by John Ringo
Some general had taken over from Assad in Syria. He had promised that they were out of the WMD game and renounced terrorism, then started playing the Saddam game of denying that there ever was any WMD and they certainly weren’t sponsoring terrorism. All the while complaining largely of fall-out from the, remarkably clean, burst over their soil. All America’s fault, of course. The girls were never there. There was no proof. Show us the proof they were there.
Video footage by news media from the site certainly wasn’t proof. Oh, no. And all the networks but Fox were eating it up and constantly asking “where’s the proof?” Flipping idiots.
Some of the girls were on from time to time and he shook his head at the tenor of the questions. Bambi… Britney was interviewed on ABC. He’d made sure he stayed awake that evening, and the interviewer, some chick, was aghast that she would have actually tried to fight. That she wasn’t viewing herself as a victim. Bambi just about tore her a new asshole. “I’m not a victim. I fought to help all of us stay alive and I refuse to be called or characterized as a victim. I’m a fighter and a survivor. Ghost taught me that.”
The government had gone from giving updates on his health to refusing to speculate whether he was alive or dead. Since he was listening to that from inside a secure — he’d seen the guards outside — military hospital, it gave him a bit of a shiver. But he figured it was for his own safety. Various Islamic groups had pronounced jihad, personally, on the horrible person that would actually kill their Great Leader. Not, by the way, that the Great Leader was dead. Show us the proof. Pictures of a body are not proof. But the man called Ghost was going to be one when they got their hands on him.
He tracked his progress by the stuff that came out and what he could do. IV, drainage tubes, the day they let him walk to the bathroom and he found out how hard it was. He tried to play mental games, remember historical events; he got one of the nurses to get him some books and they all turned out to be romances. He read them anyway and came away wondering just how traumatic it really was for the girls in the bunker. If this was what women read for fun… ?
One day he was puzzling over a scene in one of the “historicals” that didn’t match any “history” he knew, when a colonel in undress greens walked in unannounced. One read of the nametag said it all.
“Good to finally meet you, Colonel Pierson,” Mike said, holding out his hand.
“Glad to see you’re going to make it,” Pierson replied, grinning.
“Am I?” Mike asked with a raised eyebrow. “The government doesn’t seem sure.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Pierson admitted, pulling up a chair. “One of the reasons. You want to be alive or dead?”
“Can we stick with ‘unsure’?” Mike asked.
“For the time being,” Pierson said. “This administration will be more than happy to stay with ‘unwilling to comment upon his mortality.’ But… administrations change. Honestly, you-know-who is probably going to run in ’08 and she’s got a good chance of winning. We both know that.”
“How hard would it be to classify it so the bitch can’t get it?” Mike asked. “The teams won’t talk.”
“Hard but not impossible,” Pierson admitted with a sigh. “Pretty hard to not say that you survived, but we can probably hide your identity.”
“Works for me,” Mike replied. “So what else do you have?”
“Well,” Pierson said solemnly, clearing his throat and picking up his briefcase. “There are a number of forms that I need you to sign. We’re handling the money through the Witness Protection Program…”
“Money?” Mike asked.
“Well, first there’s Osama,” Pierson said, his face cracking into a grin. “There was a Presidential Finding that the President’s words to the news media, ‘dead or alive’ meant that the reward could be paid…”
“Dead or alive,” Mike said and whistled. “How much?”
“Twenty-five million,” Pierson said and grinned again. “It’s being handled through the Witness Protection Program and they’re pretty damned secure, even from presidents. It’s split in various accounts so no one bank person sees a deposit of twenty-five million. But there’s another five million for ‘aid in disrupting a major terrorist operation.’ So your grand total is thirty. There was some quibbling about your medical expenses, which were sizeable, and I’m told that when the discussion reached presidential level it descended to four-letter words. So you don’t even have to pay the hospital bill.”
“Damn,” Mike said, his eyes wide. “What the hell am I going to do with twenty-five, thirty million dollars?”
