by Scott McEwen
“The only thing I was worried about,” Mary Alice admitted to her teammates afterward, “was one of the local cops accidentally shooting at us.”
“Agreed,” was the consensus.
While Wyatt was happy with the War Dog performance, the drill had not really tested them. It was an easy win. Meanwhile, Hallsy was still out there, Encyte too, and he couldn’t help feeling they were hamstrung by protocol: sitting around and wasting time. But Avi, in a good mood from the successful operation, pulled the van over and stopped at a local butcher at Pierce’s request.
“All right, guys,” Pierce said, licking his chops. “Anyone ever had a tomahawk steak?”
* * *
The same YouTube clip that showed a junkie striking a match in a California field was sent to every major news outlet in the United States. Word of Encyte’s latest attack traveled faster than the wildfire—a matter of milliseconds—to places even as far away as Valor.
“He going to be okay?” Mary Alice asked, nodding to Jalen, who, having heard of the latest attack, had withdrawn into himself. He sat silently to the side of the group, a pained look on his face.
“He’ll be okay if we actually do something this summer,” Wyatt said.
“Maybe he should eat. But it’s hard to have any appetite at all.” Her face soured. “Especially for something cooked in fire.”
“For once, I agree with you,” Samy said.
“You can’t think like that. The fire was blameless.” Pierce piled the hardwood high around the campfire, leaving space for the air to blow through and stoke the flame. “Another one of Encyte’s tools. Just because your tools might be dangerous and crude”—Pierce dragged two flat stones the size of shoeboxes up to the firepit—“doesn’t mean dinner has to be.”
Once the bonfire reached just the right temperature, the wood literally shrieking, Pierce speared the logs and crumbled them into a pile of thick, ropey cinders. He fetched two large cast-iron skillets from the kitchen and placed one on each of the rocks. “Feel this,” he said, holding a thick tomahawk rib eye by the long angled bone. “Feel how soft that is.”
“Like you could put your finger through it,” said Mary Alice, probing the meat.
“We’re going to want this to feel like the flesh just above your thumb—it’s how you can tell the perfect doneness for a steak without a thermometer. Should only take a few minutes.” Pierce cut a little piece of fat from each rib eye and used it to grease the pans. He then sprinkled salt and pepper on the steaks and laid them down in the skillets to sizzle and pop. Five minutes on each side, and the three-inch steaks were cooked medium-rare and the potatoes and onions, which had been wrapped in tinfoil, were retrieved from the ash. Hot and fluffy, the potatoes were stuffed with sour cream and butter.
“This would be my last meal. Like, for real,” Samy said. He’d been annoyed with what he called Pierce’s “champagne taste,” but now, the whole team was more than grateful. Dinner was served with cold spring water and cherry pie that Mum had baked earlier that day.
Avi, who’d taken over as the group’s staff leader, debriefed the team on the recent operation, going point by point through the raid on the drug mill. The operation had been smooth, and the debrief was short and perfunctory. Chitchat ensued, and as soon as the food was served, the Buck knives came out and cut deep into the thick, crusty seared steaks, reaching the soft pink interior.
“Hey, Rory,” Wyatt said, making his way over. “Let me borrow your knife?”
“You forgot yours?” Samy asked, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized his mistake. Wyatt’s knife had last been seen the previous summer. Hallsy had taken it and killed someone with it to send Wyatt a message.
Rory looked down, awkwardly. “Sorry, brother,” Samy said to Wyatt, “You can use mine.” Samy handed him the grease-smeared pearl handle of his own razor-sharp Buck knife. Wyatt cut a few slices, split open his potato, and loaded it with sour cream and cheese. He found a log positioned just where the warmth of the fire and the cool of the night met.
“Bring a steak for me?” Wyatt heard his father’s voice call out as he approached the campfire.
“Here you go, sir,” Rory said, cutting off half her steak. “It’s like five times more than I can eat anyway.”
“Thank you.” Eldon fixed a plate and sat down next to Wyatt. Avi, seeing the two, came over and squatted down on a rock across from them.
