Cross down, p.7
Cross Down, page 7
“I saw that as well,” I say. “High level indeed. How did the principals’ meeting go?”
“A cluster you-know-what. Lots of finger-pointing, blame game going full force, and a couple of shouting matches. General Grissom did his best to rein them in, but Secretary Landsdale from Homeland Security kept needling him. Big disagreement as to the breadth and depth of the attack coming our way. President Kent just sat there looking depressed. Congress is still sitting on its hands regarding his legislative program. Poor guy.”
I rub the back of my head. “Who represented Metro PD?”
“Some captain I didn’t know.”
“Figures,” I say. I look around—paranoia can spread easily—and say, “Alex told me something just before he was shot, something he’d figured out and planned to bring up at the meeting. He said we were looking at the terrorist attacks in the wrong way. The patterns are too random, like they’ve been carefully planned out to look random and unconnected.”
“Interesting. Then what?”
“Then the bullets started flying.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, would’ve loved to know more about what he was thinking.”
Ned steps up to me and motions me closer. “Things are worse than we’d imagined, John.”
Chapter
27
I’ve known Ned for many years, have worked with him on a number of hard cases, but there’s something in his eyes now I’ve never seen before.
Pure despair.
“There’s a…rot or something going on within all areas of the government, civilian and military. Different philosophies—anti-government, anti-progressive, anti-conservative. Just a series of hate groups that have members everywhere. Shit, John, last week, half the members of the FBI field office in Des Moines were arrested for giving support to extremist groups.”
“Didn’t see that on the news.”
“And you won’t. Things just seem to be…slipping away.”
My phone vibrates. I check the incoming call, see it’s from Metro PD. I let it go to voice mail to join its brethren. “I’ve got something to pass along,” I say. “Got a text and phone call from an army buddy of mine, Mel Carr. We served together, did a classified mission two years back in Afghanistan.”
“Whoa, wait a sec. I thought you’ve been out of the army for years.”
“But I stayed in the Army Reserve. And I got called up.”
“What was the mission?”
“Classified.”
“John…”
I say, “I was part of a small group of highly skilled soldiers—both active duty and reserve—escorting a CIA officer into Afghanistan. In and out, but dangerous. Mel is stationed at Fort Bragg with the Eighty-Second Airborne. He said that the base is on lockdown, and certain soldiers are being called up and sent out on secret TDYs. He also said something that just didn’t make sense.”
“Go on.”
“Mel was using a burner phone, and he said that what we did and saw in Afghanistan two years back is connected to the terrorist attacks.”
“Crap, John, what did you guys do over there?”
“A typical mission, Ned, nothing that really stands out when I think about it.”
Ned says, “You need to go see your guy Mel.”
“But Alex—”
Ned’s face changes from sympathy to something else. “Alex has his family around him. He’s getting the best care. If you want to do what’s right for him, for his family, and, damn it, for all of us, you need to go to Fort Bragg.”
I loudly exhale. “You’re right. I just hate leaving everyone, especially Willow. She’s scared. She’s scared of going to school. She sees how the teachers are acting.”
“You don’t think Bree or Nana Mama will take care of her?”
“No, it’s just—”
Ned softly slaps my shoulder. “I know. It’s hard leaving her behind and letting others protect her, no matter how much you trust them. You know you’d do a better job. But John, it has to be done.”
I hear a phone chime; this time, it’s Ned’s. He looks at it and says to me, “You can reach me anytime, anyplace. But John, I’m going to say something to you I’ve never said before.”
“Be careful?” I ask.
“No,” he says, bringing his phone to his ear. “Don’t trust anyone.”
Part Two
Chapter
28
My mind is racing as I try to figure out who I should call, what I should pack, and when to talk to Willow, but all these urgent thoughts stop when I go see Alex in the ICU. I enter his glassed-in room in front of the nurses’ station and find myself unexpectedly alone. There’s humming, clicking, and hissing from the complicated equipment in here that’s keeping Alex alive.
I go to the side of his bed, pick up his hand, give it a squeeze. “I know you can hear me, Alex, no matter how wired up you are.”
His eyes are closed; there’s a tube in his mouth; his face is swollen, and his skin has an unhealthy pallor. IVs are in both arms, and hanging from the bed’s lower frame is a clear plastic bag holding his urine.
I give his hand another squeeze. “You and I…we’ve been in tough scrapes before. Beat up, cut, wounded, trapped in places where we had to fight hard to make it out. But this time…I failed you, Alex. I should have protected you better. That’s always been my job, right from the start. You had the brains, I had the brawn, and I was supposed to keep you safe.”
My voice breaks, and I have to swallow a few times to continue.
“I could use your brains now, Alex. It seems like a lot of bad stuff is happening. It’s like that Irish poet wrote in that poem you quoted to me a long time back: ‘The center cannot hold.’ Right? We’re scrambling to keep the center together, me and a lot of others. But Alex…we’re missing you. We surely could use you.” I lean in closer. “Whatever happens, I’ll be back to protect you and your family. You can count on that.”
