“Good point.” Nell was silent for a moment, staring out the windshield at the stars. She looked over at Crash again. “So where are we going?”
“To California.”
“By car?”
He glanced at her again. “They’ll be looking for me at all the airports.”
“Of course. I’m sorry. I…” Nell shook her head. “How long is it going to take us to get there?”
“Depends on how many times we stop to sleep. We’ve got to stop at least once so that I can question Sarkowski.”
At least once. He wasn’t kidding. They were going to drive all the way from the District of Columbia to California and they were quite possibly going to stop to sleep only once.
The car was luxurious. It was compact, but the seats were covered with soft leather that would be comfortable for sleeping.
The backseat was big enough for her to curl up on. Currently, it was covered by several gym bags, a suitcase and what looked to be a laptop computer case.
“Where did you get all this stuff?” she asked. “This car?”
“The car belongs to a Navy officer who’s doing a six-month tour on an aircraft carrier. I liberated it from storage. Same with the gear.”
Liberated was just a fancy word for stole.
“I have every intention of returning everything,” he told her, as if he knew what she was thinking. “Except maybe the bullets and some of the explosives.”
Explosives? Bullets? Nell changed the subject.
“So what’s in California?” she asked. “And where in California are we going? It’s a pretty big state.”
He gave her another glance before turning his attention back to the road. He turned on the radio to a classic rock station, adjusting the controls so that the signal only went to the speakers in the back. “In case Sarkowski wakes up,” he explained. “I don’t want him to be bored.”
What he really didn’t want was for the man who was tied up in the trunk to regain consciousness and overhear their conversation.
Nell waited for him to answer her question, but one mile rolled by and then two, and he still didn’t speak.
“Oh, please,” she said, exasperated. “We’re not going to play this game again, are we? I ask you a question and you don’t answer it. Can’t you do something different for a change? Like tell me the truth about what’s going on?”
It was starting to rain, and Crash put on the windshield wipers. He glanced at her again, but he didn’t say a word.
“Because if we’re going to play that old, dull game,” Nell continued, “you’d better get off at the next exit. In fact, if you don’t tell me everything, and I mean everything, starting from what happened at Jake’s house, you can just pull over and let me out right now.”
“I’m sorry,” Crash said quietly. “I wasn’t purposely not answering you. I was just thinking that…” He hesitated.
“Your apology will go a whole lot further if you actually finish that sentence.”
“I was thinking that as a SEAL, I can’t talk about any of this.” He glanced at her again. His eyes looked almost silver in the darkness, his face shadowed and mysterious. “But I’m not a SEAL anymore.”
Crash had been stripped of his commission, his pride, his very soul. There was a very strong chance that he was going to lose his life as well, finding and taking down the mysterious commander.
The truth was, he was prepared to die, if necessary. Most of what he’d already lost was more valuable to him than his life.
But if he was going to die, he wanted someone to know the whole story. He wanted someone to know what had really happened.
And he knew he could trust Nell.
“You already know that I do—did—special assignments for Jake,” he said.
“Yeah.” Nell nodded. “But I’m not really sure what that entailed.”
“Jake would send me a coded file, usually electronically. These files were specially programmed so they couldn’t be copied, and they were designed to self-delete after a very short time, so there’d be no information trail.”
Crash could feel her watching him. She was all but holding her breath, waiting for him to continue. With the exception of that one time he’d told her the story of how Daisy had pulled him out of summer camp, he knew she’d never heard him string together so many sentences.
“The file would contain information about a situation that needed checking into, or correcting or…some other type of…revision, shall we say,” he continued. “It would include a mission objective as well as recommended courses of action. Sometimes the objective was simply to gather more information. Sometimes it was more…complicated. But when I was out in the real world, working the op, my team and I—and Jake usually only assigned two or three other SEALs to work with me—we were on our own.
“Anyway, Jake sent me an encoded file on the morning he was shot. I had just flown into D.C. from California that same day. I was coming home after spending nearly six straight months out of the country. Usually the first thing I do when I get stateside is take a few days of leave—get a haircut and go out to the farm to see Jake and Daisy.” He caught himself and shook his head. “Just Jake, now. But when I arrived at the base, Captain Lovett called me into his office and told me that he was organizing a special team. He said he’d received orders to go out to the farm and provide additional security. He said the admiral had been receiving death threats. And he asked if I wanted to be part of this special security team.”
“Of course you said yes.”
Crash nodded. “I tried calling the farm as soon as I left Lovett’s office, but I couldn’t get through. And then I didn’t have time to do much more than organize my gear before I had to meet Lovett and the other members of the team.”
It had been lightly raining that night, too.
He glanced at Nell and cleared his throat. “When I got to the chopper—our means of transport out to the farm—there were three men there I’d never seen before. I was tired. I hadn’t slept in a full forty-eight hours, so I passed my suspicions off as fatigue-induced paranoia. Lovett knew these men, and he seemed to know them well. I figured everything was kosher.” He paused. “I figured wrong.