“Uhm…” Pierson hummed. “Think, rather, what you can’t do. But spend it wisely — most lottery winners go broke. Another reason to spend it wisely is that you don’t want to become too visible.”
“Boat,” Mike said. “A yacht. That way I can move around. I’ll come up with a cover story, but it will look like I’m a drug dealer or former drug dealer spending his ill-gotten gains.”
“That works,” Pierson said. “Now, we don’t expect that you’ll have actual trouble from the terrorists or any future adventures. But there may be repercussions. There is a special program for certain categories of protectees, and you’re a good example, which gives them pseudo-police authority. Effectively, you’re made a special version of the Reserve Federal Marshall. What that means is you can carry anywhere in the U.S., and in a good bit of the rest of the world. And it acts as a Class III permit, so you can carry heavy if you wish. Illegal use is illegal use, but if you can carry it, you can carry it.”
“Good,” Mike said. “I’d been somewhat worried about the tangos finding out who I was before I found out they found out. But if I’m armed in an ambush, that’s a different story.”
“Don’t go Rambo,” Pierson said sternly.
“Don’t intend to,” Mike replied. “But it’s a comfort.”
“Also, in the same vein,” Pierson continued. “You don’t exactly have a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card. But some things may come up relating to your… special status. Part of this,” he said, holding up the briefcase, “besides instructions on what you can do with your status and what you can’t and how to handle it, is a number of the Office of Special Operations Liaison. Or, as we call it, Oh-so-SOL. It’s where I work. The phone is manned twenty-four hours a day. If you have problems or questions, call it. You’re also going to be on the military database as a ‘special contractor.’ That could mean anything from a contract weapons instructor to… well, you. However, if anyone brings up your record, all the salient information is Code Word classified, so they’ll probably put two and two together and get something near four. At the very least, if it’s a military or police situation, they’ll recognize you’re not just one of the narod. Don’t use it if you don’t have to.”
“Understood,” Mike said, sighing. “I don’t just get to be myself the rest of my life, do I?”
“Nope,” Pierson said. “When I retire, I’ll be nobody. You’ll always be, at least until the terrorists get worked down to a regional nuisance, the guy who killed Osama. Sprayed him with poison gas then cut his head off. Arguably, you should be surrounded by bodyguards the rest of your life. Knowing you, though…”
“Ain’t gonna happen,” Mike said. “I’m a good enough bodyguard, thanks. That it?”
“Except for the paperwork,” Pierson said with a nod. “And running you over the instructions. Yes.”
“When can I get discharged?” Mike asked. “I have a bunch of money to spend.”
“As soon as this gets cleared up,” the colonel replied. “And we’d really like a written after-action report…”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Mike replied, grunting. “What happens on the mission, stays on the mission. Let’s get started on the rest of it, though. I have people to see…”
It was a shitty day in Athens. A weak cold front was coming through and the light, misty, rain was soaking into Brenda McCarthy’s sweatshirt as she walked up Co
llege Street. The conditions fit her mood, which was crappy. The girls had been given A averages for the semester that had been “disrupted” as the administration put it. But since the beginning of this new semester she’d had to contend with being “One of the Syria Girls.” The whispers and looks in class were bad enough. But the experience tended to attract… the wrong kind of guys. Guys that she really didn’t want calling her “Babe.” Guys that, frankly, set off her creep meter.
So it was just adding insult to a screwed up day when some loser sitting at the Starbucks called out to her.
“Hey, Babe, it is Babe, isn’t it?”
She spun around to deliver an angry reply and stopped as the man stood up and took off his sunglasses. She stood still as he approached to where he could speak quietly.
“I don’t like it when most people call me that,” she said, her face working, trying not to cry.
“Well, I don’t know your real name,” the man said. “But some people call me Ghost.”
Book Two
Thunder Island
Chapter One
“Hey, Mike, how was the fishing?” Sol Shatalin called from the dock.