I kiss his dry forehead.
“I love you, Alex.”
A few hours later, everything is packed, everything is arranged, and I’m at Alex’s home with Jannie and Willow. His son Damon has arrived and is at the hospital with Nana Mama and Bree. Jannie is in the kitchen fixing a meal for herself and Willow and preparing additional food to bring back to the rest of the family keeping vigil by Alex’s bed in the trauma ICU.
I sit across the dining-room table from my daughter. Willow’s pretty face is scrunched up in sadness and fear. She looks like she’s been cast forward decades to deal with the problems of an adult woman. “Is Uncle Alex going to be all right?” she asks, her voice quavering just a bit.
I reach across the shiny dining-room table and take her hands in mine. “He’s in the best hospital we’ve got being treated by the best doctors and nurses.” I don’t want to lie to my little girl, and she lets my nonanswer pass.
A solemn nod. “We’re all praying for him.”
“We are.”
“Then he’ll be safe, I know it.”
And the deep, dark cynical part of me thinks, Prayers to God didn’t help your mom in the end, did they, but I shut that down. I say, “I’ve got to go away for a while. I’ll try to call you every day and I want you to listen to Jannie and Bree and Damon and Nana Mama.”
Willow wrinkles her nose. “Do I have to listen to Ali?”
I nearly laugh. “No, you don’t have to listen to Ali.”
“Are you going after the bad men who hurt Uncle Alex?”
Good question. “I’m going after some bad men for sure, honey. But don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
Another nod. “I know you’ll catch them.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Will you do me one favor while I’m away?”
“Sure, Daddy.”
I say, “I know it’s heavy and uncomfortable, but please wear your new knapsack to school every day. Please?”
“It feels stiff. I don’t like it.”
“But wear it for me. Please. When I get back, I’ll get you a new one that feels better.”
“Okay.”
I stand up, go around the table, and give her a big smothering hug that I want to last forever, knowing that at this moment, at least, she is safe.
But I have to go.
I kneel down, give her kisses on her cheeks—now slick with tears—and say, “Love you, Willow.”
“Love you too, Daddy.”
I get up and walk quickly out of the house, going after the bad men.
Alone.
Chapter
29
At a gas station with a convenience store off the highway just outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, I decide it’s time to take a break from a night of driving. I’m about an hour away from Fort Bragg, but my body is weary and my eyelids are heavy, and me nodding off and wrapping my Grand Cherokee around a tall pine tree won’t do anybody any good.
I go into the store. There’s a ding-ding as the door opens.
An older man sits on a stool, and a younger man who looks like him—probably his son—stands at a corner rack restocking cigarettes and cigars. The older man slides off the stool and I note the pistol riding high on a waist holster. “Help you?” he asks. His son glares at me, and I spot a pump-action shotgun leaning against the wall next to him.
“I’d like to fill up my car, please,” I say.
The older man says, “All of our pumps have credit card readers.”
I slowly and deliberately take my wallet out. “I’d rather pay cash.”
He nods. “Gonna need a deposit—you can come back in and get your change. Sorry, that’s the way it is. Can’t trust no one, even your neighbors or the government. Bad times.”
Bad times indeed, I think. I open my wallet, slip out three twenty-dollar bills. “This enough of a deposit?”
“Guess so.”
I go out into the late evening—or early morning—and top off my Cherokee, then go back into the store and pick up some bottled water, beef jerky, crackers, a few other snacks. I go to the counter and he rings up my purchases and says, “With what you bought in gas and the money you left, that’s five bucks even.”
I take out my wallet again. “Ask you a question?”
He starts putting my purchases into a white plastic bag. “Questions are free, son. Not sure about the answers.”
I put down a twenty-dollar bill. “I’m looking for a motel nearby. Quiet. Out of the way. Managers who aren’t too nosy and will take cash.”
“Well…”
I place another twenty on the counter. “I’m not looking for any trouble, you understand. Just a clean place to sleep for a few hours.”
He smiles, scoops up the money, hands me the bulging white plastic bag. “The Pine Grove Motel. You leave here, take a right, go down the road a piece, maybe two miles. Take a right onto Youngstown Road. You’ll come to an intersection. It’ll be right there.”
“Thanks,” I say, picking up the bag.
The old man adds, “Fella, from the height and size of you, maybe you’re not looking for trouble, but I got a feeling trouble is looking for you.”
“If it comes here,” I say, “will you send it in the other direction?”
The son in the corner by the shotgun laughs, and I leave.
Not much of a drive to the Pine Grove Motel, but I flip through the stations on the Cherokee’s radio, looking to hear what’s going on out there in talk-show land this early morning in America. In my travels south from DC, I played various jazz stations on satellite radio, but after a while I realized I wasn’t doing my job. I needed to know what was being said out there, from coast to coast. I had to gather intelligence.
