by Mike Bogin
“MSJS was Relieved for Medical Reasons in December 2010. Spent two months at Madigan in recovery and then they sent him to a Medical Holding Company, parked him at Walter Reed for four months, making him wait through every day to have a date assigned for his Physical Evaluation Board. Spencer was down to one kidney, but he was fit for duty and they screwed him,” the Commander said with chagrin.
“I fought to keep him, Eduardo. But that PEB wasn’t ever about re-integrating soldiers. Bunch of bean-counters all about cost-containment and downsizing force-strength. Wouldn’t have mattered if he had a silver star, they would still have shown him the door. What a waste. They probably printed his DD-214 before he walked into the evaluation room. He was a cheap release—medical discharge with under 20 years of service, 20 percent disability rating. One-time severance of $32,000. Half a million dollars in training, exemplary service: none of that meant squat.”
Jonathan Spencer was left with one kidney, $32,000, and a killer set of skills only marginally marketable to security details. A triple-threat, the best of the best, dumped and hosed by Uncle Sam.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Owen phoned Callie from the car. Now that it was real, Callie was going to hand his father’s house back to the bank and he was letting it happen, Owen just wanted to get it over with. Besides that, putting an end to $3,900 house payments had run through his mind more than once.
She was in a dress, made-up and ready to go when he pulled in the driveway. Shelley was watching the boys and answering work calls from their house. Owen read Shelley’s face and thought for certain that Callie had told her.
She made him close the top button of his shirt and pulled his tie tight, too. He didn’t know that the lawyer was in Great Neck Plaza until Callie told him to head east on Northern. Great Neck Plaza wasn’t even a mile away from Lake Success.
“Did you tell Shelley we’re going to see this guy?”
“Yes, I told Shelley. She’s watching the boys.” Callie had a way of keeping things simple. But Owen wasn’t going to play it her way.
“When did you tell Shelley?”
“Tuesday. We can’t just leave the boys alone.” Callie pulled down her visor to check on her makeup. The Tahoe had a passenger-side mirror; his car didn’t. She knew that. Nervous. Owen could see she wanted to let the subject drop.
“And you never talked to her before? What did you say?”
“Owen Patrick Cullen, I am not going to be provoked so you can get mad and turn around, you hear me?”
Owen said nothing at all.
“No interrogations and none of that acting all passive-aggressive, either, Owen. I’m telling you!”
Ten minutes went by in silence while they drove east, taking the left turn at Middle Neck Road into a much newer suburban office and retail area that looked nothing like North Corona’s single-story storefronts with hand-painted signs all along Roosevelt. Owen resented the wide, tree-lined streets with perfect houses and perfect lawns that he envisioned just beyond the perfect-looking commercial pocket. A corner house on Bridle Path Lane.
The lawyer seemed nice enough—forty maybe, friendly without being too friendly. Shook hands too hard though. His name on the door, along with the other partners. Good-looking receptionist, offering cappuccinos or bottles of water. Owen checked his tie.
“Did you have the chance to complete the worksheet that Angelica sent you?” the lawyer asked. Owen eyed his suit and the high-backed red leather chair.
Callie produced a folded stack of papers from her purse, opened them, and leaned forward to pass them over the vast desk. Owen had not known about that.
The lawyer scanned them quickly. “Owen,” he said, “I hope you don’t mind me calling you ‘Owen.’” He turned the paperwork around and picked up one of the two showy pens that were pointed toward the clients. “Owen, sign here and we’ll have Angelica pull your current credit report. We’ll do all three major bureaus so we have a complete picture.”
“Our credit is first-rate,” Owen answered. He wanted to get through this and get back to work. The shooter had a name. Jonathan Spencer.
Angelica swept in to silently slip a file folder to her employer. The attorney looked it over and seemed surprised to verify that Owen was correct.
“Mrs. Cullen, your FICO mid-score is 718,” the attorney told Callie. “Owen, you’ve got a 742. These aren’t the sort of scores that come to see me. I understood you were losing your house. I see here that you have the income and the proven ability to pay. Unless you are behind on payments and facing foreclosure, where is the incentive for the bank to work with you on a short sale? The bank isn’t responsible for the real estate market. From the bank’s perspective, you took on an obligation and they want their money.”
This set Owen off. “OK. We take a mortgage out and they add a line of credit, and now it’s our fault for using it?” They hadn’t even asked for it, and now that they had used it, the bank had them handcuffed?
“You come to me with a foreclosure notice and I file for Chapter 7 and get you another six months before the foreclosure,” the lawyer said. “You want out of this situation, that’s how it works.”
Owen’s face flushed as he tried to get his mind around what the man was saying. “Are you saying we should lie and stop paying the mortgage?”
“I’m explaining how the system works, Mr. Cullen. Banks don’t make deals on short sales with borrowers who have perfect credit and two steady jobs. If you go to foreclosure, it might take six to eight months before they even get out a foreclosure notice. Within two years after foreclosure, you can get car loans, credit cards, perhaps even mortgages again. The system doesn’t reward people for making their payments and it doesn’t have a very long memory when you don’t, either.”
