Spies trusted no one, but a SEAL team couldn’t operate at all, unless the members knew they could trust each other, even if they trusted no one else. For the first time, Garth looked at a fellow SEAL and wondered if he could trust him to have his back. The answer was no.
Welcome to the world of black ops.
Garth was thinking more like a spy than a SEAL.
The cold truth almost knocked the breath from his body.
Garth thought his mask of inscrutability had held and MacMurtry couldn’t tell how much damage his little bombshell had caused. Garth preferred to keep it that way. He didn’t know whether MacMurtry had been unable to resist the chance to deliver the coup de grace or if he was a messenger for someone higher up.
MacMurtry was a snake, but he was a company man, which could make him a useful snake. If MacMurtry had only been a messenger—albeit one who enjoyed his work—there would be another move shortly. He might yet have information Garth could use to pull himself out of this black hole he’d been sucked into.
It was time to help MacMurtry out a little, but Garth wasn’t good at looking sympathetic, and MacMurtry wouldn’t believe it anyway, so Garth sneered. “Down here, it gets hot in May. I doubt if that business suit is rated for a heat index of 110. Why don’t you go wait for your VIP in the air-conditioning—before you die of heatstroke?”
MacMurtry looked doubtful.
Garth clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. You can still look like an eager beaver. You’ll hear the plane in plenty of time to be standing on the runway when it touches down.”
Thinking hard about MacMurtry’s revelations, Garth went to the garage. His eyes fell on the red canoe on the wall rack he’d built and the seventeen-foot bass boat—toys he’d bought to entertain himself.
He bypassed his four-wheel drive ’99 blue Chevy pickup and the nondescript black sedan MacMurtry had arrived in and got into a white van. The van was fitted on the inside with six passenger seats and the means of restraining those passengers, if necessary. Not that those restraints were ever used, of course.
He backed out the van and parked it on the gravel road leading away from the airstrip. The gravel road meandered through soybean fields until it met up with the two-lane blacktop. After skirting a cypress swamp, the blacktop would access I-40 about ten miles from tiny Sessoms’ Corner. Where the van would go after that was none of Garth’s business.
Next, he walked the entire length of the runway. The tough crabgrass that bordered it was wet from the previous rain. He noted with satisfaction that the ground was firm and no puddles had formed on the runway. A slight narrowing of his almond-shaped eyes and a tiny twitch of lips sometimes described as sensual, sometimes cruel, were the only outward signs of the pride he felt. The drainage system he had designed and built in his spare time, of which he had a lot, was functioning well.
But in his heart he was a SEAL. No matter how he felt about it, he had a mission objective, which was to see the plane land safely and send its passengers on their way. And one thing SEALs and spies had in common was a belief in Murphy’s Law. Even when everything looked fine, he believed with all his heart that anything that could go wrong would go wrong, and that meant he checked and rechecked and then checked again.
***
Black clouds had turned afternoon to dusk, and gusts from the fast approaching storm slapped at the tail of the C-37 Gulfstream when it finally touched down. Garth admired the pilot’s skill but shook his head. He was glad he hadn’t had to attempt it. Taught by his pilot father, he’d been flying a plane since he was sixteen. Garth had taken to heart his father’s admonition that there were old pilots and there were bold pilots, but there were no old, bold pilots. Garth rushed forward with wheel chocks as soon as the plane came to a stop.
As Garth helped the pilot unload the baggage, he saw MacMurtry question each of the passengers and realized that whomever MacMurtry had been sent to collect, that person wasn’t aboard the plane. Garth heard someone say, “Renfro didn’t make it.”
Renfro? Garth had heard about a SEAL named Renfro, but he didn’t think he’d ever met him. Ordinarily, Garth might have heard more since the travelers usually took turns using the head, stretching their legs, and chatting with him before they piled into waiting vehicles. Today, the threat of downpour didn’t encourage them to stand around chewing the fat.
