Reckoning

by James Byron Huggins

  “Part of me didn't care. Part of me did. But I didn't care enough to stop myself from doing it. I told myself it was for my country. But, really, I knew better. I ... hurt a lot of people." A strained pause. "It's hard to live with."

  Sarah wanted to reach out, but she held back; "I didn't think the CIA assassinated people."

  Gage made an awkward, quick gesture with his head. "They don't assassinate foreign leaders in times of peace. But they'll eliminate defectors, terrorists, or foreign assassins who are planning to hit someone in our government. Sometimes they even sanction foreign doctors in the Middle East who interrogate our people with torture. I've done four of them who worked for the Taliban." He paused, raised his eyebrows to nod slowly. "Now those were solid hits. Something that needed to be done. They won't be torturing anybody else, that's for sure."

  She nodded. "Is all that stuff documented?"

  "My missions were reported, but not all of them were fully documented. Then again, I wasn't supposed to fully document them. That was understood from the beginning. Usually, there would be a phony mission to cover the real mission. It's one method of concealment. A real mission concealed within a phony mission concealed within something else. Lies on top of lies. Confusion beneath confusion. Make it so complicated nobody can really ever figure it out. Strategy for deception."

  "And how long did you do that?"

  "Four years."

  "Until that night Simon found you in the desert?"

  "Yeah," Gage answered more grimly. "Until that night."

  Sarah leaned forward. Gage glanced up and saw the focused, intelligent understanding, easy and relaxed, on her face.

  "What happened that night, Gage?"

  Gage looked out the kitchen window, hesitating between rounds. "I was assigned to sanction two investment bankers of a Geneva firm who were in Beirut meeting with OPEC." He waited, concentrating. "But it didn't feel right. I couldn't figure it. I'd already sanctioned a Geneva banker six months earlier. And I couldn't figure that one, either. I had taken my orders, followed them. Didn't ask any questions. But I was getting tired of taking orders that didn't feel right. So I called them on this one. I confronted my supervisor, told him I wanted to know why we had orders to sanction investment bankers who had no known ties to any foreign intelligence network. I told him that the target wasn't a player, didn't call any shots. I wanted some answers. Then I told him that something strange was happening with the unit. We were making too many hits against people that had no relationships to national security."

  He notched another round.

  "It was a bad scene," he continued. "But I knew that I was right. We'd done too many hits that couldn't be explained away by security interests. Too many hits in South Africa. Too many in South America." His eyes locked on the wall. "It was strange. We'd hit a lot of very rich, very powerful targets. It didn't make sense. They were heavyweights, sure, but not in the field of intelligence. I didn't tell the DCI that I was calling it off, but I was. I was slipping out. I'd built a back door so that I could go under if things went bad. And they were. Fast. But before we could get out of Israel, it ended for everybody."

  Sarah said nothing.

  "I'd half-expected something to happen," he added. "But not so soon. I wanted to get back to the States and slide out before a confrontation." He released a deep breath. "Anyway, a few hours after my confrontation with him, somebody's army cut me and the team down in the building where we were staying, got us in a crossfire." He took a breath, continued quietly, "I don't know how long it lasted. It felt like a long time. We gave them a fight, but we were outnumbered. Outgunned. Everybody was hit. I got it pretty bad and I knew we were all going to die, so as a last chance, I fired up a satchel of C-4 and ignited thirty bags of potassium nitrate to blow the entire building, to either kill everybody on both sides or to cause so much confusion that some of us might escape and evade."

  Gage looked at her, saw her unspoken question.

  "Fertilizer," he said.

  She nodded.

  "Anyway, the building went up. Smoke, fire, the whole nine yards. It was our only chance to escape. But I don't think anybody did. Somehow I survived the explosion, crawled into the desert."

  "Why the desert?"

  Gage was silent. He had finished with the clip. He seemed reluctant to pick up the fifth.

