Dead or Alive

advantage. Or even more. They could transmit a query to Fort Meade disguised as an Agency question, but even that was dangerous, and had to be approved by Gerry Hendley himself. Well, you took the bitter with the sweet. In a world where two or more heads were in fact better than one at problem solving, The Campus was alone.

“I’m afraid not, Jack,” Bell replied. “Well, unless this Hadi’s on someone’s list by accident or the e-mail itself is innocuous, I’d say we’re looking at a courier.”

While not the fastest means of communication, couriers were the most secure. Encrypted data and messages, easily hidden in a document or on a CD-ROM, aren’t something airport security folks were trained to ferret out. Unless you had a courier’s identity-which they might now have-the bad guys could be planning the end of the world and the good guys would never know it.

“Agreed,” Jack said. “Unless he’s working for National Geographic, there’s something there. He’s operational or he’s playing support.”

The kid thought operationally, and that, too, was not a bad characteristic, Rick Bell thought to himself. “Okay,” Bell told Jack. “Put it at the top of your list and keep me up to speed.”

“Right,” Jack said, then stood up. He turned for the door, then turned back.

“Something on your mind?” Bell asked.

“Yeah. I want to have a sit-down with the boss.”

“What about?”

Jack told him. Bell tried to keep the surprise off his face. He steepled his fingers and looked at Jack. “Where’s this coming from? The MoHa thing? Because that ain’t real life, Jack. Fieldwork is-”

“I know, I know. I just want to feel like I’m doing something.”

“You are.”

“You know what I mean, Rick. Doing something. I’ve given it a lot of thought. At least let me put it on the table in front of Gerry.”

Bell considered this, then shrugged. “Okay. I’ll set it up.”

Nine thousand fucking miles and still no beer, Sam Driscoll thought, but only for a moment as he reminded himself yet again he could have just as easily made the hop home in a rubber bag. A couple of inches either way, the docs had said, and the splinter would’ve shredded either his brachial, cephalic, or basilic vein, and he might have bled out long before reaching the Chinook. Lost two along the way, though. Barnes and Gomez had taken the full brunt of the RPG. Young and Peterson had caught some minor leg shrapnel but had managed to climb aboard the Chinook on their own. From there it had been a short hop to FOB Kala Gush, where he parted company with the team, save Captain Wilson and his shattered leg, who accompanied him first to Ramstein Air Base, then on to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston. As it turned out, both needed the kind of orthopedic surgery in which Brooke specialized. And Demerol. The nurses here were real good with the pain meds, which had gone a long way to helping him forget that five days earlier he’d had a hunk of Hindu Kush granite sticking out of his shoulder.

The mission had been a bust, at least in terms of their main objective, and Rangers weren’t in the business of failing, their fault or not. Providing the intel had been right and their target had ever been in the cave at all, he’d slipped away, probably less than a day before they’d arrived. Still, Driscoll reminded himself, given the shit storm they came through on the way back to the LZ, it could have been a lot worse. He’d lost two but had come back with thirteen. Barnes and Gomez. Goddamn it.

The door opened, and in rolled Captain Wilson in a wheelchair. “Got a minute for a visitor?”

“You bet. How’s the leg?”

“Still broken.”

Driscoll chuckled at that. “Gonna be that way for a while, sir.”

“No pins or plates, though, so I got that going for me. How about you?”

“Don’t know. Docs are being cagey. Surgery went fine, no vascular damage, which woulda been bad mojo. Joint and bone’s a lot easier to fix, I guess. You hear from the guys?”

“Yeah, they’re good. Sitting on their asses, and rightly so.”

“Young and Peterson?”

“Both fine. Light duty for a few weeks. Listen, Sam, something’s going down.”

“Your face tells me it ain’t a visit from Carrie Underwood.”

“’Fraid not. CID. Two agents back at Battalion.”

“Both of us?”

Wilson nodded. “They’ve pulled our after-actions. Anything I should know about, Sam?”

“No, sir. Got a parking ticket outside the gym last month, but other than that I’ve been a good boy.”

“All kosher in the cave?”

“Standard shit, Major. Just like I wrote it.”

“Well, anyway, they’ll be up this afternoon. Play it straight. Should work out.”

It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes for Driscoll to realize what the CID goons were after: his head. Who and why, he didn’t know, but somebody had pointed the bone at him for what went on in the cave.

“And how many sentries did you encounter?”

“Two.”

“Both killed?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so then you made your way into the cave proper. How many of the occupants were armed?” one of the investigators asked.

“After we policed everything up, we counted-”

“No, we mean upon your entry into the cave. How many of them were armed?”

“Define ‘armed.’”

“Don’t be a smart-ass, Sergeant. How many armed men did you encounter when you entered the cave?”

“It’s in my report.”

“Three, correct?”

“That sounds right,” Driscoll replied.

“The rest were asleep.”

“With AKs under the pillows. You guys don’t get it. You’re talking about prisoners, right? It doesn’t work that way, not out in the real world. You get yourself into a firefight inside a cave with just one bad guy, and you end up with dead Rangers.”

“You didn’t attempt to incapacitate the sleeping men?”

Driscoll smiled at that. “I’d say they were thoroughly incapacitated.”

“You shot them in their sleep.”

Driscoll sighed. “Boys, why don’t you just say what you came to say?”

“Have it your way. Sergeant, there’s sufficient evidence in your after-action report alone to charge you with the murder of unarmed combatants. Add to that the statements of the rest of your team-”

“Which you haven’t officially taken yet, right?”

“Not yet, no.”

“Because you know this is a load of crap, and you’d prefer it if I lay my head on the block nice and gentle and not make a fuss. Why’re you doing this? I was doing my job. Do your home-work. What we did up there is standard procedure. You don’t give gomers a chance to draw down on you.”

“And apparently you didn’t give them a chance to surrender, did you?”

“God almighty… Gentlemen, these idiots don’t surrender. When it comes to fanaticism, they make kamikaze pilots look downright spineless. What you’re talking about doing would’ve gotten some of my men killed, and that I won’t have.”

“Sergeant, are you now admitting you preemptively executed the men inside that cave?”

“What I’m saying is we’re done talking until I see a TDS lawyer.”