by Anthony Tata
“Ask your mom,” Jake called over his shoulder.
“I just talked to her. She said Nina’s in the hospital, and we need to get back right away.” She was jogging now to keep up with them as the man led Jake out of the house.
“Well, she just reported that I kidnapped you.”
Amanda stopped, almost tumbling into the perfectly mown centipede grass lawn.
“What!”
The black man stopped and turned as they reached the van. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to back away while we coordinate with our headquarters and prepare the suspect for transport.”
“This is bullshit, NCBI man.” Her argument was useless. The man had already turned away from her and was ushering Jake into the side door of a cargo van. The blond agent sped past her and planted himself in between her and the vehicle.
“Ma’am, our mission is to ensure your safety. You’re a minor and you have been reported as being kidnapped.”
“Well, it’s a lie. I came here because my father was just killed in Afghanistan, and he wanted me to see some things. His name is Colonel Zachary Garrett, maybe you’ve heard of him.” She was being a smart-ass, she knew, but her shock had given way to anger. Then she noticed something. There was a flicker of recognition in the man’s eyes. The other agent stopped and turned around also.
“Say again, ma’am. You said your father is Colonel Garrett . . . and he’s dead?”
The concern and sincerity in the man’s voice caught Amanda off guard. Her mind flashed back to a few days ago when the two soldiers had come to her mother’s house to inform her about her father’s death. The major had openly wept. She was getting a sense of her father’s gravitas outside of her mother’s orbit.
“Yes. I was notified about a week ago. He wanted me to come here to his house. Our house. It’s in his will. Jake drove me.”
The two officers exchanged a pained glance.
***
Jake’s cuffs had been removed, and the four of them had gone back into the house. They sat in the family room on the sofa and two leather chairs.
“What is NCBI?” asked Amanda.
“North Carolina Bureau of Investigation. Sort of like the FBI, but for the state,” Agent Rogers said. He was the tall, blond one. The other had introduced himself as Agent Landers.
“How do you know my father?”
Landers spoke up first. “I was in Special Operations with him a while back, but everyone around Fort Bragg knows your dad . . . excuse me, knew him, anyway.”
“When is his funeral, if I may ask?” This from Rogers.
“They haven’t told me yet.”
Landers paused a second, seemed uncomfortable, and then began speaking. “Why would your mother report you as kidnapped, if you weren’t?”
Amanda hesitated, looked at Jake a moment, then back at Landers. “I don’t exactly know. Maybe she really thought I was.”
The two agents gave her a discerning look. She could tell that they knew she was hedging, protecting her mother from a counterclaim by the government of filing a false charge. It was second nature to her to defend her mother. Hell, it was her responsibility.
“We understand.”
They sat in the room for a few minutes before Amanda bolted upright and said, “I almost forgot. We’ve got to get back now. Nina’s in the hospital, and Mom says she might not make it.”
The two agents looked at each other, and then Rogers said, “We have to file a report, but we will write it up as a misunderstanding. Everything should be okay. But we can’t leave you in the house. We’ll need the key you used to get in, and we can’t let you travel back with Jake. Or it’ll be our ass.”
“I hope you understand,” Landers said. “We will put you on a plane to Spartanburg, Miss Garrett, and Jake can drive back in his truck.”
Amanda protested but saw the futility. Jake turned over the key to the agents and then kissed Amanda good-bye. He told her that he would probably beat her home.
He pulled out of the driveway, waved to the agents, winked at Amanda, and then began to retrace his route out of the neighborhood.
The two NCBI agents dropped her at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, which was on the other side of town.
“Why don’t you guys just drive me the extra ten miles to Spartanburg,” she quipped.
Agent Rogers smiled and pulled a card from his jacket pocket, handing it to Amanda. “Call us when you know about the funeral. We’re sorry about your loss.”
As she was boarding the airplane, it dawned on her that they had not retrieved a single item from the house. The wicker rocking chair, the paperwork, the DVD, everything, were all still there. She would return, perhaps, on her way to Virginia for the funeral.
Yes, she determined that’s exactly what she would do.
Finding her seat in the front row of the Canada Air Regional Jet, she glanced back through the cabin at the usual assortment of travelers. Several were chatting away on their cell phones. A few were pecking on Blackberry palm digital assistants with heads bowed as if in worship.
She buckled herself into her seat, hoping that Jake would be okay on the long drive alone. With time to think, she began to wonder about the emotions beginning to rustle inside her like the wisps of wind against the sea oats that precede a not too distant hurricane.
***
Jake watched from the side parking lot of the Texaco as the NCBI van passed him on Ramsey Street. He waited another two minutes, inhaling a microwave cheeseburger and downing a Classic Coke from the stained bench and table provided next to the lotto kiosk inside the food mart. Several Central Carolina Community College students drifted through the venue, most grabbing snacks on their way to their dorms, he figured. Once he was certain that the van was committed on its path to the airport, he doubled back into the neighborhood and pulled into the driveway of Colonel Garrett’s house.
