Terminal Impact

by Charles Henderson

  “Of course not,” Liberty said.

  “You heading there now?” Cesare asked.

  “Closing up Ray-Dean’s apartment as we speak,” Liberty said. “We’ve got what we need for now.”

  “Look, I’ll head to the club myself,” Cesare said.

  “Oh, I think we have it covered,” Liberty said. “But if you really want to help. By all means. Join us.”

  “Thirty minutes?” Cesare said.

  “Probably less,” Liberty said.

  —

  High in a window overlooking the Baghdad Country Club a block away, Ken with the face tattoo lay on a table atop a Remington model 700 custom sniper rifle chambered to shoot the standard Russian 7.62-by-54-millimeter rimmed Dragunov sniper-rifle round. George sat in a chair by the table, watching the front door of the saloon where Ray-Dean Blevins, Freddie Stein, and Gary Frank had gone two hours ago, getting snot-slinging, commode-hugging drunk.

  When the phone rang, George with the Nazi SS neck tattoo answered, “Yeah.”

  “You remember what we talked about at my office?” Cesare Alosi said.

  The big guy with the shaved head wiped sweat off of it and had to think.

  Ken looked away from the scope on the sniper rifle, and said, “Come on, George. You know. After we took those civilians to the airport. We went to the office and talked about stuff.”

  “Oh yeah,” George said. “That?”

  “Yeah,” Cesare said. Then added, “Are you where you said you’d be?”

  “Were we supposed to be someplace else?” George said.

  “Look,” Cesare said, “I have no doubt that right now our communications are anything but private, much less even resembling secure. Do you understand?”

  “So, we shouldn’t talk about what we talked about?” George asked.

  “Not even,” Ken grumbled, rolling on his side on the table. “You’re dumber than a fucking lamp, George.”

  He grabbed the cell phone from his partner.

  “Boss,” Ken said. “The mission’s a go?”

  “Yes!” Cesare said, relieved. “Be quick. You have less than twenty minutes.”

  “It’s all good, boss,” Ken said. “We did a little prep work, just in case it was a go. You know?”

  “Very good,” Alosi said, smiling. “Very good indeed. You’ve got the green light on the mission.”

  Chris Gray had listened to Alosi’s phone calls for days, and to his henchmen just now. He grabbed his driver at the CIA office in the embassy and headed out. On the run to Baghdad Country Club, he called Liberty Cruz.

  “Two hours ago, I got a call from Ajax. Blevins and his crew arrived at the club, drinking hard,” Gray said. “Just now, I’m monitoring Alosi’s phone, and he gives a crew of enforcers a green light on executing a mission they’d talked about shortly after the civilian shootings. Fair warning. Ears up, eyes open. Something’s going down.”

  “We’re nearly there now,” Liberty said, Bob Hartley zigging and zagging through Green Zone traffic, the female agent in the backseat of a government GMC Denali, hidden by black, bullet-resistant glass. “You think they’ll try something against us? Surely not!”

  “Actually, I was thinking old Cooder and the boys,” Gray said. “If Alosi’s guilty, I’m betting that Blevins and Frank-n-Stein can nail him. Especially now that you recovered the missing copy of the op plan and the thumb drive. Dead men tell no tales.”

  “About that missing copy,” Liberty said. “The one we found in Blevins’s apartment is a copy of the missing original. Made on a machine you find in any office here.”

  “Maybe Cooder passed off the original, for the cash. Kept a copy as a backup to sell to the next bidder,” Gray said.

  “Who knows?” Cruz said. “It’s not the original, but it’s incriminating for Blevins. I want to hear what he says.”

  “You better step on it then,” Gray said. “I’ve got a hunch that Cooder and his boys may not live much longer.”

  “We’re five minutes out,” Liberty said.

  “Look in the mirror,” Gray said. “Right behind you.”

  —

  Cesare kept punching the speed dial on his built-in car phone as he raced to the Baghdad Country Club. “Come on, Blevins! Answer!” he yelled, dodging between traffic.

  Just then, a slurry Ray-Dean finally got tired of hearing his smartphone buzz on the saloon table and picked it up. “What the fuck now? You piece of shit!”

