Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“Let’s get the fuck up to the reservoir, where we can kill some of these Haji assholes,” Barkley told his driver.

Dinner at Elmore and June Snow’s home last night dragged on long and sad, the pall of Rowdy Yates’s death dominating the evening. The call from Captain Burkehart had sent the colonel into a funk. Then that night, since misery loves company, what Elmore and June had planned as a cheery farewell evening for Liberty Cruz evolved into a slog through dinner and a late night with John Jameson’s best whiskey and Jack Valentine war stories. Elmore tried his best to find the lighter side with his tales, underscoring each round of two full bottles of eighteen-year-old Limited Reserve with his hearty “ Sine Metu ,” without fear, Latin toasts, but invariably even his best yarns turned dark.

Clouding everything, Elmore knew that when his head hit the pillow, the next moment when he opened his eyes, he would have to face the inevitable: deal with that dreaded knock on the Yates front door and break the news to Camp Lejeune’s newest widow. He fought off sleep as long as he could, and his wife and Liberty tried to help. Yet dawn will come for the condemned, regardless, just like the impending drop of the headsman’s axe.

With no sleep and a throbbing hangover, Liberty Cruz caught the dawn US Airways flight out of Jacksonville’s Albert J. Ellis Airport, landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National just in time for morning rush hour and a slow go to her office at FBI Headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Throughout the flight and the bumper-to-bumper drive, she thought of poor Elmore, and the even-sadder Brenda Kay Yates. Liberty counted herself lucky that she did not hold office or rank to have such casualty-call duty put on her shoulders. She didn’t have the heart for it. But then, she thought, who does?

Elmore Snow wore his dress green uniform and barracks cover with gold braid on the bill. As he mounted the steps to the Midway Park government quarters assigned to Lance Corporal Rowdy Yates and his pretty wife, Brenda Kay, he checked his emotions, swallowing a lump in his throat the size of his fist. As the Casualty Assistance Call Officer, a veteran captain, leaned to push the doorbell, the Marine lieutenant colonel took hold of his hand.

“Just a second, Skipper,” Snow said. “I knew this lad real well, and his wife. Give me a second more.”

“Take your time, Elmore,” the base command Protestant chaplain, Fred Woodhouse, said. A Navy commander, today in his formal dress uniform, Chaplain Woodhouse also knew Brenda Kay Yates quite well, along with Elmore and June Snow, and their daughter, Katherine, from their regular attendance at his Sunday worship services and Wednesday night Bible study.

“I think it will just get worse, the longer you stand here, sir,” the captain suggested.

“He’s right, you know,” Chaplain Woodhouse said.

“Yes. I know,” Elmore said, and reached in front of the captain and pressed the doorbell.

Footsteps tromped across the floor, and the door came open. A pregnant and very beautiful, and very young-looking Brenda Kay Yates greeted them. When she saw Elmore Snow, she smiled.

“Look at you, all dressed up,” she said, her voice filled with sparkle. “Chaplain Woodhouse? You, too? All dressed in your class-A uniforms? Why…”

Then it struck her. Nobody smiled, and Elmore had tears already pouring down his cheeks.

“Oh,” she said. “Something happened to Rowdy… I better go sit down. I’m sorry, Elmore. Colonel Snow. Oh, my. Maybe you guys need to go get yourselves some coffee in the kitchen. I just made some. Oh, my… I need to sit down…”

As her knees suddenly buckled, Elmore took the girl in his arms and hugged her close and tight and wept with her like a father would with his daughter who had just learned that her young husband had died in the war.

“Oh, Brenda Kay,” Elmore said, swallowing hard. “The Lord took him in an instant. Rowdy never felt a thing. He just went to Heaven.”

“Oh,” was all she could say, and she held on to this man she had known as a hometown hero when she was just a little girl and Rowdy was a little boy. Then she cried hard, “My poor Rowdy…”

“I’m calling Rowdy’s folks, then I’ll call your mama and daddy, here in a few minutes,” Elmore said. “I wanted to tell you first, then the folks back home. A Marine out of the Denver recruiting district office is already on his way to make the casualty call to Rowdy’s momma and daddy in person, but we’ll let them know first, sweetie. Unless you want me to wait. I’ve already got all their plane tickets bought. They’ll be here tonight. June will follow up with your momma and Rowdy’s, taking on that load of getting things coordinated for them, so they’ll get here without trouble.

“Right now, I’m going to help you pack your clothes, and you’ll come stay at my house through all of this, you hear me?”

She nodded yes, sobbing.

“Your momma and daddy and Rowdy’s folks will all be at my house together for as long as it takes. I’m taking care of everything, don’t you worry,” Colonel Snow went on. “I got lots of room, and we’re like family. We all came from the same well out there in Wyoming. This is what we do. You understand?”

“Yes,” she said, her face against his chest, soaking his uniform with her tears.

Elmore tilted her face up and looked in her wet eyes. Then he kissed her forehead. “Honey. I am so, so sorry. I just don’t know what else to say.”

“I know, Elmore.” Brenda Kay wept. “I’m fresh out of words, too.”

Red-eyed and feeling totally shitty, Liberty dropped her overstuffed kit duffel and her tightly packed personal travel bag at the entrance of her cubicle. Letting out a breath, ready to just collapse in the chair at her desk, her eyes caught a yellow Post-It note taped on her nameplate on the left side of the doorway. It read, “See me, ASAP,” and had her boss’s JK initials circled at the bottom.

“Shit,” she said, taking the note, wadding it up, and dropping it in the trash as she left her bags by her desk and dragged ass down the hall to Supervisory Special Agent Jason Kendrick’s office. He headed the En- hanced Tactical Operations Division that Liberty now called home.

Two knocks followed by a gruff “Enter” led Liberty Cruz inside the very well-ordered office of her boss. FBI awards and Marine Corps memorabilia decorated one entire wall. Autographed photos of Kendrick with President George W. Bush; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Pete Pace; and two commandants of the Marine Corps, General Mike Hagee and General Al Gray, dominated the center of the collection of walnut and brass. Next to them, hanging at near-equal prominence, an autographed shot of Kendrick with former Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI, New York Division, Jim Kallstrom, recently taken at the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation gala in New York City. A fellow Marine, Kallstrom headed the FBI and Marine Corps organization that provided education scholarships to the widows and children of Marines and federal law-enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.

As a young blade, Kendrick had served with Kallstrom on the FBI special operations task force that took apart the so-called Pizza Connection, working closely with undercover operative, FBI Special Agent Joe Pistone, known to the Bonanno crime family as Donnie Brasco. A few years later, the more experienced Agent Kendrick helped Kallstrom and the team get the goods on the “Teflon Don,” Gambino crime-family boss, John Gotti. Kendrick had followed Jim Kallstrom through the bathroom window of the infamous Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy and planted electronic-surveillance devices there, and in the upstairs apartment that Gotti used for Mafia meetings. Recordings of those conversations put Gotti behind bars for life and broke the wheels off the Gambino gravy train. As such, Jason Kendrick and legendary agents like him and Jim Kallstrom were Liberty’s real heroes. They did what she wanted to do.