A sideswipe at Mathias’s time spent with Brookbank?
The scar over his right eye twitched, the gash across his belly burned. He pinched the bridge of his nose to forestall the onset of a debilitating migraine.
When asked to join the trio of unholy assassins, Mathias declined. Not for lack of courage, but for lack of conviction. With Brookbank, at least, he didn’t need to pretend. Which made those men better men than he, Mathias reasoned.
“Is there a point to this late-night history lesson, Gloria? Or do you just feel the need to share?”
Ignoring him, Resnick continued. “Of the three men who went rogue, one is officially listed as MIA. One served twelve years in military lock-up Stateside, current whereabouts unknown.”
“The third?”
“The third? The Chief? Well, he, Mathias, I assume to be marauding the American countryside slaughtering innocent civilians with a long-range sniper rifle. I have a name, but I suspect you already know who it is.”
Silence on the line.
“We’ll wait on DNA for final confirmation. In the meantime, I’m supposed to set you up as bait. Are you in?”
Silence.
“We have our man, Mathias.”
“All due respect, ma’am, you have nothing of the sort.”
“You served under this man. I understand your emotions might be mixed.”
“Emotion has nothing to do with it.”
“Call it loyalty, then; I know what happened out there.”
Loyalty: a strong feeling of support or allegiance to a nation, cause, philosophy, group, or person.
“I’m in,” Mathias said with finality.
“Good on you, Mathias; I think.” No reply; damnable man and his damnable resolve. “Tomorrow, a series of articles appear in major dailies with reports on cable and network news confirming a serial killer at work countrywide responsible for at least thirty-seven kills, all by long-range sniper fire. We’ll label him a Domestic Terrorist, a former Marine gone AWOL in Iraq, converted to Islam, and returned home to take out his vengeance on his countrymen. The White House will not be happy to learn about Bohannon but will wet their jeans over any excuse to expand the surveillance mandate of the NSA.
“And you? You’ll be our giant killer, a decorated former Navy SEAL recruited to track The Shooter. We’ll distribute your name and a detailed bio, so there’s no mistaking who you are; the man assigned to take down his former commanding officer now terrorizing innocent civilians, emphasis on the word terrorism. Last chance, Mathias; tell me you’re okay with this mission because once I hit Send there’s no turning back for either of us. I have precisely forty-two minutes to make the early edition of the Washington Post.”
Mathias took a moment to reply. “Keep my family out of it, ma’am. Mention my family, all bets are off.”
FORTY-FIVE
Fallujah, Iraq
MORE THAN A YEAR AFTER America’s Commander in Chief George W. Bush declared Mission Accomplished, and despite assurances from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that Iraqi opposition consisted of a rag-tag group of disgruntled dead-enders, Mathias found himself alone atop a minaret a hundred twenty feet above street-level pinned down by a barrage of hostile Iraqi gunfire.
He’d remained behind in the tower to supply covering fire for a platoon of troops from 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Division, assigned to conduct a door-to-door sweep of the district: three Squads, sixteen men each. Somehow, four had managed to become detached from the main body of the platoon.
Assigned to SEAL Team 9, Mathias had ordered his spotter down from the minaret.
“No sense both of us getting our heads shot-off up here!” he’d said to the young Sargent, screaming to be heard over the rattle of gunfire and crumbling masonry.
Mathias watched as the man scrambled down the iron steps three-at-a-time.
Now, with two dozen well-armed, well-trained Saddam loyalists shooting-up his position, Mathias feared he may have over-estimated his usefulness to those men on the ground. Despite repeated calls into his radio for reinforcements, none came. And despite reassurances from the Sec of D, the opposition he faced was neither rag-tag nor dead-enders. They weren’t shooting with popguns; the bastards were shooting with American-made M16s.
They didn’t rush headlong into the wide-open market square like sheep to slaughter, either. No: they were a calculated and coordinated ever-moving front, boxing-in his comrades with precision until they had them backed into a blind alley with nowhere to go but up. Failing a rooftop chopper extraction, the four soldiers were doomed.
