by Jack L Knapp
He scanned the file, reading rapidly, trying to get an overall picture of her; what she did, and what she might have done that had led to her disappearance.
Name; military occupation specialty (MOS) and duty assignment, plus a thick file of orders transferring her around the Army over a career spanning twenty-plus years. Education, MS in nursing, plus a separate listing for other professional certifications in her field. There was an unusually thick file of commendations. This lady was apparently something special according to her previous commanders, a real water walker.
There were not very many nurses who went on to make full colonel or higher, since there were few duty assignments calling for that rank. This one had a good chance of doing so. She had the medical expertise and also the administrative experience that a selection board would consider.
But there was nothing to indicate why she might have suddenly vanished. Someone with that kind of record wouldn’t just take off on a whim. She was in her 40’s and unmarried; well, the Army had its share and more of unmarried and no-longer-married people.
He laid the file aside and picked up the CW3’s.
This one was considerably thinner. If this was to be believed, CW3 Tagliaferro had entered active duty with that rank. Long-service noncoms who made warrant often jumped directly to CW2, so maybe something like that had happened. Maybe he had been a reservist or a national guardsman, already a CW3 when he was ordered to active duty. The MOS code was equally strange. The usual three numbers indicating warrant military occupations were there, 350 in this case, plus a string of additional letter codes appended to the basic numerical code.
Wilson opened the laptop and called up the listing of the Army’s MOS codes and was left with a bigger puzzle. The MOS coded for “All Source Intelligence Technician”, but there was nothing to explain the extra letter-codes at the end. There was no listing for an MOS of 350(S) for example, and no explanation at all for the additional letters.
Maybe he was some kind of spook, then? CIC? CID? Maybe even CIA, slipped into the country in uniform as a cover, instead of more openly as was often the case over here? People understood they were CIA, even though the individual might claim to be an agricultural or cultural specialist.
Wilson had served a tour in an intelligence unit himself (that was where, and why, he’d acquired the little personal pistol), but he didn’t recall having seen anything like this before. There was no reason for a criminal investigator to be doing what General Adams said the chief had been doing, so maybe CIC, then, if he was indeed a soldier; counter intelligence might fit too, especially if he’d been attached to Army security or the CIA at some point. If that was the case, this record was just paper, with little relationship to reality; maybe it was the intelligence aspect of his job that had gotten him snatched, although that didn't help with figuring out what had happened to the nurse.
The file seemed too thin; Ray wondered whether the rest of the file was maintained by that different agency, perhaps one not even located in the theatre of operations? Intelligence people often had that happen to their files; the intelligence community could be quite secretive about people assigned or attached to their branch. But if General Adams hadn't been told when the CWO disappeared, there was little expectation that Ray could follow that thread very far before he rotated back to the states.
Wilson laid the file beside the other and thought about them. Finally, he put the two files in the filing cabinet and locked it, after writing the names and duty assignments in a pocket notebook. He closed the program he’d used to search the MOS codes and shut down the computer. After a moment’s thought, he removed his personal pistol from the cabinet, a Sig-Sauer P230 in .380 caliber, and clipped the black woven-nylon holster with its two spare magazines to the left side of his belt, pistol carried butt forward. It wouldn’t show under the jacket of his combat uniform.
This was the first time during his current tour he’d felt like wearing the pistol. In other cases, if he needed to leave the compound he took the Army-issue 9mm or M4; but there was just enough weirdness about this situation to make him feel better wearing his pistol, even within the compound; supposedly the two people had gone missing from inside the walls.
Locking up the filing cabinet and office door after donning his cover, he left the office and went to the dining facility. He’d start asking questions after lunch.
#
Ray sought out supervisors and soldiers who had worked with the two missing persons and asked questions. He made notes, despite there being nothing obvious reported, and then tried to make sense of them. This occupied him for almost a week. Finally, it was time to report to General Adams.
Ray opened the door and was greeted by the same clerk as before. He idly wondered if the man was some kind of personal clerk assigned to General Adams, or if his being in the office today was coincidental; major generals usually have several clerks who rotate in as needed. He asked if the general had time to see him this morning and was shortly passed in. He soon had a cup of the general’s excellent coffee in his hand.
“I came up empty, General. I scratched around and got some background, and it’s all in my report, but I thought you might like a personal briefing.”
“If we can do it in twenty minutes, Ray, then okay. If there’s anything that will take more time than that and if the written report won’t cover it, then we can schedule you some time later today,” General Adams replied.
