by Jason Briggs
I opened the menu and looked it over. Rosie’s offered the typical diner fare: breakfast with every possible way to combine eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, and pancakes. There were hash browns and biscuits and gravy as well. The lunch options included chicken fried steak, baked chicken, sliced roast beef, and a dozen different sandwiches and burgers. I decided I was in the mood for breakfast and, after settling a mental debate over an omelet or scrambled eggs, I chose the combination platter. I shut the menu just as a lady approached the table with my coffee and my water. She set them down and tugged out a straw from her apron, set it on the table.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Lana. I’ll be your server today. What can I get you to eat?”
After I recited my order, she indicated to the end of the table. “Cream and sugar are over there. You want ketchup?”
“No, thank you.”
“All right then. I’ll be back.”
She headed back to the front, and I responded to some emails and texts while I waited. When the food arrived, I took my time eating. Fifteen minutes later, the plate was clean and I was full. Lana returned to take my plate away, replacing it with a receipt that had a smiley face drawn on it. “I can take it at the register when you’re ready. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Yes. To be honest, I came here to see you, Lana.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Do I know you?”
“No. We’ve never met. I’m an investigator with the Federal Investigative Directorate, a division of Homeland Security.”
“Am I in some sort of trouble?”
“No, not at all.” I put on a disarming smile. “I wanted to know if I could ask you a few questions about your former fiancé, Marcus Treadwell.”
She took a short, tentative step back. “Marcus? Why? What’s he done?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “He hasn’t done anything. I’m trying to find out what really happened during his last deployment. I thought you might be able to help with that.”
“If you came over here for answers, then you came to the wrong person. Marcus, he didn’t tell me anything. I can send you away with plenty of cherry pie, but answers I don’t have.”
“I know you’re in the middle of your shift. Do you think we could talk outside when you take your break? I just need a couple minutes. That’s all.”
Her jaw tightened and she looked away, shaking her head like she was mad at the world. “Hold on a minute.” She left and disappeared into the kitchen. I was starting to think she had abandoned me when she reappeared and came back to the table. “I went ahead and took my break early. It’s slow enough around here right now. Can I sit?”
I extended my hand across the table. “Please.”
She slid in. She still looked angry. “Why do they have you out here asking me about Marcus?”
“We know that something happened while he was in Afghanistan. But the details of what exactly still aren’t clear.”
“All that happened almost a year ago now. Why are you just now coming around asking questions? It’s a little late, don’t you think?”
“It seems like the events of that night were buried. I’m trying to dig them up.”
She huffed and looked away. “That’s just like the government to miss something so glaringly obvious.”
“Lana, I didn’t mean that the events of that night were mishandled and forgotten. I mean that I think it was covered up.”
She turned back to me and blinked. “What?”
“I’m completely in the dark here. That’s why I need to know anything you think could help me get to the bottom of this.”
She held up her left hand and pointed to it with her right. “We were engaged. When he called and said they were sending him home early, I was thrilled—we were getting married when he got back home from his last deployment. But as soon as I saw him walk back through my door, I knew he wasn’t right. I tried for almost four months to get something out of him. Finally, he broke enough to tell me that two of their men had died and three were no longer fit for service. But he never told me why. He never told me anything. He just stopped talking and totally shut down.” She looked out the window. Tears had started to rim her eyes. “I had to call off the engagement. I could have put up with just about anything. But him not talking, growing sullen and angrier every day, punching holes in the walls.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t help him if he wasn’t going to open up.”
“I’m sorry, Lana.”
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.”
“Did the Army give a reason why they discharged him?”
“They diagnosed him with acute PTSD, but for whatever reason, they didn’t classify his situation as a medically related discharge.”
“And you don’t agree with that diagnosis.”
“No—I mean, I don’t know. Look, I’m a waitress for crying out loud. What do I know about how war can mess with your mind? I don’t know what happened over there. Could it have given him PTSD? I’m sure of it. Happens to a lot of good men and women. But what I’m also sure of is that he was holding onto a secret that was eating him alive.”
“Whatever happened in Afghanistan,” I said, “I think he was under orders not to disclose it. Did you know the events of his last deployment are classified?”
“No. They are?”
“I want to help, but I can’t do that unless I talk with Marcus and he tells me the truth. The problem is, I don’t know where he is. I called his mother up in Charlotte but she swore she doesn’t know.”
“He didn’t tell me where he was going.”
I studied her for a moment. The flick of the eyes, the downward glance, the index finger picking at the thumb. “He didn’t tell you,” I said, “but you know where he is.”
“He doesn’t want anyone to know. If he did, he would have told someone. Marcus loved the military. All he ever dreamed of and all he ever wanted was to be a Delta operator. And he did it. He did what most men never could, and became the best of the best.” Her face fell. “And then that was all taken away from him. And no one in the military or in D.C. had the balls to spend more than five minutes asking why two of our men were dead and three were in such bad shape they had to be medically unfit for service. And now you’re here telling me it’s a cover-up?”
“And if people like me keep hitting dead ends, then the truth will stay buried forever and Marcus will never get the healing he needs. Is that what you want for him?”
