“We have captured the Tawalkana commander, General Jacques Ballantine,” he said.
How do they know who I am? Ballantine strained to see the young officer’s nametag. He was wearing a sand-colored battle dress uniform. The officer hooked the handset onto a piece of cord hanging from the top of the inside of the crew compartment and turned toward his prisoner.
Ballantine sat dazed as a medic applied ointment to the cut on his head. The medic’s skilled hands worked diligently on the laceration the pistol had left on his forehead, applying bandages the best he could in the rumbling track.
“Speak English?” the lieutenant asked.
Ballantine nodded.
“We’re taking you to headquarters.”
Ballantine saw the lieutenant’s jaw tighten and flex. His green eyes radiated from a face coated with sand and dust as he leaned over to offer water. That’s when Ballantine saw the name.
Garrett. Lieutenant Garrett.
As Garrett’s face grew closer, Ballantine saw a scar that hadn’t healed properly, cutting across the man’s chin. It almost looked like a cleft, but ran horizontal to the ground. He stared at it.
“Brother shot me. Accident. Here, drink some water.” Garrett reached out to his prisoner with a canteen cup. “We need you healthy.”
Ballantine gave him a hard stare through his narrow, dusty eyes.
“You killed my brother.”
Garrett held his gaze for a few seconds, but it seemed like an hour. They bounced in the loud track. Metal clanked everywhere. The radio hummed a loud static buzz, pierced by rapid spot reports from scouts. Despite the noise, both men sensed silence.
Lieutenant Zachary Garrett was thinking about the time his brother, Matt, and he had been hunting. Their dog Ranger was about fifty feet in front, pointing with one leg at an old corn field. Five quail jumped and flew directly at them. Matt swung his shotgun, firing twice by reflex. A pellet from the second shot nicked Zachary. Zachary, older by three years, resisted the urge to punch his little brother. Instead, he worked him hard in the fields with the horses and cattle. He was close to his brother, and Zachary wondered at that moment how he would feel if this man had just killed him. He lowered his eyes.
The moment was not lost on Ballantine.
Garrett held out a cup of water for Ballantine, spilling half of it as the vehicle lurched. He pulled on his crewman’s helmet and climbed into the turret, leaving a young soldier to stand guard over the captive.
Jacques Ballantine listened as the lieutenant returned to his command role and delivered concise orders. Professional, he thought.
Exhausted, Ballantine’s mind spiraled toward sleep. He watched endless replays of Lieutenant Garrett shooting his brother in the face. Henri was dead. His insurance policy was in the hands of his captor, its significance unrealized, for now. Secret deals for secret weapons were captured in a few conspiratorial conversations, and he was certain they would be useful with the right interrogator. He was glad he had done his homework. The seeds of a plan to use these insidious weapons came to him. The Americans had no idea of what had transpired or what was to come.
In his drifting mind, Garrett’s quick-drawing pistol never stopped firing. To stop the noise in his head, Ballantine made a promise to himself: kill Lieutenant Garrett, kill his brother…
And then retrieve his backpack.
PART 1:
Seeds of Revenge
(twelve Years Later)
CHAPTER 1
Matt Garrett stood and stretched, physical scars sending waves of pain through his body. He looked at the fading blue sky from the deck of his Loudoun County home, perhaps seeking a nod, guidance — anything really — from his dead brother Zachary.
A paramilitary operative with the CIA, Matt had been wounded in the same fight in the Philippines last year, where his brother was killed. Coincidence, mostly, but the fact remained that Zachary was dead, and Matt had almost died.
He lowered his head and stared at his backyard, the terrain gently sloping away from his one-story brick rambler. Thoughts of Zachary had dominated him over the past year and had stymied his recovery. He knew he needed to move on, but he refused to let go.
Matt thought fondly of Zachary’s graduation from West Point, his brother’s service in Desert Storm, his agonizing decision to leave the service and work the family farm in the mid-nineties, and then, after the 9/11 attacks, his firm resolve to get into the fight. Which he had done.
Which had gotten him killed.
“If only he had stayed on the farm,” Matt muttered.
It was nearly six p.m., and despite Matt’s near-paralytic state regarding Zachary, he did sense an uncertain stir of change in the wind. Perhaps that was what kept him hanging on. The towering pine trees in his back yard bowed with the breeze, and Matt closed his eyes, trying to understand everything that had transpired.
Operation Iraqi Freedom had kicked off and was an apparent success so far, but he had his doubts. With all the fanfare over Iraq, he couldn’t help but pick at the open scab of his failure to kill al Qaeda senior leadership when he had had the shot. Now the opportunity was lost forever. True, high-ranking officials had denied his kill chain, and a JDAM bomb had struck closer to his team than to the al Qaeda leadership, but he still blamed himself. That failure, coupled with his brother’s death and Matt’s own physical wounds, were enough to make him doubt himself. And in his business, there was no margin for doubt — no second guessing.
Since when did you start following orders, Garrett? Should have stayed, taken the shot.
He shook his head and looked to his left, where a small hill rose above the stream. There was nothing but forest for about three miles. The April evening was filled with the hum of spring in the Virginia countryside. Through the pine thickets Matt saw budding dogwoods and darting squirrels. The temperature hovered in that optimistically comfortable range where he would begin to wear T-shirts and shorts when relaxing at his home. He stared at the pieces of a fading blue sky that shone through the pine tips to the rear of his property. Then he looked down at his batting cage.
Matt walked down the deck steps, grabbed a Pete Rose 34-inch bat, and stepped into the rectangular mesh netting. He liked the thin handle and the wide barrel of the bat. Even if Charlie Hustle had been banned from baseball, it was still the best bat in the sport. Matt flipped a switch on a small post, and the machine hummed to life. Some people meditated, Matt figured; he hit baseballs.
Absently, he wondered if he entered the cage to duel with himself. Whether it was post traumatic stress or prolonged grieving, Matt was in persistent internal conflict. Sometimes he had gnawing at him the urge to get in his old Porsche, fill the gas tank, and drive dark, dangerous roads at high speeds.
Other times he stepped into the batting cage.
His angst was no different, he figured, than the way some of his soldier buddies who were suffering post traumatic stress might wake up screaming, grab for their elusory weapon in the middle of the night, and move through the house, methodically clearing each room, calling “One up” to invisible partners, buddies who had been killed right next to them in combat.
Matt needed to fill that emptiness left by Zach’s absence and burn his adrenaline. The grief welled inside him, he repressed it, and then it reappeared somewhere else like a magician’s trick. One moment it was an obvious thought; the next it was a repressed memory. Post traumatic stress was tricky that way. The repressed memory went latent, seemingly forgotten, only to surge forward at the least expected time, manifesting itself as a spontaneous action, sometimes benign, often not. Only on intense reflection or therapy could the sufferer follow the byzantine trail back to the original mournful feeling.