by AJ Tata
Matt steadied his aim, the light dancing in tight circles. He slowly exhaled and then held his breath as his finger began to squeeze against the hair trigger.
He saw Ballantine’s head drop quickly and then snap back up, looking directly down the beam of Matt’s aiming light. Matt’s shot kicked the weapon back into his shoulder. The brief flash of flame emitting from the muzzle momentarily blanked out his field of view, causing him to lose sight of Ballantine.
Once his goggles came back into focus, he could see a figure slumped over on the ground, slowly inching into the wood line. Matt had hit him but had unfortunately not killed him. He trained the light on the crawling body again, which was moving more quickly toward the trees.
Matt’s second shot struck Ballantine in the leg just before he disappeared into the trees. Determining that he had little time to waste, Matt pulled himself up onto the dock and began moving quickly to the first cabin. He kept his carbine trained on the scrub area where his prey had disappeared while he sprinted to the side of the first cabin, gun up, elbow out, sighting along the infrared laser through the green kaleidoscope of his goggles, legs pumping, lungs working at max capacity, adrenaline cycling through his body like raging rivers.
Matt Garrett. Back in the game. Alone.
In search of his brother.
CHAPTER 31
Leaning against the wood frame, he caught his breath. Acting purely on instinct, he moved toward the back of the house, realizing this could expose him briefly to Ballantine.
Not knowing if anyone was guarding the cabin, Matt felt it would be best to try to enter from the top floor. He surveyed the deck, which had stairs leading up to the second floor balcony. Moving swiftly and quietly, he ascended the stairs and crouched low.
Reaching up with his free hand, Matt slid open the heavy glass door. He felt the warmth of the cabin brush against his face. He stayed low to avoid reflexive fire from anyone who might not welcome his entrance.
He was in. A weak light shone below the loft so that he could see on his level an unmade bed, a chair, and a television. There were a few clothes strewn about the dusty hardwood floors.
Matt crouched low in the corner behind the door and rested. He could hear his heart racing and thought it might actually explode. Crashing thoughts, extreme physical activity, and danger all combined to release adrenaline and lactic acid into his body, pushing his heart to its limit. As he rested, he could hear muted voices from the first floor. They became clear as he caught his breath.
“So where is it?” Matt heard a female voice ask.
“Where is what?”
The second voice was a man’s. And it was a familiar one. Matt leaned his head closer to the crack in the door so that he could hear more clearly.
“The backpack. Ballantine’s backpack. You stole it from him, perhaps as a war trophy?” It was the female voice again.
Ballantine. War trophy. These were all clues and indicators to something, yet they were pinging off his wall of denial, his massive defenses, like tennis balls off a tank.
“Why is Ballantine concerned about a stupid backpack?” the man said.
Matt’s mind was reeling. The voice, the inflection, the tone were all so familiar. Images of Zachary’s face began swirling through his mind, breaking his concentration.
“You didn’t find the tape?” the woman asked.
“What tape?”
“Never mind. You know he told me he saw you when you were watching them in the prisoner of war interrogation room. The colonel came out and talked to you,” she said.
“Yeah, who was that guy, anyway?”
“The colonel?”
“Yeah, him.”
“Someone I think you should know very well, actually,” she said.
“Really? I can’t quite recall him.”
Matt stood slowly, moving toward the door, and accidentally kicked a heavy brass door stop.
“Is that you, Jacques?” the woman called.
Matt quickly repositioned to the entertainment center, which sat next to the stairway leading up to the loft. From that position, he could ambush someone moving upstairs unaware.
“Jacques?”
There was silence, then the man’s voice again.
“Might be Special Forces coming to rescue me. Then again, it might be the wind. One in the same, really.”
Now it was clear. Though the male voice was speaking in a different room on a different floor of a house in which Matt had never been, it was unmistakably his brother’s voice. He stared open-eyed at the sliding glass door through which he had just entered, trying to hold back a wave of emotions. Was it really Zachary, or was he just hearing what he wanted to hear?
A movement reflected in the glass door caught his eye and brought his mind circling quickly back to reality. He gripped his M4, waiting as he watched a woman’s reflection ascend the final stair. She took two steps into the center of the room, clearly focused for the moment on the fact that the sliding glass door was ajar by about three feet.
Matt studied the woman in the dim light. She had sharp, stunning features. Her eyes were wide, cat-like ovals. She was a dark-skinned woman, perhaps African or from the Indies. She moved with the grace of a mountain lion, taking another step toward the door, then pausing.
“Jacques?”
Matt sprang forward from his hideout, catching the woman as she brandished a pistol. He tackled her before she could aim the pistol at him, but that didn’t prevent her from pulling the trigger. The shot flew wide, into the center of the television screen, shattering glass all over the room.
Matt raised his weapon and smashed it into the skull of the woman. She went immediately limp in his arms, a slight gasp escaping from her mouth. He grabbed the pistol from her hand, stuffing it in his trousers as he quickly moved toward the stairway.
He scrambled down the stairs, trying to keep his body moving ahead of the myriad thoughts that threatened to crash down upon him like boulders blocking a mountain pass. Keep going, Matt. Keep going.
