by Chuck Logan
Out of place. That’s what Sam’s gut tells him. So, curious, he drifts into the hall and trails the guy, sees him step into an open office and just as quickly come back out. Sam enters the empty office and finds just a desk, an exam table, and a red sharps needle-disposal unit. When he steps back into the corridor, the soldier has disappeared.
Sam mulls it for a moment, then walks back to the holding ward. Before entering he notes the security camera that monitors the hall. Maybe nothing, just another sloppy troop. He shakes his head and takes up his post over Jesse’s sedated features and watches the steady rise and fall of her chest.
Back in the trauma area, fortunately for Morgon, business is booming, and now more Iraqis are milling around wailing and gesticulating at a besieged-looking army translator. Gurneys with more civilian casualties scoot past. Everybody’s working frantically, so if he keeps moving in this area, he probably has a minute or so to regroup before someone questions who he is.
Okay then, think; get it done.
He looks down the hall at an Iraqi janitor who is methodically swabbing blood off the floor with his mop. Then the janitor takes his bucket into a room and returns a moment later with a fresh bucket. Before he starts mopping again, he moves a wireless COW—a computer monitor on wheels—out of the way. The machine has been pushed aside in the rush to get the new casualties down the corridor. The screen is opaque gray.
Schluf-schluf goes the janitor’s mop on the tile floor, moving crablike past him. The close triage air smells like crispy adrenaline-blasted nerves, disinfectant, blood, and vaguely of excrement. As orderlies hurry by on urgent business, Morgon eyes the computer ten feet away across the hall. It’s worth a try. He walks over and taps the space bar, and the screen pops. All right. The desktop comes up. Somebody neglected to log out in all the bustle.
Moving fast, checking the hall, he wheels the computer into the laundry room the janitor used to empty his bucket and shuts the door. It’s more of a supply closet—a sink and shelves stacked with cleaning solutions. With one hand he removes the sat phone from his back pocket and stops just short of thumbing the preset code. He’s getting ahead of himself. These things only work if you can see the sky. He puts the phone back in his pocket and takes out the notepad and pen. Then he types Captain Jessica Kraig/ 4/143rd into the search window and hits Enter. When the chart comes on the screen, he copies the notes. Then he pushes the COW to the back of the room and tucks it behind a shelf.
Moving briskly, he leaves the room and walks down the hall like he owns the place. He exits the hospital, ducks in the shadow of a blast wall, and thumbs the preset on the sat. Eight time zones and 6,000 miles to the east, John Rivard answers the call in the kitchen of his big house in Rivard County, Michigan, on the shore of Lake Huron.
“Got you loud and clear,” Rivard says. “How do you hear me?”
“Better. I’ve got maybe two minutes before I’m blown. I need to talk to Amanda now,” Morgon says.
“She’s right here . . .”
Chapter Seventeen
“Amanda.”
“Listen carefully,” Morgon says. “I may have been seen when this thing went down. If that’s the case, our business could be in the street. You fully understand?”
“I fully understand.”
“The target is a female army chopper pilot who survived the crash. She’s down the hall in a holding ward, waiting transport to Germany. I can’t get to her, but I have access to her medical chart on an open terminal.” He refers to his notes. “She’s been diagnosed with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury. We need to deal her out of the game. If she wakes up, whatever she says has to sound like gibberish.”
“How old is she?”
Morgon hears the hesitation in her voice and shakes his head. “What the hell does that . . .” he begins. Then he relents, checks the bio notes, and says, “She’s twenty-seven.”
“Okay,” Amanda’s voice is now cool and focused, “the computer you’re looking at is on the DOD system. If you alter the chart now, the file will follow her to Germany for acute stabilization. Then it will transfer over to the VA system when they ship her home for primary care. Clear?”
“Clear.”
“We can’t tamper too much, or they’ll catch it. So we’ll just do a little foreshadowing and build on it later, in Germany and maybe Walter Reed. Are you looking at the chart now?”
“I made notes.”
