Griffin smiled. Then he nodded to the hard drive in Kessler’s lap. “A soldier can be court-martialed for stealing military property, particularly if it contains sensitive information.”
“I’d be happy to go forward with that hearing, Colonel.”
“I’m sure you would.”
“So Sloane was right. It has been you all along. I never would have believed it, Colonel.”
Griffin held out his hand for the hard drive.
Kessler shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Don’t make me take it from you. It would be undignified.”
“You talk to me about dignity? You put me in this chair. That’s right, I know all about that too, how you sent us to target that granary so you could order the air strike. How you expected that all of us would die. How you conducted the investigation to cover it up. I know you were behind it all. The only thing I haven’t figured out is the transmission. How’d you do it? How did you send it so only we could hear it? You didn’t send it from the TOC because it would have been recorded at the base and others in the area could have picked it up.”
“Fortunately, the equipment Argus uses to communicate with its security forces is more sophisticated than what we’d been using,” Griffin said.
Sloane had told Kessler he suspected as much. “You sent it from Argus’s communication center on base. Was it a tape?”
“Bravo three-sixteen had been ambushed two months earlier. They never reached the building,” Griffin said. “The forces loyal to Saddam remained stronger then.”
“And you couldn’t call in an air strike because they didn’t reach the building. Sloane was right. He figured it all out.”
“Sloane is a very bright man, and resourceful. But it won’t get him anywhere. He has no evidence to prove anything, and he never will.”
“We’re still debating that now, aren’t we, Colonel?”
“Not much of a debate, Captain.”
“Then tell me why,” Kessler asked. “Why put good men in harm’s way? Why not just blow the building?”
“You know why. We heard you talking it over with Sloane tonight in his home. If the military had found the chemicals, we would have had to go public with the information. It was too valuable to bury, and you can’t keep information that big from leaking, especially with the press embedded over there and so many soldiers keeping private blogs. It would have come out eventually.”
“And a formal military mission would have raised too many questions about the nature of the target in the pre-mission meetings,” Kessler said.
Griffin agreed. “They would have wanted to know why the hell we were concerned with a granary.”
“But the men, Colonel, how could you do that to us?”
“There’s a war going on, Captain. Casualties are a part of war. You told Mr. Sloane that in this very office.”
“Those were American soldiers.”
“I did it for the American soldier.”
“What?”
“I saw it in Vietnam,” Griffin said, bitterness creeping into his voice. “Do you know how many men died over there because we couldn’t get the political support we needed to do the job? We lost fifty thousand men. What would have happened if the American public and the politicians found out that some of the chemicals we were looking for in Iraq were manufactured by American companies and shipped while members of the president’s administration held offices in those companies? The American public would have abandoned the cause just as it did in Vietnam, and the soldiers would have suffered for it. You erode support for a war’s justification and you erode support for those fighting it. That’s how they end up getting killed. How many men would have died as a result?”
Kessler shook his head. “Spare me the patriotism speech, Colonel. You didn’t do this for the country or for the men. You did it for the money. Houghton Park’s only motivation was to save his ass. Argus was facing a public relations nightmare. They stood to lose billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts, not to mention the potential liability from lawsuits. The company stock would have plummeted, and its officers would have faced significant jail sentences. They paid you, handsomely I would guess.”
“Believe what you want, but I would have done this for free.”
Kessler scoffed. “Then you’re even crazier than I thought.”
“I’ll take that hard drive now.”
“Sloane knows everything. He’s not going to let this go. He’ll keep at it.”
“Sloane is a lawyer. He knows he has no evidence—that’s why he sent you here tonight. Without that hard drive he has no case. He can’t prove what happened that night. We both know that’s why you risked coming here tonight. Mr. Sloane won’t be a problem. You are.”
Griffin nodded. The two men stepped forward.
Kessler pulled his hand from the pocket of his jacket, fingers wrapped around a grenade. The two men stopped.
“He’s bluffing,” one said. But neither man moved.
Kessler pulled the pin.
“You can’t get out,” Griffin said. “You know that.”
“What does it do to a man, Colonel?”
“What?”
“To his psyche? What does it do to a man to suddenly find himself confined to a wheelchair?”
Griffin’s eyes widened.
“He becomes bitter and angry and he begins to believe he’s entitled to more than the military will give him.” Kessler smiled. “You misjudged me, Colonel, again. This isn’t just about the hard drive anymore. You killed my men. You tried to kill me. You put me in this chair for the rest of my life. Did you think I’d let you get away with that?”
Beads of sweat glistened on Griffin’s upper lip.
“You want to call my bluff, Colonel? You have the guts when it’s your life on the line? Come on, I’m giving you the chance to die for something you just told me you believe in. Give the order. Give the order for them to shoot and we all die, and nobody ever finds out what happened. Argus walks away.”
One of the men looked as though he might take that step.
“No!” Griffin ordered.
Kessler smiled. “I didn’t think so. You’re a coward, Colonel.” He gestured to the two men to stand to the side. Griffin told them to comply.
“Put your weapons on the floor,” Kessler instructed. They set the rifles down. “Now step away from them.”
