Текст книги "Flat Spin"

Автор книги: David Freed

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

THREE

I can’t say whether there was a second gunman in Dallas the day JFK was assassinated, though anyone familiar with the elegant efficiency of your basic L-shaped ambush could take one look at the sixth floor sniper’s nest and the stockade fence behind the grassy knoll on Dealey Plaza and draw their own conclusions. I can’t say whether it was a flying saucer outside Roswell in 1957, or whether Elvis is alive and well and eating chili dogs with Marilyn Monroe on some obscure island in the Mediterranean. What I can say with certainty is that, until very recently, in the name of national security, the government of the United States relied on a select handful of men to do its dirty work in places and ways that never once made the network news.

The agency to which these men reported was classified Tier One Ultra and code-named Alpha, a purposeful tip of the hat to Alfa, Russia’s most elite counterterrorism unit. Known only within highly compartmentalized circles, Alpha showed up on no Defense Department orders of battle. There was never a mention of it in any Congressional budget reports, nor on any blogs. No Tweets. Culled from the various branches of America’s military and intelligence apparatus for their individual skills, elite operators assigned to Alpha surrendered all formal rank and title. They were referred to synonymously as “go-to guys.”They were hunter-killers, these men, honed in the arts of asymmetric warfare and oblivious to the sovereignty of treaties or international borders. They proved an invaluable weapon in the fight against global terrorism. But they were not invulnerable to the vagaries of shifting political winds. The current administration, fearing scandal if word of Alpha’s actions ever were fully known, quietly ordered the group disbanded within a month of Inauguration Day. White House officials past and present will deny there were ever any “go-to guys.” But I know there were because I was one of them. And so, too, was Arlo Echevarria.

I’d be on the next Con Air flight to Super Max were I to divulge all that we did. That’s how nondisclosure agreements work. Sign one, tell a few tales out of school, and the next thing you know, you’re bunking with Robert Hanssen and stamping out license plates the rest of your life. So you’ll excuse me if I’m a bit vague on operational details – target ID’s, mission locations, and the like. What I can tell you, though, is how Echevarria and I worked together, how I initially revered him, and how, ultimately, I wished him dead.

For me, it began in college.

We were playing New Mexico at Albuquerque my senior year. With time about to expire before halftime, I snagged a pass cutting across the middle and turned to run upfield when the Lobos’ 240-pound middle linebacker, a first-round NFL prospect with “I Shall Fear No Man But God” tattooed across his throat, separated me from my cleats. The football went one way; the major structural ligaments of my right knee the other. And so ended my collegiate gridiron career. Fortunately for me, playing football was not the only reason the Air Force put me through college.

Flash forward ten years. I’m flying A-10 Warthogs. The ’Hog sometimes gets a bad rap from other fighter pilots who drive ships with pointier noses, but there’s no better platform when it comes to blowing up stuff. I blew up stuff real good all over the world– and got paid well to do it, too. Tanks. Republican Guardsmen. Miscellaneous terrorists. A total blast. Literally. Then, during an otherwise routine six-month physical, my friendly flight surgeon asked if I had any squawks. I made the mistake of telling him half-jokingly that I was considering applying for work at the Weather Channel because I could always tell when a low pressure system was moving in based on how lousy my surgically reconstructed knee felt. The doctor bent and prodded my lower leg this way and that, then concluded that the joint had atrophied beyond acceptable Air Force standards. I was ruled unfit to fly. At that moment, no longer a fighter pilot, I could’ve just as easily been ruled unfit to continue living.

I spent a month searching for the true meaning of life at the bottom of bourbon bottles, debating whether to resign my commission. The airlines were hiring like crazy back then. Most were so desperate for pilots they didn’t care about something as trivial as a reconstructed anterior cruciate ligament. As long as you had a pulse and could more or less keep the dirty side of the airplane down, you were assured of a paycheck. For me, though, the notion of hauling software salesmen and colicky infants around in the back of a 737 held all the appeal of driving a Greyhound bus. I enjoyed being in the Air Force. I just needed a different career path. My superiors, as it turned out, were only too happy to accommodate me.

