by Anthony Tata
“This gets better each time,” Dangurs said. “I liked the rough act.”
Nina looked at him. They were not snuggling or spooning. Each was lying on their side of the bed. The only bond between these two was the recently negotiated agreement. To Nina, sleeping with a man to achieve a personal agenda was no different than any other transaction. It was purely objective.
“I guess you should with your background. You do what I say, and we’ll keep your anger management issues to ourselves. Understand? For now.”
He shifted to look at her, his eyes turning to stone. She watched him transform in front of her. His neck muscles tensed and his face seemed to become thinner, almost skeletal. His smile was wicked.
“That’s what you want, isn’t it? Keep your little rape incident a secret? Be a bitch to explain, wouldn’t it? Given your line of work?”
Dangurs continued to morph. One moment he was the consoling, inquisitive man of his profession and the next he was in a sinister trance. This was the Del Dangurs she wanted on the mission she had negotiated.
“They’re going to North Carolina tonight. Your real mission starts now.”
“Okay.” He was nearly catatonic. Nina’s manipulations had placed him in the zone where she needed him. Violence might be necessary, and the man lying in bed next to her was proven to be as violent as they come.
Nina looked at the alarm clock on the nightstand. They had about ten minutes. She wanted to provide him some positive motivation—a dog biscuit in advance.
“Want to really risk it?”
Of course he did. And so they repeated the process.
As they were finishing, Nina heard a car door shut outside.
“Guess who’s home.” She grinned as she slipped out of bed and into the bathroom. Smoothing her clam diggers with her hands, she arrived at the top of the landing in time to hear Melanie greeting the man who called himself Del Dangurs.
“Hey there. What are you doing here?” Melanie said, smiling as she climbed the porch steps.
He leaned into her to steal a kiss. Not expecting the move, she received him stiffly. He noticed and pulled away. Not wanting her to smell Nina on him, he moved quickly down the steps. He spoke to her over his shoulder and then stopped on the sidewalk.
“I’m off to North Carolina to do some research for the story. Was just nailing everything down, if you know what I mean.”
“You’re leaving this late?”
“Listen, I am late, but I’ll call you to let you know how, you know, everything’s going.”
“Do that.” She smiled.
He looked around quickly, then blew her a kiss. He walked briskly across the yard toward his automobile—the one he called his “sweet ride.”
Del Dangurs was on the move.
CHAPTER 22
Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan
Friday
Matt Garrett, Major General Jack Rampert, Sergeant Eversoll, Hobart, and Van Dreeves, sufficiently bandaged around the shoulder, huddled around the wooden table inside the headquarters at the air base.
“Sir, I saw your brother kiss this picture of Amanda and the Saint Michael medal a hundred times before missions. And he did it directly before he got on that helicopter.”
“We’ve reviewed the tapes now fifty times, and it doesn’t look like anyone was left behind, but there is the whiteout,” Hobart said.
“Maybe the picture fell out of his pocket when he rescued Jergens. AQ snatched it up, thinking it might be intel?” Van Dreeves said what everyone was thinking. They all wanted to believe that Zachary Garrett was alive, but it seemed so unlikely that no one wanted to get their hopes up too soon.
“No.” Eversoll was getting excited. He believed all along that Colonel Garrett had not been killed. “He secured that photo and medallion in the Velcro of his army combat uniform. He was captured and questioned right there in that circle. That was probably AQ taking him away when we popped out of the hole at the end of the tunnel.”
Matt Garrett looked at him. He saw an eager, fresh-faced young man who had a bit of a country look to him. He could see Eversoll’s bottom lip bulge, no doubt full of “worm dirt,” what he and Zachary had called smokeless tobacco. Eversoll wore the newer version of the army combat uniform, a tan-and-olive computerized checkerboard outfit. Velcro pockets and zippers seemed to be in all the right places. He saw the three-chevron rank of sergeant squarely in the center of Eversoll’s chest on a small piece of square cloth about an inch across.
“Zach mentioned that you were pretty squared away,” Matt said. “Think you’re up for another mission?”
“If it involves getting Colonel Garrett back, yes sir.”
Matt looked at Rampert, the consummate warrior king. Rapidly promoted to two-star general after the Ballantine mission a couple of years ago, Rampert was recognized throughout the defense and foreign policy communities as the Special Operations guru. Some were already calling for his accelerated promotion to four-star general so that he could be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Rampert would have none of that, Matt was sure. He looked at his rugged friend, crew cut somehow making him look younger than his fifty years.
“What do you think, General?”
“Going into Pakistan once without telling anyone was a huge risk. Going in twice, is what we call a gamble.”
“Know the difference, Eversoll?” Hobart had turned to Sergeant Eversoll. Clearly the three special operators saw something in the young sergeant they liked. Matt’s impression was that they had already made the decision to groom him for qualification school and ultimate acceptance into their elite band of warriors.
“Only gambling I know about is in Memphis on the riverboats.”
Hobart smiled a thin, wicked grin. His face was stern with a ruddy complexion. A full head of dark hair fell over his ears with no distinguishable part on either side.
