by Thomas Locke
The colonel stood in his doorway. He was dressed in a bathrobe and pajama bottoms and an Army T-shirt so washed it was more grey than green. He held the door open. Reese saw his mouth move.
“Why don’t we have audio?”
The speakers crackled and she heard, “Think maybe you could get a move on there?”
The camera’s view widened to show a man standing by the open rear doors of a delivery van. “You order the pizza with anchovies?”
“At my age? Are you nuts?”
“I’ve got six boxes here and every one of them . . . Okay. Spinach and extra cheese, right?”
“Yeah, that’s mine. Oh, hang on, my wallet’s in the back. Let yourself in and shut the door, I don’t want mosquitoes . . .” The door slammed.
The system was not capable of catching the delivery man’s muttered curse.
Patel asked, “What’s so dangerous about pizza?”
As in, why was this on the main board and not back in the playpen under Patel’s control. The answer was, Reese didn’t know. But she knew her boss. Something about this deal had Weldon seriously worried. And Reese’s boss did not worry easily.
She watched the delivery guy slip back through the front door and trudge around his van. The guy might have been limping, she couldn’t tell. When the van drove away, she said, “Okay, take it off the main board. But stay on the colonel.”
14
How much do I owe you for the pizza?”
“Come on, Colonel. You don’t owe me nothing.” Earl unzipped his nylon jacket. “How’d I do?”
“You did great. But you’ve got to let me pay—”
“The box is empty, Colonel. You didn’t say nothing about being hungry.”
Donovan slipped out of his bathrobe. “Laura won’t miss you?”
“She’s out playing bridge for the day. I left her a note. Told her I’d gone fishing, wouldn’t be back until after dark. If they were biting, it might be an overnight thing. Won’t be the first time.”
“I don’t want her angry with me.”
“That makes two of us.” Earl slipped on the bathrobe and house shoes. “Where are you headed?”
“East. Make yourself at home. The fridge is stocked.”
The bathrobe was too short on Earl’s lanky form. “You know, when I heard your voice asking about a pizza, I almost forgot everything you told me.”
“I’m glad you remembered.”
“This old brain putters and clanks, but it still gets me around. You in trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you think you’re under surveillance.”
“I’m sure of it. Whatever you do, don’t answer the phone.”
“I remember that much.” Earl had spent eleven years in Defense intel as a technician, then become Donovan’s personal aide at FLETC.
They had discussed the prospect soon after Donovan retired. Two old codgers sitting on a lakeside dock, drinking beer and pretending like they still mattered. Donovan knew that was what Earl had thought at the time, and his buddy had probably been right. Even so, the deal was made. If one or the other called and ordered a spinach pizza to be delivered in half an hour or less, the other was to play delivery boy and get there fast.
Donovan said, “That guff about the anchovies.”
“Pretty good, huh.”
Donovan stepped from the hallway into the living room. He reached for the door, then stopped. “It might be best if you stayed in bed as much as you can.”
“Thirty years in the military, I think I can handle a little extra sack time.”
“Keep the dog locked in the kitchen and don’t worry about any messes. If he growls, it probably means he’s hungry or thirsty. You’ll need to nose him toward his bowls.”
“The wife’s cell phone is on the passenger seat.” His oldest friend gave Donovan a two-fingered salute. “Good hunting, Colonel.”
Charlie spent the journey home reviewing the colonel’s advice and reliving the experience in Gabriella’s penthouse lab. He had heard of out-of-body experiences, even talked to a few soldiers who claimed to have watched themselves in near-death situations. But doing it himself, and having it be so calm, so controlled, left Charlie feeling intensely vulnerable. He was no stranger to fear. But this was different. No matter how unsettled the memory of this experience left him, his yearning to do it again was far stronger. The conflicting emotions left him feeling at war inside himself. Which was why, when he pulled up in front of his house, he had trouble focusing on what he saw.
“Julio?”
The kid was standing on a stepladder, half hidden in a palm tree. “Man, where’d you get that lame ride?”
“It’s a rental.” Charlie walked around a massive pile of yard debris. “What are you doing?”
“Watching your back, man. Least I could do, after your moves back at my aunt’s house and then giving me this cool place to hang.” The kid dropped to the ground and did a little duck and weave. His gloved hands held long-handled shears that he now used like a samurai sword. “Dude, the way you handled those bikers, that was ice.”
“You don’t owe me a thing.”
“Yeah, whatever. Hey, check this out.”
Charlie followed the kid around the side of the house. Soon as his rear garden came into view, he froze.
“Last two years, I earned my walk-around change doing lawn care. Pretty good, huh.”
Charlie’s rear garden was rimmed by a windbreak of Chinese cane and bougainvillea. He had always meant to trim the shrubs, which tended to rise up and overwhelm if they weren’t watched. Now the bushes were all boxed into neat shoulder-high squares. The grass was trimmed, and mulch had been laid around all his flowers. Julio had even raked the sandpits surrounding his fighting pole and the workout area.
Julio was trying hard to hide his nervousness, waiting for Charlie’s reaction, doing his duck and jive, swinging the shears.
Charlie said, “This is the best it’s ever looked.”
