The Secret Corps

by Peter Telep

  “No, why?”

  Johnny tasted the lie but was compelled to continue. “We were going through the bank records, just accounting for everything.”

  “Is there money missing?”

  “No, but I did see a few big checks.”

  “Oh, that was probably tuition, plus they always gave us some extra food money and some fun money for clothes.”

  “Ah, gotcha.”

  “You want to go over to your room?”

  She nodded. He took her over there, and she sat down on the bed and looked around. “We have to sell this place. We can’t come back here anymore.”

  “We’ll talk about that. You’ll make a good decision.”

  “I hope so.”

  His phone rang. “Excuse me.” He stepped onto the back porch, staring off toward the darkening edge of the forest. “Big Pat, thanks for getting back.”

  “Johnny, I have to tell you, hearing some of the things you called me on that voice mail made me laugh real hard.”

  Johnny chuckled. “Call ‘em like I see ‘em. So how are you?”

  “Doing well. I hope you got my sympathy card.”

  “I did. I appreciate it.”

  “Well, you’re lucky you caught me. I’m working some night ops. It’s like zero one here. They got me subsurface a lot these days.”

  Pat Rugg had left behind his old digs in Florida to take a job with the Saudi Aramco oil company. He worked for the Tanjib Marine Ops Division as a diver surveying underwater installations, ships' bottoms, drilling rigs, and platforms. He identified and sometimes even made the necessary repairs to those craft and installations. He had never married and had sworn to live the playboy’s life until he could no longer afford Viagra or until his body fell apart, whichever came first. The job with Saudi Aramco had already lasted about five years and was a far cry from some of the other work he had been doing, everything from plumbing to home construction to going out to Hollywood to try his hand at acting. He was offered a small part in a disaster film, playing a bum with a pet dog who is nearly killed when twisters carrying demonically possessed zoo animals ravage a small town. Pat passed on the role, holding out for something better because he had artistic integrity. He landed a Burger King commercial, then abandoned his dreams of Oscar-winning glory.

  “So what’s going on?” Pat asked.

  “I was going to text you this, but if you can take a note...”

  “At my desk now. What do you got, partner?”

  “Guy’s name is Dr. Ramzi Shammas.” Johnny paused to spell it for Pat. “He’s an engineering professor. He’s from Alfaisal University in Riyadh. He came over here to UNC as a visiting professor for one year. He just left this past semester. There’s a picture of him on his school’s website.”

  “Hang on, I’ll pull it up now. So is this guy a potential client? You want the whole deal on this guy or what?”

  “He’s not a client, but yeah, whatever you can get.”

  “You remember Billy Brandt? He hit that compound with us in Fallujah.”

  “Hell, yeah, I do. Crack shot. Excellent operator. I lost touch with him.”

  “Because he’s working with The Agency in Riyadh. I link up with him for lunch every now and again.”

  “So you’re thinking we can lean on him. That’s outstanding. But look, for personal reasons I don’t want red star clusters going off, if you know what I mean.”

  “I hear you. We’ll take care of it quietly. I’ll have Billy do his thing. Matter of fact, I’ve already had him do a workup on some of my bosses, and these guys are pieces of work, let me tell you.”

  “Right on. Let’s put Billy on this guy.”

  “Hey, dude, it’s done. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”

  “I didn’t get you the job, Pat. You earned it.”

  “If you say so. They don’t usually hire apes.”

  Johnny laughed. “The next time you come home, you let me know.”

  “Hell, yeah. A party at Johnny Johansen’s house is one you don’t miss.”

  “Well, I have to agree.”

  “So yeah, I’ll call you when I got something on this. You be careful, all right?”

  “Always.”

  “Take care, Johnny.”

  That was a good call; it lifted Johnny’s spirits. He remained there for another minute, checking his email, then Elina joined him on the porch. “Who was that?”

  “Big Pat.”

  “You thank him for his card?”

  “I did.”

  She took a deep breath. “I think the girls have had enough.”

  “You think this was good? Or was it a big mistake?”

  “I’m not really sure.”

