Authors: Don Drewniak
Desert Assassin
D
ESERT
A
SSASSIN
Don Drewniak
This is a work of fiction. With the exception of public figures, any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental. The opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confused with those of the author.
Copyright © 2014 Don Drewniak. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
ONTENTS
CHAPTER
O
NE
I
T WAS A CLEAR AND COOL
A
PRIL NIGHT
– one in a string of seemingly endless nights for Bill Williams, who was sitting on his starlit back porch staring out into the desert. His companions were a bottle of Merlot and a collection of over a thousand 1950s and 1960s doo-wop recordings. With the obscure 1955 “Dreaming” playing in the background, Williams noticed a faint streak of light plunging earthward in what appeared to be the immediate distance. The streak disappeared in a second or two. Assuming it was a small meteor which had burned up in the atmosphere, he quickly put it out of his thoughts.
The Merlot and the music served as counterbalances to the memories of his previous twenty-four years. Those were years of combat, killings, slaughter, sex and, finally, a year dominated by solitude.
“Dreaming” shuffled back several nights later. As the song began to play, Williams recalled that the 1950s group which recorded it went by the name of The Cosmic Rays. The group was fronted by Sun Ra, an enigmatic musician who claimed to have come to Earth from Saturn. Although he considered the thought to be nonsense, Williams could not help but wonder if the sighting of a few nights earlier, along with the simultaneous playing of the song, was more than a coincidence.
He placed a half-filled glass of Merlot on the reconstructed porch floor, pushed himself out of his recliner, walked into a small room which served as an office and retrieved his laptop. Back on the porch, he turned on the computer and waited. Once the internet was accessed via his little used satellite connection, he spent over two hours reading whatever he could find about meteors, including the potential value of meteorites.
A little more than an hour after dawn the next morning, the retired U.S. Army Special Forces sergeant major added six items to his fourteen-year-old jeep. Included were a gallon jug of water, one of his two 45 ACPs, a high-powered rifle, GPS, digital camera and field glasses. These were the six items which always accompanied him during rides into the desert, and to the hills and mountains beyond. He also added a twelve pound, short handle sledge hammer and a dozen hastily cut wooden stakes.
Williams had purchased the property on which he was living a year earlier. One of several reasons he did so was the view from the rear of the house. The desert stretched on for tens of miles imperceptibly merging with distant hills and mountains crossing from north to south. There was nothing man-made which was visible; just sand, patches of purple and white wildflowers, desert grass, shrubs and a smattering of stunted cactus plants.
He had the option of driving the jeep straight into the desert from the back of the house. However, to do so would mean disturbing nearby sand and vegetation. In addition, there were several hundred golf balls scattered two hundred to well over three hundred yards away from a makeshift tee located ninety feet behind the rear porch. There was no need to bury any more balls than those already covered by wind blown sand. Williams reminded himself to retrieve them before hitting any more out into the desert.
Driving out of his 200-foot, hard-packed gravel driveway, Williams turned left. This placed him on a lightly used road which connected his small isolated house to civilization. A mile later, he turned off-road to his left and drove an additional mile. After a final left turn, he continued until he was a mile directly behind the house. He paused briefly to look out at the desert – his backyard. “Here we go,” he whispered.
The plan was to stop at 500-foot intervals, stand up in the jeep and use the field glasses to scour the area in all directions. Searching done at stop one, he drove a stake into the ground and moved on, traveling west to the next stop. He once again methodically viewed the entire area, drove in a stake and continued the search. After completing the viewing and staking at stop three, he headed north for about 500 feet and stopped. There was nothing unusual in sight, so he reversed direction and repeated the process some 500 feet south of the third stake. Nothing.
Twelve stakes into the search, all the while keeping his jeep under ten miles an hour, Williams called it quits for the day. He had driven slightly more than a mile west and had extended the northern and southern searches out to a quarter mile in each direction. He wanted to press forward. However, he knew that to do so would probably increase the chances of overlooking his phantom target.
