by Brandon Webb
“Aye, sir.”
“And have him keep a close eye on the man at all times.”
“Sir, that may be problematic. Logistically, I mean. He may need to recruit some manpower.”
“Whatever. A few people he trusts. But as few as possible. And—”
“On the QT, sir.”
“Exactly. Thank you, Artie. And make sure he understands that he reports directly to me, through you. No need to involve anyone else in this.”
Finn pressed STOP.
So. The captain was recruiting Supercop as his own secret police—without telling his CMC. Divide and control. Finn wondered which paperback had offered that particular leadership tip.
And he could hear the stress in Arthur’s voice. The XO knew how far out on a limb the captain was going. This was a wary career sailor who would cover his own six. He’d follow his CO’s orders but keep his eyes wide open. At some point the sewage was going to hit the propeller, and Commander Arthur Gaines would make sure he wasn’t standing next to whoever’s head it landed on.
Finn listened again to the conversation with Gordon MacDonald, then switched off the recorder.
Three working theories. Hate crimes; class resentment; crimes of opportunity. As Gaines said, all three seemed reasonable, on the face of it. But Finn thought there was something deeper going on. A more careful calibration at work.
All three scenarios were based on thinking two-dimensionally, drawing logical inferences from the facts in evidence. Viewing the disappearances as a straightforward, tactical sequence.
Not the killer.
The killer was operating on a strategic level.
Yes, he’d selected as his victims a strong woman, a gay man, and a Hispanic sailor. A misogynistic bigot? Maybe. But Finn didn’t think it was a simple sequence of events. There were layers to what the killer was doing.
Biker, Schofield, Santiago.
Pilot, officer, swab.
One snatched from the air wing; one from ship’s company officer corps; one from the lowly enlisted.
The meta-message? Eenie meenie miney mo. This wolf could snatch his sheep from any corral he chose. He could come and take anyone—which meant, in terms of psychological warfare, he’d already taken everyone.
And now Finn thought he knew why poor Luca had been directed to take his charcoal pencils.
He thought he knew why, and he didn’t like it.
Time to get into the fight.
He stood, stowed and secured his eavesdropping equipment in his locker along with his steel ring knife. He wouldn’t be needing either for the next few days.
77
Down on deck 4 Finn showed up at the gym he hadn’t visited since his second morning aboard. There was West Texas, grim-faced, punishing herself on the lat press. And yes, there was Tucker, seated at the weight bench, flanked by his two rat-faced buddies.
Tucker watched Finn’s approach, his eyes narrowing. He set his weights down with an ostentatious hfff and wiped his hands off on his pants and stood. “Well, look who’s here. The pacifist SEAL.” He barked a few times. Ratface 1 and Ratface 2 hyuk-hyuk-hyuked.
“The thing I said about fighting, not seeing the point?” said Finn. “I changed my mind.”
His right arm shot out like an adder’s strike.
Tucker rocked back on his legs, grabbing at his throat and gagging for air.
Finn had a philosophy about fighting. He preferred not to; mostly it was a waste of time and energy. But when a fight became necessary, the only way to do it was to win, and quickly.
In Finn’s book there were three types of fight.
The fight to kill. That was the simplest and easiest. The fight to avoid being killed or prevent someone else from being killed. That one you accomplished by putting the other combatant out of commission, not necessarily permanently, just for the purposes of the moment. Still, the general rule in a type 2 fight was to inflict, if not lethal damage, then at least damage sufficient to ensure that the immediate danger was extinguished. Nobody was more dangerous than a committed and only partially disabled combatant.
And then there was the third type: the fight to make a point.
Which was what Finn was looking at right now.
“Hey!” A full two seconds had elapsed from the instant of impact, but Ratface 1 was just now reacting, a look of outrage and fury so exaggerated it was almost comical. Apparently he was winding up to execute some sort of counter. Not so Ratface 2, who was still frozen in place, stunned disbelief on his face.
Typically the goal in a type 3 fight was to cause more psychological than physical pain. In a word, to humiliate. Since there was seldom any real danger involved, there was rarely need for serious physical damage.
Regardless of the specific goal, though—to kill, to avoid being killed, or to humiliate—it was always best accomplished immediately. Less wasted energy, more certainty, and you retained the advantage of surprise. The fights in movies, stretched out for suspense and entertainment purposes, were pure horseshit. In a real fight the outcome was usually determined within the first ten seconds of action.
Ten at most.
This one took about half that.
Tucker had reeled back two steps, retching and coughing but not fully out of the game, which impressed Finn. There was something to be said for the inertia of sheer bulk.
Finn half turned toward Ratface 1 and punched the point of his left elbow into Ratty’s left temple, then launched off his left foot and delivered a left-hand palm strike to Tucker’s nose.
The nose is one of the more sensitive human extremities, even in a less than super-sensitive guy like this one, and smashing its delicate cartilage up against the nose bone is quite painful, as Tucker would have been able to attest if his brain were not currently distracted by firing on all sorts of normally unused cylinders. The nose also houses a dense matrix of tiny blood vessels, a number of them right then in the process of rupturing. All in all, a nose strike like the one Finn had just executed could be relied upon to make the eyes tear up to the point of shutting down vision.
