by TJ O'Connor
When I got an “assignment,” like chasing down stolen war treasures or hunting faces on a deck of playing cards, Uncle Sam didn’t want complications. Of course, we’re talking the Middle East. Complications are on the menu under appetizers, entrées, and dessert. Complications are just part of the equation. Complications like trained Afghan troops who become insurgents by night and kill their comrades. Stolen treasures can wind up in the hands of bad guys who sell them for the money to pay the wayward Afghan troops who turn on their comrades. Faces on the playing cards can be found in the most embarrassing, delicate places like an ally’s safe house, and require “special handling.” When these things happen, old Uncle wants to wash his hands of anything “untoward.” Untoward is why they have consultants. We’re one tax form short of being Uncle Sam’s employee and two toes shy of a mercenary.
Potato—potahto.
Unfortunately, Uncle gets upset when one of his illegitimate nephews disappears from the playground without permission. He gets downright nasty. Nasty like you got caught smoking dope with your boss’ daughter … in your boss’ car … after curfew … naked. That’s never happened to me, either. But, I am said nephew, and I was most assuredly in deep trouble. Finding a crime scene littered with the family of the recent suicide bomber in hometown USA was not exactly the way I wanted to contact my boss and mentor, Oscar LaRue, and whisper that I was home and okay. Hopefully, he’d be too busy with his cloak and dagger to visit, and maybe I still had a few days to find Kevin’s killer before Uncle came knocking on my door with handcuffs and a blindfold.
Sure, I’m being melodramatic. I hope I am.
The sunlight was bright and the day blue and breezy. I’d forgotten just how beautiful a Virginia spring could be. Even on this day, my gut churned when Kevin crossed my thoughts and Noor’s face played in my vision.
Noor. I had to help.
I typed her address into my cell phone and climbed into my rental car.
It took me thirty minutes to wander northwest of town and find her place just off the county highway. I bumped along a secondary road until the sexy lady inside my cell phone told me to make my turn in a quarter mile. A few seconds later, the only mailbox I’d seen for a mile appeared. The closer I got to the driveway, the sicker my insides felt. I pulled around Noor’s mailbox and bumped down the long gravel driveway toward her house. My meager breakfast threatened to reappear, and twice I nearly retreated. I checked the map program three different times to ensure I was at the right house.
Really? I needed a map to find her house?
I’d never been there before. I’d never seen photographs or read letters or chatted on the phone about “their place.” Kevin’s life—my brother’s world—was more foreign to me than many Afghan soldiers I’d trained. With them, I knew their homes and what made them tick. Most of the time. Ahead, the two-story, gray-and-white American Foursquare grabbed my lungs and squeezed.
What was I doing? I glanced in the rearview mirror and momentarily hoped the men in black would find me and take me away before I parked.
No such luck.
The driveway was a few hundred feet long, and I needed every foot to quell the rebellion raging between my gut and my brain. As I parked, my stomach twitched like a schoolboy at his first dance.
Noor’s property was secluded a mile from the closest residence. It was an older home surrounded by trees and farm fields, giving it a rustic, country appearance. To the right, east I think, was an old, single-story barn with a small, weatherworn farm tractor parked in front. To the west, a stone’s throw from the house, was a twostory garage with curtained windows and an outside staircase to the second floor. To the side of the house was a fenced-in field that extended several acres beyond. Another post-and-rail fence enclosed two large corrals and four horses.
Kevin was a cowboy?
Suck it up, Hunter. You wouldn’t know. Get over it.
Thinking about Noor and Sam Mallory made me slip my .45 out and tuck it under the front seat of the rental car. It was against every fiber in my body to lose the weapon, but meeting her for only the second time in my life wearing a gun might not get me the warm welcome I hoped for. I wasn’t sure how much Kevin had told her about me, but walking into her home while packing a gun was surely not something she’d take easily. She needed to get to know the kinder, gentler me first. I’m sure there is one hidden somewhere.
