ROCKHEAD SHERIDAN MET SWANSON back at the same watering hole that evening. This time they sat inside, at the bar. A news report was on the TV about the upcoming launch of the first mission that would eventually lead to a Mars landing. A cut of cool ocean air had moved in to drop the temperature, and rain was blowing onto the patio. Neither man was in a good mood.
“Had to be done,” Rockhead said. “Powell has already departed for a thirty-day leave to try to get his act together. Turns out he had some serious home problems and a set of new twins, both of them real sick, so he was at a personal crossroads. I told him to go home and do what was really important, take care of his family.”
“So he’s done with Team Six?” Kyle folded a wet napkin, just to be doing something. He had not enjoyed taking part in the collapse of Ryan Powell.
“Yep. If he wants to stay as a SEAL, we’ll rotate him into being an instructor in the BUD/S training. He’d be close to home and probably be pretty good at the job.” Rockhead shrugged. “Life sucks sometimes.”
They went silent for a little while. Then Kyle asked, “You gonna let me have another run at the Ghost House tomorrow? By myself?”
“That was the deal, Gunny Swanson. You should get two, three more chances to shoot some holograms before you go back to the Puzzle Palace in Washington.”
Their attention was drawn to a breaking news banner flashing on the television set that hung from the ceiling, a fragmented report about the slaughter of an international medical team in the northern part of Pakistan. Nine dead and no survivors.
“Tough,” observed Rockhead, signaling the bartender for another beer. “Bunch of tree-hugging do-gooders out hiking where they don’t belong.”
Kyle agreed. “Plenty of places in this screwy world where they could be helping, and they chose Pakistan. Not that the refugees don’t need all the help they can get. That flooding is a mess.”
“My only real beef is if those doctors and nurses start crossing over and give training in first aid and medical treatment to the terrorists. Maybe even treat their soldiers. Helping keep the enemy alive, no matter how noble, is bad karma. We want to kill them and some liberal medics want to patch them up? No way.”
Kyle thought for a moment as individual photographs of some of the medical team passed on the screen. He agreed with Rockhead. “Well, at least that one is over and done with. Doesn’t involve us.”
3
A PAKISTANI ARMY PATROL had found the bodies but knew little more than that most of the victims were foreigners. Wallets and identification cards had been stolen, but the corpses had been scattered around a truck that wore the blue symbol of the United Nations painted on its doors.
The bare details were quickly passed along to a Doctors Without Borders outpost that the medical team had visited the night before it set out on its final journey. The unofficial grapevine that binds the various relief organizations soon got the news back to UN Refugee Camp Five, allowing Dr. Lin Yao, the director and chief administrator, to place a direct call to the UN Headquarters in New York and pass along the tragic news. A general press announcement was dispatched, but the identities of the murdered doctors and nurses were withheld pending the notification of family members, no small task since the victims had been an international group.
Dr. Yao, a small and precise man, needed an entire day to confirm who had volunteered to make the trek north. His eyes misted, and he had to remove his glasses to wipe them as he determined the names of the nine dedicated medical personnel who had been senselessly murdered. Their loss was going to be a significant blow to ongoing operations at Camp Five.
There had been only one American, the team leader, Dr. Joseph Ledford, the gentle and dedicated physician who had trained at the Mayo Clinic. Two Canadians, two Chinese, and one more each from Venezuela, Fiji, South Africa, and Jordan. Yao realized his mistakes: The group did not include enough Muslims to go out into the countryside on their own, and the Fijian nurse openly read her Christian Bible every day and protested the subservient position of women in this rigid society.
Once his list was complete, Yao found their personnel folders and sent the names to New York, where workers set about contacting proper authorities around the world to carry the worst news possible to the affected families. The U.S. delegate to the United Nations was given the name of Dr. Joseph Ledford, whose home address was in the state of Iowa, and the State Department sped the information along to the office of the governor of Iowa in Des Moines, which steered it over to the state police, which passed it along to the Kossuth County Sheriff’s Office in Algona.
Towns and villages dot the farmland in the middle of Iowa, and many miles separate them. As a result of a shrinking tax base, road patrol units covering the 974 square miles of the largest county in the state are spread thin. The dispatch officer checked his computer, saw that the nearest deputy was about thirty miles east of the Ledford Dairy Products spread, and assigned him to personally go to the farm. The call was made on a cell phone to keep it off the police scanner frequencies that were monitored by the media.
Margaret Ledford was sweating in the August heat as she helped a hired hand fit a repaired chain to the screw of a broken conveyor belt, and she stepped away from the job when the sheriff’s car pulled in behind a tractor parked near the barn. She lifted the broad brim of her straw hat and wiped her forehead, recognizing Deputy Bill Turner, who had once attended the combined junior-senior high school with both of her kids, Joey and Beth. Everybody knew everybody out here. He seemed slow to get out of the car as a dust cloud settled about it, giving Margaret a moment to wonder what in the world he was doing out here in the middle of a Thursday afternoon. She waved.
Turner gave a nod and reluctantly stepped onto the dirt, looking like a cop, not an old friend. Mrs. Ledford was not someone with whom he could postpone getting to the point. Best to get it done professionally but kindly. Turner had great respect for her. Her husband, Stephen, had died of a heart attack three years ago, their son, Joey, had left long before that to become a doctor, and their daughter, Beth, was overseas somewhere with the Coast Guard. Margaret refused to move and had continued to run the big farm with hired help, losing her grief in the grind of pulling a living out of the rich Iowa dirt. Against the odds, and with a pair of full-time hands, she successfully ran about four hundred acres of corn, wheat, and soybeans, and at least a hundred and fifty head of cattle and a dozen horses. The fog of working from dawn to dark every day had slowly eased the burden of her husband’s passing; she would never forget him but had accepted things as they were. The kids came back to visit now and then, and that’s just the way life was. Her hair was going gray, but Deputy Turner knew that Maggie Ledford was one tough lady, and that she would need that strength now.
“Hey, Bill,” she called, walking over to him. “You wearing sunscreen today?”
“Yeah, Maggie.” He did not engage her in the banter, and his face was serious. “Can I get a glass of water?”
“You tell me what you’re doing here. Then you can have water, milk, or a beer of your choice.” She put the hat back on but stripped off the heavy gloves and crossed her arms, looking up at the tall deputy.
He hooked his thumbs in his belt and bit his lip, then sighed. “No way to make this easy, Maggie, so I’ll just say it: Joey’s dead. He was killed with his entire medical team by the Taliban over there in Pakistan.” The deputy looked straight up, unwilling to make eye contact, and when he glanced back down, he saw that the color had drained from Maggie Ledford’s face and she was collapsing. He caught her. “God damn them,” Bill Turner whispered to himself, taking the weight of the woman before she fell. “Damn ’em all straight to hell.”
Inside the cool house, once Mrs. Ledford recovered from the initial shock, she asked Deputy Turner if her daughter had been notified. He didn’t know. Maggie went to her little desk in the kitchen, pulled open a drawer, and found a special telephone number that she was to call in case of a personal emergency; the American Red Cross would contact Beth, who was on classified duty somewhere overseas.
“PREPARE TO TAKE THE shot, Gunner.”
“Aye, aye, sir. Think you can hold this flying machine steady for a moment? You’re bouncing around so much I might not be able to even hit the dang ocean.” The voice in his headset was totally calm.