“Read me the doctor’s comments and the medications.”
“Under admission data there’s a brief description of the crash incident, then it says she’s unresponsive, six on Glasgow, MRI, CAT scan negative for brain swelling. The meds are Valium 10 mm IV.”
“Keep the crash stuff. Delete ‘unresponsive.’ Type in ‘erratic cognitive function with violent overtures.’ Delete ‘six’ on Glasgow. Type in ‘six to ten.’ Keep the MRI and CAT scan stuff.”
Morgon quickly jots notes. He has the phone wedged in the crook of his neck to free his hands for writing.
“Now,” Amanda says, “up the meds. Type in ‘15 mm Valium IV.’ Make sure you save changes and close the file. Hopefully they’ll bump the sedative before she ships.”
“Got it.”
John comes back on the connection. First he confirms the pilot’s name, rank, and unit. “She’s going to Landstuhl in Germany, right?”
“Right.”
“We’ll have somebody waiting for her. I’ll make some calls, see if we can muddy the after-action report. Now get out of there.” The signal goes dead.
Doing his confident military strut, Morgon goes back in the hospital, returns to the surgery hall, and enters the janitor’s room. The computer is still parked where he left it and is still logged in. Quickly he alters the chart per Amanda’s instructions, then he hits save and closes the file. He pushes the computer into the hall and walks casually down the corridor. Five minutes later he’s in the Suburban, worming out of the borrowed uniform. In ten minutes he’s pulling up to the roadside café where Ahmed is waiting.
***
In Michigan, Amanda Rivard looks her grandfather directly in the eye. “We’re not killing her, right?”
John Rivard assesses Amanda, who is a touchy mixture of headstrong and fragile. The girl is rock solid here on home ground but tends to get frail when she leaves the estate. And the speed bump Morgon has hit is definitely off the family acres. She is involved to the extent that she arranges travel itineraries and the disbursement of funds. Her primary duties involve administering the day-to-day machinations of the Rivard Family Foundation. But they’re in a pinch, and John needs her to step up.
“We have to tread lightly now that she’s in the medical evacuation system. We need to sideline her for a while. We need to make her irrelevant,” John says carefully. “What can we slip her to produce that result?”
“Do we have people who can get into Landstuhl and quietly give her a drug?” Amanda asks.
“You can always find people. It will involve some expense and using an old cutout in Germany,” John says. “What are you thinking?” He’s watching her carefully for signs of faltering.
Amanda, always good at taking tests, clears her throat. “Phencyclidine.”
“Say again?”
“PCP. Angel dust. Hog trank,” Amanda says with down-curved lips, not hiding her distaste. “In large doses, like 150 milligrams, it causes stupor, drowsiness, convulsions, and possible coma. A PCP-induced psychosis could last weeks. The stuff recycles in the body’s fatty tissue. It would totally disrupt her thought processes. So hit her at Landstuhl and follow up when they ship her to Walter Reed.”
“Disrupts the thought process? How?” John asks.
“Like severe memory and speech difficulties; that would be consistent with TBI,” she says. “It might show up in a urine test, but I’m thinking, with the diagnosis, they’d be screening for brain damage.”
“That’s good, Amanda,” John says, reaching for his sat phone. “I’ll get someone crack
ing to Landstuhl who can be invisible.”
Amanda turns and walks from the kitchen, down the corridor, and turns into her office. As she sits down at her Mac she hears John’s baritone echo down the hall, talking in German to someone named Agon. Dizzy and flushed with sweat, she self-consciously touches the skin on her upper arms and her throat that is strawberry splotched and tingling.
A tall, broad-shouldered young man sitting at his own computer station across the room turns from the Warcraft game on his screen. His ponytail and laid-back smile are misleading and conceal a high order of physical and mental agility. Kelly Ortiz completes the “team.” He flies and maintains the helicopter John keeps on the premises, and as a qualified triage nurse, he backstops Amanda in monitoring John’s health. Kelly is also a veteran of two tours in Afghanistan with a JSOC Ranger group. Seeing her uncharacteristic disarray, he cocks an eyebrow.