Despite this, Mathias held his position, taking down four of the insurgents who dared venture out into the open. All he needed to sight a target was a thread of bandanna, a flash of sunlight off a buttstock or a pair of shades, a puff of smoke from a muzzle. Mathias lamented that if not for lack of ammo, he’d be able to even the odds.
Unless, of course, the minaret collapsed beneath him.
Which was possible considering the thousands of rounds the Iraqi’s had thrown his way. The structure was a hundred years old and already severely degraded by weather and age. An incoming RPG and his own goose was cooked.
All this and more flashed through Mathias’s mind in the time it took for him to retrieve and to load another magazine—two in reserve, less than fifty rounds remaining. Not enough to save himself, let alone the men below.
Sipping the last water from his canteen, Mathias issued a final call for reinforcements into his shoulder-mic. Static, came the response, loud and clear.
“Shit, shit, shit!”
No longer concerned a reflection could betray a location already well-known to the enemy, Mathias used a mirror on an extending rod to reconnoiter the status of the situation on the street below. Smoke, rubble, and dust swirled together to form a vaporous cloud. In the few moments it took for him to reload, the gunfire had subsided. Which could mean one of two things: the troops had successfully battled out of harm’s way, or the insurgents had prevailed.
His question was answered when Mathias saw a half dozen Iraqis move cautiously from doorway to doorway, advancing on the Americans’ position without taking return fire.
If still alive, those warriors would not go down without a fight.
Scanning the street upwind, Mathias spotted two Iraqis in a doorway. As one man knelt, the other pointed an extended index finger in the direction of the minaret. After a moment, the kneeling man hefted a four-foot-long black tube to his shoulder. As if looking Mathias straight in the eye, the finger-pointer gestured directly to Mathias’s position in the tower. He tapped the kneeling man on the shoulder.
“Jesus!” said Mathias, recognizing the black tube instantly for what it was.
Reaching for his sack, he scrambled to the doorway leading down. Staying low, Mathias reached the top stair. To save time, he rolled the way down using his flak-jacket and helmet as protection.
Mathias was twenty steps above ground-level when he heard the tell-tale whoosh! of the incoming rocket-launched grenade. He felt the shudder of the impact an instant before the deafening sound of the explosion reached his ears.
In seconds, he was falling, assaulted by debris, and choked by dust, pierced by a hundred flying fragments of ancient stone that managed to penetrate his flesh despite the flak-jacket. Mathias came down hard, landing on his right side, shattering his clavicle, snapping his right thigh.
Desperate, he clawed his way to the open street before the religious edifice collapsed upon him.
There, lying on his back, sunlight and grit burning his eyes, Mathias watched as the Iraqis dragged the bodies of his fallen comrades from the mouth of the alley. Further up the street, he watched the spotter and the rocket launcher high-five and dance a celebratory jig, no regard to just having destroyed a spiritual landmark.
“Fuck you,” Mathias said in response, voice weak, fingering his sidearm.
About to aim and open-fire, a shadow crossed over his line-of-sight. “Stand down, buck-o,�
� someone whispered in a familiar Arkansas drawl. “Today is not your day to die.”
Relaxing his grip, Mathias watched as another half dozen American troops rounded the corner of a nearby building to join SEAL Team 9 Chief, Captain Ezekiel Bohannon. Using only hand signals, Bohannon directed his men into position. Three minutes later, the bodies of twenty Saddam Sunni loyalists—ex-soldiers, special forces, police—littered the road, dead or dying. Dead or dying, for good measure the Chief fired a round from his sidearm into the skull of each man’s head.
Returning to Mathias still lying helpless in the rubble, he stared down. “Y’all can thank me later, soldier,” he said, before ordering his men to stretcher Mathias from the battlefield and to retreat.
FORTY-SIX
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
EZEKIEL BOHANNON COULD TAKE the head clean off a possum at fifty paces before he learned to read, write, or speak full sentences.
“Learn to read an’ write,” lectured his daddy, “you’ll always have work. Learn to kill, you’ll always have food.”
