Terminal Impact Page 3

  “It works,” Cotton Martin said.

  “Division One college ball. No NBA contract?” Jack asked, heading along the road from the Hathcock Range to the group of redbrick buildings at Stone Bay firing range, just off the coastal waters on the bottom end of Camp Lejeune.

  “At six-foot-six, I’m considered medium to short in the NBA,” the staff sergeant said, walking alongside the gunny, to his left, abreast and in step, which Jack also noticed. “Lots of hot-shooting guards in the game. They’ve got all the Steve Nashes they want. I knew if I made the NBA, it would only be a fluke. So when nine-eleven hit, that was as good an excuse as any to tell Coach Knight I’m done with basketball. I heard my country calling.”

  “How’d he take it?” Jack asked, laughing. “I hear that guy throws chairs.”

  “Gallantly,” Cotton said.

  “You are a college boy, using words like gallant around people like me.” Jack laughed. “Define how Bobby Knight took it gallantly.”

  “He wished me well, and even said he would join up, too, if he wasn’t so old and fat, and pissed off all the time,” Martin joked, as the two Marines cut across the grass parade field opposite the range-facility headquarters. Outside it, two Marines dressed in desert camouflage stood by the flagpole, holding the American Colors while the Officer of the Day checked his watch.

  Just as Jack Valentine and Cotton Martin stepped through the doorway of the Scout-Sniper School, a scratchy record sound came on the Stone Bay public-address system. Jack stood at attention, looking outside. So did Cotton.

  Still outside, running hard across the parade field, came the two knucklehead newbies from the butts. When the first blast of the bugle announced attention to Colors, the two Marines stopped, turned, stood at attention, and saluted the flag. They correctly held their salutes while the National Anthem echoed across the camp. At the last blast of the recorded bugle, calling order arms, the two Marines broke back into their hard run to the schoolhouse.

  “Good boys,” Gunny Valentine said, and smiled at Staff Sergeant Martin. “They might do.”

  “I’ve seen some guys go ahead and run it out, ducking inside during Colors,” Cotton added.

  “Me, too,” Jack said. “Then they regretted it.”

  The two Marines from the butts burst through the handprint-littered glass double doors that led into the Scout-Sniper School facility. Gunny Valentine stepped around the corner, blocking them, his arms folded.

  “You’re late!” he barked.

  “Gunny, we was pulling your targets,” the first one said, a short-sized Latino corporal.

  “That’s no excuse,” Jack came back. “Staff Sergeant Martin and I had a leisurely stroll, and even stopped for coffee and crullers along the way. We made it on time. What were you two jokers up to?”

  “Gunny, we had to take down the targets and stack them, and that sergeant in the range house, he made us sweep up the shit you blew all over the deck when you busted that spotter,” the second corporal, also Latino but taller, said.

  “By the way, Gunny,” the short-sized corporal said, “nice shooting.”

  “Go ahead and kiss my ass some more, shit-weasel.” Jack frowned at them. “Before we go in the classroom and meet the rest of our little zoo, how about some names.”

  “Staff Sergeant Claybaugh didn’t tell you?” the taller corporal said.

  “That a rhetorical question, or did you really mean what you just asked?” Staff Sergeant Martin cut in.

  He got blank stares from both Marines.

  “Rhetorical means you already know the answer to the question,” Gunny Valentine barked.

  “No, I mean,” the shorter corporal stammered.

  “Obviously, Staff Sergeant Claybaugh didn’t tell the gunny your names, or he would not ask you your names,” Cotton Martin huffed at the two bewildered souls.

  “Right.” The shorter of the two corporals nodded. “I’m Corporal Jesse Cortez, and my partner here is Corporal Alex Gomez.”

  Cortez added with a smile, “We call him Jaws.”

  “We do, do we?” Jack said, raising both eyebrows. “Jaws? Catchy name.”

  “He comes from South Central in Los Angeles,” Cortez explained. “Alex did some enforcing work for some of the holmes out there. On the side, when he tried to make it in pro boxing. That’s what they called him, Jaws. We gonna sic Jaws on your shit, they tell some poor bastard that don’t pay up.”

  “What’s your story?” Jack asked the talkative partner of the newbie duo.