  "I knew we'd been betrayed. Like I said, I'd half-anticipated something like that after I went to my supervisor. If the unit was actually dirty, I knew I would be considered a security risk, along with the rest of the guys. So I'd set up precautions against it, but they got to us anyway. When it happened I was certain that it was ordered from our side. I didn't know who to trust. I couldn't go to the embassy or a safe house. Didn't have enough contacts of my own to go under. My only real chance was to put some distance on them. Get some room to maneuver. Somehow, I made it into the desert. I had to start walking anyway because of the pain. Burns make you move. Burns like I had make you move a lot. You can't stay still. And I was dying from thirst. I never remember being that thirsty. It got to me after a while. Pain and thirst. I lost it. Somewhere I stumbled off the road and ended up in the sand."

  Gage lifted his face as if staring at the sky.

  "I'll never forget that moon," he said softly. "Big. Bigger than I'd ever seen it. And white. Pure white. And I knew I was dead." He paused. "They train us to overcome anything. Any kind of pain. Hunger. Cold. They teach us to sew our wounds shut with hair, if that's all we've got. Single focus, they call it. Knowledge and single focus. Don't think about anything but what you have to do, and do it. Ignore the pain, or sever a nerve to endure it. Whatever it takes. I've done it all. But everybody has a limit. And I'd reached mine.

  "I remember looking up at the sky, everything numb. Gone. And I knew that it had all been a lie." He smiled bitterly. "My whole life had been a lie, just denying the truth. But I was about to die. No more time for lies. No more reason to lie. I was already dead, as far as I knew. And it was on me, this judgment. I felt it, knew it. And I knew that I'd best make peace with God because I was about to meet him. And my debt was pretty heavy, for sure."

  It was long before Gage spoke again.

  Everything on the table lay forgotten.

  "I guess it was the first time in my entire life that I ever prayed for forgiveness. For anything. But I did." He hesitated. "I don't really remember anything else."

  Gage's tired eyes gazed upon Sarah again. "When I woke up, I was in your tent. Simon was there. And Malachi. Then when I healed up I knew it would be cowardly and wrong to deny a truth that I had admitted beside that tomb. I had believed in God, had recognized God for who He was. I held to it after I recovered. And it changed me little by little. I never went back."

  Somberly, looking away to nothing, Gage waited a moment, face troubled.

  "Until now."

  *

  "That's enough," said Kertzman, rising. "I'll be in touch with one of you in a few days. I'm going to do some checking around on my own. If you need me, you've got my cell."

  "Good enough," said Radford, standing with Kertzman's movement. "I'll start working the system, checking on whoever Gage knew in the field that is still out there, find out if he's made any contacts. I'll put out the word on a little compensation for anyone who knows anything."

  Milburn rose without a word, walked towards the door.

  "Hey, Milburn," said Kertzman.

  Milburn turned, regarded Kertzman calmly.

  "How is it you know so much about everything Gage did in Black Light? You said that Gage only answered to the DCI."

  "No, I didn't," replied Milburn, a slow blink. "I said he answered to his supervisor and the DCI."

  Kertzman saw it coming.

  "I was his supervisor."

  *

  Midnight.

  Robert Milburn watched stoically as the five mysterious and somber men checked the equipment he had collected: a wide and expensive arrangement of high-tech, fully-automatic weapons
, infrared night visors, adjustable laser scopes, listening and tracking devices, a case of HCI high explosive with microwave detonators, and several thousand rounds of Teflon-coated, armor-piercing ammunition.

  In an attempt to appear uninterested, Milburn stood on the far side of the mansion's library, arms casually folded, watching as the men cleaned the weapons, loaded clips, working the compact, easily concealable assault rifles with obviously superior reflexes and knowledge.

  Milburn attempted to discern which armies the men had trained with, watching who would select which weapon, how they would clear and load. He knew that, as a general rule, each of the world's elite armed assault units specialized in a different weapon. And each man present had obviously received very specialized military training. Even when a soldier left his initial unit and went freelance he would, by training, gravitate towards the weapon he had spent the most time with. But Milburn couldn't discern any origins from the men surrounding him. Each one seemed perfectly comfortable, perfectly knowledgeable with every device assembled in the room. It was as if they had no mechanical preference, no weakness.

