SNIPER POLICE: 'Close to Arrest"

Police hunting a sniper in the Virginia suburbs today hinted they could be close to an arrest after confirming a ninth killing.

Investigators said the murder of a woman in the car park of a home improvement store was "conclusively" linked by ballistic evidence to eight other killings.

They also revealed that at least one witness may have seen the man as he fired and fled the scene in a light-coloured van. Several other witnesses were also said to have caught a partial view of the van's number plate, reported to be from Maryland where six of the 11 shootings have taken place.

Fairfax County police chief, Tom Manger, said today he was "confident that this information will lead us to an arrest in this case".

Linda Franklin, 47, from Arlington, died last night from a single gun shot wound to the head as she loaded her car with her husband.

The killing came almost exactly a week after a 13-year-old boy was badly wounded outside a school in Bowie, Maryland. Police have so far been unable to rule out a link to terror organisations, including al Qaeda.

Ballistic tests on a bullet recovered from Mrs Franklin's body were a perfect match to .233 slugs used in the other shootings over the past 13 days.

As if taunting the more than 1,000 officers involved in the hunt, the gunman targeted Mrs Franklin in a ground-floor car park at a branch of the Home Depot in Falls Church, Virginia. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Witnesses said they heard a single shot and saw Mrs Franklin crumple to the ground. Within minutes the immediate area and motorways were sealed off in what was clearly a well-planned police operation in anticipation of another strike.

There were conflicting reports both of an olive-skinned man and a white man with a blue shirt seen carrying a rifle.

Motorways north and west of Washington were blocked off by police, who were stopping all vehicles and recording their number plates. Officers with bloodhounds could be seen searching a grassy knoll by a church on the other side of the main highway opposite the car park as a possible hiding spot for the sniper.

An alert was also issued for a cream Chevrolet Astro van, possibly with a broken tail-light, that was seen speeding away from the scene. The description was almost identical to that of a white van spotted at some early shootings.

The latest killing is only a few miles from Rockville, Maryland, where five people were killed in 16 hours on 2 October, the start of a random shooting spree that has brought terror to the middle-class suburbs of Washington, and which has seen outdoor events cancelled and schools ordered to keep pupils indoors.

Two more people were shot dead last Wednesday and Friday and, while there were hopes that the killings had ended after two days without further incident, it now seems that the sniper is simply following a pattern in which he rests at the weekend. All the shootings have taken place either in the early morning or evening using a .233 bullet and either a hunting or an assault rifle.

The difficulty of some of the shootings, especially the murder of a middle-aged man at a petrol station on Friday morning, leads police to suspect he may have training as a marksman. Earlier, President Bush called the killings "cold-blooded" and said: "The idea of moms taking their kids to school and sheltering them from a potential sniper attack is not the America I know."

A specialist "sniper squad" with local police members of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms poured into the shopping centre after last night's shooting. The random nature of the murders does not fit with the pattern of any known serial killer, leading to speculation that it could be the work of an al Qaeda cell.

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About your "Patsy Pool" idea: I wrote this first chapter to my novel over a year ago, but it's time to post it on its own I think. (I haven't fully proofread it, so cut me some slack, it's a work in progress, 99% finished.) ILast spring I posted two chapters on FR, "The Raid" and "The Checkpoint".

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Death fell quietly from the blue September sky. A middle aged football fan who had driven up to Landover from the Maryland Eastern Shore with an old college friend was struck on the left temple and collapsed forward onto the fans standing in front of the seats below him, fountaining blood over several other fans as he twisted down. Death struck at the moment 80,000 cheering fans were already on their feet for the second half kickoff, so the extra screaming of the fans surrounding the dying man went unnoticed by the larger crowd in the rest of the stadium.

Every two seconds the scene was repeated with horrifying variations across the western end-zone upper deck stands as death and injury dropped among the massed bodies unseen and unheard. Every two seconds another bloody scene was created and the waves of horror spread and merged and multiplied until the entire upper deck section became engulfed in a roiling wave of sheer animal panic. After another minute the unusual crowd activity in the western upper deck stands was noticed by cameramen in a dozen locations around the stadium. A baffled video director put a scene of some of the over excited fans onto the stadium’s two jumbotron screens just in time to show a house sized close up view of a wife cradling the bloody wreckage of her husband’s face, vainly trying to stop his massive fatal hemorrhaging against her white blouse. Police radios crackled, police marksmen scanned the stadium and light towers through binoculars and rifle scopes. The black clad police marksmen and their shouldered rifles were seen by confused fans throughout the stadium, adding depth to the rippling fear.