  “I grew up in San Antonio,” he began. “Born in El Paso, at Fort Bliss. My dad was in the Army. We got sent to San Antonio when I was like two, and he retired there. I ride bareback and saddle broncs in the PRCA. You know, bucking horses. Rough stock, we rodeo pros call it. I rode in the Camp Pendleton show just before me and Jaws headed out here for duty in this new lash-up, MARSOC.”

  “Can either of you shoot?” Martin asked. “Or did Colonel Snow pick you for your personality and good looks?”

  “We can shoot,” Jaws offered. “Both of us.”

  “Sniper school at Pendleton?” Jack asked.

  “There and at Twenty-Nine Stumps,” Gomez answered.

  “Me and Jaws will take on anybody at this school, except maybe you, Gunny Valentine. We know about you, dude,” Jesse Cortez boasted.

  “We’ll see,” the gunny said, and looked the shorter corporal up and down. “So you’re a rodeo star? I saw a few in my time. I was born in El Paso, too. Raised there. My mother’s Latina, gave me my good looks.”

  Both corporals smiled.

  “You any good with those broncos?” Jack asked Cortez.

  “One of the best, bro.” Jesse smiled. “I’ll show you my collection of championship buckles sometime.”

  “So, you’re a big star?” Cotton asked.

  “Just say Jesse Cortez to anybody in the PRCA, and they know me,” the corporal boasted. “I’ve been on ESPN like four times. Phoenix and Houston, then twice at Fort Worth.”

  “How about Las Vegas?” Jack asked.

  “NFR? Damn close, Gunny,” Cortez said, straining his neck to one side and pursing his lips, showing a touch of frustration. “Just out of the money. If I got one more ride, I’d make it. With this war and shit, I don’t know. Not anymore.”

  Jack looked out the dirty glass on the double doors and thought for a moment. Then he looked at Jesse Cortez.

  “How about Bronco Star,” the gunny said. “Bronco and Jaws. That’s a catchy pair.”

  “Bronco Star and Jaws,” Martin said. “It is kind of catchy.”

  “What do you think, Bronco Star?” Jack smiled at the corporal. “That work for you?”

  “Only if you spell Star with two r’s.” Cortez smiled back.

  “Oh, I like that.” Jack grinned. “Bronco Starr like Ringo Starr.”

  “Hey, it’s got to be cool for me to wear it,” Corporal Cortez popped back.

  The four Marines walked to a set of metal double doors. Above them was a carved dark wood sign with black bold letters, HOG WALLOW, burned in it. Beneath them, smaller wood-burned words wrote, HUNTERS OF GUNMEN LIVE HERE.

  Bronco Starr and Jaws stepped up and pushed the handle, but Gunny Valentine stopped them.

  “We operate on Lombardi time,” he told them, and got another pair of blank looks, as if neither man had ever heard of the legendary football coach. Jack rolled his eyes.

  “So I gotta go Barney Fife on you two yo-yos?” Jack sighed.

  Bronco and Jaws stood there, eyes wide, question marks blinking on their foreheads.

  “I say be here at 0800, that means 0745. Fifteen minutes early. Always,” Jack explained. “If Colonel Snow calls a meeting, I’m there a half hour early, and that means you be there before me. Never arrive after me. Clear?”

  “Gunny,” Bronco half whined. “W
hy not just say the time you mean? Eight means eight, seven forty-five means seven forty-five.”

  “You should’ve been a lawyer, Barney,” Jack grumbled with an even deeper sigh, and held the handle as Cortez tried to push open the doors. “You know, Bronco, those glass doors out front need a good washing. Get some cleaning supplies down the hall, in the janitor’s room. You’ll recognize it from the pine-oil smell, and you Nimrods get that glass shining like a diamond on a black goat’s ass.”

  Jaws frowned at his partner and tightened his lips as he headed down the hall, huffing with each step. “You and your mouth. Always got to run your trap and try to get up on the man. Why don’t you ever just shut the fuck up? Bronco Starr my ass. You can jump up and kiss my ass, Jesse.”

  “Dude, wait up,” Corporal Cortez called after his cohort. “Gunny was gonna do it to us anyway, bro. I saw that dirty glass coming in, and I knew we was getting tagged to clean it. Come on, dude. Don’t be pissed at me.”

  Jaws never slowed down.

