by Mark Aitken
‘Sent toilet-blue when they wanted diesel?’
‘Something like that. Don’t wanna lie to you, Gerry, but I can’t share the details.’
‘Okay, you’re in,’ said Gallen. ‘But my number two is Bren Dale. Worked with him in the Ghan.’
‘Happy to be a soldier.’ Winter shrugged. ‘So, three of us?’
‘Four,’ said Gallen. ‘Donny McCann said yes.’
‘Recon?’
‘Yep. We were a good crew, but never any babysitting for oil executives.’
‘What about these people were working for?’ asked Winter. ‘The dude you disarmed? Or the one with the sign? Didn’t look like no office boys to me.’
‘They’re ex-intel, ex-military,’ said Gallen. ‘But I think they’re the good guys.’
‘You know this Mulligan?’
Gallen nodded. ‘Paul Mulligan, ex-DIA.’
‘He looks corporate.’
‘Annapolis boy, rose to captain in the ONI,’ said Gallen. ‘He’s out of the spooking game now.’
‘Okay,’ said Winter. ‘So why was I being followed in the cab?’
Gallen paused. ‘Today?’
‘Late-model Impala, California plates,’ said Winter.
Gallen held his gaze. ‘They show ‘emselves?’
‘No,’ said Winter. ‘Peeled off a mile short of the apartment building.’
‘Knew where you were going?’
‘Seems like it.’
Gallen tried to relax. This wasn’t Afghanistan, wasn’t a Taliban stronghold. He had to detune from that old shit or he’d go crazy. ‘Okay, let’s keep an eye on that.’
‘We can get eyes now,’ said Winter, a smile creasing his long face.
‘Now?’
‘Other side of the road, in that Spanish cafe,’ said Winter. ‘Back in the shadows, at the bar. I make an Anglo male, early thirties, glassing us. Been there since we arrived.’
Without looking in the direction Winter had indicated, Gallen excused himself to take a pee. Along the hallway to the washrooms, he found a credenza sitting in front of a window. Peering through the leaves of a lily, careful not to make a silhouette, he stood still and let his eyes adjust to the change in light across eighty yards, from shade to light to shade.
After ten seconds he picked up what Winter had seen: a lone man, behind the brass tap bollards, with a set of field-glasses to his eyes. The trajectory suggested surveillance of the Pacific Mariners Yacht Club restaurant.
Leaning back, Gallen held up three fingers at Winter: three minutes then come get me.
Charging down the stairs, Gallen passed the girl at the club desk and bought a white PMYC polo shirt and a club cap, putting them on as he pushed out into the heat of early evening. Walking fast through the foot traffic he crossed the road with other walkers and kept his eyes on the tarmac, his mind running over the possibilities: Mulligan had left a dinner comp for the yacht club restaurant, and Gallen had decided to use it—now they were being followed. What were the chances of that being a coincidence?
The rules of engagement in recon units changed with the target and the gig: you were either pure reconnaissance or direct action and very rarely both. But one rule overrode all the rest: if a shadow attached itself to your party, you got to the bottom of who that fucker was and you did it real fast. Whether you scared him off, killed him or dragged him into a basement for a conversation, that was up to people like Gallen. But no special forces commanding officer ever let an undeclared snoop conduct counter-surveillance without there being some consequences. It wasn’t the reputation you wanted in the field, that you’d let that go.
Gallen decided to flush the watcher, see what he’d do, where he’d run. The Colt was back in the apartment, but the surprise factor would balance it out.
Rounding the sidewalk area of the restaurant, Gallen glanced up and saw Winter at the table in the yacht club: they’d been seated perfectly for surveillance.
Pushing into the shade, Gallen walked to the bar and kept his eyes on the tanned girl in the black tank top. Moving to his left, he could see the watcher from the corner of his eye, the pocket-sized Pentax binoculars held up to his face. Gallen ordered a beer and watched the field-glasses drop. Winter had obviously left the table at three minutes and the watcher was wondering where his target had gone.
Turning his head slowly, Gallen came eye to eye with the watcher: a sallow Anglo with goldfish eyes, which turned to saucers as Gallen gave him a wink.
‘Nice night for a perv?’
Falling sideways off the stool as he recognised Gallen, the watcher scrambled to leave by the rear door of the restaurant. Gallen saw worked shoulders under the light windbreaker, suggesting a professional, and this was verified as the watcher shouted something into his cuff as he headed for the door.
Following at a walk, Gallen had to allow the waitress with the full drinks tray to move along before he could go after the panicking field-glasses guy.
Watching the man’s ankle disappear as the rear door flapped back on the spring, Gallen moved along the toilet hallway and paused at the door: who was on the other side? A man exited the washroom beside him and Gallen held up his arm.
‘Sorry, buddy,’ he said, smiling. ‘Just got my cast off and I can’t shift that door. Would you—’
The youngster didn’t even reply, just threw his shoulder into the swing door and held it open for Gallen.
‘There you go,’ said the Samaritan, and Gallen saw a black handgun reaching from across the doorway into the side of the man’s face.