“No,” she said. “Here, let me have your phone.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Florida Everglades is the largest remaining subtropical wilderness in the United States, nearly two million acres of wetlands dominated by mangrove forests, sawgrass marshes, and wet prairies. I kept my hand on the tiller as I worked my way up a narrow inlet and deeper into the bowels of the untamed swamp. I had borrowed Roscoe’s skiff for the trip. The fifteen-foot aluminum boat had a flat-bottom hull and a 75HP trolling motor at the stern, perfect for navigating tree-choked swamps.
The sun was already low on the western horizon and the sky around me had started to dim substantially from the clear daylight it had been when I had entered the swamp a half hour ago. I continued inward, navigating the tangled web of waterways, all the while feeling increasingly isolated from the world. I passed a great egret wading through the dark water. It twisted its spindly neck and raised its head, looking at me in the same way I might look at Bigfoot. There was a fair chance the bird had never seen a human before.
I swung the tiller to the right and the boat’s bow curved left around a stand of cypress. The waterway straightened and I twisted the tiller and accelerated faster until I saw a hardwood hammock up ahead and made for it. The dry patch of land stood half a foot higher than the water and was choked with gumbo limbo and mahogany. I came in on idle and tied off on a thick tree root before cutting the engine and tossing my gear onto the dirt. I stepped out of the boat and navigated around a thick blanket of fern until I fo
und a patch of dry leaves where I could drop my gear. The light was fading fast, so I got to work bringing out my camping hammock and fastened each end to the outstretched arm of a gumbo limbo tree. I suspended six feet off the ground; it would dip lower once I got into it and I didn’t like the idea of only being a couple of feet off the ground. I ate some deer jerky, an apple, and downed some water for my dinner, then plucked out a lantern from my pack. I held down a button on the side, and when I released it five seconds later, the LED light started to flash in a rhythmic pattern. I hung it over a broken twig on the tree’s trunk. That finished, I hung up my pack, grabbed a fixed blade knife and my .45, and climbed up the tree and slipped into my hammock. I adjusted my sleeping pad below me and then zipped up for the night.
I was tired. The events of the last few days had been powered by adrenaline and little sleep. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the swamp: the chirp of crickets, the rhythmic croak of frogs, and the occasional hard, guttural squawk of the mangrove cuckoo. The symphony lulled me to sleep within minutes.
I woke to the sun’s rays piercing through the canopy of leaves and branches above me. Somewhere a few birds sang quietly, almost as if they were scared to give away their presence to some predator. My muscles ached from spending all night immobilized, but I felt rested and recharged. All I could think of for the present was unzipping my cocoon and getting my feet on the ground. I pinched at the zipper and slid it down toward my feet, then reached up to the branch above my head and pulled myself into a sitting position.
Below me, several feet from my tree, a man was sitting cross-legged on the soft ground. He wore tattered jeans and a dirty AC/DC T-shirt over a slender but muscular frame. His beard was thick and bushy and tendrils of scraggly brown hair reached nearly to his shoulders. His wrists sat on his knees, his hands drooping toward the ground, back straight, striking blue eyes staring at me like a hawk. A fixed-blade knife was stuck in the dirt in front of him.
The lantern was off the tree, sitting next to him, turned off. He plucked up the knife and waved it toward the lantern. “That was a cute little trick with the light. Was that your idea?”
“It was.” Treadwell was a former Delta man, and I knew he would have been trained in morse code. Krugman, the FID’s genius lab tech, had helped me program the lantern with a message blinking his name.
An untrusting smile broke over his face. “Well, here I am. I guess you’re here to kill me.” He said it matter-of-factly like he wasn’t surprised or even the slightest bit bothered by it.
“No,” I corrected. “I came out here to talk with you. That’s all.”
“You’ll have to forgive my skepticism. Are you armed?”
“I have a tactical knife and my Glock up here.”
“Why don’t you toss them over here?”
I took hold of them and tossed them over. He gathered them and placed them behind him. “Come on down. I’m sure you’re feeling a little stiff after a night in that thing.”
I reached back up and lifted myself out of the hammock, then set the toe of my shoe against a lower branch and put my weight into it. I swung the rest of my body down and both feet landed simultaneously on the soft ground.
“Right there.” Treadwell nodded to a thick limb that grew parallel to the ground. It was thicker than my torso. I took a seat. “How did you find me?” he asked.
“Lana.”
His eyes narrowed. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or surprised or both. “I guess that makes sense. She’s about the only one who would know. What did you do to her?”
“I didn’t do anything to her. She’s working at the diner. I went up there yesterday and asked her if we could talk, just like I’m doing right now.”
“I’m not sure how you think I can believe that.”
“I’ve got a sat phone in my pack over there. You want to call her and check for yourself?”
I watched as he considered the offer, and he seemed to relax slightly, knowing that the option was available to him. “Maybe,” he replied. “For now, what exactly are we here to discuss? I’ve stayed quiet, just like you guys asked.” He tossed his hands out. “I’m here, in this glorious swamp. I don’t know how much more quiet I could get.”
“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about, Marcus.”
He huffed indignantly. “Just who are you?”