“Morgon called,” Amanda says. “He ran into a hitch.”
“Not good,” Kelly observes.
“Right. I just revisited Pharmacology 101 to help him set up a scenario to destroy a young woman’s brain,” Amanda says brightly. “She’s a chopper pilot, twenty-seven years old.” Then Amanda makes a face and lightly touches her cheek. “I had my first sexual experience when I was sixteen, but I really lost my virginity about three minutes ago, didn’t I?”
Kelly winces and taps his teeth together. “Slow down. You want to take a walk? Smoke a joint? It goes with the territory, Amanda. In for a dime . . .” Kelly stops in midsentence, and they both look toward the hall when they hear the tap-tap of John’s cane. Then he appears in the doorway.
“Now what?” Amanda asks.
“Relax, Amanda. Everything’s going to be fine,” John says. “We’ll need Roger Torres at ASTECH; you recall he did the advance work on the Juarez job. He’s just the lad to handle the Walter Reed end of this damn thing. Get ahold of him, would you, and ask him to give me a call on secure sat.”
Chapter Eighteen
Davis stands at the epicenter of the desert carnage talking into his sat phone to Bobby Appert. “You know what happened here, Bobby? People are dead, and I put them in this.”
“Slow down, Joe. They were soldiers. It’s still a war. We got other fish to fry.”
Davis blinks away sweat and a bout of double vision as he ends the call and tucks the sat into his vest and thinks he’s gotta drink more water. He twirls an unlit cigarette in his fingers as his eyes track to where the remains of an unidentified body was dragged and bundled out of sight under a tarp. Flies gather. No idea where they come from out here.
A detachment from Army Graves Registration and several of Nasir’s men slowly sweep the area between the crash and the crater. They are having more than language problems. Pieces of the unknown casualty have been found in the helicopter wreckage. A portion of a female pilot has been found at the blast site.
Never should have put three women in one Hawk.Colbert’s words . . .
Davis walks to where Nasir stands watching his men rifle through the glove compartment of a blast-twisted Land Rover. Nasir shows him the singed registration and contractor license issued to a Richard Noland. “We’ve talked to some locals,” Nasir says. “Noland was a salvage contractor. This was his work site. Apparently he was the object of the attack.”
Davis points to the tarp where the flies buzz and cluster. “That him?”
“Don’t know, that’s just pieces; no head, no hands. How do you ID that? So for the time being, he’s missing.”
“Great.” Davis spins on his heel and walks toward the relative quiet of the ruins. Halfway there he stops in the meager shadow of a wall fragment that juts from the hardpan and tries to reconstruct the timeline, from the first radio transmission to the explosion. This is where they hid, the guys who brought down the chopper. Pausing, he runs his hand along the adobe-colored bricks that are now freshly pitted by the strike of machine-gun fire. A freak meeting engagement, that’s what everybody is saying.
His eyes click on a fresh cigarette butt that is squashed into a crevice between the bricks. He plucks it out and notes a portion of a Camel logo on the paper. Does it mean something?You’re reaching, man, reading tea leaves. So he drops the butt, grinds it under his heel, and goes back to twirling his own unlit cigarette. Too much imagination for this line of work, Davis. Always was your problem.
Some of Nasir’s men are picking through the rubble. They’ve laid out a poncho and pinned the corners with rocks. A bloody shirt, a headdress, a bandoleer, and two blood-smeared AK47s are displayed on the rubber mat along with an RPG launcher and a sack containing two rockets. The Apaches are thinking they got some.
Finally he lights the cigarette and grimaces at the hungry ache of tobacco smoke in his throat. First one in over six months, he thinks. I am definitely going to hell in a pushcart over this botched op. One of Nasir’s guys jogs up to him—an earnest, skinny young guy in a baggy uniform.
“Assalamu alaikum,” the guy says courteously, bowing slightly.
“Walaikum assalam,” Davis responds with a nod.
