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CHAPTER 79Odessa, Ukraine October REECE AND FREDDY RETRIEVED their gear bags and weapons from the back of the Agency SUV and thanked Douglass for the ride. Agent Scheer led them to a white Hyundai minivan that was obviously from a local rental agency’s fleet. “No Suburban? ” Reece teased. “Please! The advance team gets the shaft. All the cool guys on the PPD, ah, that’s the president’s detail, get their vehicles flown in on C-17s for game day and we get whatever Avis can’t rent out that week. ” Kim pulled out of the hotel and navigated the local streets like a native. She’d obviously spent some time in the area as part of the advance team. “What’s your background, Kim? Did you come straight to the Secret Service? ” Freddy asked. “No, I went to Annapolis. Then the Marine Corps. Got out as a captain, tried to go to work in the family insurance business, but that made me want to blow my brains out. Applied for this job five years ago and have been here ever since. I love it. ” “What did you do in the Corps? ” Reece asked. “Intel, mainly. Supported some high-speed units but didn’t leave the FOB much. ” “MARSOC? ” “They call them ‘Raiders’ now but, yeah, I was attached as an intel officer. ” “That’s right, ‘the artists formerly known as MARSOC. ’ Hard to keep up with all of the name changes. I was attached to DET ONE in 2004 for a couple of months, ” Reece responded. “That was a solid group. I really learned a lot from them, especially Major K. He used to run their mountain warfare training center. Great guy! ” “He was squared away, ” Kim remembered. “Was Gunny Gutierrez still around when you were there? ” Reece asked. “He sure was. Small world. ” “It is, indeed. ” After showing her credentials to local police and making her way through the roadblocks, Agent Scheer parked the minivan on Prymorskyi Boulevard and led the men toward the site of the speech. They walked along the gray cobblestone driveway past an impressive nineteenth-century columned building that had, at some point, been the residence of someone important. The gated perimeter had already been set up and the temporary fences funneled pedestrians into a tent with several airport-style magnetometers and package scanners. The uniformed personnel recognized the Secret Service agent and waved her through. As they cleared the checkpoint and rounded the building, the colonnade they’d viewed on the iPad imagery was directly in front of them. The area was smaller than Reece had expected it to be. The site had obviously been chosen for television viewing rather than its ability to accommodate a large physical audience. A stage had been built in front, with two lecterns a few yards apart from each other. Last-minute preparations were being made by a variety of workers while security personnel from the United States, Russia, and Ukraine moved busily about. They walked up onto the stage and looked around. The site of the speech sat on a high bluff, with the ground falling off sharply toward the sea below. From the land side of the colonnade, the site left very few options for a sniper. Tall trees and buildings surrounded the structure, leaving no discernible line-of-sight shooting lanes that wouldn’t be locked down by the Secret Service. A long and modern pedestrian bridge connected the area from stage right to a more built-up area of the city, but only the rooftops and high windows of those buildings offered a shot toward the stage, and all would be occupied by authorities. Each member of the team spent several minutes taking in the scene, looking for something that had been overlooked by the other dozen sets of eyes that had studied it as part of the overall security assessment. Reece broke the silence first. “I’ll be honest, Kim, this is a good spot. ” “I agree, ” Freddy added. “The only thing that bothers me is the port, but you’re saying it’s been locked down? ” “Yep. Everything within two thousand meters has been searched and secured. We have drones up looking for IR signatures and dog teams have been working it all night and morning. The port is secure. ” “What are we missing? ” Reece asked himself as much as the others. Far out on the horizon, past the closest set of docks and through a forest of dock cranes, sat a massive green and red tanker-style vessel with a handful of colorful shipping containers stacked on the deck. Strain pulled a laser rangefinder unit from his pack and aimed it toward the ship, bracing it against one of the columns for stability. “Twenty-one hundred meters. Technically, you could make a shot from that far pier but it would be a long one. ” “Sure would, especially in this wind. You think that’s a legitimate threat, Freddy? What’s the world-record shot these days anyway? ” “These records are changing every year or two but the longest confirmed real-world shot was taken in Iraq by a Canadian sniper in 2017, went 3, 871 yards. He used a McMillan TAC-50 like the ones we used to use. The shot took ten seconds to reach the target. ” “That’s crazy, ” Reece said, shaking his head. “It’s damn fine shooting, buddy. ” “No, I meant that you can remember all that stuff. ” Reece smiled. “How about on a controlled range? ” “To the best of my knowledge, a shooter out of Texas hit a three-mile shot with a. 408 Chey Tac in 2018. Before that, one of our old sniper instructors had it at 2. 8 miles with the same round. Keep in mind those are not under combat conditions and were done with the best rifle-scope combinations available, shot by the most highly trained and capable snipers on earth. ” “So, from those cranes and that ship, ” Reece said, gesturing to the distance, “it’s a low-percentage shot but not out of the realm of possibility. With the guns and optics that are out there now, it could be done. Could you have some people take a look at that far pier, Kim? ” “It’s outside of the perimeter but, sure, I’ll have someone check it out. ” Agent Scheer walked off a few steps and made a phone call. Gesturing with her hand as she spoke, she tried to describe the exact location of the tanker, before hanging up and rejoining the group. “That’s the oil terminal, so it’s not open to the public. It’s gated, and local police are manning it. They’re sending some of our people over there to look around and will do a sweep with the UAVs as well. ” “Okay, good, let’s keep looking. I still feel like something is off. ” “The Secret Service does extensive research into the threats to POTUS, ” Kim explained, “at every location on every itinerary. Ever since President Kennedy we have been extremely sensitive to sniper threats against the president, for obvious reasons. No one wants to relive the nightmare that was Dallas, so ever since 1963 we’ve kept data of every military and law enforcement sniper, and with the advent of social media we’ve kept tabs, using open-source information, on civilians going to shooting schools run by former military snipers. Anytime POTUS makes a stop, we’ve cross-referenced everyone in a given area, including incoming travelers whose names we get from TSA, to those former MIL/LE and civilian-trained long-range shooters. They each get checked out, and any in the vicinity of a POTUS stop are flagged. Facial recognition technology helps a lot. ” “That’s thorough, ” Reece remarked, “but here you don’t have that information on foreign-trained snipers. ” “The database is fairly robust thanks to the folks at the NSA, but you’re right, nothing’s a hundred percent. We have good intel on U. S., Canadian, and European-trained snipers, who are the ones that coincidentally have the best shot at taking out the president. According to our assessment, other countries just don’t have the training or equipment required to make a shot past two thousand yards. That’s stretching it even for us. ” Reece nodded and looked out to sea. “The Shishani is here, Kim. I know it. He’s in place. He’s waiting. That sniper is here. ” • • • Oliver Grey recognized James Reece from the media coverage following his attacks on various civilian and military individuals across the United States the previous year. He looks a lot like his father did. Reece and his two colleagues had taken no interest in him as they walked past in front of the Bootlegger, a gangster-themed pub that sat on the ground floor of a taller building near the colonnade. Grey was sitting at a table on the sidewalk, reading the local Russian-language newspaper and drinking coffee like just another local going about his day. Since the pub sat well below the high ground where the presidents would speak, the street where it was located would remain open until just before the event began. The fact that Reece was walking with another Westerner and what looked to be a female Secret Service agent meant that he had worked his way back into the good graces of the U. S. government. This explained why Jules Landry had fallen off the radar, which meant that this operation had been compromised. Still, it was too late to call it off now. They would never get another opportunity like it. Grey had long since passed the point of no return, and the operation had reached a similar point. There was no going back.
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