“And they go after operatives who’ve gotten out of control somehow?” p “Not just any operatives: -They go after the operatives who kill people.
This isn’t everyday work. These are specialists who hunt down other specialists.”
“And do what?”
“I heard an FBI guy once say that the term of art was extinguish. They extinguish the runaway asset. Make the problem go away. Probably in such a manner as to attract zero attention.”
“Why not bring the runaway asset, as you call him, back for disciplinary measures?”
“How do you discipline an assassin, Karen? Take him to court? Look, I don’t believe the U.S. government keeps a big stable of assassins. But I do believe it keeps some, depending on the international climate and the nature of our country’s enemies at any given time. There are even fewer sweepers.”
“And you think Galantz is a sweeper?”
“My FBI friend does. And he says that the agency in question is going quietly ape-shit over the fact that this guy is killing civilians.”
“Well, if that’s true, why on earth don’t they tell the Navy and get Sherman off the hook?”
Train thought about that as he turned the big vehicle off the interstate and headed down toward the base. “That’s what’s puzzling me,” he said.
“Johnson said the Navy had been warned off-throug4 the DNI. But I don’t know whom he’s talked to. If it was Carpenter, the admiral sure as hell didn’t tell me-other than some mumbo jumbo about what he was going to order me to do.”
“And this is a guy with one hand and one eye? Isn’t that how Sherman described him?”
“A guy with one hand and one eye who crawled out of the Rung Sat secret zone with a regiment of VC on his U-all, endured a year in a Saigon jail, and lived to tell about it.
And if he’s been working for those people for twenty years, he’s an experienced sweeper. I think I’d prefer dealing with any number of KGB colonels.” -
It was Karen’s turn to be silent as they approached the main gate of the base and showed their identification. Train drove through the base, remembering his Officer Candidate School days at Quantico back in 1970.
The airstrip was primarily a helicopter operating area, situated at the base to provide helicopter training services to the various Marine basic-training operations. There was a single main strip paralleling the river, five main hangars, a maintenance admin area dominated by Quonset huts, a fuel farm, and a standard flight line and tower complex. Train drove down the flight-line perimeter road, staying clear of two Marine CH46E helicopters that were turning up on the pad in front of the operations building. He pulled up in front of the largest Quonset hut, which had a sign indicating that the maintenance division was housed inside. Even there, several hundred feet down the flight line from operations, the noise of the two helicopters was nearly overpowering.
Inside, they faced a counter that ran the width of the Quonset hut. They produced their identification, and Karen asked a bored-looking civilian woman to see the officer in charge.
“Do you have an appointment?” the woman asked.
Karen just looked at her.
“Do we need one?” Train asked, his tone of voice clearly expressing his incredulity.
“I’ll see if Mr. Myer is available,” the woman said. Train rolled his eyes at Karen as the woman headed reluctantly toward the back of the open room, where a large red-faced warrant officer sat. Karen just shook her head. The warrant officer saw the clerk and then Karen and Train, and he stood up. The clerk indicated that they should come back. The warrant remained standing in deference to Karen’s three stripes.
“We need to interview a John L. Sherman,” Karen said.
He supposedly works as a rigger on the flight line here?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the warrant said. “I know him.”
“What can you tell us about him?”
The warrant looked over Karen’s shoulder at the clerical area and lowered his voice. “He’s kind of a shitbird, Commander. Makes like a biker hood most of the time. He’s on the wrapper team.”
“Rapper team?” Train asked. The warrant looked over at him, sizing him up, big man to big man.
“Yeah. They fly the forty-six echoes in here that’re going to dopot-level maintenance up in Pennsylvania. We do the baseline check, strip the rotor blades, and then shrink-wrap the birds for the train ride up north.”
“Where can we find him?”
Myer turned back to Karen. “Best thing to do is to go down to the wrap hangar. Last one on the line. You wanna maybe just peek through the side door, make sure they’re done, before you go in there, okay? It’s messier’n shit in there when they’re wrapping.”
“This guy Sherman, he a real biker? A hard guy?” Train asked.
Myer snorted. “Naw. Real bikers would put a guy like that in panties and turn him out in a heartbeat. I can’t believe that guy was ever in the Corps, you know what I mean?”
They -went back outside and got in Train’s car to drive down the flight line to the maintenance hangars beyond the Quonset hut. The last hangar in the line was smaller than the others. There were two helicopters already encased in the white shrink-wrap coating parked out in front.
Without their rotor blades and tail rotors, they looked like giant grasshoppers that had been dipped into a can of gray-white paint. The insect look was accentuated by the bulging blisters covering the front windshield of the aircraft.
As they parked and got out, they could hear a loud hissing noise from inside the hangar. The front door of the hangar had been lowered to within one foot of the sill, and there were signs up warning of flammable fumes and telling people to keep out of a hazardous-spray area. They went to the side door, as the warrant had suggested. When they cracked the door, the hissing noise was much louder. A reek of paint solvent wafted over them. A crew of three men, fully suited up, were standing on a pipe stage platform and operating what looked like a small cannon that was spraying a white foam over the front end of a large helicopter. Most of the body was already encased and they were focusing the spray on the final front quarter of the aircraft. One man operated the nozzle while the other two tended supply lines. Two stainless-steel bottles the size of barbecue propane containers fed the spray. A large six-foot-diameter exhaust fan built into the back of the hangar was roaring away to extract the strong fumes. They watched for a few minutes through the cracked door as the team finished covering the front of the aircraft. The foam seemed to dissolve upon contact with the aircraft’s skin, solidifying into a thick white second skin.
The team shut down the spray unit but left the big fan going.
“Help you people?” a voice asked from behind them, startling both of them.
“We need to see Jack Sherman,” Train said, producing his credentials.
“NIS to see Jack, huh? What a surprise.” The man was heavyset and in his forties. There were bits of foam stuck to the. outer edges of his beard where the mask had left marks on his skin. His spray suit was covered in the stuff and it stank of chemical solvent. “He’s the skinny guy, running the spray gun. I’ll tell him you’re here. Be about tenn-minutes.
You-maybe want to wait out front, okay? Fumes are gonna be strong in here, they shut that big fan down.”
“That’s some amazing stuff,” Train said, indicating the cocoon material.
“Tougher’n nails, I’m here to tell you,” the man said.
“Takes me a week to get this shit outta my hair.”
“How do they get it off at the rework facility?”
“Really big knives. You all better move now.”
It was fifteen minutes before Jack Sherman walked out of the hangar bay.
Train sized him up as Jack slouched his way across the concrete apron in front of the haar. Fiveng six, maybe five-seen in boots, scrawny, wearing ancient v’t black jeans, a wide black belt hat was mostly there for decoration, and a stained white T-shirt. A pack of cigarettes was twisted into the upper-right sleeve of the T-shirt, above pronounced biceps. He carried a black leather jacket slung casually over his shoulder. Train could see some facial resemblance to the admiral in the young man’s face, but a lot of the character was missing. Pale, white face, over which a scraggly black beard wandered uncertainly; long, bony nose; thin black eyebrows; and a weak, not quite chinless mouth set in what looked like a perpetual sneer. He had muddy dark brown eyes, with the purple-stained pouches of the confirmed boozer. The eyes were now appraising Karen Lawrence’s body with a casual, “I’d like to take your clothes off with my switchblade” stare. Train revised the height to maybe five-eight as Jack got closer, and he resisted the urge to smack this kid for the way he was staring at Karen’s body.