by Cindy Gerard
“Biometric facial-recognition program. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.” He took another bite, then swiped the corner of his mouth with a paper napkin. “Amazing software. Compares key features of a subject from a photo—nose, eyes, eyebrows, mouth, face shape—to the faces stored in law enforcement and DMV databases. When a requisite number of features match, bingo. It’s gonna spit out a name to go with the face so fast you won’t have time to say, ‘Whoops, I’m so sorry I lied to you, Mike.’ ”
The software wasn’t perfect, but its proponents called it a breakthrough as significant as the introduction of fingerprint technology. And the BOIs had it.
“Too bad you don’t have a photo,” she said.
“Yeah, about that.” He shifted his weight to his left hip, dug into his right pants pocket, and pulled out his phone, which he’d picked up from the Beechcraft. “Smile.” He snapped her picture.
“Oh, wait.” He made a face. “You won’t like that one. Your mouth was open. Not your best look.” He snapped another shot, then admired his work. “Much better. That scowl probably matches your driver’s license picture.”
The noise she made came close to a growl. For the first time since this all started, he actually felt like smiling.
“So… do I hit Send or do you talk?”
He had her, and she knew it.
He set the phone down, wiped his hand on his napkin, and extended it across the table. “Name’s Brown. Mike Brown. And you would be?”
She looked at a spot on the wall behind him before meeting his eyes again. She did not return the handshake. “Eva.” Her eyes were sober and dark. “Eva Salinas.”
Mike withdrew his hand on an indrawn breath as the implication hit him. “Salinas?” He had a sick feeling that he knew exactly what she was going to say.
“Ramon was my husband.”
He’d been hit with a bar stool once. It hadn’t landed as much of a wallop as those two words.
Now it all made sense. No wonder she hated him. No wonder she thought he was lower than dirt on the sole of a terrorist’s boot.
He sank back in the chair. “When? When did that happen?”
“When did we get married?”
He nodded.
“Three months before he redeployed.” She sat back, too, crossing her arms beneath her breasts.
Three months. Mike remembered when Ramon had come back to the unit after his recovery time in the States. He’d been full of his usual bravado and swagger, talking about the hot babe he’d hooked up with. He’d never said one word about getting married.
And he sure as hell hadn’t mentioned a wife to Lieutenant Hot Body from the communications unit. Salinas had resumed their “secret” affair as soon as he’d been boots on the ground back at the FOB.
Mike looked at Ramon’s widow. He could have told her that her husband, the man she hated him for getting killed, was not only a braggart with an axe to grind, but he was the camp Romeo who considered anything with estrogen fair game and hadn’t considered his marriage vows sacred.
But he didn’t say one word. He knew all about the sting of salt in a wound.
“Why didn’t you tell me that up front?” he asked softly.
“Because it’s private.” She avoided his eyes, thought better of it, and drew her shoulders back defensively. “Because I didn’t want to.”
The pain on her face made him feel bad for her, enough to wish Salinas was alive so he could take the jerk down a notch for not keeping it in his pants when he had a woman like this waiting at home.
A woman who would go to the lengths she’d gone to, to find out the truth about his death.
Eva Salinas, aka Pamela Diaz, aka the woman who’d had the cojones to brave the hazards of a foreign country, seduce him, drug him, cuff him to a bed, and kick him in the face, hadn’t deserved to be played. Strangled, maybe, but not played.
Mike was a lot of things—a coward, yeah, he’d cop to that, a dropout, and a screwup—but he wasn’t a cheat. And he had no time for men who were. Which pretty much explained why he and Ramon had never been besties.
“And because I didn’t know if I could trust you,” she added belatedly, the inference being that she’d decided that now she could. “I didn’t know who was following me. For all I knew, you could have arranged it.”
He couldn’t fault her logic. “And the jury was out until we got shot at.”
She shook her head. “Maybe before that.”
When I’d damn near blubbered like a baby.
“Look,” he said, embarrassed and wanting to get some distance from it, “I’m sorry about Ramon. I didn’t like him. He didn’t like me. But he was a good soldier and he didn’t deserve to die the way he did.”
He backed off then, giving her a little time to decide how she wanted to proceed from here.
“Eight years ago,” she said, “when they notified me of his death, they told me he died on a routine training mission. Not in combat. Not on an operation. They blamed him for making a careless mistake that cost him his life.”
Mike frowned. “Ramon was a lot of things, but careless wasn’t one of them. Not when it came to his job.”
“I didn’t know him well enough to know that. But he was Special Forces. I knew he hadn’t earned that green beret by being careless.”
“Yet you bought the report of his death.”
She tipped her soda to her lips. “I had no reason not to. So yes, I believed that’s how he died. Until a flash drive with that file on it was delivered to my apartment a month ago.”
Even though he’d lost his appetite, he dug back into his sandwich. His body needed fuel whether he was hungry or not. Then the significance of what she’d just said hit him. “Wait. I thought you said it was given to you by accident when you were researching your story.”
She looked a little sheepish. “I made that up to go with the journalist cover.”
