Walker (In the Company of Snipers Book 21)

by Irish Winters

  Still on the upper aft deck with the lockbox out of its hidey-hole, but as yet unopened, Walker nodded from the recliner, where he sat with his hands loose between his knees. He’d figured it would be a matter of time before Brimley connected the name on Kenny’s knife to the man with the yacht. He just hoped Brim took the revelation in stride when he did.

  Like a wise old man who’d seen war up close and personal, Brimley touched two fingers to his brow and answered smartly, “Proud to meet you, LT. US Army Sergeant Brimley D. Scott at your service, sir. Tell me what you need, and I’ll make it happen. I may look old, but I’ve still got plenty of fight in me. Just ask. You’ll see.”

  Goose-flesh rippled up Walker’s arms and across his shoulders at that undeserved respect and unearned devotion. Instead of recrimination, he’d been idolized. Which made him wonder if Brimley had even heard of his trial in far-off America. Not that it mattered. Walker certainly wasn’t going to out himself. But it would’ve been nice if everything were out in the open. Brim seemed trustworthy. Walker just couldn’t take the chance.

  He decided to go with partial truths that would afford his friend a healthy dose of plausible deniability if the day came he needed an out. Friends didn’t betray their friends, but should Brimley choose to turn Walker in, he intended to do all he could to protect his buddy. Regardless. Call him a fool. Call him a bastard. That was how Walker was made.

  “First of all, I don’t believe there are gems, diamonds, or gold in this lockbox,” he stated quietly. There probably weren’t any receipts, registration papers, or grocery lists, either. Not as well-hidden as this lockbox had been. “No treasure maps. No stock or bonds.”

  Brimley never batted an eye. “’Course not, it’s too small and too flat for all that. But whatever’s in it’s got you spooked. Spit it out, son. You think it’s worth opening now, or should we hand it over to the cops soon as we dock?”

  We. Such a little word with such a wealth of consequence behind it.

  If one hangs, we all hang…

  “No cops. No authorities.” Walker licked the corners of his mouth and squared his jaw. He didn’t want to open the box with Brimley watching over his shoulder. Things would be easier if diamonds and jewels were in there. He’d gladly return that crap to the real owner, once he knew who that mystery person was. But he kept thinking of the name on the registration in California’s Department of Motor Vehicles’ database. The last registered owner. Wallace Goff.

  Everything that man had ever touched had turned rancid and had gone just plain wrong. Goff had never been a worthy leader of warriors. As odd as it seemed, he’d also worn the Trident, which should’ve made him the best commander in the fleet. But not once had he served in any significant battle. Yet he’d never had a problem sending his teams into hell without proper intel, equipment, or sufficient manpower. The three friendly-fire incidents to his credit should’ve put him behind a desk long ago, but until the day he’d been murdered, he’d still controlled Team 18 with an iron fist.

  It was as if he’d been Teflon-coated his entire Navy career. Walker wanted to know why that chicken shit had been promoted as far as he had. Commander, for hell’s sake. Who had he known? Which Admiral had covered his ass and paved his way? Or was he just one lucky son of a bitch?

  Now this odd little aluminum lockbox showed up on Goff’s yacht. The width, length, and depth of the thing equaled the size of five, maybe six legal-size tablets. While the plank above it had been hollowed out to make room for it, the lockbox itself was just plain worrisome. Its locking mechanism looked simple, yet Walker worried it might be booby-trapped. That aerosolized ricin, or some other just as diabolical chemical weapon, might lurk behind one twist of his knife’s blade into the lock’s aperture.

  It could very well happen. Anyone devious enough to hide something that well, had to have been desperate. And desperation made people nuts. But if that person was Commander Goff…?

  Walker ran a quick hand over his beard at the ridiculous way his mind was working. No. Just. No. He’d seen the pictures. Goff was dead. Dead and buried. The body in those morgue shots was definitely his CO. There wouldn’t have been accusations or imprisonment, otherwise.

  Yet pictures can be doctored. Witnesses can be bought. And anyone with a brain knows your trial was a sham.

  Yeah, yeah, I know.

  Walker’s imagination seemed to have developed a nagging voice that wouldn’t let up. Not about Persia, and now, not about the man Walker knew for certain was dead and buried in the National Cemetery in Point Loma, CA.