“Can’t recover from a gamble if you lose. Lose all your chips. A risk, that’s something you can bounce back from if it doesn’t work out.”
“And the shirt off your back,” Rampert added. “Point being, we’ve blazed that trail once. No doubt AQ has already leaked to Pakistani intel that we invaded their space. So, provided we didn’t get shot down going in again, well, we’d all be put in the brig, most likely. State Department weenies wouldn’t have any of that.”
“I might be able to work something there,” Matt countered. Matt felt at ease with these men. He had been a CIA combat field operative. Although he had fully recovered from his wounds in the Philippines and Canada, at thirty-five he had begun to feel the pull of scar tissue. The damage he’d incurred to his body had cut his career short well before he was ready to switch to the policy side of business.
Two years ago, after the Ballantine incident, Matt had been confirmed by the Senate as the assistant director of the CIA. The job wasn’t really his cup of tea, but it kept him in the loop.
“How so?” Rampert asked.
“Know a few people,” Matt said, moving over to the large map. Van Dreeves had drawn a circle around the location of the raid which they had just conducted. Matt stared at the tight contour interval lines that indicated rugged terrain in the lawless northwest province of Pakistan.
“The Paks would never allow it,” Rampert said.
“They don’t have to know,” Matt countered. “Until it’s too late.”
Matt watched Rampert study him for a minute.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“You can’t possibly know, General, what I’m thinking,” Matt countered.
“I sent your brother into Canada two years ago without anyone, to include the Canadians, knowing about it. Now you want to know if I’ve lost my cojones.”
“Assuming that promotion to general doesn’t involve any surgery, then I’m going to put my money on the table that you’ve still got ’em. Sir,” Matt replied.
The five men stood in the operations center, radios occasionally chirping spot reports, large flat-pan
el monitors scrolling significant activities, and the giant map on the wall with Van Dreeves’s circles on them screaming at them.
Matt’s voice was firm and decisive.
“I’m ready to gamble, but you’ve got to tell me one thing first.”
“What’s that?” Rampert asked.
“Did the enemy find the flash drive?”
Moment of Truth
CHAPTER 23
Charlotte, NORTH CAROLINA
Thursday Evening
Riley Dwyer walked slowly back and forth in her office. The Hawaiian ladies peering down from the Peggy Hoppers dotting the wall watched her pace the floor with uncharacteristic tension. Large, leafy plants waved at her as she passed, her vapor trail causing just the slightest turbulence.
In her right hand she held a piece of paper. She had memorized the document. Heck, she had written it and had it published in several magazines. Her fifteen minutes of fame had been derived from the words contained on this document. She had neither sought the fame nor the attention that followed. She had to admit, though, that it had been good for her business.
Riley was one of the leading experts in the country on the emerging field of parental alienation syndrome. It seemed that one of the primary by-products of divorces with children had become the use of those children as weapons. The paradox had always intrigued her. Here a defenseless child frequently became the most used weapon in a parent’s arsenal. Like any combat, there was suffering, and in this particular form of combat the weapon systems themselves, the children, suffered the most. They were slung at the intended target with all the ferocity of any arrow or bullet or missile.
Riley could see it so much in Amanda Garrett that it ripped out her heart. While her relationship with Zach had ebbed and flowed with the demands of each of their careers, his presence had always been with her. She carried him inside her heart the way many carried their first love. There were no bad memories, only happy thoughts and times that were sometimes interrupted by deployments. They had been happiest when Zach had left the service and worked the farm in Virginia. He did some defense consulting with a firm in Charlotte, and he had traveled regularly to South Carolina to try to see Amanda. They each had found peace, and in the summer of 2001 Zach began preparations to move to Charlotte for a full-time position with the company. It would keep him close to Amanda and place him with the woman he loved. They were ready.
Then 9-11 happened. Riley and Zach had spent the Labor Day weekend together, and Zach had stayed on for another week. He would head over to Spartanburg Swim Center to watch Amanda compete and then meet up with Riley afterward. She respected Zach’s decision not to introduce Amanda to her until he was ready. Privately she believed that it would be healthy for Amanda to see her father in a strong relationship with another woman. The absence of Amanda, such a large part of Zach’s life, had left a hole in their relationship. They would drift apart for a while and then come rushing back together. Not Amanda’s fault at all, but Zach would not be whole until he could integrate his entire life, she knew that much.
She watched him struggle with the abuse that his ex-wife would levy upon him and Amanda. He would come home from an attempted visitation shaking with rage. For a while Riley didn’t know what to do. Zach said very little, internalizing the pain, the frustration, and the injustice. She had wondered what was truly happening. Surely, no one could be that bad.
But it appeared that Amanda’s mother and grandmother had been worse than anyone could have anticipated. Perhaps in the early days when Amanda was much younger, after she had first met Zach, she had been inspired to study the disaffected child of divorce. She had surprised herself when she began to mine the uncharted caverns of maternal abuse of custodial children.
