Terminal Impact Page 17

  “The motherfucker’s got shit hidden under all that crap. I intend to see what he’s got!” Barkley barked at the two senior Iraqis.

  “You do not have the right to inspect,” the army sergeant reminded the Marine. “You are only here to support our searches.”

  Meanwhile, the senior cop had already begun to talk fast on his radio, letting his police commander know the trouble, and the payoff.

  Then the platoon’s radio operator shouted from Barkley’s command Hummer, “I got somebody from State Department on the horn. They’ve got orders dispatched to Colonel Roberts that we are to pack up and leave this roadblock immediately.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Alvin Barkley bellowed. Then he looked at the smiling cop and Iraqi sergeant. “You motherfuckers know he’s got shit hid under that load. My bet, explosives or guns, or both, and he just put money in your pockets. Fuck you people! Fuck all of you!”

  As the angry Marine walked to his command Hummer, he put his hand above his head and waved it in a big circle.

  “Load up!” he shouted.

  As Alvin Barkley slid onto the passenger front seat of his truck, he looked in the backseat at Corporal Rattler and Sergeant Padilla. “They’re carrying some kind of bad shit that we’ll regret letting go. You watch and see. This one’s coming back to bite our asses.”

  “Definitely shit under all those boxes,” Padilla affirmed as he patted Rattler, who had his Kong in his mouth, happy.

  “Let’s get the fuck up to the reservoir, where we can kill some of these Haji assholes,” Barkley told his driver.

  —

  Dinner at Elmore and June Snow’s home last night dragged on long and sad, the pall of Rowdy Yates’s death dominating the evening. The call from Captain Burkehart had sent the colonel into a funk. Then that night, since misery loves company, what Elmore and June had planned as a cheery farewell evening for Liberty Cruz evolved into a slog through dinner and a late night with John Jameson’s best whiskey and Jack Valentine war stories. Elmore tried his best to find the lighter side with his tales, underscoring each round of two full bottles of eighteen-year-old Limited Reserve with his hearty “Sine Metu,” without fear, Latin toasts, but invariably even his best yarns turned dark.

  Clouding everything, Elmore knew that when his head hit the pillow, the next moment when he opened his eyes, he would have to face the inevitable: deal with that dreaded knock on the Yates front door and break the news to Camp Lejeune’s newest widow. He fought off sleep as long as he could, and his wife and Liberty tried to help. Yet dawn will come for the condemned, regardless, just like the impending drop of the headsman’s axe.

  With no sleep and a throbbing hangover, Liberty Cruz caught the dawn US Airways flight out of Jacksonville’s Albert J. Ellis Airport, landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National just in time for morning rush hour and a slow go to her office at FBI Headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Throughout the flight and the bumper-to-bumper drive, she thought of poor Elmore, and the even-sadder Brenda Kay Yates. Liberty counted herself lucky that she did not hold office or rank to have such casualty-call duty put on her shoulders. She didn’t have the heart for it. But then, she thought, who does?

  —

  Elmore Snow wore his dress green uniform and barracks cover with gold braid on the bill. As he mounted the steps to the Midway Park government quarters assigned to Lance Corporal Rowdy Yates and his pretty wife, Brenda Kay, he checked his emotions, swallowing a lump in his throat the size of his fist. As the Casualty Assistance Call Officer, a veteran captain, leaned to push the doorbell, the Marine lieutenant colonel took hold of his hand.

  “Just a second, Skipper,” Snow said. “I knew this lad real well, and his wife. Give me a second more.”

  “Take your time, Elmore,” the base command Protestant chaplain, Fred Woodhouse, said. A Navy commander, today in his formal dress uniform, Chaplain Woodhouse also knew Brenda Kay Yates quite well, along with Elmore and June Snow, and their daughter, Katherine, from their regular attendance at his Sunday worship services and Wednesday night Bible study.

  “I think it will just get worse, the longer you stand here, sir,” the captain suggested.

  “He’s right, you know,” Chaplain Woodhouse said.

  “Yes. I know,” Elmore said, and reached in front of the captain and pressed the doorbell.