“Noor?” I called out, heading onto the front poor. “Noor?”
I knocked and peeked in the large front window. There were no lights on. No movement. No household sounds. I wandered around the side near the barn to a stone and brick patio. There sat an immaculate yard, patio, and sunporch, all creatively designed and furnished with expensive things. Several lawn chairs, a fire pit, and an old gas barbecue grill waited for a weekend party that wouldn’t come for a very long time. The setting belonged in the pages of a country life magazine.
Kevin was doing all right for a copper.
At the sunporch, I peered inside. There was an inside door that looked like it led into the kitchen. The inner door was ajar and I could hear faint sounds inside.
“Noor? It’s Jon, Noor.”
The noises ceased.
“Noor?” It sounded silly, but I called out, “It’s Kevin’s brother.”
I opened the screen door and stepped inside. “Noor?”
In the kitchen, I found a flame on the stove below a pot. A line of ingredients—for homemade spaghetti sauce, I think—sat on the countertop beside an empty, smoking pot. I turned the burner off.
“Noor?”
A faint, almost imperceptible sound—the creak of a chair on hardwood—came from somewhere down the hall ahead of me.
Muscle memory sent my hand behind me, but there was nothing waiting there. My .45 was in the car. I looked around but there were no obvious weapons visible in the kitchen. No knife rack or cast-iron fry pans. Nothing. Too many cabinets and too many drawers made a quick search impractical, so I grabbed the first weapon I found—two giant cans of whole tomatoes.
If my pals in Kabul could see me now.
At the end of the hall, I stopped beneath an archway leading into the living room. It was a comfy room with two overstuffed chairs and a couch facing a massive fieldstone fireplace. The window blinds were drawn and the room darkened.
Noor.
She sat to my left on a wooden straight-backed chair. She faced the far wall to my right. Her hands were folded on her lap. Her face was pale—ashen—and her eyes fixed across the room.
When I eased another step closer, her eyes exploded—wide and afraid—and darted from me to the far wall.
There, barely ten feet away, stood a man. He was holding a gun.
CHAPTER 11
Day 2: May 16, 1620 Hours, Daylight Saving Time
Noor Mallory’s Residence, Frederick County, Virginia
CANNED TOMATOES, ESPECIALLY the 28-ounce size, are good for a lot of things like stews, sauces, and, my favorite, chili. Now, they were for artillery tartare.
I slid left into the living room and hurled one heavy can at the assailant. He reacted as I anticipated—he twisted himself out of the can’s path, swung his left hand up to protect his face, and fired his pistol at the spot where I’d been. His defensive reaction put him off-balance and the shot went wide into the wall a foot from me. Before he could recover, I spun around like a baseball pitcher catching a runner off first base. At the apogee of my turn, I hurled the second tomato can. It slammed him in the right eye, and he staggered backward against the fireplace.
I was on him before he recovered. My groin kick connected solidly.
Rule two of mortal combat—fair play isn’t required.
As my kick landed, I grabbed his gun hand, slammed it backward against the fireplace stones, and twisted. The gun fell. I drove a knee into his midsection. He faltered to keep his balance. Still holding his gun hand, my right elbow cracked into his temple. Air exploded from him and his eyes rolled back.
; He dropped facedown on the hearth.
“Jon!” Noor cried.
“Stay back.” I retreated a step and grabbed his gun. “Are you all right?”
A pause; then, “Yes, he did not touch me.”
“What’d he want?”
“I do not know. I came home and found him searching my house. He asked nothing. He did not seem to know what to do with me. He never spoke to me.”
Lucky. “Where’s Sam?”
She walked across the hardwood and opened the window blinds. “He left on his motorcycle just before this man came. I do not know where he went. He never tells me.”
