Kill Zone

by Jack Coughlin

  WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?

  “You bugged out on me, Gerald. Abandoned me to my fate, so to speak. That kind of made me angry, so you have to make things right between us.”

  I AM NOT GOING TO TELL ANYONE.

  “That’s for damned sure. By now, Trish should have a typed letter resting on her briefcase. It is a full confession that you were responsible for the entire Middleton kidnapping affair because you wanted to start a war as cover for a political coup in Washington. You realize now that you were wrong, that lives were wasted, that you misused your position and the power of the White House and besmirched the reputation of the United States. Noble shit like that. It’s a good letter: says a lot in two pages. Your new Constitution will also be in the envelope. Sign it.”

  WE WERE IN THIS TOGETHER.

  “After you sign, Trish will give you two little white pills. You will go into the bathroom at the front of the plane and swallow them. Within twenty seconds you will simply go to sleep, feeling no pain, and be dead.”

  HELL NO FUCK YOU GORDON.

  “One second, Gerald, while I rearrange the screen.” There was a scramble of the signal and a smaller picture popped into the lower right-hand corner. “There’s dear old Mommy, Gerald, sleeping in that fancy old folks’ home in Palm Beach. You just visited her about four hours ago, remember? Anyway, I have a nurse standing there taking this picture. You don’t sign the paper, Mumsy is going to be put down like a dog with a needle filled with a medicine that will make her last moments hell. She will feel like she is on fire on the inside, and it will take her five long minutes to die. Next on the list will be your little soccer star, Lester, who will fall from a window in a tall building. How could you name a kid Lester, anyway? One by one, until they are all gone. Then the Sharks will kill you anyway.”

  DON’T PLEASE DON’T DO THIS.

  “Sign the fucking letter. Take the fucking pills. Trish will let me know when it’s over. You have three minutes before the nurse gives your mother the injection. Terrible way for the old woman to go. Goodbye, Gerald. Do the right thing.”

  NONONONONONONONONO.

  The screen returned to the fish show and Trish pulled away the laptop and jerked the iPod buds from his ears. She slapped a letter on the plastic tray and put a pen on top of it. She made a show of clicking a button on her big diver’s watch. “Two minutes and fifty-nine seconds… two minutes and fifty-eight seconds.”

  Gerald Buchanan felt a tear come to his eye as he scanned the letter. He would go down in history not as the savior of his country, but as its biggest traitor since Benedict Arnold. No! It was too much of a sacrifice! His reputation through the ages!

  “Two minutes and thirty seconds,” Trish said, now with a mocking smile on her face. She held up a small plastic bag containing two white pills.

  He closed his eyes and put his head against the backrest for a moment, folding his fingers together tightly to keep from taking up the pen. Everybody has to die sometime, including every member of my family. They are only mortal, after all. Death comes to us all eventually. He could run to the flight attendant, but the passenger they believed to be the air marshal was actually one of the Sharks! He leafed through the alternatives. They couldn’t kill him in the open cabin if he stood up and made a scene! Sure they could. They were professional killers. He was already a dead man. It was only a matter of choosing how he would go.

  “Two minutes, darling,” Trish whispered in his ear, and her breath was hot. “I’m afraid you won’t be around for dinner tonight.”

  Buchanan looked at her. “Bitch,” he said.

  “Big Lenny over there and I will do Missy this weekend,” she replied with a cold smile. “But your little whore will give us a good time first. An all-nighter. You only have one minute, fifty seconds. Your mutt gets poisoned tomorrow morning. Marge will be raped and then die when the house burns down around her. Cousin Flo and her family are going to have a tragic automobile accident… one forty-five.”

  Buchanan scrawled his name just to stop her awful recitation. Trish snatched the letter away and placed the two pills on the tray. He picked them up without a further word and made his way to the clean bathroom, filled a cup of water, and quickly swallowed the pills before the man in the mirror lost his nerve. Gates had lied. It was not painless. Buchanan went into spasms and convulsions and screamed in agony as fire coursed through his veins and he thrashed about the small toilet enclosure. When the alarmed attendants forced the door open, they found the bulky body of Gerald Buchanan curled into the fetal position. A soapy foam oozed from his mouth.

  Trish looked across the aisle at her partner. “Fifteen seconds to spare,” she said. She sent the confirmation signal to Gates.

  CHAPTER 60

  SIR GEOFFREY CORNWELL, Major General Bradley Middleton, and Master Gunnery Sergeant O. O. Dawkins were around a small table, watching the sun settle into the Pacific Ocean. The La Fonda restaurant, perched on a cliff, was almost empty at this time of day in the middle of the week. It was about two kilometers outside the Mexican town of Puerto Nuevo, and subsisted primarily on the weekend exodus of Americans who came down from California like clockwork to play along the coastline of the Baja Peninsula. Steep stairs chipped into the cliff face covered a vertical drop of some eighty feet to a white sandy beach, and beyond that, out on the water, a few surfers were still on their boards, waiting to catch a final wave before the sun set. They knew it was not safe to be on a surfboard after dark, for sharks like to feed at night.

