by Scott Blade
I stayed quiet.
“I’m the ranking officer right now at this station for the MPs.”
I thought about it and then I shrugged.
I said, “Sure.”
“You want to do it somewhere else?”
“I think it might be something that is better kept quiet.”
“Okay. You got a name?”
“Jack Widow.”
“Mr. Widow, can I see your identification?”
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my passport. It was still damp from the rain and the Atlantic Ocean.
I may have to get a new one, I thought.
I handed it to him. He took it and kept it out for me to see and walked back into the guard hut. He dumped himself down onto a high-back stool and swiveled around to face a computer.
He hit the keyboard and started accessing a program to print a temporary visitor badge for me, I assumed.
Hamilton opened my passport. He made no comment about it being damp. Instead, he stopped and stared at the pages of the many, many foreign stamps that I had in it.
He looked up at me and said, “You sure do travel a lot, Mr. Widow.”
I nodded.
Then he started to look at the stamps. He stopped on one and asked, “What were you doing in Iran?”
Usually, I would’ve responded with a “none of your business,” but I didn’t see any reason to lie to start anything here with the guy. So, I said, “I was in the Navy. We used to do business with a lot of foreign countries. Sometimes I had to go to all sorts of places.”
That was about as much truth that I was comfortable with revealing.
One of the major functions of the Navy was counterintelligence. He would know that.
He would also know that to be effective in counterintelligence, we had to engage with unsavory people. Many of our contacts were in the foreign jurisdictions of countries that America wasn’t on the best of terms with. This certainly included Iran.
He nodded and then he said, “You must’ve been pretty important in the Navy to be trusted with missions that took you into enemy territory.”
I shrugged and said, “I was just a regular guy.”
“What were you, black ops? SOG?”
SOG was the CIA’s Special Operations Group. Which was about as vague a name as anything else. And it was all because of the word “Group.” What group?
It just meant that it was whatever group the CIA decided to incorporate into the fold.
They often recruited from the SEALs for their special operators.
“The SEALs.”
He sat straight on the stool and stared at me.
He asked, “What team?”
“I can’t tell you that much.”
“Are you still active?”
“No.”
He nodded and took the passport and stuck it underneath some kind of scanner. A light flashed and scanned the passport but nothing popped up on his computer screen. He tried again. Same thing. I guessed that saltwater bath had pretty much destroyed the electronic chip.
Hamilton keyed in the number and my face came up.
He hit a few keys and used a wireless mouse to click yes and ‘no’ on a couple of boxes.
A moment later, he was slipping a plastic badge with my face on it into a plastic case.
He handed it to me and said, “Clip that on your shirt.”
I took it and looked at it. I saw my passport photo and some pedigree information that was duplicated from my passport and the word, “VISITOR,” printed in all caps and in bold red font.
I pinched a metal clasp on the case and clipped it to the bottom of my T-shirt neckband. It hung on the top of my chest, inside the open windbreaker.
Hamilton said, “Keep that visible.”
I nodded.
“Follow me.”
Hamilton stood up and led me through the front gate. We walked two blocks north and took a right at a four-way intersection.
“Here. Let’s go in here.”
He led the way into an unmarked office building and through a set of double doors.
The Army was all about the bare minimum when it came to their buildings. The walls, the doors, the tiles on the floor, the tiles on the ceiling, and even the paint was all the same. Not the same colors, but they all had the same kind of standardization to them. Like every nook and cranny in the Army’s design for the base was all taken from the same page of the same catalog for military design.
Nothing ever changes when it comes to the Army.
I wasn’t sure what kind of office building this was. There were soldiers—men and women—standing around, sitting at cubicles, sitting at small round tables, conversing about Army business.
Everyone stopped and stared at me as I passed them by. Then they returned to whatever they had been doing before.
I followed Hamilton into a back office that was empty. There was a desk at the center of the room and a small steel desk fan on the corner. It was on and blowing and rotating. A thin string blew out from the mesh grill as it rotated from one point and back to the next.
Hamilton didn’t sit at the desk. Instead, he led us over to a small round table in the corner behind the door and said, “Have a seat, Widow.”
I pulled out the chair and sat down.
He said, “Want coffee or a coke or something?”
“I appreciate the hospitality, but I don’t think I’ll be here long enough for that.”
“We’ll be here a few minutes, Widow.”
“What I have to report may not be that big a deal.”
“You had me call my boss. So now we’re going to sit here and go through the motions.”
I said, “Can I get a coffee then?”
“Yes. Stay here a minute.”
I nodded and stayed sitting.
Hamilton went to the door, stepped out. I heard him call out to someone and ask him to bring us some coffee. Then he peeked his head back into the room and asked, “You take sugar?”
“Black is fine.”
He nodded and left again.
Hamilton came back into the room and stayed. He had a clipboard in his hand, but I had no idea where it came from. I didn’t see him pick it up.