Soldiers and Marines are quick to point out that the Air Force is the most non-military of the military services. They call it the Air Farce. The Chair Farce. Civilians in Uniform. A country club with airplanes. Deservedly so. Most Air Force weenies can’t tell the difference between a handgun and a howitzer. I was somewhat unusual in that regard. When you bounce from ranch to ranch as a foster kid on the arid plains east of Denver, you quickly learn that: 1) much of Colorado bears little resemblance to a Coors commercial and 2) shooting firearms is about all there is to do recreationally in such places unless you count goat roping and getting loaded and/or laid. Goats give me the creeps; booze, I discovered early on, brings out the bad in me; and street narcotics always seemed to me a stupid thing to do to one’s physiology. But guns, ah, now those were another story altogether.

I loved the precision they demanded, their perfect utility. For my twelfth birthday, my foster parents du jour gave me an old single-shot, bolt-action .22 with a red cocking indicator and a battered walnut stock. It was the most animate inanimate object I’d ever seen, let alone owned. I worked every job I could get – digging irrigation ditches, shoveling snow, pulling weeds – to buy ammunition, and target practiced endlessly. Cans, bottles, rocks, birds on the wing, varmints on the run. After awhile, I could hit anything with consistency and at ranges that sounded more like bragging than marksmanship. Which helps explain why, after being admitted to the Air Force Academy, I consistently registered among the highest scores in school history with both pistol and M-16.

My performance on the firing range was not lost on my superiors when they sought to find me a suitable new job after clipping my wings. Such ability, they concluded, lent itself to the wonderful world of military informational gathering and assessment. What one’s shooting skills had to do with flying a desk as an intelligence analyst was beyond me, but I didn’t ask many questions. Most things in the military make no sense. And thus, with some initial reluctance, I accepted a series of ground-based assignments, first to the Air Intelligence Agency at Wright-Patterson, then to the National Air Intelligence Center at Lackland Air Force Base, until, finally, I ended up where I did, in the darkest shadows, on the blackest operations, a token zoomie in the land of snake eaters – among them a warrior of Mayan ancestry who one day would steal from me the only woman I’d ever truly loved.

* * *

I was lounging on a rope hammock in my landlady’s backyard, hoping the sun would bake away all thoughts of Savannah and her unannounced visit that morning. The plan wasn’t working. I thought about going inside, maybe catching up on my reading, but when it’s ninety-four degrees and your home is a converted two-car garage with a flat roof and no insulation or air conditioning, going inside isn’t something you do voluntarily until well after sundown. So I just lay there. Even my feline idiot of a roommate, Kiddiot, the world’s most worthless cat, was showing the effects of the heat. He was dozing in the oak tree above me with his tongue lolling lethargically out one corner of his mouth. His lanky orange and white limbs straddled the tree like some Bulgarian gymnast passed out on a balance beam. A mockingbird perched on the same branch not two feet away from him, singing every song in its vast repertoire, untroubled by the cat’s proximity. Kiddiot’s slothful reputation obviously had preceded him.

I slipped the photo of Echevarria and me out of my pocket and studied it for the umpteenth time. I’d lied to Savannah. The blood in the picture was as real as the dead Al-Qaeda operative who’d spilled it. He was a pharmacist from Damascus, mastermind of at least four jihadist bombings in Madrid and Islamabad. More than eighty innocents had met their end, courtesy of his handiwork. Any one of the attacks might’ve easily landed him atop Alpha’s tasking board. But the Syrian pharmacist was definitely three strikes and you’re out material: it just so happened that he was related by marriage to a prominent Arab-American politico with personal ties to the White House. The President’s handlers were not keen on seeing that story above the fold in the Times. So telephone calls were placed on encrypted lines and options discussed – obliquely, to be sure, and always off-the-record. Make the evil pharmacist disappear.

Great patience and skill were needed to bag him – that and a $250,000 reward. In the end, his own daughter gave him up. He was not merely a crazy mad-dog bomber. As it turned out, he was also a member of the Disneyana Fan Club, an avid collector of all things Mickey. That alone was reason enough, the daughter would later insist, to drop a dime on Daddy. We helicoptered in on a moonless night and tracked him for almost a week before cornering him and two of his lieutenants in a wadi southeast of nowhere. When they tried to run, we shot all three with Kalashnikovs to make it look like the handiwork of local warlords. We photographed and fingerprinted the bodies to confirm their identities, then left them to rot in the sun.