“So,” Eldon said. “Avi tells me the mission in training is going well.”
“It is.”
“What about repeating the training cycle?”
“Honestly?” Wyatt asked.
Eldon nodded.
“We don’t need more training.” Wyatt looked at Avi, who said nothing, but imperceptibly gave his consent.
“You always need more training, son.”
“Okay, let me rephrase: we’re ready enough and we’re running out of time.”
“Ready for what?” Eldon asked. “We don’t have orders.”
“To get a team together and find Hallsy. It’s time to do something. We’re sitting in the woods, cooking steaks around the campfire while there’s a terrorist burning California. Let’s not wait to get called into the game but force our way in.”
“All right. So what would that entail?” Eldon looked across the fire, the other members of the team laughing and chowing, for a few moments just being kids. “I presume you have a plan?”
Wyatt shot Avi another look. “Yes, sir,” he said.
Avi came closer. “Well, with the help of Cass, we’ve developed one.”
“Lemme hear it.”
“Well, the last sighting of Hallsy was in a fishing village in Panama. The assumption,” Wyatt said, “is that Hallsy chartered a boat, made landfall in Colombia, and entered South America that way. But there are rumors of a girl traveling with him. He’s saying she’s his daughter.”
“The boat was recovered a thousand miles out into the Pacific with no one on board, its steering wheel secured and throttle powered at just above idle,” Avi added. “Like a ghost ship.”
“That was the last sighting?”
“Yes. But Dolly’s body was found washed up in the Amazon on the far eastern edge of the Colombian border,” Avi said solemnly. “So we think it’s safe to assume he’s penetrated the jungle.”
“Hallsy’s a skilled survivalist,” Eldon said, nodding. “If he made it into the jungle, he’s disappeared, just like he was checking into a damn JW Marriott. So what do you propose? Send a team to South America to comb the jungle?”
“In short, yes.” Wyatt drew a sketch in the dirt that resembled the top of an ice cream cone with three lumpy scoops. “This is northern South America. The borders between these countries—Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil—are some of the most lawless parts of the world. Exactly the kind of place Hallsy would gravitate to. Our intention is to deploy there, under the cover of Mormon missionaries. With the aid of locals and unmanned drones flown by Rory, we’ll move village by village, scouring the region, looking for Hallsy.”
“Hasn’t the Golden One Hundred already done this, Avi?” Eldon asked. “If the last contact three months ago was, as you say, in a fishing village … I would assume they’ve been all over northern South America.”
“Yeah,” said Avi. “They’ve been in the region. But there’s a difference.”
“What’s that?”
“Meat eaters can smell other meat eaters.”
“What’s that’s supposed to mean?”
“As Wyatt told you. This is an outlaw region, with three borders. You get a bunch of American pipe-hitters prowling through the jungle. Anyone—from narco to ex-military to your average criminal evading justice—can sense the guys are operators and they keep away. Given that will let us fly better under the radar, attracting less suspicion. Classic Valor.”
“What about assets? That will take months to establish if you’re going to the South American version of the Wild West. Does anyone even sp
eak Portuguese? You think you can trust any old translator on the street?”
“Actually…” Wyatt hesitated. “We were going to ask you about this last, but Jalen’s mother is from Brazil.” Eldon looked over at Jalen, who seemed to come back to life and nodded.
Jalen said flatly, “Sim eu falo portuguese.”
“You’re shitting me,” Eldon said. “You want to take a Rover to Brazil to hunt Hallsy?”
“I know he’s young, but he’ll keep his head down. And stick close. His accent is flawless. And he’s been training with us as much as possible to prepare.”
“Yeah, I know that,” Eldon said. “Your brother and others at Valor have been complaining that you’ve hijacked his summer.”
“We need him. He will pose as a street urchin turned guide.”
“Aren’t LDS missionaries a little older than Rory?”
“Most of us can pass for nineteen. Cass will go too, as our mother,” Wyatt said. “If we’re supposedly student missionaries on summer break, we’ve six weeks left and a lot of ground to cover. We need to deploy now.”