  “I think it was good. If they avoid it too much, their minds will start working, and then they go crazy.”

  “It’s harder for them, Johnny. They’re so young.”

  Kate and Isabelle joined them. “Maybe we can tear down the house,” said Kate.

  “Yeah,” said Isabelle. “Then we can build something really cool.”

  “Slow down there,” Johnny said. “You know, we got some of that Moose Tracks ice cream at home?”

  “That sounds like a plan,” said Kate.

  “Maybe it’ll make my stomach feel better,” added Isabelle.

  * * *

  Elina fell asleep on the couch at about 2230. Johnny’s nieces were watching a movie, and so he slipped downstairs into the man cave, took the dogs out for a walk, then returned and grabbed one of his range bags. He filled the bag with what he needed, and then he quietly exited the back door. Wincing over the grumble of his truck’s engine, he pulled out.

  Ten minutes later, he eased into the parking lot of the CVS Pharmacy, taking his truck around the back of the building and rolling into the last spot. He did a brief equipment check, then slipped off into the wooded area between the pharmacy and the back of East Coast Storage.

  The company’s perimeter fence lay about five hundred yards away, and he approached at a slow and deliberate pace, mindful of every dip in the path, fallen log, and low-hanging branch threatening to scrape his face. The Steiners hanging from their strap around his neck tugged harder as he came up a small mound and crossed a new mat of pine needles. The air grew noticeably colder, his breath coming thicker, his anticipation sending a shudder across his back.

  He neared the fence, where brilliant halogen lights mounted atop tall poles illuminated the entire south side of the facility. Mounted to those same poles were the cameras and motion-sensor equipment. Johnny crouched behind a broad pine and tugged out the Steiners. He zoomed in on the Hess Express gas station across the street. It was 2313. He would have to time it perfectly. He surveyed the clerk behind the counter, a heavyset kid in his twenties with a thick beard and curly hair. The kid’s gaze did not stray far from the counter, or from his phone, or from the front door. Most of the folks at the pumps Johnny pegged for retail clerks en route home from late shifts on a Friday night. A few college-aged kids were stopping off to pick up their cheap beer. The business would come in waves.

  Johnny lowered the binoculars and rubbed the corners of his eyes. Now this, this right here, was reconnaissance. Toward the end of his career, he had grown frustrated by the changes imposed upon his beloved Recon Marines. They had gone from being the eyes and ears of their commanders to just an infantry platoon with a jump and dive badge. They had succumbed to the “action guy mentality,” engaging in many more direct action operations than they should have. They were, at their heart, supposed to be intelligence gatherers, not door kickers sent in to clear and sweep cities on operations still referred to as “reconnaissance” when they were anything but. Infantry commanders did not know how to use them effectively or found it too difficult to plan and coordinate their missions; consequently they became straight up shooters, sometimes to the benefit of commanders competing with peers who had infantry battalions. The way to the top was having a maneuver element on the ground that did something a
bit more glorious than reconnaissance. Just after leaving the Corps, Johnny had written a multi-page rant on the subject, and while he only shared it with a few friends, everyone who read it nodded and said, “This is everything that’s wrong with the community, and you should have stayed in to fix it.” Johnny would laugh and say, “Sorry son, I love the recon community, but that’s one battle where only the stars and bars have a say.” Back then, he would not have imagined himself squatting beneath a pine tree, reconnoitering a Hess gas station and a storage facility on a solo mission that he had planned and executed himself.

  Earlier in the evening he had brought up Google Earth on his laptop, zooming in on the area above the facility, deciding his best avenue of approach. Johnny had assumed the gate codes were no longer good, and he had confirmed that fact by sending in Norm earlier in the day. The old man had carefully plugged in the numbers to the keypad. Access denied. That account, Johnny figured, had been closed, and the chances of finding more bricks of cocaine were not good. In fact, if there had been a shipment stored there, it had been moved just before or immediately after his brother had been killed. Nevertheless, he had to check it out.