  “Thank God!” Alosi said. “We’ve had our differences, Ray, but I’m warning you. Get out of there now! I’ll explain later. You have to leave right this second!”

  “What the fuck are you babbling about, you greasy maggot,” Ray-Dean said.

  “Yeah, you’re a fucking piece of shit off the bottom of the shit pond, Alosi,” a good and drunk Fred Stein added.

  Gary Frank sat there silent. He thought he might wangle his job back. After all, he persisted on telling everyone, he had only followed orders. Just drove the car. He never fired a shot.

  “You’ve got a crew of FBI agents maybe three minutes from the club!” Cesare yelled on his speaker as he drove his Escalade several cars behind Liberty and Gray, spotting them now and keeping them both in sight.

  “What for?” Ray-Dean said.

  “To arrest your dumb ass!” Cesare shouted, his face beet red and the blood veins bulging on his forehead.

  “They got no jurisdiction,” Blevins argued.

  “They do for treason,” Alosi came back.

  Freddie Stein heard the word “treason,” and it sent him running out of the club. He jumped in the backseat of their team’s Escalade and locked the doors.

  “Let me in!” Gary Frank screamed outside, yanking on the door handle. He had bolted on Stein’s heels. Then he saw the FBI Denali jump the curb outside the outer garden that surrounded the Baghdad Country Club and watched it slide sideways on the edge of the parking lot.

  Chris Gray came in behind them, skidding to a stop, too.

  Cesare Alosi guided his Cadillac carefully over the curb and parked behind the two embassy cars, well away from where Ray-Dean had left the Malone-Leyva Escalade, just a few feet from the blue-stucco building with the big darkened plate-glass picture window and blue neon sign in it.

  Gary Frank took off running, heading for the trees and hedges that hid Baghdad Country Club from the Islamic society offices next door.

  Ray-Dean made a dash for his car but had only made two steps out of the country club’s front door when his Escalade exploded in a mushroom of orange-and-white fire.

  Car doors flew two directions, and the roof went straight up. The hood was torn off its hinges and sailed through the blue-stucco building’s picture window, destroying the blue neon sign and taking out most of the tables and chairs across the center of the nightclub.

  Luckily, no one inside died. They had all hit the floor when Freddie and Gary tore out of the room and on their heels Ray-Dean screamed on the phone at Alosi, “You double-crossing son of a bitch! I’ll make you pay!”

  When Ray-Dean had run out of the bar, he caught a faceful of energy from the explosion, blowing him off his feet and sending him skidding across the gravel parking area.

  Gary Frank had made it to the trees, successfully pissed his pants, then instantly died when the first sniper shot split his head in half.

  Ray-Dean staggered to his feet, saw Cesare Alosi running toward him, behind Liberty Cruz and Chris Gray. He tried to run to them as well, but Ken with the face tattoo put a Russian-made bullet into his heart.

  His third and fourth shots just missed Cesare, Chris, and Liberty. They ran for cover while George and Ken gathered their gear and left the rimmed Russian sniper-rifle shell casings behind.

  —

  Midafternoon, Jack awoke, stewing in his own sweat. The camouflage sheet he had spr
ead over his hiding hole, blending him with the rocks and the Alhagi camelthorns, made him invisible unless a person walked directly over him, but it also trapped the heat. Not a breath of a breeze stirred in the sweltering afternoon, and that just made things worse.

  He took out his second bottle of water since he had lain down and emptied it in his mouth.

  “I hope I don’t end up having to drink my own piss,” he said to himself, saving the empty bottle with two others.

  Jack knew not to starve himself on food or water. He needed to keep his energy and vitality at a high peak if he expected to survive the long walk through the desert. When people trying to survive limit their water and food intake to below minimums, they fall weak and die. One thing he learned in survival training, focus on finding food and water at all times while pressing onward to the objective. He counted on finding water and food sources along the trek and taking what he needed from them. They were out here. He just had to see them. If the travelers of old could do it, so could Jack Valentine.

  Just as he had started to pull out some food to nibble from an open package of Meals Ready to Eat, Jack heard the roar of a truck engine. When he raised his head to see, a tire spun by his face, and the greasy underbody of a Toyota pickup truck went flying over his head.

