by Jack Hardin
A door squeaked open on the other end of the floor and slammed shut. Teapot made his way toward us, his hands grasping the handles of several plastic bags.
“Dinner’s up!” he said, and set the bags down on the makeshift table. Everyone stood up and rummaged through them, selecting what they wanted and digging out a plastic fork before taking their seats again. I grabbed a beer from the pail, popped the tab, and handed it to Teapot.
“Thanks, brother. I’ve got lemon chicken, sweet and sour pork, or General Tso’s chicken.”
“Lemon chicken will do.”
“You got it.” He handed me a styrofoam container and a fork. I pulled back the lid to find a dish that looked exactly like something I could get at any Chinese restaurant in the States: strips of fried chicken, a pile of fried rice, and a side container filled with an unnaturally bright yellow sauce whose main ingredient was certainly high fructose corn syrup.
We all dug in, and Teacup spoke around a mouthful of food. “You guys know how General Tso’s chicken got named after the good general?”
Chachi rolled his eyes. “Nope. But I have a feeling we’re about to find out.”
“The real General Tso was a statesman and military leader from the Qing Dynasty, lived sometime in the 1800s. The funny thing is that no one is sure how his name got tied in with this sweet fried dish. Nothing resembling it was a thing when the good general’s army was suppressing the Nian Rebellion. And another problem among culinary historians is that no one can agree who first invented the recipe. Whether it was a chef in Taiwan or a Chinese immigrant chef who cooked for a restaurant called Shun Lee Palace in New York City back in the ’70s. It’s like a serious feud.”
“I think you might have missed your calling as a culinary historian,” Granger said. “Geez,” he muttered. “I didn’t even know that was a thing. How do you know all this?”
“Watched a documentary on it. ‘The Search for General Tso.’ Pretty interesting.”
“Teacup,” Boomer said, “you are full of more worthless information than anyone I know.”
Teacup jabbed his fork in Boomer’s direction. “But now you know about General Tso, and the next time you eat Chinese with someone, you’re going to feel superior to them. Tell me you’ll be able to resist the urge to tell them what you know about General Tso.”
Bommer grinned and shook his head. “Damn if I think you’re right.”
I took another pull on my beer. “Boomer, you said you played tight end for the Bulldogs?”
“Indeed. Junior and senior years.”
“Then he got picked up in the twelfth round of the NFL draft,” Granger said.
“No kidding,” I said. “You played pro ball?”
“Nearly. I was selected by the Vikings, and my agent started working through the contract details with the team. That night, I was sitting in a bar wearing my new purple jersey, celebrating with my family when I got a call that one of my childhood buddies was killed in Afghanistan.” Boomer shook his head. “I left the celebrations early and went for a long walk through New York City. By the time I got back to my hotel room, I had decided on a different route. Next day, I told my agent thanks but no thanks and found a recruiter’s office.”
“A Pat Tillman move.”
Boomer nodded. “Tillman is a hero of mine. I mean that in every sense of the word. He gave up the fullness of the American dream and ultimately laid it all on the line. To me, that is the very definition of honor.”
Pat Tillman had played four seasons with the Arizona Cardinals as a defensive lineman. After the September 11th attacks, he turned down an almost four-million-dollar contract extension with the Cards and joined the Army. At the time, his brother was playing minor league ball for the Indians’ organization and, along with Pat, left that behind to serve his country. The brothers went through basic training together, and both went on to complete Ranger Indoctrination School before being assigned to the 2nd Ranger Battalion. Soon after, Pat was deployed to Afghanistan, where he paid the ultimate price in a firefight.
“Football taught me the love of the fight,” Boomer continued. “At the end of the day, that’s all football is—war. Albeit a different kind. After seeing my childhood buddy give his all, I realized I couldn’t spend my life playing on artificial turf. I had to get on a real battlefield.” He shrugged. “That’s about the sum of it.”