Riley had been laughed at, screamed at, and ridiculed by mothers and the media. She was cutting across the current of hate framed by such monikers as “deadbeat dads.” She had written an article for Parents magazine that, much to her surprise, had been published. The basic theme of the article was the existing inequity of the law where generally a father was forced to pay child support, but the woman was not compelled to honor the visitation schedule. She had explored reams of evidence in county courthouses around North and South Carolina where well-meaning fathers were gunned down by ignorant judges and attorneys who strung out cases so long that most men just gave up. It was a trap, she determined. The man, once divorced, was swimming upstream against the flooding waters of bias and stereotype. The courthouses were the floodgates, governing the tide against which the fathers braced.
She had once violated Zach’s rule about staying out of sight of Amanda. She wanted to confirm in her mind what Zach had not so much told her, but what she had witnessed in his stoicism. He was an enigma in her mind when it came to Amanda. She watched him wrestle with uncommon angst and pain, knowing that Amanda had been launched at him the way an insurgent presses the key fob of an improvised explosive device as a military truck passes by. In a flash, pain and suffering occur, while the terrorist walks away, whistling and looking innocently at the sky. So it was with the enabling parental alienator.
That day a few years ago, before the Ballantine event, when Zach had re-entered the service and was stationed at Fort Bragg, Riley had taken it upon herself to watch a swim meet in Spartanburg. Not fearing identification, she sat in the bleachers near Amanda’s mother and grandmother, listening to their conversation while Amanda glided to victories in all five of her races over worthy opponents. For a moment, Riley had forgotten her mission as she had become engrossed in the splashing and yelling as the competitors churned through the water.
It was the conversation, though, that had amazed her the most. The swimming was pure amateur hour compared to the well-practiced smoothness of the mother and grandmother, who openly derided the father, both in the presence of others as well as Amanda. It was a constant subtext to all that was done or said. Yet, none of it was obvious or overt.
“Don’t you know that Speedo race suit cost one hundred and eighty dollars?”
“Well, I know who didn’t pay for it.”
“You got that right.”
And so on.
And then, when Amanda was leaving with her mother.
“Good meet, Manda.”
“Thanks.”
“Too bad what’s-his-name wasn’t here.”
“Yeah, too bad.”
Then everyone was laughing.
She looked down at the paper, pondering her next move. The one positive sign was Amanda’s ability to unlock the secret compartment in her mind. She had been brave enough to go where she really wanted to go, which was to be allowed to love her father. Having been denied that opportunity since she was a small child, was it really possible, she wondered, for Amanda to love anyone at all? The transference and blockage that had occurred surely must skew any existing or future relationship. If you’re not allowed to love the father that you know is a good, decent man, then where is your baseline? What was her metric for attachment?
Her role models, the mother and grandmother, were clearly sociopaths, and had put Amanda in a canoe in that same river, giving her a good shove into the current. The distorted and pained contortions of Deep South love, Riley determined.
She had been gelling and crystallizing the two brief sessions with Amanda. She realized that she was basing her conclusions more on what she knew about Zach than on her interactions with his daughter. She had tried hard not to allow that to happen, but her love for Zach was a fixture in her life she couldn’t easily rearrange to make room for fresh analysis.
Nor did she think she had time.
CHAPTER 24
North Carolina
Early Friday Morning, Eastern Time
Amanda startled awake.
“What was that?”
She rubbed her eyes, pulling herself up out of Jake’s lap. She had been asleep, soundly, thoughts thrashing around in her mind not necessarily as dreams, but rather as lightning bolts. Her mind was the equivale
nt of an electrical storm, static electricity lighting the night sky. Thunder and lightning ripped through her mind and shook the windows of her soul.
“Nothing babe, go back to sleep. We’ve got another thirty minutes or so.”
Jake had stopped in Ashboro, North Carolina, grabbed a giant coffee, straight up, taken a leak, and then jumped back into the truck for the remaining leg into Sanford, North Carolina.
“We must have hit a bump.”
“No bump, babe, just smooth sailing.” Jake put a strong hand on her arm. Amanda looked out the window into the darkness.
“Well, I felt something.” She remained unconvinced. Always a sound sleeper, she didn’t understand the storm raging in her slumber or the anxiety she now felt. She watched a few drops of rain slap against the windshield of Jake’s truck, followed by a gaining steady rhythm of rain pellets. “See there.”
“Okay, babe, as usual, you’re right.” Jake smiled, looking down at her quickly as she lowered herself back onto his leg. Suddenly, lightning struck with a loud bang less than a mile away. This was not a distant rumble, but an explosion.
And so it went for the remainder of the trip. It was one o’clock in the morning, and they pulled into a motel in Sanford not far from the address that Riley Dwyer had provided him. Missing school would be the least of his problems, he had told her. Given what he knew about Nina Hastings and Amanda’s mother, he fully expected to find himself facing kidnapping charges within the week, if that long.
“Why don’t we just go to the house?” Amanda asked, as Jake fumbled with the key to the motel room. It was a Hampton Inn and had decent parking lot lighting, so he felt it was a safe choice.
“You don’t think I just drove for four hours to not get lucky, do you?”
“Please.” Amanda forced back a weak smile.