“No English,” the guy says with a game smile. Then he holds out a plastic baggie and places it in Davis’ hand. The guy shrugs and points deeper into the rubble.
“Shukran,” Davis says. Thank you.
“No sweat,” the guy says then he raises a finger to his cap and returns to the search.
Davis studies the dirty baggie that contains several ounces of dust and what appears to be a twisted toothpaste tube with a sheathed needle projecting from the end. He’s seen this before. It’s an old version of a 2mg atropine syrette. Atropine, he recalls from a bloc of training, is an extract of deadly nightshade. He furrows his brow and plucks a detail from memory about the officer conducting the class who’d mentioned that Spanish ladies used to put drops of atropine in their eyes to enhance the size of their pupils and give them a big-eyed allure—hence the term “belladonna.” He also recalls that atropine is an antidote specifically used in cases of nerve-gas poisoning.
As he starts toward Nasir to show him this odd find, his sat phone rings. He answers, and it’s major Greg Colbert making good on his promise to call. Colbert informs him the pilot never regained consciousness and is now on air transport to Germany.
“What was . . .”—Davis corrects himself—“is her name?”
“Captain Jessica Kraig from Grand Forks, North Dakota.” Then Colbert adds, “Are the people you work for taking over the investigation of the incident?”
“Like how?” Davis asks.
“I don’t know. I just got debriefed by a colonel at Task Force Brown; that’s way out of my chain of command.”
“We were on an Iraqi special police raid. You were our only external assets. Don’t know anything about special ops involvement.” Davis thanks Colbert and tells him to take care of himself. Now he has a name to go with the image of the medic swabbing her feet. Again he feels the piercing sensation, the way her toenails twinkled bright blue against the smoky desert sun. Then he looks past the Graves Registration soldiers to where the truncated steel bones of Tumbleweed Six leak smoke and bake in the hot sun.
***
After a less frenzied ride south from Balad, and after switching the Suburban for the more comfortable Mercedes, Morgon shakes hands with the now subdued Ahmed and gets out of the limo holding his travel grip and an airline ticket. The black Mercedes eases from the airport parking lot carrying Ahmed back into his family’s close-mouthed intrigues. Without a backward look or thought, Morgon steps from the beige furnace of a Baghdad afternoon and enters the cool airport. An hour later, after rinsing his eyes with scrupulous care to remove pesky remnants of sand, he stands by the huge arrivals and departures board. His gaze wanders up to the stylized, tented grillwork on the terminal ceiling. Foot traffic eddies around him—Arab men in business suits and tribal robes, young Americans in digital camo. The smiling ones, he assumes, are going home. Like him. His eyes start to tear up and, blinking, he checks the conc
ourse for the nearest place to pick up some more Visine.
Goddamn sand.
***
After they wheel Jesse away toward the waiting transport to Germany, Sam Dillon is leaving the ward when an orderly from the flight company hurries in and says, “Major Colbert needs to talk to you ASAP over at the company day room.”
“What’s up?”
“Don’t know, just said it’s urgent.”
After driving across the base, the orderly drops Sam off in the flight company area. As the Humvee pulls away, Dillon sees Major Colbert standing with three other soldiers outside the day room—his crew from today’s mission. They are stacking a pile of duffels and go bags.
Colbert motions to Sam, and they walk through the slanting late-afternoon shadows to a picnic table set under a plywood and tin sunroof. Sam jerks his head back toward the three crew members standing by the gear. “What’s that about?”
Colbert gingerly removes a pack of Marlboros from his pocket with his bandaged hand and offers one to Sam. As he accepts the cigarette, Sam studies the major’s angular face. The only other occasion on which he’s seen Colbert smoke was right after the first time he took ground fire.
“It’s like this, Sam,” Colbert says in a certain tone of voice that acknowledges certain priorities, like—rank in the Guard notwithstanding—back home he’s a dentist and Sam was a cop. He pops a lighter. “We just got immediate orders to catch a flight down to Kuwait; reassignment to Brigade Rear, to work on the drawdown.”
