Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

The people cheered more, and the CNN cameras zoomed tight on the grandstanding politician.

“Now,” Carlson shouted, his voice hoarse from yelling. “Our president and our military leaders have shut the door in our faces. No comment, they say. After we have found them out in this cover-up! What can they say?

“Well, here’s what I say. One word for them: Busted!”

The whole crowd went crazy.

“We have reached out to Sergeant Valentine’s mother and father in his hometown of El Paso, Texas, where he was a high school football star, loved by the whole city,” the CNN news anchor said as the shot cut back to him in the Atlanta studios. “Here is our correspondent Gustav Cisneros with Harry and Elaine Valentine.”

The shot cut to a father wearing a Vietnam veteran baseball cap, his face drawn, overwhelmed with sadness, and a mother in tears, holding a framed photograph of their missing son. While they talked, the camera took close-up shots of the many pictures of Jack Valentine, from his days in high school, in his football uniform, to a more recent shot of him with gunnery-sergeant stripes on his Marine Corps dress green uniform and a chest filled with ribbons topped with gold jump wings and a silver SCUBA/UBA head. A photo his mother had taken of him when he came home on leave following his tour in Iraq the prior year.

“Has anyone from the Marine Corps contacted you, Mr. Valentine?” the reporter asked.

“First thing we heard about Jackie missing was when that senator from Las Vegas called us last night,” Harry Valentine said. “Nobody from the government has said a word to us, except for him.”

Elaine Valentine held up the picture of Jack and pled in the camera, “Please, Mr. President. Go find our son! Bring our Jackie home.”

“Do you think he may have been captured, and the government is just not saying anything?” Gustav Cisneros asked Harry Valentine.

“Jack Valentine will never be taken alive!” the gray-headed man snarled in the camera, his face red with anger. “I’ll tell you this! He’ll send one hell of a bunch of those al-Qaeda sons of bitches to hell with their seventy-two virgins before they kill him. They won’t take my boy easy! Not my Jackie! No, sir!”

The camera panned to Elaine Valentine, who wailed and cried, “Please come home, Mijo !”

“So, Mr. Valentine, you think your son could be alive and not captured?” Cisneros asked, as the camera shot reversed to the reporter, then to Harry Valentine.

“I know my son’s alive!” the old man said. “As smart as he is, I’ll put money on him out there in that desert, avoiding capture and putting in the ground every al-Qaeda bastard that gets in his way.”

Harry put his arms around his wife and hugged her. Then he said at the camera, “My boy’s coming home. I’ll put money on it! And he’ll be real pissed that anybody had the nerve to make his mama cry.”

“You think that the government has kept this a secret because they believe Sergeant Valentine is alive and avoiding capture?” the reporter followed up.

“Probably so. They’ve got their reasons,” Harry said. “They could have told us about it, though. It wasn’t right, us hearing about Jackie gone missing from some politician.”

Cisneros looked at the camera. “Gustav Cisneros reporting from the Valentine home in El Paso, Texas. Back to you in Atlanta.”

A scene of the shooting that took place outside the embassy came on the screen, and the news anchor said, “In other news from Iraq, Senator Jim Wells of Virginia has called for a full Senate investigation of the conduct of security contractors in Iraq, following the tragic gunfire that claimed the lives of thirty-five civilian bystanders. Wells is calling for the president to order that all contractor companies operating in any combat zone come under State Department and Department of Defense jurisdiction, in light of the deadly shooting by Malone-Leyva security agents on the street outside the United States embassy in Baghdad.”

Then a picture of Ray-Dean Blevins in a Marine Corps uniform came on the screen. “The American contractor reported responsible for the shooting died just days later in a car bombing and sniper attack in Baghdad. Ray-Dean Blevins, a security supervisor for Malone-Leyva Executive Security and Investigations, along with his two-man crew, Frederick Stein and Gary Frank, were killed in an apparent attack by al-Qaeda Iraq in retaliation for the shootings of the civilians.”

Elmore Snow looked at his two Marines. “I don’t know why I bother even asking you two what’s new. All I have to do these days is turn on CNN or Fox News.”

Smedley Butler took Colonel Snow’s luggage from his hands. “Let me get that, sir.”

Captain Burkehart said as they headed for the Hummer, parked outside with Billy-C standing guard, “Colonel, to be honest. I’m ready to retire. My brother’s got a gun shop in Loveland, Colorado. I’m going there to work. Fix guns. Teach people to shoot. Live the dream. I’m done with bullshit.”

Liberty Cruz sat on the end of her bed in her Green Zone apartment, combing out her wet hair, crying. She had a small picture of her and Jack Valentine, taken during a lovers’ weekend at Nags Head, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, out front of Nestle’s Nook, a little beachfront motel where they stayed. The owner, Herman Nestle, and his wife, Charlotte, ran the little place, each cottage personally decorated by Charlie, as they called Charlotte, who also baked key lime pies that drew nightly crowds that filled their little Cedar Post Barbecue Kitchen, where the motel office and front desk sat at one end.

She and Jack had planned to get married that weekend. But a fight took the air out of that balloon. Liberty wanted to wait on having children, until after they had accumulated some wealth and success, from the business that her attorney background and FBI training, experience, and connections would open, once she launched her own security and investigations company. Her lifelong dream. She wanted a summer villa in the mountains overlooking Milan, Italy, or near Saint Tropez, France. They could rent it out when they weren’t using it, she had rationalized with Jack.

They would build their primary home someplace safe, away from the Mexican border. Perhaps Colorado, she suggested.

Jack, however, loved Mexico. His father had no family to speak of, a brother somewhere in Minnesota he hadn’t seen in years. But his mother had a wonderful family down in the heart of beautiful mountains down south. Clear streams ran into crystal lakes teeming with fish. They could just disappear, he told Liberty. Live a simple, happy life with lots of children. His Marine Corps retired pay and money she could earn doing legal work for surrounding villages would have them living in style.

“It’s Mexico, Jack!” Liberty blew up. “Drug cartels run the place nowadays. Don’t you read the papers?”

“No.” Jack shrugged. He could only remember the beautiful times he spent with his parents, visiting his mother’s family. How he and his father had spent peaceful, beautiful days sitting in a small boat on Lake Santa Maria, looking in the clear water and catching more fish than they could ever eat.

Liberty cried more as she thought of Jack, alone in the desert. Iraqi insurgents wanting to kill him. She cried more, too, because she knew that neither of them could commit nor compromise to the other’s vision of what a good life would be for them together.

She wanted nice homes, wealth, and luxury, and Jack wanted simplicity. Money never interested him. He got a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature and Art, for crying out loud. He didn’t pursue something that would enable him to climb a ladder of success. He read Victor Hugo and Herman Melville, and dreamed of a world painted by Salvador Dali. Completely unrealistic!