Finn turned his face sharply a few degrees in the direction of Ratface 2, who responded by promptly sitting down on the deck.
Ratface 1 had slumped back against the nearest machine, a leg press.
Tucker was on his knees, a supplicant weeping before the unfamiliar god of defeat.
Finn turned to the stunned scattering of gym patrons watching this all go down and lifted both hands in the air, open palms forward, in the universal sign language for It’s all good, fighting’s over. Nobody moved.
West Texas watched him curiously.
Tucker let out a low moan.
Finn sat down against a bulkhead and waited.
78
It took a full two minutes for security to show up. Long enough for a crew of sailors to lift and haul the big guy out of the gym and off to medical, his entourage in tow. The others in the gym didn’t move a muscle, just gawked at Finn.
After a half minute of silent stares he spoke up quietly. “He’ll be fine,” he said.
No one said a word. They didn’t believe him, but it was true. Finn’s fighting style was a cross between water and lightning: fluid, electric, lethal. Though not literally, in this case. Delivered with full force, that throat strike would break the windpipe and sever the vessels, causing the opposing combatant to bleed out in minutes. Or choke on his own blood. Whichever came first. Finn had pulled it. No major damage, and certainly nothing permanent. Although Tucker wouldn’t be able to talk in anything over a whisper for the next few days.
What a loss to the world.
When the security team arrived Finn was still sitting in the same spot. The two MAs stood him up, read him his rights as they cuffed him—moving warily, as if he were made of high explosive that might detonate at any moment—and ma
rched him out of the gym.
Two minutes later they ushered him through a massive, capsule-shaped door, then a second, steel-grated door, down a narrow ladder and through yet another door to the subfloor suite that constituted “Precinct 72,” the ship’s brig, and into the custody of the two masters-at-arms currently on duty.
“You’re kidding,” said one in a high gravelly voice.
Frank and his silent partner, Dewitt.
Lo and behold.
After dismissing the two escorts, Frank proceeded to pat down the prisoner, starting with his torso, then carefully along one arm, then the other, then starting on the legs.
“So, Chief Finn,” he said.
“Frank,” said Finn.
“Have to say, I am surprised. How the hell did you get yourself in here?”
“Getting in is easy,” said Finn. “Getting out, that takes practice.”
Frank chuckled as he patted down Finn’s left leg toward the foot.
Just then the bolts on the brig’s door shot back and in walked Cheryl Hawkins, the security officer who ran Precinct 72, triple-sized morning mocha in hand.
Hawkins was a skinny, wiry thing, tough as sheet metal rivets, with a hacksaw voice that could cut through anything. She also had the foulest mouth on the ship. “The Sheriff,” they called her.
The Sheriff ordered the same damn coffee drink every single day: a triple mocha, at 0630 on the dot. According to Finn’s internal timepiece it was now 0635. A five-minute amble from Jittery Abe’s to Precinct 72.
Creatures of habit.
“Well, fuck me sideways, mean and hard.” The Sheriff stood just inside the door and stared at him for a long moment, then walked over behind her desk and took her seat. Noted Finn’s gaze and turned in her chair, looking up behind her.
There, mounted on the bulkhead behind her desk, was a photo of a much younger Cheryl Hawkins, standing proudly on the deck of a fishing boat, holding a speargun at port arms; a second photo of her posing with an enormous yellowtail; and in between the two framed shots, a short American-style mahogany speargun, mounted along with a single steel-tipped bolt.
Finn had heard her bragging about this speargun in the coffee line, about how she’d won her “little beauty” in a shooting contest during a training workup. Seemed the Sheriff cut her teeth on the California docks, too.
The Sheriff swiveled back to look at Finn.
“See something you like, Chief Jizz?” she said.
Finn gave no reply.
She leaned forward on her desk and spoke in a soft rasp.
“Listen to my words, Mister Titanium Ballsack. I see you up to anything suspicious, I see you even thinking anything suspicious, so help me God I will pull my little beauty down and send that steel shaft straight up your butthole and out between your googly eyes.”
Finn nodded. He tried to picture her swimming in the deep, hunting yellowtail and abalone, cursing at the sharks. He could see it.
Frank put one hand on Finn’s forearm and ushered him out of the office, past genpop (currently empty), and back to one of the solitary cells, where he would be their guest for the next three days.
Finn sat down on the steel bunk’s thin padding, then lay back and stretched out his frame, hands folded behind his head while his grated door clanged shut and locked.
“Don’t envy you, Chief,” said Frank through the door’s steel-mesh grating. “Three days in a cell, no exercise, nothing but bread and water.”
That was not a figure of speech. Actual bread-and-water punishment, referred to officially as “diminished rations,” was not supposed to exist anymore, having been recently retired from the books; the new mandate was for all prisoners to be fed a normal three squares. The Sheriff, though, she was old school. Chain of command looked the other way. Bread and water it was.