Kessler rolled to the door and motioned the men to move further into the office. He rolled forward, picked up the weapons, and laid them across his lap. Then he rolled backward down the hall, watching them. “I release my grip and the funnel blast down this hallway will kill us all.”
“You have nowhere to go, Captain,” Griffin said. “Your vehicle has been disabled.”
Kessler entered the code on the keypad. The red light lit. The door unlatched. He pulled it open. “You’re wrong, Colonel. I’m going back to Iraq.”
He tossed the grenade down the hallway and let the steel door slam shut behind him.
KESSLER KNEW HE had only a few seconds’ head start before the men realized the grenade was disabled. He tossed one of the automatic weapons in the darkness and kept the other across his lap. It wouldn’t do him much good at present. He needed his arms to push and steer his chair through the dirt roads, his progress slowed by the potholes, debris, and darkness. His advantage was that he knew the streets intimately. He’d designed them. He hoped that would be enough of an edge to make it out. He wheeled past the burned-out shells of vehicles and the scarred walls of the courtyards surrounding the Iraqi houses, eerily similar to the real thing. Behind him he heard the metal door to the warehouse open and slam closed, echoing in the shell. His pursuers would move faster than he could roll, but he also had the advantage of knowing where he was headed.
He spun the chair down a narrow alley, continuing through the maze, arms burning, breathing labored. He turned again and pushed down another passage that would end near the rolling gate at the front of the building.
HE TOSSED THE first grenade into the building and was preparing to throw the second when he felt the sharp, stinging pain in his back, just below his vest. It felt like someone had kicked his legs out from under him. He toppled forward onto the ground. Dust and debris from the first grenade rolled over him.
Get up, he told himself. Get up.
But his body was not listening. His legs would not move. He heard Ford’s voice over the handheld.
“Captain, you have to get out of there. Move on my call. We’ll suppress. Over.”
“I can’t,” Kessler said, groaning in pain.
“Captain, they’ve called an air strike on the building. They’re going to blow it.”
“I can’t move.”
“Captain—”
“James, I can’t feel my legs.”
HEAVY FOOTSTEPS SOUNDED behind him. Kessler looked back over his shoulder.
The two men rounded the corner.
He turned his attention back to the road. Too late. He saw the pothole but could not change his course or slow his speed. He swerved, but the wheel caught the depression and the chair pitched. Kessler fought to remain upright, struggling against gravity, unable to right the chair. He toppled headfirst onto the dirt, the chair on top of him, and reached for the automatic weapon. Finding it, he grabbed the handle. Then a boot came down hard, pinning the weapon to the ground. Griffin.
The two men had also reached Kessler quickly, weapons trained. Griffin bent down and took the gun, pulled the chair off Kessler, and tossed it aside. He held out his hand. “Enough. The hard drive, please.”
Kessler hesitated.
“You’re going to die either way, Captain. We both know that.”
Kessler tossed the drive at Griffin’s feet.
Griffin stepped back and fired several rounds into the drive, shattering the casing. The men jumped backward, fearful of the ricochet. Kessler covered his face. What remained Griffin battered with the butt of the rifle, grinding it to pieces.
“It doesn’t have to end this way, Colonel,” Kessler said.
Winded and sweating from the temperature in the building, Griffin handed the gun to the man to his right and turned to leave. “I already gave you that choice. Now it’s too late.”
The interior of the building began to rattle and shake as if struck by an earthquake.
“I meant for you,” Kessler shouted.
“ROLL!” SLOANE SHOUTED to the driver. “Roll!”
The treads of the Bradley gripped the ground and the big machine lurched forward. Within seconds it was moving more swiftly than Sloane would have imagined for something so heavy. He watched their progression across the open field on a small screen from the passenger seat. The vehicle bounced onto a dirt and gravel road, turned again, and continued toward Argus, the security booth directly in its path.
The guard stepped from the sanctuary of his perch with a perplexed expression, mouth agape. Then the idiot stepped forward, thrusting out a hand like a traffic guard stopping cars.
“What do we do?” the driver asked through the headset.
Sloane had a feeling about a man who hid his eyes behind sunglasses.
“What do we do?” the driver asked again.
“Keep going.”
The driver shifted. The Bradley geared down, gaining speed.
The guard looked like a statue, frozen with his hand out.
The driver glanced at Sloane. “Sir? Sir?”
Sloane watched.
At the last moment, the guard’s eyes widened, he dropped his hand, took three hurried steps, and launched himself out of the Bradley’s path. The big machine hit the booth at full speed, glass and fiberglass shattering. It snapped the arm of the gate like a twig and ripped through the cyclone fencing as if it were fish netting.
“Where?” the driver asked.
“Third building from the left,” Sloane directed.
In his headphones Sloane heard Kessler and Griffin talking.
“It doesn’t have to end this way, Colonel.”
“I already gave you that choice.”
“I meant for you.”
The driver shouted at Sloane. “The door’s not up.”
Sloane looked to the screen. The rolling gate was still down. Kessler had not reached the switch.
“What do we do?” The driver asked again.
“Can you take it down?” Sloane asked.
“Roger fucking that,” the driver shouted. “Brace yourself.”
