by James Phelan
Ann smiled.
“Okay,” she said, tapping away at her computer to bring up the file. “The list of the dead I can do—it’s in one of my Presidential Daily Briefings. I’ll give you that, then you can set up a card table in the basement here and sort out the Middle East for me.”
“Deal,” McCorkell said with a smile, though he knew she was most the way serious about the workload owed.
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“He’s calling back asap,” Walker said.
“With the names?” Murphy replied.
“Yes.” Walker started tapping at the side table, then stood and started pacing the room. “What if you didn’t see anything in Abbottabad?”
“I didn’t.”
“Right,” Walker said. “But I’m saying, maybe no one saw anything. Maybe it’s this op listed as R&R?”
“That makes sense. No, wait, it doesn’t make any sense at all.” Murphy leaned forward. “You keep saying that we saw something in Abbottabad, now you’re saying we didn’t—make up your mind.”
“Exactly.”
“Huh? Look, we all saw plenty in there, okay?”
“Like?”
“Random crap,” Murphy said. “Computers and files and pictures and tapes and scrapbooks and hard drives and maps and hair dye.”
“Hair dye?”
“For bin Laden’s beard, we figured. He was a pretty vain guy, apparently. Probably comes with having multiple wives to keep interested. I mean, damn, he was housebound. The only time he’d go out was to pace around his vegetable garden. So, who else was he doing it for—either himself or for them, right? Probably dyed his beard in the mirror and then gave himself a selfie.” Murphy mimed jerking off.
Walker smiled, and then just as quickly his expression grew serious. “Look, I’m saying . . . Murph, I gotta ask . . .”
Walker looked at him, expectant, as though an answer would rattle out, but Murphy just returned his stare.
“What?” Murphy said.
“Well,” Walker said, “in the house, you boys really did . . . you know.”
“Really did . . . I seriously have no idea what you’re getting at.”
“You really did get him, right? Just to be sure that this isn’t some big conspiracy to stop the truth getting out—”
“Fuck—are you really asking me that?”
“Just in case. I’ve got to know. It’s true, right?”
“Yes,” Murphy said, shaking his head, incredulous. “Yes, Walker, we killed him. And then killed him again.”
“Okay. I had to ask.”
“Shit. Really? Look, we executed the op, fast and furious, then we flew back to Bagram in the Black Hawk loaded with the body and the intel, with most of the team riding out in the back-up Chinook. I was in the Hawk with five other guys. The two shooters sat on his body the whole way, grinning ear to ear; it looked all the world like some old-school photo of a couple of hunters who’d just brought down a lion or rhino. We touched down, then switched out to a couple of waiting V-22s and bugged straight out to the Carl Vinson, taking all intel—and the body—with us.”
“I know about the flights,” Walker said. “A friend of mine’s with 160th SOAR, he was one of the pilots of the other Black Hawk, the one that crashed on insertion. And I know the CIA guys who handled the intel after the fact.”
“They did good work, the 160th, that Black Hawk going down be damned. They got us in and got us out, undetected, deep in and out of Pakistan.”
“They’re good flyers.”
“The best. So, what were you going to say?”
“What if what you guys saw wasn’t there?”
“That makes sense,” Murphy said, then, even more sarcastic in tone, added, “No it doesn’t, yet again. You’ve lost me.”
“What if it was someplace else . . .” Walker looked back out the window, as if a thought was just out of reach somewhere out there. The day was still cold but the sun was out and it danced brightly on the chop on the Mississippi.
“What are you getting at, Walker?”
“Team Six,” Walker said. “You guys worked all the time. High operational tempo, right?”
“The highest. Teams from DEVGRU were out there every night.”
“Exactly,” Walker said, looking to Murphy. “So, maybe we’re looking at the wrong op.”
“Well, who said it was the guys at Abbottabad?” Murphy said. “I mean, in the first place, who made that connection, that statement?”
“I don’t know where that started. NCIS maybe. Levine said so before, right—that Grant said it? Any rate, we were told it—it’s the official line, from the Navy.”
“Well, they’d know,” Murphy said. “It wouldn’t be hard to deduce, right? I mean, eight killed; if all eight were on that op, that’d be it. Eight guys out of forty on that raid. It’d be rare for the same eight of us to be doing anything else but hunting bad guys, and bin Laden was the pinnacle—it’s not like we’d get reprisals like this for shooting some Somali pirates, right?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. It could be another op you guys carried out. It could be this off-books thing or something like it.”
“Guys were in and out of Six all the time,” Murphy said. “DEVGRU is a big unit. It’d be a hell of a coincidence if the eight guys down were on a different op. I won’t know until I get that list of the guys killed. We need it.”
Walker checked his phone, waiting for McCorkell to call.
•
“Nice place,” Squeaker said as they pulled up to a decrepit group of buildings. It had been a motel, built in the 1960s, a cluster of twelve yellow-brick buildings with stained curtains and original fixtures and fittings. The office was connected to a diner, clearly abandoned years ago. “But I think the train left this station a while ago.”
