“Fuck he wouldn’t.” Crosswhite bummed a smoke from Naples and lay back on the bunk again, resting an arm across his forehead. “One thing is for sure… if Pope pulled him off that ranch of his and away from Marie, you can bet your jockstrap he won’t show up here happy.”
“What the fuck is going on anyway?” Naples wanted to know. “I put my ass on the line for you guys last night. The least you can do is cut me in.”
Crosswhite sat back up, drawing deeply from the cigarette. “Nipples, I’d love to cut you in — but I have absolutely no idea what the fuck is goin’ on.”
Naples grinned at him, clearly believing that he was lying. “You SOG guys are all alike. Sorry I can’t let you out, Captain.” He turned to walk away.
“Hey, how about a couple of MREs?” Crosswhite asked. “I don’t know where you’ve been the past eight hours, but these jamokes haven’t given us anything to eat all day.”
Naples chuckled. “I’ll see what I can do. Sit tight.”
When the door slammed, Tuckerman opened his mouth to speak, but Crosswhite sat up and put a finger to his lips. “Be careful, Conman. The gods are obviously smiling on us. Let’s not risk saying anything to piss them off.”
Tuckerman nodded, getting up to take a leak in the stainless steel toilet mounted to the wall between the bunks. “Roger that,” he said over his shoulder. “I do feel safe saying this much… if you hadn’t found that little girl — well, I ain’t religious, but I figure some things were just meant to be. Know what I mean?”
Crosswhite nodded, exhaling smoke through his nostrils as he considered how jacked up his life had been ever since receiving the Medal. “All I know for sure is that I’ve felt like a runaway train ever since I got rotated back from the Sandbox — with no way to put on the brakes.” He drew hard from the cigarette, wanting to alleviate his surging anxiety. “Now there’s a loose nuke to worry about, we’re locked up in this fucking cage, and Colonel Shannon is apparently coming to save our asses.” He flicked an ash into the walkway. “Fuck, you must be right. How is this not meant to be?”
20
Trooper Trent Logan was a badge-heavy cop, no two ways about it, and Montana wasn’t exactly a crime-saturated state, so he treated every traffic infraction, no matter how minor, like the Lufthansa heist of 1978. Post command received at least five complaints a month from motorists traveling the stretch of I-90 between Billings and Bozeman, and Logan had taken a lot of ribbing during his first year on the job for being such a gung-ho rookie. But after hitting the mother lode one Sunday afternoon, he received what he considered to be the ultimate vindication.
He stopped a seventy-year-old woman driving a yellow, near-mint-condition 1985 Cadillac Eldorado for a simple “lines and lanes” violation just outside of Big Timber. No other state trooper in the nation would have stopped her that day for swerving to miss a chunk of splintered two-by-four on the highway, but Trooper Logan was no other state trooper. He lived by a code, and that code meant there was no room on his interstate for road raging old ladies, no matter what their excuses. So he pulled her over and cited her for the lines and lanes violation, brusquely admonishing her to abide by the traffic laws of the sovereign state of Montana. Then, as he was giving back her license, he noticed for the first time that she was supposed to be wearing corrective lenses while driving, and he asked where her glasses were.
“Oh, I broke them a few days ago,” the lady said. “The new ones will be ready next week. Here, see?” She dug the LensCrafters receipt from her purse and offered it to him.
But Trooper Logan had no interest in receipts. A crime had been committed.
“Ma’am, you’re driving while impaired. Please step out of the vehicle.” He placed her under arrest and cuffed her hands behind her back. Then he put her into the backseat of his cruiser and called for a “hook.” It was during the vehicle inventory, which he conducted during his wait for the tow truck, that he discovered a gym bag containing ten pounds of methamphetamine in the trunk.
The elderly lady was successfully indicted two weeks later on the felony-one charge of transporting with intent to distribute a “super bulk” amount of a controlled substance — a crime that would likely ensure that she spend the rest of her life in prison — and then Logan went on a tear. Convinced that every motorist in Montana was running drugs, no matter how innocent his or her appearance, he began routinely making traffic stops for infractions as petty as one mile an hour over the speed limit, never hesitating to call for the canine unit on the slightest suspicion. His fellow troopers quickly grew tired of this beyond-gung-ho approach, and the friendly ribbing turned into open and often unpleasant criticism. Trooper Logan didn’t pay them much attention, though. As far as he was concerned, he was operating on a whole different level of law enforcement, and if his fellow officers couldn’t appreciate that, screw ’em.
So when he clocked a green SUV traveling in the opposite direction doing seventy-two in a seventy-mile-an-hour zone, Logan didn’t hesitate to hit the strobes and “shoot the median.” The SUV was already pulling over when he cleared the grassy median and got the cruiser back onto the highway, but this didn’t stop him from giving the siren a short burst as he pulled up. He stepped out of the cruiser and adjusted the brim of his Smokey the Bear hat to eyebrow level as he strutted up on the passenger side of the vehicle, the heel of his hand resting on the butt of his Sig Sauer P229 in .357 caliber.
“Good evening, sir,” he said in an impersonal tone of voice. “Driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance, please.”
The fifty-three-year-old man behind the wheel handed him a German passport, an international driver’s permit, and the rental agreement for the car.
Trooper Logan had never seen a German passport, nor had he seen an IDP. “Do you know why I stopped you, Mr. Jaeger?”
Nikolai Kashkin looked at him with his pale blue eyes and smiled. “I assume I must have been speeding,” he said with a German accent.
“Do you know how fast you were going, sir?”
Kashkin shook his head. “I’m sure you know better than I, officer. I’m not about to argue with you.”
Logan especially distrusted the really cooperative ones, believing that most people hated cops. “You’re a long way from home, Mr. Jaeger. What brings you to the United States?”
“I’m making a tour of your national parks,” Kashkin said enthusiastically. “I’m on my way up to Glacier now.”
“Uh-huh,” Logan said, paging through the passport, attempting to make heads or tails of the many stamps and dates. “How long do you plan to be in the US, sir?”
“A couple of months,” Kashkin said. “Possibly longer. Mount Rushmore was closed when I tried to see it a few days ago, and I would like very much to see that before I return home.” He had actually only just heard of the monument’s closing over the radio the hour before.
“Well, it might be a while,” Logan said. “I’m sure you’ve heard that terrorists have smuggled a nuclear weapon into the country. Rushmore’s been closed as a precaution.”
“Yes, that’s very terrible,” Kashkin said sadly. He thought it insane that anyone could believe he would waste the weapon on a useless rock in the middle of nowhere, but he did enjoy hearing over the radio that thousands of American tourists were being disappointed all across the country due to the closing of so many national monuments.
“Wait here, sir.” Logan returned to his cruiser and sat behind the wheel, digging out a reference manual to foreign passports and identification from the bottom of his gear bag sitting on the passenger seat. So far he had only ever used the manual to look for reasons to hassle Canadian tourists, whom he often referred to as — quite cleverly, in his opinion—“Mexicans who spoke good English.”