I raised my beer to him. “I admire that. And all of you, in fact. Americans will never know what you do day in and day out for their safety. And I know you don’t need them to. But because you’re out here fighting in the shadows, the enemy is forced to stay on his toes, wherever he might be.”
Teacup raised his bottle. “De Oppresso Liber.” The motto of the U.S. Army Special Forces: “To Free the Oppressed.”
“De oppresso liber,” everyone chimed.
After dinner, Granger returned to his computer and continued to coordinate the flow of information with JSOC. I knocked out an extended series of pushups and situps in an attempt to burn off the nervous energy that came from waiting and doing nothing. Darkness finally settled, and I made my way to my cot. Each of us had his own space between a row of privacy curtains, and Boomer had set me up with a spot near the rear wall. I was unlacing my shoes when my phone rang. It was Charlotte.
“Hey,” she said. “Any progress out there?”
It was good to hear her voice. “A little. Nothing actionable right now. We’re in a holding pattern until something useful shows itself.”
“How are you holding up?”
“Fine. But knowing that Kathleen isn’t is wearing on me.”
“She’s tough, Ryan. You know that. Whatever someone wants with her, I’m sure she can hold out until you find her.”
I opened my mouth to tell Charlotte about finding one of Kathleen’s kidnappers murdered but then thought better of it. “How’s Zoe doing?”
She sighed into the phone. “Not well. I told her to stay home from school today. I’ll probably let her stay back tomorrow too. She doesn’t know what to do with herself. I can’t say that I blame her.”
“Yeah.”
“Look, get some sleep. I have a feeling you’re going to need it. I love you. Be safe over there.”
“I love you too.”
I have yet to sleep on a cot that doesn’t feel like a suspended slab of concrete. I laid there trying in vain to find a comfortable position and clear my head. I kept running back through every angle, every possibility, looking for anything we might have missed. I knew we hadn’t, that plenty of other people were working to find some thread we could pull, but it didn’t feel right trying to sleep with Kathleen still out there somewhere.
And there was an entirely different matter that I was still trying to digest: the newfound facts surrounding the death of my parents.
My mother and father died when I was five years old, and for my entire life since, I had been told that it had been due to a car accident. They had been on vacation in Europe, and Dad had been driving through the French countryside during a rainstorm when he was sideswiped by a delivery truck that had lost control. Their car ejected off the road and landed head on into a tree, killing both of them instantly.
That was what I had always believed. It was the narrative I’d been fed.
But it was a lie, and I never knew any different until just a few days ago.
Last week, while I was running across South America, trying to bring the mission Jonathan Watts had given me to a conclusion, I stumbled into a mercenary army deep in the jungles of Brazil. Their leader was an American named Daniel Lasseter, and before he escorted Brad and me onto a cargo plane headed for Rio, Lasseter pulled me to the side, sat me down on a fallen log at the edge of the jungle, and confessed to being the reason that my parents had died over thirty years ago.
As Lasseter relayed it, my parents had indeed been on vacation in Paris. But my mother, who everyone thought worked for the State Department, was actually a CIA officer. My father had been the only one who
knew the truth of her real profession.
At the time, Lasseter was a young CIA officer riding a desk at a black site in Paris, and one of his field agents had intercepted a data packet from the Russians. Per protocol, they left it at a drop site, but no Paris-based agents were available to retrieve it. Langley knew that my mother was currently in Paris for some leisure time, so they had Lasseter reach out to her and to ask her to retrieve the packet and get it out of the open.
This was in the early ’90s, at a time when the Cold War was ending. Publicly, it was thawing, but behind the scenes, spying between the two countries was no different than it had been. Neither country trusted each other—a sentiment that exists even to the present.
My mother agreed to the operation. She left her hotel room early that morning and made the trip across the city. A lack of time and minimal operational details put Lasseter in a position of being unable to plan the operation effectively, ensuring both its success and my mother’s safety. My mother successfully retrieved the packet but was intercepted soon after she returned to the hotel room, where a Russian agent shot both her and my father in cold blood, recovered the data packet, and disappeared.