GRIFFIN’S EYES NARROWED. The air-conditioning ducts and equipment hanging from the overhead steel rafters swayed violently. The building exterior rattled and shook. He looked down as the wall exploded inward, emitting an awful sound of metal ripping. The rolling door tore from its runner and waved like the tongue of some giant serpent, crashing to the ground.
The sheer force of the assault knocked down Griffin and his two men. By the time they had recovered, the gunner sitting atop the huge machine had trained the Bradley’s 50-mm gun on them, and half a dozen armed guardsmen were spilling out the back.
Griffin’s men put up no resistance.
Sloane stepped from the vehicle and helped Kessler to right his wheelchair. The plan had been for Kessler to get out the front of the building and raise the door for the Bradley. “You all right?” Sloane asked.
Kessler nodded as he got back atop his chair.
Sloane looked to the two men getting up off the ground. He recognized one to be Mr. Williams, the fisherman who had come to Three Tree Point and later forced Tina to swim in the mountain pool. Argus had got them out of Mexico unscathed.
Griffin stood defiant. “You’re too late, Mr. Sloane. You have no evidence.”
Sloane reached down and picked up a piece of the shattered hard drive, considering it.
“Are you referring to this? This is the hard drive from my son’s computer, Colonel. Nothing on here but some really violent video games his mother doesn’t like him playing anyway. He’ll be upset, though; he doesn’t take disappointment too well. How about you?”
Griffin looked to Kessler, then back to Sloane.
“We knew you were listening to our conversation at the beach house,” Sloane said. “So we told you what you wanted to hear.” Sloane turned to Kessler. “You look good in my jacket, Captain.”
Kessler wore Sloane’s leather jacket.
“We reset the transmitter, Colonel. Everything you just said in Captain Kessler’s office and this warehouse has been recorded.”
Griffin did not wilt. “It’s illegal. Argus’s attorneys will eat you alive. You’ll never get into court.”
“I wouldn’t make that bet, Colonel. Besides. I don’t have to get it into court, do I? I can just get it to the press and to the local authorities. And I’m sure the Justice Department will be very interested in it as well.”
“What do you want, Sloane? Park will pay you anything. He’ll pay the widow whatever she wants. Name the price.”
Sloane looked to Kessler before addressing the colonel.
“There is no price. That’s what you don’t understand. There is no amount of money to compensate her for what you took.” He stepped toward Mr. Williams. “I warned you not to come back,” he said. He turned to leave. Then he stopped. “What the hell.” He spun, hitting the man hard across the jaw, knocking him down. “And I warned you about threatening my family.”
“It’s illegal to use the military to conduct a civilian operation,” Griffin said. “How are you going to explain this?”
Kessler wheeled forward. “What civilian operation are you talking about? These men are from my former unit, and I can guarantee you there will be no record whatsoever of any civilian exercise. This was a training mission.” Kessler turned and looked up at the guardsman behind the 50-mm gun. “You appear to have driven off course, Sergeant.”
“Seriously off course, Captain,” the soldier agreed, smiling.
Kessler turned back to Griffin. “You know how a storm can wreak havoc with communications.”
CHARLES JENKINS REMOVED his headset and turned off the recorder. The re-coded transmitter had worked perfectly; so had Sloane and Kessler’s plan, with a few minor glitches. From the Explorer, Jenkins had watched the Bradley take out the security guard’s booth like a balsa-wood fake, then tear through the gated entrance. It had given him a perverse sense of satisfaction, and he couldn’t help but wish that Cool Hand Luke had ended in a similar manner, but the producer and director had gone for a more subtle ending.
During his self-imposed exile on Camano Island, Jenkins had read the biographies of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Lech Walesa, men who had taken down walls of injustice without ever firing a bullet or picking up a sledgehammer. But they were extraordinary people. Sometimes you had to physically destroy the walls. The world needed to see it, as with the Berlin Wall. But those men had been correct in their core belief. Injustice was not built of stone and mortar, or of metal. It was built of greed, inhumanity, and man’s thirst for power.
Jenkins stepped from his car and walked to where the guard booth now lay splintered and ruined. Bits of glass crunched beneath his boots and reflected the overhead lights on the security poles. Something hummed, a high-pitched whine that sounded like a motor straining. He heard a different sound to his right and turned to see the security guard rising unsteadily to his feet, his pristine uniform dirty and ripped at the knee. The guard looked to Jenkins, then back to the booth, dumbfounded.
Jenkins picked up the clipboard lying on the ground with the pen still attached by a chain. He tore off the page with Captain Kessler’s name, and tossed the clipboard at the man’s feet. Walking away, he heard something else crunch beneath the sole of his boot, stepped back, and bent to pick it up.
The guard’s sunglasses.
They were twisted and misshapen, both lenses shattered, just like the boss man’s glasses in the ending to Cool Hand Luke. Jenkins smiled. He might just have to start believing in coincidences after all.
BEVERLY FORD OPENED her front door. Her children stood beside her. “Please come in,” she said.
Sloane stepped in and made the introductions. “Beverly, I’d like to introduce Captain Robert Kessler, James’s commanding officer in Iraq.”
Wrongful Death: A Novel Page 30