He laid my passport out and open on the tabletop. He kept his left hand middle finger in the corner of the book to prop it open and as close to flat as it would get.
I watched him pull a ball point pen out of his shirt pocket. He clicked the top and started to write on the first page of a document that was stapled to at least one other page on the clipboard.
He didn’t look up. He didn’t speak for a good minute. He just wrote and filled out information from my passport.
I assumed it was name, place of birth, and so on.
Another minute went by and there was a single knock at the door.
Hamilton said, “Come in.”
A young, black soldier walked in. He nodded at me first and then he said, “I’ve got your coffee, Lieutenant.”
“Come in. Come in.”
The soldier shuffled in with two plain white mugs. He held them, one-handed. His thumb and index finger slipped through the handles of both. He used his free hand to push the door open and he squeezed in through it.
He set the mugs down first and stood straight and pulled a few packets of white sugar out of his pants pocket and dropped them on the table, near the coffee.
He said, “Anything else for you, sir?”
“That’s all, Jarson.”
The soldier named Jarson smiled and stood straight and saluted Hamilton. Which gave me the impression that it was done only because I was there. Hamilton seemed a little slack with his guys compared to other COs that I had known.
I said nothing about it.
Hamilton said, “Take your pick.”
I reached forward and took a coffee. I stared into the cup, like I could inspect it on sight alone. That wasn’t a possibility, not for me, but I could smell it. And this smelled like the real deal. A
fresh aroma. Newly brewed.
I took a slow sip, partly to test its heat and partly to test its flavor. It was pretty good. The soldier named Jarson knew his craft well.
I said, “You should promote him.”
Hamilton looked up from the clipboard and asked, “What?”
“Jarson, you should promote him. This is a hell of a cup of coffee.”
“I prefer mine with sugar,” he said and he set the pen down and proceeded to tear open four packets of sugar and let them landslide down into his coffee.
I said nothing about it.
Hamilton retrieved his pen and then he slid my passport back over to me.
He asked, “Okay, Mr. Widow. What crime do you wish to report?”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the dog tags.
I said, “I found these on Cocoa Beach.”
He cocked his head and reached over and took the dog tags from me. He stared at them, noticed the same thing that I had noticed, the scratched-off name.
He held them up in the air and let the ball chain spin and tangle.
He said, “That is peculiar.”
CHAPTER 8
“WHY DO YOU SUPPOSE the name is scratched off?” Hamilton asked.
“I’ve got no idea.”
“Looks like it wasn’t done hastily either. There’s a symmetry to it.”
I nodded.
He continued to study it for a bit longer and then he looked at me. He said, “Mr. Widow. I see now why the secrecy. If someone ditched his dog tags and scratched his own name off, then this could be a crime. But if someone stole it and did this then it could be embarrassing. Especially, if this was an officer.”
Especially, if it was done by a lover scorned, I thought.
I nodded.
Hamilton set the dog tags down on the tabletop and wrote some more on the document.
He did this for another couple of minutes and we sat in silence. Then he flipped to the second page and looked at me.
He asked, “Give me your account of how you found it. Don’t leave anything out.”
I told him my account of what had happened. But I didn’t admit some of it. I left off the part about the beach cops. No reason to drag them into a lost or stolen dog tag.
Hamilton wrote it all down in a box that took up half of the second page and then he set his pen down and said, “This is interesting. Can I ask you to hang around a bit?”
I thought about it. I thought about how this was one of the first times that a cop has asked me to stick around and not ordered me to. Better take advantage of this rare occurrence.
I said, “Get me another cup of coffee and you got a deal.”
“Sure thing. Jarson will bring you one. You can wait down the hall. There’s a sofa.”
I nodded and stood up, took my cup. It was empty.
“I’m gonna call my SC and I’ll get back to you. Shouldn’t take too long.”
I shrugged and said, “My only plans are to move forward. But I can stick around for a cup of coffee.”
He nodded and called Jarson in.
Jarson took me out into his little section of their department and showed me to a small sofa. He took my cup and disappeared to return with another one.
Hamilton disappeared back into his office and shut the door.
I dumped myself down on the sofa and Jarson returned a minute later with another cup of coffee.
He said, “I’m making a new pot now.”
I thanked him, but figured I wouldn’t be around long enough for another cup.
I was wrong and I was right.
I would be there a lot longer, but I wasn’t going to have another cup.
Coffee’s too hard to drink in handcuffs.
CHAPTER 9
THEY CAME FOR ME WITH WEAPONS DRAWN.
I sat on the sofa—coffee in one hand and an old paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged, dog-eared and open, in the other.
I found it underneath a pile of magazines on a small end table. I also found a current issue of the Army Times.
I wasn’t interested in current events at the moment.
I chose to page-turn through Ayn Rand’s classic until Hamilton came back. I didn’t have to wait long for someone to come in and let me know what was next. But it wasn’t Hamilton.
Coresca entered from the hallway into the secretarially pen with two other MPs that I hadn’t seen before. He burst in first with a look of satisfaction and professionalism on his face. One look outshone the other.