  Or was he?

  Yes. I saw the morgue shots with my own eyes, damn it. I was there.

  But did you witness his burial? What do you really know?

  Damned if his imagination didn’t make a good point. But shit! To further silence that nagging voice and all his suspicions, he leaned over the damnable box, took firm hold of the lid so it wouldn’t slip, and stuck the shiny tip of Kenny’s knife into the zig-zaggy aperture.

  POP! The lid jack-knifed open—but only because its hinge was spring-loaded. There was no pressurized anthrax dust lurking inside. No whirling razor blades either.

  “Well, that sure was anti-climactic,” Brimley grouched.

  Glancing upward, Walker grinned at the older man’s dry wit. “What were you expecting? Jack-in-the-box? Freddy Krueger?”

  “Hell, yeah. ’Least a midget ninja with a handful of Chinese stars, tense as you were.” When Rover barked, Brim smoothed one hand over his bristly head. “’S okay, Dog. Sorry I got you upset. Nothing scary here. So, what’s in it?”

  “Nothing, just a bunch of maps, love letters, and—”

  “Riiiiiight. And Romeo and Juliet kept a lockbox just like this one before they poisoned themselves in the name of looooove.” Brimley rolled his eyes and fluttered his fingers over his chest, which made Walker smile, considering all those gray chest hairs showing. “Quit your stalling. What’s in the damned thing?”

  “All right, all right, keep your shirt on.” Walker removed the only thing in the box, an accordion-pleated cardboard wallet. Unsnapping the elastic cord that bound the thing, he peered into the first pocket. Looked like receipts, some folded, some dog-eared. Second pocket, a handful of black-and-white photos. Third pocket, more of the same, only those photos were in color. Fourth and fifth pockets held one eight-by-eleven tablet with a BIC pen stuck in the spiral. Sixth pocket, two, make that three, USB flash drives.

  With a deft sleight of hand, Walker palmed those last three items. What Brim didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.

  “Well? Any gold or silver coins? Pieces of eight? Doubloons, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Afraid not, just a bunch of papers. Looks like receipts. Might make good reading over lunch.” Walker held the cardboard wallet over his head to validate what he’d said. “Man, I’m hungry. Feel like grilling that trophy shark yet?”

  Brimley’s eyes lit. “Hell, yeah,” he said as he slapped both palms to his knees and lifted to his feet. “Come on, Dog. You’re in for a real treat now.”

  “I’ll secure the plank. Be right there,” Walker said as he closed the wallet, then secured the swim deck, fastening the loose plank with the same rusted nails. They’d have to do until he located a couple water-proof bolts.

  Once inside the relative solitude of the cockpit, he rifled through the wallet’s pocket of what looked like receipts. Jesus H. Christ. They weren’t receipts for fuel or food. He was looking at handwritten orders—for blondes, redheads, brunettes. Detailed, numbered, inventoried purchase requests. For females! Short-haired. Long-haired. Caucasian. Asian. French. British. Egyptian. Shit! Twenty-one handwritten orders that included girls as young as six months, toddlers, and teenagers. Children!

  Walker pursed his lips, his heart pounding. He’d run across a thieving pack of sex-traders once before, oddly, just before he’d been illegally incarcerated. That visit to Guatemala had been on his own dime, because he’d volunteere
d to follow up on a kidnapping. His best buddy’s wife was from Guatemala, and she’d gone home with the kids to visit her folks. While there, Quinn’s darling three-year-old Emily Dooley had gone missing during what had become a disastrous family picnic.

  When every avenue failed Quinn and his wife; when he was up for the naval commission of a lifetime, Walker had innocently strolled into his office one day. Just to shoot the bull. To catch up on each other’s lies. But he’d known something was wrong the moment he’d looked Quinn in the eye. The man had barely been holding himself together.

  Haltingly, word by word, Quinn had told Walker what no one else had yet known, that his youngest child was missing. He hadn’t wanted America’s out-of-control press corps involved, so he and his wife had been working every back channel they knew to get Emily back. But they’d gotten nowhere, and Quinn was beyond desperate.