In minutes, the plane was unloaded. Garth helped one of the passengers, a man with a battered face who needed to be more than half carried, to the waiting van. The others piled in.
After a couple of worried cell phone conversations, conducted well away from the group, MacMurtry departed in the sedan, alone.
Garth waved everyone off and jumped into the pilot’s seat to taxi the plane to the hangar, intent only on getting it under cover. Even tied down, a plane this size would be no match for the winds associated with this latest storm cell.
Inside the plane, he was reaching for the starter switch when a waft of latrine smell hit him. Before he was nicknamed “Darth Vader,” the guys had occasionally called him “the bloodhound” for his sensitive nose. The odor wasn’t strong, but it was unmistakable. The man with the bruised and swollen face had obviously been beaten, maybe tortured. He must have crapped his pants. It happened.
Garth usually cleaned the cabin after performing a plane’s routine engine maintenance—given the weather, he would have waited until tomorrow. An odor like this would only get worse with time, though. As soon as he had the plane inside and the hangar doors shut, he switched on the lights and searched for the source of the stench.
The interior of a C-37 Gulfstream isn’t very big. It didn’t take him long to locate a sturdy, ventilated, white cardboard box with a fitted lid. It was wedged under a rear seat where the flotation vest should have been. He approached it with caution. Any suspicious package had to be presumed to be a bomb until proved otherwise.
To get a better look he squatted, ignoring the way the scar high on his thigh protested the movement. In red ink the box was stenciled, Bananes: Produit du Ecuador. In English, it cautioned: Perishable. Store at Room Temperature. On the box’s side, a wide, black arrow pointed up.
He leaned closer and sniffed. The bad news: The box did not smell like ripe bananas.
The good news: Bombs didn’t smell like shit.
Usually.
Assume nothing. He kept his movements slow and easy as he dislodged the box, pulled it into the aisle, and lifted the lid.
Someone had carefully padded the interior with a knitted pink blanket.
On the blanket lay a baby.
Wispy tufts of hair, the tentative gold of corn silk, framed the tender, translucent shells of pink ears. Twin fans of impossibly long eyelashes lay on the baby’s pale cheeks. If not for the stink, it could have been a doll—it lay so still and looked so perfect. His heart squeezed to a standstill. He had found it too late. It was dead. Irrational guilt and grief burned the back of his throat.
Then wide blue eyes opened and blinked in the sudden light. Seeing him, the baby’s rosebud mouth turned down, but the baby didn’t cry. Slowly, with a shuddering sigh that shook its little chest, the baby closed its eyes again.
Being a SEAL was dirty work. It wasn’t the stink that made Garth’s eyes water and caused the Nabs and Coke he’d snacked on to rise up in his throat. No trace of fastidiousness survived SEAL training. SEALs did what the success of an operation dictated, uninfluenced by what they felt. Weighed against the success of a mission and the safety of his men, distaste for filth and stench, even moral repugnance for the ruthlessness sometimes required of him, had no place.
Still, in the back of a plane looking at the contents of a box, Garth fought the urge to throw up.
Being a SEAL was dirty work, but it wasn’t dirty enough to keep him from feeling outraged to find a baby, stinking and too quiet, in a cardboard box aboard a spy plane.
/> ***
He had the overflowing diaper and saturated shirt stripped from her—the baby was a girl—and pitched into the crabgrass edging the runway before he was halfway to the trailer that doubled as the airstrip’s office and his living quarters. Once inside, he set her in the tiny lavatory of the miniscule bathroom and ran warm water over her.
She whimpered when the water touched her. In the cold blue light of the fluorescent fixture over the sink it was easy to see why. Her skin, from her armpits to her round little knees, looked like raw meat. Her bottom was the worst. Huge blue eyes fringed with long, pale gold lashes widened momentarily, then resumed their strange sunken, unfocused look.