  Absolutely perfect.

  A blond-haired man, large and muscular, probably in his late twenties, approached Milburn.

  "Let me introduce you to our team, Mr. Milburn, in case you need to address one of us specifically," the blond man said with a thick German accent.

  Milburn said nothing, shifted his eyes to the room. The most imposing of the five, the Japanese, had removed his shirt and was wrapping a long, wide white elastic bandage around his ribs and torso. Milburn knew the process.

  It was a pre-battle preparation dating back to feudal Japan. Ancient samurai often wrapped their torso in bandages before war, insuring that any chest or rib injury would be quickly stanched. The bandages would almost immediately close an upper body wound, minimizing fluid loss, stalling shock and maintaining blood pressure long after a life-threatening injury normally rendered a man unconscious.

  Milburn watched closely.

  The Japanese, large and muscular for an Oriental, continued the wrapping with a practiced, polished ritual. It was something he had done many times.

  Milburn heard the German speaking.

  "I am Carl." He gestured toward the room. "And that is Samuel, Sergei, and Ali."

  Milburn glanced at the other three. Samuel and Sergei appeared almost identical with their vague, bland features and shortcut brown hair. But the one called Ali projected a distinctly menacing presence. Possibly Nigerian, he had coal black skin with utterly black eyes. By far the largest and strongest man in the room, he was imposingly massive, intimidating. And Milburn thought that he moved with the easy confidence of irresistible strength, an appearance reinforced by his deep, overly muscular chest, shoulders, and massive arms.

  Milburn reckoned that Ali stood six-ten, would probably go three-fifty or more. And he recognized that the Nigerian claimed an unnatural muscularity, a physique developed from decades of dedicated weight training, enhanced by steroids and a multitude of artificial stimulants that dramatically exaggerated physical development. Milburn wouldn't have been surprised if the Nigerian could have bench-pressed a thousand pounds. Half a ton. Even without drugs, he would have been in the upper one percent of what a person could ultimately achieve through heavy conditioning.

  As one, they ignored Milburn's presence, but continued to prepare clips, each loading his own, occasionally exchanging a low word with each other. Ali was loading a heavy, full metal Street-sweeper—an automatic shotgun—holding the awkward weapon as lightly as a toy in his large hands, expertly placing the twelve-gauge rounds into the cylinder that could rotate the devastating blasts at a thunderous rate of one shot per second. Only the Japanese remained alone and silent, methodically completing the wrapping.

  Keenly interested, Milburn watched the Japanese open a black-lacquered case. Then solemnly, from within the lifted lid that revealed black velvet within, he reverently removed a single, sheathed blade. Milburn was entranced by the profound respect evident in the man's motion, felt spellbound as he slowly removed the blade from its leather sheath.

  "That's Sato," said Carl quietly.

  Forged with the familiar curve of a Japanese tanto, the fighting knife was fully 18 inches long, with at least 12 of the inches in blade. The edged section ended with a plain, oval brass hand guard and an intricately wrapped six-inch leather hilt topped by a solid-looking black metal pommel. Even with a casual glance, it was obvious to Milburn that the blade had been specially designed and carefully handmade by a master craftsman. But though Milburn was familiar with all the best knife makers, he couldn't identify the work.

  On closer inspection, Milburn estimated that the blade was well over an inch in width, and almost a full quarter-inch thick for the entire length. It ended in a thick, high point. Overall, the blade lent an atmosphere of supreme indestructibility, even as the Japanese himself.

  Milburn had never known a professional soldier who had held any reverence for a knife because most military conflicts were settled, quite simply, by superior firepower. A knife was, as a rule, meant to function as a tool, an instrument for digging, for prying, rarely ever playing a decisive role in combat.