After trying the front door and the breezeway entrance with no luck, he walked around the house to the backyard. Pushing on the back door proved futile as well. He stood on the stoop, looking at the ground, noticing a gravel drainage area where the gutter downspout terminated. On a whim, he reached behind the downspout and was amazed to learn that the colonel kept a magnetized spare key box hidden.
He let himself in and walked around the two-car garage, admiring the colonel’s Denali SUV and sturdy workbench. He handled a couple of the items, a hammer and screwdriver, on the workbench for no particular reason, then replaced them. He opened the breezeway door from the garage and then tried the key into the kitchen. It worked.
And it was obvious to him what he needed to do.
***
Del Dangurs watched it all from his excellent automobile and found the entire scene quite fascinating. He wanted to get into the house to dig for more insider information on Colonel Garrett and his Pulitzer prize winning series on the paradox between those in combat and those on the home front. After all, it had been his call to Nina that had prompted the whole NCBI idea. He was truly brilliant.
Now, he needed the football player out of the house and then the possibilities were endless. Perhaps even go find Julie Nguyen and soil the good Colonel’s bed sheets. Sweetness.
He watched the football player enter from the rear and then come running out of the house quickly, looking over his shoulder, as if being chased.
CHAPTER 29
Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan
Saturday
Mary Ann Singlaub, military correspondent for the Charlotte Observer, tossed her Greenbeans Coffee cup into the trash receptacle, blew her bangs away from her forehead and grabbed her steno pad. There was a story brewing. She could feel it, and it wasn’t at the Big Army end of the base here in Afghanistan.
The shooting down of the MH-47 was the big news, but that story was out. She had been able to get a couple of exclusives with some of the recovery team who had cycled back from the crash site, which was some damn good journalistic work, if she did say so herself.
On her
third tour in a combat zone, Mary Ann had become expert at using her best asset to her advantage. At the end of the day, it was all very simple. She was a strikingly beautiful woman who, with those deep brown eyes and chestnut hair, could make even the most hardened Special Operations soldier blush. She always chose her attire carefully, definitely LL Bean and Northface, which allowed her to blend in. But some days required a size 2 instead of a size 4 in order to set the hook, get them looking.
Today was a size-2 kind of day.
With just two days remaining until she jumped on an airplane to head back to Charlotte, she wanted the juice one last time. Always in a constant battle with her editor, Mary Ann refused to write a story that was in any way negative or inflammatory. She wrote human interest stories that somehow always seemed to work. In her view, there were enough journalistic predators out there digging for the nefarious deeds, and she was quite comfortable that all that was bad would be sufficiently reported. No, her perspective, her niche, was to bring home the good news. She sought the uplifting news about heroism and triumph over tragedy.
She stood from the bench as she spied her mark. He was a young soldier she knew had driven for Colonel Zach Garrett, the fabled and revered Special Operations commander killed in the helicopter crash. The news was devastating to this small military compound in Afghanistan. Every soldier killed in action was an individual tragedy of immense human proportions. Because of his stature, the Special Forces commander’s death sent huge shock waves across this base and, she figured, around the world within this closely stitched community. The number of lives he must have touched, she thought almost out loud. That would be her angle.
Though he did not wear a name tag, none of these guys did, she recognized the driver’s face from the one time she had seen Colonel Garrett going to the Big Army side of the base for a meeting. This soldier had been driving the SUV that had pulled up directly in front of the headquarters building and from which Colonel Garrett had stepped. She had walked up to the window of the SUV, which this soldier had rolled down for her.
“I’m sorry, I’m trying to find the PX,” she’d said. “I’m new here.”
He had been gracious, speaking with a slight Southern drawl and pointing her in the right direction. “Don’t sell much other than toothpaste and razor blades, ma’am,” he’d said.
“I’m not much older than you, big guy, so watch it with that ‘ma’am’ stuff.” She had playfully punched him in the arm.
So now, she strode toward him, intercepting him as he walked toward the small store that sold the basic essentials that Sergeant Eversoll had mentioned to her.
“I found it,” she said, waving her arms at him.
It was a bright morning, and he was wearing Wiley X protective sunglasses. Sergeant Eversoll paused for a moment, and she could tell he was processing where he knew her from, if indeed he remembered her at all.
“Excuse me?”
“The PX. I found it, thanks to your great directions.” They were standing on the gravel parking lot outside of a small trailer the size of a mobile home. The sun was set against a pristine blue sky, and the temperature was the perfect balance between cool and warm. Say what you will about Afghanistan, she mused, the weather in the spring was as good as it gets.
“Yesss, the reporter,” Eversoll said with time-delayed recognition. “So, you bought some toothpaste and razor blades?”
She rubbed her face with an open hand. “Closest shave I’ve ever had.”
He didn’t smile, but acknowledged her joke with a nod. She could see that he was not in a mood to chitchat, if he ever was. She took in his broad shoulders and round face. He was handsome in a country boy way.
“Mary Ann Singlaub,” she said, holding out her hand.
“Sergeant Eversoll.” His firm grip nearly crushed her slender fingers.
Removing her hand from the vise and shaking it gingerly, she smiled at him.
“Sorry,” he muttered, and began to step away. “Just gotta pick up a couple of things. So, nice to meet you, ma’am.”
