by Jim Magwood
“Sarge?” he questioned again.
“Yeah, heard you. Yeah, I might know what you talkin’ ‘bout. Wouldn’t be the old ones, though, from the war. Would be someone since. Younger. Lots more of them since ‘Nam, doin’ stuff and hiding. Guys from ‘Nam old like me, in their 60’s and such. Too old to do stuff. Just livin’ out, like me. But a lot of other guys trained now and still workin’.”
“Who are they working for, Sarge?”
“Workin’ for folks like you, cops and such. Government. CIA, maybe. Always did, back then. CIA used a lot of them. Army, too. Had work to do and not many could do it. Point these guys the right direction an’ turn ‘em loose. Get the jobs done easy. Use ‘em was right, though. Kick ‘em out when finished with ‘em and jes’ let ‘em rot. Lots of ‘em went and got jobs of they’re own, doing the same stuff, jes’ for somebody else. Lots of folks need stuff done. Hire the right guys to do it.”
“How would I go about finding some of these guys now, Sarge? They tend to hang around someplace? Could I ask someone else to find them for me?”
“Yeah,” Sarge chuckled. “They hang ‘round all right. Maybe go to a big spook convention ever’ year. Downtown in the big hotel, huh? Bring in fancy food, dance to some big band, drink to mornin’.” Then he laughed hard for a moment. “Yeah, send you right down to the convention, let you ask around. Yeah.”
Paul just waited. He knew there was absolutely no use pushing this guy. He would speak what he wanted, when he wanted. So he just sat quietly.
“Ain’t no way you gonna find him. He might find you, but you can’t see nobody unless they wanna be seen. You bes’ jus’ go home now. Let this go, otherwise you maybe gonna get hurt.”
“Sarge, you know I can’t let this go. We’ve got people getting hurt and schools burning. Can’t just walk away from that. We’ve got to follow this stuff and stop it. I really would appreciate your help on this. Can you give me any ideas?”
“Yep. Keep your head down. Thas a good idea. Thas a real good idea.” He paused for a moment, then continued, “Maybe I look around, though. Maybe.”
Paul could see Sage was getting very nervous and figured the interview was about over, so he asked, “Could I come back out and see you again, Sarge?”
“You found me once. Maybe find me again? Yeah, maybe.”
Paul saw Sarge look quickly to the building behind Paul, so he also looked that direction. Nothing moving, but when he looked back, Sarge was gone. Vanished. He jumped to his feet and took a couple of steps toward the brush, but there was no sign of the old man. There was a lot of brush down the train line, so Paul wasn’t surprised, but was still amazed at the old man disappearing so quickly.
He heard steps coming up behind him and turned to see Jake and Sylvia coming quickly toward him. He didn’t have much of a description to give them: just a guy about late 50’s or 60’s, lots of hair and beard, gray, old, but surprisingly clean clothes. White, with lots of outdoor tan on the skin he could see. And the language: while there was lots of slang and broken words, he was struck that it might either be a put on or that Sarge was actually fairly well educated and had just fallen into using street slang.
He gave the team a rundown on what Sarge had said about the ghosts, or spooks, or demons, his feeling that the old man actually might know something or someone, and that he might be able to see him again.
After considerable discussion of what had been learned and how it all might play out in their investigation, the trio got back to the car and headed toward the station.
CHAPTER 47
As Paul was driving home that night, his mind was constantly returning to Sarge. Should he try to run down the man? How might he fit in the proceedings they were working on? Did he actually know anything or anybody in all of this or was he just a bystander?
And a separate thought was whether the demons might actually be real. They were likely called by a lot of different names. Demons appeared to be one that had been ascribed to them by the Vietcong during the war, but it meant the same thing to Paul: a secret group that had likely started back during the Vietnam era and had then continued, maybe even to the present, as a for-hire bunch of highly trained men who killed people, possibly even for the government. He had heard and read about these men, mostly rumors and usually just in novels, but if they were real (which he didn’t doubt), could they, or one of them, be behind the incidents that were taking place?
But then the big question came back to mind: Why? What could have caused them to do these things? Sarge had used the phrase, Use ‘em was right, though. Kick ‘em out when finished with ‘em and jes’ let ‘em rot. Was it possibly one person, though maybe even a group of them, that had gotten upset at being kicked out to live or die on their own and had begun to hire themselves out? Or was it someone else using them now? Did someone else have a grudge and had they found these people and hired them to solve problems?
Then another thought came crashing through. Could someone in the government, a person or an agency, still be using the ghost killers to solve political problems? Paul was not a subscriber to conspiracy theories, but what if? While Senator Marks was not one of his cases, at least not directly, could the senator have run afoul of some political opponents, or even an administration that had decided he was better off out of the way? Could…
But then he came back to the schools. What would political battles have to do with schools? Why would some disgruntled politician want to burn schools? To kill someone who responded?
But his mind jumped again. Could it all come down to budgets? Could some local politician want more money for his local area and be… But that just couldn’t be. Nobody would be that corrupt. Or would they?
