The boss's daughter?" Maynard sounded indignant. "Damn it, Shooter. We're more than boss and hired help. We're friends!

  "Next, there's the matter of the offer we just made to you and that you accepted. That shows you aren't just hired help."

  The offer had come from the Sixplex owners. Bell could buy in. A little at a time, as he could afford it. Eventually...?

  "I've yet to thank you for that, Colonel. I know that the idea was yours, and...."

  "Don't distract me, Bell. The third point is that every hired hand is supposed to be trying to marry the boss's daughter, especially if she is as pretty a woman as my Sydney. Isn't that right?"

  "That's right, Colonel."

  "Now for reasons I don't understand, Sydney has picked you. My God, she could have had any of a dozen of those suspender-wearing, money-making, pencil-necked yuppies that hung around her back east, and I can name two field grade officers who still ask about her. Why she could...."

  "I'm not arguing, Colonel."

  "Well, you're not acting, either, Bell."

  Clicker said, "That wave just opened my campaign."

  Maynard still sounded grumpy and unconvinced. "Glad to hear it."

  Earlier there had been a meeting of the Sixplex, and the meeting had been momentous in two ways.

  With the national economy barreling along at unprecedented levels, one of the six owners had decided to move on. Greg Maynard had snapped up the offered sixth part of the ranch and said in an aside to Clicker, "I'll cash stock to pay for this, and I'm glad to get the money out of the market and into something real. This balloon can't rise forever."

  "Then why are you investing every nickel I can muster into stock, Colonel? You're giving me good advice, aren't you?"

  "The stock market is best for the long run, Shooter. Stock is right for you, but I am buried in the stuff, and I need to divert. If my buddies would sell I'd like to buy all of this place."

  Clicker pondered a moment. "I think the Frenchman might get interested in selling. He grumbled a lot about all of Europe being in a recession; maybe he will feel pinched."

  "You just don't like Deladier, do you, Click?"

  "He isn't as good as he thinks he is."

  "He owns a huge chemical company, Bell. What does it take to be successful?"

  "It isn't just business success, Colonel. The Frenchman is arrogant."

  Maynard silently agreed, and Bell's lodge came into view.

  The lodge was old and had once been the main ranch building. It had been modernized until it rivaled the newer and larger ranch house, and anything the lodge lacked in size it made up for in positioning.

  The builder had placed the lodge on a steep rise where it seemed to hover above the ranch's private lake. The view was entrancing and included not only the valley-filling lake but smaller mountains beyond.

  To build the lodge, the largest timber had been cut into logs which were peeled and flattened top and bottom. The logs had been laid up cabin style, and none were less than two feet in diameter. The lodge's windows were many, and the broad-leaved, low-peaked roof was shingled with thick cedar shakes. The only other nearby building was of similar construction and provided Clicker with garages and a workshop.

  Maynard said, "I love this spot, Clicker. I think I'll move down here and put you in the big house."

  I'm not moving."

  I'll pay you
big."

  "I don't think so, Colonel. You'd have to add a servant's quarters, then you'd want a pool room. Next you would...."

  "All right, Bell. I'll stay in the big place, but why don't you take a long furlough and let me have this house for a couple of months."

  "Can't do it, Colonel. You'd forget to clean the guns and empty the ashes."

  "What ashes? You use the central heat all of the time."

  The second important point at the Sixplex owner's meeting had been raised by the ranch's historian-partner.

  Shelby Grant lacked the wealth of his companions. He had become part owner because he had inherited a significant portion of the land now included in the Sixplex ranch. Instead of money, he put up his land. Without heirs, it had been expected that upon his death Grant would deed his share to the ranch, but then Sydney Maynard had appeared.

  To the aging Grant, Sydney seemed as fresh as a spring flower, and he chose the role of surrogate grandfather with a pleasure that touched them all. If Sydney would stay on, Shelby Grant's sixth part of the ranch would be hers.

  Sydney Maynard informed her new relative that she already planned on living at the ranch for the rest of her life, and that he need not bribe her into staying. Then she had whispered into the old man's ear, and Grant's eyes had swung to Clicker Bell before, to Clicker's embarrassment, he began to nod and chuckle.

  Because she knew the story and had admired his own gold camel bell, Clicker had given Sydney one of the remaining bells he had found in the Iraqi hide. Later, Sydney had come begging another because Shelby Grant was interested in hers, and she did not wish to part with it. Clicker forked over another bell from his seriously reduced hoard.

  For this gathering of the Sixplex, Grant had prepared a talk that would include a slide show. Once a professor of history, Grant still taught an occasional class at the university in Sheridan, and he was prone to entertain his partners with historical discoveries he found interesting.

  The show opened with photographs of the Gobi desert, which to everyone's surprise was mostly bare rock without appreciable earth to be seen.