The watcher’s face came into view, his face dropping as he realised he had a stranger. ‘Shit,’ he said, and turned for the car park.
The rear of the restaurant opened into a service and deliveries area, a black Escalade parked with a door open. The watcher leapt into the rear door and Gallen paused, seeing three shapes through the tinted windows. Panting in the stand-off, Gallen realised the Escalade was going nowhere. As he approached it slowly, a commotion on the other side of the vehicle made the four-by-four rock on its shocks.
The rear door flew open and the watcher dropped to the tarmac, handgun pointed at Gallen. Slowly raising his hands, Gallen eyeballed the watcher as two other men walked around the front of the Escalade, arms raised, a tall blond man following with an automatic handgun in each hand.
‘Hey, boss,’ said Winter, the guns trained between the shoulder blades of his captives. ‘Looks like we’re popular.’
‘That’s far enough, tough guy,’ said the watcher, getting to Gallen and standing behind him, gun jammed in his kidneys. ‘Drop the guns.’
‘Like watching a man eat?’ said Winter, slow as the sun. ‘Take you down McDonald’s, see plenty of it.’
Behind Gallen, the friendly Samaritan squawked, the fear getting too much. The watcher twisted as the restaurant door banged shut and Gallen pirouetted into the watcher’s chest, taking the gun hand away with a wrist slap and immediately changing to a Korean wrist-lock. Open-handing the watcher under the chin, Gallen brought the gun wrist back on itself and pushed it down hard with his body weight, snapping the ligaments and making the gun bounce free on the delivery apron.
The man opened his mouth to scream but nothing came out as he collapsed, unconscious, to the ground.
Picking up the gun—a SIG 9mm—Gallen turned back to Winter, whose captives gulped with fear but maintained their composure. A sandy-haired yuppie dressed like a lawyer muttered something like, Okay.
‘That civvie’s calling the cops,’ said Gallen. ‘Why don’t you pick up your buddy and leave?’
Gallen winked at the lawyer guy and stepped back as the two men retrieved the watcher with the busted wrist and dragged him to the Escalade.
Winter collected the handguns, threw them in a dumpster as they jogged through the service lanes, looking for a way out that the cops wouldn’t be using as a way in. They found a cab and took it to Santa Monica, silence enveloping them as they dealt with the adrenaline come-down. Crossi
ng the road beside the pier, they cased the ground and found another cab, took it south to Venice Beach. Grabbing a booth at the back of a bar located three blocks from the sand, Gallen bought the beers and they finally looked at each other.
‘Any ideas?’ said Winter.
‘The dude with the glasses spoke into his cuff once I made him,’ said Gallen.
‘See the tyres on that Escalade?’ Winter scanned the bar over Gallen’s shoulders. ‘Self-sealers. Looked military, or—’
‘Those weren’t standard door pillars, neither,’ said Gallen.
‘Built for armour and one-inch glass.’
They looked at one another, the question hanging: what the hell did the US Government want with Gerry Gallen and Kenny Winter?
~ * ~
CHAPTER 8
Aaron didn’t give away much about himself but Gallen noticed that he liked his toast cold and his coffee black.
‘So, Mulligan not around?’ said Gallen, as they finished eating breakfast and Toby cleared the balcony table.
‘I run the Durville detail,’ said Aaron. ‘You’re dealing with me now.’
Gallen’s new boss had an oval face that twisted when he was pissed. His thin hair was cut in a side parting and he had reached forty with no busted facial features or missing teeth.
Gallen lit his first smoke of the day. ‘You okay with that? ‘
‘I’m okay with doing my job. I’m okay with others doing their jobs.’
Aaron took a manila envelope from the seat beside him, placed it on the glass-topped table and pushed it across. Gallen looked at it, felt the sun’s heat and wondered if Aaron was ex-Agency.
‘Employment documents, life insurance and the health packages,’ said Aaron. ‘I have you starting Monday week, gives you eleven days to get those signed and your crew on board. That a problem?’
‘Should be fine,’ said Gallen, glad he’d refused the seat opposite Aaron and taken one at his side. He wanted eyes on the other condos and on the street. Winter was still in the upstairs apartment, watching the environment with field-glasses, but Gallen didn’t want his back to the street—not now.
‘You got the measurements for your team?’ said Aaron. ‘Like Paul told you?’
Gallen patted the piece of paper in his jeans pocket.
‘Then let’s get the kit,’ said Aaron, looking at his watch. ‘Told my man we’d be in Longbeach before ten.’
Gallen shrugged, sucked on the smoke. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Wanna bring that gorilla you hiding upstairs?’ said Aaron.
Gallen wasn’t too concerned about Aaron making Kenny Winter— the Canadian wasn’t a long-term secret, just short-term insurance. ‘He wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
~ * ~
Toby took the Crown Vic off the San Diego Freeway at 9.48 and wove through the light industrial zone surrounding the port district, the part tourists don’t see.
Trying to keep his bearings, Gallen caught a glimpse of the Naval Weapons Station across a canal and figured they were in the south end of Longbeach. At the end of a trucker’s road into a distribution depot, they veered right, avoiding the loading bays, and drove into the dimness of a large warehouse with no signage.