Paul made the decision to put all the local politicians for the D.C. areas of the burned schools into the computer search and see if anything came up, however wild the thought.
He was pondering the possibilities while turning into his street when suddenly his car seemed to be pounded and it shook severely. His mind quickly said, earthquake, a remnant of his San Francisco days, but then the explosion immediately following said gunshot. Again the car was pounded and shook, and this time he was sprayed with glass from the right rear window as it exploded inward.
An alley appeared to his left just a few feet ahead, and his instant reaction was to swerve into it. The tires screamed with the violent action and the rear of the car swung to the side, but he barely got the nose into the alley and began to accelerate ahead.
Suddenly the rear window exploded and he was again showered with glass. He saw the bullet cause a huge hole in the dash barely to the right of him and knew the slug had missed him by only a foot or so. He continued to power ahead and by the middle of the block, no more shots reached him. He slid out into the street he came to, swung to the roadside and frantically called for help. Then he just sat for a minute while the adrenaline coursed through him.
He was shaking wildly and the sweat was pouring off him. He couldn’t bring his mind to focus on what to do. Part of him knew he should go around the block to see if he could pursue the shooter, but another part of him wouldn’t let him move. All he could think, could focus on, was, Why? and Who?
Finally, as he heard sirens coming to the area and officers calling to find his exact location, he began to regain his composure. He called to broadcast his situation and to direct the arriving troops on how to secure the area, then threw the car into gear and roared around the block to the attack site. Had he actually, personally been attacked, or was it possibly just some crazy popping off at anything that moved? He didn’t know if any other shots had been fired, but knew there were at least three that had hit his car and likely didn’t go elsewhere. Hopefully no one else had been hurt.
As he reached the spot where he had been fired upon, he saw a police car coming around the opposite end of the street, then a second. He quickly stopped and grabbed his badge to flash as the cars got to him. They needed to know who he was so they wouldn’t react hastily. As they slid to a sto
p, he ran to them, holding his badge high. The other officers were quickly, but cautiously, getting out of their cars and he began to direct them to positions across the street and around the facing block to hopefully contain the shooter. As they got his name and recognized he was one of them, they jumped back into the cars and screeched away to the spots he had directed.
Two more cars came sliding around the street corners and he cleared himself with them and directed them into strategic positions. He heard his radio calling and got back to his car. Sylvia was calling, her voice frantic.
“Paul. Where are you? What happened? Are you all right?”
He quickly briefer her and allayed her fears. She was only about a mile away and coming fast. Right behind her transmission, Jake called in. He was half way across town, but was also coming at full speed. Paul slowed both of them down for safety, then turned back to his duties at the scene.
He looked across the street where the shots would have had to come from, and didn’t see anything obvious. Just homes on a simple residential street—with an alley opposite the one he had turned into. He drove ahead to get directly in front of it, and saw a squad car turning into it from the other end. It started slowly down the lane with the spotlight flashing back and forth. He hung his arm out the window facing them and again held his badge where they would see it when they got close. Then he leaned across to the glove compartment and got the bubble light out and slapped it onto the top of his car. That would keep everyone a little more relaxed seeing the unmarked car ahead of them.
The squad cars came down the alley and from around the block, lights flashing, but seeing nothing. They all reported in to him, then started out again, circling the blocks further out. The duty sergeant had arrived and after about half an hour of searching, the sergeant called off most of the search and sent the officers back to the streets. Jake and Sylvia had arrived and were working the scene with Paul. Another detective team had been sent to officially take over the investigation as Paul and his team were too close to the action, so the trio huddled together and tried to talk through what had happened.
Paul couldn’t tell them anything except what he had actually experienced. They found the bullet holes in the car, which would be thoroughly checked by the investigators back downtown. The apparent first shot had gone into the right quarter-panel just behind the right rear window, then through the upper part of the back seat and into the back door down behind Paul. The second one had gone through the right rear window and into the lower back of the driver’s seat. It had narrowly missed driving into Paul’s back.
The third shot had come through the rear window, through the back of Paul’s seat, missing him by only a few inches, and had slammed through the floorboards. The car would need major repairs, but was still drivable.
“Paul, look at these angles,” Jake said. “All three of them come from higher elevations than here. The first one came through near the roofline, then ended down here in the door. This one came through the window and down into the back of your seat. And the third came through the top of the back window and down through your seat and on into the floor. All three came down, not flat like from directly across the street.”
All three of the detectives turned to face the opposite side of the street and looked up at a slight angle. The only thing they could see over the houses on the other side was one structure—a flat roofed building that appeared to be about two blocks away, with lighted windows from an apparent upper story, maybe two showing.
Paul jumped back into the car and radioed the location to headquarters and immediately heard officers being directed to check the site.
“It has to be there, Paul. There’s nowhere else around here with any angle for these shots,” Sylvia said.
“But that’s a long shot, guys. And if it was me he was shooting at, how could he possibly tell me from anyone else? That’s got to be some kind of a big weapon, and some kind of knowledge of who he was after, if it was me and not just some kind of a wild shot.”