  Johnny pulled on his balaclava, concealing all but his eyes. He rose, then jogged along the tree line, breaking free near the fence. He picked up his pace along the east side, and then he dropped onto his belly near the front of the facility. He fished out his binoculars. The gas station’s pumps were empty, and the clerk stood near the coffee machines like Bigfoot wielding a bottle of Windex and a wad of paper towels. With that, Johnny stowed the binoculars beneath his jacket and sprang to his feet. He raced around to the six foot tall wrought iron fence and scaled it. With a groan, he hit the ground on the other side, the impact reverberating into his knees the way it would after a HAHO—a High Altitude, High Opening parachute jump. He recalled several in the high mountain desert, where due to the altitude of the landing zones, he would strike the ground with a nearly bone crunching force.

  He hustled down the row of storage units, knowing exactly where he was going. He rounded a corner, then found 31B on his left. No lock on the rolling metal door.

  With gloved hands he reached down and dragged up the door until he could duck under it. He used his smartphone’s flashlight to reveal an empty unit, with only a few splinters from shipping pallets littering the floor. If only he had the luxury of a forensics team that could do a thorough examination of the unit itself.

  Moreover, surveillance footage might show who unloaded and loaded the cocaine; however, getting his hands on that footage without alerting the police was impossible. Instead of storing recorded data onsite, most companies had their images uploaded to a DriveHQ FTP server (or something similar) in real-time. Even if an intruder destroyed a security camera, he could not destroy the recorded data, which had been sent over wifi and stored on the web. Johnny would need a serious computer hacker to obtain a copy of that footage, which, given the camera angles and distances, might not disclose very much.

  He paced around the unit, opening his thoughts to some other course of action that might present itself (other than getting the hell out of there). He was no covert operator with the country’s full intelligence apparatus at his disposal. He was no “One Man National Asset,” gamboling around like a super spy with a super model on his arm. He was just a good ole boy from North Carolina.

  However, he had determination in spades. And like the old man said, it was never the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I knew this lance corporal who used to kiss a quarter and slide it into his left breast pocket. He said it was to pay the ferry boat driver to take him across the river after he died. He said it was good luck. He got shot in the neck. Never had a chance. He didn’t need a good luck charm. All he needed was his fellow Marines.”

  —Johnny Johansen (FBI interview, 23 December)

  The trail had gone ice cold at the storage facility. Johnny stayed up until 0200, trying to learn more about Randall LaPorte and Dr. Ramzi Shammas. While they said you could discover a lot about people through simple internet searches, Johnny found little more about LaPorte. His old Twitter posts were innocuous ramblings about school and work, along with a few remarks on his relationships with girls. If he was a member of other social media websites, he had joined under fictitious user names.

  A few academic articles about civil engineering and bridge-building operations that Shammas had written or co-written turned up as .pdf files, but otherwise, he too, had a very limited online presence. Johnny did a search of the Muslim Student Association at UNC Wilmington, where he found photographs of the club’s leadership, including a familiar name, that of the club’s vice-president: Abdul Azim Mohammad. He was Daniel’s student and had won the engineering contest. LaPorte was not listed among the membership, nor was Shammas mentioned as a faculty sponsor or anything else. Exhausted and frustrated, Johnny went up to bed, where he found Elina awake.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “You need to tell me when you’re going somewhere.”

  “New rule?”

  “Now it is.”

  “Wow, roger.”

  “Don’t roger me, Johnny.”

  “Look, I just went over to the gas station to fill up the truck. Then I was downstairs on the computer.”

  “You can understand why I’m worried?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Well, look, the attorney was nice enough to meet us on a Saturday, so now I can finally get some sleep. Another big day, tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” Johnny stripped down to his skivvies, went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, then crawled back into bed. Within minutes, he was asleep.

  The nightmare was different this time. Sergeant Oliver was not on the stairs, about to leap on the grenade, Willie was. “Hey, Johnny. You know we’d follow you anywhere, right? Even if we thought you were wrong, like that night in Germany, when we got drunk and the MPs were chasing us through the snow? We ran through that kebab stand and all those backyards. We must’ve hiked ten miles back to the base and jumped the wire. Half the time you were going the wrong way, and I knew it, but I still had your back, you remember that?”