The screen door swung open with a crash, disrupting my stroll down memory lane, as my landlady, Mrs. Schmulowitz, emerged from her modest 1920’s bungalow, shuffling backward, all eightyeight pounds of her, while struggling to balance an orange plastic tray with two glasses and what looked to be a pitcher of iced tea.

“Global warming, schmoble warming. This is nothing. Try August in Bensonhurst.”

“Here, let me get that for you, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

I pocketed the photo as I bounded out of the hammock and steadied her by a bony elbow, commandeering the tray of drinks a half-second before she took a tumble.

“Always helpful Cordell, who never gives me trouble and pays his rent on time – and good-looking to boot,” the old lady said, beaming at me. “You are one handsome man, you know that? The most handsome man I ever saw.”

“You told me your first husband was the most handsome man you ever saw, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

“Don’t get me started. My first husband, such a shmendrick, that man. A man more in love with a mirror you never saw in your life, may he rest in peace.”

Mrs. Schmulowitz was pushing ninety and crooked like a question mark. Her sun-baked skin was the color and approximate texture of an apricot fruit roll. A retired elementary school gym teacher, she was the only octogenarian I ever saw whose preference in warm weather attire was Lycra bicycle shorts and a fire-engine red sports bra. Her hair was Einstein frizzy and thinning at the crown, but the years, so far as I could ever tell, had done nothing to dim her mind. Rhodes Scholars and stand-up comics only wished they were half as sharp as Mrs. Schmulowitz.

I carried the tray of drinks and set it down on a rusting wrought-iron patio table that could’ve stood a new coat of paint.

“Even money Tampa Bay chokes on Sunday,” she said, pouring me a glass of iced tea. “Their passing game stinks, they can’t stop the run, and that coach of theirs. They shouldn’t fire him. They should indict him.”

“Be honest, Mrs. Schmulowitz. New York could start Rudolf Hess at fullback and you’d still pull for the Giants.”

“Hess? Hess was a pitseleh,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “Hermann Goering, now there was a fascist who had starting fullback written all over him.” Gingerly, she lowered her arthritic back into a chair and exhaled, like air escaping a tire. “I’m making a nice brisket Monday night. With those green beans in the cream sauce you like – and, yes, I realize dairy with meat violates every kosher law in the book, but so does bacon and I think it goes without saying where we all stand on bacon, am I right? Anyway, you coming, yes or no? Be there or be square.”

“Brisket? Green beans in cream sauce? Of course, I’m coming.”

She double-clicked her dentures approvingly.

I’d signed the lease the previous summer after relocating to Rancho Bonita, where I’d vacationed one spring break in college and had wanted to live ever since. Every Monday night during football season, Mrs. Schmulowitz cooked me dinner. We’d sit together on a blue mohair sofa more shabby than chic, eating off of metal TV trays and watching the game on the world’s only still-functioning black and white console television. Cocooned in a cabinet of real mahogany which she dusted every day, it was a twenty-one-inch Magnavox that took ten minutes to warm up and hummed like a transmission tower, drowning out the announcers. But Mrs. Schmulowitz never seemed to mind. She knew more about offense and defense then any announcer who ever lived. It was in her blood. Her uncle was Sid Luckman, the late great Jewish quarterback. Accordingly, Monday nights were spent with Mrs. Schmulowitz offering her own expert play-by-play commentary, when she was not speculating aloud as to whether certain players were members of her tribe based on the names stitched on the backs of their jerseys.

“What does it matter if they’re Jewish,” I’d say, “as long as they can play?”

“What does it matter? I’ll tell you why it matters!” she’d respond, her voice rising with indignation. “It matters because the goyim of this world need to know that Jews can do more than balance the books and win Nobel prizes!”

Mrs. Schmulowitz sipped her iced tea. “So, no flying this afternoon?”

“Too hot to fly,” I said, hoping I sounded convincing.

The old lady rubbed her eye, an unconscious gesture that suggested she doubted I was telling the truth. “You wanna talk hot? I’ll tell you hot. Back in Brooklyn, we used to pour boiling coffee in our laps, just to cool off.”

“Somehow, I doubt that, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

“Believe what you want, bubby. My third husband, he’d believe anything. Nothing but trouble, that man.”

In the oak tree above us, Kiddiot uncurled his tongue like a roll of bubblegum and yawned.

“Listen, Bubeleh, tell me it’s none of my business, but some kid came by today looking for you. Said he was from a collection agency. Tall, black, muscles out to here. I told him for his own good to get lost before I had my way with him.”