  Footsteps tromped across the floor, and the door came open. A pregnant and very beautiful, and very young-looking Brenda Kay Yates greeted them. When she saw Elmore Snow, she smiled.

  “Look at you, all dressed up,” she said, her voice filled with sparkle. “Chaplain Woodhouse? You, too? All dressed in your class-A uniforms? Why . . .”

  Then it struck her. Nobody smiled, and Elmore had tears already pouring down his cheeks.

  “Oh,” she said. “Something happened to Rowdy . . . I better go sit down. I’m sorry, Elmore. Colonel Snow. Oh, my. Maybe you guys need to go get yourselves some coffee in the kitchen. I just made some. Oh, my . . . I need to sit down . . .”

  As her knees suddenly buckled, Elmore took the girl in his arms and hugged her close and tight and wept with her like a father would with his daughter who had just learned that her young husband had died in the war.

  “Oh, Brenda Kay,” Elmore said, swallowing hard. “The Lord took him in an instant. Rowdy never felt a thing. He just went to Heaven.”

  “Oh,” was all she could say, and she held on to this man she had known as a hometown hero when she was just a little girl and Rowdy was a little boy. Then she cried hard, “My poor Rowdy . . .”

  “I’m calling Rowdy’s folks, then I’ll call your mama and daddy, here in a few minutes,” Elmore said. “I wanted to tell you first, then the folks back home. A Marine out of the Denver recruiting district office is already on his way to make the casualty call to Rowdy’s momma and daddy in person, but we’ll let them know first, sweetie. Unless you want me to wait. I’ve already got all their plane tickets bought. They’ll be here tonight. June will follow up with your momma and Rowdy’s, taking on that load of getting things coordinated for them, so they’ll get here without trouble.

  “Right now, I’m going to help you pack your clothes, and you’ll come stay at my house through all of this, you hear me?”

  She nodded yes, sobbing.

  “Your momma and daddy and Rowdy’s folks will all be at my house together for as long as it takes. I’m taking care of everything, don’t you worry,” Colonel Snow went on. “I got lots of room, and we’re like family. We all came from the same well out there in Wyoming. This is what we do. You understand?”

  “Yes,” she said, her face against his chest, soaking his uniform with her tears.

  Elmore tilted her face up and looked in her wet eyes. Then he kissed her forehead. “Honey. I am so, so sorry. I just don’t know what else to say.”

  “I know, Elmore.” Brenda Kay wept. “I’m fresh out of words, too.”

  _ 8 _

  Red-eyed and feeling totally shitty, Liberty dropped her overstuffed kit duffel and her tightly packed personal travel bag at the entrance of her cubicle. Letting out a breath, ready to just collapse in the chair at her desk, her eyes caught a yellow Post-It note taped on her nameplate on the left side of the doorway. It read, “See me, ASAP,” and had her boss’s JK initials circled at the bottom.

  “Shit,” she said, taking the note, wadding it up, and dropping it in the trash as she left her bags by her desk and dragged ass down the hall to Supervisory Special Agent Jason Kendrick’s office. He headed the En- hanced Tactical Operations Division that Liberty now called home.

  Two knocks followed by a gruff “Enter” led Liberty Cruz inside the very well-ordered office of her boss. FBI awards and Marine Corps memorabilia decorated one entire wall. Autographed photos of Kendrick with President George W. Bush; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Pete Pace; and two c
ommandants of the Marine Corps, General Mike Hagee and General Al Gray, dominated the center of the collection of walnut and brass. Next to them, hanging at near-equal prominence, an autographed shot of Kendrick with former Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI, New York Division, Jim Kallstrom, recently taken at the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation gala in New York City. A fellow Marine, Kallstrom headed the FBI and Marine Corps organization that provided education scholarships to the widows and children of Marines and federal law-enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.