Lasseter’s revelation jolted me, left me reeling, and before I could ask him any of the dozens of questions swirling in my head, he died in my arms, in the lobby of a Rio high rise when a rogue bullet intended for the leader of a regional cartel caught him in the neck.
Any easy answers died with him.
Now, I found that I wasn’t so angry that the truth had been withheld from me all this time, as much as I was fuming over the awareness that whoever had murdered my parents was most likely still out there somewhere. My father had missed my ball games, my mother my graduations, not because they had gotten in a freak car accident, but because of someone else’s volition, because someone had singled them out and murdered them.
As soon as we found Kathleen and brought her safely home, I was going to call in every favor and would pull every bureaucratic lever I knew of to get my mother’s file at Langley unsealed. Then I would find out who pulled the trigger on my parents. I wanted a name, a face, an address. I wanted to know if they were still playing for the other team. And then I would pay them a visit.
I was alone with my thoughts until well past midnight, trying to quiet them with little success. In the early hours of the morning, I drifted into sleep.
Chapter Eight
I woke to the sensation of cold metal pressing into the side of my face. My eyes flicked open. I stared at the rafters and froze. There was no mistaking the feel of the business end of a suppressor. Adrenaline kicked my brain into gear faster than a cup of nitro coffee.
“Shhh…” The next words came with a thick Russian accent. “Don’t move.” The suppressor pressed harder into my cheek. “What size shoe do you wear?”
“I—What?”
“You won’t tell me? Okay. Then how many angels can dance on the end of a baseball bat?”
“I—”
Boomer’s groggy voice came from the other side of the privacy curtain. “Knock it off, Teacup. It’s too early.”
I leaned away and turned to get a look at the owner of the gun. The early morning light coming through the dingy window behind my cot was enough to see the humor in Teacup’s face. I sat up on my elbows.
“I get it,” I said. “Hazing the new guy?”
“Nah,” Teacup said, his voice dropping the Russian inflection. “Just having a little fun. I keep telling them to put an Xbox in the joint, but they haven’t done it yet. They’ve got them in at our staging stations in Jordan and Libya. If they don’t get one here soon, I’m going to go out and buy my own.”
“Yeah… You might want to go ahead and do that.”
“He put a grenade in my boot once,” Chachi called over. “Pin pulled and all. Woke me up for a full week.”
Teacup smiled happily. “Yeah. That was a fun one.” He turned and started walking away. “Come on, gents. I went out and got strapatsada for everyone. Better get to it before it gets cold.”
One by one, we slowly got up and made our way to the common area. Boomer said a quick blessing over the food, asking God to keep his team safe and for help in finding Kathleen. Then we ate. The strapatsada was seasoned to perfection. The eggs had been cooked in a puree of olive oil, thyme, pepper, and tomatoes, before a sprinkling of feta cheese was added.
Back home, Denny, the cook at The Reef, was always hunting for a new recipe to try out. This dish was definitely going to have to get on his list. We ate in relative silence and were nearly finished when Chachi’s phone rang. He looked at his number and then back at us. “It’s Solon, my ex-brother-in-law.” He stood up, answered it, and walked away from the table.
“Come on, big money,” Boomer muttered.
Chachi returned a few minutes later. “Okay,” he said, “here’s the deal. Solon’s been running his tattoo shop for over a decade. So he knows some pretty hard dudes. Last night, he put his ear to the ground and thinks he can get us in front of a guy who might know something. Given the scenario, he’s not comfortable talking about it over the phone.”
“So what’s next?” Boomer asked.
“Since the whole team doesn’t need to go in on this one, I figured you would want yourself and Savage to take the lead. So he’s expecting the two of you. I let him know I wouldn't be coming but to call me if anything changed. Oh, and he’s a cool guy, but a little heads up… He’s from the streets. Think the leader of a Mexican gang in L.A. circa 1990. That’s Solon.”
