by Basil Sands
Only two men had ever seen her the way she now saw herself in the mirror. Marcus and Jerry. And to only one of them did she regret showing herself, although he had seen her most often.
Marcus had only seen her body once, a few months before he proposed. It was an awkward moment, the memory of which she had treasured. In Germany, before Linus and Cara’s wedding, they were staying in a hotel together. Marcus was very old-fashioned and wanted to stay pure until they were married.
When they checked into the hotel, they discovered that there was a mistake on the reservations and they were booked into the same room, although he had asked for two. They had no choice—all the rooms in the city were taken for the many events that were going on related to the collapse of the Berlin Wall; the room did at least have two beds. Marcus was willing to share the room, as long as they didn’t break their vow of chastity.
Lonnie had thought he was very old-fashioned indeed, and wondered if he would really be able to restrain himself once they were alone in the room. She resolved to obey his wishes, if he was able to stay in control. If not, she wouldn’t resist too hard.
They had gone to the hotel swimming pool before dinner. When they finished the swim, she headed up to the room to shower. Marcus stayed down at the pool and chatted with a military friend who happened to be in the same hotel. Back in the room, Lonnie finished the shower, and since Marcus was still downstairs, walked naked back into the room to dress.
She had crossed the room and was reaching into her suitcase for a pair of panties when the door suddenly opened. Marcus walked in and took two steps. The door closed behind him. He froze.
Lonnie stood at the end of the room, her full, naked figure exposed to his eyes. She did nothing to cover herself. She stood still and let him stare. Marcus’s face flushed red, and he turned away, but not after his eyes had taken in her entire form.
He stammered an apology and stepped into the bathroom to allow her to dress. Lonnie was even more impressed with this man she loved, as old-fashioned as he was.
Marcus.
Lonnie blinked away the thought as she turned from the mirror and climbed into the tub, sliding the cloth curtain across the opening. She stood under the steaming showerhead as hot beads of water coursed down her bare body, washing away the sweat and tension of the long, hard day.
Emotions edged up within her and an uncontrollable flood of tears ran down her cheeks, mingling with jets of water from the shower. Lonnie knew she would have to confront Marcus, but this was not how she wanted it to happen.
“Oh, God. How am I going to do this?”
Water splashed onto the bottom of the tub and ran in uneven rivulets down the drain.
After fifteen minutes, Lonnie got out of the shower, dried off with a large terry cloth towel, and wrapped it around herself. Her body throbbed with physical exhaustion and she struggled to make it across the room to the bed. Once there, she collapsed onto the thick, down-filled comforter. Her long straight black hair splayed out like ebony rays of the sun, forming a silken halo about her head. She took a deep breath, and before she finished exhaling, slipped into a dreamless sleep.
The phone on the nightstand rang so loud, it made her heart skip a beat. She lurched from the bed and instinctively grabbed the wireless handset, pressed the talk button, and mumbled into the receiver. “Wyatt.”
“Wyatt, this is Commander Stark.”
She glanced over at the clock next to the phone cradle. It was two-thirty in the afternoon. She had been asleep for more than eight hours, but it only felt like a few minutes.
“Yes, sir.” Lonnie felt embarrassed when she realized she was naked. Even though there was no one around to see her, she pulled the terry cloth towel snug around her bare body.
“I know your shift isn’t scheduled to start for a couple hours yet, but I need you to get here earlier. Come directly to my office when you arrive. I read your report and that of the FPD shooting last night.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied, still groggily trying to rub the sleep out of her eyes. “I can be there in forty-five minutes.”
“Make it thirty.”
“Yes, sir.” The other end of the line clicked off. She put the handset into the charging cradle and hurried to the bathroom to get ready.