  Bronco stopped and called at Jaws in a long, loud whine that echoed down the halls, “I’m sorry!”

  Cotton Martin smiled as he opened the door to the HOG Wallow, where thirty hopeful Marine Scout-Snipers temporarily assigned to the new platoon waited, and let Gunny Valentine enter first. “Age before beauty.”

  “Faces before assholes,” Jack fired back.

  —

  Liberty Cruz stepped from the shower, dried her long black hair with a white towel, then wrapped an oversized pink bath towel around her tall, well-shaped, athletic body. She popped open the bathroom door and saw the handsome man she had taken home last night from a reception for security and law-enforcement executives at the Washingtonian Hotel in downtown DC still there. He was scrolling through pages on her laptop, not noticing her, focused on snooping in everything private on the computer.

  She casually padded cat quiet to a mahogany humidor she kept on top of her bedroom bookcase and took out a Montecristo Especial Number Two Havana cigar and silently snipped off the end with a cutter she kept in the fine wooden box. Sensually, she licked the thirty-eight-ring-size cigar, sliding its full length inside her mouth and drawing it out. Then she took out a gold lighter, popped a flame, and drew the fire into the end of the six-inch-long Panatela, sucking a mouthful of the sweet smoke and letting it go.

  Without batting an eye, cigar clenched in her teeth, Liberty, a Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the only woman assigned to its Special Operations branch at Quantico, reached behind a book on the second from the top shelf and took out a loaded and chambered Sig-Sauer P-226 nine-millimeter pistol, the same handgun carried by US Navy SEALs, and pointed it at the man.

  He smelled the cigar’s aroma and casually looked over his shoulder, seeing the tall, statuesque, dark-haired beauty wrapped in the bath towel, smoking the stogie and holding the gun on him.

  “I ought to have a camera,” he said, unruffled.

  “You know, it’s loaded,” Liberty said.

  “The cigar, the gun, or you?” He laughed. “Maybe all three after last night.”

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve, Cesare,” she said, and unwrapped her shiny black hair and let it fall, still damp, covering her shoulders. She shook it hard and took another long drag off the cigar.

  “Just checking a few things,” he said.

  “You set me up, didn’t you? So you could check a few things.” She frowned. “And I kind of liked you.”

  “You fell in love,” Cesare Alosi said, throwing his empty Sicilian-American charm at her. “So did I.”

  “You’re too damned good-looking for your own good,” Liberty Cruz said, dismayed. “Yeah, the name got me, too, I’ll admit. The GQ-looking guy in the trim dark suit, dark eyes, olive skin, perfectly slicked-back black hair, and a name like Cesare Pierfrancesco Alosi. It got me. That and a few too many belts of Jack Daniel’s.”

  “You had me, too, Liberty.” Alosi sighed. “The long cool woman in the black dress, working for the F-B-I. Just like the song. A tall walking big black cat.” And he began to sing, “With just one look I was a bad mess, ’cause that long cool woman had it all.”

  Liberty laughed and let down the gun.

  “You need to leave,” she said.

  “But Special Agent Cruz,” he pled, “I’m in love with you! Love at first sight.”

  “You love me so much you’re snooping out my laptop?” she said, her teeth now clenched and the gun raised again. Something about this too-pretty man pegged her bullshit meter in the red. His insincerity seemed too well played, practiced. “Your name really Abdullah from Goatville? Some kind of jihadi spy?”

  “Actually,” Cesare said, getting to his feet and starting toward her, “you might recall me telling you how I am deploying in a few days to Iraq with my company, Malone-Leyva Executive Security and Investigations. We’re under contract with Department of Defense, working in al-Anbar. I’m going over there and may not come back alive. Doesn’t that at least draw some of your sympathies for me and justify our lovemaking last night?”

  “Not so fast,” Liberty said, motioning with the gun for him to stop his advance and sit back down. “Going to Iraq doesn’t draw water with me. I know other people, a lot more worthwhile than your sorry ass, who’re going to Iraq, too.”

  “The guy in the pictures?” Cesare asked. “A Marine gunnery sergeant. Handsome fellow. Gold wings and lots of ribbons. Tough guy?”

