John Gilstrap - Damage Control

Dom sighed. “Truth isn’t a fine line,” he said. “It’s a sleeve. It’s entirely possible to vary from the line while staying within the sleeve.”

Venice scowled as she looked at him, then cocked her head. “Are you sure you’re a priest?”

“I need another way out of here, Mother Hen,” Jonathan said into the satellite phone. “We’ve been made here. We’ve gone to ground to hold out for the remaining part of the day, but the going is way too slow. If we’re going to have any chance at all, we need to compress the time in country. Can you find me an airplane?”

A pause. “Your original exfil aircraft is out of play, right?”

“That’s affirmative,” Jonathan said. “These guys know too much about our plans. We have to assume that they knew about Gutierrez’s plane.”

Another pause. Longer, this time. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Hey,” Jonathan said. “You sound strange. Is everything all right?”

She snapped, “Do you want me to find you an airplane, or do you want to chat?”

“Here’s the deal,” Scorpion said, interrupting the shooting lesson. “We’re veering from our plan.”

“Thank God,” Boxers said.

“You don’t know what the new plan is yet,” Jonathan said.

“I don’t have to. It has to be better than the one we’ve got.”

Jonathan beckoned them closer to him and offered them a patch of mulchy jungle floor. He pulled his GPS out of its pouch and turned it on. “I had Mother Hen do some additional research for me.” He handed the device to Boxers. “Look here. This satellite shot is about an hour old.” He brought up an aerial map of a lot of jungle, and then zoomed in until the picture looked like it had been taken from maybe a hundred feet up. “What does that look like to you?”

Boxers smiled broadly. “About the ugliest damn airplane I ever saw.” The make and model weren’t discernable from this angle, but it looked like a Cessna Skylane, a high-wing single engine plane that was typical of hacienda owners who needed to get from place to place while avoiding the miserable roads.

“Now you’re talkin’, Boss,” Big Guy said. “All this ground-hugging has been getting on my nerves.” He moved his head closer to the screen and squinted to see the detail. “That runway looks short, but I guess if he got it in there, I can get it out.” He raised his head and looked to the sky, clearly running numbers in his head, “Gas could be an issue,” he said. “Even with a full tank and if nothing goes wrong, it’ll be tight.”

“What does tight mean?” Tristan asked.

Boxers gave him one of the patented annoyed looks. “It means running out of gas and falling out of the sky.”

The look of shock on the kid’s face made both Boxers and Jonathan laugh.

“Don’t worry, Tristan,” Jonathan assured. “Neither one of us is suicidal.” To Boxers: “How tight?”

“Like running-on-vapors tight.”

Jonathan noted the startled reaction from Tristan.

Tristan noticed Jonathan noticing. “Hey,” he said. “You promised honesty. I get it.” He looked to Boxers.

“Does this mean I don’t have to learn to shoot?”

Boxers opened his mouth to answer, then deferred to his boss.

“Think of it as a life skill.” Jonathan said. “And if things come apart later, we’ll be able to use another trigger finger.” He let the words settle. “Besides, we have time to waste. We might as well spend it productively.”

Boxers cocked his head. “Why do we have time to waste?”

“Because we’re going to borrow the plane in the dark,” Jonathan said.

“We’re never getting out of here alive, are we?” Tristan asked.

“Of course we are,” Jonathan said. “Not a doubt in my mind.”

“Bullshit,” Tristan said. “You can’t be sure of that.”

Jonathan and Boxers exchanged glances. “Sure we can,” the Big Guy said. “I’ve turned down opportunities to die in way better places than this shit hole.”

Scorpion improved on it. “We’re getting out of here because that’s the only option that Big Guy and I will accept.”

Tristan rolled his eyes.

Jonathan sighed. “Look, I know that that sounds like empty talk, but I’m going to share a lesson with you. I’ve seen more tough days than most people, and I can tell you that commitment is everything. If you’re willing to accept failure as an option, then failure is the only possible outcome.”

The kid still wasn’t buying.

“Okay,” Jonathan said. “What’s your sport in high school?”

Tristan laughed. “Sport? I’m on the debate team.” Jonathan beamed. “I was on the debate team, too. Have you ever gotten yourself fired up enough to win a debate that you had no right winning because the other team was way better than you?”

Tristan scowled. “Sure, I guess so.”

“Of course you have,” Jonathan said. “It happens that way with everyone, and it happens that way with everything. If you project success, you cannot fail.”

“But the police are following us,” Tristan said. “They’re as good with guns as we are.”

Boxers laughed. “Um, no they’re not.”

“No one says there has to be shooting,” Scorpion said. “And even if it comes to that, no one says that everyone has to shoot. If you can’t bring yourself to pull the trigger, then you can reload spent mags. It’s all about being a team.”

As Tristan listened, something stirred in his chest. From anyone else, this would have seemed like streaming bullshit, but Tristan could tell that Scorpion was spouting what he believed to be undeniable fact. And that fact alone made it impressive.

“We need you to be a solid member of the team, Tristan.”

Trevor Munro tired of waiting for an adequate break in oncoming traffic. His Porsche 911 Carrera had a big enough engine to cut it short and still survive. He gunned it and pulled into the undersized parking lot of the diminutive Vienna Branch of the Fairfax County Public Library, cutting across two lanes of oncoming traffic and eliciting a symphony of blaring horns.

With no parking slots available, he just idled in the lot, waiting for Jerry Sjogren to make his stealthy entrance. It didn’t take long. The big Bostonian emerged through the double glass front doors just like any other patron, strolled to the passenger side, and pulled the door open. He stared at the space for a few seconds before he began the process of folding his enormous frame into the low-slung seats.

“Holy shit, Trev,” he said as he pulled his legs inside and struggled to get the door closed. “I already climbed out of a womb once. Is your dick really so small that you need to drive a car like this?”

Munro gunned the engine mostly for the noise of it, and circled around the parking lot to head back out on Maple Avenue, heading north. “You called this meeting, Sjogren,” he said.

“And you ought to be saying a prayer of thanks that I did,” Sjogren said. “You got yourself what we New Englanders call a wicked problem.”

Trevor forced himself to keep his eyes on the road. If he didn’t encourage these kinds of games, maybe they would stop, and the oaf would simply get to the point. Meanwhile, the Porsche’s horsepower would remain wasted as he surged from traffic light to traffic light, flanked by one strip mall after another.

“I got a buddy in the U.S. attorney’s office who keeps me in the loop on important stuff. He tells me that they’re on the edge of bringing in your butt buddy, Felix Hernandez. I don’t know how you do that from another country, but he’s never given me bad four-one-one.”

Munro waited for the rest.

“C’mon, Trev, humor me. I got so little in my life. This is where you’re supposed to say, ‘How does this affect me?’ ”