“So Savage should wear his Raider’s jacket?”
Chachi shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.”
“Let’s be gone in five,” Boomer said, “Chachi, are the sedan keys on the table?”
“Should be. I put them back.”
“You don’t ever put them back,” Teacup said.
“Well, I did last night.”
“Right…”
I returned to my sleeping area, got my shoes on, slipped my SIG into the back seam of my jeans, and met Boomer at the front. “You ready?” I asked.
His aviators were over his eyes and the car keys in his hand. “You’re damn right. Let’s roll.”
We took Motorway 1 south into the heart of Athens and merged onto Motorway 8, riding it west toward the coast and the Bay of Phalerum. Chachi’s contact had indicated he was willing to talk, but not beneath the gaze of the neighborhood where he lived and worked. So he sent us farther west, where he could talk freely without fear of being observed.
After exiting the motorway, our directions took us through a neighborhood of single family homes, past a series of quaint shops and local eateries, and down a sandy lane that terminated at a public park atop a cliff overlooking the bay. A full repertoire of playground equipment was positioned around a wood-framed pavilion providing shelter for a dozen brightly painted picnic tables.
Boomer pulled into an unmarked parking space, and we got out. Two young mothers stood near the slide watching their small children play. An older man sat on a bench near the cliff’s edge, staring at the vastness of the bay spread out before him. The only other person was a sturdy man sitting at one of the picnic tables, preoccupied with the contents of his phone.
We made our way over, and as we stepped beneath the pavilion, he looked up, pocketed his phone, and stood up. “You Chachi’s friends?” We confirmed, shook hands with him, and took our places across from him.
His features were large, his head shaved, his fingernails painted black, and a tattoo of the Virgin Mary decorated his forearm.
A steady breeze ran off the bay, stirring my hair and the palm trees that flanked the park. In the distance, a container ship moved south out of the Gulf of Elefsina, no doubt heading for the Port of Piraeus several miles to the south.
I thanked Solon for meeting with us. “I hear you and Chachi were related at one time?”
“Yeah...yeah. He was married to my younger sister for a while. Me and Chachi always got along. I went to Ameri
ca to visit them a few years ago for their Thanksgiving holiday. He and I smoked cigars, drank a lot of whiskey, and even went to the range to shoot some of his guns. If I’m honest with you, I like him a hell of a lot more than I like my sister.” He chuckled to himself. “She’s a selfish brat. Chachi’s way too good for her.”
“He’s a good brother,” Boomer said. “He’s saved my ass more than a few times.”
“Yeah,” Solon said. “That’s Chachi for you. Anyway, he came by my tattoo shop yesterday. I was like, damn, I didn’t even know you were in town. Then he told me about the government lady who was kidnapped.”
“She’s his direct report,” Boomer said, using his thumb to point to me. “And she’s kind of a big deal to our government.”
“That’s what Chachi said.” Solon craned his neck and looked around as if he wanted to make sure he wasn’t being watched. “I know I’m being paranoid, asking you to meet me here like this.” He leaned in closer and lowered his voice. “I don’t know what happened to your lady, but I can’t have people asking why a couple of Americans came to see me. I can’t have whoever is behind all this hearing that I’m a member of the snitch squad.”
I nodded. “That’s understandable. Do you have anything for us?”
“Maybe. I know a guy. He’s a hard, pipe hitting fool, you know what I’m saying?”
“Sure,” I said. “He can work the streets.”
“Yeah…yeah. He can work them real well. Has for a long time. So he hears things. He’s been coming to me for years for new ink. I went to him first thing this morning, woke him up. And I ask him if he’s heard anything about some American lady getting grabbed up. He hadn’t heard anything, so I got him to make some calls. You’ve gotta know that no one is going to snitch easy about something like this, even if they weren’t involved. Even if they only heard something on the wind.”