Eldon sighed. “You’re literally walking into his perfect environment for setting up a defense, laying traps, and going on the offensive.”
“Yes,” Wyatt said. “But there’s a difference. The woman he’s traveling with might be gravely ill.”
“How do you know that?”
“In the village where he was spotted, a pharmacy had been robbed. Many drugs had been taken, mostly recreational—Oxy, Demerol—but two doses of malaria pills were taken as well. What we think,” said Wyatt, “is that Hallsy raided the pharmacy for the malaria medicine and used the narcotics theft as a cover.”
“Hallsy could also be sick. That’s also a possibility.”
“If he’s sick that could mean he’d act even more dangerously. Dad, it makes sense to act. At least one of them is sick. We can find them, if we move now.”
“Okay,” said Eldon, pushing up from the log and rising to his feet, the joints in his knees popping as he stretched. “I’ll call Mr. Yellow about manufacturing the documentation to get you in. Likely will be Colombia, but that’ll be his call.”
“Oh my god. Thank you!” Wyatt, for a moment forgetting the chain of command, jumped to his feet and hugged his dad, the first hug he could remember giving him in almost a year. He also felt a wave of relief. Now that he had been given the green light on this mission, there was no chance in hell Wyatt was giving in to the offer from Darsie and sounding out of Valor.
“I’ll go tell Cass,” Avi said, excusing himself.
“Yeah, well, you two better figure out what I tell anyone if we’re called in for Encyte while you’re gone,” Eldon said, somewhat joking but also serious. “We have the secretary of defense doing a surprise visit at some point this summer. If she shows and we’re tapped to go after the world’s most dangerous terrorist, and you guys are on a revenge mission, it will kill Valor. We will be shut down.”
“You will not regret this, Dad.” Wyatt suddenly noticed that the rest of Group-A had ceased their fireside antics and were listening in on the conversation. “We’ll do good by the camp. We’ll bring Hallsy back with honor and glory.”
“If you want a chance of getting out of here tomorrow, you’d better get some shut-eye.”
The entire team let out a cheer.
CHAPTER 23
Wyatt sat up in his bunk at 0600 hours, his chest heaving and hairline dripping with sweat. Though it was unusual the night before a mission, he had slept, and in his dreams, the black ghost train sped through Grand Central Terminal, killing everyone in its wake. You chose this, Wyatt, the Darsie in his dream told him. The blood splatter crusted against the armored plates.
“Hey!” Avi was kneeling down on the floor beside Wyatt’s bunk, rechecking the backpacks they’d prepped for the mission. Hundreds of pamphlets with images of Jesus riding a cloud and a dozen copies of the Book of Mormon, each packed with contraband—C-4, magazines.
“Where’s the plane?” Wyatt whispered.
“Heavy fog,” Avi replied without looking up. “No flights in or out of the Caldera until it lifts. Go back to sleep.”
But Wyatt knew that at this point, sleep was impossible. Finally, a mission was at hand, and though he didn’t let himself think about it, he just hoped he had chosen the right one. He had said nothing to Darsie. Sure, Encyte’s terror was raging on, but Wyatt was still convinced that this wasn’t his battle. He would not blow the horn and be cast out of Valor just to appease the curiosity of one man, no matter how rich. Soon, he would board a plane, taking the first real step to revenge. So he rose, got dressed in his Mormon polyester finest, and combed over maps of the Amazon while he waited for the weather to clear.
A few hours later, the fog still hung in the air, but it was dissipating, and the members of Group-A, Team Z could actually see their own footfalls as they double-timed up the path toward the Caldera. They summited the ridge and headed down into the old crater, which looked to Wyatt like a giant bowl of soup, its center brimming with water vapor.
The team made their way down to the flight operation area, left the gear on the edge of the tarmac, and stood beside the runway. The flight operator, a former pilot named CJ, was on the radio, speaking quickly. A staticky voice, some ten thousand feet above them in the fog, responded. Then all was silent.
“Is that our plane?” Wyatt asked.
