Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

As we waited and hovered, huge, seemingly too-close passenger aircraft flew in and out of JFK what seemed like every five seconds. Listening to the pilot’s hectic radio sizzle, I started to get nervous. There were a lot of chefs here in this rapidly developing situation, a lot of stress and amped-up emotion. It was precisely at times like this that mistakes happened, I knew. When, say, a new air traffic controller gets ahead of himself and decides to shift a hovering PD chopper right in front of an incoming DC-10.

“There she is,” the pilot said suddenly over the headset as he pointed to the left.

And there she was.

I sat gaping at Air Force One, coming in from the east for a landing.

The sight of the iconic aircraft struck a strangely powerful emotional chord with me. Was it patriotism? A sense of hope? Of vulnerability? My memories of 9/11?

Whatever it was, I suddenly felt like I was a Boy Scout again. Like I should salute the plane or maybe recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

God bless America, I prayed silently to myself as the huge aircraft gently touched down on the runway below.

Please.

Chapter 4

The blind was the size of a jail cell.

It had the feel of a jail cell as well, with its concrete ceiling, the rear concrete wall, the cold concrete floor. The blind’s sidewalls and the front were made of plywood that was spray-painted black on the outside to fit in with the industrial roof space’s black painted concrete. In the forward plywood wall was a hole the size of a computer monitor with a black piece of cloth duct-taped over it.

The assassin checked his watch, then pulled the curtain off and looked down into the angled eyepiece of his Swarovski ATX hunting telescope.

The first thing he noticed as he looked out on the world was the morning’s air quality. It couldn’t have been better. It was a cold twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit and bright and clear as freshly Windexed Waterford crystal. Good bombing weather, he thought. Both the wind direction and speed were perfect, a light, gentle, eight-miles-an-hour west-southwest at his back.

From his perch fifty stories up looking east, the view field in the scope offered the clearest, most incredible view of Manhattan north of the Empire State Building. One could actually make out the curvature of the earth there in the distant horizon of Queens.

He panned the scope north to south across the gray carpet of building tops, the 59th Street Bridge, the black obelisk of the Trump World Tower. He stopped when he got to the Chrysler Building; that was on his right. It was so close and vivid in the advanced optics of the four-thousand-dollar scope that it seemed like, if he wanted to, he could reach out and prick his thumb on the glistening silver needle of its spire.

He panned the scope back a skosh to the left, and then angled it slightly down and thumbed the zoom.

Then, a few moments later, there it was in glistening focus. The target. The reason he’d been pissing into Gatorade bottles for the last two days.

The United Nations building.

Technically, the iconic glass skyscraper was called the United Nations Secretariat Building. In his scope, the sparkling rectangle of blue glass was so sharp-edged it looked two-dimensional, like a shiny forty-story glass playing card stuck into First Avenue.

He zoomed and tilted lower again and framed in his kill zone.

The bookends were the edge of the Secretariat building’s concrete sidewalk guard shack on the left and an apartment building on 43rd Street on the right. The in-between target zone was a segment of the UN building’s iron-gated circular driveway and reflecting pool. He centered the scope over the fence just to the right of the building’s front door entrance, where the VIP cars stopped.

The target zone had already been ranged in with a PEQ laser sight at a little under thirteen hundred yards away. The bullet path would be a descending one on a slight diagonal, right to left, approximately one cross street block in width. Because of the diagonal, the kill gap was tiny, a thin slot between a residential building on the corner of Second Avenue and 43rd and the north edge of an old prewar building called the Tudor Tower that was on the cross street directly across First Avenue in front of the UN.

Threading that needle would have been bad enough, but adding to things was a jutting roof structure on the UN’s Permanent Mission of India building between Third and Second on the north side of 43rd Street. By his calculations, his descending bullet would have to clear it by less than half a foot on its way downrange to the target.

Another X factor was some small American flags on a lamppost at the dead end of 43rd and First Avenue that the bullet had a chance to deflect off. But the worst of all was the sculpture in the pool in front of the UN building itself. The damn sculpture drove him nuts. It was called Single Form, an abstract, ugly twenty-one-foot piece of bronze that looked like a giant dog tag that could potentially be between him and the presidential limo.

If all went well, he would have maybe three seconds to get the shot off as the president went from the armored car to the front entrance of the building. Three seconds to gauge and sight and squeeze. Three seconds to hit a hole in one from atop a five-hundred-foot cliff thirteen football fields away.

He took his eye off the scope and checked on the electric blanket wrapped around the barrel of the long dark rifle resting on its bipod beside him.

Some guns are quite beautiful, but his world-famous thirty-pound Barrett M107 mounted with Zeiss 6 – 24 x 72 scope was about as elegant as a bulldozer. It was almost five feet long with the suppressor. Even its ammo was huge and clunky. The ten .50-caliber BMG API (armor-piercing incendiary) rounds loaded into its detachable box magazine were each over five inches in length and weighed over a quarter of a pound.

But what it lacked in form, it made up for in function, and then some. The Barrett was technically known as an anti-matériel rifle. With confirmed kills at over twenty-five hundred yards, it could shoot through one inch of armor plate or a foot of concrete.

Some might think that a Barrett loaded with APIs was a bit overkill, and that, say, a .300 Winchester Magnum or .338 Lapua round fired from a lighter rifle would have been adequate. And it might have been, but for the cold weather conditions. Because even with the warming blanket, he would be firing from essentially a cold bore, which sometimes reduced the range considerably.

Besides, this wasn’t some match event. He was only going to get one shot if he was lucky, and he had to maximize every possibility that he would kill what he hit.