by David Berens
“There’s no chance you have a security camera is there?”
Ramin sighed, “no.”
“Where’s your store?”
“It is next door, of course.”
“Show me.”
Ramin walked him out of the apartment building and down to the corner. A small shop with dingy posters of food displayed in the windows stood next door. A black mailbox hung on the door frame.
“This is where they are delivered,” Ramin pointed at the box.
Troy examined it for a moment. Nothing unusual. He thought about trying to get fingerprints, but there would be hundreds of sets of prints on the mailbox including Ramin’s. And the bone boxes had been dusted and they hadn’t found any to match anyway. He looked across the street at the now calm helicopter. Harry waved.
“Dangit,” he inhaled, “Ramin. You gotta get outta here. The people I work for want you killed and I was sent to…”
His voice trailed off as he saw the blinking light behind the chopper. The ATM. Still powered up. Still working. Still recording everything in its path.
Troy took off running toward it. Upon ripping open the machine, locating its video recorder, downloading the video to a flash drive, and watching hours of empty footage… he found what he was looking for… a delivery in progress.
He could not believe what he was watching. Special Envoy to Afghanistan, Sid Phillips, was dropping a small package into the mailbox. He had all his fingers.
9
General
General James “Buff” Summerton glared at the footage, “what the hell is this?”
“Sir, it appears to be Sid delivering his own ransom note to the…”
“Shut the hell up!” he interrupted Troy.
Summerton chewed on an unlit cigar. He clicked a button on the laptop displaying the footage.
“Who else saw this?”
Troy was confused by the question, “sir?”
“Who else has seen this video, soldier?”
“Um… Harry, and the boy’s Uncle,” Troy answered, “and now you.”
He considered this for a long moment and finally asked, “and we don’t know where Sid is now?”
“Well, I have an idea.”
“Go on.”
“Ramin said the boxes look like…,” Troy started.
“Who they hell is Ramin?” the general interrupted.
“The boy’s Uncle,” Troy said then continued, “He says he recognizes the boxes from a nearby jewelry store.”
“And…?”
“Harry and I investigated.”
Buff waved his hand to indicate Troy should continue.
“It seems Sid has been buying jewelry there. The store owner says he always talks about shipping the jewelry back to his wife.”
“Sid’s been divorced for over a year,” the general protested.
“Maybe he’s trying to get her back,” Troy shrugged, “Anyway, he always comes down the street from the North side. Toward the mountains.”
“Okay… and?”
“The jeweler says there’s an old Taliban camp up there. Abandoned, but probably still a good place to hide out in.”
“Shit,” Buff slumped forward and steepled his hands, “what in the hell are we gonna do now?”
“I have an idea,” Troy said.
“I’m all ears.”
10
Shrapnel - Today
Harry Nedman landed them just South of the rocky hills outside of town. Based on what the locals had told them, the old, abandoned camp was just a mile or so up the trail. Troy shouldered an M-16 and prayed desperately that he wouldn’t need it. Harry powered the chopper down and jumped out. He looked nervous. The camp was well within the safe zone, so they shouldn’t encounter any resistance, but if this war had shown them anything, it was that anything was possible.
They walked slowly up the road for a few minutes before finding a cave tucked into the rocky face of the hills. Outside the hole in the ground was a ring of rocks with a pile of ashes in the center. Propped against one of those rocks, blade pointed upward, was a large survival knife. It had what looked like blood stains on it.
Troy pointed two fingers at his eyes, then back to the cave opening. Harry understood and nodded. Troy pulled his rifle from his shoulder and pointed it at the hole. He walked slowly toward it.
“Afternoon, soldier,” a distinctly American voice called from above them.
Troy dropped to the ground and looked up. The sun blinded him, he couldn’t make out where the voice was coming from at all. He was a sitting duck.
“So, I guess you’ve figured out my little plan, eh?”
Troy said nothing.
“They were going to fire me, you know?” the voice said, “All the great work I’ve done in this God forsaken place and they were downsizing me.”
“Mr. Phillips,” Harry called out, “we’re just here to help.”
Troy shushed him harshly.
Ambassador Phillips laughed sarcastically, “Help?!? What are you going to help with? You going to get me a new job? Get my wife to come back to me? Hell, I’d settle for get my wife to leave me alone.”
Harry slid up beside Troy crouching low, “He’s straight back there.”
He pointed to a rocky outcropping about thirty feet above the cave. At that point, Troy Clint Bodean didn’t know the I.E.D. would go off in exactly fourteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds burying a piece of jagged metal almost two inches deep into his knee and blowing both of Harry Nedman’s legs off at the hip. If he had, he would’ve smoked his last Morven Gold cigarette before stepping down out of the cockpit of the AH-64 they’d dropped in the middle of the road just outside of Kabul. Hell, if he’d known that, he would’ve put the chopper in the air and gotten their asses out of Dodge!
“You keep him talking and I’ll see if I can get a bead on him,” Harry said.
Troy nodded.
“Ambassador, we’re just here to help you get back to the Embassy,” Troy called up to him.