  Finally, he’d broken down and revealed the sordid details of the alleged gunfight between two rival gangs on a Guatemalan beach. The staged battle had overtaken a simple family picnic on a bright, sunny day. During the gunfire and ensuing chaos, his wife, their three daughters, and her parents had run for their lives. His wife had taken the two oldest girls with her. She’d thought her parents had the baby, Emily.

  But Emily wasn’t with her grandparents, and as the nightmare wore on, it turned out the gang war was a front. A lie. Once the local police had shown, they’d explained how those particular gangs actually worked for some bastard running a sex-trade operation out of Cuba. He’d paid them to stage fights, brawls, and outright warfare, in order to herd prospective victims away from their families.

  Terror worked that day. Poor little Emily had run for cover, only to be snatched by the thugs working for some pedophile in Cuba. No one had heard her screaming because whoever’d grabbed her had chloroformed her, then stuffed her limp little body into the back seat of his jacked-up, POS, American-made truck.

  Luckily, the man had thought himself above the law; he hadn’t moved his merchandise quickly enough. When Walker arrived a couple weeks later, he’d first tracked down the police officers who’d been at the scene the day Emily went missing. When the bored sergeant he’d spoken with merely shrugged as if a wealthy American losing his child were no big deal, Walker waited until shift change. Then he followed the man home. It took a few rounds of musical chairs, knuckles, and a righteous game of talk-or-I-will-kill-you, but at the end of that long, sweaty night, Officer Bruno had squealed like the pig and coward he was.

  Walker left him bleeding and without a way to warn his good buddy Renzo, aka, the Guatemalan child predator with a basement full of women and children in his fancy house on the beach. Renzo, it turned out, worked for the guy from Cuba, which to Walker, meant the source of Quinn’s trouble probably lay farther north in America. Needless to say, the conversation with Renzo was short and to the ‘point.’ But among all the sputtering, bleeding, sniveling, and lying, he eventually told Walker that his buyer was running late. Guess some business transaction had gone sideways.

  Once he’d felt certain Renzo told the truth, Walker had bound and gagged the jerk. Then he’d gone into the basement and assured the women and children there that help was on the way. Once they’d settled down, he’d contacted a friend of a friend who’d instantly put him in touch with honorable men on the same kind of mission. ‘The Good Guys’, an organization of former SEALs, US Marines, and other USA law enforcement officers, who were out to change the world of sex-traffickers. Disgusted with what they’d witnessed happening to children all over the world, they’d joined forces with aid organizations from other countries to recover exploited and endangered children and women. In hours—hours!—the Guatemalan team of saving grace arrived with vans, first-aid, food, water, comfort, and their army of carefully trained volunteers. It took the former SEALs and Marines a couple hours longer, but they’d showed before sunrise. Renzo went to jail that day. Which was too bad. Walker had still wanted a piece of that asshat—preferably his cold, dead heart.

  But all those children…

  Seeing the condition the frightened women were in was bad enough, but the terror in all those little ones’ eyes had gutted Walker in ways he hadn’t expected. After a short, hysterical talk with Emily, then a heartfelt conversation over the phone between Quinn and his little girl, the Guatemalan authorities put her in Walker’s custody and allowed him to escort her back home.

  At first, in Renzo’s crowded basement, she’d been hysterical, afraid to even look Walker in the eye. She’d screamed and cried, and he’d cried with her. It had broken his heart that she’d been so frightened of him. At last, out of desperation, he’d dropped to his knees and told her who’d sent him to find her and take her home. He’d told her how much he loved her daddy. Finally, the elfin three-year-old had sucked up her courage and ran into Walker, burying her skinny body inside the sweaty warmth of his arms.

  He’d bowed his head, and there she’d stayed. While ‘The Good Guys’ arranged a flight back to California, via the US Air Force, Walker took Quinn’s baby girl to the beach, needing to move her as far from the house of horrors as he could. For the rest of the day, he’d done nothing but sit in the sand and hold her, because she’d needed that the most. He wasn’t her daddy, but he’d sure as hell called Quinn and made sure Quinn knew his baby girl was finally safe and coming home. Walker’d made sure Emily knew she was safe, too. Just by being there with her. Just by rocking and softly singing every damned song he could remember.