“It’s safe,” Somerville said simply to her as they got out the car. She gave a set of keys to Woods and pointed to the third room, indicating that’s where the Murphy family would be staying. “The government has owned it for a long time. One road in, fences all around, nothing but farms and the old branch of the interstate that flashes through here. If anyone comes, we’ll know about it well in advance.”
Squeaker nodded, then looked back at the diner. “Have they got food here?”
“There’s food,” Somerville said, handing her a key marked “2.” “We stocked the rooms this morning. There’s even running hot water and cable TV. Not just basic cable, either.”
“Tax money at work, hey?” Squeaker said.
Somerville smiled. “That’s about it. You go settle in with the Murphys; I’ll set up out here and drop by in about ten.”
Squeaker nodded and helped Jane with the kids.
“You’re sure this is secure?” Grant asked Somerville when it was just the two of them.
Somerville looked at him, then around the court. The empty road. The fields out back and to the sides. A couple of rows of old pines yellowing with neglect and age. The only other building visible was an abandoned petrol station a few hundred yards down the road. The sound of the interstate drifted in from half a mile to the west.
“You don’t see what I see?” Somerville said.
“I see a field, a road, one way in, one way out,” Grant said, gesturing to each as he spoke. “I see old buildings that have thin plate-glass windows and flimsy doors and locks that could probably be picked by my little sister. And you’ve got four guys here.”
“And I’ve got you and Woods,” Somerville said. “And two unmarked highway cruisers parked further out on the interstate.”
Grant looked at her, then looked around again, squinting against the sun. “I don’t like it,” he said. “I’m sticking close to the family.”
“You do that,” Somerville said, and passed him a key marked “4.” “We’ll keep our eyes out for bogeymen.”
Grant headed toward the Murphys’ room. He could see through the lace curtains that Woods was inside, helping to settle one of the kids. Then Squeaker was in there too—her r
oom next door had an interconnecting door. He looked up and down the road, and then back at the room full of life in front of him. There was nothing about this that he liked.
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“It’s been fifteen,” Murphy said, looking at his watch.
“He’s onto it,” Walker replied, checking for new email on his phone. Nothing. He sat back in the armchair.
“Damn it to hell.” Murphy paced. “The list, I mean. What will it show? Which of my friends is dead? Murdered. Back-of-the-head shots, right? Damn . . .”
“You’ll get your revenge,” Walker said. The ex-SEAL looked at him. Seething anger there, just under the surface. The guy wanted to kill someone.
“I want more than that. I need more than that.”
“You can kill those responsible and then go dig up their ancestors and kill them too, all over again. How about that?”
“I’m serious.” Murphy stopped at the window and faced Walker. “I need to know why. Why would they do this? Because they think we saw something that might stop a terrorist attack at 5:30 this afternoon?”
“It’s a demonstration. The bigger attack will follow.”
“You know what I mean. We—the SEALs—weren’t going to stop them, not today, not a month from now. If we’d seen a threat, in Abbottabad, you don’t think we would have spoken up about it, stopped it before now?”
“Right.”
“So, I’m just saying, why the need to kill us? Why?”
Walker paused, looking up at the SEAL. “You know we may not get the chance to ask that.”
“I’m calling bullshit on that,” Murphy said. “This isn’t war. This isn’t sniping some towel-head off a mountain half a mile away. This is going to be up close and personal, right? I’m not going to use that .45 unless I have to. It’s going to be this.” Murphy pulled out the hunting knife with which he’d dispatched Stokes and Duncan. “This will get the truth out of them.”
“Torture will only get you the answers that you want to hear,” Walker said.
“You think?”
“I know.”
“You know?”
Walker nodded. “Ten years in the CIA,” he said. “Iraq and ’Stan were my sandbox. Later it became Syria and Lebanon, then Iran and Pakistan. You think I didn’t see my share of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques?”
“They worked. We got the bad guy.”
“No, they didn’t. We did that for over ten years to hunt bin Laden and we got nowhere.”
“We got him in the end.”
“Because of good old-fashioned detective work.”
Murphy scoffed. “Now you’re sounding soft.”
“Listen,” Walker said, getting closer to the SEAL. “I want to know the why as much as you do. But you know what? I’ve been hunting these types of guys for a long, long time. Hell, I’ve been one of them, overthrowing governments and organizing regime changes and assassinations and waging all kinds of economic warfare.” Walker took a moment, meeting Murphy square in the eye. “I did it for my country. And some crazy people out there may well think that they’re doing it for a similar purpose. Or, worse? They’re doing it for a reason that we can’t even fathom.”
“Like what? They enjoy it?”
“Maybe. You served with men like that. I know I did. There are a lot of guys who join the military because it’s a legal way to kill. They’re out there. We’re paying them, arming them, giving them permission, indemnity.”
“Can you call your guy already?”
“He’ll call. Any second now.”
“Damn it. I hate waiting.”
“Tell me about the op in Iraq.”
Murphy looked at Walker. Let out a sigh. Sat down. “Okay . . .” he said. “This can’t leave the room.”