Owen was shell-shocked. When his dad needed help, he did what was right. Now they were supposed to withhold their payments—steal—to get the bank to work with them? Owen walked from the building’s cool lobby out into the sunlight feeling like he had the stuffing kicked out of him. Was the world turned upside down, where good guys get no rewards and bad guys get all the help?
* * * * *
“He has a Facebook page.”
Owen looked at Tremaine like he was from another planet.
Tremaine shrugged. “Eight hundred million people are on Facebook. He’s got a Facebook page and it’s open to the public.”
“You do Facebook?” Owen chided him.
“Over a thousand friends,” Tremaine responded. “Get with the times, O.” He was also making his own amaro liquors and participating in pop-up restaurants, but all that was way too Brooklyn to tell Owen, who was still needing coaxing to enter the new millennium.
Spencer’s home page showed thirteen friends. Ten in the military; three looked like family members. Hometown: Fredericksburg, Virginia. James Monroe High School. Washington and Lee University.
Owen leaned from behind Tremaine to read over Tremaine’s shoulder. “Washington and Lee. Impressive.” Expensive. Tough admissions.
“He only stayed there one year. Why do you think that is?”
Tremaine turned and they nearly touched lips before Owen lurched backward.
Tremaine clicked through the photo files. Nothing to indicate where he was stationed, but no doubt that he had served in Afghanistan. The quality of Spencer’s photography was unexpectedly high. All men. All except one wearing beards, often long beards, white skull caps or loosely-wrapped turbans. Close-ups. Men at work. In the fields. Carrying immense loads on their backs. Walking heavily loaded donkeys along high mountain trails. The photographer respected his subjects.
Looking at mountains that could be the High Sierra. Lt. warned me to confine to base unless on duty. Again. Beautiful. Saw a horse foaled by lamplight early this a.m. Made me think of Bethlehem.
Put G
on plane today. Last of the originals. Hope he gets E2. Deserves it. New boss tapped me to run conditioning. Dumb ass.
54 linear miles today. All dry riverbed, hardened mud. Flat. 34 kilos plus my big boy. Army of one. Everyone hanging tough. Proud day’s effort.
Happy birthday, Jill! Missing my little sis!
East is East and West is West and ne’er the Twain shall meet. Til two strong men stand face to face at God’s great Judgment Seat. Oh there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, when two strong men stand face to face tho’ they come from the Ends of the Earth. Like seeing thru your eyes, Mr. Kipling. Like seeing thru your eyes.
Drop televisions on these people. Ruin them with dumb programs and crap to sell. Bombs won’t ever do it.
Missed buzkashi. When will I get another chance? Heading out, full load.
Buzkashi today. Trying to catch a lift to where they’re having it. May have to shine boss’s shoes & a lot more. Worth it.
All the layers of shit and sludge that cover truth. We can never defeat these men. They have a power of truth that we have lost. We can kill them and that is all.
Boys eleven and twelve. Black hair, green eyes. Embroidered vests. Watching how fathers and brothers and uncles do it. New beards. Long beards. Gray beards. Four generations of fighters. No women. This many men together, in America they’d be gay. What does that say about culture? A week of walking across mountains to the closest village. Tonight I’ll be picked up and sleeping in a warm bed. I will never know what they know.
Spencer’s last status update was fifteen months old.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Gonzalez mapped out fifteen configurations; mission scenarios to get to Master Sergeant Jonathan Spencer. If there was a safest manner, it would have to be multiple static positions each with go-code to take the shot at first opportunity. Three-man squads, one security, TL and ATL, crossfire protection angles.
None of the scenarios included live capture.
“We might as well be naked. No artillery, no air support. Whatever we do needs to be grounded in first-shot strategies.”
The key to first-shot strategies is being the first to shoot. Gonzalez wondered how in the hell he could set up rifle against rifle while he and his men were exposed on some yacht running fifty miles of river with attack positions open on both flanks. Spencer could be hidden all along the riverbanks and heights. He had nothing static at all while Spencer could grid his entire field of fire.
Gonzalez had two six-man squads to cover his whole Eastern Seaboard District; outside their military backgrounds, the sum of their live-fire experience was exactly zero. Alongside his two Team Leaders, Gonzalez zoomed in the mapping software, studying all along both shores. If they were right, if they had identified Bigfoot’s next target—the Twenty-Fives on their river cruise—then Bigfoot might position himself at a thousand different places along that river. Even if they could anticipate the highest probability positions to stage his attack, there were dozens of places with clear fields of fire and perfect natural cover.
Bigfoot has a name, Gonzalez reminded himself. Spencer, Jonathan T.
He opened the mapping tool out to a macro view. Highways north and south on both sides of the Hudson River, plus arterials running east-west on both sides, along with dozens of lanes, Department of Natural Resources road beds, plus a thousand places to hole up. It would take thousands of men to close a gauntlet around that zone. Spencer was smart. That’s why he would favor coming after the river cruise.