At the bottom of the wooden steps, he spun to his left, keeping the front door to his right. The downstairs was as bare as the upstairs. In the distant corner, across the dingy throw rug and dusty, gray wooden floorboards, Matt saw a darkened figure, huddled and bound in a wooden chair. A shadow cut across the figure’s body, making it difficult to truly determine who was in the chair. But his instincts began to clatter as loudly as a fire truck speeding down the highway to an apartment-building blaze. His slow, careful walk developed into a gait. The desire to see who the man he prayed was his brother collided with the realization that he had a very small window of opportunity to get back to the drop zone and safety.
Approaching the bound man from behind, Matt grabbed the back of the chair and spun it around until he was staring into the wide eyes of his brother.
No question. It was Zach.
Matt pulled a small knife from his belt and cut through the ropes and plastic zip-ties, trying to stay ahead of those thoughts. Those emotions he had been bottling up for months could burst free at any moment.
For a brief moment, Zachary Garrett was speechless, looking into the focused eyes of his brother. But it was unmistakable. He recognized his younger brother’s smattering of fading freckles and sea-green eyes.
“Yes, Zachary. It’s me, Matt,” he said, quickly removing the rope from Zachary’s hands and ankles.
His brother stuttered a moment, then said, “I think I remember you.”
Matt paused, understanding what Zachary was saying. “Come on, we need to move out. Here, I’m sure you remember how to use this,” he said, handing him the woman’s pistol.
Zachary looked at him with a thin smile and said, “Naturally.” That was the signature Zachary Garrett smile and comment, which almost caused Matt to lose it. But the bullet from Ballantine’s gun that came crashing through the rear window and smacked directly into Zachary’s back got his attention focused again. His brother slumped forward into Matt’s arms, dr
opping the pistol on the floor. Matt quickly returned fire through the window.
A rocket-propelled grenade blasted through the window, knocking Matt fifteen feet toward the front door. Through the smoke and haze, he could see his older brother lying on the floor, blood oozing from his back. And he was sliding.
Away.
Sliding backward, as if pulled, Zachary looked at Matt like a wounded deer being hauled away from his den by a hunter, eyes wide and doubting. Matt was trying to move, pushing his arms to grab a weapon; but nothing was working; nothing was happening.
He could hear more firing from outside the cottage toward the wood line.
“Zachary!”
“Matt,” came Zachary’s weakening voice. Matt watched as his brother slid through the enveloping smoke from the fire that was beginning to build. In an instant, Zachary’s face had vanished, and all Matt could see was smoke.
Through the background noise of machine-gun fire, he heard the words, “The colonel . . . get the colonel.” Straining against the concussion that the rocket-propelled grenade had caused, Matt finally regained motor skills, thinking he had wasted a huge amount of time. It may only have been a minute or two, but it was too much. As he raced forward into the smoke and fire, he realized Zachary was gone.
Standing in the burning cottage, he stared out of the shattered window toward the lake and woods. He could see a limping figure carrying a body disappearing into the woods. Matt quickly found his weapon, the metal hot to his touch. He raced and leapt through the open window and tumbled to the ground as a hail of bullets chipped away the deck directly above him.
He performed a combat roll into the open and brought his carbine up, but there were no targets. The firing had ceased. He slowly elevated and began moving toward a shrub line to the west of Ballantine’s cottage.
More machine-gun fire shredded the hedge row directly above him, scattering branches and leaves over him as if he were in a blender. Again he rolled away from the concealment and found the tree line. He flipped down his night-vision goggles and could see the faint outline of two moving figures in the distance, about four hundred meters away.
A stupid quarter mile was between him and his brother. Another burst of energy shot through Matt as he began racing through the woods, leaping stumps like a running back through a defensive line.
After sprinting a considerable distance, he found himself galloping down a hill sufficiently steep to make him decide to stop and gain control. He scanned with his goggles a full three hundred and sixty degrees, picking up no movement.
Walking slowly forward, M4 in hand, he briefly flashed back to the Philippines, moments before he had been severely wounded. He remembered:
Jack Sturgeon and Johnny Barefoot had been laying down a suppressive base of fire against nearly a hundred Japanese soldiers who were charging their positions. It was a math problem. They had three weapons with about thirty rounds of ammunition per weapon. The enemy had a hundred weapons with probably significantly more ammunition per weapon. Even if they hit them all, there would still be about ten enemy survivors.
And that’s about what happened, Matt recalled.
The remaining few had broken through when he was down to only a few rounds of ammunition. An enemy soldier had approached him from the rear, causing him to spin as the man’s bayonet moved toward him. It had thrust into his stomach, and the soldier pulled the trigger, blowing a hole out his back. It was only later that he learned Zachary and his infantry company had arrived in the nick of time to ward off the remaining terrorists and get Matt onto a medical evacuation helicopter.
His memory was interrupted by the sound of a small engine. For a moment, he had the curious notion that he was listening to a lawnmower or even a model airplane.
Ballantine’s Sherpa.