“Nope.” CJ shook her head. “Someone is waiting to fly in.”
“We were due for a visitor.” Avi’s face was tilted toward the sky, his tone foreboding.
“Yeah, supposedly it’s somebody important,” CJ added with a smile.
Wyatt felt his heart beginning to jackhammer. “Ask them if the secretary of defense is on board.”
“Yep, that’s the one,” CJ called over.
“Avi, we have a problem.” Wyatt looked over, but Avi was already taking the phone from CJ’s desk.
“I need this.” Avi dialed a number while CJ looked on, confused. “Eldon,” he said. “It’s happening. Get down to the Caldera. Now.”
* * *
Thin and standing no taller than Rory, Secretary of Defense Elaine Becker was the kind of person who seemed to swim in her clothes, even those that had been tailored to her. Still, arriving in a dark pantsuit and thousand-dollar Christian Louboutins, she presented an extremely aggressive posture from the moment her private jet—not military transport—touched down in the Caldera.
Stepping out behind her, her entourage: Ken Carl, her gangly chief of staff in ridiculous reflective sunglasses, and a shifty-looking overweight Samoan who looked like a street cop.
Eldon strode toward the plane, passed Jalen in the rags of a street kid and the confused and disappointed members of Group-A, Team Z lined up along the tarmac. He attempted to salute the SecDef as she deboarded, but the little woman had something else on her mind.
“Sir, these kids,” she said, motioning to the Group-As, “should not be within fifty yards of an airstrip during landing.” She looked around. “If we crashed, we could’ve killed them all.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Eldon explained, “but these kids are awaiting the next transport outta here.” Eldon nodded to the camouflage C-160 taxiing on the far end of the runway.
“Oh, really?” The SecDef swiveled her pointy nose from the plane to Wyatt and his team standing by their gear, dressed like missionaries. “And may I ask where they are going?” She arched an eyebrow.
Eldon hesitated. “Colombia,” Eldon said softly.
“Ahh … Colombia. And I guess you don’t mean South Carolina?”
“No ma’am … South America.”
“Of course. May I ask the reason?”
“This ought to be good,” Avi said to Wyatt under his breath.
“Well, Madam Secretary…” Eldon paused. “Their mission is to seek out and locate Sergeant Eric Hallsy, a rogue operator hiding out in the jungle. This operator is a former camp staff member and former Navy SEAL. He
has betrayed his comrades and even murdered some of them in cold blood. We believe he is a wealth of confidential information and a great danger to our country if not found and recovered.”
“Annnnnd we’re done here,” Avi again whispered to Wyatt.
The SecDef blinked a few times, processing what she’d just heard. “Rogue operator … camp staff member … cold blood…”
“I’m assuming,” Eldon added, “that former secretary Admiral McCray apprised you of the Hallsy situation. McCray and I discussed the search effort at length, and he approved it. But of course,” Eldon added, “we would not engage militarily without consulting you.”
“Of course,” she said. “And no, Admiral McCray did not apprise me of any such situation.” She grinned uneasily. “I’m starting to think the former SecDef may have a drinking problem or has for years suffered from a prolonged mental and moral lapse.”
At that, her chief of staff, Ken, swallowed a laugh.
“Let’s hold off on the field trip to South America for the moment,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Eldon said.
The Group-As and Jalen grumbled, and Eldon cut their mutterings with an icy stare. He turned back to her. “Welcome to Camp Valor. How can we help you?”
“I suppose you could start by giving me a tour of the facilities.”
“Wonderful. We can start with a walking tour of the Caldera, then—”
“Let’s not waste time with walking,” Elaine snapped.
“I’ll grab a Gator,” Cass called from behind Eldon.
The SecDef’s gaze shifted from the director to the woman who stood in his shadow. “Nice costume,” Elaine said, taking in Cass’s beautiful, scarred face and Mormon dress. “Looks like Halloween came early.”
“Yeah,” Cass said, eyes ablaze. “Trick or treat.” She jerked up the hem of her frumpy skirt and fumbled down the hill toward the Caldera.
CHAPTER 24
