by JC Ryan
On the second night after his unceremonious dismissal, the 65th anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, he was repeating the first night’s entertainment. Or technically, morning, as it was nearly two a.m., and the bar would soon close. Bleary-eyed from the second pitcher of beer, almost empty, that sat in front of him, he watched a couple of locals play pool and tried once again to decide what he should do now. He expected a dishonorable discharge, though that hadn’t been specified. In fact, nothing had been specified other than he was kicked off the base and out of Delta Force.
The Foreign Service? He shook his head. The moment those bombs exploded on March 11, 2004 he had ceased to be Foreign Service material. Besides, his dismissal from Delta Force would certainly keep him out of the Foreign Service. And the colonel told him in no uncertain terms the door to the Marines was closed as well.
On the wall facing him was a poster with the words: The main difference between stupidity and brilliance is that brilliance knows its limits. Words too wise to be on the wall of a bar. Not a place where one would expect to learn wisdom.
Rex shook his head. Too much philosophy, it will do my head in.
He looked at the bottles of liquor hanging upside down with a tot-measure fitted to the opening at the bottom of each. His eyes caught the Jack Daniel’s, the bottle more than half empty. The pitchers of beer didn’t provide answers, so maybe the answer was at the bottom of a full bottle of that stuff.
“Bartender, give me a full bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a clean glass. I’ll be over in that corner.” In a drunken move, he pointed with his thumb over his shoulder somewhere behind him that could have been anywhere.
He had no home to go to. The terse letter from Jessie letting him know his house sale had gone through had left no doubt that she didn’t want to hear from him. And that had been well over a year ago. He hadn’t answered. That door was permanently closed. He couldn’t think of a thing he wanted to do, and certainly nothing he could do, except fight, and right now he was too drunk for that.
There were at least a thousand historical places he always wanted to see, and there were at least seven more languages he wanted to master. But that was in another epoch, which ended two days ago.
He had taken his seat at the far-left corner of the bar and unscrewed the cap off the Jack Daniel’s. There were 17.07 shots of 1.5 ounces each in a standard fifth of Jack Daniel’s. Rex was about to pour the first shot in search of the answer to his questions, when he noticed two men in typical biker/gang-banger gear approaching him. They wore leather motorcycle jackets despite the relative warmth of the fall evening, along with low-slung denims and black motorcycle boots. Their hair was pulled back in identical ponytails, with strands escaping wildly around their ears and temples. Surprisingly, Rex couldn’t see any tattoos, though, and the ‘colors’ – a gang cut and colored bandana he would have expected – were missing.
Still, they were making a beeline for him. He thought they looked aggressive, therefore he stood to defend himself. He wanted a fight, not so much for the kicks of it. His subconscious was hoping he would be knocked unconscious in the process. But adrenaline has a way of cutting through an alcohol fog and kind of sobering one up. He found himself thinking he’d take at least one of them out before entering the nirvana of unconsciousness himself.
“Rex Dalton?” one of them asked, in a friendly, non- belligerent tone.
His brain tried to sort out what had happened. Ten yards away they were aggressive; two yards away they were friendly. I’ll figure that out later. The question surprised him. He didn’t know these men; he was certain of that. Trusting his first impression, his answer, accompanied by a pugnacious outthrust jaw, was, “That’s me. Who wants to know?”
One biker looked at the other, an eyebrow raised. The other shrugged. The first, the one who had spoken, smiled placatingly. “Can we buy you a cup of coffee, Corporal Dalton? We have a proposition for you.”
Rex thought briefly, longingly, of his rack, and the unconsciousness that would follow from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, if he went back to it and sacked out. But the man’s use of his now-defunct rank intrigued him. “Why not?” he asked.
Rex screwed the top back onto the bottle, picked it up in his right hand, stood, and said, “Where to?”
As they exited the bar and steered him out of the pool of yellow light from its signs, Rex wondered if he’d made a mistake. Once they had him in the dark, they could turn on him. But he hadn’t spotted any weapons, and he could take them if it was a brawl they wanted.
