Phil Martin of the Washington Post got the next question, “Where is Hurst now and why just the Air Force?”
Hatten felt so alive on the podium. And he knew that President Caulfield would have loved to usher him off, but he couldn’t, they had a deal, so he was making the most of the opportunity. He used some charm, but not over the top, as this was a solemn time for most. “That’s two questions really, Phil, and I know you snuck that second one in because I can’t help but talk about the Air Force, but I’m going to allow it.
“Matt’s whereabouts are unknown at this time. We’ve lost his satellite signal, but have not found any evidence that he’s been injured or killed. On the issue of a single branch of the Military being used, it’s quite simple. We knew that Manuel had previously breached security within our government computer systems and even our military computers that were deemed unbreachable. We also knew he would come after Hurst. So the less that anyone knew the better chances the mission would be a success.
“Of course, few people anywhere realized just how far Manuel would go to make a point. Even though he’d shown just how ruthless he could be in the past, somehow a lot of people seemed to believe he was an overall good person. Well, if he was good, then he obviously went rogue, and when he did, he started killing our troops and sinking our ships.
“No good person would have done these things. The President trusted me and our proud branch of the military to do our job by implementing this. It’s just horrible that we were not able to stop this madman before a lot of good people died.”
General Hatten let himself get a little misty eyed when speaking about the loss of life. He stepped back with an outer sadness that hid his inner smugness as the President took back the podium to a flurry of hand waving. Unfortunately for the unchosen, he was down to the last question and it went to Susan Bell of The New York Times.
“Was Matt Hurst really working for the Government the whole time?” The question was asked with a bit of flippancy, and the way she hit “really” and tilted her head made her seem more than skeptical of the whole thing.
The President met her eyes when he spoke, “No, Susan, he wasn’t. Strange as the whole thing seems—and believe me I had my moments when I wanted nothing to do with hearing of his innocence—Matt Hurst was drawn into this. I’m going to make it simple and that’s not to say you need things simplified, I’m just saying the simplest explanation is sometimes the best one.
“Now I had occasion to talk to this young man two years ago after we brought him back ruined from the horrors of war. I can tell you that once he realized that these people intended to destroy his nation in such a horrifying way, he felt the same as any honest patriot felt during Pearl Harbor or 9/11, he enlisted rather than be drafted. He made it up in his mind right then and there that if any true patriot were in his situation, they would fight for their country to the death.
“So imagine Matt being on a landing craft during D-day. There was no turning back and you could not quit, war was coming. By that explanation, we took him to war, he gave his patriotic all and he survived, which makes him a veteran. So Susan, I guess I was wrong in my initial assumption. He was working for us the minute an enemy of our country took him hostage, and there were people within our Government that were trying to get me on board with that concept.
“Our young hero was sending us messages, but they were very abstruse in nature, as he was limited by time and circumstances when he was sending them. Unfortunately, when you have this job, the rights and safety of an individual pale in comparison to the rights and safety of an entire nation, so it took me a while to get with it. But get with it I did.
“Matt came back to us and didn’t ask for anything. He just went on with his life and tried to make a positive change to this great land in new ways. I know practically nothing about gaming, but apparently his game concept, American Pride, is based on patriotism. Well, I don’t have to be a big fan of gaming to be a fan of that or Matt Hurst, for that matter.
“The fact is, we owe this young man. Sadly, his family and countless others have paid a horrible price for our continued freedom. With that somber note I leave you with the consideration that although we are still a great nation, we now know that with the new millennium comes new technological innovations that can be used for evil as well as good. We also are being forced to see we have weaknesses attributed to these advancements and that our enemies don’t care about our values on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
“So next time you find yourself not valuing your freedom, think about the sacrifices this young man, our military men and women, and countless others have made in your behalf.”
Susan Bell looked very touched that her question elicited such an emotional response, especially seeing it was a very antagonistic approach that she had in the first place, “Thank you for your candor, Sir.”
“No problem Susan, you know you can always count on me for that. Thank you and God bless us all.”
* * *
Doug look bewildered, “Why did they say that, Matt? You killed Pablo and his cohort.”
“I don’t know. First my mind has to wrap around being on the other end of a broadcast like that. I can tell you, it’s a lot less terrifying this way.”
He looked over at Luke and Andy and was receiving a very approving and admirable look, the look every soldier who ever stepped off a plane from defending his country should get. His four-legged savior was actually sitting by Luke and looking at him too, with an even toothier grin.
Matt admonished, “I don’t know what you three are smiling about, you just stepped in it deeper than you could ever imagine. They had a reason for saying what they did. You must understand that. All of you,” he also turned to Doug, “have just stepped smack dab into a major conspiracy. It’s clean on their end. Did anyone ever see Manuel Noriega again? But you three pose a loose end and if they ever found out that you know, your lives could be in peril. Don’t any of you think otherwise.”
Luke looked at him with a twinkle Kris Kringle would be proud of, “Just the same as it’s always been, Son.”
Doug called Matt over to Luke’s office door where he observed the medals, his eyes focusing on the Silver Star.