“Twenty minutes is more than enough, sir. The bottom line is that I didn’t find out where they went, or whether they were taken, or how, or who might have grabbed them if that’s what happened. They also didn’t appear to have any connection with each other, other than that they both worked out of offices here in the compound. The CWO spent a lot of his time outside the wire on patrols. He generally took augmented squads, made up of troops from different units. That was unusual, but he may have been assigned to some branch of Army intelligence, maybe even CIA, and they have their own way of doing things. But the lieutenant colonel rarely went past the gate. The two were totally different in most ways and there was no obvious connection. So far as I could find out, the two never met; she dealt with medical issues primarily, a special-skills surgical nurse being her main job, but she also did scheduling of nurses, so if she ever had any sort of duty outside the wire I didn't find out about it. The people I talked to didn't mention it, and there was nothing in her records.
“They were both apparently good at what they do, but that doesn’t seem like a connection that would lead to them disappearing at the same time. They don’t appear to have ever met and certainly didn’t share any type of life style. People who knew the warrant thought he was strange, maybe starting to flake out, and nobody knew him well. Officers in the units he supported thought it might be PTSD, but they weren’t certain. There was no evidence that he'd sought medical help, and even if he had, he'd have dealt with mental health people, not a surgical nurse. Neither of them had really close friends, though the nurse did socialize to an extent with other women who worked in the medical compound. The CWO was a loner, no friends as far as I could discover, and apparently he didn't talk much to anyone. He just did the job, didn't open up to anyone, and kept apart from others, so that's one more bit of evidence that he was a spook of some kind. If I'd had more time, I might have followed up on that idea, but if that had anything to do with his disappearance, the answer won't be found here in the compound.
“If there’s really a connection between the two, it’s going to be deep. I think that if their disappearance is linked at all, it’s probably some sort of random connection; maybe they were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. They walked into something, some kind of operation in progress, or maybe they saw something that somebody else didn’t want them to see. It’s just a guess, but I don’t have anything better to offer.”
General Adams thought about that. “Makes things more difficult, then. Two people grabbed instead of one, or two people walking away instead of one
, and no explanation for either possibility. This won’t get their respective bosses off my ass, either. The medical types keep asking and I don’t have answers. I don’t like that.”
“Only one boss I’m guessing, General. Nobody seems to care much about the CWO. He’s got to be some kind of spook, I think. It’s really strange. I’ve never run across a set of records like his. The medical people are more upset though, you’re right about that. The doctors that the nurse worked with, LTC Schmidt her name is, say she’s the best special-qualification nurse they’ve ever worked with. There were thick files of letters of commendation going back to early days in her career. The docs, and they don’t just gush over their nurses, say she makes surgery easy, really supports them when they’re operating. She takes some of the load off, apparently. A couple of surgeons said she even kept them from mistakes, spotted things they wouldn’t expect a nurse to notice. I’ve never heard a doc say that about a nurse. Anyway, they’re pretty upset about losing her.
“I put it all in the report. I’m sorry I couldn’t find more.”
General Adams nodded. “I don’t suppose you have any recommendation to keep this from happening again?”
“No, sir. I looked at the compound’s security after I finished working through their records and interviewing people who had worked with them, but I didn’t find anything. Some of the guards are better than others, but that’s always the case, and there’s nothing that’s really glaring. If their disappearance had to do with some kind of guard error, I’m sure it was a random thing so I don’t have a recommendation. Maybe emphasize that people go places in pairs whenever possible or something like that. You might speak to their officers, shake up the training for guards and remind them that they're still in a combat zone even though they're inside the wire. Tighter supervision during their duty tours wouldn't hurt, and rotate people around more often so that nobody works the same post long enough to get complacent.
“But you’re going to have to bring this disappearance public to get any real results, emphasize the disappearances, and I don’t know if you want to do that. If the bad guys snatched them, then going public might shake them loose, but if they’re alive it might also get them dead. In any case, going public might not work. When Bergdahl disappeared, there was a lot of publicity, but he's still being held somewhere so the publicity didn't do anything except get Americans upset. The insurgents thrive on publicity, so if anything we handed them something they liked.
“Maybe the bad guys might make some sort of announcement or take credit if you went public, and if they did, at least you'd know what happened, whether it was a kidnapping or just a coincidence that two people vanished at nearly the same time. If it was something that happened outside the compound, rather than something these two did on their own, then that might help to keep it from happening again. But the guards keep records, and there’s nothing to show that the two of them left the compound so I think it's unlikely that they were snatched outside. If we don’t know what happened or how, then we’re just spinning our wheels.
“As for being taken while they were inside the wire, there are locals working here in the compound, and I don’t necessarily trust them out of my sight. Whether they had something to do with this, I can’t say. Even if they snatched two people, how would they get them out of the compound without being detected? Or if they’re dead, what happened to the bodies?
"I’m sorry I couldn’t find anything more, but as far as I could tell, there just wasn’t anything else to find. It’s like two people just grew wings and flew out of here.”
“OK, Ray. Thanks. And I’m sorry I had to interrupt your transition for nothing. If you need it, I can provide some help with clearing your affairs here so your departure won’t be delayed. Talk to my aide if you need help with anything. Dismissed.”