“Pretty good,” Mike yelled, as he backed the forty-five-foot Bertram up to the pier. “Grab my lines, will ya?”
He’d spent the first month or so pretty much out of sight of land, working on his tan and fishing, using various products to get the scars to look older than they were. By the time he started taking his shirt off in public, they didn’t look fresh except to a very trained eye. Now he fished and SCUBAed in the area of Islamorada, and his “address” was Slip 19-C, Islamorada Yacht Club.
Spending that much time offshore had had another benefit; he caught a lot of fish and learned how to catch them and how to fillet them, which brought more money than whole. Now, he rarely went out without at least making gas money. In fact, since he really lived a pretty Spartan existence, he was living pretty much on money from fishing. Of course, it wouldn’t have covered the payments on the Bertram, but he’d paid for that in cash. All three-quarters of a mil.
He’d recently, though, been considering a developing lackanookie condition. He could fix that easy enough by a run up to Athens, but he’d started to think he might be using the girls, and that was the last thing he wanted to do. He hadn’t been in contact with all of them, just a core of about twelve. And of those twelve, he’d only had sex with three. It had been healing for both sides. And with a few of the others, he’d just slept, and that had been healing, too.
But he didn’t want to get into a habit of just turning up for nookie. He wasn’t planning on spending his life with any of them, for various reasons. And they needed to get on with their lives. For that matter, every trip to Athens meant a possibility of somebody who recognized him from a class putting Mike Harmon, former SEAL and jerk in class, together with one of the “Syria Girls” and getting four. So letting the girls go, slowly, was a good idea.
But it wasn’t helping his lackanookie.
There were, as around any major yacht club, various “boat bunnies.” But they didn’t appeal, either, even the good-looking ones, and they were in short supply. It was a philosophical thing. He didn’t mind paying for sex; he’d done it often enough in various third-world countries. And he didn’t mind having a girlfriend who was “a little hard up.” Christy, his ex, had been a live-in aspiring actress who didn’t make her share of the rent most of the time before they’d gotten married. But boat bunnies lived “on the kindness of strangers” as Mae West would say. It was prostitution, but even hint at that fact and you got one hell of a telling-off and generally a cleared boat. Then there was the issue of “Bluebeard’s Stateroom.”
The boat had five cabins: the “master” cabin forward (with a really nice bathroom, the nicest he’d ever owned) and four “regular” cabins, two with bunk beds and two with doubles. He’d converted one of the doubles cabins into his “team locker.” Besides using his “special” status to buy various interesting weapons, he’d contacted a company that sold gear to the teams and ordered, well, one of everything. He now was as well equipped as anyone on a team: body armor, ammo vest, everything down to boots and wetsuits. He didn’t figure he’d ever need it, but he also hadn’t figured he’d end up in Syria shot to shit.
But he’d really rather not have to explain to a boat bunny why one of his cabins had a weapons’ locker, weight set and various military equipment. The cabin was locked, but some of the boat bunnies wouldn’t have cared. More than one owner had come back to find their boat stripped of everything valuable and their “girlfriend” gone. Which was why he called it “Bluebeard’s Stateroom.” And another reason not to pick up boat bunnies.
He considered what he wanted to do for the evening while running the lackanookie in the background. Fixing dinner and eating alone was getting tiresome but so was going out alone. Finally, he decided to just bite the bullet and go over to Rumrunners II and get dinner. They didn’t cook mahi as well as he did, but he also didn’t have to do the dishes.
As he pulled out of the club in the truck, the air conditioning going at full blast, he considered, again, whether he should get a pussy-mobile. He’d kept the truck even though he could buy any car in the world for some of the same reasons that he didn’t like boat bunnies. If he met a girl, he wanted her to like him for him, not for his money. So far that hadn’t worked very well, so he was considering getting a car that would reflect his… how did Pierson put it that one time… “comfortable” status. A Ferrari would do that but he really liked the look of the Jaguar XK-8. It was just a sweet-looking car. Not as hot as the Ferrari or the Bentley Fantom, but… great lines. Like a woman’s body. And much more of an eye magnet than a five-year-old pickup truck.
