Robert Tanenbaum - Counterplay

“Tran! Goddammit,” Marlene whispered, trying not to wake the Franciscan monks who lived in the house. “I might have shot you!”

She ran up and threw her arms around the thin shoulders of the former schoolteacher turned Vietcong leader turned gangster. A sob escaped her. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”

Tran shrugged. “What is death? You’re talking to a Buddhist. This was preordained, his karma; he will return soon in another body to continue the journey. His own beliefs also had him on this path where death is only a doorway into the next room.”

“Nice you can be so matter-of-fact about it,” Marlene sniffed.

“I miss him, too,” Tran said. “We still had many things to talk about…some issues still to resolve from our old enmity. But there is nothing I can do; it was his fate. I expect to meet him somewhere down the road so we can continue our discussion and friendship. I expect you will find him in the future as well.”

Tran nodded toward her room. “John’s men are spread out all around here and a snake couldn’t get through without them knowing. But Kane has eyes and ears all over this town.”

Once they were in the room, Tran described what happened after they discovered the dead agents. “They looked like they’d been dead for at least an hour, maybe more,” he said, “and I was worried we might already be too late. But then I heard the shooting from the direction of the cabin, which meant someone was still fighting. As John thought when he talked to you, we couldn’t get through to his office on his cell phone.”

With the sun setting, they’d driven the remaining few miles to the cabin until reaching the last hill providing cover and hid Jojola’s truck off the road. “I was surprised that they’d left no one to guard the rear, but I don’t think that they expected Ned to put up such a fight. We were about a mile away, but the first thing we saw was a truck overturned off the road with several bodies lying around.”

There seemed to be a lull in the fighting, which they thought meant that the terrorists were waiting for it to get completely dark. “Which gave us about a half hour to cover the mile between us and them without being spotted,” Tran said.

By following ravines and moving from rock outcropping or patch of mesquite brush to the next, they’d made it to within fifty yards of the attackers without being noticed. But they still weren’t close enough. The only weapons they had were Jojola’s police department-issued 9 mm Glock in the glove box, which he gave to Tran, and his hunting bow and hunting knife. None of the weapons had the range to be of much use against automatic rifles, which meant they too were going to have to wait until dark to close with the enemy.

They split up; agreeing that their signal to attack would be when the assault on the cabin commenced. “It wasn’t going to be easy,” Tran continued. “We were moving in the dark, but we had seen that the attackers had night-vision goggles. I was lucky that their attention was focused on Ned and Lucy because there was a patch of open ground I had to cover and would have surely been seen if they were looking behind them.”

However, the attackers were caught off guard when one of their number who’d crept up close to the cabin was shot and killed by Ned. “He barely made it back to the cabin.”

The action had then moved quickly. Under covering fire, the main body of attackers began to rush forward. Then someone inside the cabin-“I learned later it was Lucy”-shot a flare into the bales of hay. “Two guys got caught in the open and Ned picked them off like shooting fish in a barrel.

“I saw the hay bales catch fire, and I took off running to reach my targets,” Tran said. “The first guy heard me coming, but I think the fire had also ruined his night vision because he was looking right at me but his shots went wide. I shot him and didn’t stop running until I got to the next guy, who never saw me coming.”

Jojola had also sprung into action. His first target was a man kneeling next to a rock and firing at the house, trying to keep Ned pinned while the others rushed in. The former commando didn’t bother to use an arrow but instead drove his knife into the base of the man’s skull as he ran past.

Notching an arrow as he moved, Jojola shot another of the terrorists just as the man was throwing a grenade at the cabin. Instead of going through the window the device-“a flash-bang type”-bounced off the outer wall and exploded. “Lucy believes that the men had orders to try to take her alive.

“Another terrorist reached the door and appeared about to shoot when John put an arrow through his chest. Then it was over, or so we thought.”

The man Jojola had shot was still alive, but he refused to answer questions Lucy put to him in Arabic, Chechen, and Russian. “We were stupid. We failed to check him for a secreted weapon,” Tran said sadly, not quite as much the Buddhist as his initial comments to Marlene.

Suddenly, the terrorist had raised a small pistol he’d palmed and pointed it at Lucy. Poshyelk chyerto, he’d cursed her.

“John was closest and jumped in front of her,” Tran said. “He took the bullet before I could knock the gun from his hand.”

Marlene wiped at her eyes and nodded. That part she’d heard from Lucy.

Jojola had died instantly. With her dead friend in her arms, according to Tran, Lucy said something back to the man in Russian.

“I asked her what the man had said,” Tran recalled. “He’d told her to go to hell. I asked what she’d said back…. She told him that a saint had just informed her that there was a special place already reserved there for him and other murderers. I’ve never seen a man’s face so terrified, and that’s how he looked when he died a minute later.”

Jojola’s men had arrived soon after. Together they’d searched the dead and found a packet of documents on a man they figured was the leader that included a photograph of Ned and one of Jojola.

“The two white knights,” Marlene said. She told Tran about the latest chess pieces and her run-in with the terrorists in New York.

“Well, if someone’s trying to warn you that an attack is imminent, they need to work a little faster,” Tran said. “The three of us only survived because of the fight the kid put up. I have no doubt that the plan was to swoop in, kill Ned, and kill or abduct Lucy, after which they would have waited for John to arrive. I don’t think they knew I was with him.”

“So maybe Kane sent the knights, knowing he could count on me calling John to go check on her,” Marlene said.

“Or, anybody watching John for the past few months would have known that he looked in on the kids every couple of days,” Tran said.

Jojola’s men had taken his body with them to the reservation to be buried by his people before federal agents arrived. “I’m told that the guy with Homeland Security was ticked off and gave John’s guys a hard time for ‘disturbing a crime scene.’ They told him to go screw himself and that they were following their customs, which prohibit autopsies,” Tran said. “This is all secondhand. I wasn’t hanging around; as you know, I’m not fond of federal agents, especially right now.”

“You suspect a traitor?”

“Well, something’s fishy,” Tran answered. “The federal agents who got shot were set up. How else would professionals allow two truckloads of armed men to drive up and shoot them without a fight?”

“Maybe someone else got there first and shot them before the trucks arrived,” Marlene suggested.

“We thought of that, too,” Tran said. “But Ned saw the trucks approaching and then heard the shooting. And don’t forget the murder of Fey. Someone told the killer where to find him and that was something only the federal agencies had knowledge of. There’s one more thing, John’s guys swear that the photograph the terrorists had of him had been taken for his police identification card, which they said was only on file in their office and with the FBI…. I don’t think they were likely to give it to anyone; they loved that man.”