Spencer was worth a hundred police officers, SWAT included. The NYPD detectives would be liabilities, not assets. They were trained for response, never developing the instant-kill mechanism.
For three hours, Gonzalez continued thinking as a sniper first, poring over the maps and satellite images until he had nine high-quality positions with unimpeded visibility, excellent cover, plus ingress and egress that would make even helicopter tracking next to impossible. SFB. Sight-fire-boogie. Not that the thought process did much good; how do you move in on a target that sees and understands your every move and can smoke you from 1,500 meters?
The 1,500 meters was what jogged the major’s brain. At Bagram they had used an anti-personnel tracking unit that performed like close-field radar to detect anything entering their security zone. Day and night, the system put down a passive infrared detection blanket tied in to sound the alarm for base security. Whenever a man, dog, or donkey got within 1,500 meters, the security center could see their body heat on screen. Wireless hand-held relays were always carried by the officer on duty and one for each security detail. His sniper teams took down one or two Taliban sneaking in almost every night for two months until they learned better than to try it.
The system could display images well enough to distinguish between humans and dogs. With the passive infrared visuals, they could spot Spencer and know precisely where he was positioned long before he would open fire. That could be their edge. That could be the difference. Just a few questions remained. Could he find an available unit? How would it work within a moving environment? In motion on board a boat? Would the Twenty-Fives even allow it to go aboard their motor yacht? A no answer to any one of these meant he would scrub the mission in a heartbeat.
* * * * *
After the funeral, Al gave some thought to having a drink. All theoretical. There was nobody left to disappoint. But it had been so long that he was out of the habit. Just as well.
Al had opened up to Eamonn Cullen. The Big Man had friends everywhere, while Al watched other people having friends and girlfriends and wives and children. But the Big Man never had another woman. After his wife left him, he had his boy and that was all; there was never any more whispering in the sheets.
“People come to The Drink from a thousand different directions,” Eamonn told him, “But they all end up in the same place.” Eamonn knew all about that.
Trudy used to tell him, “Go to Hillel, meet people, don’t be by yourself all the time. It’s unhealthy.” But Eamonn didn’t criticize. He listened.
“I miss you, Big Man,” Al said aloud.
He had to get to the safe deposit box. Go through her papers.
Trudy had quit-claimed him onto the title to the apartment so there wouldn’t be a long probate, thank God. Should I keep the apartment? he wondered. The one time he had moved out she wouldn’t speak with him for six weeks, then he moved back in and for twenty years she had asked him if he wouldn’t rather live somewhere else.
Oy, the real estate agents. Even the funeral director passed him a business card.
“Don’t you want a place where you could bring a girl home without having your old mother around?” she told him more times than he could count. “Who knows, maybe your old mother would like to ask a man to come over?” she teased, too, giggling and clapping at her own chutzpah.
Her room was bigger, with the queen-size bed. But how could he ever breathe again in that place? Could he repaint and replace the mattress and pretend it wasn’t still Trudy’s home?
He did move out once. He rented a studio on West 112th. There was a pet store on his route between the subway and the apartment, where he used to stop and look at the pets on display. By the time he got there, the store was usually closed. The rabbits and the Guinea pigs would be burrowed under wood shavings, their cage lit up by a single purple light bulb.
On October 6, 1985—he remembered the exact date—he was going home earlier than usual and saw that the pet store was open. In a cage in the window there were three brown dachshund puppies. One of these jumped up and pressed its black nose against the glass to look back at him with its long tail arched upward, wagging with excitement. He had never considered going inside the store, but there he was, with a puppy dog in his arms licking at his face. He couldn’t bring himself to let it go.
Sammy came home wit
h him. No pets were allowed in the building, and Al had never before thought to defy the rule, but the Super turned out to be a good guy and they came to an arrangement. Sammy could stay. He was a little lonely during the day, and Al left on the television plus bought an array of squeeze toys that Sammy would toss and chase on his own.
A little loneliness during the day made the puppy that much more joyful to see him when he came home. Al started cooking, not a lot, but making some real food that he shared alongside Sammy, who stood on the couch and ate his from a plate on the coffee table. Al made Sammy a shoebox ladder so that he could get up onto the bed to sleep on his own pillow. In the winter, Sammy had a habit of crawling deep under the covers to sleep and scratching his way back up in the mornings so that only his shiny black nose showed from beneath the comforter. Al had stopped drinking without thinking about it. The vodka was there in the cupboard; he just didn’t seem to be going to the liquor store anymore.
On Wednesday, November 25, 1987, on the day Thanksgiving, Al had Sammy out for a short walk. He was looking down with the plastic bag ready, hoping Sammy would do his business, when a bicycle messenger came bolting around the corner. The leash caught in his front tire, snapping Sammy’s neck.
He never had a funeral for Sammy. Al returned to the silent apartment on W. 112 and drank vodka for two years.
Like Eamonn used to say in his thick brogue: “You can come to the drink from a thousand directions, but there’s just two ways to leave, boyo, and only the one if you’re breathing.”