He turned the baby over to let the water stream over her little behind. He’d call her medium-sized if he had to guess how old she was. Not a newborn but not able to walk. No matter her size, he had a gigantic problem on his hands.
The number of laws smashed beyond recognition, the number of regulations bent, the sheer number of things that had gone wrong with someone’s plan to smuggle a baby into the country—he was looking at the kind of snafu that sent people to jail and ended careers.
He hadn’t been told to expect a delivery, but when it came to black ops, there were wheels within wheels, and the left hand frequently didn’t know what the right hand was doing. Hell, sometimes the left hand was out to get the right hand. It was possible that whoever had hidden her on the plane had nothing to do with the agency at all.
All he knew was that this tiny scrap of humanity was the only innocent party.
In theory, he should inform his superiors and shift responsibility to them. In fact, shit always rolled downhill. Part of his job, and he understood it well, was to shield the people above him from association with the darker aspects of intelligence gathering. If he let higher-ups know, his only directive would be to “take care of it.” That would mean, Make the problem go away by any means necessary, and don’t tell me what you did.
They only wanted plausible deniability—to be able to disclaim all knowledge—and to swear the head of the responsible party would roll. That would be the person in authority who was lowest on the totem pole. That would be him.
The decision of what to do with the baby was his and his alone. Before he did anything, he wanted to talk to Clay. Clay was a retired SEAL living in Wilmington who had done some contract work for the agency while he got his fledgling sea tow operation off the ground. Garth wouldn’t have to explain that from the agency’s point of view, the baby’s very existence was a liability. He turned the water off, wrapped her in a towel, and carried the little one over to his bed.
He went to his closet where he kept several prepaid disposable phones.
“You want me, you got me.” Clay’s voice came over the wire.
Garth described the situation. “If I can figure out where she came from,” he concluded, “I can return her to the only people who have a right to her.”
Clay snorted, not unkindly. “Look, we can speculate about who put her on the plane and why, but it’s not going to get you anywhere. Once a screwup is this big, it doesn’t matter what the mission objective was. There’s no fixing it. All you can do is make it go away.”
“I can’t do that. She’s come into my hands. It’s on me now.”
“Are you crazy? You want to kiss any hope of promotion good-bye? This is someone else’s pile of shit. There’s no reason for you to step into it. This is the kind of shit that sticks forever and never stops stinking. What you should do is bury it as deep as you can and never, never admit knowing anything about it.”
“Except it’s a baby.”
“Hell, man, I know. Don’t you think I know? I love kids, too.” Clay had moved to Wilmington to be close to his two children when he realized his ex-wife was not going to cooperate in any way to help him keep a relationship with the kids. “But you got to look after yourself. Think about your objectives. You hope to make it to the top of the food chain. You want to be where you can make a difference. You want to make Special Operations more proactive about taking the fight to where the terrorists are instead of waiting for them to bring the fight to us.”
“Yeah, well about that, I got MacMurtry to shoot off his mouth a little. Getting back on track is going to be more complicated than showing up for duty once I’m transferred.”
“What did he say?”
Garth summarized MacMurtry’s implication that his platoon had been sent into a known ambush.
“A goat-fuck?”
“Yep. Except according to MacMurtry, the Taliban were supposed to win.”
Civilians assumed goat-fuck was slang for a messed-up situation. In fact it was also military jargon for a strategic use of troops. The jargon arose from troops likening themselves to a goat that has been tethered out in the open as bait to draw wolves into an attack in the open. No matter what happens to the wolves, the goat is fucked. It doesn’t stand a chance.
The strategy had to be employed sparingly since it didn’t inspire troops’ confidence in their leadership. It had its uses, though, and had been employed by generals and elected officials alike.
A military purpose of the strategy was to draw the enemy into action in the place of one’s choosing. A political purpose could be served if the attack provided motivation for a war that might otherwise be unpopular. It could make an enemy look stronger, more aggressive, and more merciless. Conspiracy theorists argued that the military’s flailingly inefficient response on 9-11 indicated that the attack had been not wholly undesired by those in power in America.
