by AJ Tata
What was it that he needed to do now? The country was under attack, the Reserves were mobilizing beyond what they had done in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the nation was at war abroad, and his brother was alive. The conflicting emotions collided inside him, causing him to question his own instincts.
His only true instinct was to find Zachary. In the end, he presumed, Zachary was all that mattered. The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks had been so chillingly brilliant in their execution that the nation was stunned to the point of disbelief. And for many Americans, while tragic, it was a distant event.
Now it was coming home to everyone. It was not New York and Washington, D.C. It was the American heartland that was being terrorized, fear undermining a sense of security in every citizen. The economy was in a nosedive that was comparable to the enemy freezing American assets, Matt thought. The Coalition has seemingly sped to victory in the Iraq War yet was actually caught flatfooted with so many troops deployed around the world in combat. There was not much left to defend the home front. With that notion, the spark of an idea lit in his mind.
But it was chased away quickly by the idea of what might be next. Surely the end game was something even more spectacular than what they had seen so far.
What would Ballantine do? What would Hussein have planned, even as he may have expected his demise?
Matt crested the hill and stared at the house, stopping as he pondered the two questions he had just asked himself. How could an enemy of the U.S. make the most headway against her? Sure, psychological terror is one thing, but what is the physical manifestation, the ultimate goal?
Through the morning fog, he saw a motorcycle turn much too quickly onto the dirt and gravel road that served as a driveway up to their home. He smiled. He knew he wasn’t alone anymore.
Matt walked quickly to the house, greeting Blake Sessoms as he dismounted the motorcycle.
“Am I glad to see you,” Matt said.
“Well, my brother, it has been too long.”
Matt looked away, at the mountains. “I know. I’m sorry.”
The two men hugged and then walked into the kitchen, where Karen was making coffee. Blake looked every bit the surfer. He was taller than Matt by about two inches. His countenance was clear, his face handsomely tanned. He was smooth and polished, intelligent, and a gentleman.
“Hey, Blake. Long time no see,” Karen said.
“Karen, how are you pretty lady?”
“Not pretty enough for you. Never was, you know?”
“Not true. You were always too good for me. That’s for sure.”
Karen smiled and then handed them each a cup of coffee, excusing herself. “Time to do some chores.”
“Thanks for the heads up,” Blake said to her as she departed.
“Doing my job,” she called over her shoulder. Karen had called Blake and told him Matt needed a friend.
Matt turned a chair around and sat down, leaning against the back. Blake followed suit.
“Need to get inside your head, bro. I know when you’re not okay. So tell me what you know, starting with Zach “the Z-man” Garrett. Karen told me he’s alive.”
Matt smiled at Blake’s nickname for his brother. He had not heard anyone call him that in a long time, and just hearing the name gave him a sense that his brother was nearby. He grabbed his coffee and kicked back.
“Okay, I’ll start, as they say, from the beginning.” He began talking, slowly and deliberately at first, leading off with the Rolling Stones fiasco and then Zach’s funeral a year ago, the conversations with Hellerman, his depression, meeting Peyton, the breakup with Meredith, the plane crash, escaping the terrorists, Dr. Insect, the firefight, and then the jump into Moncrief, Canada.
Blake nodded and gestured. On occasion he stared out to the deck, still listening, thinking, piecing together the mosaic that Matt was describing. Of course, he mentioned Lantini, almost obsessively so . . . that bastard. At a significant pause, Blake motioned for him to stop.
“You mentioned the vice president sent you on the no-notice mission to link up with some special ops guys at Fort Bragg, and then you have this Colonel Rampert guy coming to your house asking about Z-man, right? And you’re still worried about these rocker dudes, the Stones, right?”
“Right,” Matt said.
“Okay, first question is, Why have you talked more about Lantini, Hellerman and Rampert than you have the enemy?”
Matt stared at him a moment.
