Only the very tip of the red sun was visible; it almost looked as though the horizon was on fire. Turning to look at him, Naomi noticed a thoughtful expression on the man’s face.
“You know, Bosnia was Ryan’s last assignment before he came under my command at Bragg. Obviously, the rumors about him had already drifted my way before he first came into my office to report for duty. In the military, everybody has a story and everybody likes to embellish the facts. It’s easy to conjure up some history because no one knows if it’s a lie or not, and there’s no way to find out. But I wanted to know, so I asked him straight up—‘Did you kill those four people in Bosnia?’”
Naomi waited expectantly. “And?”
The general turned toward her. His face was hard to read. “Ryan didn’t say anything. He just stood up, saluted, and walked out. That was when I knew it was true.”
Naomi shivered again, but the air was still…She was glad that she had taken the time to see Hale. The deputy director would never have given her access to this kind of information. For some reason, she really wanted to know the name of the little girl. It seemed important.
“General, there was something else, wasn’t there? Something that happened between March and Kealey—”
The general’s head whipped around. “Where did you hear that name?”
“It came up between the deputy director and Kealey,” she said quietly. “In connection with the death of Senator Levy and the bombing of the Kennedy-Warren.”
Hale’s eyes were closed, his face pale. Naomi noticed that his hands were gripped tightly around the edge of his seat. For a panicked instant, she thought he might be having a heart attack. Then his breathing eased and his iron grip on the chair loosened.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just been a long time since anyone’s brought it up…”
“Who is he, General?” she asked softly.
“Please, call me Peter.” His hand moved to wipe the shocked expression from his face. It seemed like an eternity before he spoke again. “Ryan Kealey became part of my 3rd Special Forces Group just after he left Bosnia, in November of 1995. It was nearly two years before he was sent into the field again. During that time, he was the CO of ODA 304.”
“ODA? What does that mean?” Naomi asked.
“Operational Detachment Alpha. It’s Special Forces nomenclature—almost everything in the army has some type of acronym. Anyway, he was honing his skills as a leader, getting the troops ready. Everything was great for a while, I had no trouble with anyone in his company. They were the best I had, even though Kealey bitched all the time because I wouldn’t deploy his unit. I wanted him to get his head right, though; that’s why I kept him at Bragg. After a while, he came to me with a complaint about one of his sergeants.”
“The sergeant was March?”
Hale nodded. “He was the platoon sergeant. At first, I was a little skeptical, because he couldn’t point out what the specific problem was. I mean, Jason March was a hell of an NCO. He didn’t have a college degree, otherwise I would have pushed him kicking and screaming into Officer Candidate School. He was a little arrogant, but all leaders have self-confidence…Anyway, I just didn’t buy into what Kealey was saying. Even he was embarrassed to bring it up, because it didn’t sound like much.”
“What did he say?” Naomi’s voice was a gentle probe, almost seductive in cadence and tone.
The general hesitated for a moment. “He said that March never showed any emotion.” He registered Naomi’s reaction and recognized it as his own eight years earlier. “I know, I know. It doesn’t sound like a serious problem. That’s what I thought at the time. But if you think about it, you might understand what that means. For a young soldier in peacetime, the military is not a difficult life. You do what you’re told, show a little respect to your superiors, and take some interest in your job. Anyone can do it. As you gain rank, though, the responsibility grows exponentially, while the pay does not. Now you find yourself held accountable for the lives and well-being of the soldiers under your command…With the responsibility comes stress, and with the stress comes the occasional outburst. Anything else is unnatural.”
“Obviously, I’ve never been in the military, but that doesn’t sound like enough,” she said.
“No, you’re right. It’s not enough. Ryan also told me about the strange expressions that would come over March’s face, and about the fact that he lived off base but no one had ever seen his quarters. To be honest, my opinion of Kealey dropped after this little speech. I mean, it sounded paranoid and more than a little unsubstantiated.”
Naomi could see the pain flicker in the man’s eyes.
“He was right, though. I should have listened to him. I finally deployed Kealey’s unit in the fall of 1997. It was in response to the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Dhahran in 1996. If you remember, nineteen U.S. airmen were killed in the attack and Hezbollah claimed responsibility. It took a while, months of gathering intelligence, but we were finally able to pinpoint the architect of the attack: Mohammed Khalil. He had been granted political asylum by Syria, and was shacked up in a house on the Mediterranean coast.
“I needed the best because we only had one shot at it, so I gave Ryan’s unit the go-ahead. It’s called direct action, a mission that results in the capture or death of enemy combatants. It’s usually the last thing SF is called in to do, but it’s important. March was in an overwatch position. He was the only one on the squad to have completed the sniper school at Benning, so he was up on the ridge with the next-best marksman in the unit. It was going to send a message, it would have counted for something…March was supposed to take out the car with Khalil inside, and then notify the team on the ground. Instead, he shot the second sniper and fired on the unit as they came down the hill.”
Naomi couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “They were all killed?”
“All except the captain. The extraction team, which was the other half of the twelve-man detachment, arrived twenty minutes after they lost radio contact. They didn’t know what had gone wrong until later, but they pulled Kealey out with a bad chest wound and a punctured lung. It’s a miracle he survived as long as he did. They found a lot of blood at March’s position, decided that he would probably bleed out, and that was it.”
“So you just assumed he was dead?”
“There was pressure on us to do it that way. With no witnesses, nobody to dispute our version of events, we avoided a potentially huge problem. Until now, that is.”
“Until now.”
Naomi could hardly see Peter Hale, the dark having eased through the tiny holes in the screened walls, discreetly covering the porch with a black shroud. His disembodied voice reached out to her through the cool night air, along with the gentle chirps of crickets hidden among the long blades of grass.
“If Harper is sending you after him, then I hope you’re ready. If you miss him once, he won’t give you a second chance. You should count yourself lucky to have Ryan on your side, but remember what you’re up against…Whatever happens, don’t let March get his hands on you. Believe me, that’s the last thing you want.”
She felt a distinct ripple of fear run through her body in response to the general’s last words. The fear pushed through her imagined wall of stoicism and touched her deep enough to leave