  Johnny whirled as the grenade went off... and he shuddered awake.

  * * *

  Willie took a deep breath. The thousand milligrams of Naproxen anti-inflammatory medicine had kicked in, and his joints felt loose and ready to go. Chalk up the need for meds to all those years of running, jumping, shooting, and falling down into irrigation ditches in the Marine Corps. Alas, he was no longer twenty, but now he had age, treachery, and prescription medication on his side.

  The range officer lifted his voice: “The shooter is Willie Parente. On deck is Paul Kowalski. In the hole is Mitchell Deaver. Does the shooter have any questions?”

  “No,” Willie answered. His Glock 34 was tucked into his G-code holster. The 9mm pistol featured a seventeen round magazine, but Willie had added one of Dawson’s magazine extensions, giving him twenty-two rounds in the mag and one in the chamber. His hands were held high, palms out. He had already walked the entire pistol course and could visualize it in his head. He would be “unconsciously competent” with no pauses as he ran between each array of targets, and if his weapon malfunctioned, he would handle the issue without emotion or thought. It was all muscle memory and timing.

  “Make ready,” said the range officer.

  Willie double checked his boots. He stood squarely behind the long, thin pieces of wood painted red that marked the fault lines on the grass. “Ready,” Willie said.

  “The shooter is ready. Stand by.”

  Clipped to the range officer’s waist was a blue Pro Shot timer that would record Willie’s number of shots, his splits, and his overall time on the course. While the device did this, the range officer would focus his attention on safety, ensuring that Willie obeyed the 180 degree rule of not swinging his weapon back toward them, that he kept his trigger fing
er safe when moving between groups of targets, and that he remained within the firing zone and did not have any negligent discharges. At the same time, another man, the score keeper, would track Willie’s shots to see if he missed or failed to shoot a target.

  The timer beeped.

  Willie spun around and leveled his pistol on the first of four steel targets, standing at a range of fifteen yards. These were white, circular plates mounted on poles and designed to fall back forty-five degrees when struck. To Willie’s immediate right and left were barriers constructed of PVC piping and blue tarp material. The barriers were held up by rebar hammered into the ground, and they formed an elaborate maze through which Willie would run and shoot.

  His first round toppled the target, and with the pinging steel echoing away, he fired at the others, boom, boom, boom. Even as the last target fell, he was already on the move, racing along the blue barriers, making a sharp left turn, then pausing to sight the first of five paper targets ten yards away. With his heart thundering in his chest, he released a double-tap on target #1, then he took on the rest, firing from left to right. Only his two best hits would be recorded, so he could take extra shots if he chose, although the added time would count against him. There was a trade off between accuracy and time, and that gauge needed to be adjusted on each stage of the competition. Some stages required more speed, others more accuracy. Willie felt exceedingly confident on a pistol-only stage and would sweep through this one, driving nails like a banshee.

  He had started the course with twenty-two rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber. He had fired fourteen thus far. He counted his rounds because there were sixteen targets, and he would need thirty or more rounds to complete the stage. At some point he would need to reload, and he had carefully planned that moment. He would not run his pistol until empty and allow the slide to lock back. Dropping a magazine and then having to rack the slide wasted valuable time. Moreover, he would only reload while on the move.

  After hammering the last paper target, he charged away, jogging parallel with the barrier to his right until he reached the end, where two more barriers positioned in a V-shape allowed only a narrow, three-foot gap of visibility. Here Willie took aim at three more steel targets, much larger silhouettes with shoulders and heads, but they were placed farther out at twenty-five yards and spread about ten yards apart. The last one required Willie to swing hard to his right. So far his marksmanship had been terrific, but he tried to ignore that. The moment he told himself, hey, you’re having a great day, was the moment he screwed up. Well, that thought crossed his mind, just as he opened fire. He caught the first target dead on, panned to the second, fired, missed, squeezed off another round and ping—he got it. The last one took three more shots until that distinctive ring finally met his protected ears.