A polished Army issued Beretta M9 gleamed under the bright overhead LED lights. The Beretta was in his hand. The barrel pointed at the ground until he saw me. Then his arms moved fast. Quick reflexes, not faster than mine. But fast reflexes didn’t matter because I wasn’t the one armed.
The M9 pointed right at my center mass.
My coffee mug had been out in front of me at that moment. I was mid-attempt in taking another pull from it.
If Coresca fired the M9, right then and there, my blood would’ve splattered out of my chest along with the black coffee.
Made me think of one of those Jackson Pollock paintings. Black and red colors sprayed across a white canvas, like the wall behind me.
I stared at the end of the gun and was a little hurt because for once I thought that I was going to get reasonable treatment from cops.
Coresca said nothing, but he gave me a grin.
The other two MPs stepped past him and to his right and left sides.
Jarson wheeled away from his desk on his office chair. He had a genuine look of shock on his face. Which I believed was authentic.
He asked, “What’s going on?”
Again, he sounded authentic. He either was surprised or he should’ve been in show business.
Coresca stopped dead center in the room, about five feet from me, which I was sure was written down somewhere in an Army SOP manual, filed away under apprehending a suspect in a confined, indoor space.
He said, “Hold it! Jack Widow, you are under arrest!”
The other two MPs sidestepped in different directions. Each of them flanking Coresca and each of them pointing similar M9s at me.
I moved slowly and reached forward, set the coffee mug onto the edge of Jarson’s desk.
I could’ve used it as a thrown weapon, like a hot liquid Molotov cocktail, but I wasn’t here to permanently burn an Army MP for doing his job.
I raised my hands and used my abs to pull myself up off the sofa. I stood. The MPs stayed where they were.
I asked, “What the hell is this?”
“I told ya. This is an arrest.”
I shook my head and said, “You can’t arrest me. I’m a civilian.”
“You’re on Army property. Therefore, we can arrest you.”
Then he acted like he waited for me to say something, but I didn’t.
He spouted off some Army regulation statute that may or may not have been true. He claimed that it gave him the right to arrest me.
I asked, “On what charge?”
Hamilton walked out of his office at that moment. He gave me a look that made me feel a little betrayed.
He said, “We don’t have to charge you with anything. We’re not the ones who want you.”
I stayed quiet.
He said, “We’re arresting you because the FBI wants us to.”
CHAPTER 10
CORESCA CUFFED ME.
He ratcheted the cuffs tight on my wrists and he did it slowly. On purpose. Deliberate. Like shoulder checking a guy in a crowded hallway. Both guys know what happened, but no one else caught it.
I guessed that he was waiting for me to complain about it because afterward he stood there silent with a smirk on his face.
I stayed quiet. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
All three MPs holstered their weapons. I noticed that Coresca kept his safety buckle unsnapped on his holster.
I looked at Hamilton, avoided eye contact with Coresca.
I asked, “The F
BI? For what?”
Hamilton said, “It turns out, Mr. Widow, that they’re quite interested in the dog tags that you found.”
He paused a beat and then he said, “Allegedly, found.”
“I told you. I found them down on Cocoa Beach. Give me a map and I’ll tell you exactly where.”
Hamilton said, “That’s not up to me, Widow. That’s up to the Feds.”
I ground my teeth and took a long, deep breath.
I asked, “How long is this going to take?”
“I have no idea.”
Coresca asked, “Wanna put him in holding?”
Because the base was small, I was surprised to hear Coresca call any part of it “holding.” I imagined that the best they would have would be a single cell, maybe two. It was doubtful that Graham would have need for more than that.
Hamilton said, “Yes.”
Coresca grabbed the cuffs from behind me and jerked them down and pointed me to a northern direction, like he was steering me.
“Easy, Coresca. Mr. Widow is a civilian.”
Hamilton looked at me and said, “Don’t take it personal, Widow. Your story might be true and it might not. I don’t know. It’s not for me to say. The FBI is sending someone and you’ll be on your way soon.”
“I take it personal.”
Hamilton said nothing to that.
Coresca pushed me forward and I moved.
I said, “You don’t need to push.”
Coresca didn’t answer, but he let go of my cuffs.
Using verbal commands, he led me where to go and stayed close behind. One of the other MPs walked out in front of me and the second one followed behind, until we got to the end of one hall and then stepped through an open push door and onto the sidewalk.
One of the MPs turned and walked in the other direction, leaving me with just the two.
Part of me thought that was a mistake. Handcuffed behind my back or not, I could’ve figured out a way of taking out two guys. There’s always a way.
But I complied and followed the first MP down the sidewalk and past two small buildings. Then we turned on a service drive and walked up a short ramp to a building with thin windows.
Inside, I was pretty shocked to find a holding cell that was more than just one cell. There were three. One large one and two across the hall from it that were basically just the same cell, cut in half.