  Best, worst, hardest flight of Walker’s military career. Emily’d cried the entire time, and once again, he’d cried with her. Despite what nourishment he’d offered, the gourmet cookies, pretzels, or sodas the guys onboard had brought with them, she wouldn’t eat or sleep. Hadn’t wanted anyone else to touch her or talk to her, either. Didn’t look at anyone, not the worried pilot or the anxious co-pilot. Only Walker. And mile after mile, she’d made sure he knew she didn’t really want him, just “Crissy and Sissy and Mommy and Daddy!” And Walker wanted them, too. For her sake.

  “Don’t worry, they’ll be there, sweetheart. They’re waiting for you right now,” he’d assured her a thousand times. Overall, she hadn’t been physically hurt, which was damned lucky for Renzo. But she’d been so thin, and twitchier than hell. Walker was positive she’d been drugged. Her sad blue eyes were faded and sported dark, black circles beneath then. Her pretty, long blonde hair had been cut short and dyed bright red to suit some pervert’s idea of a dream girl. The bastard. A tattooed number had been inked into the delicate skin on the top of her poor left foot. Guess that meant something to Renzo, but not Walker. Pissed him off. Made him wish he’d ended the conniving jerk before the Guatemalan task force had ever arrived.

  Justice would’ve been served then, and Walker had been angry enough to have taken matters into his own two hands. He could’ve ended Renzo. God knew he’d wanted to. But Emily had needed him more.

  By the time the AF transport landed at Naval Air Station North Island, Coronado, CA, Emily had been emotionally drained, so had Walker. But when Quinn broke down the second he’d spotted Emily… When he’d finally had her in his arms… When she’d acted like she’d wanted to crawl inside her daddy’s skin and never be seen again—Walker’d known he’d do it all over again. That was what friends did for friends. He was just damned thankful he’d gotten to Emily in time.

  But the next time around? If ever Walker were to ‘bump’ into Renzo again? The rat bastard wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hell. As it had turned out, Renzo’s posh beach home had only been a temporary staging point, a quiet, out of the way place where he’d collected his buyer’s assets, and where those human assets had been drugged, dressed up, paraded, displayed, and auctioned off to buyers all over the world. Via freakin’ satellite.

  Some perv in far off China had ‘ordered and purchased’ Emily. Walker planned to visit China someday, soon. He didn’t know how; he didn’t know when. But he would locate the entitled M
r. Su Chen Fong. Walker only needed to see the guy once. At a distance. Under a damned dim light. In his fuckin’ crosshairs.

  Oddly, the morning after Walker had delivered Emily into her father’s and mother’s safekeeping, he’d been rudely awakened by the local Navy MPs, who had already been inside his house. Wasn’t that a kick-in-the-gut coincidence? Walker knew he’d been targeted the second he’d destroyed that perverse human supply line in Guatemala. He just hadn’t known by whom. Certainly not Quinn. Sure wasn’t his brothers from Team 18. Walker wanted to meet whoever was behind his sham of a trial. He wanted the name of the bastard who’d benefitted from the torment he’d encountered in that dark, crowded basement, where blankets and tears had covered a dank, concrete floor. Then he wanted Mr. Asshole Fong. In that order.

  Yet here again, another human tragedy lay in his hands like a horrid gift. As if she hadn’t done enough, Karma seemed to have tagged him for a repeat performance of what he’d found and done in Guatemala.

  Caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea, Walker set the disgusting stack of human purchase orders aside, then spread out the black-and-white photos from pocket number two. He counted twenty-one. All little girls, each photo assigned a three-digit number in the upper back corner, which coincided with the number of digits inked onto Emily’s perfect little-girl foot.

  Jumping out of the chair, Walker strode back to the door and flipped the switch that opened the ceiling vent. The cockpit was suddenly too warm.

  Back at the desk, he lined up the color photos alongside each corresponding B&W. The same women and girls were in both sets, but the B&Ws were obviously preliminary shots of possible targets. The color versions were after shots. After the females were abducted. After they’d been dressed in scanty outfits, then posed as dreamy-eyed models. After they’d been drugged, then obviously staged to go to, or were already on, the black market.