Within twenty minutes, Lonnie walked into her garage, fully uniformed. Her hair was in a tight bun, over which she put the blue, wide-brimmed smoky hat. She got into her patrol car, pressed the button on the garage door remote control, and started the engine. As soon as the door rose high enough, Lonnie backed the long, white Crown Victoria out into the last bright rays of the late afternoon. In moments, the sun would drop below the horizon. She made her way across town in the fading light to the Fairbanks Northstar Borough Public Safety Building.
At 15:05, she walked into Commander Stark’s office. The trooper commander sat behind his desk, perusing the files from the previous night’s events.
“Close the door, Wyatt,” the commander said without looking up. “Take a seat.”
Wyatt did as she was instructed, sitting erect in a chair directly across from him. She looked at the file open on his desk and waited for him to speak.
“This thing is big, even bigger than we thought. In your report, you mentioned footprints that led to a square area of discoloration on the side of a transformer at the substation, where it looked like a sign had been removed. I called down to Anchorage, Palmer, and Valdez, and asked the commanders of those areas to have patrols to check the main substations there as well. They found almost identical marks on their outermost stations as you found in the Salt Jacket station.”
“That’s curious.” She crunched her eyebrows together in contemplation.
“Curious?” Stark snapped back. “Damn right it is. Each local power utility also reported vehicles stolen, maintenance crew trucks, around the same time yesterday morning. All of them have been found again, but only ours had a witness who saw the perpetrators. FPD scoured both of the vehicles they found last night, as well as the house. While the stolen truck was exceptionally clean, they managed to get several good sets of prints from the perp’s house and personal vehicle.”
Commander Stark handed Trooper Wyatt two sheets of paper, computer printouts with pictures and personal information on two men.
“Adem Jankovic is from Kosovo in former Yugoslavia. He had initially come into the US on a special student visa after his family was massacred by Serbian troops in the civil war. He disappeared two years ago when he was linked to an Al Qaeda cell in San Francisco. He has been known to go by the aliases of Harry Foil from England, Frederik Styr from Germany, and Adem O’Shay from Ireland.”
“This guy doesn’t look like the Al Qaeda stereotype,” Lonnie said as she studied the picture.
Jankovic was blond-haired and blue-eyed, with distinctly Germanic features. He was handsome and wore a pleasant smile in the photograph. His features would blend in almost any crowd across Europe or North America. In his eyes, though, she saw coldness, cruelty from somewhere within. In another generation, he could have been the subject of a Nazi propaganda poster.
As she looked at the image, she recalled a recent History Channel show about the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Her attention had been drawn to it because she knew that Marcus had been to that part of the world many times. In the show, they mentioned that the Kosovar Muslims had sided with the Nazi invaders in order to defeat the Serbian-controlled government. Adem, Lonnie surmised, may very likely be the progeny of a German soldier’s liaison with his Kosovar grandmother.
She switched to the other picture. It was of a very stern-looking man with dark features who looked like a mix of Eastern European and Turkish. Framed by a matte of thick, black hair and a heavy uni-brow, hateful eyes stared into the camera above lips that curled in a snarl.
“This guy is freaky,” Stark said. “Nikola Nousiri, an Albanian national verified to be part of the Islamic Brotherhood of the Sword, an assassin according to CIA and FBI reports. He i
s supposed to be dead. The son of a bitch was killed in gun battle with Homeland Security last summer in Seattle. His body was burned to a crisp and half decapitated but they claim to have positively identified him.”
Commander Stark rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers. “I’m getting too old for this crap, Wyatt. I don’t like it when dead men leave fingerprints on a crime scene after they’ve been in the ground for the last six months.”
She looked up from the pictures. “So, do we have any leads as to where the two men went last night after killing Beed?”
“No leads.” Stark shook his head. “I want you to take these two pictures out to Salt Jacket and check with the men who claim they saw them. Verify that the faces in the pictures are the men they saw yesterday.”
“Yes, sir,” Lonnie replied. “Um, Balsen said Johnson was going to be out running his trap line for a couple of days. He may not be available.”