When the officers at the building radioed in that they found signs from the shooter on the roof of the building, Paul’s mind immediately flashed, The roof. The same as at the first school fire. Shooting from a roof a good, safe distance away. But definitely a long shot. And why me? He explained his thoughts to his team and the other detectives.
Jake’s comment to end the bizarre night was, “Paul, this has definitely taken on a new direction and impact. We need to talk this over in depth and figure some things out quick. We’ve got problems if this thing is related to the others.” “No, there’s nothing. Whoever pulled this is good. So far, we haven’t got track one, and we don’t have a clue to even get us started looking for clues.”
Ed Mason was the Director of the FBI and he was on the phone to Frank Maine of the Secret Service. Both men were more than a little concerned with both the attack on the Federal Reserve and the barrage of e-mail attacks on the political people. The accusations and confusion had died down to a degree, but the public was still clamoring and the heat was definitely on from the White House.
“Ed, do you have any thoughts yourself? Nothing official, just your own thinking? If these people can get through security like they have, and can lay such believable trails, what else can they do? We’ve tightened up around the family here and several of the other high level people, but we can only go so far without declaring an emergency. Even then, we can only hold a position like that for a short time before the whole world will be coming apart.”
“I know what you’re saying, Frank. I’ve got the same problem here. We’ve got all the big guns running, but there’s just nothing. The only thing we’ve found is a very few places where there was a trail left. At a couple of the banks involved, and a couple of the people who got the e-mail attacks, we found traces where somebody went into the files and made changes and didn’t entirely erase all their tracks. There was nothing to follow, almost nothing there, but at least we found some traces. But nothing that put any fingerprints on anything.
“And, no. I don’t have any personal thoughts. There’s just nothing to hang a hat on at all. I can guess and speculate, but it’s just throwing ideas into the wind. And the wind’s blowing all the ideas back in my face so far.”
“I would guess you’ve got all the trackers in the sky searching e-mails and stuff? I remember that group just a bit ago that got busted plotting some kind of massive invasion with possible massive weapons, WMDs, against parts of the government. I don’t remember exactly—Wisconsin or some place. You guys caught them before they did anything, but some kind of religious militia group. Could it be someone like that? And, is it possible to find them all? If they were able to walk in here with some kind of weapon… Or fire something from across town… We couldn’t stop it.”
“Yeah, I know. That group was just that—some religious nuts getting ready for the end and all. They were going to kill some officer, then take out a group of them at the funeral. Were likely going to use homemade explosives from the messages we intercepted. We got them through catching their emails, but with this thing, there’s just nothing so far. All I can say right now is to button down the best you can and stay awake. We’re chasing everything we can, but until we get some bit of a lead, we can’t go anywhere. I’ve got every undercover I’ve got digging for information. Just nothing so far.”
“Okay. We’re tight over here, but keep in touch, okay? My man doesn’t want to cut back any plans, but even he’s getting a little nervous. Doesn’t want to show it, but facts are facts. Somehow we’ve got to stop this thing.”
“I’ll definitely keep in touch, Frank. I know you’re a praying guy, so send up a few for us, okay. That we can get a handle on this quick.”
“Will do, Ed. Definitely will do.”
Roger Evans had taken time off from his business in Vancouver and traveled to the cabin at Bistcho Lake. The business ran well without him and he often laughed when he considered how much vacation he was able to take. He would usually fly
his own plane in to a small landing strip at Tapawingo Lodge on the north end of the lake or hire a bush pilot to land on the lake. Steve and Debbie from the lodge knew him and kept his horse and pack mule while he was gone. Then he would ride down the shore for a few miles to his place. Tapawingo, in the native language, meant “Place of Joy,” and his lodge was all that to him. He had tried to name the place some years before, but finally decided there was no need. It was just his place of peace.
And, it was his computer home away from home. He had a full computer system, powered by his solar and generator systems, which could keep up with his system in Vancouver. It was linked to Vancouver, so if he ever needed extra resources, he could simply run through Vancouver and link to the full capabilities of his business there.
Now he was trying to make some sense of the reports he had received from the search he had run. He had loaded all the materials Paul sent him and started a worldwide search to see if anything, anywhere, matched. While there were thousands of matches for the news office, the schools and so on, nothing was popping out with flags waving. Nothing that linked the items together to create a trail. The one thing that did make links was Paul’s references to Sarge and the ghosts and demons.
There were many pages of text that talked about the underground warriors of the Vietnam era and since. Several of them spoke of the activities of the secret armies in fairly recent times, but none of them could be truly labeled as factual. Most of them were in the categories of rumors, fictional novels and conspiracy theories. No official sources authenticated any of the theories; many bluntly denied them. But, there were enough of the rumors and stories that gave a sense of credibility behind them.
Roger thought of his friend, Jacob Asch from Israel, and quickly decided to send him an e-mail to see if he knew anything about the subject. With Jacob’s long experience in the Mossad and undercover work, he as well as anyone should know something. He tried to compose a message that was at least a little cryptic, but hopefully still understandable on Jacob’s end.