He struggled to return to full consciousness. When he did he realized the phone was ringing. The hands on his watch told him that it was either Mel or a wrong number. It was better to have her talk to the answering machine right now.
Jazz sat up to get some water. His father’s knife was in his hand. He stared at it in the dark. He vaguely remembered holding it as he went to sleep, hoping it could give him some solace of the past year.
When the phone stopped, he heard a sound in the living room. Someone was there. He slipped into the closet behind the door. Just as he did, the door opened.
A large dark figure stepped into the bedroom.
Jazz lunged, turning sideways and jamming his hip into the intruder’s, knocking him slightly off balance. His left hand went around his head and pulled it back while his right hand plunged the knife into the neck on the left side. He pulled and tried to slide it to the right.
The knife did not want to move. He could feel blood spurting onto his hands and forearms. A gurgling scream came from his victim. Jazz pulled him backwards now toward the floor. He tried to move the knife in a sawing motion. There was some movement but not enough.
Now he dropped his opponent on the floor, let go of the knife and sprang for the bed. He reached underneath and pulled out a baseball bat. Clutching it with both hands, he prepared to crack the skull next.
The man lay still, arms at his side. There was little air moving through him.
“Uk, uk, uk,” were the last sounds that emanated from the body.
Jazz turned on the bedside light. He first looked to his hand, which was sticky with blood. He then looked at the man on the floor of his bedroom.
It was Johnny Ashland. Johnny Ashland lay on his bedroom floor, blood draining slower now since his heart stopped pumping, a gun on the floor beside him.
Jazz stared at him for a long time. His teammate did not look real with a Mark III mission knife sticking out of his neck and a pool of blood on the floor.
Then, in true form, Jazz ran to the bathroom and threw up.
When he looked in the mirror, James J. Jascinski gained clarity of thought that he would never again have in his life. In an instant he realized that Ashland was one of the SANPAT terrorists and was involved in killing Martin, West, and T-Ball. He surmised that Ash was connected to the De Luca murder and the detonation of the magazine in Tirane.
Before the moment of clarity washed through him, Jazz took one more action with Ashland’s carcass. He returned to the body and placed his knee on Ash’s chest. With both hands he pulled and removed the knife. The blood did not come off easily under hot water, so he wrapped it in a towel.
Jazz went to the closet and found his kit bag with extra gear stored in the floor of his closet. He put the Mark III knife there and extracted the T-Ball’s K-bar.
It was a struggle to get the knife back into Ashland’s neck, but it worked. There was no way he would allow his father’s knife to end up in an evidence cage. Perhaps there was justice that T-Ball’s knife would be recorded as the blade that killed Johnny Ashland.
He picked up the portable phone and dialed 9-1-1. Just as the operator answered there was a knock at the door.
“Portland Emergency Services. Can I help you?”
“Uh, yeah one moment.”
He went to the door. Three men in suits were outside.
“Who’s there?”
“FBI, Mr. Jascinski. We know what happened. Please open up.”
FORTY-THREE
The conference room and the coffee gave Jazz a sense of déjà vu. He sipped the bitter liquid from a mug emblazoned with the EOD Mobile Unit Six logo, waiting for Elena Cruz to return and finish their debrief. He recalled his telling conversation with Ash on the flightline in Albania.
“I am sick of this shit. Fucking Haiti, sir. Fucking Somalia. Fucking Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania. The mother-fucking Balkans! What the fuck are we doing here?”
Jazz understood Ash’s frustration; he shared some of his notions. Plus, the det endured a firefight and a narrow escape only hours before. They were all still decompressing.
Jazz would never forget Ash saying, “The purpose of the military in my view is to drain the lifeblood of our nation’s enemies until they either submit or succumb to our will. Anything that detracts from that is pure unmitigated bullshit.”
But it was the tone in his voice that even then set an alarm off in Jazz’s mind.
“Damn shipmate, you sound very angry,” Jazz had said.
“You don’t know the half of it, LT.”
So Jazz’s theory was wrong and Elena’s was right on. Ash was not a Kaczynski, he was a McVeigh.
Elena walked back into the conference room. She set her notebook and a stack of files on the table and sat down. Jazz waited for her to speak.
A moment passed. Finally Elena spoke.
“Well, Jazz, we seem to have it all laid out now.”
“Did you receive confirmation about the explosives from Norfolk?”
“Yes. I was just told over the phone that Ash was Det Norfolk’s Ammunition and Explosive Manager. In that position he was able to draw explosives from the magazine and report them as expended. In reality he was saving them for his organization.”
“Well how are we able to prove that now if not before?”
“We contacted Norfolk and had them compare logs at the demolition range against the det’s internal monthly operation reports, and the monthly inventory sent to the Navy’s explosive managers in Crane, Indiana. Apparently an inspection was scheduled right before Ash transferred here from Norfolk, but the det was away responding to an incident at sea.”
“The helo crash, the one with the test missile. I remember hearing about it and Ash telling us about it later.”
“Yes, well as a result the explosive safety inspection was cut short. They merely checked what was in the magazine versus what Crane said that they should have.”
“And they matched?”
“Yes. We are going to have to look into Ashland’s history, but he may have obtained hundreds of pounds of explosives for his organization.”
“Fuck, well who are they?”
“We don’t know yet. But undoubtedly they are connected by this fundamentalist terrorist cell that we know about in Albania and in Italy. Pucharelli and I are hoping that the cell in Albania is the head.”
“So, Ash was a member of an anti-government organization?”
“Yes, or a white supremacist group. We suspect that up until recently Ashland was not an active agent, but a merely a supplier of explosives. Who knows, maybe he was not even a full-fledged member, maybe he was only sympathetic to their ideals, or he supplied them only for personal gain.”
“But he obviously joined them recently, otherwise why did he kill T-Ball, why did he try to kill me?”
“That answer brings us back to San Patricio.”
“How?”
Elena pulled out a file and slid it over to Jazz. He opened it. On the top of the file was a mug shot of a man.
“The name there says Marcus Levitt. It is a false identity. First he tried to pass as a Navy lieutenant named James Smith. The Levitt identity passed scrutiny. His real name is Gabriel Miller. Sound familiar?”
“Yeah,” said Jazz flipping through the file.
“He was the owner of the house in San Patricio where the explosives were discovered.”
“Is he in custody?”
“No. Notice that the mug shot says DPS on the ID plate. That stands for Defensive Protective Service. He was caught in the Pentagon parking lot with a trunk full of explosives. Guess where they are from?”