“When we got to the farm, Jake seemed really surprised to see us, like no one had told him a SEAL Team would be coming out,” Crash continued. “That should have clinched it for me. I should have known then that something was off.” He clenched his teeth. “But I didn’t, and Jake died. But before he died, he told me about the file he’d sent.” He turned to glance at Nell. “He believed that he was shot in an attempt to cover up the information he’d sent me in that file—that to keep his investigation from going any further, someone had set up this hit.”
Nell nodded slowly. “And you think he was right, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” The rain was turning slushy and thick against the windshield. The night was getting cold, but it was nice and warm inside the car.
Too warm.
He glanced at Nell again. The way she was sitting, turned slightly toward him, her knee was only an inch and a half away from his thigh. Because of the car’s compact design, she was sitting close enough to touch. She was close enough so that even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t have avoided breathing in her sweet perfume. He looked at the odometer. They’d only traveled forty-seven miles. Two thousand six hundred and fifty-three to go.
Crash stared at the road, trying to clear his mind, to desensitize himself to the scent of her perfume and the sound of her voice. He tried to focus on the feel of the leather-covered steering wheel beneath his hands, but all he could think about was the soft down that grew at the nape of her neck, and the silky smoothness of her bare back. Her skin was impossibly soft, like a baby’s.
He’d let himself touch her, that night she’d spent in his room. After she’d fallen asleep, he’d allowed himself the luxury of running his fingers across her shoulders, down her back and along her arm until he, too, had fallen into a deep sleep.
“Can you tell me what was in the file Jake sent you?” she asked softly.
Crash kept his eyes on the road. “No, but I’m going to tell you anyway.”
“You…are.” Nell couldn’t believe what she was hearing. He was going to tell her top secret, classified information.
“The mission objective was investigation. Jake believed there was a cover-up going on—that someone had screwed up bad during a SEAL training operation that took place six months ago.
“See, there’s a small island nation in Southeast Asia,” Crash told her, “that for the past forty years has been one of the major ports for illegal drug trafficking. When the United States began actively trying to cut off drug dealers closer to their source, we worked to establish an alliance with this island’s government.
“Right up until recently,” he continued, “we’d managed to build a foundation for a relationship that would be good for both countries.”
Nell leaned back against the headrest, watching Crash as he drove. He was a good driver, always checking the mirrors, holding the wheel with both hands. She felt safe sitting next to him, despite the fact that he was number one on FInCOM’s most-wanted, armed-and-dangerous list.
“But then, about six months ago, I was part of a team that intended to use this island as a training site. I’d hooked up with some SEALs from Team Ten’s elite Alpha Squad, and we took four FInCOM agents to this island on a training mission to show them how we can kick ass in a potential terrorists-with-hostage situation. We were going to execute a rescue op, going up against some jarheads on the island, who were going to play the part of the tangos.”
“Whoa,” Nell said. “Back up a sec. You lost me. Jarheads and tangos?”
“I’m sorry. Jarheads are marines—the nickname comes from their haircut. And tango’s radio talk for the letter T, which is short for terrorists.”
“Got it. Go on,” she ordered him.
“When we inserted onto the island, we found ourselves jammed in the middle of one of the biggest training op snafus I’ve ever dealt with. See, as we approached the site where the simulated rescue mission was to take place, we found two KIAs.” He interpreted before she could even ask. “We found the bodies of two of our marine friends—killed in action.”
“My God.” Nell sat up, transfixed by his story. “What happened?”
He glanced at her. “Apparently a firefight had broken out between the two major drug lords on the island between the time we left our ship and the time we hit the training site.”
“Firefight. You mean, a gun battle between the two gangs, right?”
“Yeah,” Crash told her, “but I wouldn’t call them gangs. Both the drug lords had private armies with state-of-the-art technology. We’re talking thousands of men and name-brand firepower. These armies were more powerful than the government’s own armed forces. What started that day was more like a full-scale civil war.” He glanced at her. “The average yearly income of the men who owned these armies was higher than the entire GNP of this country. One of ’em was an American expatriate named John Sherman—a former Green Beret, which really pissed off the jarheads. The other was a local man named Kim, nicknamed ‘the Korean,’ because his father was from there.
“Sherman and Kim had been careful not to go into each other’s territory for years, and more than once, they’d helped each other out. But on that day, whatever agreement Sherman and Kim had between them disintegrated. And when they clashed, lots of innocent people were caught in the cross fire.”
He took a deep breath. “It wasn’t easy, but we finally got all of Alpha Squad and the surviving marines off the island. But the fighting went on for days after that. When the smoke cleared, the body count was in the tens of thousands, and property damage was in the millions. The only good thing that came of it was that both Sherman and Kim were killed, too.”
He was silent for a minute, and the sound of the windshield wipers beat a rhythm that wasn’t in sync with the Christmas pop song playing on the radio. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”
“I don’t get it,” Nell finally said. “You said there was some kind of cover-up. What was there to cover up?”
