Eric Maddox - Mission - Black List #1

“Who wants to know?” she asked, still suspicious.

I took a deep breath. “I’m from Enid. I was born here and I was adopted and I think that you have a daughter, Debbie. If she had a child and gave it up for adoption, I think I’m that person.”

She took another long pull off her cigarette and let the question hang in the air with the smoke for what felt like a lifetime. What was I doing here, I asked myself again. Was this a mistake? How long was that ash on her cigarette going to get before it fell off?

After a long silence she responded. “No, no, you look too old.”

“May 10, 1972, does that ring a bell?” I persisted.

Finally she smiled and said, “Maybe you ought to come inside.”

I blinked but stood motionless. Now I knew. I actually could have just left and been perfectly happy. They said I couldn’t find her, but I did. Hell, I did it in less than eight hours.

Inside Thelma Webster told me that her daughter lived in Austin and volunteered to call her for me. I wasn’t at all ready to get on the phone but couldn’t find the words to stop her from making the call.

Thankfully, Debbie wasn’t home. I asked Thelma if she had any pictures and she showed me several. I noted our striking resemblance in silence then asked if I could have one of the photos of my mother taken when she was in high school. She gave it to me and I thanked her. Then I left.

I never attempted to contact either my mother or grandmother again. Finding them was enough. I keep the picture in my office and consider it to be one of my most treasured possessions.

I had joined the Army to be a paratrooper. My goal was to be a “ground-pounder,” a grunt. I joined the Army to serve my country, and I wanted to make the most of my enlistment. Out on the front line was where wars were fought and won.

In 1995 I made it into Ranger School and it proved to be every bit as tough and demanding as I had heard. But I made it through and went on to become a squad leader for the 82nd Airborne Division. I had achieved the goals I set for myself when I first enlisted. It was time to start thinking about new objectives.

An interesting opportunity presented itself when I was sent to Latin America for training exercises. I started learning street Spanish from the locals. I had never considered myself especially good at learning languages, but I enjoyed the process. It prompted me to check out the Army’s foreign-language program. I took the test and scored high enough to get my choice of any of the dozens of languages being taught at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. I picked Mandarin Chinese. At that point I was offered two options. The first was to be a voice interceptor. That basically consisted of sitting in a windowless room with a pair of headphones listening to foreign radio transmissions. The second was to be a Mandarin Chinese interrogator. Since we weren’t at war with China, the likelihood of actually interrogating anyone was pretty slim. But it was certainly preferable to sitting behind a desk monitoring broadcasts eight hours a day. So I signed on. I figured it might prove useful when I left the military and moved into the private sector. A working knowledge of Chinese could be a very marketable skill.

It was also one of the hardest languages in the world to master. Over the next eighteen months I struggled to read, write, and speak it; and, when I graduated in 1999, it was by the skin of my teeth.

There wasn’t a lot of forethought that went into my decision. It wasn’t as if I ever wanted to be an interrogator or even thought I had the skills to be one. But once I made the choice, I was determined to do the best I could. From that point on, I thought of myself as an interrogator and wanted to do interrogations, even though I had no idea how to go about it and wasn’t likely to get the chance.

Instead I was eventually sent to Beijing, where I was attached to the U.S. Embassy as a linguist and translator. Mostly my job consisted of translating newspaper articles and escorting American VIPs around town, sometimes even bargaining for them with the local shopkeepers.

By late summer of 2000, I was back in the States, where I returned to Fort Huachuca for a course that would qualify me to become an E-6 staff sergeant. When I was there I met a woman in Tucson and we got married later that fall. We would go on to have two sons, but our marriage didn’t last. In our first few years together, I deployed six times, and nearly every tour was for six months. Our very young marriage couldn’t take it.

There are many effects of war, not just casualties on the battlefield. Sometimes even two good people cannot make a marriage work. Whatever the reason, it was a difficult and painful decision. Thankfully both of us were committed to the kids as our number one priority.

By the time our second son was on the way, the Army had loaned me out to a military intelligence agency. It was there that I first met Lee. We were sent on various deployments where our specific training and language skills could prove useful. I found myself increasingly desperate to take these trips.

Then came 9/11. Suddenly I knew what I was supposed to be doing: hunting down these sons-of-bitches to the farthest corners of the earth. I started making numerous requests for assignments, anywhere and everywhere. Lee, who spoke Farsi, was naturally more in demand as an interrogator and would eventually serve in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay. I had to be satisfied with a string of backwater deployments, far away from the action. But when the war started and the request came down for experienced interrogators with infantry training to go to Iraq, I saw my chance. I had no hesitation in pointing out to my superiors that I had volunteered for whatever they had thrown at me. Now there was a real war going on, with a real need for interrogators for the first time in decades. I may not have had the opportunity to ever interrogate a prisoner before, but it was not for a lack of volunteering.

They saw my point. It had been a long time coming, but I was finally going to do my job.

I woke up at 1100 feeling totally refreshed and revived. I’d only had about three hours sleep. There’s something about getting shot at by a fifty-caliber machine gun that gives you a whole new appreciation of life.

Everyone else was still in the rack, so I took the opportunity to look around. Over the next few days, I’d get a complete picture of the mansion’s layout. Upstairs was a large open area with rows of bunk beds. This was the shooter’s quarters. Each one got both a bottom and top bunk. The bottom was to sleep on; the top was to store their weapons and equipment. There were a few couches and a TV where they played video games in their downtime. A corridor led to the operations room I’d seen on my first night, equipped with maps and computers for receiving and evaluating intelligence.

From the second floor there was a view of the mansion grounds. From the back you could see the Tigris River, down the slope of a dead lawn past the thick brush of the bank. The wide flow of the river created a natural barrier to the post.

Off to one side of the mansion was a guesthouse and behind that a large pool used by the task force. Its chlorinated blue water contrasted starkly with the dry desert in every direction.

Downstairs, past the piles of weapons and ammo in the living room, a spacious kitchen opened onto the dining room. This was the main meeting area, where everyone gathered around the big table to talk and eat. Another hallway led to two more bedrooms and a laundry area with a washer and dryer.

I was loading the few pieces of clothing I’d brought when I heard a voice behind me. “What are you doing up so early?”