Matt sprinted in the direction of the airplane, tripping and stumbling down the hill until he was standing knee-deep in a creek. To his rear, the creek opened to the lake. To his front it widened into the rocky shore, Ballantine’s landing strip. The crescent moon hung in the southern sky like a misplaced ornament above the opening in the tall fir trees.
The sound of the airplane grew in intensity. With his back to the lake, he saw the Sherpa bouncing along the small river rocks, lifting ever so slightly into the air, and then finally gaining altitude as it buzzed directly over his head.
Matt turned and watched the airplane fly across Lake Moncrief into the night. The airplane looked different, though. It seemed darker, and the wingspan looked like bat wings.
With a certainty he had not felt in a long time, he knew that his brother was on that airplane. With that knowledge, he cemented his conviction to find a way get him back.
Alive.
PART 3:
Blowback
Chapter 32
Fort Sherman, Panama
Frank Lantini was kicked back in an old metal chair that had two legs digging into the plywood floor and two legs angled up in the air. His AK-47 rested on his thighs. He sat in the corner of the cinderblock hut watching enemies of the United States plan and debate the next moves of what they were calling Phase Two.
He had grown a full beard that grayed toward the tips of the uneven strands of hair and stood in contrast to the dark brown hair on his head, now longer than when he had been CIA director last year. He wore old olive-colored pants, a black T-shirt, and a tan fishing vest in which he carried ammo. He passed as a simple, mute guard.
Lantini caught Tae il Sung’s eyes ogling his beautiful assistant, Sue Kim. Sung was the North Korean leader of the Central Committee and knew Lantini as “Ronnie Wood.” He had an understanding with Sung. He provided information and access where possible, which at times was substantial, in addition to strategic guidance.
As Lantini watched Sung stand to address the group that included representatives of Russia, Colombia, Serbia, Angola, Cuba, China, Iraq, and North Korea, he reflected on his path to this particular spot.
He recalled watching Matt Garrett lying in the snow with his team watching over a small village in Pakistan. Then Garrett linked them into his sniper scope via a USB-port uplink, and they were all staring down the length of the scope, looking through the interrupted cross hairs at al Qaeda senior leadership.
Lantini knew that his personal involvement in the Rolling Stones conspiracy last year was witting, yet forced. His guilt over guiding in the JDAM to Garrett’s position and denying the kill chain had racked him. Lantini viewed himself as a patriot, yet his career aspirations had left him no options, he believed.
So last year, his life in disarray, he had fled when he heard that Matt Garrett had returned alive from the Philippines. If anyone knew how to beat the system, it was the director of the CIA. He had the passports and credit cards and identity-altering materials in a go-bag. Last May as the Shimpu was diverted from Los Angeles harbor with its rogue nuclear weapon, he used that focus as a magician uses misdirection. Lantini secreted himself in his 40-foot Chris Craft Roamer and used the two 200-gallon fuel tanks and twin Volvo IPS 500 engines to power along the Intracoastal Waterway down the East Coast. From Florida, he popped into the Caribbean Sea, all the while changing his appearance.
And thinking.
Like Fox and Diamond had done to Stone, the real Ronnie Wood had done to him. Wood maintained an E*TRADE account in Lantini’s name with his social security number, and his home address that showed 10,000 shares of AIG short trades in the first week of September 2001. The trades were covered in January of 2002. He suspected that the money generated by the faux account had either been piped into the Philippine deal last year, or pocketed by the man who had held the weapon to his head as he called in the kill-chain denial to Garrett. After all, government employees, particularly military officers, didn’t make much in the way of salary, and the frame job would have been entirely believable, not to mention impossible for him to refute.
And then he was given three options: Accept the role as Ronnie Wood, endure the embarrassment and prison sen
tence from the short trades, or die. He chose the path of least resistance and had remained a skeptic through their deliberations. Did the other Rolling Stones know he was a coerced participant? He didn’t know. What he did know was that the real Ronnie Wood was a heartless megalomaniac.
But he could do something about it now. Last summer as he cruised south, he passed to the north of the main island of Puerto Rico, skirted the east side in the channel formed by the island of Culebra, and then cruised to the east of Vieques Island, which at one point had been a Navy bombing range.
And was sparsely inhabited.
He had circled the twenty-mile-long island once and then settled on anchoring in Sun Bay, just off shore from the coastal town of Esperanza. Vieques had been his target all along, it was just a matter of where he would anchor. The south side gave him a quick escape route into the open waters of the Caribbean, relative shelter from most hurricanes, and, most importantly, open portal access to the radar station managed by the Joint Interagency Task Force for Counter Drug Operations.
The satellite dishes on his boat weren’t simply piping in HBO and XM Radio; rather, he had taken the effort to have a private contractor for the CIA build a state-of-the-art communications suite into his bridge. From this platform, he had been able to conduct sufficient eavesdropping operations to piece together the communications traffic of the Central Committee, determine their plan, and infiltrate the dilapidated Fort Sherman prior to their arrival.
The pressures inside the beltway were enormous for those who cared about career advancement, legacy, and such. A Navy admiral, Lantini remembered, had shot himself when a reporter was about to break a story that he had worn a medal that he had allegedly not earned. Lantini knew he was not a saint, nor was he a martyr. He was a survivor, at all costs.