Wiping out a whole platoon of SEALs would make the Taliban look fierce indeed. There would be calls for more troops, which would mean more matériel and more support. More matériel and more support meant more power to the upper echelons and more profit for the private contractors who provided goods and services.
There was money to be made in war and reason to pursue victory as inefficiently as possible. Every time the Taliban destroyed a school, a road, a power station, or a hospital that had already been rebuilt once by contractors, the contractors made even more money rebuilding it. Again. There were those who had incentive to make the war last a long, long time.
“What do you think?” Clay wanted to know. “Is it possible MacMurtry’s right?”
“All I know is, if sending my platoon into ambush was deliberate, then the orders had to come from far above my pay grade. They’ve had all the time they needed for a complete cover-up. One that quietly implies I’m unfit to command.”
“You’re washed up.”
“I’m not accepting that. Not until I know more.” Garth stared at the closed blinds behind which lightning flared white. The storm had broken in full force. “Anyway,” he went on, “straightening it out will take time. For now, this baby has fallen into my lap. My superiors don’t want to know about it, so I can’t win any points no matter how I handle it. But I can lose them if I don’t keep it under wraps. I’ve got to figure out someone who will take her for me. I can’t keep her here.”
“You’re damn right you can’t. In a four-room trailer, you can’t keep her out of sight. Give it up. Take her to an ER—a big, busy ER. You can be in Raleigh in eighty minutes. Better still would be somewhere a large percentage of the population is always transiting—Norfolk, Charleston, even Myrtle Beach. Leave her some place she will be found and walk away.”
“If I do that, she will disappear. There aren’t any birth records in this country to be found. She’ll be untraceable.”
“That’s the point.”
“No. She may be a pawn, but she’s not a throwaway. Somebody loved her.” Something about the little pink blanket the box had been lined with and the cloth doll tucked beside her made him think that whoever had hidden the baby on the plane had cared what happened to her.
“Somebody who screwed up six ways from Saturday!” Clay roared.
Garth rubbed his neck. “That person might deserve whatever they get, but she doesn’t.”
“Are you getting soft? Think, man. Think of yourself.”
“Look, the only person who knows she’s in this country is whoever put her on that plane. The only other person is whoever was supposed to pick her up at this end. All I want to do is stash her somewhere for a few days. Someone is either going to come looking for her—or not. If they don’t, dropping her off at a hospital can still be Plan B.” Although privately he knew Plan B would never happen.
If no one to whom he could, in good conscience, turn her over ever showed up, well, he would cross that bridge when he came to it. All he knew was he was not going to deposit her into the system and walk away. No institution could care for a child. Its rules and needs would always come first. He’d find a family that wanted to adopt her and manufacture the papers that would make it possible. “You’ve got contacts with civilians. Who can I take her to now?”
“All right,” Clay conceded reluctantly. “A girl I know runs a day care. Sometimes she keeps kids overnight for people who do twenty-four off, twenty-four on shifts. I’ll call her, but I’m warning you, she’s a stickler for paperwork. You’ll have to tell her you’re the baby’s father.”
Chapter 5
It is the rule in war: if ten times the enemy’s strength, surround them; if five times, attack them; if double, divide them; if equal, engage them; if fewer, be able to evade them; if weaker, be able to avoid them.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Garth memorized the name, address, and phone number of the sitter. He thanked Clay and clicked the phone off.
When he judged the baby was dry enough to uncover without fear of chilling her, he peeled the edges of the towel back. He didn’t know much about babies, but he did know chafed, raw skin, shriveled from being wet too long.
“Surf torture” was a fundamental part of SEAL basic training. Recruits were made to link arms and sit where ocean waves would break over them. The first thing a man learned, when they finally let him up, was that the crotch of his uniform and underwear had filled with sand. Sand he was given no opportunity to get rid of.
SEALed Forever Page 4