“Think about it. You’ve got Zachary in the hands of an international terrorist and the nation under attack. Your instincts are the best I’ve ever seen, and you’re talking about these three bubbas. What gives?”
“They’re central to everything,” Matt said slowly.
“How central?” Blake asked suspiciously.
“That, bro, is the question.”
“Sounds like we need to go to wide field of view.”
Matt smiled. It was just like when they would hang out every day as teenagers. Blake was always good at helping Matt see the forest through the trees.
“Let me read it back to you,” Blake said. “You’ve got Zachary in captivity somewhere, probably being held as a hostage in exchange for something. You’ve got a special ops commando colonel with intense interest in the Z-man. Then you’ve got a tape that sounds like it might be a conspiracy to start the first Gulf War.” Blake was ticking off the points as if he were responding to an oral comprehensive exam for a master’s degree. “You’ve got some missing Predator drones, and then you’ve got this Dr. Insect guy that you think has done something to make the Predators able to communicate.”
“Don’t forget about Lantini,” Matt said.
“We’ll get to him in a minute. So what you’re dealing with is the fact that your brother is both in captivity and expendable to the government. You may have uncovered a conspiracy, and you may have the information to prevent a major, perhaps cataclysmic, attack on the country.”
“About right.”
Blake added another layer of analysis. Matt listened and was reminded that Blake had a rare acumen for discerning the precise heart of the matter.
“You’re trapped. You’ve got two or three people that you think might be involved in a conspiracy not only twelve years ago, but maybe even today. I agree. There’s some connectivity between the tape and today; otherwise, they wouldn’t be looking for it. Bottom line is, you want Zachary back alive, but you also have a conscience with respect to your service to the nation. And you can help. You know some things that can help. It’s just a piece of information or two that you need.”
“Again, right on.”
“So tell me what you think the gouge is,” Blake said.
“Well, I’m trying to be objective about this, but I can’t help but think Lantini is driving this bitch from somewhere afar. Then I think about Colonel Rampert from special ops. Zachary said, ‘Get the colonel.’ And Rampert was in the first Gulf War. He mentioned to me that he had met Ballantine. ‘Face to face’ is how I think he put it. He also operates in circles that would have access to ambassadors and intelligence operatives. He would be able to reach across the spectrum of political and military heavyweights with a fair amount of gravitas and authority.”
“Face to face? Huh.” Blake scratched his chin, then offered a counterpoint. “Maybe Zachary was saying, ‘Get the colonel so he can help us’? Or maybe there’s an entirely different colonel? It would make sense to me that the colonel he is talking about is someone who he knew from Desert Storm or before. Weren’t all these bubbas ‘colonels’ in Desert Storm? But what I’m hearing is that we have to figure out whose voice is on that tape, and that should crack the code as to who might be allied with Ballantine, correct?”
Matt thought a moment. “Roger, they were. And, correct, it seems plausible that it could be Rampert to me,” Matt said. “Maybe I’m just too focused on Lantini.”
“You don’t say that with a whole lot of conviction, bro. Who else could
it be? Think about all of the new points of contact you’ve had in the last few months. Anybody?”
“Well, there’s Peyton.”
“You still need to introduce me. My question is, Where’d you first meet her?”
“When the vice president called me and told me to go to Fort Bragg, she was already at my house,” Matt said, his voice trailing off toward the end.
“The vice president?”
“Yes, you know, Hellerman.”
Blake took a sip of his coffee, smacked his lips, and looked at Matt. “Isn’t that a little unusual?”
“What’s that, meeting with the vice president?”
Blake nodded.
“Maybe,” Matt said. “He wanted to use me on a special task force for terrorism.”
“How did he contact you?”
“Well, that’s actually how I met Peyton. Like I said, the vice president sent her out to my house to get me to come to the meeting. I had disconnected my phone.”
“She works for the vice president?” Blake asked suspiciously.
Matt looked at Blake without speaking, then nodded. “I see your point.”
