When Rome Stumbles

by David Kershner

  Josh chuckled again and replied, “Little of both these days, actually. And you?”

  “Former Air Force Pararescue.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Why? Because I’m a woman?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “At least you’re an honest Marine,” she said. “They started fully training women in 2016, but they still won’t let us go into combat,” she finished with an edge of incredulity in her voice. “They let females fly fighters starting at the turn of the century. Some of those have even flown in hot zones, but let’s ban the ones that want to jump out of one. Chauvinist jerks.”

  “Touched a nerve did we?” Josh said rhetorically.

  She placed a playful scowl on her face and held up her hand to show Josh her forefinger and thumb an inch apart.

  Laughing, Josh said, “So when did you leap from that burning hulk?”

  “When we first started descending.”

  “Holy crap! That was at about twenty thousand feet,” Josh said in astonishment.

  “Twenty two, actually.”

  Josh whistled in amazement at that. “So what’s your name?” Josh asked. “Or would you prefer that I keep calling you ‘ma’am’, ma’am?”

  “Samantha, but everyone calls me Sam.”

  “I see, and does Samantha have a last name?” he asked sarcastically.

  She groaned and turned to him. “Are you gonna be a smart ass the entire time?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly. The day is still young,” he replied and plastered a stupid looking grin on his face.

  She couldn’t help but smile at his attempt to bring levity to the situation. “Jameson. My name is Samantha Jameson.”

  * * *

  Gregg had been hanging, shackled, to the stone ceiling with his feet barely touching the floor for he didn’t know how long. This is a new touch.

  He had been in and out of consciousness so much that he was having difficulty keeping track of time, let alone the weeks. He had only been fed a handful of times since his capture and was in a constant state of hunger. By his estimation, he was spending about a day conscious while being beaten and tortured for information. Then he’d spend an unknown number of days unconscious recuperating. When he was allowed to recuperate, he was provided only liquefied nourishment and his wounds were tended to by a doctor and one of two nurses. He was never permitted the use of utensils and his arms and legs were never unshackled. He also had never left the room he had first awoken in. On the plus side, the guy that used to scream non-stop in the next cell was finally quiet. He’s probably dead.

  The familiar grinding of steel locks and bolts alerted him to the arrival of a visitor. I’m not strapped to the bed so this won’t be good. Suhrab entered the enclosure and shut the door behind him. It was immediately locked by someone on the other side. Interesting, I wonder where the rest of the goon squad is.

  His interrogator walked over to the desk, picked up the chair, and began walking toward Gregg. He set it down in front of the hanging prisoner. It occurred to Gregg that Suhrab had knowingly placed his perch outside of the reach of Gregg’s leg swing. This is not this guy’s first rodeo.

  “Mr. Chastain,” Suhrab began.

  “Oh, I think we are beyond the formalities now, Suhrab. Don’t you think?” Gregg said, cutting Suhrab off. “By all means, call me Gregg.”

  “Mr. Chastain,” Suhrab continued unfazed. “If I were to refer to you by your given name... your Christian name, then that would possibly start the beginnings of a bond. A friendship even. We can’t have that. I am your captor. You are my prisoner. I am your interrogator, judge, and most likely, your executioner.”

  “From where I stand, Suhrab, you don’t have the stones to carry out the sentence,” Gregg responded. “You’re strictly hands off. You get other people to do your dirty work.”

  “Ahh. Mr. Chastain has been paying attention,” Suhrab answered. “I like to think of it as a perk for being in charge. Besides, I wouldn’t want to blur the lines of our... relationship.”

  “You’re a cold fish Suhrab. You know that?” Gregg said.

  “Eh, call it what you will.”

  “So what do you want Suhrab? Your desert dwelling sand monkeys aren’t here so am I to assume we are just having a conversation?”

  “I’m afraid it will be a bit of a one sided conversation,” Suhrab replied before continuing. “Unfortunately, I am the bearer of bad tidings.”

  “Seriously? Could you talk any more like a British fop?” Gregg shot back.