“The file Jake sent me contained a copy of a secret deposition taken from Kim’s widow,” Crash told her. “She claimed to have overheard a conversation in which an American Naval commander supposedly approached Kim and told him that the Americans would look the other way when he did business, on the condition that Kim use his army to destroy John Sherman and his troops. There’s no single officer in the entire U.S. Navy—admirals included—who has authority to make this kind of bogus deal, but apparently Kim didn’t know that. The deal was done and the Korean began planning a surprise attack on Sherman’s stronghold.
“But news of the so-called agreement and the impending attacked was leaked—for all we know, Kim’s wife sold him out—and Sherman struck first. It was during this initial attack that our marines were targeted, too, and two of them were killed.”
Crash glanced at Nell. Her face was only dimly illuminated by the greenish dashboard light, but he could see that she was hanging on to his every word, her eyes wide.
It was clear that she trusted him. She believed every word that fell from his lips. Even now, after the way he’d abused her friendship—all those letters he never answered, all those times he’d kept himself from calling—she had total faith in him. Something inside him tightened and twisted, and he knew with a sickening certainty that he’d let far more than he’d ever dreamed possible walk out of his room when Nell had left that morning, nearly an entire year ago.
And now it was too late.
He held the steering wheel tightly, telling himself that he’d been right to let her go. He’d been home all of five weeks in the past twelve months. Of course, he’d volunteered for every overseas assignment he could get his hands on. If he’d wanted to, he could have spent most of that time in the States.
But still, what he felt, what he wanted, shouldn’t really matter.
The truth was exactly the same now as it had been a year ago. Nell deserved better than he could give her. Of course, in Crash’s opinion, she deserved better than Dexter Lancaster, too, but even the lawyer won points simply for being available.
“Hey,” Nell said. “Are you going to tell me the rest of this story, or do I have to figure out where to drop the quarter in to get you talking again?”
Crash glanced at her. “Sorry. I was—”
“Thinking,” she finished for him. “I know. Trying to figure out how to track down this commander, right?”
“Something like that.”
“Are you sure it’s not just a rumor? You know, things go bad, and everybody tries to figure out who’s to blame.”
“In the aftermath, there were tons of rumors,” he admitted. “There were people who believed that the U.S. did make a deal with Kim. There were people who believed that rumors of the agreement between Kim and the United States were falsely planted by the U.S. to cause Kim and Sherman to wipe each other out. But none of that was true. I’m very familiar with the policies used in dealing with this island, and I know we stood to gain far more by playing by the rules.
“If this commander really did make a deal with Kim, and I believe he did, he’s responsible for starting a war. Thousands of innocent civilians were killed. Not to mention the fact that our alliance with this country has totally crumbled—all of their trust in us is gone. All the work we’d done to maintain goodwill and cooperation in stopping the drug traffic closer to its source was for nothing. The entire program’s been set back a good twenty years.”
“But if you don’t know who the commander is,” Nell said. “How are you going to find him? There must be thousands of commanders in the U.S. Navy. Kim’s wife didn’t know his nam
e? Not even his first name? A nickname?”
Crash shook his head. “No.”
“Can she describe him?” Nell asked. “Maybe make some kind of police composite sketch?”
He glanced at her again. “She’s disappeared.”
“And Jake really seemed to think she was telling the truth, huh?” Nell asked.
“He told me,” Crash said. He had to stop and clear his throat. “After he was shot, he was still conscious for a while, and he told me that whoever this commander was, he had to be behind the shooting. I believe that, too. This son of a bitch killed Jake and framed me. And now he’s trying to kill you, too.”
Nell was silent, her eyes narrowed slightly as she stared out at the mixture of sleet and snow falling on the windshield. “What was his motive?” she finally asked. “This commander. What did he stand to gain by starting this civil war between Kim and what’s-his-name?”
“John Sherman,” Crash supplied the name. “I’ve been running that same question through my mind ever since I read the file. It’s entirely possible that things went as wrong for the commander as they went for the rest of us. And in that case, his intent probably wasn’t to start a civil war.” He glanced at her. “I have a theory.”
“Spill.”
He looked at her again. Yes, that was kind of what it felt like. After so many years of silence, everything inside of him was in danger of spilling out.
“My theory is that the commander’s motive was exactly what he’d told Kim. He wanted John Sherman dead. My theory is that this commander didn’t give a damn about the drugs or the armies. My theory is that it was personal.”
“Personal?”
“A man like Sherman’s got to have lots of enemies. Over in Vietnam, his unit specialized in liberating large shipments of drugs and confiscating stashes of weapons. He spent quite a few years taking half of everything he liberated for himself—and turning around and selling it back to the highest bidder. It didn’t matter that he was selling it to the enemy. Word got out that he was doing this, but before he was arrested he went AWOL.”
“And you think, what? This commander was getting back at him for having gotten away?”
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Vol 1: Tall, Dark and FearlessTall, Dark and Devastating Page 140