  As a young blade, Kendrick had served with Kallstrom on the FBI special operations task force that took apart the so-called Pizza Connection, working closely with undercover operative, FBI Special Agent Joe Pistone, known to the Bonanno crime family as Donnie Brasco. A few years later, the more experienced Agent Kendrick helped Kallstrom and the team get the goods on the “Teflon Don,” Gambino crime-family boss, John Gotti. Kendrick had followed Jim Kallstrom through the bathroom window of the infamous Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy and planted electronic-surveillance devices there, and in the upstairs apartment that Gotti used for Mafia meetings. Recordings of those conversations put Gotti behind bars for life and broke the wheels off the Gambino gravy train. As such, Jason Kendrick and legendary agents like him and Jim Kallstrom were Liberty’s real heroes. They did what she wanted to do.

  “Hell of a good job, Agent Cruz. Top rung at sniper school and at SERE school both. Most impressive,” Kendrick said, putting the final touches on an email, his eyes focused on the computer screen.

  “Would you have accepted anything less, sir?” Liberty said, standing at attention, centered six inches in front of the supervisory special agent’s desk.

  He looked at her and smiled. “Not one bit less, Agent Cruz.”

  She smiled, still at attention. “You left a note on my cubicle, sir.”

  “That I did,” Kendrick said, and pointed to a chair. “Have a seat.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Liberty said, and sat, trying hard not to expose her fatigue.

  Kendrick slid a manila folder trimmed in red, marked TOP SECRET across his desk. “Take your time reading through the brief; however, the folder does not leave this office.”

  Liberty nodded as she began working her way through the pages, and Kendrick went back to typing more emails on his computer.

  When Liberty Cruz looked up from the folder, after reading the last page of the briefing, she saw Agent Kendrick leaned back in his desk chair, sipping coffee, waiting for her.

  “What do ya think?” he asked her.

  “Pretty mind-boggling, to be honest, sir. I had no idea,” she said, and slid the top secret folder back across her boss’s desk. “We have acts of cold-blooded murder, kidnapping, human trafficking, drug trafficking, major theft. Instance after instance. And nothing done to these thugs? Seriously?”

  “One of those things you don’t realize until after you’ve gone to war,” Kendrick said. “All of it pretty much outside our legal jurisdiction, as it now stands with our current status of forces agreements and treaties with the struggling and still-forming governments of Iraq and Afghanistan. But, yes, as you say, pretty mind-boggling.”

  “A Baghdad cab driver shot by a security-contractor supervisor, purely for sport? A delivery driver murdered by this same creep the same day. Killed them both for the fun of it? Because he was going home the next day and had not killed anyone during his year in Iraq? Seriously, sir? There’s literally no rule of law governing the conduct of these government contractors in Iraq or Afghanistan?” Liberty said, amazed.

  “Only the host nations’ rules of law, which are basically nonexistent right now, considering the war and all,” Kendrick said. “State Department pays off the injured families and closes the book. The criminals go scot-free. That’s why the Senate investigation, and the president directing the FBI to look into things. We have to make a recommendation before anything truly disastrous happens.”

  “Like mass murder,” Liberty offered.

  “Or a host of other really scary possibilities, including press coverage, once you think about it,” Kendrick added. “On one side we have Virginia Senator Jim Wells, a fellow jarhead with the Navy Cross and two Silver Stars from his Vietnam service, wanting some sort of ruling authority in Defense or State Departments, or both, overseeing the contractors, and prosecuting all criminal acts. More or less, pulling government contractors under the umbrella of federal jurisdiction, pretty much the same kinds of rules that the military operates under. Which I think is pretty sane and long overdue, if you wanted to hear my opinion.

  “Then on the other side, we have Nevada Senator Cooper Carlson championing the status quo and his special interests. Which I think are probably pretty shady but we have no evidence to prove it, just me suspecting it. And him saying the contractors ought to have every freedom to operate as any other American business does in any other foreign nation. The United States should not try to extend its jurisdiction into other nations.”

  “And what does all of this have to do with me?” Liberty asked.

  “Your kit packed?” Kendrick asked.

  “Yes, always, but I have a bunch of dirty laundry,” Cruz answered.

  “Wash it or change it,” Kendrick said. “You’ve got a helicopter to catch at 1400. You’ll launch from here with three other tactical agents who make up your team, and chop to Dover Air Force Base, where you’ll depart via C-17 Globemaster for Baghdad tonight.”