“I’m an agent with Homeland. I’m looking into the events of your last deployment.”
“Are you now? Since when is Uncle Sam interested in what happened over there? They were never interested before.”
“There have been good people who have tried to sound an alarm. But to be honest, they keep dying. Someone is trying to cover all this up. I think you might be one of the only people with some answers. I need your help, Marcus.”
“I can’t help you,” he said. “Whoever these people are, they’re too powerful.”
“So you’re just going to live in the Glades for the rest of your life? What are you doing all the way back in here, anyway?”
“My dad used to take me camping out here when I was a kid. He made a sport out of catching snakes. Cottonmouth and rattlers mostly. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to join Delta. I’m comfortable in nature. Except for the cold. I really hate being cold.”
“So that’s it? You’re just going to eat gator meat for the rest of your life? Live off the grid and forget the world?”
“You think I like living out here?” He snapped. “I’m not a swamp rat. This place is the pits.”
“Then let me help you. Help me understand what went down in Afghanistan.” His shoulders slumped slightly, and he took a deep breath. He looked off into the distance and seemed to go somewhere I couldn’t follow. “Marcus.” He looked at me. “What really happened over there?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Treadwell grabbed up his knife, stood up, and walked to a bald cypress. He stuck the tip of his knife into the trunk and looked off toward the water. “My element was heading to a town to meet an informant who knew the whereabouts of a local insurgence leader. Our directive was to go in small, so we hoofed it over the mountain and came back down onto the desert floor. No helos, no Humvees. We hit our waypoint just after 2200 hours and I got in about five hours of shuteye before my Sergeant Major woke me so I could take my slot in the overwatch rotation.”
Treadwell grew quiet for a couple of minutes. I watched his hands and his neck gradually tense as he thought back over the events that had changed his life forever. “I felt like someone had slipped me a few Benadryls,” he continued. “I couldn’t keep my eyes open at first. But I got up the hill and the cold air helped to keep me awake. Around 0500 I watched my commander, Major Archer, emerge from his sleeping bag and start to wander around like he was lost. He looked like a drunk stumbling out of a bar. Then he threw up all over his boots and then clapped his hands over his ears, like this”—Treadwell imitated the action—“and started shaking his head like there was something inside it and he was trying to get it out. Then he started banging his head on this big rock. And he wouldn’t stop. He just kept slamming his forehead into it like he was trying to crack the rock.”
My stomach twisted as I continued to listen.
“Then Sergeant Major Carlson gets up and starts doing the exact same thing. He pukes, stumbles around, and starts hitting his head on a different rock. Then...” Treadwell drifted off. When he spoke again, his voice was thick, choked with grief and anger. “I watched my commander take out his sidearm and blow his own brains out. No hesitation at all, no second thoughts. He did it with the confident ease of someone shooting a target downrange. And then... then my Sergeant Major did it too. By the time Major Archer got out of his bag to the time they both were dead was no more than three minutes. Just like that, they were gone. I haven’t seen worse things in a horror movie.”
“I’m sorry, Marcus.”
“Yeah... well. The rest of my element, they never stirred, never heard a thing. I called it in and wh
en the birds came to get us, I had to help to carry them to the helos—all three of them. They didn’t wake up until we got back to base.”
“Lana said they were unfit for service after that?”
He nodded. “Coleman, Diaz, and Gaskin. Damn good men. They never were right after that night. When they woke up, they had the minds of an eight-year-old. Coleman’s still in a psych ward in California. I was the only one who got off with no adverse effects. After the sleepiness wore off, I was fine.”
“What was the formal diagnosis?”
“Acute PTSD,” Treadwell said dryly. “That, and the after-effects of some bad booster shots we got before we deployed. The vaccines were routine, but they claimed something was defective in them. A ‘bad batch’ is what Major Dodson called them. And I never did get anything more than a rehashed version of those two explanations.”
By the time Treadwell finished telling me the details of that abominable night, my blood was boiling. I looked down to see my hands curled into fists.
“So why did you leave the Army if you were all right?”
“I was scared. Something wasn’t right. I started getting really angry, and that was affecting everything I did. Major Dodson recommended that I discharge. He said he was concerned that I might do something rash, something I’d regret. I didn’t disagree with him, so I left. And they let me.”
“So then why are you holed up here in the Everglades?” I asked.
“I started asking questions of my own, trying to figure out what really happened that night. But I kept hitting wall after wall. I even had my blood work taken by an independent doctor off-base. He couldn't find any traces of anything. It was after I went and visited Diaz at his place in Atlanta that I found an unaddressed note in my mailbox telling me to back off. But I was like ‘screw that.’ I wanted to know what they did to my troop. So I kept on—even went to the Delta commander and the J-SOC commanders with it. They heard me out, and I believe they meant well. They’re good men. But all they could do was forward my concerns to people they trusted. Nothing ever came of it. Just the same explanations as before. One night I arrived back home from the bar to find a man sitting on my couch. He had a gun pointed loosely at me, like holding a firearm was the most natural thing to him. And he told me that if I didn’t stop asking questions, or if I told anyone about the conversation we were having, then it would be all over.”