“I think Luke and Andy understand.”
* * *
Dr. Arshad Singh closed his door and sat in his chair. He closed his eyes for one second and started falling down the darkness so quickly he had to jerk himself awake. He gulped the coffee in his hand. It was just above drinking temperature, but he drank anyway, slightly scalding himself in the process. He turned his computer screen on and brought up his reports. He had a few minutes to get some organizing done. Why he shut his eyes he’ll never know because now he could not stop thinking about sleep.
Coming from New Delhi, this situation tonight was actually calm given the circumstances. He remembered a bad heat wave one year, hundreds died in his understaffed and overwrought hospital. That and the wailing of the families was one of those things he tried to block out of his memory, but it always surfaced when he thought he had it bad in whatever current situation he might find himself. His Skype light was flashing so he pushed the connect button and his sister Sanji was on the screen live. Apparently she’d heard the news.
“Hello, Brother, how are you?”
Getting his number one concern out of the way, he first asked, “Hello, Sanji, how are Mom and Dad.”
“They are fine, they wanted me to call you and make sure you are okay.”
“They really won’t step into the screen?”
“You know them and technology, Brother, so what are you doing? Why aren’t you busy helping people?”
“I have been, I needed to get off my feet for a few minutes. You got really lucky reaching me.”
“Really, what’s the most intriguing case so far?”
“You know I can’t talk about that stuff here, this is a very protected place when it comes to medical privacy, but there is one case that bothers me, although
it’s not related to the plane crash.”
“You know I’m in my last year of Medical School, so test me.”
“No sister, I’m afraid this is out of your league. It’s a neurotoxin case, most likely a planned attack. I have a mother and her four-year-old son battling for their lives. They were brought in stable, but both are comatose. I took the samples I could, but being in a facility that lacks the testing tools I need and lacking credentials in this country I have to defer this. Unfortunately, due to the plane and ferry tragedy, their ride out of here has been delayed. I just know that if I had the right tools, I could be the one to solve this. There has been a steady decrease in vitals over the last six hours and I fear they won’t make a long plane ride now.”
“Why don’t you ask Mansoor to help you.”
“Mansoor?”
“For such a smart man, sometimes you can be so dumb. Your cousin is in Brazil, has been for a year and a half. His specialty is neurotoxins. He’s working for some big pharmaceutical company on stroke recovery.”
“I do remember Mom and Dad writing me and telling me that, but my own life is so crazy, I just let it slip away as information I didn’t need to retain.”
“Well retain it now.”
“I will. E-mail me all his contact info right away. I need to get back to work. Bye, Mom and Dad.
From off the screen he heard a unison, “Bye, Son.”
He hung up very happy. He would be able to get Mansoor whatever data he had and maybe he could help the forwarding doctors solve this case. Mansoor could be on it as soon as the Sandler Neurology Center at UCSF sent him the data; which reminded him, his data should be ready by now. He fought off fatigue once more and got moving, half of staying up was moving, although he was pretty sure he was going to fall asleep walking one of these days.
* * *
Malcolm Ward thought he’d heard and seen it all. Although he was just twenty-four years of age, he had covered a lot of the road to manhood in that time; which was the reason he ended up with Frederick Tedesco, because a lot of that road was hard to shake off. The Company can tell you how to handle stress—they have it all compartmentalized for you in manuals and videos and counselors; problem was, everyone was different and each person had his or her own personal breaking point, the point where they’d seen enough children raped and enough fathers left holding their dead families to last a lifetime of nightmares.
His last mission was to infiltrate and eliminate anyone that survived a drone strike on the group that blew up a CIA operated building in Kandahar. One of their informants was apparently a double agent and suicide bombed the building, killing seven agents and analysts. Once they got word of the whereabouts of the compound, he and his spotter set out.
Based on their intelligence report, an air strike was set and he was to pick up the strays. At the designated hour, the drone made its attack. Unfortunately, it only blew up the back of the building leaving many of the enemy in the front. The first man made a move for the warehouse and vehicles to the right. Malcolm shot him in the leg at the knee. It severed his knee and threads of flesh and clothing were the only things holding it together at all.
Arterial spurt abounding, the man was screaming for help, and a second one came out to help the first. Malcolm let him get to his friend and then blew his knee out, too. It was slightly high, so no severance, but the same effect took place. Now two were pleading for their brothers and this is where he got evil. He took several wild shots around the fallen men. Horrible shots that led the men left to believe that those were lucky shots that struck their brethren.
Sure enough, one of hidden combatants came out for his brothers, but he was not the one that he had the scope on. No, it was that gentleman standing in the doorway watching the scene with bated breath. The shot took him through the brick wall right in the heart, the wall puffing in a cloud of brown dust. The third man looked back and upon seeing this understood he had been hoodwinked.
He ran low toward the destination of cover and cars across the compound. Even though the man was crouch running with his head bent slightly forward, Malcolm was able to just blow the top of his head off, the bullet going in just one inch under the scalp and removing the skull plate. When he hit the ground, the contents of his head spilled out in a grotesque show of the horrors of war.