It wasn’t pretty.
In my hours of driving, I heard the terrorist attacks—although not officially linked together—blamed on the Jews, the Muslims, gun-owner nuts, gun-control nuts, feminazis, incels (involuntary celibates), vegans, anti-vaxxers, pro-vaxxers, and about a half a dozen other groups.
Every caller, every talk-show host, was sure that he or she was the only one who knew the real truth and had the real solutions. It was always “the others” who should be arrested.
In the darkness of the night and my own thoughts, I think of my rough upbringing, how I’d practically lived by myself as a preteen with my father long gone and my mother gone most of the time, both sucked into the world of drugs and crime. If it weren’t for one determined older woman—Nana Mama—I would have ended up in prison or dead within the decade. I could have been one of those nameless forgotten “others.” But she had saved me, and so had the army and the DC Metro Police.
I have large debts there, debts I’m honor bound to repay.
I pull into the lot of the Pine Grove Motel. Two red lights flickering—OPEN and VACANCY—tell me what I need to know.
Behind a low counter in the office sits a yawning young blond woman wearing black leggings and a UNC Tar Heels football T-shirt. She looks to be six or seven months pregnant. In the corner is a small crib where a toddler is sleeping. Low sounds come from a TV playing what looks like an old Hallmark Channel movie.
I pay cash for my room and I’m pleased the clerk doesn’t ask for my identification or license plate number. From the office in the center of the one-story building, I walk to the end room. It has two beds, a moldy bathroom, and not much else.
I drop a black duffel bag on the far bed and suddenly I’m tired from hunting bad guys.
I whisper, “Sure wish I was back home with you, Willow.”
Then I get to work.
Chapter
30
I twist and turn; it’s always a struggle to get my six-foot-nine-inch frame comfortable. Billie used to tease me that she wasn’t sure which half of my body she was going to cuddle up against.
I shift again.
It’s been a long while since I’ve thought of those funny, loving moments.
Don’t think about that. Don’t get distracted with memories of your Billie. Think about what’s ahead. The talk with Mel Carr.
I try to decipher what he said to me yesterday about our mission to Afghanistan, about the current state of affairs at Fort Bragg.
You should be paranoid. All of us who went on that cross-border expedition into Afghanistan should be paranoid. I think what we did and saw there is connected to all these bombings and shootings.
The trip to Afghanistan.
Sheep-dipped so we were no longer with the army but attached to the CIA. The CIA provided transportation and a woman field officer to supervise us.
We didn’t land in Afghanistan but in a cold, windswept airfield in neighboring Tajikistan.
What did we see there?
What did we see in Afghanistan?
What—
There’s a noise.
Chapter
31
The three attackers move silently across the motel’s parking lot to John Sampson’s room, and the lead armed man places small detonation charges on the door’s knob and three hinges.
The charges flare into life, and the lead man flips down his NVGs and kicks down the door, which falls with a satisfying bang.
They do a quick sweep of the room’s two beds, and the near one holds a huddled shape, blankets pulled up, boots lined up on the floor; a duffel bag is on the other bed. All three open up with bursts from their silencer-equipped MP5s, tearing up the bedding and sheets and the shape underneath. Spent brass thuds on the floor, and the room smells of gunpowder.
They advance slowly and carefully—they wouldn’t put it past their highly trained target to sleep with a Kevlar blanket—and the lead man reaches down with a gloved hand and tugs the sheet and blankets away.
Revealing a row of shot-up pillows.
Time to get the hell out and regroup.
The lead man looks around, wonders why the room is so crowded. The four of them are nearly elbow to elbow.
Wait.
Four?
He brings up his MP5, but he’s not quick enough.
Chapter
32
Before I set up my bedding in the rear seat of the Cherokee, I placed a small motion-detection night-vision camera in the grille, pointed right at the door of my motel room. A cable threaded through the Cherokee led to a small laptop that would chime if something stopped in front of my motel-room door.
There.
When the chime sounds, I roll over, look at the laptop’s screen.
Three armed men, ready to break into my room.
I watch their well-planned action, and when the door to my room drops, I put on my night-vision goggles and push open the rear door of the Cherokee. I slip out of my car, Glock 17 in my right hand, my bare feet on the cold pavement. Even shoes designed for my huge feet squeak as I walk because of my weight and size, which is why I’m shoeless now.
I hear the thud-thud-thud of suppressed gunfire and see the flicker-flicker-flicker of the muzzle flashes, and I move into the room right behind the three attackers. If we were in DC and these three were standard street thugs, I’d have to follow a host of procedures and regulations. But not in this place.
The only rule now is they go down and I stay standing.
I go into the room, dodging the fallen door, see the three clustered around my so-called bed. The one to the left seems to notice me and moves and—
Two shots to him.
He falls.
Whip-quick, I put two shots in his companion and two more into the third one.
They fall in a jumble.
All of them are wearing body armor. But that won’t keep them safe. Shots to the head for all three of them.