“I’m having a few minor cash flow issues. Nothing to worry about. Business’ll pick up.”

Mrs. Schmulowitz reached over and patted my hand. “Of course it will. But, listen, if there’s anything I can do between then and now, slip you a few bucks to tide you over, whatever, you give me the word, OK? Happy to help. And don’t you worry none. I got more money than I know what to do with. My first husband, he saw to that, may he rest in peace.”

I thanked her for her generosity and assured her that I was getting along just fine. Taking a handout from my landlady would have been about as low as I could go. I wasn’t there. Yet.

* * *

Kiddiot and I were napping on the hammock when my cell phone rang an hour later. He jumped off my chest and onto the grass while I groggily fished the phone out of my pants pocket. I was hoping it might be a new student or possibly a whale watching charter. Anything to generate a little income. It wasn’t.

“My hot water heater just took a dump,” Larry Kropf up at the airport said, “but I can’t call a plumber. Wanna know why?”

“Well, your telephone’s working, Larry, so I know that’s not the reason.”

“I can’t call a plumber, smart ass, because I can’t afford a plumber. The wife wants to run a load of clothes. The kid wants to take a shower. But they can’t do either one because I got no hot water! So now I gotta replace the fucking heater myself and go to the plumbing supply place and buy all the fittings at least three times because nobody in the history of mankind has ever done a plumbing project without first getting the wrong parts at least twice. Plus, I gotta take time off from making money so I can spend money I ain’t got! You know what I’m getting at here, Logan?”

“That retirement check’s coming in any day, Larry, I promise.”

“When’re you gonna pay me what you owe me?”

“Soon as I can.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means have a little faith, Larry.”

“Faith don’t put food on the goddamn table!”

“Tell it to the Pope. You should see that guy’s table.”

“Sell the Duck.”

“I sell my airplane, I’m out of business.”

“You’re out of business now! You got no students, Logan!”

I told him that running a flight school is a lot like fishing. Some days they’re biting, some days they’re not. Things could turn around for me tomorrow, I said. You just never know.

There was silence on the other end for a couple of seconds. Then Larry said, with more resignation than rage, “You got two weeks. Either you pay me what you owe me, in full, or you’re out. You don’t pack your shit up on your own, I call the sheriff and he packs it for you. I got other people interested in the space, Logan. Nothing personal. It’s business. You understand.”

“Yeah. I understand.”

The line went dead.

The left side of my face burned from too much sun. The back of my head throbbed from too much Larry. For a moment, I considered taking Mrs. Schmulowitz up on her offer of a loan, just to tide me over. But the notion of it made my stomach spasm. I was forty-three, a divorced, dime-a-dozen flight instructor with a tired airplane and no students, sharing a converted garage with a cat that barely gave me the time of day. My life was in a flat spin.

I thought about calling around to some of my old superiors in the intelligence community. Maybe one of them might know of a job somewhere. After all, I’d left Alpha on good terms. Passed my psych evaluation on the way out with flying colors. My superior officers couldn’t believe that anyone would ever willingly leave so coveted an assignment. I gave them some clichéd explanation about needing new challenges. In my resignation letter, I even managed to squeeze in a quote by Anaïs Nin that I remembered from my Academy days: “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore.” But the reality was, after a decade of covert ops, I was tired of all the secrecy and all the blood. I knew it was time to hang it up when I finally ran out of euphemisms to describe death in my after-action reports. You can write that the target was “voided” or “neutralized” only so many times before the words begin to lose their potency. Yet all of that only partly explained why I had wanted to move on. The demise of my marriage to Savannah also factored into my decision to quit. Echevarria, arguably my closest friend in Alpha, had stolen her from me while my fellow go-to guys did little more than watch. There’s an old maxim among warriors: “Trust me with your life, never with your money or your wife.” It was my fault, my brothers-in-arms reminded me: I’d been stupid enough to trust one of them.

I left Alpha angry. Six years later, I was still angry. But anger, like faith, as Larry reminded me, doesn’t put chow on the table. His threat to kick me out of his hangar reinforced what should have been glaringly apparent to me long before: I needed a steady job.

I decided to head inside despite the heat and check the classifieds on Craigslist. I rolled out of the hammock and was bending down to strap on my sandals when my phone rang again.