“You’re starting to be very predictable,” he said, in lieu of a resounding “aha.” “So… State Department? DOD?” He’d been speculating about that ever since he’d seen her fake ID.
“CIA.”
He almost fell off his chair. “Oh, this keeps getting better and better. You’re a field agent?” That would explain the Glock and her tactics.
“Attorney. Office of General Counsel,” she clarified, chasing down a bite of her sandwich with another drink of soda.
No wonder she’d known she’d get cut off at the knees if she contacted the CIA or the FBI with her theory.
A woman slogged by, wearily pushing a squalling baby in a stroller. He let the commotion subside before picking up the conversation again. “Back up to how you got the information.” He’d get details on her CIA gig later.
“It just showed up,” she said. “The flash drive was messengered to my apartment. After I got over the shock of what was in the file, I tried to find out who sent it but the messenger service had nothing on record for that customer. No credit card. No address. Claimed they must have lost it. And no one remembered having seen him—or her.”
“How convenient.”
“Too convenient,” she agreed.
“So tell me about the file.” The file that was supposed to have been deleted. The file that branded him the kind of guy whose ego and inability to follow orders got people killed.
“It was a detailed account of the mission that night. The after-action report was signed off on by your base commander. Every word laid the blame squarely on your shoulders.”
Which was why she hated him. Territory they’d already covered. “Who would want you to have that file?”
“You want a name? I have no clue. But it had to be someone who knew I had the means and the motivation to start digging.”
“Then the next question is why they wanted you to investigate.”
“Because they wanted to expose you? Or because they wanted me to find out the truth? Maybe it’s someone who believed your pretrial statements. Someone who wanted me to ask the tough question
s.”
“And that’s when doors started slamming.”
She nodded. “And when I started to sense I was being watched.”
An announcement on the PA system called their flight.
Appetite gone, Mike stuffed the rest of his sandwich back in the bag. She did the same. She hadn’t even eaten half of it.
“You have to tell me, you know.” She met his eyes with earnest entreaty. “You have to tell me what happened.”
Yeah. He tossed the bag in a trash can and started walking toward the gate. He had to tell her.
And thinking about that took him right back to the night he had tried for eight years to forget, but knew he never would.
11
Afghanistan, eight years ago
“The boys are taking their sweet time.”
Taggart was right. And Mike was worried. The team should have been back by now.
He squinted into the night. He’d flown the mission totally dark. No locator or position lights, no cabin lights, used only his night-vision technology and his instruments to guide him down to the landing zone. They were still dark, though the bird was powered up and ready to lift off at a moment’s notice.
Behind the controls of the Black Hawk that he’d set down on the unforgiving Afghan terrain with only the night and a jagged wall of rock for concealment, Mike glanced over his shoulder past his copilot, Sonny Webber, to his gunner, Bobby “Boom Boom” Taggart. The Special Forces sergeant had drawn bird-protection duty with him, Webber, and Jamie “Hondo” Cooper, while the rest of the team executed their recon mission—and Taggart wasn’t happy about it.
Restless behind the Black Hawk’s multibarrel M134 machine gun, Taggart wove a jack of spades in and out between his fingers, using the worn playing card as a diversion from the uncertainty and the wait.
Mike understood why the tough-as-nails Bronx native was getting twitchy. Mike and Webber were used to waiting; pilots always stayed with the bird. But regardless of how many missions they had under their belts, Taggart and Cooper would rather be crawling around on their bellies, planted on a ridge with night-vision binoculars, checking for Mr. Taliban, and covering their team’s six. Anything beat staying here in the cramped confines of the idling bird, playing sit and wait for the rest of the team to return.
Salinas, Smith, Wojohowitz, Brimmer, Johnson, and Crenshaw had left over twenty minutes ago to hike less than half a kilometer to conduct a quick sneak-and-peek on a small village. They were following up on a report of Taliban fighters taking over the village and forcing the inhabitants to shelter them.
No engagement with the enemy; observation only. In. Out. Twenty minutes on the ground, tops. Report back to Command Central when they returned.
If this had been a Special Forces team, a Night Hawk pilot would have dropped them in. But this wasn’t an ordinary team. This was the One-Eyed Jacks—Uncle Sam’s grand experiment incorporating special operations personnel from the Navy, Army, and Marines.
It was such a standard-fare mission that Com Cent had dubbed it Operation Slam Dunk. Recon only. Easy Peasy.
Mike checked his watch—twenty-five minutes and counting—and stalled a trickle of concern. Even with full packs and dogging it, they should have been back by now. It was taking too long. But he was used to waiting. Very seldom did he ever leave the bird. His job was to fly the team in, protect the Black Hawk until they returned, then fly them back out. He was damn good at it, regardless of whether they were taking fire on either end of the op. Taggart and Cooper, however, were used to action. Neither liked getting bird protection on the rotation.
“You’re going to wear that thing out, Boom Boom,” Webber, a quiet staff sergeant from Arizona, said as Taggart continued to work the playing card through his fingers.
The card was barely in one piece. Taggart had used clear tape on it several times, repairing a cut from a KA-Bar that had almost sliced it in half.