The kid beamed. “For real?”
“I’ve always meant to do it but never did. Even if I had, I couldn’t have done a job this good.”
Julio beamed, started to punch Charlie’s shoulder, then thought better of it. “The best is yet to come, bro.”
Reese stood on the carpeted rear ring by the Vault’s stairwell. She was connected to Trace by her headset. Through her earpiece she heard the jet’s soft rumble and the man tapping his heavy gold ring on the table.
She asked, “Are you getting this?”
“Five by five,” Trace confirmed. His face was on the arena’s top right panel. His features were turned slightly orange by the in-flight transmission. “How recent is this?”
“It’s live, right, Patel?”
“Real-time feed,” Patel confirmed. He heard Trace the same as she did.
Trace and the Vault’s crew watched Julio shout something lost to the roar of the Stingray’s motor.
“Smooth ride,” Trace said.
The kid juiced the engine again, then cut it off and slipped from the car. They heard him tell Charlie, “Back before he got busted, my old man used to let me work in his garage. He was magic with cars, man.”
Charlie replied, “I tried to take it yesterday, but the thing wouldn’t start.”
“What I figured, since you left the keys in the ignition.”
“I can’t get over what you’ve done here.” Charlie put his arm around the kid’s shoulders. “This was my dad’s all-time favorite ride.”
“It’s a sweet machine, bro. Pure cherry.”
Charlie steered Julio into the house. “Let’s grab a bite. You work up an appetite?”
Reese asked Trace, “When do you arrive?”
“Hold one.” He was gone and back in ten seconds. “Pilot says we’re inbound at twenty and closing.”
“Once you’re on the ground, how long will you need to ready your team?”
“Depends on what you want.”
“I want Hazard gone
.”
“I know that.” She could hear Trace tapping the ring in time to his words. “What I need to know is, how much noise can I make?”
Reese lowered her voice. “The less the better. But speed is the most important factor.”
“We could slip in tonight, do the job, fire the house. They’ll know it was deliberately set, but not why.”
“No. No waiting. We’ve got to assume he’s on to us.”
“Then it’s liable to get very noisy.”
“Weldon will hate that.”
“You take out a Ranger, especially one who knows you’re coming, it’s bound to wake the neighbors. What about the kid?”
The sound of his ring tapping the table felt like a drill to her brain. “What is the word you guys use for that kind of stuff?”
“Collateral damage.”
“Just do the job.”
Charlie was just finishing his sandwich when the phone rang. “This is Hazard.”
A voice distorted by tension and cell phone static said, “Foxtrot to Eltee. Foxtrot to Eltee.”
Charlie turned to stare out the home’s rear window. To the left of his practice pit rose a massive live oak, a Florida tree that never lost its leaves. It was one of the world’s slowest growing. It was also one of the hardest. During the Revolutionary War, planks of live oak were used to construct the ship that came to be known as “Old Ironsides,” due to how cannonballs fired by British guns bounced off its gunnels. Charlie had time to review this and the wind sifting through the tree’s silver leaves, all in the space of about three heartbeats. His adrenaline rush was that strong. “Reading you five by five.”
“Zenith. Repeat Zenith.”
The power punch grew stronger still. “Roger that.”
“Give me your RP in the one-niner-two grid.”
Charlie did not need more than half a second to respond, “Java Surf at A1A.”
“Hold one.” There was a tense silence. “GPS says I’m inbound in eighteen. Foxtrot out.”
Charlie hung up the phone. He stood gripping the receiver. Staring at the sunlit tree. He debated whether he should go back to the main house and pack a case, then decided there wasn’t time.
“Charlie?”
He turned around. “Pack your things. Bring whatever’s important. We leave in ninety seconds.”
Reese demanded, “What did I just hear?”
Patel was scrambling. “No idea.”
“Bring Trace back up. And somebody get me a source for that call.” When Trace’s frown appeared on the front screen, she said, “Play it for him.”
“Here we go,” Patel said and reran the telephone call.
The conversation lasted a grand total of fourteen seconds. Reese timed it. “Do we have a fix on the source?”
Patel’s team member replied, “Cell phone. Area code is for Lake City.”
Trace asked, “Where is that, exactly?”
“Southwest of Orlando,” Reese replied. “Hazard has a contact near there. Colonel Donovan Field. He stopped by and saw him earlier today.”
“Field is Ranger?”
“FLETC. Retired.”
The techie seated next to Patel, Kimmie, said, “I have something. The nearest pizza house is 28.6 miles from Donovan Field’s home.”
Trace said, “Long way to go to deliver a ten-dollar pizza.”
“There’s something else.” Kimmie tapped the keys. “This is a playback of the original call Donovan Field made.”
The sound of a phone ringing came over the line, then, “Hello?”
Patel muttered, “Sounds like the call woke the guy up.”
They listened to Donovan Field order a spinach pizza and give his address, and the guy on the other end gradually come alert, confirm, and hang up.
“No business name,” Reese said. “No price. No checking the address.”
Kimmie said, “The number belongs to one Earl Hammond. The van’s license plate matches.”
Patel said, “Could be a side business.”