  “Shit!” he said, putting his head out to see if the passing vehicle simply had run past him or its riders had seen him.

  A quarter mile away, the blue pickup truck with a gunman in the back, carrying an AK rifle, made a spinning donut turn, shooting dirt sky-high as he came back around.

  “They saw me,” Jack grumbled to himself, taking his Vigilance rifle and putting the crosshairs on the driver, now bearing down on him. “I shouldn’t have looked. They saw me when I stuck my head out. They were going away, and dumb-ass me, I had to look.”

  At a hundred yards and closing, Jack’s shot killed the driver, and the truck turned sideways. It shot up in the air, flipping like a football kicked for a field goal. The passenger managed to stay inside, but the rider in the back went bouncing across the world, his arms and legs snapping and his head twisted on his neck like a rag.

  The tumbling wreck came straight at Jack, and he lay flat in his hole as it passed overhead and stopped rolling fifty feet behind him.

  Somehow, the passenger inside managed to survive it all. He crawled from the wreck moaning. Then he saw Gunny Valentine standing, his hand reaching down his leg for the pistol strapped there.

  The Haji had a broken leg. When he tried to stand and aim his AK rifle at the Marine, the bone folded below the knee. He went down hard but still kept going for his gun.

  “Fuck, dude,” Jack said, pulling out his Lippard .45 and taking aim. He squeezed off a 230-grain flat-nose hardball into the guy’s head. “It just ain’t your day.”

  _ 13 _

  “You’re free to go,” Liberty Cruz told a haggard, disheveled, stinking-body-odor, dirty-underwear, ragged-out Cesare Alosi as she took manacles from his hands and feet that chained him to a chair bolted to the gray-concrete floor with a curious drain in the center. There were no water faucets in here, nor a showerhead.

  Chris Gray typed in the unlock code on the keypad outside that opened the steel door to the secure interview room at Camp Liberty, on the north side of Camp Victory joint military headquarters, letting Cesare walk out with Liberty and Bob Hartley behind him. Tucked among rows of hundreds of similar nondescript block-shaped white modular buildings, the CIA took interesting people here for long, often persuasive periods of discussion about all they knew.

  A tight-lipped secret, the place had no flags or signs nor anything else to set the CIA annex apart from all the other hundreds of identical refrigerator-like modules, except for the number stenciled in black paint on each corner, and some bombproof steel doors with special locks. The Camp Liberty complex provided Chris Gray and Speedy Espinoza a snug place outside prying eyes and ears to do their dirty work and prepare for other dark jobs. Their CIA teams could also come here unnoticed, store gear, shower, hit the rack in the dozen adjoining sleeping modules, watch television, relax, or drink a beer or two undisturbed. Iraqi counterparts could also bring clients here with black bags on their heads, and no one paid attention or cared.

  For the FBI special-weapons-and-tactics team, and their leader, Agent Cruz, it provided the perfect spot to turn a few screws, if needed, plot and plan, and not have to tell a soul about it. Gray extended the invitation to use the facility right after he concluded that Liberty Cruz and her boys could play hardball on anybody’s team.

  The compound’s location also gave Liberty the added benefit of being close to the joint-military-command headquarters, where she daily checked on the status of Jack Valentine. There, she could speak directly with Black Bart Roberts over the resecured command voice network, getting his reassuring updates. Gunny Valentine was his friend, too, in the way that colonels and gunnery sergeants can be professional and share a strong, long-lasting friendship.

  Liberty had wanted to tell Jack’s mom and dad about him missing, and tell her parents, too. But Roberts forbade it.

  “We will only worry them with our not knowing a thing,” the colonel explained. “More importantly, anxious parents who fear that the enemy has their sons often try to reach out to them on their own, and appeal for mercy via the news media, who are all too enthusiastic to help, for their own selfish interests. Jack’s life greatly depends on the enemy’s not knowing he’s out there.”

  “I understand,” Liberty agreed. So she bit her tongue and did not discuss Jack Valentine with anyone, not her team and not even with Chris Gray, her new best friend.

