“Lance Corporal, we lost a good man out there today, that SEAL kid. Why?”
“He fucked up.”
“Yes, he did, and because he did, he is gone, out of here, and that is not the friggin’ point.”
“What is the point then, Gunny? He screwed up and I didn’t. Why are you so pissed off at me?”
“Because war is not an individual sport.” Hall stopped beside his desk and opened Kyle’s personnel folder. “I’ve wasted some time looking into your background, Swanson, and talked to a couple of shrinks about your kind of personality. It’s all there. You’re about as special as a cheap Tijuana whore. All the symptoms of a classic loner: Alone as a kid in an orphanage. Alone in school. Even when you played baseball in high school, you were a pitcher, the one individual that everybody else on the team supports. But this is not a place where a loner can excel.”
“I seem to be doing okay on my own, Gunny Hall.”
“You think so?” Hall sat down in his chair, leaned back, and folded his hands. “Not in this game. The name of the friggin’ course is Scout Sniper, you moron. Consider this as a combat situation: A minimum of two men go out together, and if one of them dies, chances are damned good the other one will, too. Scout. Sniper. Personal excellence is mandatory, but it is not enough. Right now I would not want you as a partner.”
Kyle blinked, caught by surprise. “Why?”
“Because I could not trust you. You might go off and try to accomplish the mission on your own, leaving your spotter alone. I could not rely on you for help if I was trying for a shot, or trying to escape and evade.”
“So I should give myself up to make somebody else look good?” Kyle did not understand this logic.
“No, Swanson. Look, we both know that you cheat and that you succeed. That is good. You are a natural leader, and you really are better than the rest of them, so I expect more from you. Help these other guys, son. Share your skills and your ideas and your methods. Show them how to do what you do. I want you to prove to me and the other instructors that you can be trusted when the crap hits the fan. It’s all about trust, Lance Corporal Swanson.”
“I can do that.”
Hall was finished with the lecture and just grunted and waved the kid away, with no idea if Swanson had listened to a word he had said.
8
OVER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
MONDAY NIGHT
JIM HALL WAS SPREAD out comfortably aboard a Citation Bravo executive jet, the modified Cessna 550 model, sliding through the night sky at four hundred knots and thirty-five thousand feet. He had dropped the facing seat to make a bed, changed into an old Adidas tracksuit for comfort, popped five milligrams of Ambien, lowered a silk mask over his eyes, and stuck the buds of an iPod into his ears. Classical music and the drug would ease him into sleep while they crossed the pond.
The private plane was one of the ghost fleet, special aircraft owned by an Agency front company and used primarily for unique missions such as renditions and paramilitary support. The small, quick plane, with its pair of Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines mounted aft and high, had been to a lot of places, always off the record. It was still bouncing through some air pockets from a storm front that was closing across the East Coast but would rise through the clouds soon. Lauren Carson was across the aisle, wide-awake, to answer the phone if he needed to know anything.
This was style, exactly the way Hall wanted to run the final assignment of his career with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Word had spread that he was about to retire, and even before he left Langley to board the plane at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, he had detected the tattered threads of disrespect tangling around his ankles. Invisible shackles. After this, he would be nobody; another old man gone. Somebody else would become the special assistant to the deputy director of operations, and there would be a string of promotions on down the ladder. The CIA was a gigantic bureaucracy. No desk stayed empty very long.
He changed position in the seat and increased the volume of the music to mask the whine of the engines. Like many workers with a lot of years in any industry or business, Hall had become disillusioned with his profession.
The first major puncture in the balloon of faith came with the hard lesson that the shield of anonymity provided to CIA agents was neither impenetrable nor absolute. That idea was knocked for a loop when a political scandal ripped the name and face of one agent out of the shadows. The president of the United States himself had declassified the identity and thrown her to the political and media wolves. The affair actually had made Jim Hall feel a little better, because it proved that he was not the only person running a game in the dangerous jungle known as Washington, D.C. In fact, he figured that he was one of the littler fish. After he assessed how the impact of an agent being outed had spread like a virus through Langley and ruptured so much trust, he decided that it was only prudent for him to prepare for the unexpected; in other words, cover his ass.
Hall was one of the old-timers who had been chosen to help put the trust train back on track and given the rank of special assistant to the DDO. Instead of being a plum assignment, a springboard to an even better position, he viewed it as a sign that he had gone as high as he was going in the Agency. His lack of formal education was given as the reason for the blockade. He had managed to earn an associate’s degree from a community college, but that could not compare with bright men and women from the Yales and the Harvards. A lifetime of experience spent in the weeds, learning about the world and risking his life to protect the nation, could not overcome the ivy-covered walls of academia. It grated on him and made him feel inadequate: Which of them could do what he had done? None!
Nevertheless, he had set about the new job with gusto, coming out of the chill of being a spy to craft a very public persona. Jim Hall became the top CIA lobbyist on Capitol Hill, where he was a coveted source of news tidbits for the media hounds, and the go-to guy when deals needed to be struck in cloakrooms of the Capitol concerning the intelligence community and its secrets. He was amply rewarded with limos and unlimited credit cards and girls and fancy restaurants and embassy parties, seats at the Kennedy Center, status, and entree into the corridors of power, including the White House. He even had the beautiful Lauren Carson around to carry his briefcase. Hiding in plain sight and being highly paid in many ways was a life that Hall enjoyed.
Every once in a while, for a special job, he had to return to his roots for a mission and pick up a weapon or personally guide a black operation. Then the affable Jim Hall would disappear from Washington, and Ms. Carson would explain that he was skiing at his condo at Crested Butte, or fishing in Alaska, or visiting his mother down in Palm Beach. After a few weeks, Hall would reenter the Capitol hive, cheering up everyone with risque jokes and making his rounds of secret briefings and dropping pro-Agency propaganda to journalists. It was perfect.
Retirement would end that easy access to power and money. He could live out a full life within a protective bubble, mowing his suburban lawn and cooking bratwursts over his propane grill. That held no appeal whatsoever for Jim Hall. There was the option of becoming a real lobbyist for a defense company, but that meant that he would eventually end up as one of the old guys standing alone at the end of the bar at the National Press Club, soup stains on a wrinkled tie, hoping for a conversation about the good old days. Hall had decided to make other arrangements.
ACROSS THE NARROW AISLE, fully alert at a little desk, sat Lauren Carson. She watched Jim settle down and fall asleep so amazingly quickly, as if he had not a care in the world. An old warrior’s trait, he had explained; eat and sleep when you can because you don’t know how long it will be before the next meal or rest. His chest barely moved, and the slightly parted lips breathed in the cool cabin air.
She had been with him for six years, straight out of the training farm, and admired the tough, quirky guy with the sharp sense of humor. She had no illusions: Jim always looked out for Jim. He always had a plan, was always a couple of steps ahead of everyone else. He was also a liar and some other unsavory things, like being a professional