Growing up in Witts Springs at the junction of Arkansas Hwy 16 and State Hwy 377 bordering the eastern flank of the Ozark National Forest, for young Zeke it was a lesson well learned. In Witts Springs there was a post office, a general store, a Baptist Church, and a cemetery, which Zeke could see across the road through the filthy side window of his daddy’s dilapidated doublewide. Growing up, for Zeke, there were no jobs in Witts Springs and no future he could see; just broken-down house-trailers, rusting tool sheds, vehicles decaying on blocks, and people with rotten teeth growing old and dying prematurely.
For young Zeke Bohannon, to join the military seemed an obvious choice, which he did in September nineteen ninety at the age of eighteen years. Before Operation Desert Storm, the combat phase of the first Gulf War, Bohannon enlisted in the Navy determined one day to become a SEAL.
Though during the brief skirmish Zeke didn’t see action, he trained relentlessly. Hand-to-hand combat, extreme survival skills, tracking, sharp-shooting, making and diffusing roadside IEDs, endurance training, and swimming.
By the time of the second Gulf War, Zeke held the rank of Lieutenant. Having won a dozen sharp-shooting competitions and receiving accolades from superiors and trainers alike, Zeke was accepted to the Navy SEAL program. Graduating SEALS Hell Week—five and a half days of grueling training designed to test the psychological and physical limits of recruits—with high honor, in two-thousand-two, Bohannon was deployed to Iraq where he first met Mathias Menzies.
FORTY-SEVEN
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
EZEKIEL BOHANNON WAS SURPRISED, though not alarmed, to see his photo on the front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The picture was thirteen years out-of-date, taken during a final tour in Iraq. Bohannon was much heavier at the time, tanned, whiskered, and wearing reflective aviator sunglasses. He wore a Harley Davidson kerchief tied around his head. The military fatigues and the Mk-12 sniper rifle crossed over his chest shouted American war hero more than it screamed domestic terrorist. Though named in the article with former rank, no one would connect the man in the photo with the man he’d become.
Still, labeling him a domestic terrorist rankled. A man who spent a career in military service exterminating rat-bastard insurgents and jihadis on behalf of his country was no damn domestic terrorist.
More irksome, still, was recruiting a former platoon-mate to hunt him down. Bohannon had evaded capture in Iraq from the masters he’d so bravely served, and now they’d turned a man whose life he’d saved more often than once, against him.
Could Mathias become a complication? Bohannon didn’t yet know how.
Last he knew, his former SEAL Team member had left the military, sold out to a private contractor for a bag of filthy gold coin, got himself and his team blown all to shit in Afghanistan. Returning to America, he’d disappeared into the outback like a ghost.
How dangerous could such a man be?
Bohannon recalled Mathias at the Battle of Fallujah. A smile creased his lips. He pictured Mathias covered in rubble and dust and blood hoisting his weapon with his one good arm; a man preparing to make one-last-stand.
Though Bohannon disapproved of Mathias’s post-war work for Brookbank and carried a grudge over his refusal to join Bohannon’s band of Merry Men, he couldn’t deny the man his courage. Or his skill. He’d stuck it out to the very end that day potting Iraqis to protect men he knew were doomed, knowing he was doomed, too, getting himself near incinerated by an incoming RPG for his trouble.
When assigned to SEAL Team 9, Mathias was just a kid. Nevertheless, he’d qualified to be a SEAL and to join the elite squad under Bohannon’s command. Soft-spoken, All-American quarterback good-looks, one hundred sixty pounds in full military kit. Chance of surviving in combat? Zero to none, Bohannon wagered at the time.
But Mathias surprised: stoic, a man of few words, a crack-shot. Better than Bohannon, better, even, than Chris Kyle. Forty-two kills in the first ten days, alone, in the battle for Fallujah. Kid was like a lizard; one second there, the next gone, climbing ground-level to an elevated sniping position within moments. And like a chameleon, impossible to spot.
Like most military special forces, Bohannon suspected Mathias carried baggage, a shit-ton for a kid so young. Rumor in the compound was the father was ex-military. Following in his daddy’s footsteps or a man out to make amends?
