images she had seen of children missing for five or ten or fifteen years on the missingkids. com website? Would she always hold out hope that her daughter was still alive, somewhere? Would she become one of those pitiful mothers of lost children she had seen on TV, keeping Grace’s room exactly as it was now, always believing that one day she would return to this room?
The doorbell rang.
Elizabeth was still in her bathrobe and in her daughter’s room, so many thoughts running through her mind, trying to imagine life without Grace.
The doorbell rang again.
Her heart froze. Then it began to beat rapidly; her breathing came faster. She stood. She knew.
It’s her! It’s Grace! She’s come home!
Elizabeth bolted out of the bedroom and ran down the long hall and to the stairs and down to the first floor and through the foyer and to the front door and pulled the door open, ready to embrace her daughter and to hold her and to cry with her and to never let her go.
But you’re not Grace.
Standing on the porch was a young woman in a black dress; her anguished face seemed vaguely familiar. It took Elizabeth a moment to place it. Gary Jennings’s wife.
Elizabeth slumped against the doorjamb. She had been so sure it was Grace. Now, for the first time since the abduction, she thought she might be drifting toward insanity, floating on a raft down a slow-moving river, steadily and inexorably toward rapids where she would crack up on the rocks, finally to be thrown over the edge of a steep fall, driven down deep into the darkness below, never to resurface. The thought was inviting.
“Mrs. Brice, I’m so sorry about Gracie. But my husband didn’t take her. Gary would never do something like that.”
She started to leave, but she stopped when Elizabeth said, “Your baby.”
She turned back and said, “The doctors say she’ll be okay.”
She walked down to a waiting car, got in, and drove off. The street was silent and vacant; a few pink ribbons tied to mailboxes fluttered in the breeze and several scattered missing-child fliers skipped along the ground like children playing hopscotch. The TV trucks and police cars and cameras and reporters and gawkers were gone, back to their lives as if the world had not been irrevocably altered seven days ago; fathers and career mothers had gone back to their offices, stay-at-home moms to exercise classes and shopping malls, children to school, reporters to new stories, and the networks to New York. The circus had moved on.
Elizabeth turned and shut the door on her life.
John watched as Ben opened a door to a vault under the floor of the workshop and then knelt down and shone a flashlight into the dark space below.
“I hate rats,” he said.
Satisfied, he hopped down into the hole. His head was below floor level. He handed up three long metal containers. Then he hoisted himself out.
Ben dusted off one container with a cloth. He unlatched the locks and lifted the top. Inside, set into a molded form, were a black rifle, boxes of ammunition, two telescopes, one normal size, the other oversized, a black tube, what John knew was a silencer, a leather shoulder sling, two ammunition magazines, and a crude brass bracelet.
Ben slipped the bracelet onto his left wrist, then he removed the rifle and mounted the smaller scope and the silencer. He loaded a magazine and snapped it into the underside of the rifle and attached the sling at both ends. He stood and walked outside. John followed.
Facing the vast open space, Ben knelt, raised the rifle to his shoulder, gripped the underside of the stock with his left hand, extended his right elbow from his body, and sighted in with his right eye. The sound of the rifle’s discharge was muffled. Ben grunted, adjusted the scope, sighted, and fired again. Another adjustment and another shot.
“What are you shooting at?”
“Cholla cactus, five hundred meters out.”
John slanted his glasses to obtain sharper vision but without success. “Dang, I can’t even see it.”
“Inside, in one of the other boxes-a spotting scope.”
John returned to the workshop and opened the other containers. Inside one were a knife with Viper etched into the shiny blade, two sets of dog tags, one for Brice, Ben, and the other for Dalton, Roger, a small machine gun with a shoulder strap, and the spotting telescope. John took his father’s dog tags and put them around his neck. He then removed the scope and ran back out.
Ben said, “Straight down the barrel, rock formation.”
John looked into the scope, adjusted the focus, and spotted the rock formation.
“Got it.”
“Beyond that, a cactus.”
“With the yellow flower?”
“Yep.”
Standing behind Ben, John figured the theoretical probability of hitting that flower from five hundred meters- 1,640 feet-had to be one in a million, even in the perfectly still conditions, and particularly by a sixty-year-old… the thought crept into John’s mind… drunk. The rifle discharged; the yellow flower split off whole from the cactus.
“Dang, Ben, that’s awesome! You must’ve been a dead shot!”
From Ben’s expression, John knew he had said exactly the wrong thing. Ben stood and walked over to a big rock and sat; he stared at the dirt for a time. Finally he spoke.
“NVA officers didn’t wear insignia. You couldn’t tell a grunt from a general, so you’d sit outside their camp, maybe a thousand meters out, watching them through the binoculars until you picked out the ranking officer, sometimes just because he had more cigarettes in his pocket. Then you’d wait until he was sitting down, eating, and you’d put the scope on him. And when you did, you played God. You decided he’d never see his wife or kids again, or even the next day, that because he was born in Hanoi instead of Houston he deserved a bullet in his head. You observed the last moments of his life, the last smile on his face, the last drag on his cigarette, and you squeezed the trigger. And his life was over.”
He looked up at John.
“I didn’t kill for God or country, or for those medals, or even to defeat Communism. Well, at first I did, but at the end, when I knew the war was lost, I killed so fewer American boys would come home in a body bag. Like your father did. That’s why I stayed over there, John. That’s why I wasn’t here for you.”
John looked out on New Mexico and felt his eyes water. “I should’ve been there for Gracie. I should’ve hung up on Lou and gone to the concession stand with her. I should have protected her.” He shook his head slowly. “Ben, I just let her go.”
“No, son, you didn’t let her go. They took her.” Ben stood and was the colonel in the photos again. “And we’re fixing to take her back.”
After graduating from high school, boys in Henryetta, Oklahoma, either go to college on football scholarships, take up farming like their fathers before them, or join the Army. Jack Odell Smith was big and strong and played football for Henryetta High, but he got ejected from most games for unsportsmanlike conduct. And he never took to the plow. So, barely a month after graduating at the bottom of his class, Jack O. Smith had joined the United States Army.
Jacko was not your leader of men. But he was a loyal follower and kept his mouth shut, character traits much admired in this man’s Army. Those traits, along with his physical strength, temper, and ability to kill without remorse, earned him a spot in the Special Forces Training Group at Fort Bragg. There he had met Major Charles Woodrow Walker.
Jack Odell Smith had found his place in life.
Major Charles Woodrow Walker had always thought his place in life would be the White House. “Jacko,” the major had said, “the American people are sheep. In times of peace, they just want to graze off the land and feel fat and happy. But when the wolves are in the pasture, they want to feel safe. ‘Make love not war’ sounds good when