“If you can’t find him, the other two should be good enough until he gets back. I want all the info we can get on these two.”
“Sir?” Lonnie asked with a note of discomfort in her voice. “Can someone else interview Johnson, maybe even take over management of the case?”
“No.” Stark looked into her eyes with a hard, commanding stare. He softened his expression and continued in a calmer voice. “Lonnie, I am aware of the relationship between you and Mr. Johnson. Don’t let your personal feelings get in the way of this case. Keep it professional, and everything should work out fine. You got the case because you were on patrol in that area when it started. You are keeping the case because you are one of the best investigative troopers I have, and I know you will keep at it until it’s solved, no matter what. You will stay on this assignment, and you will keep it quiet as much as possible. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
“Now, get out there. Call me as soon as you find anything new.”
“Yes, sir.”
Trooper Wyatt left the city and drove east on the Richardson Highway. By 1630, she was nearly at the gate of Eielson when a white Jeep passed in the opposite direction, going nearly eighty miles per hour. Under normal circumstances, she would have immediately swung around and pulled the driver over to serve a ticket. These were not normal circumstances, and she let the driver go.
Chapter 13
Lonnie pulled into the Salt Jacket General Store just before 17:00. Tia Balsen, Linus and Cara’s cute eleven-year-old daughter, sat behind the counter, blonde pigtails bouncing rhythmically as she bobbed her head to a teenybopper song on the radio. The loud jingling of the bell above the door startled Tia. She let out a squeaky little surprised yelp as Trooper Wyatt entered.
“Hi,” Lonnie said. She removed the tall smoky hat to make herself look less intimidating. “Are your parents here?”
“Yes, ma’am, they’re in the back,” the girl replied. Her eyes scanned slowly over the female trooper in front of her. Starting at Lonnie’s face, the girl ran her gaze down her uniform until it became fixed on the pistol hanging tightly on her right hip. At that point, Tia’s gaze froze, eyes wide with amazement and fear.
Lonnie cleared her throat, causing the girl to snap her stare back up to her face.
“Could you tell them Trooper Wyatt is here?”
“Oh, yes…yes, ma’am. Just a minute.” The girl climbed off the tall wooden stool on which she had been perched. She turned off the radio from which emanated the shrill sound of a very young teenaged girl singing some impossibly high note that only the ears of an adolescent could distinguish as music. Tia trotted several steps to the door that lead to the living quarters in the back of the store.
“Dad! Mom!” she shouted with a voice that seemed inhumanly loud for such a small body. “There’s a trooper lady out here to see you!”
Tia walked back to the counter and took her place on the stool. From her seat, the girl resumed staring at Lonnie.
“You are very pretty for a trooper,” Tia said. “I didn’t know they had pretty troopers.”
“Why, thank you, Tia.”
The girl’s mouth dropped open. “How do you know my name?”
“I’m am an old friend of your parents. I knew you when you were a little baby.”
“Wow,” Tia replied, staring into the trooper’s face. “You must be old.”
Lonnie smiled at the girl’s blunt remark. “Yes. I am. Old beyond my years.”
The girl made a quizzical face, but before she could say anything else, Linus and Cara both entered the store.
“Lonnie!” Cara cried out as she ran forward and gave her old friend a big hug. “It’s been so long! How are you?”
“I’m fine, Cara,” Lonnie said. “It has been a long time.”
“So, what brings you here?” Cara asked.
Linus stepped forward. “Is it about those guys?”
“Yes, it is, Linus,” Trooper Wyatt answered. “We obtained some pictures we think may be them. Can you verify if these two men are the ones you saw last night?”
She handed him the color printouts Commander Stark had given her.
Linus looked at them, and right away said, “Yep, these are them.” He pointed to Nousiri’s picture.
“This one was called Nikola by the other guy. They didn’t mention the blond one’s name, but these are definitely their pictures.”
