Kill Zone

“This has something to do, I assume, with why you have been wandering around the ship wearing a locked and loaded.45?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you weren’t really expecting pirates to come charging over the starboard bow shooting RPGs?”

“No, sir. This is for real.” Dawkins undid a Velcro snap on the sleeve of his flight suit and retrieved the envelope. “You remember when that spook from Washington came aboard to meet privately with Gunny Swanson?”

“Ummm. Figured he was getting tagged for a special mission when this was over.”

“Sir, this was the special mission. Kyle was put under some top-secret orders, and his death leaves us with a situation.”

“A situation.” Sims put his forearms on the desk and leaned forward. He was tall and lean, with dark brows and a beaked nose that gave him the look of a pissed-off eagle like the ones he wore on his collar.

“Yessir. Maybe more a major league fuckup that will make people look back fondly on Richard Nixon after Watergate and Bill Clinton’s blow job.” He slid the letter across the smooth desktop with his fingertips. “It’s all in there, sir.”

“Swanson told you about this?”

“He refused to carry out the order until the spook threatened to get the White House to verify it. Then Kyle somehow snuck a copy without that Washington fuck realizing it, and the fool burned the copy, thinking it was the real thing. Gunny gave me the original in case he got whacked. He got whacked. So here it is.”

“I don’t think I really want to open that.”

“No. Probably not, and I don’t blame you one bit. But that’s why you’re a full bird colonel with a bunch of college degrees and I’m just a master sergeant. You decide where it goes from here.”

“What’s it say?” The colonel held the envelope as if it were scalding hot, turning it over and over in his hands.

“If it looked like the rescue attempt was going to fail, Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson was under orders to execute Brigadier General Middleton.”

“The hell you say,” said Sims, running a thumbnail under the envelope flap. His eyes gave away nothing as he read the handwritten note.

“The hell I do say, sir. The reason I went around the chain of command to get straight to you is that we don’t know who may be involved in this thing. I guess it is going to be a very special need-to-know category.”

Sims dug out some thin plastic map overlay sheets from his desk, folded them around the letter and envelope, and carried them to his private safe to lock them away. “You’re right, Double-Oh. In fact, you’re so damned right that I’m going to have to think about our next step. A wrong move and we both end up at Gitmo with German shepherds chomping at our balls. You got a suggestion?”

As the colonel resumed his seat, Dawkins stood. His leathery face actually wore a smile. “Yeah, Skipper, I do. The Thirty-Third MEU is an independent Special Ops unit, and as its commanding officer, you report straight to Central Command. I suggest you pack your bags for a routine trip back to Tampa to give the boys at MacDill a ‘special briefing’ about why the helicopters crashed. Have your staff type up a bunch of papers and make a PowerPoint show for cover.”

Sims rubbed his thumb across his lips, which had gone dry. “And while I’m there, I get some private face time with CENTCOM?”

“No, sir. Halfway across the Atlantic, your flight will be diverted because the Pentagon will decide it wants to hear your lame-ass excuses in person. I can cash in some favors and get the Sergeants’ Network to cut orders that far and keep you below the official radar. Once in Washington, it will be up to you to snag a meeting with General Hank Turner, our old boss from the First MARDIV. Although he happens to wear four stars and be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff now, he’s still an old Force Recon operator at heart. Him we can trust.”

Sims agreed. “You’re right. Turner will kick in the doors to find out what is going on.” The colonel folded his hands behind his head. “Make it happen, Master Sergeant.”

“Semper fuckin’ fi, Colonel.”

CHAPTER 28

ALI SHALAL RASSAD MADE HIS afternoon prayers in one of Basra’s crowded mosques, in the midst of a crowd of kneeling, praying men. Afterward, he smiled his way to the door, hugging fellow worshippers along the way and dispensing words of encouragement, a whispered promise of help, a handful of coins. He was a leader because the people considered him to be one of their own, a warrior and a dutiful, humble servant of Allah, whose name be praised. The prayers provided quiet moments during which he often thought about how much he owed to the dictator Saddam Hussein. Without pure evil, how would people recognize good?

Like so many Iraqis, Rassad had grown up in poverty, a product of the Baghdad slums. He caught the attention of his teachers at the religious madrassa schools because he possessed an intellectual curiosity and showed a natural leadership ability. They decided he was worthy of more education, with the idea that he might become an Islamic scholar and religious leader. They misjudged the boy. During the day, he piously studied the Koran, but at night he read other books, and led a small gang of thieves through the alleyways of Baghdad. Death was never far away in the slums, and Rassad had gutted several men before his fifteenth birthday. He was a realist instead of a zealot, interested in obtaining his own goals and not simply obeying the rules of any book, not even the Koran.

No one was surprised when Rassad passed the exams to qualify for university study abroad as an engineer, nor that the government let him go to school in the United States. His family would remain in Baghdad as hostage until he returned to take a job with one of Hussein’s ministries.

Rassad studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and also studied the complex organism that was America. He traveled to the oil fields in Louisiana and the West, to Silicon Valley in California, and to the vast farmlands of Kansas in search of understanding how and why democracy worked in Washington, D.C.

The individual experiences started coming together during his junior year, when he drove from Boston to Florida to participate in the annual ritual among students known as spring break. The all-night parties had been quite educational, and several pretty girls had found his dark eyes irresistible. The important lesson came late on a Monday night as he grew tired while driving back from Daytona Beach. A green neon sign of a little diner beckoned near Brunswick, Georgia, and Rassad followed a side road north for two miles. There was only a weathered pickup truck and a little Honda parked in the lot, which was illuminated dully by the ragged circles cast by three lights attached to the eaves of the building. He parked his new BMW 735i SE, went inside, and took a stool at the counter. A disinterested waitress took his order for a glass of water with ice and a piece of the fresh pecan pie that sat in a plastic case.

“Looky here,” Myron Hix muttered. He was seated at a table crowded with empty beer bottles. A younger man, small, thin, and unshaven, was pushed back in another chair, a grimy Atlanta Braves baseball cap on his head. Rassad ignored them.

“Give that boy a beer!” Hix bellowed. A thick man of middle age with close-cut hair over a red, round face, he lifted a bottle of Budweiser in a toast. “You look like a man who needs a drink.”

Rassad raised his hand to the waitress to signify he did not want a beer. “Thank you, but I do not drink alcohol,” he said to the man.

“He ‘do not drink alcohol.’” The man laughed, and so did his friend. Both wore dark blue shirts with open collars and name patches sewn above the pockets, the uniforms of a local garage. Scarlet script spelled that the big man’s name was “Myron.” The other man was “Robert.”

The waitress slid the saucer with the pie and the glass of water before Rassad with the clatter of cheap china on thin Formica. Georgia was famed for its pecan pie. He took a bite. Delicious. The waitress, a bored woman with dyed blond hair, vanished into the kitchen through a swinging door.

The man approached him and perched uninvited on the torn leatherette stool. “Name’s Myron Hix, boy. You a stranger in this neck of the woods and I wanna buy you a drink. So what’ll it be?”