  “My team?” Liberty smiled.

  “Don’t feel so flattered just yet,” Kendrick said. “Your mission is no picnic. Not so much gunslinging, but finding facts, gathering intelligence, and verifying witness claims, so the director and the attorney general can make a solid recommendation to the president. All undercover and highly classified. That’s the hard part. Keeping your cover locked tight. I warn you, any gunplay had better stand righteous and well justified.”

  “But, my team, sir?” she asked, still smiling.

  “Yes, your team. I’ve got faith in your moxie,” Kendrick said. “But it’s your ass if anything goes awry.”

  Kendrick pulled a thick folder from a stack of wire baskets on his credenza and slid it across his desk for Liberty to take.

  “You might tuck that someplace safe,” he said. “Travel orders, vouchers, authorizations for weapons, points of contact, clearances, letters of access and authorization signed by the director, should you hit any snags.”

  “And what if some people don’t want to honor these documents?” Liberty asked.

  “You have my mobile number. Call me twenty-four/seven,” Kendrick said. “I have the director’s mobile number, twenty-four/seven, and he has the hotline to the president.”

  Kendrick pointed his finger at her. “Don’t take shit from anybody, especially that weasel running Malone-Leyva who you had your little one-nighter with some time back.”

  Liberty’s eyes opened wide. “You’re watching me?”

  “We’re watching him,” Kendrick said.

  “I am so embarrassed,” Liberty said. “We met at that security industry party at the Washingtonian. So long ago, I had almost forgotten it. Cesare Alosi, what a scumbag. I caught him going through my laptop and reading my email. I threw him out and never spoke to him again.”

  “He’s got your picture on his desk in Baghdad,” Kendrick said.

  Liberty’s eyes got bigger. “Sir! I had no idea he even had a picture of me! I have nothing to do with him!”

  Kendrick laughed. “Relax. We know. We checked. You passed muster. But you might use his attraction to you to our advantage.”

  “I’m not going to bed with that guy if that’s what you’re suggesting,” Liberty snapped. “Don’t ever consider using me in any kind of romantic relationship with him or anyone else. I’m not that person. Frankly, sir, I’m offended that you would even suggest it.”

&
nbsp; “Look, Agent Cruz,” Kendrick said. “I’m not suggesting anything of the sort. Your familiarity with him is an intelligence advantage, that’s all. Use his fondness for you as a tool, or don’t use it. I wouldn’t dare go there, to suggest you compromise your integrity, and you ought to know it. However, Mr. Alosi does have your picture on his desk, and obviously has an attraction to you. Use that fact at your discretion. I’m just saying, it may open doors.”

  “Judging by what I’ve learned about Cesare after the fact, some very dangerous doors,” Liberty added.

  “Very dangerous indeed,” Kendrick agreed. “That’s why you have a three-man enhanced tactical team assigned to provide you high cover at all times. Cesare Alosi and his boss, Victor Malone, the company’s owner, won’t hesitate to eliminate any threat. And I mean with extreme prejudice.”

  Liberty gave him a look, reality soaking in.

  Kendrick made a motion to his coffeepot and cups, and Liberty took him up on the invitation.

  As he filled both cups, Kendrick continued, “We also have three undercover intelligence operators working on the inside at Malone-Leyva. Just so you’re aware. In addition to your high cover, we’ve got these guys, who are amply capable to step up if you need help.”

  “You think Cesare might try to kill me?” Liberty asked, a pang of anxiety hitting her.

  “Definitely if he regards you as a threat,” Kendrick said, going back to his desk and Liberty returning to her seat. “Here’s a little story, and we’re still looking at this pretty close.

  “A month ago, a Marine Scout-Sniper died in Wisconsin. Seems he and his wife had gone home on leave and went out dancing with friends. The Marine went to the bar to refill their beer pitcher and never came back.

  “In a little while, sirens and cops outside brought out the crowd. The Marine had apparently wandered onto the highway, supposedly in a drunken stupor. A passing motorist, a fellow from China who spoke little to no English, had hit the Marine, stopped, and reported the accident.