“Where’s your ride?” the second guy asked.
Hearing his mild tone, Rex answered in kind. “Got none. Where’s yours?” He slurred a little, but he was sobering up fast.
They pointed to two identical crotch-rockets, black of course. Hmmm. Not Harleys. What kind of bikers are these?
“If you think I’m riding behind one of you, think again,” he said.
“In view of your, ah, debility, why don’t we walk?” the first guy said.
It sounded like a good plan to Rex. He had only spoken to bartenders for two days, and those were mostly with gestures and single words, such as, “another” or “yep” or “fill it up”. Talking to other people felt good. There was an all-night diner nearby, where he’d had breakfast the previous afternoon, after sleeping off the first night’s two pitchers of Bud. As the three men walked toward it, the first guy introduced himself.
“I’m Ed, and that’s Butch,” he said, indicating the other guy.
The fresh night air must have cleared more fog out of Rex’s mind, he instantly knew those were not their real names. “Yeah and I forgot to tell you my middle name is Santa, as in Santa Claus.”
A flash of white teeth in the night gave away Ed’s grin. He said, “To save a little time, we’ll tell you a story on the way.”
“Sure, I like stories. Go for it.”
‘Butch’ took up the tale. “Once upon a time,” he said, “the United States had a functioning intelligence service. That was long ago and far away.”
What’s with the Star Wars reference? Rex thought. But he listened carefully as Butch outlined what Rex soon understood was a nightmare. Since the end of the Cold War, the intelligence services in general, and, in particular, the CIA, had devolved from a highly-trained force of field operatives, to a bureaucrat-dominated fiefdom. The result had been fifteen years of zero reliable intelligence, analysis by agents who’d never been in the fields in which they were supposedly experts, and worst of all, unfounded intelligence upon which Commanders in Chief had unfortunately relied.
The boondoggle that was the current state of the War on Terror was the aftermath of one such intelligence snafu – the supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction that prompted Bush’s ill-conceived second Gulf War. While Rex had been training for his Special Ops assignment, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence had determined that it was very unlikely that large caches of newly-produced WMDs existed. Only small caches of degraded weapons had been found here and there, and although they were touted as justifications for the campaign, the President had become a laughingstock.
Rex had known some of it. History didn’t end in the distant past, after all. Current events were as interesting to him as Ancient Greece or Egypt. “What’s all this got to do with me?” he asked.
They had arrived at the diner, and Ed asked for a table in an isolated corner he pointed out. “That section’s closed,” the hostess answered. A twenty-dollar bill appeared in Ed’s hand, and he extended it between two fingers. “That ought to open it?”
She shrugged and led them over. “Patti will be your server,” she said by rote. Then, on a lower pitch, she added, “It may be a while before she gets to you.”
“That’s fine,” Ed said. “But please tell her we’re great tippers and we need strong, with the emphasis on strong, black coffee really urgently.”
Less than a minute later, Patti arrived with a full pot of coffee and asked for
their orders. “Leave the pot, and maybe start brewing another just in case we run into a coffee crisis over here,” requested Ed, after he ordered the lumberjack special all around. When she’d left, smiling because he’d ordered the most expensive item on the menu, Ed answered Rex’s question.
“The first thing you need to know is that your dismissal from the Delta Force program was a ruse. You’re going to disappear, and we don’t want your cronies looking for you. That’s if you accept our offer,” he said, as Rex started to rise. “Please, sit down and hear me out.”
Rex hadn’t liked the sound of him disappearing, but the mysterious men with him still hadn’t made an aggressive move, even though he was exhibiting extreme suspicion. He sat down. “Go on.”
“You won’t have heard of our agency,” Ed continued. “You ever hear the expression, ‘don’t be part of the problem – be part of the solution’?”
“Of course,” Rex answered impatiently.
“We’re the entire solution.”
“Huh?”