Back home just before eleven, he made an early two sandwich lunch. He then used some scrap wood to cut out twelve stakes for the next day’s search. The afternoon was used for a daily ritual, doing repair work to both the thirty-year-old house and a garage located off to the north side of the house. The property, which included four acres of sand covered land, had been unoccupied for nearly five years prior to his buying it and was a prototypic handyman’s special. Williams had spent the first few days on the property living in a tent while putting a new roof on the house.
Evening approached and with it came an eight-mile trip to a roadside diner, the main clientele of which were truckers. Mixed in were a few locals and tourists en route to El Paso, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Roswell or the mountains. The owner and cook was a mammoth sized character nicknamed “Killer Two.” At 6 feet 4 inches, he topped Williams by three inches in height and was at least ninety pounds heavier. Much of what was once muscle had disappeared. The dominant feature of his round face was a nose which appeared to have been slammed to wrestling ring mats a few times too many. Now in his mid-fifties, he had briefly trained over three decades earlier with the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s wrestling legend Killer Kowalski.
Kowalski opened a professional wrestling school in Massachusetts following his retirement in the late 1970s. Killer Two was one of his first students. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Killer Two quickly realized he had no future in wrestling and quit after five months. However, the memory of those days lived on. The walls of the diner and about half of the interior surfaces of the windows were covered with autographed photos of Kowalski and newspaper clippings about the Polish Great One.
The pride and joy of Killer Two was a photograph of him in the ring with Kowalski. Suspended from the right side wall of the diner was a 42-inch flat screen television connected to a DVD player. A nephew of Killer Two had put together a DVD comprised of clips of matches featuring Kowalski which had been taken from
YouTube
. He then gave Killer Two several copies of the DVD as a Christmas present. From opening to closing day after day, the clips were played on the television.
The only person in the area who Williams considered a friend was Killer Two. One of the reasons for the friendship was that Williams seemed to be among the few who enjoyed listening to the big guy repeat stories of matches that he had been told about by Kowalski. Williams, in return, shared very little about his past other than he had served with the Special Forces. With nothing to prove it, Killer Two nonetheless believed, or perhaps wanted to believe, that Williams had killed a fair number of enemies in combat.
Williams visited the diner twice a week for what he understood to be his two less than healthy weekly meals – a large steak, a double order of mashed potatoes smothered in gravy, the vegetable of the day, rolls and coffee. He always ate at the counter, paid cash and never failed to leave a sizable tip. Returning to his house from the latest visit to the diner, he spent two hours on the porch and then went to bed.
He moved forward approximately a mile each of the next eight days. Each day’s effort entailed a considerable increase in the area covered due to the conical shape of the search. Not for a moment did he question the odds were stacked heavily against the finding of a meteorite which had survived burning up in the atmosphere, if indeed what he saw had been a meteor. The odds were greater still against it having been large enough to be found even if it existed within his target area. The distance he intended to search extended fifteen miles outward from his house.
The years spent in the military taught him the values of determination and patience. As a result, he treated this quest as he did all the many missions to which he had been assigned. Despite the odds, Williams would continue on to a conclusion, successful or not.
Day ten was no different in weather than the previous nine – clear, warm and dry. About a quarter mile into the forward movement and a half-mile to the south, he spotted a dark object as he looked through the field glasses. Whatever it was, it seemed out of place with its desert surroundings. He pulled the jeep to within a hundred feet of it and then walked to within fifty feet. It was a dull reddish black, roughly spherical and appeared to be a little over a foot in length at its greatest diameter. Surrounding it was a thin, one inch crater wall of sand. He did not question for a moment that he had found his meteorite.
Williams returned to the jeep to retrieve the camera. Keeping fifty feet away from the meteorite, he slowly circled it taking over a hundred photos using multiple zoom settings. He completed the circle, sat down and stared at the meteorite for more than thirty minutes before making his way back to the jeep.
Back at the house, he downed a quick lunch, did a Google search and started a long drive north to Albuquerque in his biggest luxury, a fully-loaded Nissan Pathfinder. He arrived in the city over two hours later and proceeded to park one block away from a military surplus store. Williams found what he wanted, paid cash for it and walked back to his vehicle carrying a hand-held Geiger counter.