“Anything else you can remember about them? Things they said, maybe. Or where they may have been headed?” asked the trooper.
“No,” Linus said. “Marcus, though, he speaks fluent Albanian. He heard everything they said, something about a mission and cutting Marcus’s balls off.”
Cara smacked her husband on the shoulder. “Linus! Tia’s listening!”
“Sorry, baby.” He turned to the girl and said, “Don’t listen when Daddy says that.”
“Dad!” Tia said in whiny thirteen year old exaggeration, “I know what balls are.”
Cara’s eyes got huge. “Young lady, get in the back, now!”
“But Mom!” she protested, “I want to listen to Trooper Wyatt. I bet she knows what balls are, too!”
“Move it!” Cara shouted in a strong Norwegian accent. Her arm jutted out and she pointed her finger toward the door, her face red with embarrassment. Turning to her husband, Cara said. “How could you talk like that in front of your daughter?”
“Sorry, I forgot she was here.”
“Bye, Trooper Wyatt,” Tia said as her mother took her by the arm to the back of the house.
“Mom, can I be a trooper when I grow up?” The girl’s voice trailed off as the door closed.
Lonnie shook her head and grinned. “You have quite a girl there, don’t you? She’s going to be a handful when she gets a little older.”
“She already is more than I can handle,” Linus said.
Trooper Wyatt turned back to the topic of the two men. “So, you said they threatened Marcus?”
“Look, Lonnie. You really need to talk to him. Marcus heard everything those guys said, but didn’t translate it all to me. I know you don’t want to talk to him, but he’s the one who can answer your questions.”
Her expression grew stoic and business-like again. “You said he was out on a trap line. When is he getting back?”
“He wasn’t supposed to be back until tomorrow, but he unexpectedly popped in a couple of hours ago to get some gas, and then drove to Eielson. Said he couldn’t talk. He was in a hurry to get to the base and would fill me in later. He may be back at the cabin now.”
She took a deep breath and said, “Man, what a reunion this is going to be.”
Linus offered no response other than a nod and sympathetic expression. Lonnie attempted a friendly smile, but her nervousness showed through. “Thanks for the information, Linus. Tell Cara and the kids I said goodbye. I’ll stop in to visit more sometime later.”
She walked out to her waiting cruiser. Once in the car, she radioed dispatch to report that she was en route to Marcus Johnson’s cabin at six-mile Johns
on Road.
A few minutes later, Trooper Wyatt arrived at the little cabin Marcus called home. Her heart pounded within her chest as she pulled up the long driveway. In the dark, a thin wisp of smoke rose from the chimney, pale in the illumination of the three-quarter moon that hung in the sky.
She approached the cabin and climbed the step onto the landing that led to the front door. There were no lights on inside, and no vehicle parked outside. She banged on the door with the handle of her Maglite.
No answer.
She knocked again. Still no answer.
It was 18:00. She decided to return to the pipeline pump station to talk with Bannock again, then try back in half an hour.
Trooper Wyatt drove up to the pump station. Bannock was just coming on shift and readily verified that the men in the picture were beyond a doubt the two men he had seen. He went back over the details he had given her the previous night, adding nothing new to the story.
“So I guess they really are terrorists, eh?” Bannock said.
“Just a possibility,” Lonnie replied.
“Uh, Trooper Wyatt?” he said. “Those are CIA identity sheets. I’ve tracked down men all around the world with one of those in my hand.”
“Oh,” she replied. “I guess you would recognize one of these.”
He changed his tone, raising one of his eyebrows. “I was thinking all last night about what Islamic Terrorists would be doing at a power substation way out here in the middle of nowhere. And then I had a couple of ideas.”
Bannock paused, an eyebrow cocked up as if dramatically trying to draw her into his thought process. It looked like a poorly done impression of a Sherlock Holmes character.
Lonnie waited for him to continue. He stayed quiet until she grew irritated with his melodramatic attempt.“And your idea is?”