  Work and focus on Cesare Alosi took her mind off her missing Marine. She spent day and night at the CIA modular offices. So did her crew. They liked it here better than the Green Zone apartments in town.

  They had spirited Cesare to Camp Liberty right after Ray-Dean and his boys got theirs, under the guise of protective custody, should anyone up the chain ask questions. If what Alosi had claimed was true, that al-Qaeda or the Iraqi police, or both, wanted retribution for the slaughter of the thirty-five civilians in the protected International Zone, and that’s why they killed the men responsible, then the killers might also want to get even with the dead men’s boss.

  Cesare could do nothing but cooperate.

  Bob Hartley took agents Runyan and Towler to the airport right after the shootings and car bombing at Baghdad Country Club, looking for George and Ken, where Cesare said he had sent them. He had supposedly given them a green light to hunt a sniper outside the KBR terminal at Camp Fallujah.

  The FBI agents did in fact find the two skinheads, rifles and kits with them, mounting a Malone-Leyva black Jet Ranger helicopter with the silver M-L and Scorpion logo on its side, about to depart for Fallujah. The agents inspected their weapons. Nothing dirty, all clean, oiled, ready for service. Both men freshly washed, too.

  Runyan got on the phone with the dispatcher at the KBR terminal and he confirmed that Malone-Leyva had contracted with their company to take care of security, and the ongoing sniper problem that not only took its toll on trucks and drivers but took an increasing number of Marines and soldiers patrolling from Camp Fallujah and Camp Ramadi, too. He complained about their delay. Hartley disconnected the call in midsentence of the KBR dispatcher’s rant.

  Liberty slapped a set of handcuffs on Alosi as soon as he opened his mouth to whine. Poor Ray-Dean Blevins and bed-wetting Gary Frank still quivered in the dirt, as Freddie Stein lay scattered in pieces with the car. Cesare immediately sang his song about the Iraqis wanting to get even, and that’s why they must have murdered the crew.

  “Bullshit!” Liberty said as she clamped the bracelets as hard as she could squeeze them on Alosi’s wrists.

  “You put them on too tight! That hurts!” Cesare wailed.

  “That’s because they’re new,” Liberty popped back. “Wear them awhile. T
hey’ll stretch out.”

  Chris Gray took Miz Cruz aside while Bob Hartley shoved the squirmy little dirtbag into the backseat of the CIA Denali, so they could head to the airport and before Iraqi security forces got there to make things more difficult.

  “You have no jurisdiction,” Gray reminded her, taking Liberty aside. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do with him? And what about Jason Kendrick?”

  “No!” Liberty said. “And jurisdiction can kiss my ass. You know and I know he had those guys murdered before I had a chance to talk to them or protect them. Fuck the rules. Fuck Kendrick. I want Alosi’s head on a pike!”

  “In Iraq, we do things differently,” the CIA operator said. “No jurisdiction? No court to back you up? No problem. In the States, no evidence, as in our case, you let him go. Here, the CIA can take any asshole off the street for any phony-baloney reason we hatch up. Hold him as long as we need or until we get bored, or the son of a bitch dies. Worst case, we at least make Cesare sweat his balls off.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Liberty asked.

  “I’ve got his conversations with his people, ordering the hit, recorded,” Gray said. “We can let him listen to himself giving the green light for a while, until it sinks in good and deep. Then we let him listen to the recording of him calling Ray-Dean on his car phone. He didn’t think we had that number. But I’m the CIA. I got your number. Maybe we scare him. Say we’ll give him to the Iraqi national security cops.”

  Liberty smiled and looked at Alosi sitting smugly on his hands in the backseat of the Denali. “Even though we can’t really give him to the Iraqis, I’d enjoy pressing the sneaky bastard. Watch him squirm.”

  She looked back at Gray. “Honestly, though? I don’t think he’s going to say a thing. He’s getting away with espionage, murder, the whole thing, and he knows it.”

  “So, we have a few days’ fun torturing the smug little motherfucker. See how he likes the taste of his own shit,” Gray said. “Junkyard justice.”

  Liberty laughed and looked back at Alosi. “Fuck yeah.”