by Nate Hawk
“You just make sure you fug’n follow through on all of the details,” Basciano reminded Kelly as if his life depended on it. Both men knew that it did.
***
Chapter 21
Megan had no choice but to remain confident in the face of intense uncertainty. The plan that they had concocted would either allow them to win it all or lose everything. There was no middle ground. If the plan continued working then the three friends had a bright future of life and happiness. If one of them went down during the fight it was likely that they all would. Each person knew there were a ton of variables. All of them had different roles but the plan couldn’t proceed with any one of those roles vacant. Megan knew the next step well. Even though Quinn was probably being put inside a lobster trap somewhere off of the coast of the island that very moment, Megan had his phone and planned to use it to her team’s advantage. There were three preprogrammed numbers. One of them had been called several times and Megan reasoned it was probably Quinn’s top guy. Just as she was preparing to call it the phone rang. She clicked it on.
“Quinn, where the hell have you been? You got that bitch yet?... Quinn! You there?”
Megan said, “ There’s been a change of plans. We’ve got Quinn. You want him back then meet us at Southern Florida Import and Export so we can work out a trade.”
“A trade, huh? Put Quinn on the damn phone. I want a proof-of-life.”
“See you boys at the import business!” Megan said as she disconnected the call.
“Hey you bitch!” the man said in anger. “I said…”
After hearing a beeping tone emanating from the phone the operator ripped the device from his ear and stared at the screen.
Mess with us and see what happens, he said to himself.
***
Megan had wanted to be involved with how the operation moved forward next. Taking out Quinn had been a big move and Kelly (and Owen) had been terrified at what would happen if something had gone wrong. And there had been a whole list of somethings that could go wrong. Instead of having leverage Megan could have easily become the leverage. Doesn’t matter much now, she admitted to herself with her thoughts moving on to the men in her life: Kelly and Owen.
She was walking back to the B&B but not to stay. Instead she had agreed to pick-up her VW Tourag and go to a much more public place where she was to wait until the situation was resolved. She wasn’t to call unless an emergency came up. If she didn’t get a text from Kelly or Owen every thirty minutes until the situation was resolved then she had agreed to drive herself (and the contents of the car) north where she would use one of her false IDs to begin putting together a new life.
The agreed upon public place was Fort Zachary Taylor in the southwestern corner of the island. She took Southard Street down and around until it turned into Angela Street. Initially she had trouble locating a parking place due to an ongoing historical event. There were a few men dressed in antiquated blue military outfits and an army of Confederate soldiers. Both groups of men were shouldering single shot percussion fired Springfield and Enfield rifles and seemed excited to have another go at the annual ritual of spilling each other’s blood.
After Megan did find a spot to park her SUV she walked over towards the old fort. On the way in there were booths selling war regalia and memorabilia. She picked up a candy bar and began casually consuming it as she walked around and continued nervously checking her phone for incoming texts.
“We didn’t have those back in ’63,” a man dressed in blue boasted without solicitation. “No ma’am.”
Megan’s mind was elsewhere as she looked up in surprise at the man standing before her with a gun. Like the others it was resting on his shoulder as he gazed at her, amused that he’d found such a beautiful woman to share his excitement with. She looked at him with a bit of uneasiness on her face, not quite sure what he was talking about.
“That fancy telegraph machine in your hand there,” he clarified. “We go weeks without hearing from our families.” The man said this in the present tense, fully playing his character of an enlisted Union soldier during the war. He pulled a weathered envelope that contained a hand written note from the breast of his blue jacket. “This here came two weeks back. I’ve memorized it now…,” he said proudly with a beaming smile.
Megan smiled at the man as he was succeeding in taking her mind out of the dark place it had been sitting as she awaited the next text. The man was truly gifted in playing his role in the war effort. Seeing some interest on her face he continued on.
“I’m only making thirteen dollars a month for my service… but I do reckon there’s some good news on the horizon… They’s tell’n us some talk of raise’n the pay next year to sixteen Yankee dollars!”
“Sixteen bucks a month to go to war! That sounds like something that the government would think up,” she said sarcastically, knowing full well that it was more money back then than it currently sounded like.
The banter went back and forth for a few moments before Megan excused herself and disappeared further inside the growing crowd of people where a group of Union soldiers had begun to muster around a flagpole for their orders.
***
The man that Megan had spoken with went by Keifer. He was Quinn’s new chief of operations regarding the ongoing mission to take down Owen and anyone else he had contacted and was deemed a threat. Previously, he’d trained in the Navy Seal program and had done well. Ultimately though, Keifer had been disqualified based on an eye injury sustained during training. The brass hadn’t been pleased with the way his right eye had healed and surgery hadn’t yielded enough satisfaction to allow him to continue training within the program. It’d been a damn shame for him because he had been on track to graduate in the top ten percent of his class. He’d even made it through “Hell Week”. After being discharged from the Navy he’d spent the next six months retraining himself to shoot as a “lefty”. It had been a challenge sure, but a leaner learning curve than some of the concepts that he’d been tasked with in the service. He had short and thistly black hair and blue eyes. He was built like a carrot; a thick upper body that seamlessly transitioned into runners’ legs. He’d been trained to kill on command and had no qualms executing orders (and targets) without any eventual regret.