There were people sitting outside of Rumrunners, some of them quite pleasantly female. But it meant the place was probably packed. He wandered into the open air front and got in line for the hostess anyway.
“How many in your party?” the cute little blonde asked. Quite shapely, she reminded him of Bambi, same pretty face and curly blonde hair. As he thought that he got hit with a nasty flashback of the blonde bending over to scavenge ammo from the dead, arms and legs covered in blood and lovely blonde bush reflecting in the red flare light. “Are you okay?” the girl asked hurriedly.
“Yeah,” he answered after a second, closing his eyes and telling himself that he was in Islamorada and at Rumrunners. Not back in the bunker. “Sorry, sort of a headache thing,” he continued, taking off his sunglasses to dangle on their lanyard. “One, nonsmoking.”
“We’re pretty busy this afternoon,” the girl said nervously. “It will be about an hour.”
“I’ll wait in the bar,” Mike replied, taking the flashy buzzy pager thing and dropping it in his pocket.
The bar was even more crowded than the front, all the tables taken and no room to even move up to the bar and get a beer. Finally he spotted an open seat next to a curvy brunette and pushed his way through the crowd to it.
“This seat taken?” he asked, groaning to himself. He’d be more than happy to hit on the brunette, who was wearing a light sundress and looked even better from the front than the back, but mostly he was just trying to get to the bar.
“Yes, as a matter of fact it is,” the girl said coldly. “My friend will be back in a minute.”
“Not hitting on you,” Mike said, trying to get the barmaid’s attention. “I was just trying to find a seat.”
The girl turned away and he shrugged. Finally, the barmaid got free and came over to him.
“I’ll take a Fosters,” Mike said. “And please give the young lady and her ‘friend’ a refill so she won’t think I’m a jerk.”
The barmaid glanced at the brunette, who shrugged and nodded.
“I’m sorry I snapped,” the girl said, not turning her head.
“It’s okay,” Mike replied. “You probably do get hit on all the time. I think it would be different for a guy, but for young ladies it probably
gets to being a pain in the butt.”
“It is,” she said as a short, well-set-up blonde with short hair and lovely green eyes walked up and looked at Mike. He realized he was enough in the space that she couldn’t sit down.
“Sorry,” Mike said, backing away. “Just trying to get a drink.”
“And buying us one,” the brunette said, with a slight grin. “I’m Pam Shover.”
“Mike Jenkins,” Mike said, holding out his hand over the blonde’s back. “Boat bum.”
“What’s a boat bum?” the blonde asked, interested despite herself.
“Somebody who lives full time on a boat and has no visible means of income,” Mike replied, taking out a card and handing it to “Pam.” “If you ever want to go fishing or cruising or whatever, give me a call. Again, not a hit. I just like to show off my boat.”
“Probably not,” Pam said, tucking the card away. “We’re only down here for a week.”
“Summer break?” Mike asked.
“Yes,” Pam said. “And even with all the other girls in town, I feel like the main character in the song ‘Fins.’ ”
“’Got fins to the left,’ ” Mike sang, chuckling. “Gotcha.” He glanced at his watch and shrugged. “I’ve got about fifty minutes until my table’s ready. So can we talk or should I just crawl under a rock?”
“We can talk,” Pam said, grinning again and looking over the blonde’s shoulder. “So, what does a professional boat bum do?”
“Mostly fish,” Mike admitted.
“I’d wondered what the smell was,” the blonde said, then flinched. “Jesus, I’m sorry, that came out as a real cut and it wasn’t intended.”
“I was catching dolphin this morning and spent a couple of hours filleting them all out,” Mike said. “I showered and scrubbed before I landed. But getting all the smell off is tough.”