Blake gave him a quizzical stare and stood. He walked over to the door, opened it, and stepped outside, looking up at the sun. “Man, we’ve got a problem,” Blake said.
Matt stood and walked onto the deck, taking in the chill and the sun hanging low to the southeast. “I don’t think there’s any way that she is involved in this, or that the vice president is, for that matter.”
“Theoretically speaking, the vice president could be our man, and O’Hara could be his spy,” Blake said.
Matt considered the comment. “Okay, I’ll play along. If your theory is correct, that would mean he has contact with Ballantine and is involved with the terrorist attacks on America—theoretically speaking—and that would make him our man on the tape as well.”
“It would. Hence, we’ve got a problem.” Blake ran his hand across his face and then through his long hair. Matt sat in one of the deck chairs, observing the fog lifting ever so slowly from the crags in the mountains.
“And that brings us to Zachary,” Matt said, “who is my main concern.”
“Naturally. I think we needed to work through all of that to get to what is important. Whether it’s Lantini, Rampert, or Hellerman, Zachary is alive and that’s huge.”
“That’s right, and I think Zachary was a surprise to whoever the contact is.”
“But he was with Rampert for the last ten months, you told me,” Blake said. “How could that be a surprise?”
“Right. What probably happened there, if it is Rampert, is he knew, but wanted to keep the secret from Ballantine, though that doesn’t really make sense.”
“Unless he’s a cruel son of a bitch who likes to play games and wanted to feed Zachary to the lion’s den up there and give his buddy Ballantine a crack at him before he came to kill you. I mean, what is this nonsense about a one-man mission? I’m not in the military, but I’ve read enough to know you don’t ever send one guy to do anything,” Blake said.
“Good point. Rampert told me that Zachary had been in a coma until recently, when he became fully functional again. Apparently, physically he was okay a long time ago, but psychologically he was slow to recover.”
“So the actions with Zachary indicate that it might be Rampert,” Blake said, trying to nail down a point.
“Right, I’ll buy that. Rampert could have been grooming him to go into Moncrief as part of some type of deal he cut with Ballantine. Your ‘no one-man missions’ theory. He hides my brother from us, retrains him, gives him a new identity, and then sends him on a suicide mission.” Matt paused, shaking his head.
“Doesn’t make sense unless he wanted Zach dead, really,” Blake offered.
“But, then again, the actions with me might indicate it was Hellerman,” Matt said.
“How so?”
“Just look at what happened. As you pointed out, all of a sudden I get a visit from a good-looking babe. Then I get a phone call to meet Hellerman at the airport, and I’m off to Fort Bragg, but my plane gets hijacked to Vermont. It’s almost as if he knew what was going down.”
“As if he was feeding you to the lion’s den.”
“Right. An eye for an eye. Zachary killed Ballantine’s brother. Maybe his goal is to kill me. But he didn’t kill Zachary, he took him. Why?” Matt said.
“To exchange for the tape?”
“I’ve thought about that, but the tape seems to benefit the contact more than Ballantine, though it could be a sort of insurance policy for Ballantine, to hold the contact in check,” Matt said.
“I agree.”
“And it’s not likely that Hellerman would have known about Zachary being alive. If Rampert’s a good guy, he wouldn’t tell a soul.”
“That’s reassuring,” Blake said, scoffing at the notion.
“Then there’s Lantini. Maybe he’s orchestrating the entire thing,” Matt said.
“But can you really believe that any of these guys would actually participate in the killing of thousands of Americans?”
“Lantini helped start a war in the Philippines, and he denied me the shot on AQ senior leadership,” Matt replied.
Blake nodded and took a moment to think, then said, “Could be a financial motive, could be something else. Ideological maybe.”
“Not sure I buy the financial motive thing.” Matt stopped talking and stood. He walked over to the railing of the deck, staring straight ahead at the mountains. The thought came tunneling back to him like the Metro train barreling into Union Station.
“What is it, bro? You’ve got that look,” Blake said.