He was hot then, knowing that his boss had been taken. Why Quinn had insisted on grabbing the woman himself, he wasn’t sure. He knew damn well where Kelly and Owen were but Keifer had hoped to nab Megan for enough leverage to avoid an all out firefight. His motto was: if you were prepared to play fair, you weren’t prepared to win. Besides, executions were so much simpler.
The other two men that worked on Keifer’s CIA killer team had similar resumes but had been dishonorably discharged for abhorrent behavior while serving. Ice and Cutter weren’t quite as smart as Keifer but they were equally ruthless. All had a similar build and all shared mostly forgettable features, other than the fact that they carried some intensity in their body language.
Like Kelly’s crew, Keifer’s crew had contingency plans. Keifer opened an application on his phone that allowed him to track the phone Quinn had been using. With the island the size it is (small), it was obvious that Megan, if she was the person that still had Quinn’s phone, wasn’t headed to the import warehouse. Based on the GPS tracker that Keifer was looking at she wasn’t heading east at all. She had headed southwest and had ended up at a State Park.
“Alright guys… Let’s go get this bitch and see what happened to Quinn,” Keifer suggested.
The men piled back into the big black Ford and drove purposefully towards the southwest end of the island. They paid the fee to enter but had the same trouble finding a parking spot so they created their own at the end of a line of cars. They knew they wouldn’t be there long. Besides, surely the state employees were busy doing other things on such a busy occasion. Keifer was looking for a way to blend in as they grabbed the girl. He also wanted to bring their submachine guns for added firepower. Maybe there was a
way to provide a disguise and firearm concealment. The weather was warm and it looked like some of the soldiers had left their heavier coats inside their vehicles. Keifer knew when you were in the ranks of the service you didn’t leave your uniform casually strewn aside on a hot day. He thought back to his SEAL training and laughed at the punishment that he would have received for that. He quickly located a vehicle with some Union blues in it. He jimmied the lock and produced two jackets. He knew they needed to hurry and two jackets might be a game changer anyways.
Keifer and his boys heard the steady beat of drums and then a bugle charge. The noises culminated in the tempo of the upbeat calls of cadence designed to grab the troop’s attention. There was a rustle of thick clothing, rifles with bayonets and the noises of other items of gear brushing into one another.
“Ice.. Cutter… Put these on! You two take those suppressed MP5s. I should only need my Glock if things go right.”
Megan was standing in the short shadows on the south side of the stockade wall. Her intuition was fairly astute and she felt trouble near. She sunk back further into a rounded recess within the fortification, her thoughts of Kelly and Owen overpowering her concerns that danger was close. Outside of the hidden area where she was submerged she heard muffled voices.
“GPS tracker says the phone is right here.”
Suddenly three men appeared with the shock and surprise of a bolt of lightening. Two of them wearing Union Civil War era jackets and the third dressed in athletic looking khakis and a t-shirt. They looked unnaturally bulky in their upper extremities. Not like those body builders but something more intimidating. Megan knew from her nursing days of treating CIA operatives what it was. The men had hidden machine guns under their jackets. Standing within the small, secluded area of the fort’s ramparts, Ice and Cutter turned around and stood guard. Keifer walked deeper into the shadowy cavity.
Keifer began to draw his pistol from the holster that was secured inside of his pants. He’d drawn many times and was actually quite quick with it when he wanted to be. He hadn’t seen any perceived danger by catching the beautiful red-head off guard and so he had chosen a slow casual draw over instead of trying to beat his all time record like he should have. At the same moment the crowd of Yankees and Confederates were seething in anticipation of battle. The tempo of the drums continued beating and the bugler prepared to give out a trumpeted call to engage in battle. Although the reenactment soldiers had carried out the same performance several times, the adrenalin rush was always exhilarating.
“I guess you and your guys thought you could outsmart us!”, Keifer boasted. “I mean, really? We’ve got the resources of the CIA. You didn’t think we’d track Rick Quinn’s phone and find out where you were hiding?”
“Actually, we were betting on it. Rick Quinn underestimated me too,” she said as she quickly raised her 9mm Glock to Keifer’s face and pulled the trigger.
As if Megan’s shot was the ‘shot-heard-‘round-the-world’ in 1775 during the American War of Independence, both sides of the picket lines began firing blanks at each other in a full display of Union and Confederate antiquity. The courage on the battlefield was admirable as the men choreographed their most fearless theatrics.