  “I see we are going to continue with the personal attacks.”

  “What else have I got? I’m chained to the ceiling ya jerkoff!”

  “And there’s the name calling.”

  Gregg was amazed that Suhrab had never once reacted overtly to anything he had done or said. Since his capture, Gregg had insulted Suhrab’s mother, father, siblings, country, and religion. The guy never batted an eye. When something even began to stick under his skin, Suhrab simply ordered Aban, Mahtab, or Taj to wail on him harder.

  “Fine. What do you want Suhrab? What can I do for you? You’ve been beating me for months and I haven’t told you anything. What makes you think a conversation is going to alter that?”

  “Because what I have to tell you will gut you. What I have to tell you will make even the most hardened of prisoners... compliant.”

  “Alright then,” Gregg said somewhat excitedly welcoming the change of pace. “What have you got? I’m getting tired of the cat and mouse games. Besides, the suspense is killing me,” Gregg replied as he began laughing at his own words given his current predicament.

  “Very well, Mr. Chastain. Imagine a woman,” Suhrab began. “Imagine a very pretty woman. Perhaps a blonde woman. Imagine that, just perhaps, this pretty blonde woman were pregnant.”

  Dejected, Gregg interrupted, “Seriously, Suhrab? I thought this was going to be something different. This is the same ol’ schtick. We’ve covered this. The kid’s not mine.”

  “How dare you use that offensive Yiddish language in front of me!” Suhrab shot back.

  “What? Schtick?” Gregg replied unassumingly not fully aware of the word’s origin. When he saw that his captor flinched at the intonation, he went on a Tourette’s fueled verbal diarrheic rampage against Suhrab.

  “Schtick! Schtick! Schtick! Screw schtickity you, Suhrab! Schtick! Schtick! Schtick! Suhrab’s a schtickity tool!” Gregg continued until the man snapped.

  His interrogator wheeled out of his chair, grasping the back of it as he did so. Firmly grabbing on with both hands, Suhrab crashed the piece of wooden furniture against Gregg’s exposed ribs.

  “Yes, that is what you said!” the man screamed back at him as the chair broke apart and flew across the floor in pieces.

  With Gregg finally quiet, as if nothing had ever happened, Suhrab calmly said, “May I continue, Mr. Chastain? I haven’t finished my story yet.”

  Coughing and wincing from the fresh beating, Gregg managed, “You’ve got some real anger management issues there buddy.”

  Seamlessly moving forward, he began, “Thank you. Now, as I was saying, imagine a young vibrant pretty blonde woman with a history of miscarriages. No doubt I’m sure due to her belief in a false Prophet, years of birth control pills, and that little abortion she had in college she didn’t think anyone knew about.”

  For weeks on end Gregg had managed to contain his feelings for Emily and their unborn child. These two things represented the last bastions of his sanity in this hellhole. You touch a single hair on her head you bastard and I’ll kill you! No. No. Calm down, Gregg. Relax. Don’t give him anything.

  “I’ve heard this one too. Let me guess, she’s a doctor at a research facility, right?” Gregg said sardonically.

  “Oh, tsk-tsk, Mr. Chastain. No emotional investment in such a significant story,” Suhrab admonished Gregg like a practiced schoolmaster.

  Gregg would have shrugged in a nonchalant gesture if he could have moved his shoulde
rs. The hatred he felt for this man was palpable. Instead, he managed to let out an audible, “Hmph.”

  Suhrab paused for a few moments before continuing, “As I was saying, imagine a woman with a history of miscarriages being told that her darling husband, whom she thought was merely a linguistics instructor, was shot down while on a Special Forces mission somewhere over northeastern Syria.

  “Can you fathom how someone with that specific medical condition might handle the truth about a husband who wasn’t what he seemed? I wonder how she would react to that?”

  Gregg could barely contain the pain and anger growing inside of him. Suhrab reached into his pocket and retrieved a small portable electronic device.

  He began interacting with the interface and said, “Oh wait, I think I have a video of this little story.”