“The meeting that I went to with the vice president at Dulles airport. He asked me to think about this thing called ‘secular spiritual stagnation,’ a condition envisioned by Walt Rostow . . .”
“Yeah, I know, his sixth stage of economic growth,” Blake said. “Rostow’s fifth stage was high mass consumption, where we just buy stuff. Very materialistic. Because he wrote the book in the late fifties, he didn’t know what would follow, but predicted it would be a kind of ‘every man for himself,’ lack-of-spirit, lack-of-unity environment.”
“Right, forgot you were a genius. Anyway, the vice president went on about how the nation is adrift—no national spirit, and so on. Not sure I agree, by the way, but come to think of it, he seemed to know an awful lot about Ballantine. Of course, that could have been intelligence.”
“So we’ve got three suspects,” Blake said, “that could lead us to Zachary. You’ve already said, though, that Rampert didn’t seem to know where Z-man is. But that could either be a ploy, or the possibility exists that Ballantine may be jacking with Rampert. Then Lantini, who you seem fixated on. Is there something there?”
“All three are plausible.”
“That’s right,” Blake said. “And don’t forget that you may be the target.”
Matt nodded.
“Maybe I can talk to Meredith about him, see what she thinks.” Matt looked away. The thought of Meredith caused him to pause.
“Think that’s a good idea? What’s that X-Files saying? ‘Trust no one’?”
Matt smiled. “I think it’s ‘The truth is out there.’”
“Depends on which show you watch, I guess. So where do we go from here?”
“We?”
“Yeah, we,” Blake said. “You don’t think I’m going to let you do this alone, do you?”
Matt paused. He had been away too long. He had pushed away his family and his friends so that he could wallow in his self-pity. That had to stop.
“Yeah, man. I’m glad you’re here,” Matt admitted, looking at Blake.
“I’ve always been here, bro,” Blake said, hugging Matt. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll find him.”
Matt broke the embrace and walked down the steps of the deck to the field in the back. Blake followed. “First, we need to confirm who the voice on the tape is. That will give u
s some leverage against both Ballantine and the contact. For the time being, we need to assume that all three—Lantini, wherever he is, Rampert, and Hellerman—are all bad guys. Assume the worst.”
“I agree.”
“Okay, then we need to find the contact, once we confirm his identity, and use the tape to get Zachary back. I’ve already planted that seed with Rampert.”
“The tape for Zachary? I like it. Okay, let me head back down to Virginia Beach. I’ve got a couple of rat-holes I want to check. I’ll get back with you tomorrow. My sense is that we don’t have much time.”
“That’s right. And Blake, there’s something much larger hanging in the balance here. I can feel it.”
“Well, if you can feel it, then it’s happening. I know that much, dude.”
They walked around the front of the house, where Matt noticed Blake’s new Honda Super Hawk. “Sweet.”
“You can touch her, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait for you to take her for a spin. I’ve got a mission.” Blake grabbed his helmet and said, “I’ll call you tonight. In the meantime, be careful about your bed partners.”
“No problem.”
Blake revved the engine, pulled down his face shield, kicked the bike into gear . . . then stopped. The engine sputtered. Lifting his face shield, he said, “Almost forgot. The dudes at the Pilots Quarters said, ‘hello.’”
“Burns and that crowd?”
“Yeah, he and Austin.”
“Burns getting any yet?”
“No, but Austin’s got hooker problems from Baltimore,” Blake said.
“That crew’s always got something going on.”
“You’re telling me,” Blake said, laughing. “Get this, Austin was out fishing for cobia last night—caught a killer about thirty pounds—said he saw a plane with bat wings land on a merchant ship . . .”
“He smoking weed or what?”
“No, he gets kicked around being a legacy there and all—what?” He stopped in mid motion of popping his visor back down when he saw Matt’s eyes widen.
“Wait a second,” Matt shouted, holding up his hands. “Wait just a second. What did that plane look like again?”
