Stephen Coonts: Combat

“I want you to help me kill those men,” she whispered, her voice as hard as a bayonet blade.

I grew up in a little town in southwestern Missouri. Dad was a welder and Mom waited tables in a diner, and both of them had trouble with the bottle. The afternoon of the day I graduated from high school I joined the Marines to get the hell out.

Sure, I killed my share of gomers in Vietnam. By then I thought life was a fairly good idea and wanted more of it. If I had to zap gomers to keep getting older, that was all right by me. It helped that I had a natural talent with a rifle. I was a medium-smart, whang-leather kid who never complained and did what I was told, so I eventually ended up in Recon. It took me a while to fit in; once I did, I was in no hurry to leave. Recon was the place where the Marine Corps kept its really tough men. The way I figured it, those guys were my life insurance.

That’s the way it worked out. The guys in Recon kept each other alive. And we killed gomers.

All that was long ago and far away from Julie Giraud. She was the daughter of a Marine colonel, sure, a grad of the Air Force Academy, and she looked like she ran five miles or so every day, but none of that made her tough. Sitting across the table looking at her, I couldn’t figure out if she was a fighter or a get-even, courthouse-stairs back-shooter. A lot of people like the abstract idea of revenge, of getting even, but they aren’t willing to suffer much for the privilege. Sitting in Burger King watching Julie Giraud, listening to her tell me how she wanted to kill the men who had killed her parents, I tried to decide just how much steel was in her backbone.

Her dad had been a career officer with his share of Vietnam chest cabbage. When they were young a lot of the gung ho officers thought they were bulletproof and let it all hang out. When they eventually realized they were as mortal as everyone else and started sending sergeants to lead the patrols, they already had enough medals to decorate a Panamanian dictator. Whether Julie Giraud’s dad was like that, I never knew.

A really tough man knows he is mortal, knows the dangers involved to the tenth decimal place, and goes ahead anyway. He is careful, committed, and absolutely ruthless.

After she dropped the bomb at lunch, I thought about these things for a while. Up to that point I had no idea why she had gone to the trouble of looking me up; the thought that she might want my help getting even with somebody never once zipped across the synapses. I took my time thinking things over before I said, “What’s the rest of it?”

“It’s a little complicated.”

“Maybe you’d better lay it out.”

“Outside, in my car.”

“No. Outside on the sidewalk.”

We threw the remnants of our lunch in the trash and went outside.

Julie Giraud looked me in the eye and explained, “These men are instruments of the Libyan government—”

“I got that point earlier.”

“—seventeen days from now, on the twenty-third of this month, they are going to meet with members of three Middle East terrorist organizations and a representative of Saddam Hussein’s government. They hope to develop a joint plan that Saddam will finance to attack targets throughout western Europe and the Middle East.”

“Did you get a press release on this or what?”

“I have a friend, a fellow Air Force Academy graduate, who is now with the CIA.”

“He just casually tells you this stuff?”

“She. She told me about the conference. And there is nothing casual about it. She knows what these people have cost me.”

“Say you win the lottery and off a few of these guys, what’s she gonna tell the internal investigators when they come around?”

Julie Giraud shook her head. “We’re covered, believe me.”

“I don’t, but you’re the one trying to make a sale, not me.”

She nodded, then continued: “Seventeen days from now the delegates to this little conference will fly to an airstrip near an old fortress in the Sahara. The fortress is near an oasis on an old caravan route in the middle of nowhere. Originally built by the ancient Egyptians, the fortress was used by Carthaginians and Romans to guard that caravan route. The Foreign Legion did extensive restoration and kept a small garrison there for years. During World War II the Germans and British even had a little firefight there.”

I grunted. She was intense, committed. Fanatics scare me, and she was giving me those vibes now.

“The fortress is on top of a rock ridge,” she explained. “The Arabs call it the Camel.”

“Never heard of it,” I retorted. Of course there was no reason that I should have heard of the place — I was grasping at straws. I didn’t like anything about this tale.

She was holding her purse loosely by the strap, so I grabbed it out of her hand. Her eyes narrowed; she thought about slapping me — actually shifted her weight to do it — then decided against it.

There was a small, round, poured-concrete picnic table there beside the Burger King for mothers to sit at while watching their kids play on the gym equipment, so I sat down and dug her wallet out of the purse. It contained a couple hundred in bills, a Colorado driver’s license — she was twenty-eight years old — a military ID, three bank credit cards, an expired AAA membership, car insurance from USAA, a Sears credit card, and an ATM card in a paper envelope with her secret PIN number written on the envelope in ink.

Also in the wallet was a small, bound address book containing handwritten names, addresses, telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses. I flipped through the book, studying the names, then returned it to the wallet.

Her purse contained the usual feminine hygiene and cosmetic items. At the bottom were four old dry cleaning receipts from the laundry on the German base where she was stationed and a small collection of loose keys. One safety pin, two buttons, a tiny rusty screwdriver, a pair of sunglasses with a cracked lens, five German coins and two U.S. quarters. One of the receipts was eight months old.

I put all this stuff back in her purse and passed it across the table.

“Okay,” I said. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume you’re telling the truth — that there really is a terrorists’ conference scheduled at an old pile of Foreign Legion masonry in the middle of the goddamn Sahara seventeen days from now. What do you propose to do about it?”

“I propose to steal a V-22 Osprey,” Julie Giraud said evenly, “fly there, plant enough C-4 to blow that old fort to kingdom come, then wait for the terrorists to arrive. When they are all sitting in there plotting who they are going to murder next, I’m going to push the button and send the whole lot of them straight to hell. Just like they did to my parents and everyone else on that French DC-10.”

“You and who else?”

The breeze was playing with her hair. “You and me,” she said. “The two of us.”

I tried to keep a straight face. Across the street at my filling station people were standing beside their cars, waiting impatiently for me to get back and open up. That was paying business and I was sitting here listening to this shit. The thought that the CIA or FBI might be recording this conversation also crossed my mind.

“You’re a nice kid, Julie. Thanks for dropping by. I’m sorry about your folks, but there is nothing on earth anyone can do for them. It’s time to lay them to rest. Fly high, meet a nice guy, fall in love, have some kids, give them the best that you have in you: Your parents would have wanted that for you. The fact is they’re gone and you can’t bring them back.”

She brushed the hair back from her eyes. “If you’ll help me, Mr. Dean, I’ll pay you three million dollars.”