Jack Coughlin - Kill Zone

“That was a little photo album that we gathered of your entire family.” Gates’s voice in his ear was cold. “Did you like the one of Missy on the bed? Looks like your little princess just got laid, but never mind that for now. The young woman seated next to you and the big guy across the aisle, who happens to be the air marshal for this flight, are a Shark Team, ole buddy. They are there to make sure you do what you are told.”

WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?

“You bugged out on me, Gerald. Abandoned me to my fate, so to speak. That kind of made me angry, so you have to make things right between us.”

I AM NOT GOING TO TELL ANYONE.

“That’s for damned sure. By now, Trish should have a typed letter resting on her briefcase. It is a full confession that you were responsible for the entire Middleton kidnapping affair because you wanted to start a war as cover for a political coup in Washington. You realize now that you were wrong, that lives were wasted, that you misused your position and the power of the White House and besmirched the reputation of the United States. Noble shit like that. It’s a good letter: says a lot in two pages. Your new Constitution will also be in the envelope. Sign it.”

WE WERE IN THIS TOGETHER.

“After you sign, Trish will give you two little white pills. You will go into the bathroom at the front of the plane and swallow them. Within twenty seconds you will simply go to sleep, feeling no pain, and be dead.”

HELL NO FUCK YOU GORDON.

“One second, Gerald, while I rearrange the screen.” There was a scramble of the signal and a smaller picture popped into the lower right-hand corner. “There’s dear old Mommy, Gerald, sleeping in that fancy old folks’ home in Palm Beach. You just visited her about four hours ago, remember? Anyway, I have a nurse standing there taking this picture. You don’t sign the paper, Mumsy is going to be put down like a dog with a needle filled with a medicine that will make her last moments hell. She will feel like she is on fire on the inside, and it will take her five long minutes to die. Next on the list will be your little soccer star, Lester, who will fall from a window in a tall building. How could you name a kid Lester, anyway? One by one, until they are all gone. Then the Sharks will kill you anyway.”

DON’T PLEASE DON’T DO THIS.

“Sign the fucking letter. Take the fucking pills. Trish will let me know when it’s over. You have three minutes before the nurse gives your mother the injection. Terrible way for the old woman to go. Goodbye, Gerald. Do the right thing.”

NONONONONONONONONO.

The screen returned to the fish show and Trish pulled away the laptop and jerked the iPod buds from his ears. She slapped a letter on the plastic tray and put a pen on top of it. She made a show of clicking a button on her big diver’s watch. “Two minutes and fifty-nine seconds… two minutes and fifty-eight seconds.”

Gerald Buchanan felt a tear come to his eye as he scanned the letter. He would go down in history not as the savior of his country, but as its biggest traitor since Benedict Arnold. No! It was too much of a sacrifice! His reputation through the ages!

“Two minutes and thirty seconds,” Trish said, now with a mocking smile on her face. She held up a small plastic bag containing two white pills.

He closed his eyes and put his head against the backrest for a moment, folding his fingers together tightly to keep from taking up the pen. Everybody has to die sometime, including every member of my family. They are only mortal, after all. Death comes to us all eventually. He could run to the flight attendant, but the passenger they believed to be the air marshal was actually one of the Sharks! He leafed through the alternatives. They couldn’t kill him in the open cabin if he stood up and made a scene! Sure they could. They were professional killers. He was already a dead man. It was only a matter of choosing how he would go.

“Two minutes, darling,” Trish whispered in his ear, and her breath was hot. “I’m afraid you won’t be around for dinner tonight.”

Buchanan looked at her. “Bitch,” he said.

“Big Lenny over there and I will do Missy this weekend,” she replied with a cold smile. “But your little whore will give us a good time first. An all-nighter. You only have one minute, fifty seconds. Your mutt gets poisoned tomorrow morning. Marge will be raped and then die when the house burns down around her. Cousin Flo and her family are going to have a tragic automobile accident… one forty-five.”

Buchanan scrawled his name just to stop her awful recitation. Trish snatched the letter away and placed the two pills on the tray. He picked them up without a further word and made his way to the clean bathroom, filled a cup of water, and quickly swallowed the pills before the man in the mirror lost his nerve. Gates had lied. It was not painless. Buchanan went into spasms and convulsions and screamed in agony as fire coursed through his veins and he thrashed about the small toilet enclosure. When the alarmed attendants forced the door open, they found the bulky body of Gerald Buchanan curled into the fetal position. A soapy foam oozed from his mouth.

Trish looked across the aisle at her partner. “Fifteen seconds to spare,” she said. She sent the confirmation signal to Gates.

SIR GEOFFREY CORNWELL, Major General Bradley Middleton, and Master Gunnery Sergeant O. O. Dawkins were around a small table, watching the sun settle into the Pacific Ocean. The La Fonda restaurant, perched on a cliff, was almost empty at this time of day in the middle of the week. It was about two kilometers outside the Mexican town of Puerto Nuevo, and subsisted primarily on the weekend exodus of Americans who came down from California like clockwork to play along the coastline of the Baja Peninsula. Steep stairs chipped into the cliff face covered a vertical drop of some eighty feet to a white sandy beach, and beyond that, out on the water, a few surfers were still on their boards, waiting to catch a final wave before the sun set. They knew it was not safe to be on a surfboard after dark, for sharks like to feed at night.

The Vagabond was lodged securely in a nearby marina, and Cornwell took Lady Pat and his guests out for an early dinner of lobster tacos and cold Pacifico cerveza. Mariachi bands were playing in some other restaurants, and the songs drifted on the salty air. Lady Pat went shopping with Middleton’s wife, Janice, and the three men stayed to drink beer. They raised their bottles in a salute. “To Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson, USMC,” said Sir Jeff, and the others said in unison, “Semper fi.” Middleton added, “May he rest in peace.”

They had all been at the funeral six months ago, and since Swanson had no family, the flag draped over the coffin was folded and given to Lady Pat, whose teary eyes were hidden by dark sunglasses. An honor guard fired a farewell salute, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry Turner, gave a brief speech before yielding the microphone to the President of the United States, who read the proclamation for a posthumously awarded Congressional Medal of Honor. The service was solemn and proper and very vague on details.

Now, with so much time having passed, Middleton took a long drink and gave a little laugh. “Shake treated me like a new recruit,” he recalled of the Syrian fiasco. “I thought a couple of times we might shoot each other before anybody else got the chance.”

“It was indeed a merry chase,” said Sir Jeff, who had been briefed privately on the details of the mission weeks earlier to help solve the final mystery.

“Not so fucking merry at times,” said Double-Oh. “When we came into the LZ it looked like a helicopter air show. The Syrians were facing us, and we were facing them, soldiers spreading out on both sides. Two lines and everybody was locked and loaded. Then those two Harriers came screaming in right overhead, no more than a hundred feet off the deck, and gave the Syrians an attitude adjustment. After that, we all got along just skippy.”