“I’m going nuts here.” Taggart shifted behind the big gun.
The munitions and explosive expert was an adrenaline junky. And he’d seen too much action. On his last leave home, he’d had a tattoo inked on the inside of his right forearm: a pair of combat boots supporting a rifle on which a combat helmet hung. Beneath the image were the letters RIP, in tribute to his brothers in arms who’d been killed in action.
“You’re already nuts.”
This from Cooper, whose jack of hearts—every One-Eyed Jacks team member had a card—was worn and burned around the edges.
While Taggart was proud of his mixed German and French heritage, Cooper liked to say that his Caucasian, African-American, and Latino blood beat them all in the mongrel department. The communications expert kept in shape doing push-ups with his toes wedged to a wall and wouldn’t think of marring his skin with a tat.
Cooper was a serious Marine but quick with a smile. Unlike Mike, who’d grown up herding cattle on a ranch in Colorado, and Taggart, who’d mixed it up on the streets in the Bronx, or Webber, the son of elementary school teachers, Cooper had grown up in luxury—compliments of his Colombian-born model mother and his father’s lucrative export business. Cooper had been a model himself and an actor, but had enlisted in the Marines when a friend had been KIA in Iraq.
Mike had just decided he might have to send Cooper and Taggart to investigate, when his headset crackled.
“Crenshaw to Primetime, do you read me? Over?”
Relieved to finally hear from the big Minnesotan who towered over most of the guys by a good head, Mike answered quickly. “Read you five by five, Crenshaw. Not like you to miss chow. How ’bout a sit rep? Over.”
“Ran into a buzz saw.” The details Crenshaw proceeded to give him on what they’d found made Mike’s gut tighten.
The team had not only spotted Taliban fighters in the village, they’d witnessed a brutal execution of a young woman. And it wasn’t their first kill. Bodies were stacked up like firewood in the town center that was patrolled by Taliban fighters. It appeared the team had stumbled onto a systematic slaughter that was still in progress.
“Seek permission to engage. Over.”
Mike totally got it. Crenshaw and the team wanted to take the Taliban fighters out before they killed any more civilians. But permission wasn’t his to give—their orders were recon only. He had to contact Command Central at the Forward Operating Base.
“Hold for further. Over.”
“What’s going on?” Webber asked from the copilot seat.
The three men had heard only Mike’s side of his conversation with Crenshaw but they all sensed the news wasn’t good.
Mike changed radio frequency and immediately tried to raise the FOB. As soon as he made contact he recounted the situation on the ground, then waited for the radio operator to relay the intel to the commander. He didn’t have to see the other men’s faces in the dark to know they were chomping at the bit to engage. They’d heard his side of the radio commo loud and clear.
Mike listened, his body tense as he received his orders.
“Roger that,” he replied. “Over and out.”
“We going in?”
Mouth tight, Mike answered Taggart with a single shake of his head. “They’re sending air support. We’re to call the chicks back to the roost and return to base.”
Behind him, Cooper swore. “It’ll be sixty minutes before they get gunships up here.”
No one knew that better than Mike. He knew how hard he could push the Black Hawk in this climate and terrain. Crews could gear up in a matter of minutes and aircraft was always at the ready. The distance was the problem.
And air support with civilians in the area, being executed? JDAM smart bombs were wickedly accurate, but not accurate enough to take out a bad guy with civilians within ten or twenty yards.
Puzzled by his commander’s call, but keeping his opinion to himself, he changed frequency again and tried to raise Crenshaw and call them back to the bird.
“He’s not answering,” Mike muttered aloud after severa
l attempts to contact the team leader.
Silence was always bad news.
After several more unsuccessful attempts, he ripped off his headset. He and Webber couldn’t leave the bird, but Taggart and Cooper could.
“Go,” he told them, knowing he couldn’t stop them if he wanted to. Both had already locked and loaded their M-4s. “Keep commo open.”
He watched from inside the cockpit as the two men in full camo gear sprinted in the direction the team had taken, then disappeared from sight in the inky black night. Webber climbed behind the mini, just in case.
Long minutes passed. Mike repeatedly checked his watch. Swore. Waited. Watched. Then caught his breath when the two men emerged out of the dark fifteen minutes later.
“The sonofabitches have them. All of them.” Taggart’s voice was thick with anger and alarm.
“What are we up against?” Mike already assumed that since they’d come back alone, they were looking at big numbers of Taliban fighters. Too big for two men to engage.
He swallowed hard when they told him.
“We can’t leave them there.” Cooper’s face was set hard with determination. “They’ve got them on their knees in the middle of the village square, rifles pointed at their heads.”
Mike told himself that American hostages made good bargaining chips; they’d be foolish to shoot them. On the other hand, dead Americans also added fuel to the radical zealots’ fires.
There was no telling what they would do to them.
He got on the radio again. “I repeat,” he said, attempting to contain his anger after relaying the gravity of the situation and being told to stand down until the base commander could be contacted. “Situation critical. Request permission to engage. Over.”
When the orders finally came down, he was sure he’d heard wrong. They were to return to the FOB. “Say again. Over.”