“It’s not perfect,” Finn agreed. “But it has its advantages.”
“Such as?”
“If anyone else gets killed out there while I’m in here, you’ll know it wasn’t me who did it.”
Frank started to chuckle, then abruptly stopped. “You serious?”
“I’m always serious.”
Frank chuckled again as he walked away, leaving their prisoner in the semi-gloom. Finn stared at his cell’s ceiling and thought about his last conversation with Jackson.
Commodities.
He knew the CMC’s team had no leads, nothing at all, and that Jackson was counting on Finn to give him something.
All Finn had to work with was the files in his head.
He thought about Stevens, the psychologist, and what he’d said about Finn’s memories. Maybe those are just the ones you remember.
What was he not remembering?
Finn closed his eyes, took a series of long, slow breaths, and began to think back.
From outside there came a long loud booming sound, a single five-second blast on the ship’s horn, audible for miles around: the signal for getting under way. They were pulling out, bound for their Pacific crossing, their killer still on board.
79
Jackson was about to go take some chow when a light knock came on his office door. “Open,” he called out.
Indy poked her head in. “I have something to report,” she said, in a tone that said, Fasten your seatbelt.
Jackson ushered her into his inner office, where they both took their seats on his little facing couches. “Let’s have it,” he said.
“I’ve been sifting through all the email and web traffic in the days around the disappearances. Since you asked me to look into Chief Finn’s background, I decided to take a closer look at his Internet usage. His second day on board he did several web searches, all based on the word ‘Mukalla’—that’s a city on the coast of Yemen…”
Jackson recognized it: the location Finn mentioned, where the “incident” occurred.
“The other search terms included ‘terror attack,’ ‘massacre,’ and the date July twenty-nine.”
“I don’t remember any news about a recent massacre in Yemen.”
“There wasn’t any. So I dug a little.”
It had taken a bit of digital forensics to tunnel down to it, and all she could unearth were references in an obscure Naval Special Warfare report, withheld from the public and classified as “investigation pending,” plus a few unsubstantiated rumors.
“There was an AQAP cell operating in the area, carrying out local assassinations and grand theft—mostly drug money.”
Jackson nodded. AQAP: al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
“According to the report, nearly four weeks ago, on July twenty-seven, the group tortured and killed an American journalist. Two days later a SEAL team stormed their safe house, but they managed to evade capture. That same night, they slaughtered a nearby settlement of farmers who had given up their location. You didn’t read about this because the whole thing was buried, kept completely out of the press.”
Jackson gave a low whistle. “An American journalist. Wonder how they kept that quiet.” He frowned. “And why?”
“Why indeed,” said Indy. “Which is where the rumors come into it—and where it gets weird. As I said, that is the official report. But there’s also a story, entirely unsubstantiated, that it was not the terrorists who killed the locals, but a few rogue SEALs from that same team who went off the reservation and committed the atrocities.”
Indy paused. The office was so quiet Jackson could hear his own heartbeat.
“There have been no charges brought,” she went on. “No formal investigation. Right now there is nothing but a vague cloud of suspicion.”
“This SEAL platoon,” said Jackson. “Would that happen to have been Chief Finn’s unit?”
“It was.”
Another silence.
“So I’m guessing you’re going to tell me w
hat Chief Finn’s role may have been in all this, if anything?”
Indy looked up from her notes. “Nobody is drawing that connection, at least not that I’ve been able to find.”
Jackson sighed. “You used the word ‘atrocities.’ ”
“Yes. There is one more ugly detail. Whoever it was that killed these families, the rumor is that they took trophies. Ears. Scalps.”
Jackson closed his eyes. “Let me guess,” he said quietly. “And fingers.”
“And fingers,” said Indy.
Mère Marie.
80
July 29. Near midnight and still infernally hot. The air shimmers with unspent static charge. It’s been two days since the journalist’s murder. Finn and his squad approach the cell’s safe house silently, invisibly. Their breacher plants his charge. Finn gives the signal. The charge goes off with a roar and they sweep through the place. There is no one there…
And then?
A gap.
Finn opened his eyes.
He was on the floor of his cell, back against the bulkhead, where he’d been sitting all day with the light switched off, looking for lost memories in the dark. He took a slow breath, shut his eyes again, and once more slipped back into July 29…
A flicker of heat lightning rips open the sky, a flash bulb instant.
He is somewhere else now, standing by himself in front of a small dwelling of plaster rubble and sun-baked mud bricks, facing a wooden door. He waits a moment for the flash’s night blindness to fade.
It feels all wrong. He shouldn’t be alone. This is what a squad is for. Like the civilian police: always call for backup. But he hasn’t. He doesn’t.
His eyes regain their sensitivity, and now the darkened scene in front of him starts to resolve.
Now he sees the door clearly.
Shattered to pieces.
Someone has smashed it in.
And then? Only disconnected fragments.
A flickering lightbulb, skips in an old vinyl LP.
He pushes aside the shattered wooden fragments and steps through the mud-brick doorway—