Panic erupted through the western upper deck as the realization spread like an electric current that an unseen sniper had them in his crosshair gaze. Six thousand adrenal glands pumped out a last ditch fight-or-flight response, unthinking mob psychology took over, and six thousand fans stampeded downward for the exits to put them beyond the sniper’s reach. It had taken over an hour before the game to fill the steeply sloping western upper deck, now the same number of fans attempted to escape the unrelenting rain of bullets in a single minute.

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He was jolted back from a peaceful place by blows to his head. He heard a gruff voice say “wake up asshole,” but when he finally forced his eyelids open there was no one to be seen, so he wasn’t sure if the kicks and curses had been the bitter end of a dream, a hallucination, or reality. A bare cement ceiling came into focus above him, he could feel that he was lying on a cold cement floor, the familiar smells of concrete dust and something else filled his nose. He rolled his head to the side and saw that an entire wall was missing, wide open to a sunny blue sky not a yard from him. A breeze stirred white papers around the room and out to the sky, one page dipped as it fluttered past his face, and he thought for a moment that he saw those crazy Arab worm letters on it. He vaguely remembered the worm letters from his time in Kuwait.

After years spent in and out of veterans’ hospitals, Jimmy Shifflet was no stranger to waking up in strange places. Aside from the starched sheets and side rails of hospital beds he had come-to along the sides of highways, half in rivers, once even across the tracks on a railroad bridge. He raised his right arm to block the sun from his eyes, and saw a desert camouflage sleeve, something he did not remember wearing since his discharge from the Marines a decade earlier.

The problem was that the damned nurses at the VA hospital put new drugs in your juice and never told you what to expect. They fed you new “study” pills by the handful like they were jellybeans; some made you shake, some made you sweat, some brought nightmares and some brought peace. That’s what happened to a sick vet who was broke: they used you for a damned guinea pig. Some of the nurses were nice though…

There was a weight across his chest. His hands fell across something hard and hot and heavy, his fingers traced old half remembered shapes and contours: even for a hospital dream, this was a real doozy. “Any time now,” he thought, “I am going to wake up in the VA hospital.”

In the meantime he used his elbows to push himself up into a sitting position, and looked down upon a strange rifle laying across his lap: black steel and brown wood, with a gray metal tube the size of several beer cans fixed to the end of the barrel, and a short black scope attached to a home made mount not on top of the rifle, but offset high on the left side. The scope was not only mounted off to the side, but seemed to be pointing downward, hopelessly misaligned. A fat pad or pillow bulged out from the stock where a shooter’s face might rest; it was attached with gray duct tape. A pair of bipod legs was attached to the barrel just behind the long gray can.

It was without a doubt the ugliest and oddest rifle he’d ever seen, as befitted a hospital dream, and after he finished looking at it he tried to set it aside but found it was attached to him by a length of green cord behind his neck. To get the cord over his head he needed to lift the heavy rifle up off his lap. If he wasn’t careful he could fall right out through the missing wall, but in a dream such as this he sometimes could fly. The dreams where he could fly usually started out scary but ended up happy, soaring like an angel over green fields. Out of the missing wall past woods and fields and roads in the distance stood some kind of huge brightly colored thing, looking for all the world like the mothership landed on earth to take him home, or maybe to just do more experiments on him.

Suddenly dropping in front of the missing wall there appeared an insect like blue and black and white helicopter, which slowly turned until its side was to him, its rotors invisible and unheard. “It’s not right they put the damned drugs in your juice and don’t tell you,” he thought, still trying to lift the rifle’s string over his neck.

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“Roger that base, I have the shooter in sight, confirmed shooter in sight, he has a rifle, he’s moving, take him Billy, take him out!”

SWAT sniper Sgt. Bill Paxton found the subject by his movement; he was hard to spot in clothes which matched the bare concrete of the half finished office building which hid his sniper’s lair. A telephone tip from a civilian had alerted the police to the suspected sniper’s location, the tip was passed to the Maryland State Police helicopter, and they found him in under a minute after leaving their tight orbit around the stadium.

The sniper had found an A1 position, Paxton had to give him professional credit, he was hundreds of yards beyond the stadium’s outermost security perimeter. No one had ever considered the stadium to be in danger from such a distance, well over a thousand yards, because it was believed that any shots fired at the stadium would either hit its outer walls or sail safely over it. This sniper had somehow figured out a way to precisely drop his shots just over the stadium and down into the opposite upper deck. Nobody had ever thought of it before, it was one for the books.

So Sgt. Paxton didn’t underestimate the sniper and quickly settled his scope’s reticle on the sniper’s head: at 150 yards it was not a challenging shot, even restrained by a harness sitting half out of the vibrating helicopter. The pilot held steady as Paxton squeezed his rifle’s trigger and fired a single 168 grain Black Hills .308 caliber hollow point, then flicked the bolt and reacquired his sight picture. There was no need for a follow up: the evidence of his accurately delivered head shot was all over the wall behind the dead sniper. >

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