Chapter Twelve
Arizona, December 2006 through November 2007
REX LISTENED WITH growing disbelief as the men filled him in on their mission. They left out huge chunks of it, including the name of their organization, because he wasn’t cleared for it. But they gave him enough to know that he’d been selected because of his stellar performance during SpecOps training, and because of his unique combination of scholarship, language proficiency, and close combat expertise. If he agreed to join them, he’d learn the rest. When he was done laying it out, Ed said, “You can have forty-eight hours to sleep on it and decide.”
Rex was almost sober, but not quite. With bravado he might not have had if he’d known who these guys were, he laughed. “Okay, come on, where are the cameras? Are you guys for real? No more bullshit, now.”
All the earnest assurances that they were for real didn’t mean a damn thing to Rex. They wouldn’t show him ID, and every question he asked was met with, “You aren’t cleared for that.”
Finally, he half-believed them, because it was a straw to clutch onto, but there was one more problem. “You guys have been misinformed. I washed out of SpecOps. They kicked me out, and even the Marines don’t want me back. I’m a screw-up. So even if you are for real, I’m not. Not anymore. You don’t want me.” He’d already forgotten that their first assurances had been that his wash-out was a ruse.
Ed reminded him of that and continued, “What would convince you?”
“Get that sorry son-of-a-bitch, my CO, over here to apologize and tell me to my face he lied. No, get me the damn colonel. I want the commander of the base to come and apologize and tell me I didn’t fail.” Rex knew nothing of the sort would happen. He didn’t know why these guys were having him on, but he hadn’t fallen off the turnip truck yesterday. If they wanted to play the fool with him he would oblige them.
But instead of continuing the prank, ‘Ed’ left to make a phone call.
By five a.m., to Rex’s utter bewilderment, his former CO showed up at their table. He wore civilian clothes, as all Delta Force did when not on base. The life of a Delta Force soldier was markedly different than that of a regular military man. Their existence was an open secret, subject to a great deal of fascination from civilians, studied by news media and novelists alike, but not acknowledged by the Pentagon. To avoid being identified by friendlies and unfriendlies alike, they were allowed – even encouraged – to grow beards, keep their hair long if they wished, and conduct their lives as best they could without anyone the wiser that they were military at all.
But the CO was not there for breakfast or to apologize or convince Rex. He was there as an escort. By 5:30, Rex had been whisked back inside the base for a secret meeting with the commanding officer, the same colonel who gave him his marching orders two days ago. That same colonel vouched for ‘Ed’ and ‘Butch’ and apologized for the deception, saying he’d never had a finer SpecOps recruit and that he regretted being forced to give Rex up.
The man is like a chameleon, Rex thought. I’ve only spoken to him in person three times and every time he was a different person. First, he was kind of friendly-ish when he hired me. He was a complete and utter rude ass when he fired me, and now he is apologetic. To the colonel however, he said, “Thank you sir, much appreciated, sir.”
“In fact, Dalton, if you refuse these guys, I’d love to have you back. But to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever refused them. No one who went with them has ever come back.” He raised one eyebrow, and Rex got the message—it’s not a good idea to refuse them.
But Rex still had enough alcohol coursing his veins to make him brave. He turned to ‘Ed’ and ‘Butch’. “Since joining the Marines, I’ve only ever wanted one thing, and that’s to help bad guys into the afterlife. Specifically, al Qaeda bad guys. But I keep getting jerked around by military people. I want to know two things. Are you people military or something else? And if I join you, do I get to kill bad guys?”
“We’re not military,” answered ‘Ed’.
“But if you make it through our selection and training you can blow away bad guys to your heart’s content,” answered ‘Butch’.
“Then count me in. I don’t need forty-eight hours.” To the colonel, he said, “I knew I hadn’t failed.”
The colonel smiled, got up from his chair, walked around the desk and extended his hand to Rex. “Well-done Dalton. You’ve kept your promise; you’ve not disappointed me. All the best.”
Dalton saluted, and the colonel returned the salute.
Only a couple of hours later, after getting his paltry gear, sans the Jack Daniel’s, from his motel, Rex was loaded on a Blackhawk and told to get some sleep. His training would begin as soon as they landed. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“You don’t need to know, yet. Suffice it to say, it’s warmer and drier than here.”