Malcolm then quickly put the decoys out of their misery as surely no one else was coming out. He couldn’t be sure he’d gotten them all though, as he had no idea how many where here to begin with. He would have to go in. Seeing it was just the two of them, they flipped. He lost. His spotter, Ashton Paulson, would be his cover. He shouldered his sniper rifle and drew his Colt for the trip. Using the same logic as the enemy, he circled to the warehouse and vehicle cover. He holstered the pistol and re-evaluated with the scope. Nothing.
Switching back to the pistol he advanced on the house on a direct angle with the corner of the house. Once safely against the wall he flattened and drew the flash grenade. He was about to pull the pin and throw it in the window when he heard the sobbing, and then Farsi being spoken, he heard. “Baba, Baba, wake up.” More sobbing, “Baba, they will come.”
He didn’t know why, but he did not throw the grenade and he entered the building with less deadly intent than was healthy for a man in his occupation. He spoke and understood a few words in Farsi and he knew inflection. His wall shot orphaned this person behind this voice, or at least took his father. He turned the corner to meet the terrified eyes of the young man, still pulling on the lapels of his fallen father.
Malcolm spoke, “I won’t hurt you,” it was one of the phrases he’d learned to say, needing it often. This time the words had no effect; the boy was maybe twelve and obviously had a lifetime of brainwashing against the great evil, not to mention his mind only knew war, and when a child’s eyes only see war, then they honestly see martyrdom as a righteous act.
Malcolm said it with more compassion this time, “I won’t hurt you.” At those words the kid went for his father’s rifle that lay on the ground. Malcolm was yelling, “No” when it went too far and he shot the boy in the chest with the Colt. The boy had been wearing sandals and he was literally blown right out of them. He lay against the back wall and as Malcolm approached with the pleading look of why, the boy tried to lift the gun and Malcolm fired again, hitting him in the heart.
According to his spotter, he left the building using no military movements whatsoever. He just sulked as he walked out and broke all the rules on the return trip, including entering the base the same way they had left. He had finally found his breaking point and it put his spotter’s life at risk the whole way back.
Malcolm’s mind came back to the present as he parked the van, unbuckled, and got into the back through the blackout curtain. The van was a commercial type, which bore no side windows and had heavily tinted windows in the back. There was padding on the back floor, along with a padded resting arch for his rifle; and when he lay prone, there was also a small sliding plate on the door that he could pull back so he could get the rifle barrel out.
The parking structure had railings on the edges of the upper lot, but the van sat high and he was able to scope the front of the building over it. A massive crowd had gathered in front of the hospital, and after hearing the Presidents speech, he knew why.
Malcolm now saw why Frederick had chosen this as his first assignment back. There was no misunderstanding that helping this hero stay alive was a very important and noble thing to do. There was no ambiguity in the mission and he could live with the thought of whom he was helping. Malcolm cared about Matt Hurst without ever having met him.
Frederick helped him accept that if he hadn’t killed that boy, he would be the one dead. If he could ever get the kids accusatory and hateful eyes out of his thoughts, then maybe he could really accept that and he could have some recovery. Instead, all he could see in his subconscious were those incriminating eyes of hatred aimed at him.
Malcolm closed the left plate and opened
the one on the right side door. There were two office buildings in the hospital plaza. Combined with the parking structure they made a foursquare with the hospital, with grass and benches in the center. Directly across from the van’s parking spot was a four-story specialist office where he could see straight across to its roof. On the right was another four-story office building; same deal, he had a good view of the roof. He would have to toggle between the two ports to get the complete picture, but he had a clean shot on anything not directly below him. That thought occurred to him, but he wanted the top of the garage as it afforded the rooftops of the office buildings. If he took a shot from the top, it would be much easier to walk away from the van and rifle, both untraceable. If he shot? Malcolm hoped there would be no “if.”
Not long ago, he’d promised himself there would never be another shot, yet here he was, bandaged back together, sent back to do that robot thing he did best. Pull the trigger.
Malcolm thought about Hurst’s story and he’d realized that he was just wallowing in self-pity with his piddly situation. Matt selflessly lost everything in the physical world a person could lose. All he was doing was selfishly battling his own internal demons.
Apparently Frederick considered that he would see this and it would prod him to get back to what had him here in the first place, his loathing of injustice and inequity. It was his driving force—he hated it, hated to see all the injustice in the world.
In college he knew what he wanted the minute the CIA recruiter asked to talk to him. He’d heard stories from the Sixties of this happening, but thought it outdated in today’s technological world for the CIA to recruit live like that. He was wrong, of course, and in very short time, he was working for The Company.
All his life he had always been the best at everything. When they’d found him, he was captain of the baseball team, debate team, and a Delta pledge from his father at UCLA. He was definitely going places. Unfortunately for academia, he clearly saw where that would lead and he didn’t like it so much. Many of his contemporaries were taking the gold-lined path that privilege provided in this country, and surely he was tempted to be one of them, but then it kind of hit him . . . then what? Wife, kids, suburbs, GOLF!
Without Wrath (Harbinger of Change Book 3) Page 26
