The Diaries - 01 (16 page)

There was no
use.
 
He was trying to dam a raging river
with twigs.
 
The memories barged in…it
had been a brutally hot day in June; the kind of scorcher that came with
intense, dry heat that burns a man’s nostrils, baking the soft tissues of his
sinuses with every breath.
 
Gage and
three others, their faces stained orange from the powdery island dirt, had been
chosen to take part in the insertion.
 
Word had come down from high that they wanted the terrorists taken
before sunset, due to their usual nocturnal activities.
 
The people in question were accused of
bombing a U.S. Navy barracks in Manila, tracked over a period of years to their
Crete hideaway.
 
Radicals, they drew
their funding from several sources, each with an axe to grind with the U.S. and
most of the western world.

Hunter’s team was
chosen because the assault wasn’t going to be claimed.
 
The terrorists were wanted by the Dutch, the
English, the Japanese, and the Israelis.
 
But Uncle Sam wanted them all to himself, and he wasn’t in the mood to
ask anyone’s permission.
 
The Greeks were
quietly cooperating from a distance, probably the recipient of something in
trade in order to keep the operation secret.
 
The team had orders (if at all possible) to take the terrorists alive;
they possessed needed information, especially about their funding sources.
 
As Gage and the rest of the team well knew,
every other time they had been told to take anyone alive, after they were
turned over to the shadowy men whose eyes they never saw, the object of their
mission was never seen or heard from again.
 
Probably taken to some God-awful place, tortured and questioned until
they resembled a sponge with no remaining water.

And then, useless,
they were surely eliminated.

No one on Hunter’s
team cared.
 
It wasn’t their job to care.

Gage lay prone
behind a grouping of rocks with a low-lying cactus pricking his thigh.
 
He had the scope in his hands, watching.
 
Upstairs in the dingy apartment, one of them
sat at the table slicing a green apple with a combat knife.
 
They knew his identity—he was their so-called
leader, a man with Manson-like values and oddball magnetism.
 
The news played on a television behind him,
CNN International, and through the powerful scope Gage could even see the
fabric pattern on Becky Anderson’s attractive suit.

In the other room
a man slept.
 
The highly-educated intel
man.
 
He was thought to have sought out
the group’s sinister objectives and used his intelligent brain for the worst
possible reasons—probably the most valuable of their targets on that day.
 
His beard and face were filthy and, in the two
hours that Gage and the team watched, he would occasionally stir, laughing to
himself and glancing down at the floor before falling back into his slumber.
 
They wondered whether he might be drunk or
high because there wasn’t any logical reason for his odd behavior.
 

Two others moved
about occasionally, a man and a woman.
 
The
man was the lowest priority target, a so-called weapons expert.
 
The woman was the fourth member of their
troupe—she traveled with them but had never been witnessed participating in any
of their attacks.
 
The team was told to take
her anyway.

The terrorists
were all of Danish origin.
 
The oldest,
the man with the apple, was nearly forty.
 
The three others appeared to be in their late twenties or early
thirties.
 
The girl’s face was not classically
attractive, but as she moved about the apartment, Gage noticed the swells of
her breasts and wondered if one, or perhaps all, of the men were intimate with
her.
 
He watched her break into laughter
as she rubbed the oldest man’s shoulders while he sat there eating the apple.
 
Twenty minutes later, confirming his
suspicions, Gage saw her kissing the other one who was awake.
 
Something odd, and communal, had been going
on in that apartment.

After the pictures
were relayed to Washington, Gage and the team waited, silently, each man in his
own little world of taciturn readiness.
 
Waiting was the primary component of their job; the impatient needed not
apply.

As he lay there
quietly, the scope in his hand, there was something in that apartment that
bothered Gage.
 
He’d seen the pictures of
the suspected terrorists, matching them beyond a shadow of a doubt with the
ones from Manila.
 
He had no doubt it was
them.
 
But there was something about
their actions in the apartment, and the dozing man on the sofa that tugged at
his brain.
 
The man on the sofa’s
actions, and the woman’s, bothered him.
 
Gage
smelled trouble.

“I don’t like this,”
he muttered to Randy Vasquez, the mission leader.
 
Vasquez was a small man with intense green
eyes and a high IQ.
 
Known for his shooting
prowess and his ability to rapidly dissect a critical situation, Vasquez also
knew when to listen to his charges.
 
He
inched closer to Gage, his voice a hoarse whisper.

“What exactly
don’t you like?”

Gage turned to him.
 
“Not sure,
Vazzy
.
 
You know when you just get that deep-in-the-gut
feeling that something’s off?
 
Well,
that’s what I have right now.
 
Can’t
really give you specifics, but it’s there.”
 
He lifted the scope as he spoke.
 
“I’ve got a positive on every one of them, and the place looks isolated,
but I really wish they’d let us allow them to leave before we take them.”

Vasquez didn’t
respond for a moment.
 
“If we do that,
then there’s a chance we all get made.”
 
He lifted his own binoculars and stared at the apartment for several
minutes, nibbling on his bottom lip.
 
Finally he lifted the small satellite radio and stared at Gage.

“Golf-six,
Whiskey-two, over.”

“Golf-six, go.”

“Whiskey-two,
break,” he removed his thumb from the button and licked his dusty orange lips.
 
After a few seconds he depressed it again.
“Recommend delay action.
 
Say again,
recommend
delay action
, delta-alpha,
over.”

A pause then a crackle.
 
“Golf-six, wait one, over.”
 
The man on the radio sounded like a robot,
completely devoid of any emotion, and his mechanical tone made Gage want to
teleport himself across the Atlantic and beat the ever-loving shit out of him.
 
