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Mission 7.3

Mike Schneider

    Summer is the best time. Leaves. Leaves on trees, on bushes, on hedges. And in fields and gardens. You get behind the leaves, or in the leaves, and either it’s harder for them to see you, or they can’t see you. That’s why I always wait until summer.
    Today though I lucked into something even better. In the 36 years I’ve been doing this I’ve never had a more perfect vantage point.
    I’m in a garage.
    Two weeks ago while running reconnaissance in the area to find the best spot I came upon this house with a sign in the window saying, “Private Property, No Trespassing.” That often means no one is living in it. The next door neighbors confirmed the owners had moved but weren’t putting it on the market until fall. They gave me the couple’s cell phone numbers. I called, they’re 800 miles away.
    It’s the last house on the block, nothing beyond but a fallow field with the road approximately 200 yards out, and a clear view of it for 100 to 120 yards, more than adequate for my purposes.
    I came in under the cover of darkness last night about 2:30 a.m. Me, my AR-15 with a .556 suppressor, ammunition, bottled water, and three MREs as I’ll have to wait until well into the night when the whole neighborhood is sleeping—at least an hour after the bars close—before I withdraw.
    Usually getting in and out are the most tense moments of the whole operation, but here it’s different. While I won’t stick the barrel of the rifle out of the window, the window will nevertheless be open and that’s always an eye catcher when a house is vacant. Nothing I can do about it but pray.
    I also pray this will be the time. It’s my third attempt. He has three routes, uses a different one each time, varying them in no particular way, including once in a while following the same one twice. The timing is always the same though. He leaves his house between 9 and 10.
    The most attempts it has ever taken for one of these missions is seven. That was back in ’04 in Texas. It seemed like that target couldn’t be depended on to do anything the same way twice, ever. It was a full year before everything finally came together.
    What I do takes a lot of patience.
    This time it has paid off.
    I was loaded and ready this morning at 8:45. At precisely 9:07 the U.S. Secret Service bicycle brigade with President Biden in the middle came into view on my left. I waited until the president had passed in front of me and was going away before I raised my rifle, got him in my sights for a dead-on kill shot, held it on him about three seconds, then brought the gun down and unloaded.
    I tried mountain climbing, aerobatics, kayaking through some of the most treacherous river rapids in the western hemisphere, and more, but there’s nothing in this world I’ve found more exhilarating than having the president of the United States in my sights, knowing I can kill him, and letting him live. It’s hard to describe the feeling in a word, easier to say that for those few seconds I feel like the most powerful man in the world, having the ability to change the course of history by simply bending my forefinger.
    I started with Reagan back in ‘86, seven presidents. The way I look at it, everything those men accomplished—good or bad—after I locked onto them, they accomplished because I allowed them to live. There is no one, I mean no one, who has had a greater affect on the history of our country than me, and I’ve done it by something so simple as not pulling the trigger.
    Man that is one indescribable trip. As the infamous former leader of another nation might have said, it’s the mother of all highs!

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