Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

For the FBI special-weapons-and-tactics team, and their leader, Agent Cruz, it provided the perfect spot to turn a few screws, if needed, plot and plan, and not have to tell a soul about it. Gray extended the invitation to use the facility right after he concluded that Liberty Cruz and her boys could play hardball on anybody’s team.

The compound’s location also gave Liberty the added benefit of being close to the joint-military-command headquarters, where she daily checked on the status of Jack Valentine. There, she could speak directly with Black Bart Roberts over the resecured command voice network, getting his reassuring updates. Gunny Valentine was his friend, too, in the way that colonels and gunnery sergeants can be professional and share a strong, long-lasting friendship.

Liberty had wanted to tell Jack’s mom and dad about him missing, and tell her parents, too. But Roberts forbade it.

“We will only worry them with our not knowing a thing,” the colonel explained. “More importantly, anxious parents who fear that the enemy has their sons often try to reach out to them on their own, and appeal for mercy via the news media, who are all too enthusiastic to help, for their own selfish interests. Jack’s life greatly depends on the enemy’s not knowing he’s out there.”

“I understand,” Liberty agreed. So she bit her tongue and did not discuss Jack Valentine with anyone, not her team and not even with Chris Gray, her new best friend.

Work and focus on Cesare Alosi took her mind off her missing Marine. She spent day and night at the CIA modular offices. So did her crew. They liked it here better than the Green Zone apartments in town.

They had spirited Cesare to Camp Liberty right after Ray-Dean and his boys got theirs, under the guise of protective custody, should anyone up the chain ask questions. If what Alosi had claimed was true, that al-Qaeda or the Iraqi police, or both, wanted retribution for the slaughter of the thirty-five civilians in the protected International Zone, and that’s why they killed the men responsible, then the killers might also want to get even with the dead men’s boss.

Cesare could do nothing but cooperate.

Bob Hartley took agents Runyan and Towler to the airport right after the shootings and car bombing at Baghdad Country Club, looking for George and Ken, where Cesare said he had sent them. He had supposedly given them a green light to hunt a sniper outside the KBR terminal at Camp Fallujah.

The FBI agents did in fact find the two skinheads, rifles and kits with them, mounting a Malone-Leyva black Jet Ranger helicopter with the silver M-L and Scorpion logo on its side, about to depart for Fallujah. The agents inspected their weapons. Nothing dirty, all clean, oiled, ready for service. Both men freshly washed, too.

Runyan got on the phone with the dispatcher at the KBR terminal and he confirmed that Malone-Leyva had contracted with their company to take care of security, and the ongoing sniper problem that not only took its toll on trucks and drivers but took an increasing number of Marines and soldiers patrolling from Camp Fallujah and Camp Ramadi, too. He complained about their delay. Hartley disconnected the call in midsentence of the KBR dispatcher’s rant.

Liberty slapped a set of handcuffs on Alosi as soon as he opened his mouth to whine. Poor Ray-Dean Blevins and bed-wetting Gary Frank still quivered in the dirt, as Freddie Stein lay scattered in pieces with the car. Cesare immediately sang his song about the Iraqis wanting to get even, and that’s why they must have murdered the crew.

“Bullshit!” Liberty said as she clamped the bracelets as hard as she could squeeze them on Alosi’s wrists.

“You put them on too tight! That hurts!” Cesare wailed.

“That’s because they’re new,” Liberty popped back. “Wear them awhile. They’ll stretch out.”

Chris Gray took Miz Cruz aside while Bob Hartley shoved the squirmy little dirtbag into the backseat of the CIA Denali, so they could head to the airport and before Iraqi security forces got there to make things more difficult.

“You have no jurisdiction,” Gray reminded her, taking Liberty aside. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do with him? And what about Jason Kendrick?”

“No!” Liberty said. “And jurisdiction can kiss my ass. You know and I know he had those guys murdered before I had a chance to talk to them or protect them. Fuck the rules. Fuck Kendrick. I want Alosi’s head on a pike!”

“In Iraq, we do things differently,” the CIA operator said. “No jurisdiction? No court to back you up? No problem. In the States, no evidence, as in our case, you let him go. Here, the CIA can take any asshole off the street for any phony-baloney reason we hatch up. Hold him as long as we need or until we get bored, or the son of a bitch dies. Worst case, we at least make Cesare sweat his balls off.”

“What do you have in mind?” Liberty asked.

“I’ve got his conversations with his people, ordering the hit, recorded,” Gray said. “We can let him listen to himself giving the green light for a while, until it sinks in good and deep. Then we let him listen to the recording of him calling Ray-Dean on his car phone. He didn’t think we had that number. But I’m the CIA. I got your number. Maybe we scare him. Say we’ll give him to the Iraqi national security cops.”

Liberty smiled and looked at Alosi sitting smugly on his hands in the backseat of the Denali. “Even though we can’t really give him to the Iraqis, I’d enjoy pressing the sneaky bastard. Watch him squirm.”

She looked back at Gray. “Honestly, though? I don’t think he’s going to say a thing. He’s getting away with espionage, murder, the whole thing, and he knows it.”

“So, we have a few days’ fun torturing the smug little motherfucker. See how he likes the taste of his own shit,” Gray said. “Junkyard justice.”

Liberty laughed and looked back at Alosi. “Fuck yeah.”

For the next four days, they pressed Alosi. Let him sit it out in the little white room with the one-way glass window. They cooked him to stew the first twenty-four hours with the heat up and no restroom privileges until he finally went to the corner and urinated on the wall. When he took a shit there, they locked him to the hard bottom metal chair bolted to the floor, where he slept sitting up, if he slept. No restroom privileges.

Chris Gray played a repeating loop of his recorded telephone conversations with his pipe-hitting enforcers and with Ray-Dean Blevins on an overhead sound system. During breaks, Liberty came in the room with Hartley or Towler or Runyan at her side and questioned him. He sat cuffed to his chair, glared at her, and said zilch.

Then Cesare spent the next day in total silence, with bare fluorescent tubes overhead burning a pale dismal green hue against the white walls and gray floor. Bob Hartley brought him a meal of bread and water. Alosi ate it, drank the water, and smiled defiantly.

After that, Chris Gray turned on thirty straight hours of Norwegian black metal rock over the room’s embedded surround-sound system. Tsjuder, Mayhem, and Immortal roared out their apocalyptic rage, mixed with random selections from Marilyn Manson, turned up full blast. A nonstop loop with the lights shut off. The sealed room, blacked out, left Alosi in utter darkness, smelling his shit and hearing without relief the raspy voices of what Satan and his demons must sound like.

Alosi endured it all and still said nothing. Not one word. He felt proud, powerful. Fouled drawers and all. He showed them.

Then on the fourth day, CNN reported the findings of the Iraqi police that the Americans guilty of killing the thirty-five civilians had died from an al-Qaeda attack. Zarqawi had issued a statement: Retribution for the innocent lives the Americans took. He gave credit for the bombing and sharpshooting to none other than the legendary Phantom of Baghdad, Juba the sniper, and his sidekick, Hasan.