  The Vagabond was lodged securely in a nearby marina, and Cornwell took Lady Pat and his guests out for an early dinner of lobster tacos and cold Pacifico cerveza. Mariachi bands were playing in some other restaurants, and the songs drifted on the salty air. Lady Pat went shopping with Middleton’s wife, Janice, and the three men stayed to drink beer. They raised their bottles in a salute. “To Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson, USMC,” said Sir Jeff, and the others said in unison, “Semper fi.” Middleton added, “May he rest in peace.”

  They had all been at the funeral six months ago, and since Swanson had no family, the flag draped over the coffin was folded and given to Lady Pat, whose teary eyes were hidden by dark sunglasses. An honor guard fired a farewell salute, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry Turner, gave a brief speech before yielding the microphone to the President of the United States, who read the proclamation for a posthumously awarded Congressional Medal of Honor. The service was solemn and proper and very vague on details.

  Now, with so much time having passed, Middleton took a long drink and gave a little laugh. “Shake treated me like a new recruit,” he recalled of the Syrian fiasco. “I thought a couple of times we might shoot each other before anybody else got the chance.”

  “It was indeed a merry chase,” said Sir Jeff, who had been briefed privately on the details of the mission weeks earlier to help solve the final mystery.

  “Not so fucking merry at times,” said Double-Oh. “When we came into the LZ it looked like a helicopter air show. The Syrians were facing us, and we were facing them, soldiers spreading out on both sides. Two lines and everybody was locked and loaded. Then those two Harriers came screaming in right overhead, no more than a hundred feet off the deck, and gave the Syrians an attitude adjustment. After that, we all got along just skippy.”

  The Englishman called for another round of beer. “I cannot tell you chaps how sorry I am about Excalibur. We have mended the problem, of course.”

  “I almost crapped my pants when I saw Shake throw the rifle and the pack with the computers into that hole. The grenade tore apart the most likely source of hard evidence against Gates. That’s how the bastard skated free of charges.”

  “General,” said Dawkins, “Kyle wasn’t there to collect evidence like a cop.”

  “Of course. He knew that we were bugged, and the only three things that could be giving off a signal were his long gun or the laptops. He didn’t have a chance to figure out which, so all of them had to
go. It worked. The Frankensteins bit, and went after the GPS position instead of us.”

  Jeff rolled a chunk of lobster into a warm flour tortilla and covered it with hot sauce. He took a bite, and it was a slice of heaven. After a drink of cold beer, he shrugged. “When we designed the GPS system for Excalibur, none of us even considered that it could be used against whoever was carrying the rifle. It was strictly to help with the computations and to help the shooter know his position, but we did not guess that it might be pirated. Only three of us knew about that capability anyway. Two of them are now dead. My number-one man, a delightfully solid former Para named Timothy Gladden, sold us out to Gates.”

  It was getting dim outside and only three surfers were left, and the waves continued to slope in irregular and small. “My own security team, making a scrub of our telecommunications systems, picked up that someone in our shop had called Gates. I was thinking it was just some industrial espionage going on, not unheard of in our business, until you told me about the GPS tracking device you found on the body of that mercenary. Excalibur’s one flaw almost brought about an armed conflict.”

  “But it didn’t,” said Middleton. “And it won’t again in the future.”

  “Right-o!” said Sir Jeff. “Unfortunately, Tim Gladden had a terrible accident on our trip across the Atlantic a few weeks ago. He fell overboard during some heavy weather and was never seen again. Tragic.”

  Only one surfer was left in the fading light, a bearded fellow with shaggy blond hair who seemed in no hurry to come back in. “Look at that lad,” said Cornwell. “Sitting out there like he doesn’t have a care in the world.”

  The surfer sat easily on his board, facing sideways between the setting sun and the cliff, waiting for a set of waves. Being dead wasn’t all that bad. He could live with it. Anyway, without Shari, what was the point? He unconsciously rubbed the gnarly scars on the left side of his abdomen where the doctors had dug out the two bullets, and then had to go back in later to stop a raging infection caused by tiny threads of dirty cloth taken inside by one of the rounds. He had lost a chunk of his large intestine and his spleen, and a bullet fragment had ripped down far enough to crack a bone in his hip. That was only physical. Losing Shari was what really hurt.

  His friends were waiting for him up in the little restaurant overlooking the K-54 beach, but his attention was on the patterns of the incoming waves. His recovery had been very slow, but he had recovered from wounds before. What would not heal was the part of his heart that was missing. Nothing would make that ache go away, but he knew of some medicine that would make it easier to bear.