The suspension squeaked as they emerged from the car, the four of them removing sunglasses as they looked around. It was a tin-sided facility the size of a hardware Supa Store, with six aisles between racking that extended to the ceiling. The front of the aisles contained boots and fatigues, tents and field shovels, some of them in sale bins and others modelled on military mannequins. Gallen knew what would be down the back.
‘This way,’ said Toby, leading them towards a metal scanner of the type used at the bag search area of airports. A tall security guy took the team through the scanner one by one, issuing white plastic bar-coded security numbers that they pinned to their shirts. The scanner beeped and they turned, watching Aaron remove a handgun from his hip and a bitch-gun from his ankle rig.
The security guy took the weapons and secured them in a lockbox under his desk. ‘This way,’ he said, walking them towards an office where a thickset black man in his fifties stood, lighting a cheroot.
‘Chase,’ said Aaron.
Gallen noticed that Chase shook the offered hand but kept his eyes on the people unknown to him.
‘These the boys?’ Chase asked, walking around Aaron.
Gallen stepped forward, offered his hand. ‘Gerry Gallen.’
‘Chase Lang,’ said the big man. ‘Corps, right?’
‘Ex.’ Gallen noticed a SEALs ring on Lang’s heavy right hand, and recognised the name. Chase Lang was a military services provider, what in the old days was known as a middleman for mercenaries.
‘The man say you got a budget of twenty-five grand,’ said Lang. ‘Let’s go shopping.’
The golf cart hissed around the aisles, Chase Lang giving a running commentary as they passed the bins of everything a small army would need for life in the field. Starting with the fatigues, Gallen read from his piece of paper the dimensions and boot size of a crew that were accustomed to ordering precisely the fit they wanted. He ordered sets of blacks, jungle camos and arctic camos, and then sifted through the racks of civvie fatigues, military gear designed for use by special forces and intel teams when they wanted to pass for mining assayers or geology analysts.
The security guy beside Lang input the orders into a handheld device and Gallen noticed that a John Deere Gator was following them, the items being dumped in the tray on the back.
They threw in socks, underwear, undershirts, thermals and field toilet bags with the good razors that lasted for at least twenty shaves. He ordered caps, hats, gloves, travel pouches that were really handgun holsters and sunglasses that held boom mics and earpieces. Winter pointed out a selection of tiny cameras that transmitted wirelessly to a screen. The whole set-up seemed to run on lithium batteries and Gallen ordered one screen and four cameras.
There was a bin of boots on sale—JB Goodhues, known to soldiers as Canadian fire-fighter boots. They were ten-hole lace-ups with steel shanks and a sole rated for walking across burning coals without melting. They were lined with fire-retarding insulation and because they usually cost two hundred and fifty per pair, the military didn’t stock them in the PX and didn’t have them on general issue. Winter seized on them when he realised what they were and Gallen ordered two pairs each at the sale price of forty dollars a throw.
‘Make a man happy with good leather, boss,’ said Winter, lighting a smoke and pleased with the boots.
Gallen smiled; at officer training there had been an old-school instructor who used to tell the young candidates that if you looked after a soldier’s feet and stomach—and gave him fair warning of what was expected each day—then you were basically a good officer.
They took six Kevlar vests—all in taupe—before driving through the internal security fence at the rear of the complex, Chase Lang holding forth on why his teenage kids sat twenty yards from one another and communicated via text messages.
‘I think this generation are the smartest young people ever,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘So what are they so afraid of?’
The golf cart stopped in front of a weapons cache as large as any Gallen had seen outside of Camp Pendleton, the home of the US Marines 1st Recon Battalion. Following Lang along the display racks, Gallen and Winter noted the handguns, the assault rifles, the grenades and marksman rifles. There was a special section for the assault rifles with grenade launchers under the barrel and night sights on the top.
They’d agreed on 9mm handguns and 7.62mm assault rifles, so Gallen ordered five SIG Sauer handguns in matt black, ten spare mags and two large boxes of Winchester loads, each containing thirty-two smaller boxes. Gallen was about to get a set of Colt M4 assault rifles loaded in the Gator when Winter cleared his throat.
‘Problem?’ said Gallen, playing with the breech and cocking the action of a weapon he’d come to know very well during his time in Mindanao and Afgha
nistan.
‘You ever seen the NATO-issue?’ Winter pointed down the display racks to the Heckler & Koch section.
Following Winter to the German weapons, Gallen was out of his comfort zone. US-made firearms may not have been the most advanced, but they worked in all environments and all weather. He watched as the Canadian picked up a futuristic assault rifle labelled ‘G36’.
‘Looks fancy,’ said Gallen, as Lang joined them. ‘But I don’t bet my crew’s life on fancy.’
Lang and Winter chuckled at each other and Gallen felt the flush of anger in his face. ‘Something funny?’
‘Boss,’ said Winter, handing the G36 to Gallen, who immediately felt its lightness and balance, ‘when I first joined ISAF and realised I’d be using the Heckler, I didn’t like the idea. Next morning, my captain tells me to go into the galley, get the rifle from the deep freeze and go shoot some targets.’