Iraq? He wondered. But despite his two days of what he’d thought was civilian life, he was still accustomed to taking orders without question. He was trained for the sandpit, so if they were sending him there, he’d deal with it. He stretched out on the floor, his knapsack under his head, and, following the advice and training he’d received in Delta Force training to sleep or eat whenever he could, he fell asleep inside ninety seconds.
He never felt the chopper land for fuel and return aloft, but it was full daylight when he awoke. They hadn’t told him he couldn’t look at the land passing below, but he couldn’t tell much. He assumed they’d flown west, because he’d have expected it to be dark after seven hours flying east. If they’d gone north or south, they’d be in Canada or somewhere in South America. Logic and the sere landscape below told him they were somewhere in New Mexico or Arizona, maybe Texas. Another two hours of flying over desert convinced him their destination was western Arizona or southern California. Not that it mattered.
He was told the training center was located thirty-two miles due north of the ironically-named Bagdad, Arizona, a copper mining town with a population of about 1850 incurious residents. If he wanted to get somewhere, the nearest real town was Kingman, some twenty miles away as the crow flies, but he’d need a chopper to get there that way. Otherwise, it was a rough hike to Highway 40, where he might be able to hitch a ride, so long as he was going toward Kingman. Coming back in the same way would be a problem, because Kingman Prison posted signs on all highways warning drivers not to pick up hitchhikers.
He got the message – they were off the map and off the grid. All the better to train top-secret agents of Crisis Response Consultancy, or the more affectionate CRC. It seemed the spooks also liked alphabet soup acronyms, just like the military. By then, he’d understood the mission, though it hadn’t been spelled out.
When they did spell it out, it confirmed his assessment that he was being trained as a spook and assassin, along with other trainees who, despite being told not to discuss their backgrounds, could not hide the demeanor that screamed Special Ops training. Something that was
going to be beaten out of them over the next ten to twelve months. The military pose was not tolerated in this organization. They weren’t encouraged to make friends with the other recruits, but they had to understand teamwork.
Rex had plenty of opportunity to think he’d gone through a time warp and come back in some alternate version of reality, where he was back in boot camp. The difference was no military in the first world would recognize a boot camp like this one. Hygiene wasn’t particularly valued. Only his natural reticence to show an emotional or physical response to unpleasantness kept him from retching when he was shown to his quarters. In a word, it reeked of men who’d been working out in ninety-degree or more temperatures. Apparently for days without taking a shower.
Soon, he would get used to not showering for days, using dirt and lack of deodorant as a camouflage when he was in-country. But he wouldn’t learn that for a while. What he learned immediately was that Marine drill instructors were charm school graduates compared to the instructors for this outfit. He had to restrain himself from going ballistic when they called his mother everything except a white woman, and made references to his sister that, had they been anything but smack, would have made him kill them with his bare hands.
It wasn’t all physical hardship, though, despite the merciless circuit of calisthenics and brutal ten-mile runs with poles, rocks, sandbags, and sometimes carrying each other. The latter didn’t really bother him, though he had to adjust to the heat and withering conditions. He knew he could run fifty miles if he had to – he’d done it. But in the Arizona desert, doing it without plenty of water was death. His sixty-five-pound rucksack was now ten pounds heavier—water weighed a lot. If he’d had any appetite, the quality of the grub would have made it all worthwhile.
Every morning began with the same drills he’d endured as a Delta Force trainee. One hundred push-ups, followed by one hundred pull-ups, then weight drills. All while being yelled at and accused of slacking. Now and then, an instructor would choose a man at random and blame him for the whole troop being made to do more. It took Rex a while to understand that the man in question had done nothing wrong. The practice was just one more test of mental toughness. Could they take the resulting harassment of the others, who resented the extra work? Did they make excuses, fight back, become isolated or sullen? The washout rate was ninety percent. A significant number when considering that all trainees, prior to this, had gone through Special Forces selection processes and training.