Even as a novice, Mathias had been exceptional. As a battled-scarred vet?
He’d do well not to underestimate Mathias, after all.
FORTY-EIGHT
Carmel-by-the-Sea, California
“WITH MATHIAS RUNNING-OFF to play cowboys and Indians now’s your chance to cut-and-run, Tara. Far as I can see, you don’t owe the man a damn thing. Fact is, I’d say he owes you for what you’ve done for him. Big-time. You’re still young enough to have a life of your own. Unhitch your wagon, baby, you’re not a bloody rescue-dog.”
Tara stared from the window at the incoming swell crashing on the rocks of Carmel Bay, mesmerized as much by the shifting tide as her big sister’s use of mixed metaphors.
There was truth in what Allison had to say. Seven years of progress undone by one phone call, an offer to set things right. Why did she expect differently? Mathias would forever be willing to sacrifice himself on the altar of self-righteousness. Which was not necessarily the problem. Problem was, Mathias was prepared to have Tara burn at the cross, too.
She’d arrived in Carmel the day following Mathias’s departure to Washington, leaving the house key with the man he’d contracted to care for the horses.
Staring at the key, the man had asked her, “What I am supposed to do with this?”
“Frankly,” Tara had replied in her best imitation of Rhett Butler, “I don’t give a damn.”
Of course, Allie had welcomed baby-sis with open arms into the gazillion-dollar mock-Tudor home on Scenic Drive with the unparalleled view overlooking the Bay. For Allie, a captive audience because Allie had never approved of Tara’s relationship with Mathias.
A practicing environmental attorney accustomed to fighting for a cause, Tara couldn’t help but consider the two Range Rovers in the drive and Maserati Turbo in the garage as a contradiction. But with Trump in office and the EPA gutted, Causes, these days, were hard to come by. With business slow, Tara would do.
“You know I’m right, Tee; let it go.”
Probably, Allie was. Tara had dragged Mathias back from the brink; now the rest was up to him.
About to respond, Tara was interrupted by Allie’s third husband entering the kitchen.
“You girls seen this?” Trevor said.
Trevor was underwear model slim and Gillette razor-blade-handsome, far enough beyond the right side of thirty not to be called a boy-toy. To his credit, he earned an honest living as a network television ad exec commuting to San Francisco, though making only a fraction of Allie’s income.
Annoyed at being interrupted, Allie said, “What is it, Trev?
Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
Taking no offense, Trevor hoisted a copy of the morning Washington Post. “Article in the Post. Seems Mathias is working with the FBI.” Said somewhat in awe, Trevor enthralled by Mathias’s past exploits and his capacity to survive. “Tracking a terrorist who shoots victims from long range. According to the Bureau, thirty-seven dead, already, and counting. They suspect a former SEAL, Mathias’s former commanding officer, is responsible. According to the Bureau, the man is a jihadi turned while serving in Iraq. There’s a bio and a couple of pics of Mathias, too.”
“Jesus,” said Allison, snatching the Times from Trevor. “Does the man have no shame?”
Taking the paper from Allison, Tara read; nothing in the article she didn’t already know or suspect. When done, she tossed it to the kitchen island. “None of it is news to me.”
“Sorry, Tara,” Trevor said, sounding apologetic. “Page four, below the fold, column three.”
Retrieving the paper, Tara turned to page four. Below the fold, there was a photo of herself, a dated security mugshot from her time with Brookbank Security. She scanned the article.
Though brief, the article detailed Tara’s time with Brookbank, her relationship to Mathias, her current home address in Antimony, Utah. Pale and trembling, Tara set the paper back down.
Alarmed, Allie moved to the island to join her sister. Reading the article, she said, “Bastard!” Cradling Tara in her arms, she said, “Don’t worry, sweetie, you can hole-up here until this blows over or they deliver that son-of-a-bitch in a casket. I’ll pay for the funeral myself.”
Shifting from foot-to-foot, Trevor said, “It may not be that simple, Al.”
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