“It’s Mary Ann, and could I ask you one question?”
She watched him pause, could see he was uncomfortable. “Like, where’s the PX, or, like, what happened the other night so I can print it in my newspaper?”
“Well, I’ve found the PX, thanks to you. What I wanted to ask you about was Colonel Garrett. He seemed like such a wonderful man and had touched so many lives. I wanted to do a feature piece on him.”
Mary Ann suddenly felt like a bug underneath a kid’s magnifying glass as Sergeant Eversoll stared at her. Was it the soldier’s standard distrust of the media, or was it something deeper, as if she were violating a bond? Had she gone too far?
“You were his driver, correct?” she prodded carefully.
“No comment.”
“I do human interest stories on soldiers and their families, Sergeant. I’ve never written a single story with a negative overtone. The research I’ve done on Colonel Garrett, and what others have told me, indicates he was a great man. I doubt there’s anyone who could tell his story better than you.”
More of the magnifying glass.
“He is a great man. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get moving.”
With that, Sergeant Eversoll left Mary Ann Singlaub standing in the gravel parking lot. She wanted to scream after him, “You mean, was a great man.” Unless he was trying to tell her something. She dropped her arms to her side with a flapping motion. Wishful thinking, she scoffed. There’s no pony in that stable, as her dad had always said when a situation lacked substance or possibility.
“He is a great man,” she whispered to herself, unable to let go of the connotation.
Then she had an idea.
CHAPTER 30
Karachi, Pakistan
Saturday
Mansur had debated what to do about Kamil. Finally, as they had arrived at the port of Karachi, he took Kamil into the dockside warehouse where they would wait for a truck back to Peshawar. They had made the trip in under two days so far and Mansur hated flying the leaky propeller airplanes of Pakistan Airlines.
“What’s your better idea, brother, Mansur?” Kamil asked.
The warehouse was quiet, the occasional sound of a rat scratching along a rafter, the close boom of a tug pushing up channel, or the wind pushing against the corrugated metal roof. They stood next to two partially disassembled Tata Motors trucks from India, their notorious transmission problems apparently having sidelined both vehicles.
“We need to keep half the money,” Mansur said. “With $500,000 we can live good lives in some country like India or Indonesia. Start a business.”
Kamil regarded his childhood friend closely.
“Not possible.” He shook his head sullenly.
“Think about it. We leave now–”
“And Rahman kills our families. I have two children, you have one! How can you suggest such a thing?”
“Rahman will not kill the children and we can find new wives. As Muslims we are allowed four, no?”
“How can you joke around at a time like this? Rahman was expecting two million and we only have one million and now you are talking about giving him nothing?”
“Did you see what we gave the man in Dubai?”
“Of course not. Did you?”
Mansur smiled, holding up the pocket sized Coby Ultra DVD player he had purchased for $25 at a local bazaar on the way to Dubai.
“We are forbidden. They have ways of determining whether it has been viewed.”
“They let us go, no?”
Kamil fidgeted for a second. Mansur could see that he was curious.
“It is a video of an American special operations colonel denouncing the war and giving very detailed American withdrawal plans to Mullah Rahman. He said the Americans were tired of the war and were pulling out of their base camps along the border so that Afghan forces could get in there and defend their own country. And he described how Al Qaeda could effectively attack Bagram
Air Base.”
Kamil grimaced, as if knowing made him complicit in Mansur’s scheme.
“I cannot know of this. Do not include me in your ill deeds,” Kamil said, turning away.
“How long have we known each other?” Mansur asked.
“Since we were able to know our names,” Kamil said. “Since Khagozi.”
Khagozi was a small village to the northeast of Chitral, toward the sliver of Afghanistan that led into China, where the two men grew up together herding sheep. Now, they were carrying a million dollars in two bags.
“Can we not dream of another life far away from here?”
“And leave our families like cowards?”
“No, we can get our families, if you insist. I will say you were killed on the boat, lost at sea along with your money, and then I will go back, to be beaten assuredly, but you can fly, get there first, get your family and move quickly, maybe even get my family. Take $250,000 and leave it for Rahman.”
“Your plan is full of holes. Mullah Rahman is too smart for these games. You know he keeps guards on our families until we return,” Kamil said.
Mansur could see that Kamil was not going to participate in his scheme and so reluctantly shifted gears.
“I bought something else in the market when you were speaking with the ship captain,” Mansur said.
He brandished a small knife, wickedly sharp, that he thrust into his friends abdomen before either of them had a chance to think about it. He pulled his friend close and whispered, “Since you won’t join me in a new life, I will send you to another.”
Ratcheting the knife up toward his sternum, Mansur felt Kamil’s weakened grip attempt to push him away, but it wasn’t enough.
“Traitor,” Kamil whispered, a bubble of blood aspirating out of his mouth.
Mansur dragged Kamil’s body to the back of the warehouse, which opened to a pier. In the dark of the night, he wrapped loose chains around Kamil’s body, secured them with his belt, and retrieved his bag of money before dumping Kamil to the bottom of the Baba Channel where the ebb would certainly drag him into the Arabian Sea.