Ray saluted the general and executed a perfect about-face, opening the door and closing it softly behind him.
General Adams watched Wilson leave the office and then turned back to his desk. No answers.
It was going to be one of those days.
Interlude
T’s life had changed in a number of ways since leaving Afghanistan.
He'd had no need for his PK Talent, and even the protective shield he called the bubble had been activated rarely. On a few occasions, he’d simply tossed a pebble using his PK, just to prove to himself that he still could and rolled down a few hills while inside the bubble, but he really didn’t need the practice and was soon bored with the pointless exercise.
The paranoia he'd felt in Afghanistan decreased as he got further from the Rockpile and into a population he could blend into. He and Shezzie kept moving and attracted no attention. It helped that officialdom had no idea they’d left Afghanistan on their own, so there was no search mounted for them and no expectation that they would appear in Europe. The two had simply disappeared, and apparently no one realized that the disappearance of an anonymous CW3 named Tagliaferro and the simultaneous disappearance of LTC Sandra Schmidt were not only related but that the two were now traveling together.
After a few days, the hunt in Afghanistan died down, and soon other needs diverted official attention; there was still a war on, people were being killed and wounded, helicopters crashed, and IED's blew up. The disappearance of Tagliaferro and Schmidt became old news. Since there was no evidence they'd been captured, they were just two people who'd gone missing in a combat zone, and not every corpse is reclaimed after a crash or an IED explosion; sometimes burning helicopters or explosions leave nothing that can be recovered. News sources paid no attention to their absence, other than to list the names among the casualties.
They were just two more names among the list of MIA’s; the terrorists had not claimed credit for a kidnapping or released their names as hostages, so the press never picked up on the story.
#
T had been interested enough in the name ‘Shezzie’ to ask her about it. They’d established a relationship based on friendship in the beginning, then seamlessly drifted into physical intimacy. Without intending to do so, they’d become a couple. Perhaps it was inevitable after the melding their minds had undergone; physical intimacy is as close as most people ever get, but for two with strong psi ability, intimacy has a meaning that those who lack Talent can never know.
That first melding of her mind with his had produced changes that made them very nearly two parts of one individual, a kind of left side and right side. There were differences still, but not significant ones. The process of change had given each of them more than either had possessed before.
T found his Talent for communicating much stronger; the PreCog became more reliable as well. Practice, he thought, but then realized that his PK talent had also grown, and he’d not practiced that ability much at all. The ability was simply there, ready; the concentration he'd needed before was no longer required. Moving an object was no more complicated than the process of grasping something with his hands. At the same time, the headaches that were the price he'd paid for using his Talents had become infrequent and much less severe.
#
Even with their close relationship, when he asked about the name he knew her by, she’d blushed.
“I had a hobby. Somehow Surfer picked it up from one of those first contacts with me. I think I was on my way to practice, and I was thinking about it and...well, anyway, he caught some of that thought. A few of us had developed an interest in belly dancing. It’s exercise, it beats calisthenics, and anyway it was my only real social outlet. A group of us had hired a local woman to come in once a week and give us a class. She led the dancing more than taught, but she’d stop and show us a move and help us get in time with the music. She didn’t speak English and we knew just enough of her language to allow us to learn, but it was fun. It took us away from hospitals and trauma and people who came in from the field with arms or legs blown off.
“Surfer thought that a proper nom-de-Talent for a belly-dancer was ‘Scheherazade’. I simply r
efused. I wasn’t having any of that, even if only two people knew it! He shortened it to Shezzie,” she paused for a moment, “and I just drifted into accepting it. It's a silly name. But he thought it was important not to use my real name, and after he told me about those things that are in the back of your neck, a little paranoia seemed justified.”
The two had found it relatively easy to blend into the English-speaking population around the US air base, where they’d left the plane after escaping from Afghanistan. But they moved on after only a short time. The train took them from Germany to France, thence to England. Every move took them slightly farther from what they'd left behind in Afghanistan.
They lived in a modest section of London, at first in a private apartment where the lessor augmented his income by renting them a bedroom for a week, then into a tiny apartment of their own.
Quiet, reclusive, most of all not-English, they were not a good fit within London society. They found more acceptance among recent immigrants and the invisible underclass that swirled around and through native-born society, without ever quite becoming a part of it. The non-English society was never theirs; cultural and language aside, the main difference was that they had no plans to remain in Britain as the others intended; still, in the seams between the two, they found safety and anonymity while they worked out a way to get home to America.
They acquired their first set of fake documents in England that allowed them to board an airliner for the US. It took them just over a month to accomplish that. Good documents, the kind that could withstand scrutiny in an age when hijacking of airliners was common, were not easily acquired, nor were they cheap.