  Gregg began sobbing and turning his head away from the screen. “It’s a lie. I’m not watching that... I’m not watching that!”

  “You will watch it,” Suhrab answered angrily. “Even if I have to cut your eyelids off... Allah be praised, you will watch it!”

  * * *

  Secretary McInerney hadn’t slept at all. He had tried, but the most he could manage was a series of catnaps. Even then, those precious moments were spent restlessly tossing and turning on the overstuffed leather couch in his office. Whenever he wasn’t trying to sleep, he was pacing around his darkened office desperately willing his phone to ring. I feel like some teenager waiting for an invite to the dance.

  When he wasn’t blankly staring out into the streets of Washington, he was standing in front of the large commercial sized office windows watching the remnants of a snowstorm blow out to sea. He turned and glanced at his desk again. Why the hell hasn’t she called?

  He and Samantha had agreed that he was not to try and reach her while she was in Montana. It was coming up on seven in the morning on the east coast and she still had not tried to touch base with him. Something’s happened.

  He started to walk toward his desk to initiate contact when there was a quiet knock on his office door. It wasn’t expected. The sound startled him. He reflexively retracted his hand from the phone’s receiver like he was being caught by his mother trying to sneak a snack before dinner.

  “Uncle Elias, are you in there?” came a voice from the other side.

  “Yeah, I’m here. Come on in,” was his reply.

  Mara entered the room and saw his disheveled state. “Did you get any sleep last night?” she asked.

  “Oh, I got a few minutes here and there. What are you doing here? The weather is horrible.”

  “I only live a few blocks away. I figured out how to get here without barely going outside. I cut through buildings, underground parking garages, and use overhead walkways. Easy peezy.”

  “Mara,” Elias exclaimed. “You’re almost a native now.”

  She giggled at the comment. “They’re saying it’s the worst storm to hit D.C. since the 1980’s. It’s kind of pretty. We don’t get winter weather like this in Charleston.”

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  “It is amazingly quiet out there too,” she replied and walked over to stand next to him in front of the window. “Look there,” she said as she pointed to a snow trail emerging from a parking garage across the street. “Those are my footprints.”

  Elias pulled the glasses down from his brow. “Ah, so they are. Well I’ll be.”

  Mara turned to start heading back out of the office when Elias said, “Did you come here alone?”

  “Yes, why?” she replied as she slowed to answer him.

  “No reason. It’s just that there are two set of footprints in the snow.”

  She quickly returned to his side to see for herself.

  “Yours plow across the entire street. The second pair only go halfway and stop.”

  “They probably forgot something in their car. They must have gone to get it,” she answered.

  “Then why would they utilize the same tracks? Why not just turn and go back the way they came? Why make the conscious decision to retrace your steps?”

  Mara shuddered at the thought of being followed and said, “You’re starting to freak me out, Uncle Elias.”

  Thinking more out loud than anything else, Elias responded, “The military trains their personnel to do that to disguise their numbers. I wonder if they did it because they realized they were leaving a trail.”

  She stared at him in stunned silence. What do you say? What do you think?

  Elias could read the panic on her face. To calm her, he said, “You’re probably right though. Whoever it was must have forgotten something. Maybe they didn’t want any more snow in their shoes.”

  Mara exhaled loudly and slowly closed her eyes.

  As if he had never made the previous comments, Elias turned and started heading toward the couch. “Can you man the phone while I try to get some shut eye?”

  “Sur – ,” she started to say until she saw the red dot on his back.

  She recognized it for what it was from all of her TV shows and screamed so loudly and so intently that Elias jumped and quickly spun around to address her. Glass flew through the room as the assassins bullet lodged itself in the wall, barely missing Elias.

  Seeing the shards of window and sheetrock fly through the air, Elias yelled, “Get down!” as he grabbed the door handle. He flung it shut and threw himself on the floor.

  “Where are you baby girl?” Elias asked in a whisper. He could hear her shallow panicked breathing coming from near his desk.

  A few tense seconds passed before she replied in a hushed voice, “I’m under your desk. Why did you close our only escape route? We need to get out of here!”