  “You might just find out if you fuck around with me,” Liberty threatened. “Or I might just shoot your worthless butt here in my bedroom. You’re dressed, and I’m showered clean. I came out of the bathroom, found you snooping, and I killed you. Home invasion. Make my day. How about that?”

  “But what about all those FBI agents and supervisory special agents who saw us leave together?” Alosi mused.

  “Just try me,” Liberty Cruz threatened, and now her face turned red as the throttle controlling her anger engines went forward.

  “I’ll leave,” the slick mercenary supervisor said, easing to his feet, his hands raised. He knew when he had reached a limit and didn’t want the beautiful Latina to lose her good senses and her temper and empty the magazine in him. Just as in their lovemaking, women like her never stop with one shot. They go a full fifteen-round capacity.

  “Gunnery Sergeant Jack Valentine,” Cesare Alosi said, going downstairs and through her living room, heading for her Georgetown town-house front door. “He writes some romantic stuff in his email to you.”

  “I’ll fucking shoot!” Liberty raged.

  “Ciao,” Alosi said, waving, skipping down the steps to the P Street Northwest sidewalk. He stopped and looked back at her, still holding the gun in her right hand and the cigar in her left, the bath towel breezing open, exposing way too much of Liberty Cruz to the world. “If I see Gunny Valentine in Iraq, I’ll be sure to give him your regards. Oh, and dear. Do cover up. Your puberty is showing.”

  Liberty threw down the cigar and grabbed her bath towel closed around her nakedness.

  “You better not say a fucking word to Jack Valentine!” she yelled. “You hear me? Not ever!”

  —

  Two weeks of togetherness, and Gunny Jack had his platoon trimmed to eighteen finalists. The dozen culled out went to battalion sniper platoons or to the newly formed Marine Special Operations Battalion for additional training and seasoning.

  Lieutenant Colonel Elmore Snow, wearing the new Marine Corps desert-camouflage MARPAT pixel-pattern utility uniform with the slanted breast pockets, crisp and squared away, stood at the front of the classroom and said nothing for a long time, studying each face.

  After five minutes of silent, cold gray eyeballing, several of the Scout-Snipers began to fidget. Jaws stared back, locking his dark brown eyes on his senior commanding officer.

  “He wants to do Mexican sweat, I’ll show him how a r
eal Mexican plays that game,” Alex Gomez thought to himself. Then he wondered if the colonel could read his mind, maybe his face. So Jaws worked hard to show no expression. Just a hard-assed stare.

  Bronco Starr broke first, seventeen minutes into the standoff.

  “What’s going on, sir?” Cortez asked.

  Snow took a breath, looked at Gunny Valentine, and smiled. “Broke the old record by two minutes.”

  Then he strolled down the center aisle where the men sat at schoolroom-type desks, their eyes and faces following him. He made an about-face, smiling, and walked back to the front of the room.

  “Very good, gentlemen,” he said. “I do have your undivided attention.”

  “Sir, we could have saved seventeen minutes,” Bronco said, a bit perplexed. “You had our undivided attention from the get-go.”

  “But you’re just a touch impatient, Corporal Cortez, aren’t you?” the colonel came back.

  “I don’t think so, sir,” Jesse politely argued. “I just don’t like wasting people’s time.”

  “I’m wasting your time, Corporal?” Snow said in a voice that could crack plaster at a hundred yards.

  “Oh, no, sir!” Cortez exclaimed, and got to his feet, snapping at attention. “Sir. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just all that staring and waiting. For what?”

  Elmore Snow smiled at the corporal.

  “Take your seat, young man,” he said in a friendly, fatherly voice. “My point with the silence and the waiting is very simple. Patience in our business is everything. We are a handpicked Special Operations team with a mission to go to Iraq and work the entire theater. We’re not going there to work a base camp or patrol a road. We are going there to hunt.”

  Snow paused, waiting for the dramatic moment, then added, “Hunt the devil himself. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

  “That, gentlemen, requires persistence, ingenuity, and the utmost profound patience.

  “We are part of a greater, Joint Special Operations Command that combines our Marine operators with the best that Delta Force has to offer, the best that Air Force Pararescue, Combat Control and Special Operations has, and the best of the Navy’s SEALs. Our operators today scour the mountains in Afghanistan for Osama bin Laden, our number one target. And soon we will scour the Iraqi deserts for an even worse devil, in my opinion, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”