Double lucky. I knelt down on one knee beside the assailant and rolled him onto his side. He was young, pale-faced, and bald. His features were hard and strong—burly and robust. He was cleanshaven and had no distinguishing marks—no tattoos or scars or eyepatches. Okay, eyepatches would make him a pirate, but there wasn’t anything that stood out about him. He wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a black t-shirt beneath an old, dark-green military field jacket.
“Who is this man?” Noor asked. “Why is he in my house?”
I reached for his wallet. “I’ll ask him. If he’s a good boy, he might be able to walk to the police car later.”
“I will call Dave.”
Oh sure, call Dave. “Wait a few minutes, Noor. He might talk to me faster than them.”
“But …”
I looked back at her. “Trust me.”
“Otyebis.” The assailant’s left hand slashed up. He had a knife from nowhere that sliced across my shoulder. His strike surprised me, and he followed with a kick to my knee. His boot heel knocked my leg from beneath me, and I teetered off-balance. He rolled away and landed a hard, head-rocking heel into my jaw before I hit the hardwood. He was on his feet and out the door before my eyes refocused.
Stunned at first, I checked my arm and found only torn jacket fabric and a faint cut beneath—no more than a scratch—across my shoulder.
I went after him.
At the kitchen door, I saw him disappear behind the barn. I followed with his 9-millimeter pistol out and ready. At the barn’s corner, I scanned the woods as the roar of a distant motorcycle told me I was too late.
The chase was over before it started.
It had been pure luck to take him in the first place. He could have easily killed Noor and then me, had it not been for an old adage I’d learned on my first tour in Iraq—the last one to move dies. When ambushed, you assault. Surprise often wins the battle.
Noor’s living room had been the ambush. I assaulted. Had I been armed, he’d be dead now. He survived my artillery barrage of whole tomatoes. Unfortunately, he’d also used an old tactic that I’d learned in the Army—play possum until the enemy is off guard. Then counterattack. I screwed up.
Rubbing the slice on my jacket sleeve, I knew I was lucky to be alive. A few inches to the left and he would have taken my head off. Still, I’d learned something very important.
“Otyebis” was slang and my knowledge of idioms was rusty, but I was sure the man had told me to fuck off—in Russian.
CHAPTER 12
Day 2: May 16, 1650 Hours, Daylight Saving Time
Old Town, Winchester, Virginia
“FOLLOW,” ORDERED LARUE, as he sat back and sipped a cup of tea. “Are we prepared to intercept?”
Shepard tapped the keyboard that sat atop the table in front of him. The table was a combination command station and dinner table. It was littered with an empty lunch tray, a still-steaming pot of Earl Grey tea, and a carafe of coffee. Across the room, the large 52-inch TV screen tracked the small image of a lone man on a motorcycle driving through the country. The bike weaved around a farm tractor on the dusty county road and accelerated around a turn. A moment later, the words “Tracking” flashed on the screen and a bull’s-eye encircled the motorcycle as it made its way southeast toward Winchester. Across the bottom of the screen, like a late-breaking news story, the motorcycle’s position in satellite GPS longitudes and latitudes appeared, then translated into road names, compass bearings, and distance from the command center.
The command center was LaRue’s three-room suite at the George Washington hotel in downtown Winchester. It came complete with room service, fresh linens, and state-of-the-art surveillance.
LaRue rarely traveled second class.
“Yes, sir,” Shepard said. “A team is standing by.”
“Execute.”
The unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, banked sharply and leveled above the motorcycle some one thousand feet overhead. Unlike the larger, sophisticated military or intelligence drones used in Afghanistan and Syria, this UAV was only four feet in diameter—barely larger than a home enthusiast’s radio-controlled replica. Shepard had nicknamed the device “Tweety.” Now Tweety banked left to maintain its position above and slightly behind the motorcycle that had just escaped Noor Mallory’s farm.
Shepard spoke quietly into a headset to two men eating lunch at a roadside convenience store three miles ahead. An instant later, Tweety’s feed was relayed to their cell phones.
“Ready, sir.”
“How long has our boy been in the area, Shepard?”