  “Light pollution,” he answered.

  With the switch off and the office shut to the reception area, the only source of available lighting was emanating from the streetlights. Given the angle, only the ceiling was illuminated.

  “Can you see the phone cord?” he asked maintaining the whisper.

  “Yeah,” she replied confused. “Why?”

  “Grab it and pull it off of the desk.”

  “Don’t you have the cell I got you for Christmas?”

  “It’s in my pocket, but I don’t know how it works,” he replied embarrassingly.

  “Are you serious? I spent hours teaching you how to use it,” she whispered back incredulously.

  “Well, it didn’t take, all right. Technology and I are incompatible.”

  Stealing a phrase from her grandmother, Mara exclaimed, “Sweet Mary mother of Francis! Give me that phone!”

  Elias crawled around the backside of his desk and slapped the wireless device into her outstretched hand.

  She stared down at it confused. “Who should I call?” she asked.

  “How the hell should I know? I’ve never had anyone try and assassinate me before!” he shot back.

  “Screw it,” she said and dialed 9-1-1.

  Chapter 8

  February 1, 2022

  Emily’s parents exited the driver and passenger side of the Cadillac sedan at the same time. Her father opened her car door while her mother went up the steps to the Victorian home and unlocked the house. He reached in, took Emily’s hand, and helped her out of the vehicle. Emily stood and stretched her body with her face to the sky as if she had just finished an eight-hour drive with Gregg to visit his family in North Carolina.

  “You all right, sweetie,” he asked compassionately.

  “I’m fine, dad. You guys need to stop hovering over me like a teenage boyfriend.”

  Her father smiled at the comment. “That’s our job. We’re your parents. We don’t stop the hovering just because you’re grown.”

  He then held out his arm for her to grab hold and steady herself. She took it in hers as they began to walk toward the front door of the house that she and Gregg had once shared.

  “We’ll try and tone it down some,” he remarked as they walked.

  She stopped walking, turned to face h
im, and said, “Just a little... but it’s sweet. Thank you.” She paused before continuing, “Really, dad. This isn’t necessary. I’ll be fine. Besides, after being cooped up in that hospital for two weeks, it’ll be nice to have a good night’s sleep without some nurse or doctor poking and prodding me or checking my vitals at all hours of the night.”

  After having had three miscarriages prior to this most recent one, the emotional impact of losing a child was lessened. The physical pain from the surgical scars was something new to deal with though.

  When the Army representative came to her door and conveyed his condolences about Gregg, she had fainted in the middle of the foyer. The Chaplain that had accompanied him had called 9-1-1 while the soldier held her and wept. She had just lost her husband and baby on the same day. When she awoke in the hospital, the doctors explained that she had had another miscarriage. Apparently, while she was in the O.R., they had discovered tiny cysts on her ovaries and the pathology reports confirmed that she had ovarian cancer.

  Emily asked for her parents and the officer had made the call. While she and the stranger sat and awaited their arrival, he dropped his bombshell about Gregg and his role in the Army. The most severe shock to her system was the news that he was missing, not killed. The man fulfilled his duty and stayed until her parents arrived.

  During their conversation, she had attempted to bluff her way through. She tried to state that she knew all along that he was more than a linguistics instructor. However, when he asked her if she had received letters home on colored paper, the dam broke and she began sobbing uncontrollably.

  He explained that many operational units used the different colors as a key to help them remember where they were when the letter was sent. Each represented a country or theatre of operations. He said, “Email could be used from time to time to communicate with loved ones back home when they were actually in a F.O.B (Forward Operating Base). The units couldn’t risk the security of the mission when they were in the field. As a result, colored paper was utilized.”

  Emily managed to clean herself up before her parents arrived and the three of them listened intently as the doctor described the ovarian cancers aggressiveness and the recommended course of action. The team of medical professionals was espousing a complete hysterectomy. She could try chemo, but the odds weren’t good. Her body was not going to allow her to have a child. The cancer would eventually kill her if she didn’t opt for the procedure.