•
Somerville spoke with her FBI agents about protecting the Murphy family. The agents were decent guys, each around thirty, each had done the usual entry-level work in the Bureau and now had chosen St. Louis to settle down a spell, raise families, put some time in. In that sense, they weren’t about to go rocketing up the career scales, but then that was the vast bulk of her co-workers, and those at any other agency or institution, for that matter. Somerville knew that, as competent as many people were, they were content to hold down a job and pay the mortgage and not rock the boat. Dependable. You knew they weren’t going to take risks or cut corners for the sake of getting ahead. In Somerville’s law-enforcement experience, agents with outside-the-box initiative were just as dangerous—perhaps it was even more of a liability—as those who didn’t have it.
And these four were those kind of dependable workhorses she needed right now.
They were in two vehicles, a couple of five-year-old Ford Crown Vics with tired old Detroit V8s thrumming under the hoods.
“I want you parked on the road in,” Somerville said into one car. “Stay there until I say otherwise.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the agent at the passenger side replied out his open window.
Somerville turned to the car idling behind her and said to the driver, “I want you guys to cruise the perimeter road, for the next hour.”
“Got it,” he said. “Same circuit we did this morning?”
“Yep,” Somerville said. “All of it. Every road, there and back. If you see so much as someone pulled over to change a flat, you check it out.”
“Got it,” he said again.
“On your way back,” she said, “time the run from the state police station.”
“Eighteen minutes, at a decent pace,” he replied.
“Do it again in current traffic,” Somerville said. “To be sure.”
“Okay,” he said, then added, “Do you really think someone is going to go after the family? I mean, they’re nothing, right? It’s the Team Six guy they want dead.”
Somerville looked up and down the old road, which was cracked blacktop with bits of grass poking out here and there. The petrol station had a faded Shell sign, the kind that was a large raised shell of plastic, the yellow faded to an off-white. The motel was in a ghost town. The wind whispered in the weeds.
“I don’t know what’s coming,” Somerville said. “And that scares me.”
95
“Like I said,” Murphy began, “that three months wasn’t training. Wasn’t even R&R, aside from those few days at the end. It was an op, in Iraq, 2003. And there were sixteen of us involved. And if I’m right, and I’m pretty sure I am, nine of those, including me, were in the DEVGRU unit that later hit Abbottabad.”
Walker nodded slowly, checking his email. Nothing. “So, what was it?”
“Well . . .”
Murphy suddenly looked sick, and Walker wondered what kind of an op would make a guy like this look like that; a secret so dark that, even now, with his family threatened and his ex-service mates murdered, it was still hard for him to talk about.
“After it, we were all given new papers to sign, the highest level of secrecy there is, apparently,” Murphy said. “It carried the death sentence for treason, right in the first line on the page.”
“Go on,” Walker said. His mind imagined the worst. He’d seen and heard dark things in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers and operators losing it, going out and raping and murdering civilians. He imagined that maybe this SEAL team did something like that, or was witness to it, or cleaned it up. Maybe some kind of My Lai-type massacre, and they were sent in to kill the US servicemen who perpetrated the attack. Walker knew that only the tip of the iceberg was ever reported, that all wars contained crimes. The bulk of them were handled internally, hushed up, wiped from the history books and cleaned from the face of the earth and all but the all-seeing eye of God and some General in the Pentagon.
So, Walker was completely thrown when Murphy said, “We found WMDs. In Iraq. We found them.”
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“We were on a long-range patrol in the northwest,” Murphy said. “Sixteen of us. The place was sanitized, we owned it, but for a few towns where Republican Guard typ
es were now in plain clothes and retraining in the art of making IEDs to wage asymmetric warfare on our asses.”
Walker poured more coffee and sat on the arm of a chair, cradling the steaming cup in his hands.
“We were sent out there to hunt down some brass motherfucker who headed up their chemical warfare division. One of those guys from the deck of cards. It turns out, we found the guy on the second day. We found him, expected to bring him back to the Green Zone and drop him to some CIA guys for a nice little debrief, but he started talking to us. Couldn’t shut him up. The fucker spoke English better than half the guys in our team. Trained in the UK and US, sent off to study there by Saddam because his daddy was some Ba’ath party honcho. And so he talked to us and was all repentant, saying how he’d do anything not to be taken to a black site to be tortured until he disappeared. They were well known then, the CIA-run camps. Abu Ghraib was big in the news, the dog collars and naked pictures and shit. He just wanted to live out his years in this village in the desert with his family and his mud house. Said they had some date plantation that he wanted to retire into. Said he’d show us something that’d change our lives, if we let him go.”
Murphy looked briefly out the window, “He said that he’d show us where the WMDs were. That there was a cache, a big one, about a hundred klicks northwest, in what was a depleted oil field near the Kurdish zone that’d been a no-fly zone since the first Gulf War, so it had been left all alone since then.”
“You checked it out?”
Murphy nodded. “Yep. Our CO decided, since we’d been allocated three weeks to kill or capture this guy, that we had time to burn, and who knows—we might become national fucking heroes because of it. It’d make our careers and then some. Free beers and blow jobs for the rest of our lives. We all agreed. So, we bagged the dude and headed out to the site.”
Murphy paused, squinting at nothing in the distance as though he could see the dust roads and date plantations and craters and mountains of that region.