With two more men beginning to turn her way and situate their hidden guns towards Megan, she knew her life was in the balance. But where was Kelly?
***
Chapter 22
The deal that Basciano had worked out with Kelly and Owen was rather simple. They had needed a way to draw in the remainder of the CIA kill team to an open area where they could eliminate them. They had talked about a few locations on the island but with its population density there seemed to be only a few good options. Then Kelly had remembered the restored Civil War fortress that was currently being maintained by State Park entrance fees. With his interest in history and a schedule that allowed ample time for… well, anything… Kelly had been there a couple of times. He knew there were shadowy alcoves within the rampart walls that would act as a great place to hide in plain sight. The open field within the walls was large enough that he thought he could find a good hiding place on one side and shoot the unexpected operators when they made their move. If he was wrong about finding a good hiding spot on one side then he knew there were other options. There was a building running along the eastern wall of the fort. Kelly could think of worse places to shoot from than the top of a building overlooking his target area.
Basciano had agreed to do a couple of things that would keep his hands mostly clean (giving him plausible deniability if the plan went to shit) but still allowed him to help with Kelly’s and Owen’s efforts. The first was to send a cleaning crew in to take care of the mess that Deluca and Franco had made in the warehouse. The job would definitely require professional attention. The second was that Basciano would be on site at the fort in case he or his men were needed. There had been some grumblings about that part of the plan lacking class and style but Basciano had grudgingly gone ahead with it and positioned himself at the fort. Basciano had a handicapped tag for his caddy and he agreed to park right out front and stay there until the shooting stopped. Owen had located a strategic spot picked out at the fort’s entrance.
Owen and Kelly rode in the white Magnum. Both men thought something seemed off with the car but they didn’t have the desire to talk about it. Kelly had requested a jacket from one of the Basciano’s men so he would be able to infiltrate the fort with his short-barreled rifle unnoticed. There was more grumbling and a couple of East Coast slurs but the biggest of the two reluctantly handed it over telling Kelly he owed him a new suit. It just wouldn’t be the same after Kelly stretched into it, the man had said.
“If it all goes to shit as I expect it to,” Kelly had said, “meet us in the parking lot behind the McDonalds off of North Roosevelt Boulevard. We will make sure that you get every cent of the money that we were watching for you.”
Basciano winked and said, “I just hope you know what the fug you’re do’n kid. This better not turn into amateur hour.”
Kelly and Owen had quickly gone separate ways. As Kelly walked in he could see a sea of Union soldiers and their encampment. Unfortunately, he quickly realized that the area where he had wanted to shoot from was occupied by Union tents that surrounded a smoldering campfire. Damn, he thought to himself before beginning to think of a way to make the current circumstances work to his advantage. Then he had it.
Kelly walked casually over to the white canvas tents. Most of them had the doors open to allow for the appropriate ventilation during the daytime heat. A few didn’t though and he reasoned they were probably full of clothing or personal items. After all, these guys that did the reenactments did so with commitment. They even spent the night in the uncomfortable tents, sharing the experience with no-see-ums and Florida mosquitos the size of a vampire bat. Kelly acted like he belonged in the encampment and lowered himself behind one of the tents with the flaps down. He quickly crawled in and disappeared behind the canvas, laying on his belly. He prepared his rifle while he laid in the prone position peering through the small opening he had made at the bottom of the white canvas tent flaps.
As he waited in anticipation, he began to get warm. Then he began to get downright hot. A line of sweat had appeared at his hairline and small beads began racing down into his eyes, one at a time. With Megan’s life in the balance, Kelly’s nerves were getting to him too. Then, to make the accommodations more unsettling, the bugs started biting. He felt like he was spending more time swatting at the insects and wiping sweat off of his brow than he was watching for Megan. Good thing I’m not doing this in the middle of the summer, he began to think to himself before the 3/5 Battalion Marine inside of him pushed the disparaging thoughts away. Then he saw her.
Megan was making her way around the perimeter of the wall as they had discussed. But there was a problem. Some Yankee Doodle had caught Megan’s attention and had begun chatting her up. Kelly began to sweat more. He needed her to get away from the oth
er people so that Kelly would have a clear shot. Then the bugler began some amped up measure that translated in a call to attention and the troops began to muster in an organized fashion in the center of the prairie. The Yank that Megan had been talking to excused himself and hurriedly moved towards his regiment.
Megan found a spot where Kelly had a good line of sight with no real obstructions; other than the swarm of bugs that had taken up residence in front of his face. They were really beginning to feast on him now. Megan nearly disappeared into a heavy shadow but he could still see her sensual silhouette. Kelly kept an eye on the gate, looking for the three guys that he had previously seen. He waited patiently for the men as he impatiently slapped at a fresh round of bigger insects that seemed to have found him.