  The only exception to the rule was when a knife was wielded by a true master, a highly trained knife fighter. Someone who could stalk silently, swiftly, and patiently, closing with cold skill and cold concentration on a target to terminate with a single, painless killing move. In that dimension of war a knife could be the most effective of weapons, an edged deliverance to violent death that commanded a scarlet respect even in the world of professional terrorists. An instrument of horror. An assassin's weapon.

  And yet the most difficult aspect of knife fighting was not the profoundly complex skills of mind and hand necessary to wield the weapon, but the content of soul that allowed a man to look his quarry in the eyes, time and again, at the moment of death, at the moment when the edged steel severed life from a victim's body by drawing a deep, momentarily bloodless line.

  Eyes remaining bland, Milburn shifted slightly, awkwardly, at a sudden coldness, attempting to shake a strange stiffness from his shoulders and arms.

  After checking the blade with religious solemnity, the Japanese lifted the sheath again and carefully slid the steel into the concealing black leather. Milburn shifted his gaze from the sheathed blade to Sato's face, registering the almost sensual pleasure evident in the black eyes.

  Absently Sato nodded, seemingly oblivious to the others who had ceased their preparations and were watching him in silent tension, and, Milburn thought, respect. Then the Japanese turned to regard Milburn with implacable composure.

  Milburn held the gaze a moment, rigidly refusing to reveal any of the respect summoned from within. Attempting to appear uninterested, he looked tiredly away. Milburn felt his jaw tighten with the effort of control. But inside his flesh, where there could be no lies, he could not deny the quickened, heightened heartbeat. Milburn had felt the fear before, but only in moments of combat. Yet now the vivid lightness, the speed, and the thrill were alive in him and it initiated a deeper fear, a fear of his own weakness in comparison to the Japanese.

  Stiffly, Milburn shrugged, resolutely attempting to ignore the sensation.

  The German, Carl, had sat down, relaxed and strangely jovial, on a nearby desk. A Steyr AUG assault rifle, a suppressed, 14-inch barrel inserted for silenced, close combat, was laid on the desk beside him. Five fully loaded clips of the 4.85mm rounds were also on the desk.

  Milburn noticed that Carl had selected the clear plastic clips that allowed the shooter to visually monitor how many rounds remained in the weapon. It was unlike the usual black matte magazines that the others had chosen, and which did not allow a quick visual inspection of remaining rounds, a potentially lifesaving move in heated combat.

  "Tell us about Gage," said Carl through his German accent. "We have all studied his file. We know he is out of your revered Delta Force. We are familiar with thei
r methods. But you worked with him. What else can you tell us that is not in the file? We would like to know his preferred methods for penetrating a security screen."

  Milburn looked blandly at Carl, wondered when it was that he had sold out his country, his beliefs, his life. And for what? For money? All the money in the world wasn't worth this. Nothing could be worth this.

  "He's a hard man," Milburn said quietly. "He's the best there is."

  Carl laughed loudly, genuinely amused, joined by the others. Only Sato looked up, solemnly staring at Milburn, steady and searching, open. Then Milburn felt a sudden surge of adrenaline as the Japanese stepped forward, moving closer, the blade hanging beneath his left shoulder in a specially designed rig that allowed easy access from under a coat.

  Laughter from the others faded as Sato stopped quietly at the desk, gazing down at Milburn. Milburn blinked. He had not realized how tall Sato was, a visual trick caused by the Oriental's unusually massive, intimidating muscularity.

  "Tell me about Gage," Sato said in a low tone.

  Milburn stared into Sato's face, opened his mouth to speak, but respect for Gage faded into nothing in comparison to what stood in front of him now. Milburn shook his head, searching for words, lost track of his thoughts.

  Sato waited patiently, coal black eyes intently, steadily focused on Milburn's face.

  Milburn realized dimly that he was waiting for something, some confidence that wasn't going to come. He steadied himself, decided to just say it. He looked directly into Sato's black eyes.