Kimmie added, “The cell phone that just called Hazard is listed under the name of Laurel Hammond.”
“Track the phone. Now.” She turned to Trace’s image and said, “What can you tell me about that call to Hazard?”
Trace was frowning. “It’s military code.”
“Well, just, duh.” She snapped her fingers. “Come on. I need to know what just happened!”
“Eltee was a nickname you heard once in a while. Short for lieutenant. It meant an officer that the men on his team fully respected. Most officers weren’t liked well enough to get tagged.”
“Who was Foxtrot?”
“Could mean anything. Ditto for Zenith. Every division in the field develops its own lingo. Means they can be on the same wavelength as a dozen other squads and identify what is specifically meant for them.”
“What about RP?”
Trace nodded. “Sure, that’s standard chopper speak. Means rendezvous point. He asked for a meeting place in the 192 grid.”
Patel read off his screen, “Highway 192 runs from below Orlando straight to Melbourne, the city below Satellite Beach. It dead-ends beachside at Highway A1A.”
Reese said to them all, “He knows.”
Trace replied, “Gee, you think?”
She was going to snap at him but was saved from needing to apologize later by Patel saying, “Check out the main board.” The earlier image of the pizza delivery van pulling up in front of Donovan Field’s home flashed on the lower screens. “Earl Hammond retired in 2005 from thirty-five years in the military. Rank of master sergeant. A string of medals.”
Trace said, “Probably a hard striper.”
“What?”
“Means an NCO who earned his rank in combat.”
Reese mulled that over a fraction of a second, then rolled her finger at Patel. Go.
“His last posting was as chief aide to Colonel Donovan Field.”
She told her team, “Run the delivery sequence.”
They watched the two men argue, then the man carried the pizza box inside and the door shut. Three minutes later, the door reopened and the guy returned to the van. Hat down, sunglasses on, jacket lapel up.
Reese said, “He’s limping.”
“So?” Trace said.
Kimmie read off her monitor, “Colonel Field lost part of his foot outside Kuwait City. Earl Hammond carried the colonel to safety and won a Bronze Star for his trouble.”
Reese said, “Field knows we’re watching. He waited to contact Hazard until we wouldn’t have time to scramble.” She had to report this to her boss. Weldon Hawkins hated being interrupted when the Combine gathered. But this couldn’t wait. She asked Trace, “Can you still take him?”
The guy was still watching the screen, still frowning. “Tell Hawkins we don’t have any choice but to light up the whole city.”
15
Charlie drove them to the municipal airport in silence. He dropped off the rental and tossed Julio’s backpack into the rear hold of Gabriella’s Range Rover, which was still parked in the private aviation lot. Julio slid into the passenger seat and gave the side window his best sullen glare. Charlie knew Julio’s life had been filled with adults who did things he couldn’t understand. Sullen was probably his best defense.
Charlie told him, “That phone call I received was from the colonel I served under after I did my stint with the Rangers.”
Slowly, gradually, the kid emerged from his funk. “You were one of them?”
“Four years, but less than four weeks of that was frontline duty. We were stationed in Anbar Province. The first two weeks, we had a couple of close calls but nothing serious. A few night firefights . . .” Charlie stopped.
“What is it, bro?”
“I’ve never talked about this before.” Not even when the nightmares woke him screaming and Sylvie was so spooked she made him sleep in the living room. He shook off that batch of bad times and went on, “I was wounded before my first month was up. I spent a
bout a thousand years in rehab. Then I was assigned as a trainer at the Ranger school. Three years later, I moved over to serve the colonel in charge of a place called FLETC. It trains field agents.”
“You mean, like, Homeland Security?”
Charlie nodded. “My call sign was Eltee, a tag my NCO gave me. The colonel was Foxtrot. That’s what I just heard on the phone. ‘Foxtrot to Eltee.’ Nobody has spoken those words to me in years.”
Julio was clearly lost. “So what did the dude say?”
“That we’re about to meet incoming fire. And we’ve got to hurry. Or we die.”
Charlie stayed in the car, the motor running, the nose pointed toward the world. He watched in the rearview mirror as Irma Steeg emerged from her apartment building. The kid walked alongside her, talking a mile a minute. Irma opened the Range Rover’s passenger door and Julio slipped into the rear seat, saying, “I’m telling you, Charlie’s place is a trip.”
She asked, “This for real, you’re giving Julio an apartment?”
“That was the plan. But it looks like that may not be an option, at least in the short term.” Charlie had the car moving before Irma shut her door. “I need you to take a ride. I don’t have time to sit here and explain.”
“All I’ve got holding me here is a cup of coffee that went cold an hour ago.” Irma turned and said to Julio, “Only reason I haven’t offered you a room is, I’ve got a tiny one-bedroom condo.”
Julio said, “I’ve been to your place, Irma. I’ve seen bigger closets.”
Charlie headed south on A1A and related the colonel’s call. “Zenith is field comm for ‘our perimeter is breached.’ It means we’ve got enemy combatants coming at us and we’re cut off from base.”
Irma said, “You think this retired guy is going to tell you something that will put you back on the road?”
“No idea. But Donovan Field is a man who never spooks.”