  A shadow curled below the horizon, a set coming in steep and flowing toward the beach with intense purpose. He saw them building and getting higher, and turned the board toward the beach and started to paddle. Then the first wave caught up and pulled the long board into its powerful center. He was riding with the break when he pushed up against his fifteen-year-old board, planted his feet, and stood, relaxed and perfectly balanced, and rode all the way in, wrapped in the pure essence and freedom of surfing.

  The man who was no longer Kyle Swanson waded from the water and hauled the board up the worn stairs, bumping it a couple of times on the stones, as always happened at the K-54. It wore its scars with honor, just like its owner.

  The following day, the Vagabond had snugged into a berth in San Diego after passing more naval ships at rest than most nations had in their entire fleets. Coming in from the sea instead of across by land at the San Ysidro crossing meant no border inspection. Two aircraft carriers were in port, Marine recruits were going through boot camp, and SEALs were training on a Coronado beach. Two-star general Brad Middleton examined the gathered vessels for a while with Sir Jeff, then went belowdecks and knocked on a stateroom door. Master Gunnery Sergeant Dawkins opened it, and Middleton stepped inside.

  “You about ready?” Middleton asked. He and Double-Oh were on a unique shopping tour of elite units within the Navy and Marine Corps, looking to steal some hard-bodied warrior types for the general’s new command. After the congressional hearings and subsequent investigations, Middleton “went black” and took Double-Oh with him as operations chief.

  It had been decided that if Kyle Swanson remained dead and buried, a special unit would be built around the sniper, just as a professional football team could build a championship around a franchise quarterback. They could surround him with support players who were similar masters of their own specialties, and they would have a unit that could go anywhere and do anything, because the people on it did not exist.

  Kyle had agreed, on one condition, and his wish had been granted. Now he was at a mirror on the far side of the stateroom with a splattered towel around his shoulders, the result of dyeing his long hair black. “I look like fucking Charlie Manson,” he said.

  “Naw, you don’t have that little swastika thingie on your forehead,” said Double-Oh. “You look like some heavy-metal freak.”

  “You ready for this?” asked Middleton, taking a seat on the bed. “Once it starts, you’re on your own.”

  “More than ready, General. Jeff wants me to field-test Excalibur II. I’ll be back in a few days and then we can get to work.”

  “Okay, Shake. I’ll see you back here on the boat in five days.” Middleton walked out.

  Double-Oh popped Swanson on the shoulder with a balled fist and waved as he shut the door. “Later.”

  Kyle looked at the photograph on the California driver’s license of James K. Polk. A Social Security card and two credit cards in the same name were on a night table, along with a thousand dollars. The dark hair of the man in the picture was pulled back in a ponytail, and the facial hair was neatly trimmed. He picked up the scissors and began to shape the beard.

  Taped to the mirror were stories he had clipped from the society pages of The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News. After dinner with Jeff and Pat, he put Excalibur II into the trunk of a silver SUV and drove east. A stack of new CDs kept the music flowing, and he actually felt comfortable for the first time in six months.

  EPILOGUE

  ASPEN, COLORADO (UNP)- The body of missing billionaire industrialist Gordon Gates IV was found late yesterday in the rugged Rocky Mountains, police announced.

  Law enforcement sources said that Gates had been killed by a single bullet to the head in an apparent hunting accident.

  Gates, a decorated military veteran and avid hunter, was last seen Saturday night when he hosted his annual Christmas season fund-raising gala at his elegant home in this elite mountain resort. Some of the guests said he left about midnight in hopes of reaching a secluded canyon in which a rogue mountain lion recently killed two campers and mauled another.

  “Gordon really wanted that big cat,” said his attorney, Wilford Stanton, at Gates Global headquarters in Washington, D.C. “He spent a small fortune on guides and employed military-style detection equipment to track it to this particular location. He felt the lion was a danger to everyone in the area, and wanted to be the one to bring it down.”

  Sheriff Matt Randall said other hunters frequently had also been seen in the area stalking the mountain lion. “Mr. Gates was wearing a brush camouflage outfit, but not a brightly colored warning vest. Somebody apparently saw him move and took a hasty shot. The victim took a large-caliber round in the left temple and was dead by the time he hit the dirt.”

  A police search for other hunters was unsuccessful. “We are asking anyone with information about this unfortunate accident to come forward.”

  Gates Global, the multinational holding company, posted a reward of a million dollars leading to the arrest and conviction of the shooter.

  Gates had recently been under intense government scrutiny for alleged corruption involving government contracts, and his firm sustained substantial public relations damage last year over alleged involvement in the kidnapping of Marine Brigadier General Bradley Middleton and the Syrian situation. The company insisted it had no knowledge of any involvement,
and Gates invited the FBI to search its files and databases. Nothing was discovered that would link the giant corporation to the abduction.

  Jack Coughlin

  ***

  Donald A. Davis

  ***

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