Harry scrambled a few feet away and stopped, waiting.
“I know what you boys are up to and it’s admirable, but I’m not going back,” Phillips called down, “And I can see what you’re doing down there. Trying to triangulate on my position. I’m going to shoot you long before that happens… that is, if you don’t step on one of my bombs down there first. It’s amazing what you can pick up from the impound lot.”
“Shit,” Harry muttered.
“I have a proposition for you, fellas,” he called out again, “You just hop back in your chopper, head back to the embassy and tell them you couldn’t find me.”
Harry shuffled a few feet. The ground popped in front of him and scrabble flew up from a warning shot from above.
“Hold it right there, kid,” Phillips said, “you don’t know what you’re getting into.”
Troy held up his hand in a stop gesture and stood up.
“Sir,” he said smoothly, “we just want to help. There’s no reason for anyone to get hurt.”
Again, Phillips laughed, “If you wanted to help, you would’ve dropped my money in the right place. Damned if you didn’t try to drop it in a terrorist hot spot. If you had been able to pull off that simple exchange, everything would be okay.”
Without warning, Harry jumped up and aimed his rifle at the hill. He shot a couple of times. Troy yelled at him to cease fire, but he couldn’t hear him. Harry took two steps to the right and that’s when it detonated.
The entire lower half of his torso exploded. He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. His torn body crashed to the ground and stopped moving. Troy was knocked backward from the blast and his head rang from the sound. His hearing was muffled, but he didn’t care. His right leg was screaming in pain. He looked down to see the ragged piece of shrapnel buried in his knee. He dragged himself over to Harry, but he was gone. He laid there waiting for the shot that would end him… but it never came.
He slid into darkness.
11
Home
Troy woke to the sounds of silence. He lifted himself up on his elbows to see that he was lying in the medical building. He blinked his eyes as a cute nurse walked over to him.
“How are we feeling?” she smiled at him and looked at a clipboard at the foot of his bed.
“I feel like a hundred bucks,” he said rolling his head around, cracking his neck.
“Good,” she replaced the clipboard, “can I get you anything for pain?”
She nodded at his leg. It was bandaged and held in place with a large leg brace on his knee.
“How bad is it?” he asked.
“Your ACL was shredded,” she said, “but given the situation, it could’ve been much worse. You’re lucky that Dr. Samson was here. He’s an expert surgeon.”
“Awesome,” Troy flashed her a thumbs up, “so, when am I back on duty?”
“Oh, you’re not going back on duty with that injury,” she shook her head, “you’ll be going home.”
* * *
The debriefing was thankfully short and sweet. Apparently, Harry had somehow gotten off a shot that struck Ambassador Phillips in the head and killed him. If he’d only stayed in the same spot, he wouldn’t have triggered the bomb. Poor Harry. Inside the cave, they found Aasif’s parents, bound and gagged. Alive and mostly unhurt. The worst of it was that the man had his fingers removed from his left hand and his mother had one toe removed from her left foot. Phillips had been a doctor before being appointed to his post and had done a reasonable job of surgery to remove the digits.
They were reunited with Aasif and paid the hefty sum of 1.5 million dollars for their trouble. Sedra’s body was returned to them and Uncle Ramin had sent a hand-written note to Troy thanking him for his effort to save her.
Troy was awarded a Purple Heart for injury officially caused by hostile forces, since the I.E.D. had originally come from the Taliban. He was honorably discharged and spent a week in the medical building flirting with the nurse. After that, he was shipped back to the states… some reports indicate that he is living in Las Vegas, working as a D.J. at the Peppermint Hippo Strip Club…
… but that is another story.
Rogue Wave - Excerpt
A Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller #1
Introduction
So, here is a piece of Troy’s first book - Rogue Wave: A Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller #1.
I owe a tremendous debt to all the people in my family who kept urging and asking for this completed novel. Some of these characters are based on real people we met while playing cards and watching it rain one fateful vacation on Pawleys Island. If it hadn’t been for Tropical Storm Debby giving us a rainy vacation, none of this would’ve ever happened.
Special thanks to Kelly, Sarah, Robert, Linda, Jay, Debbie, and Laura, who continually helped me create characters out of thin air and give them life on the page. And thank you to my early readers who helped me catch errors of grammar and plot and other things.
Thanks be to God for my ability, judge as you may, to create these stories and record them for your enjoyment. And, if you happen to recognize yourself in one of these characters, enjoy it for what it is… all good fun.
Part I
Hat Check
“Put one person’s hat on another person’s head.”
-Chinese Proverb
1
Non-Discretionary Spending
Rick Hairre had not known before today that the barrel of a gun tasted like pennies. Or maybe the taste was the coppery tang of his own blood pooling in the crevices of his ever-swelling mouth. He also had not known the butt of a gun felt so heavy and cold when used as a hammer on one’s head. He guessed he would probably lose most of the teeth he’d spent so much money on veneering prior to the last election cycle, and wondered if he’d ever get a chance to see his dentist again… an odd longing… to see the dentist.