Shepard grinned. “Less than twenty-four hours, sir.”
“My, my.” LaRue removed his eyeglasses for a cleaning. “He does tend to stir things up rather quickly.”
“You’re surprised, sir?”
“Oh, no.” LaRue slid his eyeglasses back on and reached for his Earl Grey. “If it were not so, then I would be surprised.”
CHAPTER 13
Day 2: May 16, 1700 Hours, Daylight Saving Time
Noor Mallory’s Residence, Frederick County, Virginia
“I CALLED DAVE,” Noor said, nervously pacing the kitchen. “He cannot make it, so they are sending someone else. There has been a terrorist attack in Fair Oaks. It’s awful.”
“Yes, I, ah … heard.” Should I tell her? “Did Dave say anything about it?”
“I did not speak with him. Everyone on the task force is very busy.”
“Where’s your television?”
She gestured above the refrigerator to a small television and picked up a small remote. She switched the TV on.
Every channel had the story. Every channel was the same. Fire trucks, police, FBI, and dozens of ambulances surrounded the shopping mall I’d been at just hours before. Smoke and flames billowed out the top of the four-story structure. Chaos consumed the picture. Bodies and injured consumed the reporters. Fear consumed the audience. On the bottom of the screen, the ticker commented on various sources, but the last one I caught sent a chill—“President calls for calm. Puts nation on highest state of alert since 9/11. Military at the ready.”
Military at the ready meant the Joint Chiefs were reviewing one of a hundred or more special operations plans put together after 9/11 for just this contingency. All around the world the DefCon—Defense Condition—was prepared to nudge upward to DefCon 3—increased readiness. One step closer to war. Special Operations units supporting the Middle East would be packing up and readying to board transports to the region. Those in the region—my brethren—would be primed and ready to fire at whatever targets the Joint Chiefs dictated. Everyone would be on pins and needles. Someone’s hand would be on the trigger—waiting on the President’s orders. This President was not known for his patience in these matters. All he needed was the right target and—Boom—there we go again.
“This could get ugly,” I said to Noor. “Fast.”
Noor’s hands went to her face. “I cannot believe this. Not here. Not again.”
“Believe it, Noor.” Should I tell her what I’d witnessed? “We should talk.”
“Talk? Yes, we should.” She flipped off the television. “And you, Jon Mallory, what kind of business consultant are you?”
Huh? “What do you mean?”
“No, no, thank you for saving me.” She came to me and wrapped her arms around me for a brief embrace. She lingered for a
moment—perhaps a moment too long—before retreating across the room. “I did not know business consultants could fight as you do.”
What exactly had Kevin told her about me? Business consultant? Are you kidding me?
I smiled and diverted her attention. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Frightened but fine.”
“That guy never said a word to you?” I flexed my arm a few times and massaged my knee where the assailant kicked me. “What was he doing when you walked in?”
“He said nothing. He was searching Kevin’s den. He turned, pulled his gun, and forced me into the living room. He spoke on his cell phone, but I could not hear. He spoke very low. His words were foreign and I could not say what language. I was very frightened. Then we sat like we were waiting for something or someone.”
“You’ve never seen him before?”
She shook her head. “No, but he is a dangerous man. Even when we heard you come in the house, he was relaxed. It was as if he knew everything that was about to happen. I remember men such as he.”
“Men like him?”
“In Sãri. Where I was a young girl.” She looked away. “He was evil. He had done evil many times before.”
She was right. He wasn’t startled when I came in. He could have easily shot me the moment I appeared in the living room archway. Instead, he just waited, watched me. Waited for what? Reinforcements?
“We got lucky, Noor.”
“Yes, of course.”
“He … didn’t find what he came for. Why else would he make a phone call after grabbing you?”
“Oh, I understand. He was reporting to someone?”
“Yes.” I stood and raised the assailant’s 9-millimeter. “I better take a look around the house. Just to be sure.”
She stood. “I do not wish to be alone.”