He and Vasquez stared at the apartment until
the radio popped again.

“Whiskey-two,
golf-six, it’s out of my hands.
 
That
call will come from on high, and unless there is a logical reason you can give
me now, you’re soon to get the green.
 
What’s the
prob
, over?”

Vasquez turned his
eyes to Gage.
 
Gage glanced again into
the apartment with his scope.
 
It would
be dark in an hour.
 
The man at the table
was now reading a paper; the man on the couch was still sleeping; the woman
appeared to be fixing dinner; the other man walked by the window, a beer in his
hand as he rubbed his belly.
 
It appeared
to be prime time to move in.

“
Anything?
” Vasquez asked, urgency in his
voice.

Gage’s internal
voices screamed that something was wrong.
 
But the sensible side of him, the one who saw a primed terror team ripe
for a quiet picking, had no evidence whatsoever.
 
He turned to Vasquez and shook his head.
 
“Just a gut.”

Vasquez cut his
eyes impatiently, keying the radio.

“This is
Whiskey-two, negative to the problem.
 
It’s just a…just a feeling we’re getting.
 
Objective is clear to our knowledge, over.”

There was a long
pause as Gage knew Colonel Hunter was probably sitting there, his eyes narrowed
at the radio, wondering what was going on with Vasquez’s team for him to make
such a request based on someone’s feeling.
 
Finally the radio operator came back.
 
“Whiskey-two, golf-six,
exactly why
the request
, over?”

Gage remembered
staring at Vasquez as he closed his eyes, wincing at what was probably going on
at the other end of the line.
 
Other than
Hunter, the Pentagon and Langley brass were surely listening in, speaking in
Hunter’s other ear.
 
Vasquez keyed the
mike.
 
“Golf-six, this is whiskey-two,
an old-fashioned hunch
, nothing more,
over.”

Gage knew Hunter
would normally respect such a request, but only if he could.
 
The team’s many successes were not to be
credited to sheer ability; intuition often came into play.
 
Without instinct, a soldier’s abilities were
mechanical at best, and he would eventually be defeated by a thinking soldier.
 
It’s why drones hadn’t replaced the human on
the battlefield—the situational reasoning by a real-live brain had yet to be equaled.

The radio chirped
and it was Hunter speaking.
 
“This is
Golf-six, prepare to move, Whiskey-two.
 
The order’s coming down, so you might have ten mikes to prove your
hunch.
 
Otherwise, be prepared to un-ass
your AO, over.”

“Whiskey-two,
roger.”

“Golf-six, out.”

The stark cold of
France contrasted with the horrors dominating his mind.
 
Staring out over the Moselle, Gage neared the
end of the gruesome flashback, feeling his insides churn.
 
He staggered down the French promenade,
allowing the sickening catharsis to play out in his mind.
 
Two children had died as a result of the
concussion grenade.
 
Gage had thrown
it.
 
Their diminutive bodies, strangely
unscathed, had been lifeless as the medics carefully loaded them onto the
gurneys.
 
Vasquez had sat in the corner
of the room, listlessly relaying the full story to Hunter and the bureaucrats
on the satellite uplink.
 
Gage Hartline had
sat huddled in another corner, numb, watching as the medics prepared the
children’s remains for transport.
 
Vasquez stopped speaking three times to tell Gage it wasn’t his fault;
Gage never heard him.
 
Before the
paramedics removed the children, Gage stood, placing his hands on the white
sheets, staining them from the orange dust, muttering over and over that he was
sorry.
 
Since that moment, his life had
been off axis.

Months later, back
at Fort Bragg, it seemed every counselor in the Army had met with Gage, murmuring
over and over inane little nuggets about combat guilt.
 
The last night Hunter’s team was officially
intact, Gage had lost it, wrecking the day room of their small facility.
 
Singlehandedly, he tore apart a pool table
and four hundred square feet of ceiling tile.
 
He then knocked out three plate-glass windows, slicing his arms to
ribbons.
 
Five men, his teammates, could
barely hold him down, two of them, along with Gage, needing stitches afterward.
 
They’d strapped him to a bed after that, the
Army getting him under control the old fashioned way—pharmacologically.

As he had stared
at the ceiling from that private hospital bed, his tongue and lips full of
holes from his own teeth, something finally snapped inside him and Gage knew he
would have to pull it back together.
 
Or
at least fake it.
 
Had he not, he might
have been eliminated as well.
 
It took
months, but in the end he passed all their tests, their ink blots, their
fucking questionnaires.
 
He accepted his
new fate like a prisoner might his new polyester suit following parole.

Because what
choice did he have?

Back in Metz, the
panic attack had faded.
 
After the
proprietor checked on him for the fourth time, he wiped the sweat from his head
and hands with a napkin, eating the crepe and swilling his water.
 
Slowly, he removed his sunglasses, blinking
rapidly and deciding he could stand to go without them.

Gage Hartline,
because of the incident in Crete, was no longer a violent man.
 
He plied his trade the peaceful way, avoiding
any job which might result in bloodshed.
 

He’d not killed
anyone since that blazing June day.

But on
this
day, things would soon change.

***

While Gage
gathered himself and Monika napped, and while U.S. Army Investigator Damien
Ellis was stepping off the train at the baroque
Gare
de Metz train station, Michel Brink was having another cup of coffee in the
back of his book store, attempting to approximate the value of the diary find.
 
Gerard was out front, dusting the stacks of
books, humming to himself.
 
The bell at
the front door jingled.
 
Michel perked
his ears.