As the current Vice-Chairman of the 2012 Murrell’s Inlet’s Board of Directors, he counted his acquisition of funding in excess of seven million dollars for the Tourism Conservation & Wetland Education Project as his crowning achievement. It was a private deal, with several under-the-table understandings. All parties to the deal would remain anonymous, and a small fee of a half million dollars would be deposited directly into another account of his choosing for managing the deal with… discretion.
But beyond his selfish interests, the money would provide the local community with informational pamphlets, catchy bumper stickers, kids coloring books, and rental home refrigerator magnets discussing and educating tourists about the delicate ecosystem at work in his precious inlet home.
Counting the zeroes on the check helped him stomach the fact the money had come from the nearby Consolidated Paper Mill. Naturally, the check had come with an understanding—Rick would bury any mention of the pollution the independent environmental scientists had discovered traveling downstream from the mill.
The mill’s owner had channeled the money through a governmental sounding company and encouraged Rick to say he’d procured a federal grant for the work. With this cover story, he’d soon be rising above Vice-Chairman.
As the blood trickled from his nose, he vaguely wondered if the two hooded men interrogating him suspected that a completely untraceable cashier’s check with a seven and six zeroes was tucked away in his Outback Tea Stained straw cowboy hat. Another thought occurred to him through his throbbing haze of pain; what if these two men had been sent by the mill owner to collect the check and get rid of any evidence of the deal—namely Rick. But that didn’t make any sense. The deal had just been made, and everyone was happy to go along with the stipulations of said deal.
Okay, happy was a stretch. But when Rick had chosen the life of a politician, he’d been too green to know the lower tier guys in local governments made little if any in the way of salaries. Some were even volunteer posts. Most were only in it for the power. He smiled wanly at that last thought… what power did the Vice-Chairman of the 2012 Murrell’s Inlet’s Board of Directors actually have? Not much.
But his acquisition of these funds—however ill gotten—would’ve gone a long way to further his ambitions. And he’d long since given up being selfish in that regard. He was in it for his daughter. He thanked God he’d had the foresight to wire his half a million straight into her account. He smiled at the thought of her the next time she checked her balance, yet he ached at the likelihood he wouldn’t be around to explain the huge addition of funds to her.
The Outback Tea Stained straw cowboy hat he wore had been a gift from her long ago. She’d only been six or seven at the time, and thought the hat was just perfect for her dad. And though it was somewhat out of character for a short, pudgy bald man to wear such a thing, he wore it proudly. As he struggled to maintain consciousness, he couldn’t remember why he’d folded the check and slipped it into the band of his hat behind the colorful peacock feather perched there, but there it remained.
Rick retraced his steps back to the meeting at the mill and sorted through what he could remember of the conversation, but nothing struck him as sinister. He’d walked out after shaking hands with the mill’s owner, and there had been smiles all around. His last text to his daughter (a newly acquired skill for him) had said he’d be stopping by for dinner. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what had prompted his sudden kidnapping outside Lee’s Inlet Kitchen and was even more unsure why they had smashed the butt of what appeared to be an AK-47 against his face and sending his beloved hat skidding across the floor. He would’ve handed over the check had they just asked! He’d tried to tell them that, but his efforts to speak were hampered by his crushed jaw.
His dinner—Lee’s homemade clam chowder—exploded violently from his stomach with the pain from the first wicked blow to his skull, and he was still retching as they hovered around him whispering to each other.
“Where is it, mate?” one of the hooded men growled in a strange accent—maybe Australian, or South African?
&n
bsp; Rick opened his mouth to answer, but all that came out was more of his favorite from the appetizer menu at Lee’s.
Apparently that was an unacceptable answer, as the man’s fist slammed into the top of Rick’s head, dislodging his expensive European hairpiece. Guaranteed to stay on in a hurricane, my ass, he thought as the toupee flopped to the ground.
His baldpate glistened brightly as warm blood began flowing down into his eyes. His thoughts began to jumble wildly through his life and he saw himself in his high school senior pictures with already thinning hair. After a few unsuccessful attempts at a comb-over, he just clipped it closer and closer to his head. By the summer of his senior year, he was a nineteen-year-old bald guy. It’d been bad enough that he was born with a build like that of Danny DeVito and not as good-looking as most of the guys he’d played with on the football team, but his last name was Hairre. Hairre, for God’s sake. With a name like that, and a chance to re-invent himself upon starting college, he’d sought out remedies to his ever-expanding baldness. Since the summer between high school and his freshman year at Clemson University, he’d been a closet member of the Hairre Club for Men.
Before the chocolate-brown head of hair—woven strand-by-strand—had become part of him, his high-school classmates often asked if he’d shaved it because of sickness or cancer treatments; sometimes he said yes. Years later, Susan, his wife of fourteen anniversaries, had succumbed to the pancreatic version of his lie. When he visited her in the hospital, he would remove his hairpiece and be bald with her as she suffered. He wondered if his current hair-jarring episode was karma circling back around for another go at him.