Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“I thought she was flying back home today,” Elmore said. “Didn’t Kendrick recall her since the lid blew off her investigation, and Alosi and his boss got subpoenaed to testify before that Senate committee?”

“She plied her wiles, Elmore. You know pretty women and gruff old men. Kendrick’s just like the rest of us.” Gray chuckled, then Liberty snatched the phone from him.

“Jason told me that I should stay here until we rescued Jack,” Liberty told Colonel Snow. “He cares. He wants us to get Jack back alive. No plying of womanly wiles. Besides, Mr. Kendrick knew I’d be worthless back there, and I might even be a help here. So he told me to stay.”

“How about your three boys?” Elmore asked.

“They took the flight home with Alosi,” she said.

“You’re welcome to the facilities there with Captain Burkehart and Smedley,” Elmore told her.

“I’ve already moved in,” Liberty followed.

“Jack’s bunk?” Elmore laughed. “Or is that a dumb question?”

“You know me too well, Elmore,” she answered.

“Stay close to the phone,” the colonel said.

“I wish I could be there with you guys,” she said.

“You’ll do fine with the skipper and Smedley,” Elmore said. “It would be problematic, even if you could manage to get up here. What would you do, anyway?”

“Go out and hunt Jack, with you guys,” she said.

“Get some sleep, Liberty. I’ll call you later,” Elmore said, and hung up the phone.

He walked to the next module, where Speedy Espinoza had set up shop and pounded on the door.

“Wake up!” he bellowed, imitating his all-time hero, John Wayne. “You’re wasting daylight.”

“What the fuck?” Espinoza moaned, opening his eyes to total darkness. “What time is it?”

“Four thirty in the morning. Coffee’s made,” Elmore said in John Wayne character, as Speedy opened the door.

The colonel went to the three racks where Walter, Kermit, and Cory still snored, and started kicking cots.

“Top Gillespie, I’m surprised that you let this air winger beat you to breakfast,” Snow growled.

“We’re up, Colonel,” Hacksaw grogged, rubbing his eyes.

The outside door swung open, and First Sergeant Alvin Barkley stepped through, helmet on and combat-ready.

“You boys ready to rock and roll?” He smiled, a big old-fashioned metal canteen cup in his hand, steaming with hot coffee.

“Getting that way, First Sergeant,” Snow answered. Then he looked at Espinoza. “Speedy, beam up your computer and open that big file that Langley sent while you rested.”

The former Marine pilot had already sat in the chair and begun typing in his password. In seconds, he had a list of maps and pictures. He clicked on one and up came a photograph of Abu Omar in his Republican Guard uniform, no beard and a black moustache under his nose. He looked remarkably like his cousins, Saddam Hussein and Chemical Ali.

Next thing, CIA Agent Espinoza opened a file that had side-by-side portraits of Omar. One, a photograph of him in a business suit, bare chin and moustache, and the next, an artist’s take on what he might look like with a beard and typical dress of an insurgent leader.

“I know that guy!” Barkley exclaimed the second he saw the graybeard with dirty teeth.

Espinoza gave him a look. “Oh do tell.”

“Way back, when we first started setting up shop here,” the first sergeant went on. “Abu Omar comes rolling up in this fucked-up Russian truck stacked to the sky with all kinds of vegetable produce. Boxes and boxes lashed to the cargo deck of this smoking piece of rusted shit. He has this real pretty young girl in the passenger seat, showing off a little titty for the Iraqi cops who checked them out.

“I had Sergeant Padilla with his killer dog, Rattler, smiling those titanium teeth of his at these scumbags, checking out the truck. Dog alerts, so I want to inspect the cargo. He’s got something hidden under all those onions.

“Both the Iraqi police and the local army bosses stop us in our tracks. They say they know this old goat fucker and claim that he’s harmless. Like ten seconds later, we get a call on the radio from our bosses, and State Department orders us to stand down. He’s just a harmless old farmer from Baiji trucking his vegetables to Haditha.

“Harmless my ass! I’m chapped. So’s Padilla.”

Then the first sergeant stuck his head out the door, and yelled, “Jorge, get your ass in here with your dog. Give this goat fucker a look and tell me if you know him.”

In ten seconds, Sergeant Padilla and Corporal Rattler stood front and center in front of the CIA computer. He took one look at the picture.

“Motherfucker!” Padilla said. “We had him in our hands! Those Iraqi cops. Fuck them! They let this asshole go!”

Elmore thought for a moment, and observed, “He’s probably not far from Haditha then.”

“I’d say within a twenty-mile radius,” Barkley said.

“Let’s get this show on the road!” Elmore said. “Instead of wandering up and down the MSR and side roads, we’re going to fan out in a line and move west. I want a five-mile-wide sweep.”

Espinoza sat pecking at his computer, and brought up a map. “There it is. Langley sent it, too. I’ve been searching for this map forever. Take a look.”

“What is it?” Snow asked, looking at the screen and the first sergeant at his side, the room now crowded with a growing number of Marines who had begun stuffing themselves into the tight quarters.

“For two thousand years, probably more,” Espinoza said, “camel caravans moved large tonnages of cargo from the seaports to Baghdad. These caravans traveled down south to ports by Kuwait, and those along the Mediterranean coast. Places like Tyre and Beirut. Crossing the desert to the west took doing. Once they intercepted the Euphrates flowing south at Haditha, they had it made, followed it to Baghdad. But getting across all this dry country?

“Scattered out here in the desert we see these places in the middle of nowhere. How can people survive out here? No water. Just sand and rocks. Right?”

“Water wells and underground facilities,” Elmore said.

“Bingo!” Speedy laughed and pointed at the red dots on the map. “Each of these locations is an ancient caravan stop. See how they fall in a line that leads toward the Mediterranean seaports?”

Then he pointed at one forty miles southwest of Haditha. “This one here? You had a nest of Hajis based in it. We ran an air strike on it day before yesterday. Took out a trio of gun wagons running high speed cross-country, then we hit the house with two five-hundred-pounders.

“Pilots reported that they saw the place on fire before their bombs hit. Smoke plume drew them to the target. Could be Jack was nearby. Very possible that he set the place ablaze and got caught there?”

“Good guess,” Elmore said.

“Should we check it out?” First Sergeant Barkley asked.

“No,” Elmore said. “They won’t be keeping Jack in a bombed-out camel stop.”

“But they will have him in one that is still operational,” Speedy said, pointing to seven more in a thirty-mile radius, along two lines west from Haditha.

“Flip a coin and shoot?” Elmore asked.

“I think start visiting them systematically,” Speedy said. “We need to get rolling.”

“How’s that look, First Shirt?” Elmore asked Barkley.

“We’re organizing gear, getting Marines suited up, loading ammo. It takes time,” he said.

“Can we get moving by eight o’clock?” Elmore asked.

“By nine, anyway,” Barkley said.

Burning orange bleeding across the Iraqi desert from first light of a new day cast the Arabian oryx buck’s white coat the same color as the blood-red dunes that surrounded him and his three doe. He stood munching a salad of low-growing green succulents that had found moisture somewhere deep beneath the sands, and gave life where none might otherwise exist.